Chapter Three Hundred and Seventy-Three. Conversations and exploration.

Chapter Three Hundred and Seventy-Three. Conversations and exploration.

"He really does seem like a nice boy, but it sounds like he's carrying quite a bit of baggage, yeah?" Veronica said.

"Yes, mum, I know," Jessica sighed. "I don't know if we'll ever move beyond friends, but I do know that if I stick with him, I'll end up tier twenty or something."

"I don't know if you need to go that far," Ronald shook his head. "Tier ten is crazy enough."

"Everyone I started with has fallen off," Jessica replied. "They've all hit tier six, and evolved to tier seven, but they've all slowed down to a crawl." She shook her head. "I get it, yeah? They're around level forty, most everyone with a double affinity, and they're comfortable. There's not much that can really threaten them, and you really don't have to work that hard to maintain a comfortable standard of living. If I wasn't running about with Bob, I'd have fallen off the leveling train myself." She sighed. "Would I like to give being with Bob a shot? Yeah, I would. But I'm not chasing him for that. I'm haring off after him because he's keeping us all motivated. Strewth, it's the challenge of keeping up with someone that's so driven, yeah? I mean, Bob's great, and he had sort of an early access to the new System interface before anyone else, but the thing of it is, he's not special. It's easy to look at someone who is super gifted and just be like 'right, well, that's not me' but with him, it's just a matter of putting in the work."

"But why?" Veronica asked worriedly. "You're a full tier ahead of your other friends, and they're living leisurely lives of luxury. Why chase more power?"

"Because I want to know just how far I can go," Jessica admitted. "That other species, the Eire, some of the things that tier fourteen woman said," Jessica shook her head again. "There's so much more out here than we could ever have imagined. Tier ten isn't the end, and if she was to believed, the beings who rule that universe are over tier forty. We're just children, playing in our little sandbox whilst the rest of the world is out there, waiting for us to grow up and start exploring."

"I love you, but the Jessi-bear I raised wasn't interested in ruling over anyone," Ronald grinned as he continued. "Not least of all because she would be bloody awful at it."

Jessica shook her hair out with a toss of her head, raised her chin and looked down her nose imperiously. "I'll have you know that Queen Jessica's subjects will regard her as both benevolent, and kind."

"Queen Jessica has yet to file her own taxes," her father replied dryly.

Jessica hung her head. "I'll have a minister for finance to handle that sort of thing," she grumbled.

"So long as you're not putting all your eggs in one basket," Veronica said. "Unrequited love is unhealthy, yeah?"

"I'm not in love with him," Jessica sighed. "He's a friend first, and if he ever gets past his hang ups, I'm still single, we might give it a go."

"As a father, I feel like I should object to any man you're interested on general principal, but I'm going to wish you luck anyway," Ronald said. "That man is carrying a lot of weight, and I imagine a good shag would loosen him up."

"A good shag, eh?" Veronica mused. "I don't suppose you know where I might find of those?"

"I've heard about this room just down toward the end of the ship," Ronald replied, "where if you go in wearing lingerie, such as that lacy yellow teddy, and a blindfold, that you might just find yourself subjected to a mind blowing shag."

"Oh really," Veronica smiled wickedly. "Is there any sort of time schedule for this?"

"I don't wanna hear this," Jessica complained.

"I'm sure if you went to put on your teddy in our daughters room, by the time you get back it would be open for business, as it were," Ronald smirked.

"Out!" Jessica said firmly, "both of you!"

Bob looked around the table.

Bailli, Erick, Mike, Jack, Eddi, and Wayna had decided to take the first rotation, farming for Mana Crystals to keep the search for an appropriate world funded, leaving Jessica, Dave, Amanda, Harv, and Eli to keep him company.

"So, we're going to plan on being away for a month," Bob began. "Given the number of jumps it took to find ourselves in a solar system last time, we should be shaving a lot of time off the search, but I imagine we'll still find a lot of solar systems that don't have anything for us."

"We should probably talk about just how low we'll go, yeah?" Jessica asked.

"We shouldn't go for anything that can't support tier sixteen, but I'd be willing to settle for tier fourteen," Bob replied.

"I'm not going to lie, I don't really know what to expect when we start swinging at tier ten and higher," Bob shrugged. "It's brand new territory, but the math all works out as far as experience goes."

"We know that something has to change at tier ten," Dave said. "Unless taking that System skill that puts you on the prayer switchboard makes all the difference."

Bob didn't have the answer, and having asked, he knew that Trebor didn't either. Naomeh, the tier fourteen Eire he'd met, had told him that certain information was restricted by tier, implying that the ability to understand was linked to your tier in some fashion. She had said that below tier ten was considered the 'Mortal' tiers, while below twenty was labeled 'Ascendent.'

She'd been unwilling to go into further detail, but the whole thing led him to suspect that these were break points where something changed.

He'd only recently begun considering if that applied to monsters as well.

"We won't know until we get there," Bob said. "With that in mind, I'm ready to make the first jump, unless anyone has something they haven't taken care of first?"

When no one spoke up, Bob nodded, and stood up, rolling his neck. It was time.

"Well, shit."

"Green, white, and blue, that's a good sign, yeah?" Jessica smiled.

"It is," Bob agreed. "We'll need to check it out, but that's promising."

The first jump had brought them to a M class solar system with nothing in the habitable zone. It had two gas giants and an ice giant, and was completely unremarkable.

This was the second jump, and while he wasn't ready to celebrate quite yet, the second planet in from the sun, another M class, looked an awfully lot like Earth, at least from the edge of the Solar System, which appeared to be where the new spell would be dropping them off, although two jumps didn't exactly provide enough data to say with any certainty.

"How far out are we?" Jessica asked.

She was the only one besides himself in the bridge, having offered to keep him company, while Dave and Amanda did couple things. He was pretty sure Harv and Eli weren't doing the same sort of couple things, but they were hanging out together as well, leaving Jessica to fend for herself while Bob was jumping the ship.

Bob checked his screen. "If we full burn then decel, call it four weeks."

Jessica winced, and Bob nodded. "Yeah, we'll be doing a lot more exploring than we used," he agreed. "We don't know how many solar systems are going to have something worth exploring, but being guaranteed to be in a solar system each jump cuts out a lot of the time."

Bob pulled up an image of the solar system they'd entered. It showed six planets, although it was possible that there were more that were currently behind the star. There was a small planet close to the sun that was almost certain to be a scorched rock completely devoid of life. The next planet was their target, and it was probably riding the outer edge of the habitable zone. The next planet was a grayish color, but it lacked any indication of an atmosphere, and given it's distance from the star, it was most likely frozen.

The next was a gas giant much further in, but the computer had identified over a dozen moons so far. Another gas giant was on the far side of the solar system, and the imagery was only good enough to suggest it's composition. Rounding everything out the final planet was an ice giant, which was sized somewhere in between Saturn and Neptune.

Bob was going to hug Alex when they got back to Thayland. Or at least give him a firm handshake. The upgraded armbands had been fantastic, but he was quickly coming to the realization that they really were toys in comparison to the computer systems he'd installed on the Freedom.

The software, which Alex happily admitted was stolen from NASA and then improved by DARPA, was putting together a picture of the solar system remarkably quickly, pulling data in from not only the sensors on the masts, but six large and complicated telescopes that Jack had sourced.

"It looks a bit like home," Jessica said.

"It's a lot colder though," Bob said. "The computer says it's running at just over 3k, and while that's at the upper end for an M, our sun runs at 5.7k, so it's barely half of that."

"Still, blue green and white means water, plant life, and atmosphere, right?" Jessica asked.

"I think so," Bob agreed. "I imagine that we'll have a better picture of it once we get closer."