Chapter 210

A Cat With Its Own Laser Pointer

Work is therapeutic in a way. Something terrible going on in your life? Well, find a job, devote those parts of yourself that are in pain to the all mighty job, and then work until you are nothing left but skin and bones.

The only problem is, once you realize what you are doing, the act of blindly throwing yourself at your job becomes less effective. Then you get a passion project in addition to work and supporting your kids.

Then eventually, when the kids move out and start life on their own, that’s when you realize that you are now hollow. That one aspect that you used to give you motivation to get up and push farther and harder than you ever have before is suddenly gone.

Right now, my entire being is working on fixing up the old junk ship on floor 235 of the Arcanarus Tower.

Personally, I think the ship is both a godsend and a gentle nudge to me from the world as to what I am supposed to do.

See, the ship can only be run by using both external mana and Qi simultaneously.

That’s right, right after I created the Outsourcer-5000 for the mages in my classes to use to work on their mana control, I of course went and created the Outsourcer-6000 for my cultivators. This way both groups had ways of practicing and using both forms of energy in a way that didn’t require me to constantly yell at them and tell them they were doing it incorrectly.

Of course, I thought nothing of this, thinking that it was a one and done process, until I found this derelict blimp ship.

The thing was ugly, left in the middle of a salvage yard run by an old crusty gnomish hoarder of dead and dying mechanical devices. Yet, one look at the ship and I knew it was what I wanted to work on as my next passion project.

How did I know that the system wanted me to take this vehicle as my next passion project, well there were quite a few warnings.

The first was that my Disaster Foresight skill was going off like crazy when I saw it, which of course meant that it was somehow important. I saw the ship for what it was apparently supposed to be, and not what it was.

I saw it as the possible ship of the future, as it seemed absolutely perfect to me.

It even seemed to beckon to me, as I could see traces of both mana and qi in its gears and piping. This ship could be powered by Qi and Mana.

At least, that was what I thought at first.

Also, it didn’t hurt that the ship felt oddly familiar in a way that was hard to explain at first. It wasn’t until I eventually bought the stupid thing by doing a million fetch quests and part creation quests for that stupid gnomish hoarder that owns this junkyard, that I found out why this ship felt so familiar.

The ship was a walking, well stationary, copyright violation. It was as if the system took both my Outsourcer-5000, and my Outsourcer-6000, overlapped them over each other in the way a kid who had no idea what they were doing would do. Then when they were angry that the toy, they were working on didn’t work, they angrily crumpled up the defective super-toy and left it in a junk yard.

A junk yard that I would be all but forced to pass by and thereby see the monstrosity and be drawn to the ship as if it was some oncoming iceberg of doom, and I being the Titanic ditz that I am saw said iceberg and said, you know what, I could dance with that and be just fine.

“You know Cass, it is called Disaster Foresight, for a reason.” I chastise myself as I rip out even more of the internal wiring to make room for my refitted piece that I must create on my own.

“Still angry at the fact that you won the rights to this pile of garbage?” Zero asks.

That was the other thing, I had to win the title to this vehicle from the gnomish hoarder via a card game. I won, I mean how could I lose, the guy had so many tells that I thought his first name was William. That was before you add in the fact that I could read both his cards and my own and the fact that whenever I really wanted to intimidate him I just needed to open my third eye and cycle a bit of Qi through the eye.

After that, he seemed to lose most of his will to battle with me, and I soon found myself the owner of a brand new sky ship.

Tingles.

I was so excited in winning the thing that I immediately went to the ship to find out what was wrong with it. Finally, after so many years, I had done it, I had reached the BiPrism dream. I owned my own flying airship.

Just thinking about it made me giddy with delight.

I remember Teleporting into the ship and standing behind the wheel.

“Can you even see over the wheel there?” Zero asked.

I just shake my head and answered truthfully.

“Of course I can,” this wasn’t a complete lie. While my small body made it so I couldn’t traditionally see over the steering wheel without flying, I fortunately didn’t need to do such an act to steer the vehicle. What’s worse is that Zero who is also short used that time to call me out. I know he can change his height, but by that same note I can too, so I don’t quite know what the dig about height was for.

Still this was my first vehicle that I owned.

Well, my first one here in my retirement, and I was so ready to make it perfect.

I could tell that there would clearly be a few things that needed to be fixed. There was the breached hull, the broken air tubes, the faulty wiring from being left to rot for so long, but it had good bones.

At least, that was what I thought when I first began working on this project, yet the more I worked on the system, the more I realized the person who created this had absolutely no idea what they were in fact doing.

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There were two separate feeds that I would use to grab onto and channel out Qi and Mana into. This was fine, and what was to be almost expected as you could do certain things with mana that you couldn’t with Qi and vice versa.

Chief among the greatest ideas was the separation of the core responsibilities for each set of energy. Mana would be used to rapidly fill up, deflate, and otherwise protect the blimp portion of the ship.

Qi was supposed to provide stability to the base, help make movements fluid and provide overall grace to the ship.

At least that is what I thought should happen.

Of course, no one asked for my opinion on how to create a mana and Qi powered airship, which is why I was left with this monstrosity.

Rather than separating the two powers, it tried to forcefully combine the two powers in a spinning spiral chamber. Which would be great, if the stupid thing worked.

This seemed to be the creation of a rambling good idea fairy, where someone with more money and imagination than brains decided, yes let’s coil two different streams of energy together, use it for absolutely nothing and then separate the two a moment later. Or at least try to separate the two coiling energy strands and break them off into functional energy forms. The only problem was that once separated the new energy forms were highly combustible and as anyone who has ever tried to fly their own airship would tell you, trying to use a highly combustible energy source to do everything was just asking for trouble.

That said, there was one glaringly obvious reason as to why the two streams of energy were combined right away.

This was something that I clearly missed while I was taking apart everything, rewiring the entire ship to not be a fire hazard, and ultimately changing out very piece of burnt wiring and containment units.

As it turns out, there was a bit of logic to the initial blending of the two energy sources.

Namely the starting instrument panel that had been set right after the combination of the two forms of energy was a way to measure the flow input of energy to the ship.

How I missed this key detail, well I will tell you the truth. It was burnt down with so many other instruments within the command room that I had a hard time distinguishing what it was, at first.

The fact that I was able to understand what the burnt down goo of metal and parts was at all was a miracle to me, and something that I will forever say is a mystery I could have honestly lived without solving. Basically, I was able to read just enough characters from ripping apart different components to find enough words to determine that it was an energy, height, and speed regulator, basically the autopilot for a futuristic steam punk blimp run on mana and Qi, rather than fossil fuels.

Basically, after a week of ripping up and out every burnt piece of wiring and other problems I found from the terribly constructed system, I found out that I might actually want the two energy sources to be added.

Ultimately, I did, and decided to work the console back into the features of the ship, but only after it had made its victory lap around the ship, powering the sails, thrusters, propulsion units, and everything else that was needed. Then and only then, was the energy allowed to come back, mix in a better twisting container to measure the energy input and output.

“So any progress on your quest?” Zero asks.

Groan.

I swear Zero just loves torturing me on this, as he noted many times that he and I could just fly wherever we wanted, and that having an airship was a bit tacky.

Of course, he didn’t understand the mystique of being a sky pirate with an eye patch and really cool leather jacket. This was why he always needled me over my quest that I was given to fix this stupid ship.

New Quest Discovered: Flight of the Penguin (Ongoing): You have found the remains of, and became the owner of a derelict ship designed to run off of mana and Qi. The only problem is that the ship doesn’t fly. Fix the ship and fly to the heavens. Current progress for repairs (98 / 100). Rewards: Experience, Skills, New Unique vehicle, other.

From a collection of random skills perspective, this quest has been great.

New Skill Gained: Piloting is now level 1. Piloting is a Dexterity, Stamina, Perception, and Intelligence based skill.

This skill was kind of a no brainer, as it was definitely a skill I would need to gain before being able to actually fly. Also, the fact that I had to move and twist every gear to make sure everything flowed smoothly was not lost on me. Though I was exceptionally happy that I got this skill before my maiden voyage, so I could at least practice before spending the better part of a month working on completely refitting every major component of this ship, before taking it up, only to crash it.

New Skill Gained: Customized Repair Work is now level 1. Customized Repair Work is a Strength, Dexterity, Stamina, Personality, Sociability, Perception, Intelligence, and Willpower based skill.

This skill was one that sort of made sense, and I was not too surprised with the Attributes that were affected by it. This was the skill that I was basically using to appease myself with the new parts I was creating and placing into my vehicle. The fact that Attractiveness was the only Attribute not affected by this skill was sort of a shock, at first. That was until I realized the truth, namely that everything dealing with this skill was not pretty at all. This skill was the hard and fast version of forcefully creating, bending, and twisting an object to fit a specifically desired location so that one specific function could be performed, otherwise the entire ship would not work.

That was how I got the ultimate artisan related skill.

New Skill Gained: Custom Detailing has reached level 1. Custom Detailing is a Dexterity X2, Stamina, Personality, Sociability, Attractiveness X2, Perception, Intelligence, and Willpower based skill.

With this skill I got the attention to the Attractiveness attribute that I desperately wanted as this forced me to incorporate more of a feng shui style to my creation and implementation of parts. While I might be okay with random wires hanging out and dangling everywhere, some less cultured people might feel frightened about such occurrences, as such having this skill really helped me keep a de-cluttered approach towards repairing the ship.

With this, I would go work on a section, which meant I would rip it open, pull out its guts, dissect it on the spot. Then replace those ripped out organs for newer better organs, then pack up the spot, making it look better than new, and move on.

Very time consuming, but overall very cathartic.

Those three new skills alone were enough to keep me working on this ship alone. That is part of why I think this instant reward system of being able to stop and see your skill increases is entirely underestimated as a way to continue to keep being motivated on new tasks that prove to be more troublesome than originally expected.

Yet, despite everything I still couldn’t figure out what this last two percent was for.

“No,” I finally answer Zero as I let out an exasperated huff.

“Well, have you figured out what all the tools did?” Zero asks.

With that, I just gesture to the command room, this was the first place I began my work, and now it seems to be the final spot that I find myself in. My gesture was meant as a way to show that most of the instrumentation panels around me are little more than burnt down slags of rubble.

“I’ve found the voltage meter, or whatever the equivalent for measuring combined mana and Qi flow rates should be called.” I state.

“You know, you really should name that.” Zero presses.

Sigh.

I hate naming things. I am always so bad at it, then when other people come to see my new inventions they always poke fun at the names. Which only puts more pressure on me to come up with a better name the next time, which ultimately makes it so I want to stop creating things if only for the fact that I won’t be forced to name anything ever again.

That said, apparently what I did was enough to create a brand new measuring machine that had never been seen before in this world and Zero was here giving me the prompt to name this machine. A machine that would measure the rates of Qi and Mana and measure their Flow through the ship and see how they ultimately converged into a pool that could serve as an emergency battery for when the ship was being overpowered by the user.

It was the battery part at the end that I think is where the new name came from. Well that and likely the whole relay system. Ultimately, the world gave me the guidelines of what it said was possible, I just filled in the variables to actually make them make sense and be able to work properly.

“Do I have to?” I ask.

“Yes, this is very important and something every inventor would be extremely proud of. This device can and will revolutionize the air transport industry. From here on out mages and cultivators alike will be able to afford passage on luxury air ships for nothing more than being a cheap but reliable fuel source for the airship crew and their captain. Think about it, with this you will lower emissions and make it so we have a cleaner brighter future.” Zero states, giving me the most intricate save the planet speeches of all pep talks.

“Fine,” I say thinking about it, about how I want it to be simple and yet able explain what the machine does. How it monitors the ship to see how well energy works and if there are any disconnects between the person supplying the energy and where it ultimately ends up at the end. Then it hits me, and before I have a second to doubt myself I realize that I have done it. As I have come up with quite possibly the perfect name to describe this device. “It’s the QiMO machine.”

“QiMO?” Zero asks.

“Yeah, you know a contraction for Qi and Mana FlOw machine.” I state, trying to emphasize the ow sound there at the end.

Silence.

Finally after my staring at Zero for a minute he seems to begrudgingly shake his snout as he replies, “okay.”

“What? You don’t like it?”

“What’s not to like about QiMO, I’m sure everyone will be thrilled to have this in their lives.” Zero states, and I am momentarily lost, but before I can get too distracted about Zero’s odd reaction I get the system message that I have been waiting for all this time.

New Quest Completed: Flight of the Penguin Part I (Ongoing): You have become the owner of a derelict ship designed to run off of mana and Qi. You even managed to fix it so it could finally fly. Current progress for repairs (100 / 100). Rewards: Experience, Skills, New Unique vehicle, other.

Then before the results of the quest are provided, I find myself stating, “that was it? That was all that was needed, me providing a new name?”

“Yep,” Zero responds, with a note of apprehension to his voice.

Hearing his resignation I can’t quite understand why, as all it took was one cool acronym and now we can fly, all thanks to QiMO.