[Third Person POV]
The city of Khilux was flourishing. Golems of every kind moved from place to place across the city, handling their jobs.
With laws and taxes in place, coins had started to change hands. There were all kinds of work available: builder, adventurer, scholar, explorer and more. Most golems could fight in some way, except the ones made specifically for a role, like blacksmithing or construction.
Joul's guild hall had requests posted from King Daz, and from the kingdom's various departments, for all sorts of materials. The highest-paying request was still for as much silver mithril as possible, from the new dungeon Queen Jane had found with her party. Most of the adventurer golems took it.
Most people would assume golems don't need money. The golem community welcomed it anyway, because it gave them a way to reward each other's hard work. They usually spent it on food, clothes or expanding their homes. Every so often, someone ordered a signed picture of the King.
The statue of the King stood at the center of the city. The city itself was triple the size of Reinhardt, and still growing.
[Daz's POV]
The planning meeting for the first outing went about as well as every meeting does in my family.
"Jane's Recruit," Jane said, reading the class name off the draft, "is a perfectly good name."
"It's boring," said Juliet.
"It's dignified."
"It's boring, Mama. Mine should be called something cool. Like 'Princess's Blade.' Or 'Juliet's Berserker Army.' Or 'The Princess Is Always Right Brigade.'"
"Juliet's Recruit," Jane said, and wrote it down, and that was that.
Juliet sulked. Then she discovered the system would let her choose the color of her quest marker, and went from sulking to radiant in about a second. She picked pink. A very specific pink. When Fenrir asked why, she said, "Because they'll see it from the road."
That left the question of where.
Martimer suggested Winston, since it's close. Torva suggested somewhere far from Grid, so I wouldn't get distracted. Zuriel suggested we build a dedicated quest pavilion first, with proper foundations, which would take about four months.
"Bairan," I said.
Everyone looked at me.
"That's where it started," I said. "It seems fair to start this there too."
Jane squeezed my hand under the table. Nobody argued after that.
[Third Person POV]
It was time for one of King Daz's scheduled outings with the Queen and the Princess, to give the players of Satisfy a rare chance at a quest.
Daz had all kinds of items, weapons, armor and companion golems he could offer as rewards. The system decided which, though. Daz chose the quest's criteria, and the system recommended the rewards to match. There was one rule he'd set for himself: no quest from the royal family would ever be below A rank.
This outing had a specific goal. Daz wanted a player to accept a quest from him, a different one from Jane, and another from Juliet. Each quest led to a brand-new class.
[Disciple of Daz]
A class that makes its holder a disciple of the Golem King. The disciple may walk many paths at once: swordsmanship, magic, blacksmithing, alchemy and more, drawn from the combined skill of the King's golems.
The disciple cannot create golems. That power belongs to the Golem King alone.
[Jane's Recruit] / [Juliet's Recruit]
Classes for players who join the golem army. Recruits rise through the ranks under the Queen or the Princess, and may one day become knights of Khilux.
All three classes offer a race change: the player may become a golem.
A player who refuses the race change cannot reach the final upgrade of their class.
King Daz left Khilux with Queen Jane, Princess Juliet, and a small delegation of guard golems. Not that they needed one.
[Daz's POV]
I picked Bairan for the first outing. For sentimental reasons.
It was smaller than I remembered, and much busier. Grid's success had turned it into something like a pilgrimage site for new blacksmiths. There were half a dozen smithies on the main road now. The one where I'd stood on a box and stared through the window for two hours had a little plaque on it that said Where the Legendary Blacksmith Began.
We were in disguise, more or less. The guards wore the old skull masks. Jane and Juliet wore hooded cloaks. I'd decided to go in my normal avatar: gray robes, glasses, not very tall. Nobody looks twice at a short man in gray.
I was wrong about that.
An old woman at a vegetable stall looked twice. Then a third time. Then she grabbed her grandson by the shoulder and pulled him behind her.
"Don't look at it, sweetheart," she hissed. "Don't look it in the glasses."
Juliet made a sound like a teakettle. Jane had to turn around and face a wall.
"It's been two years," I said.
"The Ghost of Bairan has returned," the boy whispered, enchanted.
"I'm not a ghost."
"That's what a ghost would say," Juliet told him, very seriously, and he nodded with his whole body.
While we waited for the square to clear, Juliet bought a bag of honey sweets from a stall, ate half of them, and gave the other half to the old woman's grandson. He accepted them with the solemn air of someone receiving gifts from the spirit world.
Jane wandered over to the little plaque on the old smithy, Where the Legendary Blacksmith Began, and read it twice. Then she looked back at me with that crease at the corner of her mouth.
"Hun," she said, "is this the window?"
It was the window. You can still see the scuff marks on the frame where I leaned in for two hours.
I went inside. The blacksmith there now was young, a player, and very nervous to have a man in gray robes and glasses walk into his shop and stare at the anvil for a long time without saying anything. I bought a hammer from him. A plain one, normal rated. I paid him ten times what it was worth and left before he could argue.
I'm going to give it to Torva. She'll pretend she hates it.
We set up in the village square. It wasn't much: a table, three chairs, and guard golems standing around looking intimidating. The system did the rest. Quest markers lit up over our heads, gold for me, silver for Jane, and a bright, slightly smug pink for Juliet, which she'd apparently picked herself.
Players noticed. Of course they did. Within the hour, the square was ringed with them, three and four deep. Nobody came close. They held up appraisal skills and flinched at the results. They whispered, recorded, posted. I could almost hear the forums catching fire from here.
"Golem King," someone said loudly. "That's the Golem King. Four question marks. I saw the video."
"Then who are the hooded ones?"
"Who do you think?"
Two hours passed. A few brave players asked what the quests were, read the difficulty ratings, and retreated very fast. One Ranker-looking type in shiny epic gear made it as far as the table before Juliet looked up at him from under her hood and smiled. He found somewhere else to be.
We did get some visitors, in the loosest sense of the word.
A group of four, in decent rare-grade gear, argued for twenty minutes about who should go first. When they finally came forward together, they read Jane's quest, saw the difficulty rating, and their leader quietly fainted. His party carried him away.
A streamer arrived with a floating camera orb and a lot of energy. He approached my table talking very fast about how his viewers wanted to know what the Golem King's secret was. I told him the secret was head pats. His chat apparently exploded. He left without taking a quest, and I'm told that clip now has more views than the national competition.
One young woman in a mage's robes came right up to the table, read Juliet's quest, looked at the pink marker, looked at Juliet, and said, "Your marker is the most beautiful color I've ever seen." Juliet was so delighted she almost gave her the quest on the spot. Then the woman saw the clear conditions, said "Oh, no," very softly, and backed away into the crowd. Juliet watched her go with real regret.
"She had taste," Juliet said.
"Maybe this was a bad idea," I muttered.
"Hun." Jane didn't look up from the book she'd brought. "You stood on a box outside a smithy for two hours once. You can sit in a chair."
She had a point.
It was close to sunset when the crowd shifted. Someone was pushing through from the back, apologizing as they went. A player in newbie clothes. Not just low-level gear. The actual basic clothing the game gives you when you have nothing equipped. The same clothes I'd seen on a certain blacksmith, the day this all started.
They stopped in front of the table. Their hands were shaking. Their level wasn't even worth appraising.
"Excuse me," they said. "I, um. I don't have anything. I know I don't. Everybody's been telling me to quit. But I saw the quest marker from the road, and I thought... I thought the worst thing that could happen is you say no."
I looked at them for a long moment. Then I looked at Jane. She'd put her book down.
Then I looked at Juliet, who was leaning forward in her chair, eyes shining under her hood. She already had her mind made up, and was trying very hard to let me be the one who said it.
[A player has approached the Golem King.]
[Quest available: Disciple of the Golem King.]
"Sit down," I said, and pulled out the third chair. "Let's talk about what you want to be."