Sam looked up, as Tamako walked past his workshop, heading straight for the training area in their private courtyard. Jen came in a few seconds later and shook her head laughing, “she won today, but she was not happy with the ‘way’ she won.”

  Sam shrugged and said, “what do you expect from a perfectionist?”

  Jen walked further into Sam’s shop and said, “I finished setting up the safe house, and I’ve marked its location on your map. Now you just need to go over there and set up some wards.”

  “Great, I’ll get some wards up this week.”

  Jen picked up the miniature siege tower on Sam’s desk and asked, “Anyways, how’s your work coming along?”

  Sam smiled and replied, “Crapshoot and I finished the tower yesterday, but it will take weeks for the Highland Guild to charge it up with mana.”

  “Was she O.K. to work with?”

  “She’s has a passion for enchantments, but feels insecure about her enchanting ability. I think it stresses her out. The stress just ramps up her bitch temperature. However, I learned a ton of enchanting basics from her that I was missing.”

  Jen asked, “She didn’t think it was strange that you didn’t know the basics?”

  “The funny thing is, when I advised her about the rod in her office, she got the impression I was a master enchanter. While working together, as I asked her questions, she thought I was testing her, and that I was trying to help reinforce her understanding of the basics.”

  Jen asked, “did you have time to inspect her mana system?”

  “Yes, and you’re rubbing off on me. I’m feeling guilty after examining her mana system without her permission. Anyway, she only has three channels open and her entire system is full of corruption.”

  Jen nodded and said, “I’ve noticed that people on this deck have more channels open, but they are not manipulating or cleaning their mana system.”

  Sam replied, “What about opening more of our channels, running multi-focus with all the subsystems for cleaning, gathering, filtering…and everything else is still almost maxing out my mana regen, even here on the Second Deck.”

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  “I know. It’s on the list, but you just gave me an idea. What if our skills can be organized like subsystems on a computer?”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m going to try and see if organizing our onboard apps and multi-focus can increase the efficiency. I’ll let you know… So, how did you fix the tower?”

  “The damaged runes provided a reinforcement function that I could easily replace using a substitute from my enchantment book. The good news was Crapshoot explained several of the rune enchantments on the tower that I would have needed to spend weeks studying in order to understand its functioning fully. I kind of feel like a fraud. She did all the work, she explained the enchantment functions to me, and she explained a mana carving technique for etching enchantments on mana-imbued metals. I simply pointed out the one damaged rune that needed to be fixed, and she thinks I’m the enchanting genius! I’ve told everyone in her guild how she fixed the enchantment, and they all think I’m just being modest!”

  Jen put down the expanding siege tower and started looking through some of the other loot they gained after the fight with the Poison Dagger sect in Venesia City, and asked, “So, what are you doing now?”

  Sam continued separating the loot and replied, “I invited Crapshoot to inspect and study all the enchantments on the rest of our loot with me. She got approval from the her Guild, and she is going to bring by all their enchanted loot that their guild has in storage, that they were waiting for her to work on. We are going to identify and study all of it together.”

  “How long before we can send all this stuff off to be sold?”

  “We’re planning to start in a couple of days. I think we can enhance some of the pre-existing enchantments, and add some simple enchantments to the blank weapons and armor. This should increase the sale price. Ohhh! Speaking of money, I need 120 gold to purchase a mana-carving technique book from the system shop.”

  Jen paused and looked at Sam before saying, “Do you have any idea how much 120 gold can buy?”

  Sam looked worried and said, “I thought we had plenty of money. Do we need to wait until after the auction for me to buy the technique book? Based on what Crapshoot has said, I think we should make well over 500 gold from the sale of all this stuff after we’re done with it.”

  Jen shook her head and pulled a bag of gold out of one of her rings and said, “No, we’re O.K., especially with the rental discount we received from the Highland Guild for this place. There is 150 gold in this bag for you to spend. However, you should know that 150 gold is still a MASSIVE amount of money on the Second Deck!”

  Sam put the money bag into his ring. “Do you want to come with me to buy the technique book and some imbued metal mana shavings?”

  Jen thought about it before saying, “Maybe, but afterwards can we go check out some cute boots I was thinking about buying?”

  Sam rushed to the door hollering, “Sorry, I can’t hear what you said. See you later!”

  Jen laughed, knowing her request to go shoe shopping would send him running.