Retainers

[Core Room]

"Retainers, hm."

"Yes. The Master's retainers have been unlocked. A retainer always becomes a named-ordinary monster, so they likely became summonable once named-ordinary monsters were unlocked."

"So retainers are something separate from monsters."

"It's a matter of translation. A dungeon monster is, in the original language, a 'creature,' that is, a living thing. Golems, which this dungeon can't summon, are 'artifacts,' that is, man-made objects, treated the same as fixtures and equipment. The Dungeon Master's retainers are 'henchmen,' that is, underlings. Though the original meaning is 'a stable groom.'"

"If there's a stable groom in there, then I wish it could summon horses too."

"That's only the etymology. Whether a stable groom can actually be summoned would require combing through the summon list, but my hunch is that if you prepare the animal-husbandry course of an agricultural school, you'd be able to pick one."

"An agricultural school? Aren't there restrictions like the ones the Shiso (Asura) have?"

"The Shiso (Asura) are constrained by the 'setting' that they graduated from a specific university; there's a limit on their backstory educational credentials. Retainers do have constraints if they're university graduates, but they can also have the 'setting' of being graduates of a vocational school, that is, a technical school or a commercial school."

"If you're actually going to run a factory, you won't manage without engineers who graduated from technical schools. Whether it's a factory or a construction site, machines have moods of their own, and the world doesn't run the way theory says it will."

"However, if you want to summon a technical-school graduate, you won't unlock that part of the summon list unless you've first summoned one of the technical schools whose curriculum covers the same field of study (or, for an agricultural-school graduate, one of the agricultural schools). The school in their backstory credentials doesn't have to be that particular school, though."

"Hmm. What does that mean? I don't quite follow."

"For example, if you summon a single technical school that has a machinery course, you can then summon a retainer whose backstory credentials are the machinery course of a different school. That's what it means. Of course, just like the Shiso (Asura), it's only a 'setting.' So if you summon several technical high schools with different departmental layouts, you'll roughly cover the industrial fields. In the case of agricultural schools, though, you'd run into trouble if you summoned schools from drastically different climate zones, say, an agricultural school from Hokkaidō or Taiwan."

"For a quick start, let's go with Ōmiya Technical School, Urawa Commercial School, and Yono Agricultural School. We'll add whatever departments are lacking. Saitama Prefecture really is rather poor in technical-school variety, you know."

"In the case of the Master's retainers, the definition is probably something like 'specialist technical and clerical workers.' On top of that, for simple work anyone can do, it's better to hire immigrants, since that very thing generates dungeon energy. So the best way to proceed would be to have the Shiso (Asura) and the retainers split between them the work the people of this world can't do."

"Split it between them, hm."

"Shiso, being labiate plants with square stems, basically have square, stiff personalities, so they're unlikely to cause the outrageous workplace accidents a retainer might, but they're limited in both numbers and occupations. Then again, retainers also seem to have a population cap; I doubt you could summon a hundred of them."

"So what can retainers do, and what can't they do?"

"They're underlings, plain and simple, named-ordinary monsters, so they have no access to the Dungeon Core. Meaning, you can't let them use the Core's functions. For instance, they can't summon a building, or create fields by way of the dungeon's functions."

"I see."

"Surveying for the sake of summoning, or using, maintaining, and processing equipment that's already been summoned, that they can do. In other words, they can't summon a bookmobile, but if they have the corresponding skill, they can strip the bookshelves out of a summoned bookmobile, refit it into a bus or a truck, and drive it."

"So the vehicle problem gets solved too, at least for now."

"Indeed. Though it won't do if we start using hundreds of cars. Lastly, retainers all need names, but they aren't a pirate's underlings, they're the Dungeon Master's retainers, so perfectly ordinary surnames and given names will do. The people of this world have things like clan-names and common-names and so forth, mind you."

"A pirate's underlings can't have ordinary names?"

"Correct. Pirates must have pirate-ish names. A Viking's underlings would be Knut or Thor. Captain Cook's underlings would be Charles or George."

In other words, names that wouldn't feel out of place within that cultural sphere.

"We'll have to set priorities and decide what sort of Shiso (Asura) and retainers to summon. Everyone's too busy to convene a full meeting, so I'll ask each of them individually whenever they come to the Core Room. I've already heard Mint's wishes, so let's make those concrete first."

"Hurrying is well and good, but if you rush too much you'll get nothing but shoddy results. We should hold thorough consultations and examine it all properly."

The actual summoning is in the next chapter.