“If it were me and I couldn’t be where I wanted, I’d probably choose Skal’s middle-ground town, wherever it ends up being,” Karbo said.


    Karbo lifted up another huge rock out of the quarry. He wasn’t exactly Arthur’s first choice for advice, but Karbo had wisdom in his simplicity. He tended to deal with most problems by punching them and trusted ones that he couldn’t solve by punching or throwing to resolve themsevles. He was nice and cared about whether or not Arthur ended up being happy. That counted for a lot all by itself.


    Laying the rock on the ground, Karbo began to circle it, poking and prodding it here and there as if looking for some kind of secret he would have otherwise taken for granted.


    “Why there, though?” Arthur said. “There are a lot of tough warriors in the capital, right?”


    “Of course there are. Some of the best. Which is a problem. There’s hardly any monsters to slay around here, and they get all pissy when I kill what’s left.” Karbo shook his head. “It’s horrible.”


    “That’s reasonable.” Arthur watched as Karbo scooped a smaller, sharper rock off the ground and started etching into the much larger block, marking deep lines through the rock with no apparent sense of artistry at all. “But you do know I’m not a warrior, right? I make tea.”


    “Yeah, but so do a thousand other people in this place. Do they even need you here?” Karbo glanced back at the city in the distance. There weren’t really open quarries in the capital proper.


    “That’s the big question,” Arthur said as Karbo began tapping the rock deeper and deeper into the etched lines with about the same amount of effort a normal person would spend pushing a butter knife into too-cold butter. “I think it’s a little different. The monsters don’t actually care how many people there are in a town, right? It doesn’t make more spawn?”


    “It actually does, a bit. There are always a few more dungeons around big demon settlements. Something about the majicka flowing better. But it never keeps up. The bigger towns get, the safer they are.”


    “And you sell safety,” Arthur said. “Makes sense.”


    Karbo looked amused. “Sell safety. That’s funny. Yeah, I sort of do. But you sell tea, right? That feels different.”


    “Yeah, but every competitor is another mouth to feed. And most cook classes don’t focus on quantity or work all that many hours. There tends to be plenty of business to go around.”


    “But more in the transit town, right?” Karbo asked. “Fewer cooks per person, or whatever.”


    “Sure. But I’d be busy enough, either way. Especially since I don’t think they want me making tea for fun anyway.”


    “Really? They think that about you?” Karbo laughed. “Do they think they can convince you to stop breathing air too?”


    “They seem to. I’m sure they’d be flexible if I pushed it, but the idea is for me to make a lot of Portable Arthur and Powerplant Boba.”


    “Which do what? With the way they’re acting, you’d think they are a new kind of booze.”


    “It’s mostly like… I think they want to send them with people like Minos as first aid kits. And to stock them for sick people they can’t cure with just alchemical stuff. And since I’m the only person who can do what I can do, I’m the only person they can ask to do it.”


    “Ah, yeah. That would do it,” Karbo said. “It’s the same in fighting. A little edge can be a lot, when things are close.”


    “Yeah.” Arthur nodded. “That seems to be about the extent of it.”


    “Shame you can’t cause a widening of the path.” Karbo finally brought his little rock down hard on the bigger one, busting off large piece of it, then picking up Arthur in his offhand while he measured the new chunk of rock with his main. “It’s a bit too heavy still. I’ll chip it down.”


    “Fine. Just don’t pick me up if you don’t need to. It’s embarrassing.”


    “That was the deal. If you come along to the quarry, I get to use you as a weight to calibrate these rocks,” Karbo said. “Just shush. There’s nobody here to see anyway.”


    Arthur resigned himself to his fate. He really had agreed to it. “Fine. But you said widening of the path.”


    “That’s right. If you could pull that off, you’d solve all your problems. Flat out, deus ex machina style. No worries, no problems, no leaving your little town.”This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    “That sounds great actually. How do I do that? Because I’ll do it. Or try, at least.”


    “It doesn’t work like that. If it did, I would have widened the path around what I do a long time ago.” Karbo looked thoughtful as he set down both Arthur and the rock. “It’s like… Okay, first, you don’t know what I’m talking about at all. Right? Because you are an offworlder, and they are like little babies who don’t know anything.”


    “Basically.”


    “A widening of the path is when the system looks at something one person has done, some innovation or something. Like a runner who finds a new way to run, or like a warrior who pushes a particular way of fighting way past what their class is supposed to do.”


    “Like you.” Arthur motioned at Karbo. “With your auras, and your freehand class, and all that.”


    “Right. But if that’s all it took, I’d have widened the path ten times by now. I’m not even bragging. I’m the best. Nobody can beat me up.”


    “What about Pomm?”


    “We don’t talk about Pomm. The point is, there’s more than that.” Karbo chipped a few chunks off the rock, picked up Arthur again, nodded, and went back to work. “It has to be something the system wants. At least that’s what scientists think. And something that fits the age. I think that’s why I haven’t ever widened the path. This age doesn’t need warriors, much. Just one of me covers probably half of the heavy-hitter battling anyone wants. It’s not an era of fighting.”


    “Do you think it’s an era of tea?”


    “Maybe. But even if it was, you still can’t get out of your troubles that way. That’s the biggest limit on it. Widening of the path stuff never gets anyone out of a jam. It’s not for that.”


    “How do you know?” Arthur says. “It must have done it sometime, even if it was by accident.”


    “We had centuries of war, Arthur. No city was ever saved by a widening. No battle was ever won. And they kept records on that kind of stuff. Eventually, the widening benefits everyone. But it never gets anyone out of a jam. Ever.”


    “Well, that sucks. And this is a rule?”


    “As much as anything is. I’d like to say you could break it, but it’s about as constant as gravity, and you can’t fly.” Karbo looked at his stone and smiled, suspiciously. “Not yet, anyway.”


    —


    An hour later, Karbo had carved out several stones from the quarry, strapped a chain around them, and was carting them back towards the capital. But not quite towards the gates. Instead, he and Arthur were walking towards one of the farthest points they could actually see on the curved wall, a place where several hundred people had gathered between the outer border of the capital and a largish lake.


    “This is stupid, by the way,” Arthur said. “Someone’s going to get hurt.”


    “That’s why we are trying it out on you first.” Karbo gently elbowed Arthur in the side, sending him flying a few steps to the side. “And your friend is doing a lot of calibration he frankly doesn’t need to. It’s hard to miss a lake, and once he gets done with these rocks he could put you in a barrel if he wanted.”


    The catapult thing, as Lily called it, turned out to be an entire event Milo had wormed his way into. Machinists were rare and so he had been allowed to observe since the very beginning. Once Arthur finally got him and Lily to give the whole story, he saw that a lot of other machinists, lumber specialists and metalsmiths had been working on a more sober, experimental sort of knowledge-building project.


    Milo had immediately ruined that. His influence seeped in like dye into a t-shirt, slowly coloring the entire event until it became a circus. And, to his credit, Milo had managed to increase the appeal of the entire thing from something that interested a small handful of weapons enthusiasts to a party that had drawn enough people to populate a mid-sized town.


    Everyone liked a circus.


    “Milo, this is intense. Are you sure you don’t want to move to the capital? You seem like you fit right in.” Karbo dropped the bundle of big rocks near the catapult, stirring up a small cloud of dust as they plunked to a stop. “You’d do well here.”


    “My wife and me really like Coldbrook, thanks,” Milo said. “Although we are definitely putting this on the list of vacation spots. Arthur, are you ready to get launched?”


    Milo patted the side of the catapult with a threatening amount of glee. Arthur sighed. He had already said he would do this. He couldn’t have said no. Milo wanted it too bad. They were best friends, and best friends made sacrifices for each other, even if one of those sacrifices was agreeing to let your friend terrify you entirely for their own amusement and the general fun of a crowd of spectators.


    “Fine. Let’s do it,” Arthur said.


    “Ha! Not yet, we won’t.” Milo laughed and began wrenching on the catapult with a huge, exaggerated metal tool. “There are still hours of calibration to go. I just wanted to see if you were backing out yet.”


    “Jerk.” Arthur looked over the machine. “You really built this in a couple days?”


    “Only some of it. A lot of the parts came from the smaller one. These guys aren’t bad at what they do. The metal parts will hold up. Of course all of the base and the wooden moving parts are new. They couldn’t get the distance we needed with the scale.”


    “So when is this going down? I said I’d ride it. I didn’t say I’d sit in suspense all day.”


    “Four hours. Right at the end of sunset. We thought it would be scarier in the near-dark.”


    “And he’s right.” Lily appeared around the back of the catapult, pulling a small cart. “But have no fear. I figured out what to do to keep your mind off it in the meantime.”


    “Is that all my tea stuff?”


    “Yup. All you need for this kind of thing. Mizu found an old well and got it mostly into shape for you, so there’s water too.” Lily waved her hand towards the crowd. “And hundreds of people. Get working. It’s the best thing for you.”


    It was. Mizu commandeered a few tables and chairs in addition to the well, which meant Arthur had everything he needed to get a makeshift stand going. He fired up his Empathetic Brewer skill, but almost immediately turned it off once he figured out the crowd was almost entirely of a single mind on what they wanted out of his tea.


    And it’s shocking what they want. Absolutely shocking.


    They wanted tea. Plain, ordinary tea, untouched by majicka. They were there to have fun. They didn’t need stress-reducing tea, or energy beyond what a light amount of pep could give. They just wanted to taste good things.


    Arthur was far from the person to refuse that kind of request. He cracked his fingers, told Lily to give her majicka-lamp buff to the catapult people, and got to work making the best tea he possibly could.