"That is a lot of armor." Amelia says when she comes out to the courtyard to get me for dinner. "Do they all have different flowers on them?  ...Of course they do." She rolls her eyes when I just grin.

I'd finished off the chainmaille earlier, and decided to work on the plate armor next. One-thousand suits of armor take up quite a bit of space, even with all the extra bits shoved inside the torso. That's why I came out here after quickly filling the room I was working in.

"Yes it is a lot of armor." I say while finishing up the one I'm working on. "There's another few dozen of these to go, and then I've still got the scalemaille, and gambesons to make. But, at least the conduit is coming along nicely." I pat the spool next to me. Focusing on it is the reason I haven't blazed through all the armor and then some. "Think I've got a good plan for the file handler too."

"I knew getting those plants for you would be worth it." She puts her arm around my waist when I walk over. "I left standing orders with those couriers to keep their eyes out for anything new. So, a few more things are sure to trickle in, in the future."

"You really are the best." I return her hug. "How ever did you get Apricot to keep the secret?"

"She was happy to keep it, she wanted to surprise you too."

"I told her all we had to do was wear those bunny-girl outfits." Apricot says with a teasing smirk. "But, she wanted something special."

"I told you not every gift has to end in the bedroom." Amelia says and pulls her in for a kiss. "Now, come on. Dinner's going to get cold."

...

"That was great, babe." I say after we finish up. Her parents’ and Apricot murmuring their appreciation along with me. "You want anything special for desert?"

"Oh, just some ice cream is fine." She says and the others quickly agree.

"Butter pecan?" I ask after her favorite?

"Yes, please." She answers, and the other three give their selections at the same time. "Raspberry sorbet, if you don't mind." - "Pistachio, please." - "That peanut-butter cup one."

I whip them up real quick and add a bowl of mint-chocolate for myself, with a couple of the frozen peanut-butter cups on the side.

"You've got that look again." Apricot says around a spoonful of peanut-buttery goodness.

"Yeah." I say while staring at the frozen snack in my hand. "The magical fruit got me thinking about preserving foods earlier, and the peanut-butter just now made me remember that it was used to feed soldiers."

"You planning to make ice-cream for the army?" She laughs.

"Hahah, no." I shake my head. "But, I am thinking of long term food storage. We don't have the steel to waste on canning foods in actual cans, and glass breaks too easily. But, if I line wood with a thin layer of silicone, like so." I demonstrate. "Then I can fill it up, cook the food with magic, and seal it tight." I demonstrate with some green beans in a rectangular box with a thin score line where someone can easily use a knife to open it.

"You should bring that up with the General when you see him." Turner says and leans over to pick up the box. "How long will these last?"

"A few years, the same as canning it in a jar.  As long as the wood doesn't break, that is." I used the modified stuff to make that less likely, but wood is still wood. "I might be able to stretch that out longer after I have a good look at the fruit Amelia got for me." I dig it out of the box it came in.

"Oh? Your couriers all came in?" Her mother asks.

"Yeah, the last one arrived yesterday." She nods with a smile. "Thanks again for giving me all those contacts."

***

"Finally! I've got it." I exclaim.

"Is 'it' a giant pile of laundry?" Amelia snorts while looking up from her book.

I finished the plate and scale armors last night after dinner last night, and have been working on the gambesons all morning.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

"That too, yes." I chuckle and bind up the latest batch before floating it next to all the others. "But, I meant the latest part of the file handler for the data Rune. I was having a bit of trouble adapting the simple one I used for the image takers to use the array."

"So, it's almost done then?" She seems more interested in her book than my adventure in enchanting.

"The hardware side, yes." I heave out a sigh of relief. "Now, I need to finish up the data structure, and then it's just a bunch of math, really. Working out how to digitize pictures, music, and movies, etcetera."

"That's that ones and zeroes thing, right? Well, good luck with it." She sends me a wry smile. "I kinda understand counting the high scores for the games, but you made my head spin last time when you were trying to explain doing the same for books."

"At least you were able to stay awake." Apricot lets out a fake snore that's loud enough to startle Mittens. "The enchanting stuff is fun, but every time you get into the really technical side of things I just feel my eyes slipping closed."

"If it weren't for the fun of working out the puzzle, I'd be right there with you." I tell her seriously. "Truthfully, I'm probably going to switch to another project as soon as I get the basics done. I just wanted to get the tracking system working for the Rune chargers. And besides, if I wasn't doing something to keep my brain active I'd never be able to finish up all these, or this." I gesture to the armor, and the steadily filling spool of conduit.

"Just wait until you have to do ten times that number." She smirks at me before going back to her movie.

"Gee, thanks for that reminder." I sigh and go back to working on the file table.

I'm sure some future nerd will call what I'm doing a horrible hack job, but fuck them. I need something that just works and is simple and easy enough to understand. It's not perfect, but it makes sense to me.

Once I have it working how it should, I start switching from using different colored lights to manipulating magnetic fields. The read speeds are blazing fast, but writing is a bit slower than I'd like. I should be able to parallelize that function in the future, but it's still more than enough for now.

Now that I have the basic two megabyte array working on a cubic centimeter magnet. I try scaling it up to see how far the array can go. I couldn't do this while using light because it chewed through Mana like crazy. But now, it doesn't have to support millions of lights, and will only use Mana for reading and writing.

Since it's a cube, every step increase to the array provides eight-fold the previous level's storage. I keep checking as the storage grows, and the first thing I notice is that the write speeds keep increasing. It takes me a second to figure it out, but I finally understood that as the dots grew smaller, they had less metal to affect and were able to do so quicker.

This thing works even better than I could have imagined, and is only one step away from the exabyte range before errors start showing up. I dial it back a couple steps to 'only' two petabytes just to be safe, and start a rigorous suite of tests.

Most of the day passed in a haze of enchanting, armor making, and conduit crafting. It's late afternoon before I'm sure that the data Rune is fully stable. And fortunately, all the armor is done too. I still have over a hundred kilometers of conduit to make, but two out of three ain't bad.

"It's done." I announce. "And in typical me fashion, I kinda, maybe, sorta overdid it... just a little, itty-bitty, teensy bit."

"Uh huh." Amelia dead pans. "You might as well just tell us so we can pretend to be surprised." She snarks.

"Hahaha." Apricot giggles. "Oh, she got you good there."

"Yeah, yeah." I roll my eyes, but smile all the same. "Okay, so that first cube you saw had two-hundred-fifty-six dot per edge, over sixty-five-thousand on a side, and sixteen-plus-million in total. And, all that would have held like four books."

"Hah!" Apricot barks out another laugh. "And, here I though regular Plantkin were weird. But, you take the cake and multiply it by really big numbers."

"Moving on." I fight not to roll my eyes again. "The final version has over two-hundred-sixty-thousand per edge, and uh... eighteen-quadrillion in total. That's around four-and-a-half-trillion books."

"Why?" Amelia says with a blank face.

"I wasn't planning to, didn't even think it could go that far." I shrug. "It actually went a bit further, but I dialed it back a couple steps after some errors started showing up. Not sure if that was the Rune, or the magnet though. Things were getting kinda small by that point."

"So, what are you going to do with it?" She asks with a sigh.

"No idea." I shrug again with a stupid grin on my face. "I could have done the tracking for the Rune chargers with the original cube. I'll probably end up filling it all with movies or something." I have no idea how video compression works, and only the barest inkling about picture codecs. "But, for now it's going in my inventory, so I can forget about it."

"What's next then?"

"Food. No, not dinner." I say after Apricot perks up. "It's still a bit early for that. I thought I'd try out a few different canning recipes, and mess around with that fruit a bit."

"You know we could probably sell those boxed foods too." Her inner merchant peeks it's head out again.

"Add it to the list for when you take over the mercantile world." I tease.

"Daddy's got that well in hand for now. I'm happy relaxing and practicing magic. There's some really interesting Light spells in all those books you copied from the guild."

"Well, I promise as soon as I feel Larendath won't crumble the minute we leave." I say with a slightly forced laugh. "Then we will go travelling and collect as many more books as we can find." I haven't forgotten about her walking the path of the Archmage either, but Apricot still tends to close up whenever other Fae are mentioned, so I try not to mention it.

"You don't have to carry the whole country around on your shoulders, you know?" She sighs. "I know you feel it's your responsibility, but if you ever want to leave it all, you only have to say so."

"I know, but it's not just about me feeling responsible, not anymore." I say with fire in my eyes. "This is my home now, and I'm willing to fight for it."

***