Demesne Patron EX SS 18 – "What If… Lori Was A Mentalist Instead Of A Whisperer" (Patreon)

Sometimes, Lori wished the other two hadn't died. Then she wouldn't be in this mess. Probably. Well, she'd be in less of a mess than she was now, though she probably wouldn't be the demesne's Dungeon Binder.

Whisperer Full-of-herself could have been using her Whispering to make them basic shelters out of stone, which was hardly in short of supply since the ground was right there. Deadspeaker Wants-to-be-a-farmer could have made them out of the trees that were growing everywhere, or grew his own, or at least made putting houses together easier by fusing pieces of wood together to save time. Really, it had been inconsiderate of them to die like that while Lori had been off hunting to bring back meat for their little group of idiots.

It was just old grumbling at this point, however, as she used a blade of thought force as thin as she could imagine—the width of a split hair—to cut down the tree in front of her. Normally, this would have been very dangerous, since Mentalists usually only had the imbuement to maintain one formation of thought force at a time, but she was a Dungeon Binder now.

With the endless well of power coming from her core, she had no trouble arranging another formation of thought force to solidly grip the tree she was cutting so it wouldn't fall on her. The schism controlling the second formation was very simple, with only a yes/no logic to it, but that was all she needed for it to keep the tree in place as she cut. Carefully, she cut between the parallel lines of thought that another schism was maintaining as a guide, letting her make the cut level as level as possible. It was a trick that she wouldn't have been able to use before, since she could only place thoughts within her body and mind, but with her ascension, the entire demesne was her body now, allowing her to place thought everywhere.

And she was using it to cut down trees.

It couldn't be helped. Despite her absolutely perfect memory that allowed her to remember all the basic lectures about Whispering, Deadspeaking and Horotracting from when she had begun her education, as well as all the random lines of information she'd read over the years, had apparently not been enough for her to start using the other forms of magic when she'd become a Dungeon Binder. There was probably something she'd missed, something that had been conveyed in a lecture that hadn't been written down. Well, she had all the information she needed to begin reconstructing their methodologies from first principles.

If she ever found time to do so, that is.

Now that they were no longer traveling and were settling down to found a permanent settlement, suddenly there was a lot of work to be done. A lot of raw materials were needed for construction, and a lot of food needed to be eaten so that people would be fit enough to do it. Which was why she was here cutting trees. Normally such a thing would be beneath her, but given there was currently nothing above her at night but a leaky tent canvass, she allowed it in the pursuit of proper shelter. Even if she took her time aligning her thought force, she was able to cut more trees faster than a group wielding all the axes they had. Once she had the fallen lumber stacked, she could move it more swiftly and safely on uneven ground by wrapping the trees in thought force and lifting it back to the sawpit.

She wouldn't have been able to do any of that before she became a Dungeon Binder, unless she had been swallowing think beads like they were water. It was a common stereotype with certain kinds of Mentalists, who couldn't function without ingesting beads every hour or so. Lori considered such people bad at properly breathing and regulating their magic.

The blade of thought force finished cutting through the tree, and Lori switched her focus, taking control off the thought force formation of thought force that gripped the tree from the schism she'd set to maintain it. She took deep, even, controlled breaths out of habit, even as magic from the connection to her core was used to imbue the formation that lifted the tree and turned it sideways, laying it down on the ground like all the other tree she had already felled. It was still covered with leaves and branches, but the other people would get to that, stripping the tree before she carried it over to the sawpit where it would be hewn into beams and planks to make shelters.

Indeed, a third of the other trees she'd felled were already stripped, branches set aside in piles to age and dry for firewood. Unfortunately, they didn't have the time to do that with the trunks, and with Whisperer Full-of-herself and Deadspeaker Wants-to-be-a-farmer dead, there wasn't anyone to quickly cure the wood. It had to be used while it was still green, and while that was supposedly standard practice, she had been told it would inevitably lead to structural problems as the wood dried and potentially changed shape over time. Apparently this as considered acceptable, but it made Lori twitch inside.

"Your Bindership, everyone, lunch time!"

Lori and everyone else looked up at the call of the man walking towards them. His clothes were splattered with mud, though his hands had been cleaned, probably in preparation for dinner. Her lord, because every Dungeon Binder needed a lord to deal with little annoyances that they had no time for such as people. Or in this case, telling her it was time to eat, since she had better things to do than to arrange a formation that kept track of the exact time of day.

"What's the food?" Lori asked.

"Roasted beast meat, what else?" her lord who smiled too much said with a shrug. "I can't guarantee what it will taste like though, since it was a kind of beast we haven't seen before."

Lori shrugged. "Meat is meat, Liam."

"It's Rian," he sighed. Was it? Well, she really couldn't be bother putting in the effort to pull the right name out of her memory. It was close enough, anyway.

The thoughts in his head flowed and aligned, and Lori didn't need to emulate the pattern in her own head to know he was annoyed and exasperated. Once, she'd have needed to be physically touching someone's head to be able to discern the pattern of their thoughts so she could emulate them. Now that she was a Dungeon Binder however, her demesne acted as her body, meaning she was technically in contact with the thoughts of everyone in her demesne at all times. She could detect the patterns of their thoughts in real time as they had them if she simply focused on her awareness, though despite the name, she couldn't actually tell what they were thinking. The discrete elements that Mentalists imbued and called 'thoughts' were not actually people's thoughts, but rather the combination of the lightning running through their body and the changes in their soul in reaction to their cognitive functions, feelings and the very impulses of their flesh.

How the wizards and Dungeon Binders of the distant past were able to determine that, no one remembered. Or if they did, it wasn't knowledge that was disseminated.

Lori suspected it meant there was a fifthform of magic that involved the soul. One either lost from the world's bloodlines or deliberately obscured and hidden in some way, for some unknown reason. After all, how could so much be definitively known about how the soul was involved with magic when none of the known forms of magic could even perceive the soul as a discrete element?

"What is the progress on the shelters?" she said as she arranged a formation of thought force to wrap around her legs, lifting her above the mud on the ground as she began floating towards the communal eating area they'd established. Just because she'd been standing on mud all morning because she couldn't be bothered to make a schism to maintain a thought force formation to keep her off the ground didn't mean she wanted to walkon mud. Standing in one place was entirely different from walking on the substance! Her certification and license to fly was the first thing she had worked towards when she had been in school, since she it had allowed her to work as a courier, which had been easy beads.

Being a courier hadn't paid as well as being an accountant, or a secretary, or a computer, but it had allowed her to fly while being paid for flying, which she considered far better.

"They're going up," her lord said as he trudged after her. "We should finish with two more shelters by the end of the day, which means all the children should be properly covered against the rain tonight."

Lori nodded. Good. "Good." She needed to invest properly in the future, after all, and conditioning the children was the best way to ensure the loyalty of future generations. "Progress on the leather?"

"Very slow. With the constant rain, the gold water isn't evaporating very fast, and we can't spare any cooking vessels to concentrate them faster. And since you didn't want them inside your cave—"

"Dungeon," Lori corrected. Honestly, couldn't he remember? She corrected him like this every time!

"Right, that, then there's not much they can do but keep them covered and let time sort it out. It's not like they can do more than clean out the hides and stretch them over fires to dry without more infrastructure, which they're already building. It's the same with the smoking shed. Until we can get that up, we don't have a way of keeping any of our meat from going bad."

Hence why she'd need to go hunting again after lunch so they'd have more meat for dinner. Lori grit her teeth in frustration as she slid through the air, before sighing in resignation. "I'll excavate deeper into the hill," she said. "We can use the resulting cave as a shelter while we divert construction efforts towards the smoking shed, and the excavated rock can be more building material." Blades of thought force would work on stone just as well as wood.

"Please remember to leave supports for the ceiling so it doesn't collapse," her lord said immediately. "And don't make the rocks too small. If they're too small it will be inefficient to use them as building material."

"Noted, Iyan."

He sighed. "It's Rian, but that was actually pretty close this time." He looked around for a moment, then spoke in a quieter voice. "Why do you keep getting everyone's names wrong? I thought Mentalists were supposed to have perfect memory!"

Lori glared at him for his impertinence. As usual, he courted death with his comments. If he didn't take pains to ensure they were kept private, she would have slapped his face to discipline him! "Once more, you court death with your comments. If you did not keep your impertinence private, I would have slapped you."

"Yes, you've said. I can remember that much without being a Mentalist. You realize its Mentalist villains in plays who talks like that, right? The heroes are always more dignified and restrained."

"Well, the heroes are boring," Lori snapped. "Always so predictable and protecting the way things are when they have the power to make things better, always going on about how their power comes from friendship and their companions…"

"Well, it does help you beat someone by outnumbering them five to one. What does that have to do with you always forgetting everyone's names?"

"I remember everyone's names just fine, Rayin! There's you, and that little boy, Catrina…"

"It's Rian, and her name is Karina. Luckily for you, everyone thinks it's just a nickname because you've gotten fond of her."

"Wait, he's a girl?"

"Yes. Admittedly, it's hard to tell because she wears the same clothes as her brothers, but the name should have been a big clue. And now we're back to our original topic. So, why are you so bad at people's names? You were the one who asked me to get you a list of the names of everyone in the demesne, which I had to write down on a tree trunk because we didn't have anything else, and that was a pain to do… so why is it that every name you actually call people by is conspicuously not on the list?"

Ugh, he sounded like her mothers! She wasn't forgetful, she just didn't care! If it was something she actually did need to remember accurately, then she'd spend the imbuement to search her memories for the information. People's names weren't that important, however, so what's the point? "I'm not forgetful, I just don't care," Lori said. "Besides, what good is a list of names if I don't know the faces of who they belong to? And I don't talk to anyone but you in any case, so it doesn't matter!"

"It kind of does if by your own admission I'm the only one you talk to and you still keep getting my name wrong. You never even use the same wrong name twice in a row! Honestly, at some point it stopped being hurtful and just became sad."

"If you're sad, you can ask Uwu and Mikan to comfort you."

"Their names are Umu and Mikon, and why would I do that? I barely know them, and they're pretty busy with their own work. Reeds aren't going to turn themselves into baskets by themselves."

Lori turned, adjusting the arrangement of her formation so she was floating sideways, and gave her lord an intent look.

"What?" he asked.

She shook her head, arranging her formation once more so that she was facing forward. Idiot.

The schism she'd set aside to observe the weather made itself known, and it provided her with her observations and conclusions. Lori grimaced as she paid attention to the air herself. It was full of little sparks of lightning, the flowing presence of the planet seeming to fluctuate minutely along its invisible paths. "Ryan, tell everyone to pack everything that's loose again," she said. "We're in for another storm tonight, possibly as early as this afternoon." The already overcast sky looked unchanged so far. Lori would have to fly up high so she could see the far horizon if she wanted to get a better idea of where the storm was coming from.

Her lord nodded wearily. "I'll tell them. Hopefully we don't lose any tools this time. Ugh, there goes dinner." He sighed.

Yes, sometimes Lori really wished Whisperer Full-of-herself and Deadspeaker Wants-to-be-a-farmer hadn't died.