In the months and years prior to the start of this Expedition, Henrietta had studied extensively the means by which one could be a good leader. As an Expedition's Commander, it would be her duty to interact with the locals, to be the rallying cry to which they would attract additional support in their fight against Calamity, then to oversee the organization of a massive conglomerate of people brought together to construct a portal back home. All the while, she would need to balance the needs of her team with one another as well as against the pressures and constraints they were under.
She'd studied how to advise with trauma, heartbreak, heated arguments, debates on planning and differences in combat styles. She'd read about arguments in favor of progress, how to sway influential figures towards the side of science, the rhetoric needed to sway the masses towards supporting the construction of a portal. She hadn't prepared to direct a society into its first steps of civilization.
Does it count as a society with just the five of us?
It would certainly be easier in many ways. She wouldn't need to oversee the squabbles of hundreds of individuals, merely the four entrusted to her care, and while she was well-equipped for that task it was nonetheless a daunting prospect. With only the five of them present, tempers were already beginning to flare from the combination of stress and proximity.
She really wished they'd gotten more time before the Jump to get to know one another. Her other Expedition had given them five whole years to get to know one another before they actually left, whereas this one had been mere months. She'd heard that they'd relaxed their intensity somewhat since that first wave of Expeditions, but this seemed... a bit much.
Still, with all of them together, she was optimistic that they could finally focus on their true mission. And while it may have been slightly different than normal... it was still applicable.
Pacify the land. Accelerate magi-technical development. Create a portal home.
Now yes, the nominal assumption was that any society would have at least discovered metalworking, and have decently robust networks of trade and information that would enable the accumulation of both powerful reagents and promising individuals to aid them in their development of the portal. Having neither assistants nor ready-made magical artifacts made it complicated.
She was aware of a prior Expedition which had landed in a world composed entirely of warring tribes and therefore had no trade. And another in which the oncoming Calamity was the collapse of magic, and several where the Calamity was a sudden wave of magic. All of those had required substantial deviations from the normal formula, and all of them had made it home in the end.
Not that they heard about the ones that didn't.
Having an entirely uninhabited world was unprecedented, and she didn't know how to process that. Was their Jump far too late? Did the Calamity already happen thousands of years ago, with all traces of the society having been wiped from the face of the world? Did they somehow arrive too early? She wasn't aware of any temporal shenanigans interfering with previous Expeditions, but was there some potential for their presence to itself be the trigger for their own arrival. Interplanar invaders were a relatively common instigation for a Jump Nucleus, after all…
Though perhaps she was overthinking things. She should be writing everything down, both that she would need for later in the Expedition as well as for study after their return, but for the time being what the five of them needed first and foremost was safety and stability. Once they had some time, she'd make herself a pen or brush out of a twig, get some wooden slates or find some appropriate bark and start writing. Her Sketchbook couldn't record words within it without creative workarounds, unlike most of her prior team's own artscapes.
Fortunately, they were decently en-route to accomplishing both of those goals to a very basic degree. Though she wasn't capable of seeing through the eyes of her inklings without some off-class skills, Henrietta was able to get a vague sense of awareness from them, and she used the three remaining pseudowyverns to look for any particularly dangerous creatures.
Her overall impression this far had been that while this world had a good amount of megafauna, none of what was near them was of the truly dangerous sort. The large 'valley' they had made their Shelter in was too small for anything too big, but when at the top of the cliff, she had once gotten a brief look at something the size of a mountain moving on the edge of the horizon. Safe for now did not mean safe in total.
With that said, she was confident that the combined strength of herself, Jacob, and Alyssa ought to drive off most creatures that could have an interest in them. It was a similar reason to how thrill-seekers could go camping in the true wilds, so long as you didn't bring anything too magical - and weren't too high a level - your presence was likely to go unnoticed.
For the time being, they had adequate food and water, and there was little inherent compulsion to explore the surroundings before they had stabilized slightly more, a milestone they were swiftly approaching after just a few days of work.
Oliver had been working on their shelter to make it a proper resting place, Alyssa had been looking for more edible foodstuffs and getting a general lay of the land around them, Jacob had been tasked with clearing out the forest from Shelter, Clark was cooking and doing his best to make their sleeping situation somewhat more comfortable, and she had been attempting to locate plants and animals with magical capabilities.
None of them moved with substantial purpose, though, which Henrietta could only blame herself for. They had such grand and lofty goals for themselves, but no clear path on how to get there. They were all working to level their skills, of course, but it was such a tiny thing and they all knew it. As a result, morale... wasn't great.
But, she'd started formulating plans on how to improve it.
It was obvious that Clark and Oliver needed the most oversight, though for very different reasons. To say that Clark slacked off was unfair. He was a diligent worker when he remembered to be, but he might suddenly decide to change his task midway through and not inform her, so when he should have been tending to their food he might instead go to gather more mosses for their bedding. Nothing bad had happened yet, and food hadn't even been burned, but it had gotten close a few times.
Oliver was the exact opposite. When he began a project, he simply wouldn't stop. He refused to stop to give his wrist more time to heal, and instead kept hurting himself whenever he used it. And if he wasn't stopped, he might easily go for hours without eating, drinking, napping, or taking care of himself in any way. Fortunately, that particular habit had been in his file so she knew to be watching out for it, but it didn't make it less of a problem. He hadn't fallen asleep working that Henrietta had noticed, but he did tend to slow down dramatically if he wasn't well-rested, to the point he'd nearly had wands blow up in his hands because he didn't process that red sparks flying from the wood was probably a bad sign.
That, at least, was easily treated by Clark… after the two of them had rested, because Clark had apparently exhausted his mana [Unblemish]ing his hands constantly, and had only been able to use the skill a couple of times before he ran out. She'd had a talk with him about making sure that they always had their one and only healing spell constantly available, but he'd just seemed confused that he'd had any issues with mana capacity. She mostly chalked that up to his upbringing – as a scion of a noble house, no matter how obscure, he had undoubtedly had plenty of mana-restorative options, and given he'd been level sixty before the Jump, his stats had likely only exacerbated the issue.
Overall, Clark was…
Well, she wasn't certain yet. On the one hand, he was clearly competent in some ways given his ability to use cantrips, but at the same time, what kind of weird education had he received where he could cantrip but relied on System assistance for skill usage?
It was blatantly obvious at this point that his uncle had streamlined the entire process for him to join the IEO, and therefore she needed to reassess him in totality. Previously, she thought that they might have bent the normally-strict testing procedures due to his high level and familial connections, but that he was a valuable, if untested asset. Now, she was less certain. He seemed to not fully grasp the fact that this wasn't just some vacation they could pop back home for on a whim. She could only hope he understood the implications of this world being Unchained, and didn't do anything stupid.
Still, she refused to allow herself to grow resentful. She'd suspected that the Expeditions were treated with less gravitas than they had been near their start after dedicated full-group training had scarcely lasted two weeks. But even disregarding that, Clark was not to blame for his current situation. The blame lay entirely with Director Haleford, for allowing his nephew to get into a situation he was clearly unprepared for. Further blame may be due his name, but that was a thought for another time.
And even if [Prince of Shining Streams] wasn't the first Class she thought of when thinking of Classes for healers, [Unblemish] was undeniably a healing skill, and one that served their purposes adequately. They'd been hit with a complete level reset, even if he'd been a [True Healer] with [Bodily Restoration] as his skill, no level 0 healer would be capable of all their duties. Clark displayed many signs of exceptionalism, and as a leader it would be her duty to maximize the things he was good at while minimizing the things he wasn't.
The only thing you couldn't fix was attitude, after all.
They just needed to level, to grow, to stabilize. They needed to expand, and with Henrietta already at her limits for how many constructs she could maintain with just clothing for the five of them and her trio of pseudowyverns, there were only a few options realistically available to them. But none of them were good.
In order to properly utilize the System, you needed access to a System Node. Fortunately, Oliver was supposedly quite adept at System Engineering, though it was clear that the type of schooling he'd undertaken hadn't prepared him for this specific situation. The System was an intensely potent and intricate bit of magic, after all, with countless functions and endless utility.
Even if you assumed you had full access to all modern equipment and enchantments, creating a System Node was a daunting task. But without a System Node, given their soul-based System Enhancements had been stripped from them and their backup portable nodes had been lost, they would be effectively unable to level – as they'd be incapable of assigning their earned stat points, unable to change classes, unable to even drop or swap out skills.
From what Oliver had told her, he seemed unable to earn skills at the moment, and that made it all the harder. He'd need skills to make a Node, and he needed a Node to get skills. The rest of them weren't as directly hampered, but they did have their own limitations.
They were fairly certain that Alyssa and Clark were at their Skill caps, Jacob was abstaining from Skill earning until they got a better sense for where he'd be most needed - loading him up with combat abilities when they needed him to focus more on harvesting-type skills would be nearly as detrimental as the reverse - and she needed actual paper to practice her scribe skills. [Refined Calligraphy] needed something at least nominally paper-like to unlock subskills, so as helpful as ⟨Epizeuxis⟩ would be... there was quite a bit of work that would need to be done first.
Still, for magical progression of the other sort, you needed impressive amounts of manpower. Fellow mages to partake in ritual casting, harvesters to gather rare ingredients, specialist crafters to make more and better foci, even unskilled labor to maintain and build the sorts of environments where powerful magic could be worked.
Which left Henrietta with something of an awkward position, as the team's leader.
What could they do, truly? There were just the five of them, and there weren't about to be any more people joining them. Thanks to Identify World, she knew that if there were people on this world, they were so distant as to be irrelevant to them. They had no way to extend their reach far enough to match the strength of an entire country, which was what was truly needed to create a portal.
And it was her job as the team's leader to bring them together and forge a path forwards, even though she couldn't see a way that it could work.
A good leader delegates, she thought to herself. But what could she delegate here? Figuring out what to do was the job of a leader. She designed the plan and saw it through to execution... or did she?
She'd had bosses, very good ones, who knew basically nothing about the product that they were making on a basic, technical level. Mark hadn't known very much about how to build a portal, and had probably never even touched a class that wasn't heavily Execution or Interaction-type, but he'd managed to oversee a very successful Expedition by delegating the individual steps to her.
And, she realized, she was assuming that Oliver needed skills to make a System Node. That wasn't inherently true, but she'd dismissed the possibility too soon.
Alright, she decided, We'll start there.
Oliver was on his knees in the corner of the hut, bent over and with a wand clutched firmly in his fingers as he muttered to himself. It didn't sound like Magespeech, so she felt alright with interrupting him.
"Smith," she caught his attention as she sat down next to him.
"Yes, Commander?" she could watch the wheels turn behind his eyes, thinking about whether or not he'd remembered to eat and drink recently enough for her insistence – he had – but was unwilling to simply ask.
"The System. I know that it's something of a specialty of yours. What will it take to get it online?"
The artificer shook his head, "A lot? For a proper System, I'd need elemental sources, mental illusion generators, a substantial Significance engine, projected soul-surgery enchantments, hundreds of nodes-"
"Sorry, I misspoke," Henrietta forestalled him with a bit of a white lie, then changed tactics. "I want to start simple. What will it take for your custom System to work? If you don't know, give me your best and worst-case scenario."
Oliver paused, setting his wand down to fold his hands in front of his face, shifting how he sat as he did so. "I don't know what's broken. But... but best case scenario, it could just be a good night's sleep in a properly Ordered environment. Maybe it's stuck in a boot loop of sorts, and simple prodding will work once I pull it out of the chaos. Worst-case scenario... something really, deeply core to my soul broke in the Jump, maybe if I didn't properly disconnect from the Encyclopedia Systema, and it tore out a lot of my additional enhancements."
"Talk me through it," Henrietta prompted, "How did you make your changes, and what were they?"
"I integrated my interface with my arcanoception," Oliver immediately replied.
"That wasn't... it, right?" Henrietta still wasn't going to judge her teammates for the choices they'd made which exacerbated the situation, but if Oliver had broken his System just for a minor quality of life feature....
"Oh, no absolutely not," Oliver assuaged her worries, "That's just the thing I most like about it. It makes some really advanced divination far more possible, integrates extremely nicely with [Appraise] and other [Identify]-type skills, and helps my overall sensitivity with my arcanoception. Intuitive-type sensing is great, but it's not always the most detail-oriented. But I still get the information, so having my interface automatically work with it gives me the benefits of audible and visual-type senses as well."
"And the other benefits?"
"A lot of normal advanced [Status] functionality running locally," he shrugged. "Note-taking, skill management, bodily monitoring, a Encyclopedia Systema download, stuff like that. Even though I couldn't test it, in theory I can even class swap if... oh."
Oliver sighed very deeply and rubbed his temples, burying his head in his hands, "That's the problem, isn't it?" he asked quietly.
"You figured something out?"
"It's my Aura," Oliver explained, "Spiritually speaking, we as homo primus are magical creatures, with our magical potential bound up in our System and capacity for growth... Jumps bypass that because allosmos exposes us to a different 'species' of magic that is able to coexist because biology, but our soul can still only support so much magical potency, and that's what the Aura stat is supporting, and I wasn't even thinking about it when I did it, but yeah, my System mods all are modifications to my Aura, and so my soul is trying to do everything I've taught it to, but it's not strong enough and failing, maybe even injuring itself when I try too hard."
Henrietta nodded encouragingly. Though Oliver wasn't about to become a great professor or anything, she knew the mechanics he was talking about potentially better than even he did, and could easily follow along. "What will it take to fix it?"
Oliver drummed his fingers on his leg, "Believe it or not, I did actually kinda prepare for loss of Aura, and I can engage or disengage the extra functions piecemeal. But I didn't account for [Erudite Enchanter] not having any base stats in Aura."
"An enchanter class with no base Aura?" Now that she said it, she did remember seeing that when she'd looked up the class.
"It's the combination of Knowledge and Technology. They both have Associations with concepts that require build-up over time, and Arcane seals the deal by redirecting the base stats to Generation instead." Oliver rubbed his face, "It is a major stat, though. So at least my free points will still get doubled..."
"Okay," Henrietta was feeling much more optimistic now than she had been, which was good. That was why she wanted to talk to Oliver. "So, will you need five, ten levels? Just... assign the stat, and it'll fix itself?"
"Honestly, it probably only needs four to six points effective? So two to three assigned?" Oliver hesitantly replied, "I don't remember my exact thoughts, but most enchanter classes start with about four or five Aura, I don't think I'd make it so my minimum mods needed more than that."
Henrietta didn't respond to that, "Okay. So, to get your System working again, we just need to get you the ability to level up?" She waited for him to nod, "Once that happens, you'll have more of the tools you need to get the System as a whole working?"
"The System is still so huge and complicated, I don't know where to start," Oliver shrank back into himself, his mind clearly elsewhere. This probably wasn't going to be especially productive, she could tell.
"What about starting with a really basic node that all of us can use to level up?" she prompted.
"Right... yeah. Yeah, that would work."
"What do you need for that? Just leveling functionality, don't worry about anything else."
"That..." he thought for a moment and muttered something under his breath that smelled like a memory spell, "I'd need a tower. Forty meters prominent, and with processing wards all the way up. I'll need metal, and I need some way to generate elemental Significance."
"Anything else?" He shook his head. "What about the tools you'll need to make it?"
"I will need those. Um. Tools to make a tower, and I'll need a proper focus. Something good." He looked at the wand he'd set down, which to Henrietta's nose was already starting to smell like Smoke, "Once I've got my mana-smoothing ward working, then I can make myself an actual staff, and once I have that... I might still need more? But I don't know what else at this point. Honestly, a good staff would do wonders for me. If I had that... I could do a lot more."
"Well," Henrietta patted him on his shoulder, "Then let's get you a staff."
Finally, they had a plan.