It took some time to get everything squared away. Lily was having trouble focusing on anything other than the backpack he had fixed, whereas the Enchanter was attempting to help his daughter and chase them out at the same time. Dix eventually just grabbed the money the man was waving at the dwarven girl, threw it in his backpack, and then handed the disconnected bag to the girl while pushing her out of the door. Realizing he would get little information from her before she had satisfied her curiosity, he stripped the weapons from his bandoliers, then exchanged them for the bag when she started looking at them. A final quick suggestion got them headed the right direction, “I bet you can get a better look back at your shop!”

The girl didn’t even respond verbally, instead just rushing down the street, somehow navigating around people without even taking her eyes off the collection of belts she held in her hands. It reminded Dix of how he drove. It took about ten minutes to make it to her shop at a fast jog; she was at a dead sprint.

The shop, and presumably home, of Lilliana Stonehammer was a junkyard. It wasn’t something he had been anticipating seeing in his new world, but that was very much what it was. A modestly sized, and slightly run down, home sat amidst the detritus of a number of medieval wars. Piles of broken armors, weapons, and tools shared the fenced area with pieces of broken wagons, miscellaneous monster shells and bones, and cast out tools too worn out to be salvaged. On closer approach he noticed a shed behind the house, hidden by the larger piles of broken gear, that seemed to be Lil’s target. Despite its appearance, he didn’t think it was an outhouse, but it still looked too small to be anything useful. When Lilly yanked open the door, he was pleasantly surprised to find stairs leading down into the ground. There was a faint yellow glow coming from somewhere out of his vision.

On reaching the end of the very long, winding stairwell all Dix could do was stare. The area was positively cavernous. They had gone down quite a number of stairs, but he hadn’t expected them to lead to a room that could house an american football field and its goal posts. The ceiling must have been sixty feet high, and was festooned with a number of things he had expected to never see again. Cranes, lifts, chains, and hoists all dangled from a series of catwalks anchored around the walls and ceiling of the oversized shop. Banks of flood lights were arranged around the walls to leave no place unilluminated, while spot lights were focused on work areas from a number of angles to ensure optimum lighting. The far wall had what appeared to be some form of blast furnace, along with a more traditional smelter and forge nearby. After that was a series of vats that he could only assume had to do with either alchemy or leatherworking, and then what looked like the world’s most impressive chemistry set that he knew had to do with alchemy. A smaller section dedicated to woodworking was crammed off to the side, seemingly of less importance. Looms and spinning wheels were next, along with something that looked like an archaic and simplified version of a sewing machine. And finally a series of tables with strange symbols, rods, powders, and crystals.

The next section along the wall was a massive collection of storage boxes, jars, vases, bottles, drawers, cupboards, baskets, tubs, and a host of things he had no names for. The area looked like the combined storage of a wine collectoring, mad scientist, hoarding, voodoo practicing witch. Powders of all colors of the rainbow and more; eyes and assorted body parts; metal shavings, rods, and ingots; wood of more kinds than he could name; plants that were alive, dead, and in between. All this and more was stored, labeled, and organized in a series of containers of all types covering at least half of the cavernous area he had been led to. By comparison, the final area seemed almost mundane. The last section of the massive underground shop was a library, but judging by the rest of the contents, it was anything but simple. As he followed Lilly through the room he noticed there were semi permeable magical membranes that separated each section of the room from the others, as well as climate controlled. He knew he would be more appreciative of that the closer he came to the blast furnace.

The girl finally stopped at one of the empty tables near the leatherworking area of the shop. Unceremoniously dumping out the contents of the backpack onto the table, she quickly moved to the nearby mannequin and sequered the collection of leather strapping to it. Several test pulls and notes later, she absentmindedly tossed the entire contraption back onto the table with all of Dix’s items. Taking this as permission, he stored his items and then reattached everything to his body. He idly studied the contents of the room while he waited for the dwarfette to get back to him. Ten minutes of his time to let her make sure she had it all right would be worthwhile if all worked out.

Eventually she looked up. Spotting Dix, she thought for a moment, then walked over to him. “Hand,” she demanded. Having been through this process before, he didn’t even blink, simply gave her his hand. Being linked to a repository wasn’t a complicated process for the person receiving the link, and only cost a bit of mana for the person doing the work. The only requirement beyond mana was a skill level beyond novice and an already accessible link to that particular repository. Lilly seemed to have access to all of them, and was very grateful about the backpack.

Appraisal Repositories Linked: Blacksmith, Leatherworker, Tailor, Enchanter, Woodworker, Processor, Poisoner, Treasure Hunter, Archaeologist, Merchant, Thief, Warrior, Mage, Priest, Ranger…

The list of classes that he gained Repositories from continued for a while, encompassing virtually all of the classes he had read about in Thunk’s class guide books. He couldn’t imagine one that had been missed. The odd thing was that they all came from one dwarven girl in her teens. As the links kept appearing, so did his confusion. There seemed to be no way that she could possibly know all of these, yet alone own this massive, multi-profession workshop. When the notifications finally trailed off, Dix had a headache, and Lilly was panting from mana exhaustion. They each took a couple minutes to recover, then Dix simply asked, “Why?”

Lilly pointed to the backpack, saying, “Do you understand what that is? It’s the absolute best backpack I could envision for Adventurers. But it didn’t work. All of the work, all of the time, all of the materials and thought and effort. And it didn’t work. That backpack was my future. It was going to make me rich. Rich enough to finally be safe. Rich enough to find someone to hunt down those bastards that killed my parents.” She had gotten progressively more upset, turning redder in the face as she did so. Dix thought she looked like an angry wee Irish lass, something she’d probably nut punch him for thinking. Lilly took a couple of deep breaths, visibly calming down. She looked at Dix and continued. “I gave it to the church because I couldn’t bear to see my failure anymore. I was so angry at myself that I couldn’t think about it calmly enough to figure out how to fix it, so I gave it up. And you found it and fixed it. You might not have done the best job at it, but it works, and now I know how to make them work. I have my future back. Thank you.” She ended with as deep a bow as her short stature could handle, then stood up to look at him again.

Big crocodile tears were dripping down her cheeks from her emerald green eyes. Dix, who was fairly light on emotions, was a bit embarrassed to realize he had absolutely no idea how to deal with a crying girl thanking him. It wasn’t something he had had to deal with before. Saving Elise had never resulted in her crying, just a brief thanks and a promise of free drinks. “Uh, yeah. No problem.” In the awkward moments following that pathetic attempt to accept the praise, Dix finally got his brain functioning again. Cycling back through her statement, he jumped at a lifeline. “You said you were going to sell them? With all of the attachments?”

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“Yep, the best backpack ever. Was going to call it the Adventurer’s Bag. Great, right?”

“The name is pretty solid, but I think there might be a better way to sell it,” Dix offered. “Instead of selling it with all of the attachments, just sell the backpack with the quick detach. Then sell the attachments separately. You can get more basic bags sold for a lower price, and then get people to keep coming back for the extras, which you can charge a bit more for. Not everyone wants or needs the bandolier set up that I use, but for the Rogue types it’s fantastic. Mages that already have a light spell don’t need the light stones, but they’ll be happy to pick up a belt that has loops for potion holding to keep their mana up during fights. If you happen to sell the very potions they need to fill it, then they will probably buy them from you while they are here. Same thing with quiver attachments and arrows, bandoliers and throwing weapons, pouches and alchemical concoctions to fill them. Give them a reason to come here, and they will happily buy anything else they need that is conveniently available at the same place. Understand?”

The dwarven girl’s eyes had grown as the implications of modern marketing were revealed to her. For someone that was already a one stop shopping extravaganza, it was amazing that she had never figured it out. Although with actual crafting ability being such a big thing on Mantra, it did make a sort of sense. While she was vigorously nodding, and beaming a smile at him, Dix added, “If you can get some more of these backpacks whipped up fairly quickly, I can mention that I finally found where my bag that all of my fellow students are wildly jealous of comes from. That should get you nearly twenty sales right off the bat. I’ll tell them mine was a delivery mix up, the man who ordered it skipped town, and it should keep them from asking too many questions.”

She was practically vibrating in excitement now as her dream started coming true before her very eyes. Dix didn’t want to rain on her parade, but he did need some help. Providing a preemptive helping hand seemed the best way to ensure he got what he needed. To make sure she paid attention to what he needed he held up a finger. When her eyes locked on his, and she stopped bouncing, he posed his request, “Before you jump right into a crafting storm, I do need a bit of help. My trainer, Error, seems to think that Enchanting holds the secret to adding elemental damage to my basic attacks. The guy who I met this morning was supposed to teach me, if I had the aptitude to do so. Any chance you could set me on the right path?”

Her head cocked to the side as she considered his request. It only took a second before she nodded. Beckoning him to follow her, she headed towards the enchanting section of her workshop. She chatted over her shoulder at him as she walked. “My best guess would be Inscriptions. Normally they are fairly useless, and are only used for training purposes. However, if you have some basic mana skills and a fair bit of mana to burn, it could be quite the potent weapon.” By this point she was flipping through a series of notebooks on the table, but still talking. “See, Enchanting is the art of permanently changing an item so that when you use it or mana flows through it, you get an effect of some sort. You need to burn through a bunch of expensive stuff to enchant things, but the end result is quite worth it. It allows fighters with no knowledge or skills with magic to cast spells; or archers to swing swords with special attacks; or mages to shoot arrows that actually hit their targets with no prior experience.”

Lilliana had gestured to nearby weapons on her workbenches as she pointed out what each one did. It was a silent companion to her drifting speech, which made the sudden slamming of her fist into the table a bit of a shocker. With a barked laugh, she strode towards her library, once more gesturing to demand he follow her. Now in her element, the previously shy girl that stumbled over her words was gone. “Now Inscriptions are a whole different world. Like I said, they are mainly a training tool because they are temporary creations. Unlike Enchanting, you don’t need all the fancy tools and ingredients. You don’t even need to have a ton of knowledge of runes either; just the basics. Or at least for what I assume you plan to do with it you don’t.” She stopped at a section of shelves, scanning the titles, while still speaking over her shoulder.

“The basic idea is that you create the same structure as you would while Enchanting, but you do it with your own mana. The only real trick is the binding so that it stays long enough to be used. Inscriptions are closer to spells than Enchantments are, as they use the mana that makes them up to power their effect.” She grabbed a couple of different books and thumbed through them quickly before returning them to their shelves and resuming her search. “You won’t need to do anything all that hard if all you want is an elemental boost to an attack, but you will need to do it many times, as it will need to be redone with each strike. That’s not to say that you can’t do more exciting things with time and practice, but if hitting something with a flaming sword is easy enough to do, do you really need to use a Flaming Slash Inscription that costs ten times more mana? AH HA!” Abruptly, she whirled around and slammed a book into Dix’s chest. He started flipping through it, while she kept talking. “That right there is the basic instructions for starting with Inscription. It has the basic elemental runes, the formation you need to use with each, and the binding you need to make them work. If you can master all of those, you will probably cover everything you need, but come see me if you decide you want more.”

She backed off a little bit and took a closer look at him while he was distracted with the book. The Folk before her didn’t look like any sort of caster at all, particularly in light of the number of weapons he was carrying, so needing something like Inscription both did and didn’t make sense. A normal mixed weapon melee physical damage type, like he appeared to be, would have a number of different elemental skills lined up to acquire already. The only reason she could see for someone using Inscription was inspiration, or lack of imagination. Some folks just couldn’t think up an image to go with their skill, leading to them having a hard time creating them. Inscription would be a more cost effective version of self help for that sort of problem versus using enchanted weapons.

Despite her conclusions, something didn’t feel quite right. It took her a bit to figure it out. The man was actually reading the book, which wasn’t the problem. It was the speed at which he was doing it. There was no slow down for the runic script, and he wasn’t skipping it. That meant he could actually read it. This was obviously a beginning level book, but only enchanters and mages should have the knowledge to actually read the runes. She was further surprised when she noticed the light coming from his hand. He was actually a caster? Then why all the weapons? The light abruptly cut out, and he raised his head to say, “Do you have a training dummy I could test this out on? I’d love to get a feel for this before I head for my next appointment.”

Lilly just nodded and pointed to the stairway. She used to have training dummies in the shop, but had learned to only really do testing outside. Explosions were expected with alchemy and enchanting, but she had a tendency to attempt to combine the different professions to increase the potency. It only took one enchanted fire bomb to convince her to take the testing outside. She knew she would be tempted to try again if the dummies remained in the shop, so she moved them all outside. At the top of the stairs she pointed to the training targets standing in the middle of the junkyard.

Dix didn’t even slow down, just changed direction. He tucked the book into his belt, pulling a couple of knives in the process. He focused his mana into the blade of one of the knives. The book said he needed to be wary of the location of the Inscription comparatively to what effect he wanted it to convey. With just the basic existence of an element, it was best to have it concentrated into the damaging surface of the weapon. For a throwing knife that would be the point. Following the instructions, he crafted the rune for fire and attached it to the framework and binding. The framework dictated its size and shape, matched to the blade of the throwing knife, while the binding was just required to lock the effect until impact. With the three pieces combined, the runic bundle sank into the blade. Glancing at it, he could see nothing different until he activated his Mana Sight. Then there was a faint reddish glow to the knife blade, along with some hard to spot lines that hadn’t been there before. Shrugging at the small visible change, he just threw the knife at the nearest dummy.

After its flight, the knife sank into the target and burned.