Chapter 247: Remotivated

The memorial service did more than just help the heroes remember their fallen friends, many of whom they had spent the majority of their lives with.

Both Kalka and Marimgar had Academies that were chosen to have the bulk of their heroes, and as such, many of the heroes knew each other. So, every fallen comrade was likely to be a longtime friend or acquaintance of hundreds of others.

There were few outsiders here.

Though, it could be said that at this point, there were no outsiders at all. Everyone here had been through enough together that it didn’t matter if they’d met partway through instead of knowing each other their whole lives.

Once everyone had paid their respects, the altar was covered in small trinkets and offerings to the dead.

Someone had thought of that, and came back with a large aquarium tank, into which they loaded all the small trinkets, leaving a number of larger items leaning against the wall. To most, they would mean nothing.

Just broken weapons, and random personal items.

But to the ones who left them, they were the most important memories the deceased had left behind.

Kalli purchased a second, larger aquarium from the store and placed it upside down over the first, creating a weatherproof glass enclosure, and then went back to her day.

There was no time to fall apart, she had a city to upgrade, and the residents of Marimgar all had ideas about how to make that happen.

Some of the ideas weren’t actually good ideas. But that was part of the charm. They could try anything and everything, as long as it didn’t interfere with anyone else’s work. They would still get a quest completion for spending the time working.

The biggest project that she could see going on so far was the effort to decorate the apartments.

They were all uniform, but the mystery boxes had rewarded a surprising number of paint containers. The colours weren’t always what the recipient wanted, but someone would want it, and repainting a wall or two in the apartment was a great way to make it feel more like home.

Kalli hadn’t gone into great depth with the alterations to the units, so most of them had the feeling that they were more of a hotel room than a proper apartment.

Well furnished, but generically acceptable to everyone, and not at all individual.

The younger residents appreciated that, as they were used to living in the dorms. The responsibility of fully furnishing an apartment at this point in time would have been too much to ask of them.

But many of the others had families, and they wanted something that felt a bit more permanent and personal.

Especially the Kalkans, who hadn’t grown up in Marimgar Academy, where everyone knew everyone, and everyone lived in nearly identical dorm rooms from ages five to twenty-two. Sure, the rooms changed as they grew older, but they were all functionally identical, and the school didn’t approve of repainting.

So, now that they had the chance to actually do it, many of the residents were spending their first day of the trial making the city of Marimgar just a little bit more liveable.

That was the goal of the mission, after all.

It didn’t have to be grand infrastructure, it just had to be a better quality of life, and you could get that simply by repainting, setting up some more shops that weren’t daily necessities, and adapting everything from its generic showroom base to something more.

However, what was happening above ground paled compared to the underground.

The lighting was set to match the day and night cycle of the suns, so that those living in the underground blocks still had something of a circadian rhythm. But for three quarters of a million refugees, the plain concrete buildings were the greatest godsend that they could have asked for.

Nearly nobody remained on the Arks other than staff.

They had all gone out into the city, and the warehouses were shipping down food to the few wholesale warehouses that had been registered by Kalli. There wasn’t anyone actually working at them yet, but there would be as soon as they realized that it was an open job.

There was a sign on the doors, which wouldn’t unlock until there was staff on duty.

But they all needed work, and even if it was four hours a day, the bare minimum to complete the quest, they would take it.

Then, they would be able to distribute food to everyone running a grocer or other shop in the lower city.

Everything was rationed at the moment, but if you had a restaurant, you just had to account for the customers who came through, with everyone scanning the Marimgar App to make purchases of necessities.

It was not the most efficient system, as none of the delivery workers actually knew where anything was in the new parts of the city. So, bringing freshly harvested food down meant that they kept getting lost, and more than once there were incidents with people robbing the carts.

That led to the deliveries having armed security, but it also led to the Ark Commanders putting military patrols on the streets as police.

There was one thing that the Commanders all understood, and that was the fact that the residents of upper Marimgar, as they were calling the rest of the city, would not keep coming with the deliveries if they got attacked every time.

And if they missed even one or two deliveries, people would run out of food.

So, they made an announcement that was played on every public video screen in the lower city.

{Attention, newly transferred residents. We request that the violence against the food deliveries cease immediately. If it does not, all fresh food deliveries will be made precooked to the central common areas near the Arks, under armed security.

For the sake of peaceful coexistence, please allow the food deliveries to make it safely to the warehouses and the newly opened restaurants.

Your app will grant you three meals a day at standard portion sizes.

There is no need for violence.}

The appeal to their better nature might not work. But the threat of only ever letting them eat from a soup kitchen in the hangar was enough to very quickly change everyone’s mind about the risks of accosting the deliveries.

The fact that the next few were made by warriors in power armour helped.