There was a large fruit tree growing in a container near the exit to the training yards in Home Square. The notice board used to form groups was in front of the tree. Grandmother’s nuisance jumped from her to the tree, as she passed it. It ran up the trunk to the branches. Grandmother smiled at the small animal. The earthen squirrel would be safe here in Home Square and it looked happy.

  Grandmother's team was in the square today working on gathering equipment for structure chemistry. Grandmother finally talked Asher into giving a demonstration. After doing an early morning scavenging run together, the team split up to collect different items on Asher’s list of required equipment. Squirrel appeared just as the team was leaving the annex and climbed into Grandmother’s pocket for the trip.

  Squirrel’s jump past the group forming board reminded Grandmother that she wanted to talk to Harry. She headed over to the guard storefront. A very young warrior was sitting on a tall stool behind the counter. He looked familiar to Grandmother.

  “Good day,” Grandmother said to the boy. “Is Harry available?” As the head of the guard he might have gone out to supervise the guards working at the coliseum for Challenge day, but Grandmother doubted it. Harry was a homebody, he loved this square.

  “I’ll tell him you're here,” the boy said, jumping from his stool and disappearing into the back of the shop. The boy was back in moments, opening the passthrough in the counter. “He says to let you through. He’s at his desk,” the boy instructed. Grandmother decided the boy went on the training run with the team last summer, but she couldn’t come up with his name.

  “Thank you,” she said politely, as he held the door open to the back room.

  A large desk, it was actually three desks pushed together, stood just inside the door to the left. The desk was covered in books and loose vellum sheets. Standing behind it was Harry.

  “Grandmother,” Harry said with respect.

  “Good morning,” Grandmother replied.

  “It’s closer to mid-day,” Harry responded, as he pulled a second chair over so she could sit next to him, behind the desk. “Have a seat,” he said, offering his own chair, which was finished with the specialty curved wooden pieces made for chairs. Harry sat in the chair he pulled over, which was finished with iron sheets.

  “How are things going?” Grandmother asked.

  “Good,” Harry responded. “I think we are finally finding the rhythm of the coliseum. I just wish I could hire more guards.”

  “If you recruit from other squares, I am looking for a female instructor for the sword, spear, ax or war hammer,” Grandmother commented.

  “I didn’t think you wanted a big inflow into the square,” Harry responded.

  “I didn’t,” Grandmother admitted. “I still don’t want there to be more than ten percent immigrants. I didn’t realize how many selkie would come when I spread the word of the coliseum here. I understand how much stress I’ve put on the guard. I don’t want the safety of our square to suffer.”

  “It hasn’t,” Harry assured her. “I’ve been hiring temporary guards from among the selkie to help with escorting challenge groups. That frees some of our own guards to watch the gates.”

  “Good,” Grandmother told Harry.

  “Have you thought of hiring a female selkie to teach the ax or war hammer?” Harry asked.

  “I’d love to get a selkie to teach anything,” Grandmother confided. “Especially pottery or stone sculpting since we don’t have those skills. I want a human woman to teach the use of heavy weapons. I am afraid that some of our male students might get the impression that the heavy weapon skills are being taught by men or non-humans because a human woman can’t handle them. There are very few physical differences between men and women to support that conclusion. The nanobots here equalize all those differences, making them irrelevant. It is only our human biases that keep women from learning those skills.”

  Harry agreed with Grandmother. His guard was composed of both men and women. Grandmother won the square for them, saving them from the last migration, but the earlier migrations left them dangerously short of trained fighters. Harry turned to the surviving women, training them as he trained the boys back in Londontown. Harry spent the last thirteen years making sure Grandmother remained the leader of Home Square. He was starting to think that his decision to arm and train the women was probably a key reason why he succeeded.

  “I came over here to give you these,” Grandmother said. She pulled a set of vellum sheets out of her pack and handed them to Harry. “The top sheet is a notice I want to put up here and in OpenSky. The bottom sheets provide more details, give them out to anyone who asks. I wanted to give you more copies but Ellen and Sarah are still causing a vellum shortage.”

  Harry read the notice. Then he read the notice again.

  “Is this real?” he asked.

  “Of course it's real,” Grandmother responded. He switched to one of the bottom sheets and was reading the details. The sheet explained how using fertility implants allowed a couple to plan their family. They could delay having their first child until they could afford one. They could space their children apart, making it easier to supervise and teach them. In the dangers of the structure a poorly watched child could easily lead to their early death. If a couple went and registered with the artificial wombs, a child could be born after the death of one or both parents.

  “If both parents are deceased, who would raise the child?” Harry asked, dumbfounded by that idea.

  “A grandchild can be a great solace to a parent, especially if their child died before they had any children of their own,” Grandmother explained.

  Harry thought about his own children who died during the quest for a new square. He grieved for them still, but they were children in his mind, not adults with children of their own. He saw parents devastated by the loss of a child. Usually it was their last surviving offspring who died in early adulthood. He could see how those parents might prefer to raise a grandchild, instead of a new child of their own.

  “Why are you making them available now?” Harry asked

  “They have always been available,” Grandmother explained. “It is in the colony bylaws. The bylaws are from the agreement our ancestors made back on Earth before they ever built the Speedwell. The entire landing generation should have known. Lizzy assures me that she didn’t. She worked as one of the academy recruiters. I think she said something to someone here in Home Square, because Betty showed up at the Speedwell wanting an implant. I realized I’ve been doing a poor job of informing everyone of their rights.”

  Grandmother really felt bad about it, especially since she should have realized it earlier when Lizzy found out. In the rush to get the school going she was missing things. It was proof she was only human, but she wanted to do better for the colonists. After Redfalls, Irene spent years putting things off. She reasoned with herself that she needed to plan more before getting started in order to ensure that her actions didn’t cause something worse to happen. It was Todd, Ellen, Alex, Sarah and now even Companion looking to her for direction that made her realize all that planning had become an excuse to do nothing. She started trying some of the bigger ideas she thought about for years. Her brother talking about educating his children made her remember Sharl telling her she should teach magic all those years ago in The Heights.

  Irene decided if she was going to get it done, she needed to set a deadline and stick to it, no matter how rough around the edges the first year ended up being. Any education Irene managed to impart to the young people in the colony was more than they would have if they stayed at home for the winter.

  Harry, oblivious to Irene’s thoughts, fingered the vellum as he thought about the security implications.

  “Will you be posting these notices in the other squares?” Harry asked.

  “Eventually,” Grandmother admitted. She promised herself she would post them by next year, but inviting all the humans in the world to the Speedwell without any planning was crazy. The transportation room at the annex made it possible. The distance through darkspace and Control’s methods of pushing players back into the game, would have made it impossible for large numbers of people to leave the structure before.

  “I haven’t actually posted them here yet. I’ve brought them for you to review first. I want to set up a different transportation room near the entrance from the one we are using now. That one is part of the association hall we are holding academy classes in and I don’t really want that many visitors traveling through it. There is another entrance to the structure on the other side of the eastern villages and I thought about setting up a transportation room there, but I don’t think I want the traffic to go through the villages either. Those are the only two entrances I can see on the advance ship’s survey records, but I think there may be more.”

  Grandmother often told Harry things about the world beyond Home Square. She tried from time to time to get him to visit places outside the square. He did his best to avoid these manipulations, seeing his duty clearly as keeping Home Square secure. Something about this situation drew him when nothing else did.

  “Who is handling your security at the Speedwell?” Harry asked.

  “Todd handles it in the structure,” Grandmother responded. “Ed helps him out. The Speedwell handles its own security. No one will touch us there.”

  “Are you sure?” Harry asked. “Would you mind if I double checked your setup?”

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  “I would be honored,” Grandmother said with a smile. “I’ve always thought you should get out more. How can you know what may be coming if you don’t go out and see it?”

  “That’s what I have you for,” the old warrior retorted.

  “How is the caravan to Londontown progressing?” Grandmother asked.

  “Our third trip is leaving the day after the Challenge ends. I couldn’t spare the guards until then,” Harry answered.

  “I must have lost track of time. The last I remember you were planning the first trip,” Grandmother responded. “I brought you some wheels I found by scavenging around Londontown, but I left them up in my room. They are larger than the small ones Alex has.”

  “Wheels?” Harry asked. “I’ll walk over with you,” he said, rising to his feet. Grandmother chuckled under her breath, remembering how excited she was the first time she found wheels.

  When they went to get the wheels, Grandmother remembered the camera amulets she also bought for the guards' use. She gave them to Harry and explained how to use them. She could see that he didn’t completely understand. Grandmother was hoping to get more recordings of the coliseum matches since the selkie on the Speedwell really enjoyed watching them.

  After lunch with Harry in the inn, Grandmother spent most of the afternoon in the market and shops making her purchases. A wave of selkie and human warriors returned to the square and Grandmother realized it was getting late.

  With Ellen and Sarah minding the shop, Kai spent the entire day trying to make glass bottles for Grandmother’s chemistry experiment. She brought him a bottle from a ruined closet to try to match. His first attempts resulted in melted piles of glass. As failures they weren’t too bad, since the glass could be reclaimed in his furnace. Finally he managed to produce three close matches.

  It took him even more time to work from the tumbler pattern to the glass cap. On his last attempt as he released the cap from the blowing tube a phantom image flashed across his vision. It was the indication that he unlocked a pattern. He forced himself to study his new cap versus the old. It looked like a near perfect match. He sat it on top of one of his bottles. He thought it would work. The cap was held on the top of the bottle with a metal cage and a gasket underneath. He needed them to really check it.

  He tossed all his rejected caps back into the furnace. He picked up one of his blowing tubes and flicked open his pattern graph. There were three new patterns! One was the lid. The second one was the bottle. The third pattern was the straight sided smallest ‘bottle.’ There was an easy size adjuster for height and body diameter on the bottle pattern. There was only the height adjuster on the straight sided container. Kai wondered if he could make the entire diameter larger.

  If he scaled it back up to the size of the original bottle and made a larger cap to fit, it could be used to store bigger objects. He decided to work on that later. For now he set about making multiples of every bottle size and caps for each of them. Until he mastered the patterns he would continue to have failures. Even a mastered pattern would vary in quality. He wanted to show Grandmother that he was a quality glass crafter.

  After he made six of each size, he threw the seconds along with the failures back into the furnace. It was getting late. Kai could hear the selkie in the showroom, which meant the challenges were finished for the day. He skipped lunch in his desire to get the bottles made. He shut down the furnace and went out into the showroom.

  “How is it going?” Ellen asked.

  “I finally got the pattern. It was strange, the bottle pattern only revealed itself after I got the cap pattern,” Kai responded.

  “That’s interesting,” Ellen said. “I’m going to write that down.” She looked around for a notebook. She ended up grabbing one from the back while Kai kept watch on the counter. The selkie were all looking but not buying. Sarah was mingling with the customers, answering questions as best she could with hand signals and the few words of selkie she could pronounce. It was the same method Kai used. Although they were all getting better at speaking selkie.

  “I actually revealed three patterns,” Kai explained when Ellen returned. “I have one for a bottle and one for a straight sided container. All three of them showed up when I got the cap, even though I made the bottles first.”

  “A straight sided container?” Ellen questioned.

  “Hold on,” Kai said. He went back and picked up one each of his two smallest containers with their caps. He showed them to Ellen. “Made these because Grandmother said she was interested in small bottles. Since it’s a separate pattern I think I can scale it up.” Ellen took the taller of the two and looked at it.

  “I bet we could sell this one to hold pins,” Ellen commented. “It’s nice because you can see what's inside. Todd might like it for his spices. Did you make any bigger ones?”

  “Not yet,” Kai said. “Do you think I should?”

  “Definitely,” Ellen said, “but don’t worry about it today. It’s almost dinner. I know you didn’t get lunch, so you should eat.”

  “Is it that late already?” Kai asked. “I take it they didn’t get through all the challenges today.” If they ran out of challengers the crowds would have returned to the square earlier in the day. The selkie customers still mostly browsing was also a sign. They tended to do most of their buying on the last day.

  “Nope,” Ellen confirmed. “Can you tell me the order you tried things?” she asked.

  “Sure,” Kai responded. “I started with a tumbler.” Ellen took notes as he explained the steps he took to reveal the patterns. The shop was emptying out when he finished. They headed over to the inn for dinner when Sarah ushered the last customer out.

  The inn was packed with Challenge visitors. Kai normally ate in his apartment on Challenge days, finding it impossible to get a table in the common room. Ellen and Sarah headed confidently across the room to Grandmother’s table. It was miraculously still open. Kai noticed that most of the customers in the dining room took note of them when they sat down.

  Within moments one of the innkeeper's grandchildren was there to take their orders. Alex and Companion arrived next. They were conversing with a group of selkie. One of the selkie followed them when they came over to the table.

  “Everyone, this is Fa-Ray-Me,” Alex said, “He is from Whitewater.” Everyone greeted the selkie. Companion settled onto his bench as two servers arrived with a second bench for the new selkie to sit on. Alex brought the selkie along because Grandmother told them all to be on the lookout for new instructors. He thought she would be happy with a stone sculptor.

  “Where’s Grandmother?” Alex asked.

  “I haven’t seen her since about mid-morning,” Sarah reported. “She went shopping.”

  “Is she with Todd?” Alex asked.

  “Todd is brewing beer,” one of the servers reported. The inn spawned a brewing room during the first selkie Challenge. Todd was very pleased with it.

  “I hope he remembers we are heading back tonight,” Ellen commented.

  The door to the courtyard opened and Grandmother stepped inside, carrying a large iron bowl. She was followed by a hunter. It took Kai a second to recognize Valin in his disguise. A rush of gray fur ran past Grandmother’s feet.

  “Squirrel,” Grandmother called, “get back here. I don’t want anyone to step on you by accident.” The animal ignored her and continued on its way. It disappeared into the kitchen. Grandmother sighed. She crossed the room and went up the stairs while Valin joined them at the table.

  “How is OpenSky?” Ellen asked Valin. The elf spent the day there instead of here with the rest of the team.

  “Much more restful than here,” Valin responded. The servers arrived with everyone’s drinks. Valin ordered hot tea. A teapot with two tiny teacups was delivered quickly. Grandmother always drank tea. Everyone else ordered juice and beer. The beer was served in tankards. Juice came in glass tumblers that Kai sold to the inn. The teapot and teacups were part of Grandmother's china set.

  Todd came out of the kitchen. The small gray animal was running around his body as he walked over to the table.

  “Can you catch it?” he asked Ellen. “It’s too quick for me. I think it knows I can’t hurt it.”

  “Have you tried feeding it?” Ellen asked after a few failed attempts.

  “I don’t think it is hungry,” Todd responded. “Where is Grandmother?”

  “She went up to her room,” Sarah responded. “She should be back soon.” Todd carefully sat down. The animal settled onto the warrior's head. Valin smiled at Todd’s obvious distress.

  “Is that a nuisance?” Fa-Ray-Me asked in selkie.

  “Yes,” Companion answered. “It belongs to the Elder. She likes it.”

  “Was that the Elder?” Fa-Ray-Me asked, dismayed that he didn't identify the lesser god.

  “Yes,” Companion responded. “She very rarely wears integrated fabric here in Home Square. She prefers her leathers so she can pass unnoticed.”

  “The Elder doesn’t like special attention,” Alex told the new selkie. “Treat her as you would a neighbor and you’ll be fine.” Kai could hear echoes of the conversation among the other selkie dinners. A hush fell over the room. Kai turned slightly to see Grandmother walking back down the stairs. Her pace didn’t alter. By the time she reached the floor, conversations started back up, even if they were a little stilted.

  “There you are,” Grandmother said to the animal as she approached the table. “I see you found Todd.” The animal stood up on its hind feet, still on Todd’s head and burbled something to Grandmother. It jumped from Todd and landed on Grandmother’s leathers. It circled around her and disappeared into one of her pockets. It came back out with a chunk of travel bar. It jumped to the table and took up a seat next to the teapot where it started eating the bar.

  “I thought you said it wasn’t hungry?” Ellen asked.

  “It wouldn’t eat anything I offered,” Todd responded.

  “That’s a bar from the Speedwell,” Grandmother commented as she took her seat and poured herself a cup of tea. “I’ve noticed she prefers them.” Grandmother took a sip from her cup as her eyes settled on Fa-Ray-Me. Alex noticed and introduced the selkie.

  “Whitewater?” Grandmother responded. “Isn’t that the selkie federation capital?”

  “Yes,” Fa-Ray-Me responded after Alex translated her words, “I am not here in any official capacity. I am a simple traveler.”

  “Fa-Ray-Me is a master stone sculptor,” Valin reported. “His shop in Whitewater is well known and highly successful.”

  “Are you enjoying Challenge day?” Grandmother asked the selkie, Alex translated her words to Fa-Ray-Me. “I understand Whitewater has its own Coliseum. How do we compare?”

  “I am impressed with your record keeping. The log of heroes is an inspired invention. I plan to lobby for its adoption in Whitewater,” Fa-Ray-Me responded, “with your permission.”

  “Harry thought that up. If you need anyone’s permission it is his not mine,” Grandmother responded. “I don’t see why you would need his permission to write something down. Although I am sure he will be pleased to hear you like the idea.”

  “I am interested in visiting your teaching community,” Fa-Ray-Me said. “Blue advised me that if I asked I might be allowed to travel with you.” Kai realized that Fa-Ray-Me’s Blue was a stand-in for Alex’s name.

  “Are you interested in working for the academy?” Grandmother asked. “I am looking for a stone sculpting instructor for next year.”

  “You have selkie instructors?” Fa-Ray-Me responded after a pause.

  “No,” Grandmother admitted, “but I’d like to.”

  “I will consider it,” Fa-Ray-Me replied. “I would like to see the teaching community first.”

  “Do you vow not to bring any harm to any occupant of the academy while you are there? And that you will not remove anyone, except yourself, from the academy without my express permission?” Grandmother asked.

  “Yes,” Fa-Ray-Me replied. Grandmother smiled. A hush spread across the room and something shifted.

  “Excellent,” Grandmother responded. “We are heading out tonight. Meet us at the back hall and you can come with us. There is a cost of ten iron a day if you stay on the Speedwell. You will need physical coins to pay with.”