TMLoCL- Extra - Observers P1

“Monsters eat people.”


A simple statement that Monsters are overwhelmingly carnivorous, but that truth is far less simple than it appears.  Among the low-mana areas where Animals are dominant, there are relatively few carnivores compared to herbivores. Frankly, the line between those two is not nearly so sharply delineated, but regardless the majority of animals in any area are herbivores.

This supports a relatively small number of carnivores. Too many herbivores and the plant life is consumed, and everything starves. Too many carnivores and they eat all of the herbivores, and then starve.

The details are unimportant here, but it is easily observable that there simply is not enough food to support the world’s population of Monsters.

Again, this is a truth that is far deeper than it seems on the surface. Carnivores can overpopulate and overeat local species into extinction among Animals.  In fact, at a certain number of predators in an area, it is less a “can” and more of a “must.”  So if almost all Monsters are predatory, why haven’t they driven species extinct and achieved some kind of balance?  Especially when you add on the efforts of Adventurers and armies.

But I said, “Monsters eat people,” not, “Monsters eat meat.”  This is a difference with an important distinction.  Monsters are, almost universally, extremely aggressive - to a truly bewildering degree, as it happens.  If possible, Monsters will choose to attack Demihumans and Sapients over Animals or Monsters, and will attack Animals over other Monsters.

Why?  It is a mystery.  Unfortunately for those who seek knowledge, Scalus and Alet are unwilling to explain.  All we can do is muddle along and try to work out the answers ourselves.


-  The introduction to “A Study of Monster Behavior,” a mildly heretical book.  It is banned in most countries, not because of its heresy, but because its information is often misused and that misuse tends to result in large scale deaths to Monsters.



*[Professor] Connar Gess POV*


I snapped my copy of “A Study of Monster Behavior” shut as the first rays of dawn started to make their way through my tent.  I spent a moment musing on my own good fortune; I had a lot to be grateful for recently and in general.

For one, Kolaro was such a young country it had yet to ban “A Study of Monster Behavior,” so I didn’t need to bother hiding it. Second, for a country famous for its shiny metals, the real gold mine in Kolaro was an opportunity for research.  Traveling out to this gold mining camp may have been a hassle, but the old continent simply did not have opportunities like this any more.

And, of course, even after decades of time to get used to it, I was still amazed by the Abilities and Stats that allowed me to forgo sleep and read in the dark.  I had saved an absolute fortune on candles and have been able to get so much done.

Listening to the groans of the two [Students] I had brought with me as assistants as they got up, I couldn’t help but chuckle and reflect that, without the need to sleep, I never had to struggle with getting up.  I could hear them grumbling in their tent, complaining about the hard ground.  They would need to get used to the experience if they wanted to pursue Monsters as a research topic.  You didn’t find Monsters in fashionable inns.

Well, not the ones you wanted to meet, anyways.

“Good morning, you two.  How did you sleep?” I stepped out of my tent and greeted the [Students], politely pretending that I had not heard them and didn’t already know.

“I slept fine, [Professor]," Aris gave a polite lie, but Theo was not so reserved.

“I think that calling it ‘sleep’ might be a bit much, [Professor]," he said with a scowl as he stretched. “Feels like I slept on a rock the size of a- WYVERN!”

He suddenly shouted as he pointed into the sky where, indeed, a wyvern was flying up into the sky.  A wyvern with a saddle.  And rider.  That had also been on the caravan that escorted my [Students] and myself here.

After a second without a reaction from Aris or myself, Theo realized his mistake and slowly lowered his hand.  As he turned red and mumbled to himself, I looked back at the wyvern as it flew away - presumably on patrol with the other adventurers.  I had used Identify and Inspect when I saw it the first time, and it was a mildly interesting Monster.  Although it wasn’t particularly relevant to what I was here to study.  Its Evolutions were far too spread out to say much about its behavior without a lot more information and it certainly wasn’t relevant to the Monster behavior around this camp.

“So, let’s review over breakfast,” I gave a small clap to bring attention back to me.  I already had the food prepared - cooking was a necessary skill when you were alone in the wilds - and wanted to make sure the [Students] were reminded about why we were here.  Biscuits and gravy weren’t particularly difficult to make, and the gravy was easy to freeze with magic and it would keep well enough that way.

“Both of you are aware of what you signed up for,” I say as Aris and Theo grab plates.  “However, there is a difference between academics and practical experience.  We are here to study a rare display of Monster behavior, and that comes with risk.”

Monsters are inherently unpredictable and this is not a developed and civilized area.  We are on the frontier.”

“We know [Professor],” Theo grumbled, his mood fouled further by his earlier embarrassment.  “You gave us a similar lecture before we left the University.  And then another lecture when we got on the boat.  And then another one before we joined the Caravn to Evergold.  And then anoth-”

“I repeat myself,” I interrupt Theo, letting my tone take a more serious inflection and allowing some of my oratory Skills to seep through. “Because it bears repeating.  The path of the [Field Scholar] is a particularly difficult one, and while you may have [Mage] Classes, that won’t help very much.”

You are academics, and your Levels reflect that. Your Stats reflect that.  You need to be careful, because you do not have the Endurance or Vitality to shrug off hits like the adventurers around us do.”

I was aided by my half-elven heritage, but Aris and Theo were both young human men.  Barely more than boys, really, with nary a physical Class between them.  Magic and support Classes might be able to work in adventuring parties, but we weren’t one.  Frankly, there wasn’t enough funding to both get here and hire a front line of adventurers.

I was used to that, and could handle myself, but in my youth I had many close calls.  All of the grant money went to either studying how to kill Monsters better, or farming them - by killing them better.  Studying how and why they behaved the way they did had incredible potential, but it was rare that a [Lord] saw it that way.  Even if a Monster’s natural behavior can be exploited to prevent attacks, that wasn’t an entirely good thing to the people in charge.  Monster bodies were valuable, after all.

“With so much of this continent unexplored, there is always the chance that we run into something dangerous.  You need to be cautious, observant, and always aware of where the camp is, should you need to run back to it.”

I cleaned the dishes myself using a mix of Water Magic and Earth Magic.  Figuring out how to make soap using Earth Magic was, in fact, my most lauded accomplishment in academics even though it had nothing to do with my actual research.  It was quite convenient though, and it certainly beat out the work involved in camp clean up during my youth.

As we prepared, gathering our notebooks and provisions, Aris and Theo had managed to get themselves into another argument regarding the various hypotheses about the phenomenon.  Really, they were just rehashing points they had already made several times over our journey, but I certainly appreciated their energy.  I had challenged them to come up with their own ideas and had kept my own to myself for now.

Aris believed that the cause of the rash of Monster attacks on the camp was caused by adventurers eliminating the “alpha” Monsters in a large region.  His argument was that this created an imbalance of “pressure” where Monsters would move away from areas with powerful “alphas” instinctually to try and seize territories for themselves.  Of course, adventurers would eliminate these newcomers, so the “pressure” would never actually equalize, leading to a constant influx of Monsters.

Theo, meanwhile, was of the opinion that something was attracting the Monsters to this location.  His ideas were less defined than Aris.  He didn’t have an idea of what might be attracting the Monsters, but he did have several reasons to doubt Aris. Not the least of which was the fact that adventurers effectively provided a kind of competition with Monsters of their own.

My own thoughts on the matter was that they were both probably right in parts. Nature was often complicated and nuanced.  The Sapient disruption of the local ecosystem would have only made it more so.  Ideas were only so clean and easily divided in an academic setting, while real life tended to be rather messy.  It was a good thing for my [Students] to learn.

We stopped by Captain Hamel for a brief discussion, where he continued to be rather cagey and suspicious of us.  We weren’t exactly welcome here, even if we also weren’t about to be tossed out.  The attitude didn’t particularly surprise me, this was a gold mine, after all.  I had noticed several individuals in various forms of stealth moving around the camp.  There was certainly a shadow war every night between random adventurer [Rogues] who thought they could steal their way to riches, and the hidden security.  We even had one of those security personnel tagging along behind us - not that I let him know I knew.

Honestly, it was a rather large oversight for them to not have someone with some kind of identification or evaluation ability.  I didn’t have anything to hide, and it would have quickly revealed that they would need someone of a higher Level to keep tabs on me, and a much higher Level if they wanted to try and stop me.

Sure, that old bastard Ivano was around in Evergold, but if they needed to call him down to fight me, well…  They were already dead.


*[Student] Aris POV*


The [Professor] is a madman, that much had been plainly obvious at the start, but there wasn’t much point in complaining about it.  It was deeply unfortunate that he was also the best in his field of research. Not that Monster behavior was a particularly popular field of study, but I planned to change that.  The other [Scholars], even the [Professor] and Theo, didn’t see the big picture - the potential!

Monster farming was dangerous and difficult, but it was also ludicrously profitable.  This new continent represented a fortune of information on new Evolutions and potential for [Enchanters] and [Alchemists].  But that was not even half of the possibilities, not with this much space to work with!

Terraforming it all would be costly, but the opportunity to craft entire ecosystems to produce specific reagents was…  How did these two blind fools not see it?  I grumbled to myself as I hoisted my pack, which only caused Theo to grin at me.

“I keep telling you, Aris,” he whispered conspiratorially as we trekked away from the camp. “There was a reason that no one wanted to study with this guy.  I’d bet he knows what is attracting the Monsters and just isn’t telling us.”

“Probably because nothing is attracting them,” I rolled my eyes back at Theo. “The entire idea is ridiculous.  For one thing, anything that could attract this many Monsters of this variety would have to be an Artifact of some kind.  Sure, gold is valuable, but it isn’t that valuable.”

“That is a lot of assumptions there, Aris,” Theo’s reply was so smug sounding that I could only sigh as he started ticking off a list on his fingers.  “That there is only one thing is attracting the Monsters.  That the one thing has to be an Artifact and that the Artifact has to be more valuable than a literal gold mine.  Which, itself, is built on more assumptions, because it assumes that there is a person behind this, that the person values the gold mine the same way you do, and that there actions are related to the value of the gold mine.”

“As opposed to, what? A heretofore unknown universal Monster lure popping out of the ground?” I replied sarcastically as I pushed a bush out of the way.  We were getting further from camp now and there weren't really paths to follow anymore.  “Sure, all the [Alchemists] and [Adventurers] over the years who have tried and failed to create lures that can attract every Monster haven’t failed because it was impossible. They just had to dig in the ground, right over there, and they would have found it easily!”

Theo was always like this.  Always looking for fantastical explanations for mundane events, but not even fantastical explanations that were plausible.  If he had hypothesized that a Priest of Monsters was attracting the beasts, well that was at least possible.  Even if it made no sense whatsoever.

It was just so aggravating!


*[Student] Theo POV*


Aris was such an asshole, I found a lot of real joy in pissing him off.  I admit, I actually agreed with his idea regarding the Monsters.  It made a lot of sense to me, although I believed that there was probably more to it than that.  However, I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.

He wasn’t nearly as smart or cunning as he thought, either.  His greed regarding Monsters was obvious, but I had no idea why he wanted to keep it secret.  It wasn’t like trying to create new and useful materials was a bad thing, or even an uncommon idea.  Pretty much anyone who worked with Monster materials, like [Enchanters] or [Alchemists], had the same idea at some point.

Unfortunately, I had to stop needling him as the [Professor] cast an invisibility spell on us.  Which was interesting in its own way, because after months of observation I was fairly certain that the [Professor] was doing it without assistance from Abilities.  Which would mean that the mild, unassuming, somewhat eccentric, half-elf was far more powerful than he let on.

I shook my head to clear my thoughts as the [Professor] cast “See Invisible" on us and he and Aris popped back into view.  It was time to make some observations on what we came here to see.  Monsters.