"There's 200 of them!" exclaimed David, horrified.
"Excellent!" said Joseph, rubbing his hands together. His father's first shipment of slaves had arrived that morning, and they were creating quite a stir in the courtyard, where they were waiting patiently and in formation, for orders.
"There's no room for that many in the castle!" cried Timothy in a panic.
"We can't turn them away to a noble's house, that would seem unsightly from the king. We'll have to arrange to have people moved around. Normal entourages are no more than 50!" moaned David.
The head butler was very busy all morning, and Joseph knew he had just gained several new enemies as people were shuffled out of their rooms to new ones, to make room for all of the new people. Thankfully, these slaves were very well behaved, and there were no problems with them sharing rooms with each other for sleeping quarters.
Joseph looked at the letter that was delivered with the slaves. His father would have another shipment ready to arrive at the end of the month. He knew that he was going to have to make plans to leave for the north at that time, because there was absolutely no way there would be room for even one more person here at the kings castle. As he started talking things over with the generals, it was decided that he couldn't leave any sooner than June 9th, three days after the next shipment of slaves would arrive. They just couldn't get their own affairs in order soon enough to leave any sooner.
As the slaves were settled, much to the gratitude of the other denizens of the castle, Joseph, started sending them out on quests. They were in the library, scouring the books for more information, they were in the kitchens, helping to prepare the extra food for them all, they were in the scullery, cleaning all of the clothes and bedding for them all, and they were roaming the halls, doing the myriad of other tasks Joseph came up with.
The castle seemed to have gotten much smaller, and much less quiet, even though they didn't talk much, the sounds of their coming and going were noticed. They were reporting to him, in his room, at all hours of the night, which meant his nightly magic meditation, was split into smaller fragments of time.
He started going through the castle, checking the servants and people who lived there, for magic, much like he had done for his father's caravan of slaves, and discovered that about 10% had magical bloodlines and about 3% had magery, almost the exact same as his father's caravan.
Checking out the nobles in court, since the known mages obviously had magery, he overlooked them, but the number of nobles with magery and unknown mages was limited to the eldest sons. It looked like after the heir was taken care of, only the potential mages with obvious talent were trained in magic. They likely didn't train the eldest, for fear of accidents when learning. However, there were at least 25% with magical bloodlines, excluding those with magery, and a few had both.
Joseph didn't see any development for the bloodlines. Unless he could get access to the magical notes from the royal mages, he couldn't confirm it, but he was about 80% certain they didn't actually know about, or know how to, activate bloodlines. Many stories of the founding of their houses had legendary figures that could certainly have awoken their bloodline, or at least had a strong version of it. Since then, the noble houses actively married into strong mage lines, so it looked to increase the strength of the magery in their children.
With nothing else to really take up his time, he decided to get to some of the missions left by the system. It was much easier with so many slaves around, to hide the more difficult and annoying missions. He ordered a wide variety of foods for one of the larger meeting with the slaves and went through, sampling the 25 dishes in order to get the acute taste to 5. Then, for acute touch, he asked Stella to help him come up with 40 different things he could touch, to get his acute touch up to 5. He had a dozen slaves go out catching butterflies, then released them in the nursery of the castle, for the babies to be amazed at, then finished the acute hearing to 5 very quickly and easily.
(CONGRATULATIONS! FOR COMPLETING ALL OF THE ACUTE SENSES TO 5, YOU ARE AWARDED +2 TO YOUR PERCEPTION.)
It was still hard to notice Stella, when she was trying to sneak though.
He needed to hear three more languages from the king's advisors to get the language quest completed.
'System,' he thought, 'is there a quest to increase Magery or grant me voice? I assume that I can't still do the acute senses missions to earn extra life points?'
(CORRECT, YOU CANNOT. WOULD YOU BE WILLING TO UNDERTAKE A MISSION TO SPEAK IN DIFFERENT VOICES EVERYDAY FOR A WEEK? YOU MUST ACT THE PART AS WELL, OR I WON'T GIVE IT TO YOU. ENTERTAIN ME MORTAL.)
'You must mean, 'No'. I have enough on my plate without faking accents for a week.'
(THEN WHEN YOU GET THE POINTS FOR ENHANCED PARRY OR FIT OR FLEXIBLE, USE THEM INSTEAD.)
'But those are actually useful abilities.'
(YOU COULD TRY FOR A SECOND ENHANCED PARRY.)
'That would work. Alright. System, I wish to purchase Magery to level 3.'
(CONFIRM PURCHASE?)
'Confirm, but only show me the status updates, please.'
(ONLY BECAUSE YOU SAID PLEASE.)
(STATUS)
(SECONDARY STATS)
PERCEPTION: 13 (+5 for hearing, tasting, smelling, or seeing)
(ADVANTAGES)
PATRON – King, unwillingly but magical contract
NIGHT VISION (9)- ignore 9 penalty for poor lighting, will not work in pure darkness
RAPID HEALING-Heal injuries twice as quickly
KNOW DIRECTION-always aware of true north
INTUITIVE MATHEMATICIAN - Solve complex math problems mentally instantly
MAGERY (3) – +1 per level to magical skills and stronger magic allowed
(DISADVANTAGES)
REPUTATION-Father took advantage of the King
(MAGIC)
PURIFY FOOD (training)
MANA EXTERNALIZATION
REGULAR
JET
GAZE
BREATH
AREA
MISSILE
(REMAINING LIFE POINTS – 11)