Fortuna Verto

48-Establishing Finances

Two more nights passed, a period filled with opportunities of self discovery and self improvement. The entire time was still not spent on any single planet, plenty of opportunity was found to explore such forms of awareness in both worlds.

"Rosa, it's dawn now. We should probably get some rest and then look into matters on the other side. My sister had wanted me back there pretty early, something about having made an important appointment for something." "Oh, yeah, the academy was having that fair today, something about a historian's exhibit. Your sister's way of thinking isn't even surprising anymore." "Oh, so the two of us are going to go see an exhibit?" "Naw, she'll tell you she has too much homework to worry about and probably just ask you to bring her teacher." "Except.. wasn't her essay supposed to be done today? Certainly that would mean she wouldn't be busy so quickly, right? Besides, she's always seemed able to just find free time when she's needed a chance to step away from her work." Kori could hear how tired Rosa even sounded in such statements, clearly they both just needed some rest. It was more than a little perplexing how much Rosa just suddenly seemed so worn out there, but maybe research had just been hard today. They had both invested the time into trying for practical applications with true chaos.. the results being more confusing than anything. Even their limits in usage seemed to be flexible without cause, something that they found easy to do at one point later proving too taxing for another. At least the matter of process was making it easy enough to adjust to such absolute randomness.

Such, though, wasn't the only thing that had gone on. Rosa quite frequently disappeared for what she called business meetings with Drew. When pressed upon the idea, Rosa did admit that most of the time was spent making sure Drew had someone on hand who he could associate well with in all of the corporate struggles they were currently enduring. Kori might have provided some stock of supplies, but Velvet cutting them off from civilization was simply making things hard for everyone. Supposedly then, making sure they had proper leadership was supposed to keep them organized? That might be a fair assessment at least, such was generally the same struggle on the other side, with the academy isolated by the foundry. There at least, the academy had quite a stock supply to work with, the citadel providing even more. Even so, things were clearly pretty rough at the academy, it was even starting to feel like Jhez was counting on her to be there for him. Considering such thoughts, she settled down to her time-suspended sleep, ready to visit the other side once they had both woken up again.

"Great, Axln is here now. Okay, so I've got these two tickets to this really sweet fair I think you're going to love. Sadly though, I've got a few assignments to still worry about from some of my other classes, so I won't be able to go with you. Lyun probably won't enjoy this sort of thing, but it seems like my teacher is actually free today! If you go ask him, he'll probably be just as thrilled as you to go check things out. Have fun now, and be sure to tell me all about it!" Xwyhr quickly handed off the two tickets and made sure everyone was promptly moving along. Axln accepted both tickets while Lyun felt the onset of a mild headache. As expected, it didn't take much for Jhez to be compelled to visit the fair either. Once Axln and Jhez were gone, Lyun turned on Xwyhr to get an honest assessment of the situation.

"Homework.. right. Need any help with this 'homework'?" "Actually, yes. I got that essay done, and it seems like everything had been taken very well by relevant people in society. Well, in the academy at least, of course nothing has been able to go beyond that. There has been quite an outreach of speculation from such, but we've landed a bit of a roadblock. Everything seems to honestly point to the foundation of the void's resourcefulness on Ruixse, the same potential that made the entire kyuemu industry rather lucrative. A lot of this involves the cycle and distribution of elements between solar seasons, but finalizes upon what made such a thing so rich. That.. that would be the foundry's greatest secret. The academy is now certain that this path had never gotten conjecture before because the foundry had ensured it never would." "There is no chance the foundry would be willing to spill such a secret and endanger their profits just simply for the sake of historical research." "Yeah, that. The foundry even really hates the academy right now, making that even.. less likely somehow. The only chance we have in learning more is to outright take the foundry's greatest protect-secret from them.. without their consent." Lyun could see where Xwyhr was going with this. Someone would need to break into some of the most secure sections of the entire foundry and actually directly and explicitly steal such priceless information. This wasn't even a matter of just wandering into some underground vault to steal some boring shell of a rock, nor was it breaking into some floating legacy to take a book no one knew about. This would be the foundry's greatest asset, possibly the biggest heist historians had ever recorded.