All the Dust that Falls

Chapter 113: Kidding Around

It was nice of the women to offer to clean up after the breakfast mess. I would trust them to do a good job for now, but I would find some time to come back later and check. Not that I honestly thought that they would do poorly, of course, but because I knew that humans didn’t have the same capabilities as I did. It wouldn’t be that big of a deal to sanitize everything afterwards. Just a quick swipe with my lamp and all the germs would be eradicated.

Entertaining the children was becoming even easier as I started to better understand their mindsets. They weren’t like the adults at all. In many ways they were much more focused on the task at hand, but only for a short while. I just needed to find something they liked and they would focus on that for a long time, until they suddenly got bored and would need something else to do. Currently that meant they were chasing each other around the castle courtyard with gusto. Their first new resident, Felix, luckily fit right in and within a few minutes was running around with the rest of them.

My main trouble was keeping them away from where Trent, his older kids, and many of the women worked in the field. They were moving dirt around again. At first I didn't understand why that needed to be done. But as the work progressed I noticed the ground developing similarities to the fields that Tony had gathered food from a little while ago. That made sense. They were getting rid of the grass and less useful plants in some areas so that they could make more food.

The kids were endlessly fascinated with what the adults were doing, though, and it was a chore to keep them from running over the second I wasn’t looking. Luckily, I discovered their fixations with anything round that rolls. When that failed, I found small sticks that they liked to hit each other with. That one took a bit more training on my part. It took a couple of reprimands to teach them to mostly hit each other’s sticks and be gentle when hitting each other.

I had to fill up on water a couple of times before they were all in line with that.

When the stick fighting had first started I had wanted to put a stop to it, rather than find a way to guide them to do it safely. But when I saw how much fun they had I just couldn’t help myself. Besides, I had seen a lot of adults do the same thing with steel at this point. So perhaps there was some value in them getting in good practice now.

Leanne was the only one of Beatrice’s siblings that joined us regularly for playtime, but she was a bit older than the rest of them and mostly just helped me keep order. I appreciated her help. As well as her occasional head pats.

It was her idea to make the stick whacking part of the kids’ regular routine. Now every morning when the sun rose, we gathered all the children from the rooms they shared with each other and their mothers and pulled them out into the front yard of the castle. For a while they just engaged in a general melee and things were chaotic. That was fine.

I wanted to stop that at first, but after seeing how much easier it was to get them to listen after they had a bit of their excess energy out, I just incorporated it into our routine. I called it “warming up”.

After that I had everyone line up and watch as I demonstrated a few moves against Leanne. I first pulled out the divine sword to use as a demonstrating tool, but it was so bright that the children had to shield their eyes and couldn’t see what I was doing. That is why I was swinging around a stick instead. They were basic things like a sideways slash or a jab. Nothing too fancy, just the kinds of things I had done to that large threatening demon. But the children all cheered and were very excited to watch me. Then they would repeat the move 100 times in the air as I watched. Most of my time was taken up with correcting mistakes and the like. But overall that took about 15 minutes, which was the limit for how long I could make them pay attention to anything. After that, Leanne helped me pair them up with someone their own size.

The general chaos that followed was fun. They sometimes tried the moves I showed them, but really it was mostly flailing around - especially for the little ones. That was fine though, some of the larger ones actually would try to imitate me. It was a little hard to adapt though, as legs worked differently than wheels.

My models had worked really hard on the problem for a couple days, but eventually I figured out the best way for them to move. I started carrying around a long thin stick that I would use to help correct their movements. Gently adjusting the placement of knees and elbows. This lasted for as long as the children wanted it to. Eventually the little ones would get tired and we would transition to watching a pair of the larger kids taking turns going at it.

I started taking notes to remember how everyone did. For example, the largest boy was not actually the best at these one-on-one matches. He’d get too aggressive, leaving himself open to counters and refusing to think past the next move. Rather there was a smaller blonde boy who seemed to really put some thought into his footwork and dodging. He even worked on something resembling a combination attack at one point. It was quite impressive.

Once I started letting them know how many times each got hit and gave them scores, everyone got much more eager to take a turn. It was as if seeing their numbers go up was enough motivation to work ten times harder.

This generally lasted until breakfast. Once Mary would ring her triangle, all the sticks were dropped and everyone made their way to the kids table. I would have said they all ran to the kids table, but they were usually too tired to run. The general lack of energy made breakfast much easier to handle though. Instead of yelling and food throwing, I mostly had to remove kids' faces from their plates of food.

Mary and the other adults seemed to understand what was going on. I assumed they approved, given that breakfast got a little later each morning. This gave more time for our stick whacking. After breakfast though, things slowed down a lot. The kids went for a nap or to see their mothers. That was when I got my cleaning done.

With my skills, I was now able to tidy up the whole castle in under an hour. I was starting to consider adding the catacombs to my standard route just to stretch things out, but it was really not necessary to clean it every day.

This was how my mornings went every day for a full week. During that time I didn’t see Beatrice unless I visited her in the library. She seemed so focused on something she was writing that I didn’t want to disturb her.

In the afternoon, after a long nap and a snack, I had tried to teach the kids how to clean early on. However, that endeavor was having much less success. The best I could do was have them make their beds. It was a start.

That all changed once Beatrice finally finished her writing.

The morning routine didn’t change much. Sometimes Beatrice joined in with the stick game, but other times she also helped in the fields. After all, what they were doing was very hard work and she was quite strong. However, after lunch she would take the kids off my hands. The little ones, the larger kids and even some of the adults would join her in the library where she would teach reading and writing along with basic numbers.

This left me with more time than I knew what to do with. The only people who weren’t taken into her lessons were a few of the women who went about doing their own things. I could clean around the castle more but I didn’t need to. Even with the sudden influx of humans and the incredible mess-making capabilities of the kids, it still wasn’t enough to challenge me. At first, I just wandered the hallways, trying to remember the last time that I had time without things to do.

It had been a recurring problem lately, one that I didn’t know how to solve. Taking care of the kids was helping, sure, but it wasn’t enough. This wasn’t a problem before I came here, back when I still needed to charge. At least then doing nothing had a necessary purpose. Now I survived off just converting the dust I picked up, and that was more than enough to sustain me. As I grew more powerful my energy requirements grew, yes, but not at the same rate. I could only assume that my conversion efficiency had also improved with my other capabilities. Matter had a lot of energy potential in it after all.

After dinner I would have time to talk with my disciples. As the rest of the families had some time to themselves, we let them do their own thing and gathered in Beatrice’s room. Mary had finally ousted her from the mattress she had in the library. Now she was in the largest room in the castle that contained a proper bed. I could tell that she hasn’t been exactly happy about it, but she eventually relented. She did insist on bringing huge stacks of books back with her to the room though. I had moved my favorite rug over to the foot of her bed, where its red and gold majesty truly brought the room together. Lounging on it, I would spend the hours before sleep answering Beatrice and Tony’s questions.

“Master, how should we deal with other humans?” Beatrice asked that first night that our routine was established. Tony leaned in slightly, apparently also interested in the answer. It was something I had to think about. Not because the answer was particularly complicated, but because I didn’t really understand the question.

Other humans? Did she mean other humans as in ones from the outside? Weren’t all the humans but her from the outside? Even Tony came from the outside. Maybe she was talking about humans we just hadn't met yet. If that was the case, then it would entirely depend on how they acted. I saw no reason to turn anyone away, as long as they were willing to bathe and wouldn’t try to cause any trouble.

If she was talking about those that would cause a mess though, it depended on how insistent they were… Overall I would say that it was complicated and would vary a lot case by case. As I thought, I did my best to communicate the ideas running through my processors to Beatrice and Tony.

For some reason Beatrice was writing as fast as she could on sheets of paper spread out on the floor in front of her. “So it will vary by the degree of their transgressions. We won’t turn away anyone from joining our…organization…but they will need to prove their good intentions. How will they do that, Master?”

Hmmmmm, the only way to build trust was with time and cleaning. If someone wanted to stay with us, maybe they could stay separately and do some cleaning for a bit so we could get a judge of their character before trusting them more completely. That way, if they did tend to make a huge mess of things, it wouldn’t be right in our home.

“So we can have a probationary period. Like an outer disciple position?” Beatrice clarified. “What about the children who grow up here? Will they also need to go through a trial period?”

No, I thought that I would be able to make a good judgment on who they were by the time they grew up enough to start contributing. That was one thing that I wanted to ask her, though. How old did humans get before they needed to work? Voicing my question, Beatrice didn’t seem to know how to answer it. Nervously she looked at Tony who also had a thoughtful look on his face.

“I think that is an honest question, not a test.” Tony said but he didn’t sound very confident. “It might make sense, actually. I don’t know how well Master understands human culture and growth.”