Sophia wanted to build the first level of the physical Tower, because she was pretty sure it was required for the Gateways. A quick question to Cliff confird it; he could see a few steps farther along the list and that was why he put it first on her list of options. It was also the cheapest of the four options, if not by much, and its maintenance cost was by far the lowest.
It was also the only one that was completely selfish. The physical Tower was the original entrance; as far as Sophia could tell, it was the only way to get in during the entire Kestii Empire. Sophia was pretty sure it was also the normal first upgrade and might well even be before the Tower opened normally. After all, how could you enter the Tower without having a place to enter?
The ability to participate from other places through stable Challenges was new. Sophia didn’t know if that was due to Cliff’s influence or if the Guide had learned new tricks after the Tower fell. It was also possible that it was a symptom of the Tower’s fall and might disappear once the Broken Lands were restored.
The only thing she could be confident of was that it wasn’t at all likely that it was a feature the Tower originally had. Ansuz, Tiwaz, and Bai were all clueless about it, which ant that the only way it could have been locked out was before Ansuz was created. That was early enough that Sophia simply didn’t believe it.
Now that she thought about it, that was another good question for the Wanderer. He specifically said that he paid more attention outside the Broken Lands than inside them; he’d know.
The next two options both made a lot of sense for growing the Tower. The more people that went in, the better it would do, and either option opened it to more people. More entrances, especially entrances at cities that didn’t already have stable Challenges, would bring in entirely new groups of people. Opening it up to people who were past the first upgrade would also be huge, since that was a huge percentage of the population. Sophia thought most Called were probably in one of those two categories, though there were a good number past the second upgrade. Passing the third upgrade was the unusual one.
A conference with Cliff told her that creating new stable Challenges was both expensive and had a high ongoing cost; he had to first create the seeds, which was best done in large numbers and explained the up-front cost, then set them into a nexus for an additional cost before they could be used. After that, they had both a fairly low maintenance cost per Challenge and a cost per use.
Without actually translating it into numbers it was hard to compare, but Sophia got the impression that getting it up and running would be expensive. If it was actually used, it would more than pay for itself in the long run, but that was a matter of months to years depending on how frequently the new openings were used and whether or not anyone ran the stable Challenges or just used them as a gateway to the Tower’s Challenges.
It was possible to significantly reduce the cost by building things like the nexus terminals. With a nexus terminal, the stable Challenge that provided the entrance wasn’t necessary. That didn’t explain why the terminals existed, but Sophia already knew the reason; they were how people with Imperial Spheres managed their purchases and upgrades. Unlike normal Spheres, it couldn’t be done directly through the Status. Sophia hoped there was an upgrade sowhere that would change that, but she hadn’t found it yet if there was one.
Adding first upgrade Challenges inside the Tower was similar, but seed to generally be cheaper because it was connected to existing infrastructure rather than having to create it all. The up-front expense was actually higher but the cost per instance was much lower. The cost to use each one once they were created was higher but so was the expected gain per use. Overall, if it saw the sort of use Sophia thought it would, it would pay off faster.
It just wouldn’t bring the benefits of the Tower to all of the places it couldn’t already reach.
The last option was the one Sophia thought would heal the Maze and maybe eventually bring the Broken Lands back together. It was probably the most important but also the only one that would not directly pay for itself, at least not in any reasonable ti period. The cost Cliff outlined wouldn’t fix things; it was just the first step.
Sophia wanted to do all of them eventually, but which one should be first?
She took a couple of days to think about it and asked everyone in her team what they thought, but in the end it was really a choice between two options: prepare what was needed for the Gateways or help the Tower grow. If she helped the Tower, making the Gateways would probably be faster … as long as she didn’t count the delay from whatever she selected.
How selfish did she want to be?
Sophia decided that so selfishness wasn’t a bad thing but she should probably mix it with the best choices for everyone, which ant growing the Tower first so that it could do more later. It made selfishness easier to justify. She’d do the first upgrade entrances first, then the Gateways, then the additional entrances. That would also give ti for news to move around the Broken Lands that new “stable Challenges” were going to appear and that people should find them. She was pretty sure they wouldn’t overflow the sa way normal stable Challenges did … but she couldn’t guarantee it. The Maze did, after all, and this was really similar to the Maze.
It took five tendays to build the first of the first upgrade zones. Sophia spent the entire ti anxiously awaiting when she could tell Cliff to start on the upgrade she actually wanted. That upgrade was faster, but four tendays still didn’t feel fast at all.
When the first level of the Tower was finished, Cliff told Sophia she had new options. Fortunately, there were only two new options other than building a Gateway and neither opening the City of Stars nor adding access limitations to the physical Tower seed worth it, though the news that anyone could enter the Tower regardless of upgrades was definitely interesting. Anyone who made it deep enough into the Maze to find the physical Tower was likely to be third upgrade and the Tower couldn’t make a place strong enough to challenge them. Sophia wasn’t certain what that ant but it didn’t seem like it would be too bad. Probably.
It helped that no one in Mazehold seed to be pushing to reach the Tower, so it probably wasn’t an imdiate problem, at least. There wasn’t really a reason to push for it anymore. The resources that could be pulled out of the Maze were far more valuable and they were why most people spent ti inside the Maze anyway.
Sophia could ignore the attempts on her life. They weren’t really all that dangerous and there hadn’t been one after the first couple were handled. She really wasn’t sure why they even bothered; didn’t they go to the Arena? The first one should have known that a spell aid at Sophia from several blocks away was just going to be shredded before it reached her and the poisoned knife didn’t even scratch Sophia’s armor after her Shield blocked most of the strike. It probably wouldn’t have penetrated regardless; attempting to push a knife through dragonscales was a poor idea.
The fact that both assassins survived was completely deliberate. Treating people who try to kill you like foolish, naughty children tended to discourage more attempts. Sophia knew that from her father, and it seed to work just as well here as it did back ho. Sure, she wasn’t as strong as her father, but neither were the two people who tried to attack her.
Okay, maybe she did need to be able to lock the Tower. It still wasn’t a priority.
For the original options, repairing the Broken Lands had effectively not changed, while seeding additional Challenges at nexuses that didn’t have them was more expensive, not less, despite the handful that had built or repaired old nexus terminals while the upgrade was happening. Sophia hadn’t thought about it, but it made sense; of course creating a link that first upgrade people could use would be more expensive than one that could only be used by people without an upgrade.
If she’d done it in the other order, the cost would probably have been tacked onto creating the first upgrade Tower Challenges. It would probably have been better to do it in the other order, to get Tower access more widespread sooner, but what was done was done. She couldn’t change it.
The important thing was the fact that creating a Gateway was now an option. It was a two-part task; there was a small expansion area to the Tower that was needed, then building the Gateways themselves, but the first Gateway was included in the initial cost. All she had to do was pick where it went.
The list of possible destinations was short. Cliff said it would grow as the Tower grew, but for now her only options were Aestarix, Skorak, Ivalith, Arcatiz, Ba’lo, or Efra. Aestarix, Ivalith, Ba’lo, and Efra were all ordinary Gateways, but Skorak and Arcatiz were cheaper even though they were probably farther away because the Tower on the other side of the Gateway was set up to do most of the work for new Towers, and Sophia’s Tower counted.
Sophia was sceptical of the two connections that were willing to pay to talk to new people. That might an they were altruistic and wanted to help, but Sophia knew that it was at least as likely that they intended to take advantage of the newcors.
Well, there were a couple of other things she knew that probably mattered. Skorak and Efra were unknown to Ansuz and Tiwaz, but they both knew Aestarix, Ivalith, Arcatiz, and Ba’lo. They were other Towers that once connected to the Kestii Tower through its Gateways.
Aestarix and Ba’lo had human populations while Ivalith and Arcatiz were alien, but that didn’t an the humans of Kestii had a natural alliance with the other humans. They got along fairly well with the Ba’lo, who inhabited a wide stretch of ocean with few landmasses; the Ba’lo were master alchemists and were happy to trade their products for Kestii’s tal goods. The Aestarix, on the other hand, didn’t seem to see a real difference between Kestii and any other location that could be reached through the Tower. They were happy to take what they could get their hands on and didn’t really care if it was banditry or not as long as they could escape back through their Gateway.
Ivalith was ho to the Alodi, a species that was described as combining the characteristics of rabbits and wolves. Trade with the Alodi was limited; finished goods didn’t cross the species boundary well and raw materials were usually easier to extract from the Tower. A handful of Alodi visited to explore the Kestii Tower and a number of Kestii went to the Ivalith Tower, but the Gateway was fairly inactive.
Arcatiz was ho to the Archons, the usually birdlike elentals that built the conduit system that connected the facility-minds. They were also the source of the nexus terminal schematics and the experintal lab that beca the Garden. Sophia had no idea how the Kestii Empire paid for everything they bought; the quantity of infused aurichalc that was listed as the paynt was large but not nearly as large as Sophia thought it should have been.
Sophia had no reason to expect that any of the situations on the other side of the Gateways would be the sa. Sixteen hundred years was a long ti. That didn’t change which location she was going to pick for the first Gateway; the choice was obvious.
Archons’ Refuge. Arcatiz.
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