The celebratory dinner ended a bit over an hour later.
Only Ansel and Althea remained on the floor, with Sheila and the others sneaking through the warehouse's back door. They still had plenty of things to discuss after all.
Now alone in the beautifully designed lounge, the two siblings sat relaxedly by the coffee table. They were having tea to help them digest the marvelous meal they just had.
Today they were Ginger-sagada tea, the local alternative to ginger mint tea, which was a soothing blend and was great to drink for a hungover.
The tea was a steaming and fragrant infusion of the two plants and a few more flowers, and it permeated the room with pleasing warmth.
"Ah, this is the life~~" Ansel said, lounging about the large sofa in the room. He just had the most wonderful wine he had in a while, and now he was chilling with minty tea. There wasn't much actually, regrettably not enough to get him drunk, but he could take what he could get.
Speaking of the drink, he couldn't help but recall the faces of the Aborigines when they took a sip of Althea's special wine.
He could've sworn their souls left their bodies for a moment.
"The Aborigines are really quite interesting.." He said, "Very amusing to watch, especially when they're exposed to our things in Terran."
"Well, they are indeed quite fun," She said, "And surprisingly quite sincere."
Ansel couldn't help but recall how they were during the party, and how they were near tears with so little, exacerbated by the wonderful alcohol they were having.
"They definitely fell in love with the territory, Althea. You're amazing." Ansel said, pausing, looking out the window, and staring at one of the strange moons of this world. "I have a hunch they'd be of great help with our assimilation with… the outside world."
Althea nodded, agreeing. The outside world, from the aborigines' words alone, was obviously a large and dangerous place, much more than what they had encountered so far.
However, the unknown also presented a lot of opportunities, so Althea was bent on making her territory benefit from the opening or transition from the Protective Period, rather than fear its disappearance.
One of the ways to do this with the least risk was to have good NPCs, especially with the system assurance that they could not do any harm to the territory, even if they wanted to, and even if they were no longer associated with it.
"I hope I get a good one today." She said with a hint of prayer. She would be taking Ansel to the NPC summoning today, hoping to get a decent hire.
The past few days there had been regrettably no decent NPC options to choose from, and it was such a pity, whichever one it was that she had hired, they were all so helpful.
She had no doubt that the territory and its people wouldn't have grown to such a degree so quickly if they weren't there to guide them.
With a bit of hope, Althea climbed to the summoning platform and paid the required silver for summoning.
Unfortunately, her luck still wasn't very good.
One was a book boy (though he looked like in his thirties. Should it be called a bookman instead?). His job description was literally just to carry books and other basic personal assistant tasks like cleaning up after their master.
His tagline was 'I clean up all the messes of my boss, no matter how dirty'
Another was yet another woman with a questionable job description. This one was still wearing revealing clothing—which was actually not that common even with women of the same job—and she could see over half the woman's breasts.
She gave Ansel a furtive glance, curious about his reaction, and he was offended she was watching his reaction at all!
"I don't play with those things!"
Althea shrugged and ignored him, activating her final slot for the day.
It was a cleaner. Specifically, a feces cleaner, because most territories didn't really do hygiene facilities at all.
"Still none today, it seemed…" she sighed with regret.
Ansel, a born businessman, thought a bit differently. "Well, it probably meant that most professionals don't choose to get hired this way. At least not to our small villages."
Althea paused. Then after thinking about it, she nodded. It made sense. The NPCs had told her professionals were rare. They were most likely in demand in territories much better than mere villages.
Then… why would Oslo and the others choose to get hired in her little village?
Althea couldn't help but think more of the NPCs that were in the territory.
To accept getting hired in a village—and she was still a Level 1 village at the time—there must have been other reasons for them to end up here, rather than them just looking for a job.
As she mused the intricacies of it all, she couldn't help but overhear Ansel's mumbling. She ended up watching him enter a soliloquy.
Ansel at this time was walking around the summoning circle, fascinated, droning on about the magic and how cool it was. "This is a real magical technology. Summoning people from somewhere to here…"
He paused, seriously pondering. "I wonder who's… in charge of all this?"
This statement made Althea pause. A part of her probably thought subconsciously, due to the game elements, that this was a bit like a game. It was why most of them referred to the aborigines as NPCs—subconsciously lightening up all these tragedies by likening them to games.
She forgot that every function probably had a force behind it.
These magical buildings and their functions… who developed them? Was there some organization that controlled them?
Were all these—whether it was NPC hiring or the building of structures—being overseen and managed by a certain force? Or maybe multiple?
Perhaps, they even had different departments.
How… interesting, she thought, but she did not dwell on it.
She'd just ask Oslo in case he knew, and if he didn't… well, it didn't matter. She had too many things on her plate at the moment, anyway.
She would just do her best with what she had and, hopefully, that would be enough.