“Hello there!”

Reality felt… blurry, but I knew that voice. I shook my head, and after a moment, things came back into focus. What the heck? I was back in my lab. Tutorial number one, actually, it looked a lot like a dentist’s office, and I was in the chair. Something… a lot of somethings, felt… missing.

“Hello, Crystal.”

She smiled meaningfully at me. Damn, she was beautiful. I disliked her intensely, but there was no disputing the fact that she was incredible. Pale flawless skin, a perfect figure, small but firm breasts, long legs, a slender elfin face, slightly pointed chin, long shimmering platinum-blonde hair. It was all shrouded in thin, wispy clouds of sparkling silk that wouldn’t stop a common cold. If I had a body I’d….

“What’s going on?”

She chuckled, “Normally, at this point, I’d be explaining to you that you died a hero and got to be reborn as a hero in another world, but that’s not exactly how it happened, is it?”

“I died? I can’t die!”

“It was a gift, usually reserved for immortals that don’t have a body, like dungeon cores, Benevolent spirits, ancestor spirits, basically people who have spent their whole non-existence trying to do the best job they can, even if that job’s not very nice. I guess congratulations are in order. Technically, you are reincarnated after trying to save billions of people.”

“I guess that means I failed.”

She shook her head, “Doesn’t matter, at least not to you. You did it out of a sense of pride and decency, not because you thought you would gain anything out of it. That spells hero.”

“Can you send me back?”

She giggled, which made interesting parts jiggle in ways that made my situation start to become painful. “My goodness, a mortal for five minutes and you are already asking the same questions they all do! Of course not, you know that.”

***

“Wake up!”

I’d had that weird dream again, the one I almost always forgot instantly, but this time it stuck with me… The face was beyond beautiful, as was her voice, and I remembered the name, Crystal…

And then it was gone as Angel shook me to full wakefulness.

“Huh? What? What’s going on?” I asked as the dream faded swiftly from my memory, except for the face. Her face lingered. I had been seeing it for much of my life.

I was still a little tired, but I was okay… at least I was clean. When I was shaken or kicked awake, in my experience, I wasn’t usually in a comfortable bed, feeling well-fed, and clean. I’d managed to expand and drop the toxin ranks on three potions last night, a basic strength boost, a basic healing potion, and an actual common restore potion, which came out incredibly well… My new deep scan let me find and identify the patterns in ingredients that best matched and reinforced the potions I was trying to purify, and apparently, that was enough of a boost that I was able to barely reinforce common patterns.

“We have to go! Put this on. Charlie heard some folks asking around about four girls and a boy at her rift guard post and recognized two of them, they are part of Aster’s rare hit squad.”

I quickly tugged on the robe. It was very much designed for a female, and when it was over my head, Angel started brushing eye shadow around my eyes. I noticed that Lilah was stuffing my few possessions into my backpack, including rolling up the blanket and pillow I’d been using moments earlier.

I tried not to twitch as Angelique put something on my mouth and lips, and I recognized the smell as one of Lilah’s red-purple less-than-usually-goth lipsticks. I definitely didn’t like it, but they were clearly trying to conceal the… masculinity I had gained the last few days. My face still wasn’t particularly manly, but Angel knew what she was doing, and the robe was doing a good job of hiding the rest.

“Where?” I asked when she stopped messing with my face.

“Charlie stopped by to roust us up and was heading to the port. She has secured passage, but the tide is already running out, so we have to hurry or we are going to be stuck for another day… and the hit squad is absolutely deadly.”

I nodded as we headed down, and I grabbed and put on the pack that Lilah handed me. We were out the door and headed towards the Eastern docks only minutes after I got up, and I was sort of dazed from sleepiness as we walked.

“Should we run?” I asked.

Lilah shook her head, “Nope. We are just three girls headed for work really early in the morning. If we run, we will attract attention, so we walk fast since we are worried about being late for work.”

I nodded, and the early chill and walking were waking me up, but I would have killed for some instant coffee powder. Coffee powder was cheap, and often a lifesaver if you got rousted out of a safe sleeping hole. Streeters called it blitz because when you mixed it with cold water until it was kind of a thin sludge, the caffeine hit you hard enough to almost be considered a street drug.

I started to ask a few questions but got shushed by Angel, who seemed to be walking quite well by now, even if she occasionally winced. I could see the shipyard from quite a ways off, with the decaying metal and wood superstructures visible above the buildings.

After a few minutes, we were walking up a powdery aluminum stairway as I watched young women unwrapping some kind of weird metal cones from around the mooring lines in the lantern and electric-illuminated darkness. The lights seemed to be attached to the ship, hand lights held by people at the railings of what had to be the strangest ship I had ever seen. Admittedly, I’d never seen a real live ship before, or even a boat, but this one took the cake.

Once we were on board, past a woman who looked impatient and directed a crew to start lifting the boarding stairs after a quick couple of muttered words from Angelique, I got a better look around.

The thing was vaguely shaped like a ship, at least the hull seemed to look that way, but it was nearly sixty yards long, and twenty yards across. The superstructure looked about five stories tall and was squared-off and boxy, with turrets at the top four corners, and a large square hole cut down the middle of the box, presumably to allow vehicles to drive through the superstructure from the front of the ship to the back.

The entire back of the ship was a huge gate, and the front was a sort of giant roll-bar pair of derrick arms that extended from the forecastle, had its own railings, and was almost as tall as the superstructure. From what I understood, there were still a few drill platforms operating on the lakes, where the monsters were much smaller than the giants of the deep that controlled the oceans, but small ships were still targets for lake-dwelling leviathans if they ventured out over deeper water than the river inlets. Diesel-powered ships were still the majority except for a few smaller craft that could afford heavy enchantments and defenses.

With a few whistles and shouted commands, we left the dock behind and were rolling smoothly over the waves. Angel was staring at four figures that were standing on the dock. I could barely make them out, but she scowled. “That’s them. Clearly, they know we are here, and they probably have a seeker that can still hear us.”

“They can’t get to us?”

Angel shrugged, “They probably could if they wanted to push it, but even this close to the docks there are creatures under the water that will ignore a ship the size of this one, but would happily go after something human-sized. As rares, they would almost certainly win, but it would slow them down and inconvenience them, and Aster’s people are not exactly highly motivated, since if it was a serious fight, followed by fighting us, they could wind up using more resources to win than they would gain from the bounty.”

“Aster tends to be… rough, with lower-ranked people, but her hit squad is made up of mid-rares and is one of the ways she clings to power since a good team could end a very rare. She usually uses them for dealing with other warlords that try to muscle into her territory. The fact that she used them to hunt us says something, but I am not sure what.”

Charlie had approached while we were talking. “I think it means that she’s willing to pull out all stops while you are approachable. She probably recognizes a value but isn’t particularly desperate. Sort of like putting up a high bid at an auction, but not being willing to keep raising and go into debt to buy off the item when it moves past your pay height.”

“Does that mean we are safe from her?”

Charlie shook her head, “Not entirely, but as long as you keep a lower profile, hopefully, we will have time to get you, and the rest of us, to a rank that she’s unlikely to be able to touch. You said you have combat slots, which means you will be able to make yourself a dangerous opponent, even if you don’t get as many as most pure combatants.

I sighed, “I don’t mind keeping a low profile, but I really don’t like the idea of leaving people in pain or dying when I could help them. It feels irresponsible. I am no doctor, but I figured I was given this affinity for a reason, and I’d very much like to use it more.”

Charlie nodded, “The safest way to do that would be to pick up low-quality potions and then distribute them for cheap. You were able to expand the volume by decreasing the toxins and lowering the strength, and if you can upgrade your fieldcraft, you might be able to keep their strength. If you are feeling charitable, you could even set aside some of the potions for giving away.”

I shrugged, “I have ideas. Were we able to afford the trip?”

Charlie laughed, looking a bit embarrassed “Oh, yeah. Sort of. This is a working vacation. This old ship used to be a troop transport, but its cranes are special heavy-duty that are mostly human-powered, so now it transports heavy loads and vehicles from Green Bay, which is a tier Five city, out to Montreal, a tier three city, where it picks up wood and bulk animal products and brings them back.”

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“Of course, an old boat like this tends to have a lot of problems. Our contract states that we will help protect the ship if we encounter something that can threaten it, but umm… Saint Mary is sort of out of their way, and I had to sweeten the pot.”

“Sweeten it how?”

She stammered for a moment, “Well, I told them that you were a cold forger.”

Angel snorted, and then shook her head, “Working vacation. So you volunteered him again.”

Charlie shrugged helplessly. “Except for you two, the rest of us are pure combatants. Most of this route is known and the ship already has guards. Compared to the value of the cargo, whatever pittance we could offer to divert, even with our protection, wouldn’t have swayed him an inch.”

“The idea of a cold forger getting some of his old machinery working, though, that got him excited. I think he expects you to restore some old parts, but training your mend on machines should be profitable, right?”

I nodded, “Can I caveat?”

Charlie nodded, “Of course.”

I smiled a little, “One of you negotiate. If I am going to spend the entire trip working as crew, especially if I can fix some of his old machinery, I'll want better compensation than just transportation. Especially if I want to fix something big. What’s a cold forger?”

Renee lifted a finger. “It’s a bit like a mender, except it’s a pure crafting class. Cold forgers can repair metal items without having to fully reforge them, and some of them can even repair enchantments. It’s a valuable vocation, although, not quite as valuable as yours, since they sometimes deal with metals that have a melting temperature higher than anyone save a glassblower could get from a forge.”

“Cold forgers are expensive, though, because working a single item could tap out their essence for days, where a typical smith could turn out hundreds or even thousands of nails in a day. But a cold forger could also craft something like a sword that you couldn't.”

I side-eyed Renee, "Thank you so much for pointedly reminding me of my handicaps," which, surprisingly, caused her to flush a little.

Charlie smiled slightly, “I think I can work that out, depending on how powerful your mend is. We know what you can do with people, now, but bollard motors are big and very powerful. He has a few mechanics, but there are limits to what they can do without spare parts.”

“Is there a workshop?”

She nodded, “He said that the old DC workshop is yours for as long as you want it.”

***

I had to admit, sometimes the shortcuts my abilities took made me feel almost guilty. I could mend glass without requiring heat or blowguns, metals without having to pound them out like a smith, the only thing I couldn’t actually do was create anything complex, and I didn’t see anyone standing in line to teach me the ins and outs of aligning the crystals of carbonized iron with heat and hammers.

I did what I could. I understood the end results of pounding steel, but I will freely admit I had no idea about the techniques. I said almost guilty, but in the end, it took me an enormous amount of work, knowledge, and effort to manipulate and repair objects successfully, even if I didn’t spend long hours paying my dues by pushing a bellows or risking burns trying to use a punty to yank glass out of a three thousand degree day furnace.

Ironically, I was rather sure I could use improvised fieldcraft to create a decent refractory day furnace and annealing or pottery kiln. Making the tools to make the tools seemed to be improvised fieldcraft’s greatest strength, and even a rough forge didn’t seem to be out of its reach.

The ship, the ‘Pippin’, had a LOT of spare and broken parts, and for the next two days solid, the ship’s mechanics, a group of rough girls headed up by a grizzled and untrusting looking fellow named Humphrey who apparently had been on board the ship since the crash, feeding me tasks of increasing difficulty to repair.

Between Renee’s continuing schedule of burnouts, aided by some weights that the ship’s captain was more than happy to allow her to access for her ‘new trainee’, and spending the afternoons trying to mend everything from battery-powered CD players to the stern gate lock that had gotten sheared clean through, I was going to bed exhausted every night.

On the third day, I was trying to fix one of the two winches that directly sat under the aft back of the ship. I was a little nauseous because the flat-bottomed boat swayed a lot more in the chop and tide than most ships did, but the occasional mend tweak was keeping me from getting truly seasick.

Charlie was watching me as I tried to maneuver the giant cog reduction gear onto the generator with a chain falls, and soon stepped up to simply lift the three-hundred-pound painted iron drum head in place with her bare hands while I utilized mend to tighten up and repair the threading on the retaining assembly for the capstan.

“Is it ready?” she asked as I spread a generous handful of what I think was bear grease into the assembly. Supposedly, it was originally designed to be lubricated with white lead, but advanced lubricants, especially the poisonous ones, had fallen in popularity.

I nodded, “Should be, but I need to let Humphrey know to tag the electric system back in before we can test it.”

“You don’t have faith in your mend?”

I laughed, “Of course I do, but I’m not an idiot… I repaired the capstan head and repaired the retaining bolts, cleaned up and re-lubricated the core, regenerated the brake band, tightened up the clutch, and even fixed about seven hundred feet of cable. But there are about a dozen things I might have accidentally missed, so you gotta test it before you can do something crazy like using the heavy stern gate.

Charlie nodded, “You have kind of blown apart the whole cold-forger story by doing a lot of junk a cold-forger couldn’t touch, and you also did enough work for any ten cold forgers or mechanics.”

I shook my head, “I was actually being careful. Did you know that mend is actually a spell?”

“Yes, but it’s a lot weaker than your mend.”

I nodded, “That it is, but turning a spell into a trait is considered a pretty normal thing for utility mages. I had a discussion with Cranberry, one of Humphrey’s hull technicians, and realized… you guys never really partnered up with a utility mage before, have you?”

Charlie shook her head, “Not really. I mean, we have worked for them, mostly on resource-gathering missions, but enchanters, especially, are generally way out of our price range.”

I turned on and off the control mechanism, just testing the contacts without the power connected, and smiled as I detected how smoothly the contacts linked in. To be completely honest, I was liking mender a lot more than I thought I would. There was something deeply and viscerally satisfying about watching something get restored and knowing I had a part in that. Maybe it wasn't as sheerly exciting as slaughtering a room full of monsters or blowing up a house with a fireball, but it had its own rewards.

“Most utility mages aren’t enchanters… they have no real reason to adventure, and do things like maintaining infrastructure, cleaning sewer systems, and updating city defenses… and most of them are not considered very valuable, being barely above pure labor vocations,” she added.

“Mend is not terribly uncommon, although they usually shift the spell into a trait rather than gain it as a trait immediately on gaining a vocation. Once you enter bigger cities, even healing, mostly temporal surgery, is not uncommon. I didn’t ask about true healing, of course, but it seems to not be impossible, although as you mentioned, most of them are incredibly expensive and controlled by either the churches or powerful warlords.” I said, letting her know what Cranberry told me to check its accuracy.

Charlie nodded, “Well, we are onboard for the rest of the week, and you already more than fulfilled our obligation… if this capstan comes up clean, you have even made quite a bit of money, to boot, although the captain doesn’t actually carry gold between cities.”

“That means you have a couple of days of downtime. It was easier to hide you as a girl, but now that the hit squad knows what to look for, it’s probably time to remove the handicap, if you are willing.”

I nodded, “I have been checking myself out. The stunted growth will probably crank my mend up to enhanced, but we all have the retrovirus, I don’t think I will be able to fight with that until I get to at least greater mend or gain a much better version of the trait.”

“The retrovirus?”

I nodded, “The retrovirus that kills off most of the male zygotes, or at least Renee thinks that is what is doing it. I haven’t scanned everyone, obviously, but so far everyone I have scanned has it, and it’s apparently shielded to avoid triage and other standard medical scans.”

Charlie glared at me, “Wait, what? You are saying that you have figured out what kills men?”

I sighed, “Renee and I have been working from that assumption. My deep scan is very weird according to her, since it seems to reveal conditions and potential functions, more like a scavenge ability, but seems to be almost useless for revealing other character attributes, unlike scan.”

“It’s a gene-tailored retrovirus, which means it was created intentionally, not as just a side effect of the crash. Renee wants to do more research and thinks I will probably need much more powerful abilities before I can fight it.”

“Why?”

I shook my head, “Because it is labeled as permanent remission. I think that my affinity is the only thing holding it at bay, and if I start monkeying with it before I am ready, we are both worried that it will just kill me.”

Charlie nodded, “Well, where we are going, a man showing up with several women will be far less conspicuous. Saint Mary Canadian side is actually pretty popular.”

“You want me to work on my disability?”

She nodded, “If you can, is there going to be anything you need?”

I nodded, “Yes, please. I am not sure, entirely, but I get the feeling I am going to need lots of food, especially proteins and calcium, some water, and maybe some painkillers. I tried to use my recognize on myself. “Yeah, I think I can do it, but it’s going to hurt, a lot, even though you are right that it needs to be done.”

Charlie sighed, “I still don’t get it.”

“How do you mean?”

“Angel was talking about the signs of malnutrition. The kind of long-term damage you suffered… it should have killed you several times over. I imagine your life affinity might have been the only thing keeping you hanging on a few times.”

I nodded, as we walked back towards the berthing we shared. It wasn’t fancy, but it was apparently some kind of troop officer’s quarters, with several hanging bunks and its own bathroom. To be honest, even the bathroom was a bit of a wonder to me since it was better than the one we’d had back at the orphanage by a long shot, with three separate showers, sinks, and toilets that worked. Yeah, I had to share it with the team, which meant my timing was sometimes a little odd in order to preserve modesty, but I took the rack closest to the bathroom as Charlie started going through her pack.

“What’s that?”

Charlie smiled a little, looking younger for a moment. “This is Tiered food Angel made. I pretty much lug it for the team, but it’s not terribly heavy and doesn’t take up much room. Some of it is basic, and some of it is common, but it does contain essence. I’m not going to feed you uncommon, though.”

I nodded, “Essence poisoning?”

She laughed, “Yes, plus, it’s pretty valuable even after field preparation and wouldn’t help you at all. One of us will be here at all times, how long do you think it will take?”

I sighed, “I will probably be done before we hit Saint Mary, but other than that I don’t know. As far as all of that’s concerned, the bones are going to be the hardest part. It also just creeps me out to remember all those times I was crouched in an alley and couldn’t move or even throw up…”

“Can you do this?” Charlie asked, looking concerned.

I nodded, “I think so, I just wish someone else could. I don’t want to relive it, but I kinda have to, especially the parts where I was hurt and couldn’t heal for months because I couldn’t get enough food or shelter. The worst parts were actually when I had just escaped from the home when I was twelve. By the time I was fifteen, I knew how to at least survive, but for a couple of years there I was no better than an animal.”

Charlie nodded, “Well, Renee, Angel, or I will be here the whole time unless the ship gets attacked. Lilah has her own job and is cutting a gem for you based on what she said was your spell design. Just remember that we are here, and Renee will be playing nurse if you need it.”