Welcome everyone!

It’s been a while since we’ve had one of these rants as an opener to one of our sessions, and since I know how much you’ve probably missed this— 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

Here we are!

Now in this session we’re going to be jumping forward, because honestly I doubt you would want to hear everything about our day to day lives.

Even though it would take away my chance to tell you more about my awesomeness, and make up for some of the reputation that went down the drain with Julia’s sessions.

I didn’t say you made me look bad.

I definitely appreciate how you told everyone how sexy I am.

But some of what you said did make me look slightly... wimpish.

Anyway, like you could see in those sessions of Julia, I now had a role as an advisor to the chief of Lofie village.

Which apparently was never really the case.

Apparently that role came with some attachments I was completely unaware of, and some extreme manipulation tactics.

I know you only did what was best for me, but manipulation is still manipulation, my love.

Anyway, let’s get to it.

***

So it had been a few weeks after my chat with Worick, and he had already started to implement some of the tax laws we had spoken about.

Obviously there still wasn’t any particular growth in any of the areas he had decided would need improvement on with the first fiscal year tax revenue budget.

It’s not like the revenue was there already.

That’s the thing about tax revenue of a country, it’s a one-time income that needs to be spent over the following year according to the budget.

Which means that for the first year everything would just continue like it had.

Or it would have, if I wasn’t an awesome advisor.

I introduced to Worick the wonders of property tax, and provisional tax.

Now some of you might think that this contradicts my plan to not ruin the spending power of the villagers.

But like I said, I’m an economic genius.

So the plan was simple.

Instead of a one time ’massive’ property tax payment that each owner must make, we decided to have a small monthly property maintenance fee.

Now once again you might think that this would still have a massive impact on the monthly spending power of the villagers, but you would be completely wrong.

When Worick did his research on the median income of the villagers, he determined that it was around ten silver coins per month.

Now just for those of you who don’t have any idea of the fantasy world currency, I’ll explain it properly.

Though if you’re here listening to us, I expect you to at least know the standard currency formula of a fantasy world.

Ten copper coins makes one silver.

A hundred Silver makes one gold.

And there you have it, simple and elegantly explained.

So we decided that the monthly maintenance fee on every property owner would be five copper, which if your math works out, is five percent of the monthly median income of a villager.

Which meant that with the hundred villagers that owned properties we would net a monthly property tax of five-hundred copper, or fifty silver.

Which meant that we could hire three people at ten silver a month, and still have twenty left over that could be used to purchase any materials or equipment that they might need to do their jobs.

So with all the blabbering I did up until now I’m basically just telling you that we now had three people running around the village doing all of the standard services you would see in a functioning city.

You know, garbage removal, maintenance on roads, fences, walls, even some beautification work on the village square.

They were in charge of lighting the new lamps we had planted on the streets every night, and then extinguishing them each morning, and ensuring they had enough fuel in them to go burn through the night again.

So like you should be able to tell by now, things were starting to get pretty civilized.

Julia and I walked past the three men we had hired as we headed back into the village from our daily training session outside.

In those weeks I had actually made a lot of progress.

Not that Julia told me any of that, she just made the workouts and training sessions harder each time it looked like I might actually get through it without puking.

The woman is the love of my life, but she is a cruel and vicious taskmaster when it comes to training.

As if it wasn’t bad enough that I had to swing a log around for sword training, she had now found a way to make that even worse.

At that time she had even found a way for me to carry around what felt like a ton of weights when I was doing my fitness part of the training regimen.

The log I had used for sword training kept getting heavier each time.

She wouldn’t even spare me when we were sparring.

I mean she was already kicking my ass, but apparently that wasn’t enough.

No, even then I had to keep carrying around the extra weight, and I still had to use the heavy-ass log for a sword.

I actually told her once that I was afraid of hitting her with that slab of wood, and that it would hurt her.

Do you know what her reaction was?

She laughed at me!

Not a small elegant giggle.

She had actually been rolling around on the ground holding her belly as she roared with laughter.

"Do you actually think you would be able to hit me?!" She had asked between bursts of laughter.

Now if ever you want to burn a man’s confidence to the ground, and light a fire of motivation under him at the same time, that’s how you do it.

From that day onwards it had become my mission to land at least one blow, not one that would hurt her of course, but just one blow.

Had I been successful up until that day?

Definitely not.

The woman was beating me soundly every day.

At night when we got back to the inn, I was beaten black and blue.

And then I had to go and work my shift in the bar anyway.

That had been going great, I had even made a couple of friends, some of the regulars had even started to hang out with me and Julia when we had time.

Of course I had been treating that sexy elven lady with absolute cold professionalism since my previous little quarrel with Julia.

I mean if she was killing me with training then, how would it be if I pissed her off again.

Anyway, there was one very, very important part of my day that made everything I had to suffer through worth it.

And at that moment Julia and I were standing before it.

The newest building at the edge of the village.

Nestled between some trees.

My pride and joy.

Even more so than the bar I was now running.

My very own... bathhouse.