“If I may, Jagdar Marat?” Dr Ross asked, stepping forward from our group. “I am the diplomat amongst our group.”

The leader of Neub eyed him carefully for a moment, but seemed to decide that Dr Ross was worth listening to and nodded for him to continue.

“I represent Avonside, a newly arrived town on the ring,” Dr Ross began, pausing when the Jagdar opened his mouth to speak.

“Newly arrived? How?”

“Via an obelisk of unknown construction and origin,” Dr Ross said gravely.

Suddenly, the Jagdar looked a lot less sure of himself and a lot more apprehensive. Clearly, he knew that even in the presence of two mages, the changes that Avonside represented were the most dangerous thing to his town’s existence. “I see.”

“We have no imperial ambitions by ourselves, and we intend to remain a small city state within the mountains, but since your town is the closest settlement to ours we decided it would be irresponsible of us not to warn you of our existence. Furthermore, we will need many goods that we ourselves cannot at this time produce, and thus, trade will be required.” Dr Ross explained. “Our towns have the opportunity to become very prosperous, if we can both play our cards right.”

“Or we could both be wiped out in a calamity that would probably engulf the entire known ring,” Marat replied.

“That depends entirely on our people and our skills as leaders,” Dr Ross said with a smile that held just a hint of challenge.

Impassively, Marat locked eyes with the intelligent university professor, and for almost ten seconds they were both silent. Then, surprising me at least, Marat laughed. “You have resolve. This is good. Let us discuss our situations more casually over a meal. Then once we understand one another, we can place an arrow into the details of the matter.”

“Of course,” Dr Ross said with a slight bow of his head.

****

Turns out, Neub cuisine was basically just meat, wild grain bread, and root vegetables… but they could do a lot with them. The meat was cured using salt and herbs from the hills nearby, then marinated for a few days before it was seared and served. Meanwhile, the root veggies like parsnips, carrots, and onions were fried with goat butter and more salt. The bread was interesting. Because it was made mostly with wild grains, they served it as small baps or buns and you were expected to dip it in the juices from the rest of the meal. All of this was eaten without utensils, or at best, a knife. It all seemed relatively simple, but holy moly was it delicious.

During the meal, we learned a lot about the Jagdar and his people. At first we’d assumed that the entire massive steppe that bordered the western flank of our mountains was populated by one culture. That could not have been further from the truth.

Neub was considered a Reti town, who were once a nomadic people, but they’d put down semi-permanent roots several hundred years ago when the Ghraigan Empire conquered them.

Their cousins, the Bahyti had kept their nomadic nature but had since become more aggressive and warlike, taking to raiding the towns of their once-brothers and the empire they were forced to serve. They were the ones who’d attacked Avonside all those months ago. Huh, was it actually a year ago? Time was beginning to fuzz together for me.

About the Reti’s needs and wants, we discovered that despite the fact that they lived close to the mountains, their primary export was not ores, but salt and horses. If this’d been a normal world, I’d say the mountains used to be a dried out sea. But it was a ring world, and although it was thick enough to have its designed plate tectonics, it simply wasn’t old enough to form that kind of thing. The Umare must have designed the mountains to have salt, somehow.

“Yes, we’re expecting a trade caravan from the inner empire at some point in the next few weeks,” the Jagdar was saying when I tuned back into the conversation.

“Okay, and would you be willing to allow us to construct a road to Neub from Avonside?” Dr Ross asked. “Then we may be able to convince some of these trade caravans to take a detour into the mountains to visit once they arrive.”

“Of course, although…” the leader of Neub said slyly. “We may need some help. If we’re to become a trade stop then we’ll need to make certain… considerations and changes to our settlement.”

There it was! The sneaky little quid pro quo.

Dr Ross kept an impressively blank and vaguely interested expression on his face. “Oh, like what?”

“We will need food to feed the travellers, but we do not have the tools, time, and manpower to raise that food. That is not counting the food that will be required to feed any new people we bring in from the plains to guard the route,” Marat said.

I wasn't surprised when Dr Ross glanced in my direction. Resting my elbows on the table, I leaned forward and asked, "What's your biggest obstacle to growing the food you need?"

"The soil," he said instantly. "We may have vast amounts of empty land, but the past has shown us that attempting wide scale farming will sap what little nutrients are in it."

"A'ight," I nodded, leaning back to think.

My first thought was a plant that used magic to grow, which would then die and decompose to fertilise the soil. Unfortunately, if I planted something like that on the ring it would consume all the neutral ambient magic and leave this whole steppe as a magical desert. I could only imagine the carnage that would cause.

No, the solution would need to be a lot more elegant than that. Huh… what if I just exploded magical fertiliser over the region? It would work, and maybe I could just come back every so often to do it again.

This would be so much better if I could manipulate bacteria. Then I could create something more permanent to do heavy duty nitrogen fixing.

Oh! Oh shit!

Flexing my magical might, I popped out of existence with a flash of flower petals. Returning to my grove, I used my telekinetic tendrils to climb the outside of my tree like a magenta-haired Dr Octavius. I swept into the library in a rush of air and ideas.

Catherine squealed and fell backwards when I landed, the books she'd been carrying to her usual work table flying all over the place. I caught both her and the books with my mind and gently resettled them at the desk.

"Kitcat!" I exclaimed, giving her a hug. "I have an idea you might find interesting!"

She put her hand out to steady herself when I let her go, only to find the books were there. Adjusting, she blinked owlishly at me from behind her glasses. "O—oh? Um… uh… what, why?"

"So the people in Neub need a way to consistently fertilise their soil because it's shit quality. Obviously we don't have a fertiliser factory, so we can just yeet that all over the place. I considered doing it with magic, but like… that's not a permanent solution."

"Um— okay, I…" she said, frowning. Oh… I might have overwhelmed her. Oops. Okay, chill Ryn, chill. Let's give the poor girl time to compute. She hummed as the gears in her adorable little bronze-haired head began to whir. “You can’t use plants that use magic as fuel because they’ll be out in the mundane where there isn’t consistent ambient magic generation. It’ll drain the whole area of power and leave it feeling all itchy. Might work in the short term, though.”

“Yup!” I nodded eagerly. “However you look at it, you need an input to get an output. Most of the time we make our plants use ambient magic because it’s either in the garden or just a few plants so it won’t bother the mundane realm.”

“Yeah, so we need a fuel source other than magic, and obviously we can’t use the soil because that’s what we’re trying to improve…” she said, following along easily. She looked up into my eyes and I grinned, waiting for her to realise what I had a few moments earlier. Gasping, she grabbed my hand in both of hers, “We go further down!”

“Exactly!” I laughed, picking her up in a sudden full embrace. When I dropped her, she hung in the air for a second before gently settling on the ground. Oh, girl had been practising!

She was grinning widely when she outlined the same idea I’d gotten. “You make something to dig down really far and pull material up from deeper than most crops grow. You then burn that fuel in the plant to make— oh my god, Ryn!”

Now it was my turn to wait with bated breath. This was exactly why I rushed over to talk to her.

“Rynadria!” she said, clapping excitedly. “If we get the mechanisms right, these plants could be used in the mountains to dig up whatever element we need! Just set them to burn whatever stuff we don’t want and gather what we do want in a fruit or a root or something. Oh, oh, and we could design the fertilising plant to be edible once it was done with its job too… oh except we’d need to make it have an obvious ripening and uh… you know.”

“Right, right,” I nodded enthusiastically. “Collecting and burning anything and everything down below would make the fruit toxic as fuck until it was done processing everything. I think a root vegetable would suit the Reti. We make the leaves grow with all the good soil stuff, and then concentrate a bunch of sugars and starches down in the root.”

“What will we do with the stuff we can’t turn into useful food or fertiliser? The trace heavy metals and stuff?” she asked thoughtfully. Then she smacked her forehead. “Right, we burn them for fuel. Oh my god are we going to fuel these with trace radioactive material? That would be kinda hilarious.”

“Well, there won’t be nearly enough in the soil for that, but sure… god, the more I think about this though, the more complicated it gets in my head. We’ll need to account for pretty much everything that might be under the topsoil,” I said, beginning to groan as I realised what I was getting myself into. “Fuck, and what if the mass amounts of rich bio waste we’re using to fertilise things becomes a breeding ground for the wrong type of bacteria? Man… things are so much more simple when you have tenders and functionally unlimited amounts of magic.”

“So true,” Catherine giggled, patting one of her books idly. “Okay… how about we work on this later tonight? You can tell the… you said they were called the Reti? You can tell them we might be able to do something.”

Pulling a dramatic pose, I gave her a big thumbs up and popped back into the mundane world, still flashing the thumbs up at Jagdar Marat, who appeared to have almost fallen out of his chair with the surprise of my arrival.

“I think we have an idea, Jagdar!”

Beside me, Grace slowly and deliberately pressed her palm to her forehead.