Maid with Necromancy

The blue-haired Professor Chastain stood in front of a pile of scrap so hacked up it was barely recognizable as one of the guards from Orty’s Tomb. Scrap was a kind description for what most throw away instead of trying to make use of it.  “I always start my orconomics lecture after the student dungeon entrances open up. For if the seven deaths we had on the opening day weren’t enough to convince you that delving into the dungeon is a terrible idea, it is time to convince you of the terrible financial choice it is to continue to do so.

What you see here is what most students manage to bring in to complete their first quarter requirements of defeating tomb guards. Once this loot is sold and split up between the five team members, you will each have enough to buy a new pair of underwear. Which some of you surely needed after entering the Tomb for the first time.  I know you’re saying to yourself that you’re special, that you’ll get better and manage to earn the actual payouts related to bringing in a complete guard chassis. Don’t test it. The repair work on your weapons and armor costs more than you will earn. And if you don’t understand the math by the end of this, remember this,”  She made one grand gesture to the metal rubbish, “is what was brought in by our new su-primus’s team.”

Now Harmony felt the crowd’s eyes turn to her. The seminar was supposed to be a relief from that attention. And if she had known she’d be used as the example, she would have returned a near-perfect guard corpse, and then the professor would have picked some other ruin as an example. It’s not like she’d known at the time of her new ranking, or done more than let the rest of her team handle the opponents for training purposes.  [Keen Investigative Awareness] pointed out Alex’s bear paw print, the gouges from Tun-Knee’s metal claws, and divots from Tasha’s balls, as she activated the skill. She’d been too busy dealing with an ambush, and then putting the corpses back together for revival to commit their damaged prize to memory enough for her to immediately recognize what Chastain had unveiled.

A flicker of [Renew Spirit] toward her nails and eyebrow caused a flash of blue flames, which was all the acknowledgement she gave the crowd, but enough of a nod without lowering herself to that same expression. That got those who had looked at her back to paying attention to the lecturer.  They could read into that what they would; surely, some of them had returned better specimens and had judgment, but if they expected her to flinch or look ashamed at being put on the spot, she’d had to endure worse serving elites in the nearly-nothing outfits Tyler had picked out for her in the past.

“In the organized economics model coined by Pike, those who delve into the dungeon take the most risk for the least reward. Those who walk a path to grow rarely care about the quality of the materials they bring back; it is those who stall in their progress or have a local connection with no other option who learn the best ways to harvest materials to sell. And even they compete against powers that wade through out of curiosity and take what they fight for as easily as one plucks a berry.

For students, you might as well be gnomes grinding through metal to get piles of debris you can trade for fresh underpants. And then what is your plan, collect underpants and profit?”

“I know a girl who sells dirty underpants for profit.” A boy chuckled under his breath a few rows away.

“Today I’m going to break down the actual economic engines around dungeons and give you an overview of what works, from how every dungeon has a half-step potion to the tourism circuit.” Chastain continued.  

Every dungeon? This was the first time someone had said “every” in front of Harmony about half-step potions and dungeons; though possibly hyperbolic, the mad dash for Tasha’s potion had been explored using incongruent items and skills to get a result because the iron body one was unacceptable for her progress. As rewards she’d seen them given out in the Ascendant Games, but as something crafted, it made sense alchemically. Iron body half-step potions worked because the materials had enough of the same resonance that they didn’t fight and aligned with the monster of the dungeon, those twisted metal frames that had come out when she’d extracted that from the prisoners under Hexio Curie’s supervision. If every dungeon could produce them, then what half-step recipes were lost or suppressed from Old Bones or Nae’s Garden back home?

This would require a whole list of supplies to be shipped to White Manor. [Recall] kept track of the lecture in the background, and it had stiff competition as she daydreamed solutions and theory crafted as Professor Chastain rambled on in a diatribe where every other word talked about profits related to buying materials and crafting finished productions. The lecture was filled with terms like success rate, open market, meeting demands, and safe money builds skills.

[Poise and Bearing] had Harmony looking attentive, but the material was dry and full of numbers and facts more about plodding than anything inventive. A hard reminder that it had been a get-rich-quick scheme that had gotten her into all this trouble in the first place. Why settle? Why couldn’t she take the dead dragon with its rainbow colored feathers? That was before the royal in her demanded she take it all, because authority gave her that right. Bad habits baked into one’s soul were always a struggle.

While not holding her interest, she focused enough to be able to transcribe this lecture and get it passed off to Ambrosia to hand to their money person, possibly Gareth the bookie?

“With organized economics, we see that for the goal of building wealth, methods that produce the finished products produce the most profit. Dungeons are only to be used as a route to progress your levels, gain achievements, quests, and other short-term stepping stones. They are not a long-term career goal for Academy students. Now I’ll open up the floor to questions.”

Oops. Was that why Maekus assigned her to this seminar? She hadn’t paid enough attention to ask questions. Though wouldn’t doing that reveal her ignorance?

“Greep.” Hyacinth chastised Harmony’s doubts from his spot in her breast pocket.

When she’d left  Flint Steelheart’s office, she’d committed to a what-would-Ambrosia-do style approach. Make noise, create a crowd, even as her friend would lecture her about the fact that such things happened naturally around Harmony; being proactive would mean a controlled starting point. Starting with the image of the strong, silent type for the school's new su-primus would be hampering.

[Keen Investigative Awareness] worked with [Recall] to dig through the lecture she’d daydreamed and planned alchemy requests through. There was time. Chastain was answering a question about, “What if there was a way to bring back five near-perfect guard corpses, and if the recent increase in supply reduced guild set prices?”

Chastain was mostly taking the question as unserious, not wanting to deal in hypotheticals, over something a student couldn’t accomplish.  So maybe she didn’t have a lot of time to pick a topic, and it would be good to get something related to current problems. Much of the lecture was about stable systems, and how Oorty’s Tomb had been stable so long. Old Bones showed what a shift could cause, as Maekus said; this dungeon was boring. Also a hypothetical question, but a wedge could be used to force an answer.

Harmony raised her hand. The way her nails were lit up by her bit of cosmetics made it a torch in the crowd. No one had copied the look yet, but soon others should try similar things.

“Shall we see what the number one student has to say?” Professor Chastain asked the crowd in a professionally neutral tone.

Skipping ahead of the line. A gift laced with a bit of envy and annoyance? Not every professor must be happy with this shift,  even if she’d barely met the woman.

“While organized economics makes sense in a stable system. We’ve seen the alarm go off in Oorty’s Tomb this quarter, demonstrating the potential beginning of an unstable time. Would you expect economic factors to be different if, say, the prisoner’s door on the fourth floor were opened, and that quest completed? How much would that affect the economy?”

Harmony matched the professor’s tone and cadence in such a way only someone with a skill or a demanding mother who insisted on perfection when reading acting parts back to her could create.  Too natural and perfect to be a mockery, unless that was the initial intention.

The professor's grin widened in a way that immediately set her version of alarm bells ringing to [Keen Investigative Awareness] and [Poise and Bearing]. Less the, I know a thing you don’t know, but there was a hint of that, and more of an, I got you, and I’m going to take you down a peg, to it. The fact that Chastain wasn’t even trying to hide it with a social skill wasn’t helping.  Before showing up to this seminar, there hadn’t been any warnings that this professor would be antagonistic to her, but the unprecedented nature of her new rank, followed by all the attention several pillars were giving her, should have made such a possibility obvious.

Chronostasis slowed things down.  The signs were there, from the dead Tomb guard taken from her team as an example, to several jabs she’d missed daydreaming, that [Recall] now brought up, including a dig about relying on luck more than skill.  Too distracted by the possibility of solutions to Ambrosia, Tess, Steven, and whoever else evolved in Hazeldown’s problem of a lack of body enhancements.

This couldn’t be the professor who made the bet with Flint? But surely that person had friends. Doesn’t matter; the way she smiled was someone who had already won somehow.  A social mistake? Was the question dumb? Both of those wouldn’t be a victory. Even as a new su-primus, she should be above a professor among peers. This had to be something within the realm of the teacher's control.

Leaning into Chronosasis, [Recall] went back to relevant source materials. She spent so much time looking at words that they were just more pages among the thousands she’d recorded to memory. It did make remembering things with daily memory difficult if she didn’t find it important or interesting, but that is why she’d chosen the skill. This would be something between the lines anyway. Someone who argues about how one percentage point being the difference between success or failure in economics was sure to be a rules stickler.

Dorm handbook, student handbook, class syllabus, more obscure, what other class documents had she read, pledge to work hard, a clause in the dress code, she’d checked that before nail and hair modifications, oh, the dungeon waiver, tucked away school obligations of risk being unbecoming due to restricted topics, linking back to the syllabus for unbecoming behavior.  Really? Oh, ashes, Professor Chastain was talking.

“We’ve found reference to the alarm previously when an overpowered individual damaged the dungeon domain’s weaker upper levels centuries ago, but even they found the barrier of fate impossible, so that was probably someone fooling around. More concerning about your question, Student White, is that you’d bring up something so unbecoming as the quest around the prisoner’s door.

I place so much pride in keeping students alive by teaching them the truth. If you haven’t noticed, the dungeon is too strong for children who have only just evolved. To have a broken quest tailored to those at their level is a death trap, and because of that, talking about that quest is restricted.  The fevered hunt for the Iron, silver, and gold keys has in our school’s history killed thousands of students.

You wound me, Miss White, and while I consider myself lax in some regards, I am not about the safety of my students. Someone of your station talking about the keys is liable to have students trying to meet those crazy qualifications or worse, hunting for the missing gold key.“ Switching her attention to the whole class. “Seminars are like any other class; students, they may not come with a grade, but you can, if you make the wrong choice, fail them and have that count as a mark that will lead to your expulsion to The Academy.  It looks like you will be an example in more than one way today, Student White.”

This professor was the kind to dot every “i” and cross every “t” in her paperwork to make sure failing this class went through. Harmony could fight it or let it pass; after all, she has to fail five classes to be expelled. She could soak up one if needed. All it would take would be the public indignity of making such a mistake and having the news spread. She could even be forced to apologize.  Restricted topics in the handbook were at the teachers' discretion for discipline, usually lax discipline, but if pressed, this was one possible result. The only time students were excused was if it had a direct bearing on themselves, their progress, or their bonds.

Harmony muttered a silent apology to her teammates, for this was going to hurt, socially.

“Apologies, professor.”  Harmony started.

“You’ll find it too late…” Chastain pressed, punitive pride ready for her triumph.

“I only asked the question because I am the holder of the golden prisoner’s key.”

Even if the professor wasn’t stunned to silence, the chatter spreading among the assembled students who’d been quietly soaking up the drama until this shocking revelation would have masked any response she had.

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