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. Updated from novelb(i)n.c(o)m
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”.
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.”