Designing the Kin (Vocational School Graduates)

[Core Room]

"Next, then, are the vocational schools we need in order to summon retainers who aren't college graduates."

"First, I will summon three schools: Ōmiya Technical School, Urawa Commercial School, and Yono Agricultural School. However, Ōmiya Technical School has no civil engineering department, so a separate technical school is needed as well. The agricultural school, too, needs separate schools for stockbreeding and forestry, and when we eventually put Minuma to use for logistics, I suspect we will also need a merchant-marine school, which Saitama Prefecture lacks. A fisheries school is unnecessary for now, since it will be ages before the fish multiply, but Minuma is freshwater, so we ought to bring in a fisheries department from an inland prefecture."

"So what are we preparing first?"

"Two technical schools, one commercial school, and three agricultural schools, six in all. And since we might just possibly be able to increase our teachers, I'll summon a normal school and a girls' normal school too."

"Erm, which school was it you graduated from, Marie-san?"

"Matsuyama Girls' Higher School. Strictly as a 'setting,' of course. There are, naturally, no Asura in the otherworld."

"So it wasn't Ōmiya."

"A Shiso (Asura)'s 'setting' career history is often not even in Saitama Prefecture. Now then, I'll summon the vocational schools."

When Marie summoned the six vocational schools, the corresponding retainers each became summonable. The normal school, however, did not increase the teachers even after being summoned.

"Looks like teachers aren't among the retainers."

"What sort of system this is, I cannot quite make out. Or perhaps, quite simply, the qualities demanded of a teacher do not square with the 'slapdash' nature of a retainer. I'll go on registering the vocational-school-graduate retainers to the Core, but as I said earlier, there are no 'do-overs,' and dungeon energy is finite, so please keep the numbers modest."

"Understood. For agriculture, Ikeda-san and on down, lining up the endings with -da (田): Morita-san, Masuda-san, Murata-san, Harada-san, and Fujita-san, six of them. For forestry, Machida-san and Uchida-san; for stockbreeding, Fukuda-san and Shimada-san. For civil engineering, Katō-san and on down, ending in -tō (藤): Itō-san, Endō-san, and Kondō-san, four of them. For machinery, Watanabe-san, Abe-san, Yamaguchi-san, and Ōtsuka-san, four. For electrical, Ōno-san and Sekiguchi-san; for architecture, Nakamura-san and Kimura-san; for chemistry, Ishii-san and Imai-san; for bioengineering, Inoue-san, a technical-school graduate, and Aoki-san, an agricultural-school graduate, two each. For shipbuilding, Tajima-san, and for aviation, Yamazaki-san, one apiece for now, with reinforcements drawn from machinery when needed. Something like that."

"And, Master, will you be able to remember the retainers' names?"

"No chance…"

"Once we've summoned the clerical team, I'll have them draw up a roster. Even so, this is quite the sudden increase, isn't it."

"With the technical line, unless you've got skilled technicians who graduated from vocational schools too, you can manage at lab scale but you can't take anything to 'practical application' or 'mass production,' after all."

"The world does not run according to theory, no."

"For the time being, drivers for the official cars, and since drivers will still be needed even if we introduce self-driving going forward: Shimizu-san, Ishikawa-san, Nakajima-san, Ogawa-san, Hasegawa-san, and Kojima-san, six of them, ending in -kawa (川) or -shima (島) and the like."

"Monitoring, and responding to accidents and breakdowns, will be necessary, yes."

"And the clerical team being Matsumoto-san, Yamamoto-san, Hashimoto-san, and Sakamoto-san, four… Marie-san, how many retainer summoning slots are there?"

"Erm, sixty-four at present. Those already set for summoning come to fifty-four: sixteen college graduates and thirty-eight vocational-school graduates. Allowing for the possibility that we may need additional summons such as sailors and fishermen, let us call it finished around here."

"That's a fair jump in headcount."

"This means the dungeon will hold twenty-one Shiso (Asura), plus the Master and fifty-four retainers, seventy-six all told. Add the residents' side, with the heads of each warrior-band and the chieftains of each race, and the dungeon's management side will come to roughly a hundred or so, I should think."

It is, naturally, a 'setting' that even Marie is not so superlative a top student as to gain admission to the First Girls' Higher School. The Librarian who could have been summoned during the dungeon's tutorial would, it seems reasonable to suppose, have a career history of being from Tokyo and a Tokyo Imperial University graduate, though this remains undecided.