Repairing Renee’s arm hadn’t been even remotely like fixing Charlie’s scars and long-term Damage. It had taken a LOT longer, for one thing, and It took several false starts, one of which gave me damned near a migraine. Blood was NOT friendly without being able to overcharge the marrow to produce it, and Renee absolutely needed to be eating constantly in order to replenish the nutrients her body was draining.

While I had thought that there would basically be four systems to replace, bone, muscle, nerves, and skin, it was a thousand times deeper than that, to the point where I finally just asked Renee not to watch as I fixed her hand, based on her pained gasps and wide eyes as she watched me work.

No, my mend was not an awesomely fast superpower. It had taken me almost two hours to deal with Charlie’s injury, it took me over three to take care of Renee. I guess that the Silhouette considered me a ‘healer’, but from what I understood true regeneration was much, much better, and according to Lilah there were regeneration potions that could fix injuries like Renee’s in minutes, although they would probably cost all of a decent uncommon team’s income for a year to buy and might have some truly brutal toxicity.

I was still a little unsure about what ‘toxicity’ really was. It wasn’t simply neutral ingredients, or straight-up poison, or anything like that, it was more like… Anything that the potion wasn’t supposed to do, almost like a magical pollution that had physical side-effects. That seemed to be the biggest difference between true alchemy and crafting vocations… crafting vocations like brewer, herbalist, or chef could create food, liquors, and teas that had almost no toxicity, although they were, of course, vastly weaker.

Whatever process lets a talented chef imbue her food with a hint of magic seems to use all of the magical potential of the food, and give it a lot of minor variables like improved taste or lots of tiny bonuses, but when you need the heal right this second, you went to an alchemist.

Which meant, in the end, my mend wasn’t actually that special. The balanced party bonus? Most parties could gain that by rare, but it required every party member to either alter their chosen path, as Charlie had planned, gain some permanent healing and regeneration items, or have a specialist on the team.

Specialist means specialist crafter, like an argentist, talismanist, or homeopath. All of whom had far more profitable and safe ways of advancing than risking their lives in a rift. If anything, a homeopath could heal injuries far more quickly than I could, albeit at a very hefty cost in ingredients. In the end, my only real advantage was the fact that mend was extremely cheap, although we had no idea where the troubleshooter path could lead.

It was also a little grotesque, to be honest. Like Charlie, I’d had to start with her bones, and all the support networks to keep them alive while I worked. Thank goodness I seemed to be completely unbothered as a gleaming red skeletal hand slowly grew from her stump, or things could have gotten messy. And then came muscular layers of flesh and nerves, as well as the tracings of blood vessels and then eventual arteries, each layer taking more concentration as they built outwards from her bones.

Finally, pale skin grew over her muscles, a very odd shade that would have to darken naturally until it matched her own browned flesh. Once that layer was finished, Renee started flexing the hand, a bright smile on her lips and tears in her eyes.

“Does it seem okay?” I asked, wiping my lap with a clean cloth. Some of the stages had required that a weird sort of keratin mucous form in between the layers as I rebuilt the next one, to protect things as I work I guessed, and now I needed a shower and to sterilize the apron I’d borrowed while I worked.

She nodded quickly, “It’s wonderful. It’d going to take some work to get back into shape since I sort of got used to it being gone, and the nerves are a little tingly, I also don’t have the shield callouses I used to, but all of those can come back with training. Thank you from the bottom of my heart!”

I blushed a little, embarrassed, “Umm… you are welcome. Does this mean you don’t hate me anymore?”

She shook her head, laughing a little. “I didn’t hate you. Admittedly, I don’t trust you, but that has nothing to do with your powers and everything to do with what you are.”

“What I am?” I asked, folding the towels and soaked apron. “Crafter? Male?”

She nodded, slowly closing and opening her hand. “Yes, and more importantly, your upbringing. I grew up rough myself, although probably not as rough as you did, and I know from experience that there’s a certain attitude that tends to develop in people who have always survived on the edge, a level of selfishness that absolutely makes sense for them, but doesn’t necessarily make sense for interacting with others.”

I nodded, “I think, maybe, we might have different definitions of rough.”

“How do you mean?” She asked curiously.

“You grew up before the crash, right? Before childhood protections?”

She nodded slowly.

I smiled a little, “I read some books about that time. Growing up in gangs, learning to shoot rivals, dance battles in the streets, racing for pinks… but with childhood protections, it was not like that at all.”

“Dance battles?”

I shrugged, “That’s not important. But children don’t fight. Childhood protections prevent any actual violence other than minor physical discipline from designated guardians and educators. There was bullying, but it almost universally involved withholding resources. Putting kids in cages or tying them up until they were dead or almost dead. And of course, giving them drugs and sex after they turned twelve to get profit from them or make them pliable.”

“Sure, that leads to desperation, but not like pre-change. Most kids are loyal as hell to whoever gives them food and a warm place to sleep.”

Renee was looking at me with tears in her eyes, it was very discomfiting. “That is horrible. That’s even worse than growing up in a gang.”

I shrugged, “Maybe so, and maybe not. I mean, sure, I got hurt plenty when I was a kid, but mostly that was my fault, and it was better than getting eaten by monsters, and from what I understand, there were enough orphans after the crash that gangs of feral children would have been a serious and potentially deadly plague.”

I quickly changed the subject, “Oh, and I made rank nine, too. Extra combat and utility slot, fifty percent advancement, and a free point. I told you bio-mending was worth a lot more advancement than just fixing bollards.”

She smiled, “That’s incredible. How many free points do you have now?”

“Five.”

She nodded, “You have a combat slot? My suggestion is to save at least two points to carry into your next vocation, but feel free to spend points on things you want now because there’s no guarantee that the next vocation on your path will offer the same traits, the same amount of free points, or the same slots.”

I nodded, “I already know what I plan on spending them on.”

“Oh?”

I smiled slightly, “Yes. Looting and amplify space both seem to be core traits, which might change for my next vocation and rune creation, I plan on blowing out my points on magical traits. I suspect that the affinity-based traits are going to stick around, and Lilah told me in no uncertain terms that not investing in rune creation would be a crime.”

Renee nodded, “No combat traits?”

I shook my head, “Improvised block and improvised weapons? I mean, if I had Charlie’s combat physique, I’d jump at it, but remember… with a little work I can craft lots of things into crude or even basic weapons. I think it would be much smarter to train a trait that has much more valuable end goals and opens up new combat traits, like shield, spear, or ax.”

I looked at her skeptically, “That, and my one affinity trait, drain essence? It sounds horrible.”

Renee sighed. “It IS horrible. That’s a trait that usually only necrotic monsters possess. It drains people into walking corpses, dried-out caricatures, and if you kill something with it, there are some creatures that can bring them back as undead slaves or sort of essence vampires.”

I nodded, “Right. So something about my affinity offers to make me a vampiric monster. I think it would be best if I steer well clear of that unless I have to. Once I get to gold circle, If it gives me another free point, I will grab both activate substance, because it sounds like what alchemists can do, and the ranged trait, because it might help my mend be more useful in a fight.”

“We will be rifting when I hit basic, right?”

She nodded, “Yes. And that’s a fairly decent plan, especially since you already have dodge, damage resistance, and improved endurance. You also have running, which is a huge boon. Once you get to common and can start using trait blending, you might be able to lean more into taking an active role in fights as well, which should improve your advancement speed a lot.”

“Trait blending?”

She nodded, “Yep. One of the few things Silhouette gets right. After you hit a common vocation, you can use a common or better shrine to merge similar traits together into a new trait. You know that traits have their own hidden advancement, right?”

I nodded.

“Well, when you merge traits, their new advancement total is a multiplier of that merge, but if they are similar, there is a discount, just like the balanced party gives you an advancement bonus. In addition, if you can merge a seldom-used trait with one you use all the time, it’s a lot easier to raise that trait. For instance, if you merged improved endurance and running together, they are closely related enough that any time you use the new trait, steady wind, both of them would raise together more quickly than using them both separately.”

“Also, stuff you rarely use might be linked to something you use all the time, like… umm…”

“Damage resistance and toxin resistance?” I asked.

She nodded, “Exactly right. Charlie has damage, cold, electrical, and fire resistance all linked. When she’s fighting, the damage resistance is almost constantly used, but when she’s training, she often can use a campfire or just sleep naked in the snow to improve it all. She is up to greater elemental resistance which is pretty amazing, and now that you have fixed some of her old injuries, she might be able to stay scar-free for a while.”

“So it works for more than two traits?”

She nodded, “Yep, as long as they are similar. The closer they match, the better advancement they get, but if they are too far apart, the shrine will start whining and you will get a warning that the combined advancement cost is greater than the sum of its parts. Still might be worth getting it, though.”

“Why is that?”

Renee started getting to her feet and rolling her sleeve back down over her new arm. “If you have a rare trait that is incredibly difficult to advance, you might decide to link it to something that is only vaguely similar that you use all the time so that it can grow with your frequently used trait. Like your improvised fieldcraft and rune creation… according to Lilah, creating new runes is hellishly difficult and incredibly dangerous at low levels, but you use improvised fieldcraft all the time, and might even use them together to create things like minor talismans eventually.”

“That, and if there are traits you frequently use together, like your deep scan, sexual empathy, and anatomy, merging them together just makes it easier to keep track and also speeds up their advancement enormously.”

That was food for thought. Renee smiled at me a little and then excused herself. Maybe I shouldn’t be worrying about this until after I advanced to common, but some stuff I would love to stick together as a common trait. Probably not mend, unless I found some kind of linking trait in my next vocation since bio-repair and mending gear were so different, but looting and amplifying space seemed to fit together. So did rune creation, preserve patterns, and improvised fieldcraft, since I didn’t seem to have the gift of forming patterns in the air like a mage could, I’d have to craft anything rune-related I made.

Not to mention there were more than a few traitstones I would love to get if they were affordable, or even learn the craft if it was possible from a professional. Cooking, brewing, gardening, husbandry, I sort of had an attachment to food-related professions for some inexplicable reason.

Yeah. Inexplicable.

***

“Why exactly are ya?” the heavyset older woman asked me. Somehow, despite her being a foot shorter than I was, she still managed to look down at me scornfully, and her accent was a little… different. Almost a bit Cajun, if a Cajun started out in Rhode Island. Canadian?

“I want to learn how to cook.”

She scoffed, “Why? Yer already a Coldsmith. Hell, the Captain has tried to buy out your contract six times to that big boxer woman. Ye’d be better stickin’ to what yer best at.”

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

I grinned a little, “I am a fieldcrafter. Fixing bollards and repairing winches is not what I am best at.”

She went from glaring at me to looking at me thoughtfully, “Can ya boost food?”

I nodded, “Only a tiny bit right now, but I was hoping there were some learnable traits, like scan ingredients or something, as well as some real cooking techniques that aren’t based on traits that I could learn. The best I have been able to manage is broth and noodles with a very modest advancement bonus.”

“So, you want to add cooking techniques to yer fieldcraft?”

I nodded, “Well, that and maybe learn to cook well enough to impress a girl.”

She laughed, “Oh, now that I can believe. She’d be an incredibly special girl since yer already pretty impressive. None of us can afford to be picky.”

I shrugged, “I don’t know yet. I haven’t met her, but I know she exists.”

Her eyebrow arched, and then she looked back at her galley. “Don’tcha already have a ton of work?”

I shook my head, “Not really. I already fulfilled our contract, and every once in a while the Captain lets my boss know if he has more commission work, but I figured I could spare an hour or two around mealtimes, and apparently, my vocation needs a lot of variety.”

She laughed, “I gettit. Most crafters run into the same mess. Beef Wellington is powerfully difficult, and pure gold for a rank, but after you get it, it just ain’t enough. But ya know that I’ll put ya to work doing scut jobs, right?”

I nodded, “I’ve been doing scut jobs my whole life when I could get them. Put me to work.”

Put me to work she did. Technically, the ship had a skeleton crew, less than fifty people out of the hundred and fifty that were supposed to crew it, or the two hundred extra rough passengers it could transport, but vocations made a huge difference. When one porter could carry as much line at a time as any ten pre-crash sailors, a lot more could be done with a lot less.

Not to mention, traits always had a cost. Sure, they were magic, but if you just hauled ten thousand pounds of heavy-gauge wire from one end of the ship to the other, you still burned enough calories that you’d eat like a farmer.

First exercise, cracking eggs. Fairly soon I was doing two, and then four at a time, two eggs in each hand, hitting the edge of the bowl and prying them open with my fingers. Noodlemaking followed, which was as much about keeping the machines clean and active as it was about actually pounding noodles into shape.

Butchering, especially frozen carcasses, washing dishes, loading and unloading ovens, cleaning out the traps, cleaning vegetables, cleaning out the deep fryer and filtering the oil, and just cleaning the hell out of basically everything. I was learning the basic life skills that twenty years earlier would have probably been taught working for a fast-food chain as a teenager.

What shocked me was how much working in the galley resembled working in a pre-crash cafeteria. The machines worked, especially after I repaired a few, there was power, heat, and light. A lot of the medievalist-style touches I was used to from growing up in Aster, from torches and firewood heating to bad nutrition and a lack of food preservation, just didn’t seem to exist onboard the ship.

In between those meals, I was still getting repair commissions from Charlie, training with Renee and Lilah, and even working on projects with Angel. Charlie would train me occasionally, but for some reason, she seemed to want to avoid me except when she was giving me the captain’s commissions.

The best part? I didn’t get seasick, and every night I slept like a baby. An exhausted baby. Until I didn’t.

***

The ship slowly tilted as we traveled. It wasn’t a whole lot, but it was enough to notice the water at the side of the ship growing closer for a few moments before slipping farther away, even as it sparkled in the moonlight.

There were monsters in them waters, and at night, no one ever got onto the main deck and all the hatches were battened down except the ones that crossed the big tunnel through the middle of the superstructure. Instead, a guard would keep an eye on the big steel folding gates that stretched across both ends of the tunnel.

The waterline was a good twenty feet below the main deck, but there were plenty of aquatic predators that could easily scale that distance, and if you wanted to go out on the deck at night, you climbed up the inside stairs to the secondary deck and ‘smokers cage’ another twenty feet upwards. Mostly because even if aquatic predators couldn’t climb the sides, there were more than a few that could scoop you off the deck like a piece of salume off a charcuterie board.

Even if you were tough enough to survive the fight, it might be impossible for the ship to circle around and pick you up again, especially if it had to fight more than one. That was why the seldom-used gun pods were on the second story, and there was a ‘duty watch’ of three people who napped in the armory, armed and ready to fight at a moment’s notice.

Each of those warrior women had traits that were specifically related to missile weapons. That, and enchanted shells, were the only way that something like a fifty-caliber machine gun could affect post-crash monsters. However, with those advantages, the ship was reasonably well protected from even the biggest freshwater predators.

Over the oceans? Well, supposedly flying ships and the occasional airplane still existed, but when there were ocean giants that could use a supertanker as a toothpick, and avian monsters that were nearly as dangerous as ancient jet fighters, travel between the continents mostly required expensive and delicate teleportation artifacts, the kind that no normal person would ever even see, let alone use.

But here in the Great Lakes, ships were still very much a thing, which made subsidiary industries, like deep fishing, shipping, oil drilling, and even the rare yachting possible as long as you avoided the deepest and most dangerous parts of the lakes.

Add to that some traits that just didn’t make logical sense.

Think about it. A smith with the right gifts could turn fifty pounds of ore into twenty-five pounds of metal ingots. That seems fine until you realize that ninety percent of that ore is just rocky silicates and shale.

Where does the extra metal come from? No clue. Why are some metals considered ‘higher quality’ than others even if chemically they are identical? No clue. The world was full of mysteries now, and most of those mysteries were just… stupidly mysterious. Somewhere, if any survived, there are probably some old scientists still trying to figure out how it all works, but they weren’t talking to me.

It was like my mend. Small things like cracks, nicks, and holes would just sort of ‘fill in’ without any real extra resource requirements. Big stuff needed resources, obviously, but as my mend increased its level, the number of resources needed was reduced, even below the actual amount to fix something. Where did it come from? No clue, but based on a capstain head I weighed both before and after I mended it, the extra material was real and came from somewhere.

Hell, apparently Silhouette recognized the ship I was on as a ‘ship’ too, despite being pre-crash. I had to wonder how that happened, as well.

After a week I learned a few things.

Rune creation? An absolute bust and a wasted slot. Why? Because I had already puzzled out a lot of the basic rules with Lilah when she was trying to teach me basic magic skills. The only thing rune creation DID was show me how to draw the runes the way I already knew how to do and caused me a little bit of a headache when I started carving them creatively or uniquely to experiment with the effect. Totally wasted slot and point, but Lilah told me that sometimes that shit happened.

I also wasted a slot on the basic runic library, but at least it hadn’t eaten a free point too. I’d learned the basics from Lilah the hard way, and I guess when I learned enough, the thing just bumped into my spell slots.

I purchased Loot and Amplify Space, but I got the feeling that I would actually have to handcraft some kind of container to take full advantage of it. Right now, I found out I could make my coverall pockets carry about ten percent more than they should probably fit, and while that was kind of fun for a joke or for carrying parts for work, it wasn’t tremendously useful.

And looting? Well, the three encounters with aggressive aquatic life we had ended with a few cannon shots. Frankly, I had nothing to loot, and since the ship had professional hunters on board, they probably wouldn’t have let me try my amateur hand at it anyway.

I glanced at the gunner that was on watch. She was wearing a yellow-painted helmet and some kind of armor, but she didn’t actually stay down in the cannon’s firing chair, I guess so that she could switch to whichever side was most necessary while the rest of the crew headed towards their guns.

She was kind of pretty in a freckled way, and the patch on her top said ‘Cowler’. I had noticed, though, that she seemed to be paying a lot more attention to me than to the waves, except when I looked directly at her.

I pointed at the water, where little flecks of moonlight played off the waves, and asked her something I was curious about. “What are those?”

She leaned forward slightly, and smiled, “The moonlight sometimes interacts with bioluminescence on the lake surface in our wake. That’s what makes it look like the flecks are shattering. It’s kind of romantic.”

I shook my head, “No, not that. I meant deeper. See the kind of weird purple lights under the water? They look like they are getting ready to pass under us.”

She shook her head and yelled, “No! They are… ALERT! General Quarters! Orks to port! Orks to port!” She stepped into the gunner position, and flipped up an enchanted gunsight on the heavy… whatever-it-was metal cannon she was arming. “Check to starboard! And then get the hell out of the way.”

I nodded and dashed over to the right side of the ship. I didn’t see any of those purple lights approaching, so I yelled, “Nothing on this side that I can see.” as three more girls spilled out of the ammo chamber.

A taller girl with midnight-brown skin and bright teeth said “Hey, GQ, can you shoot?”

I shook my head, watching the other shorter blonde girl hop over to a rail-mounted fifty caliber machine gun, sliding the bolt and dropping at the end of an ammo belt from a box she’d brought with her.

She nodded, “Can you fight?”

“A little, but no traits. I can take a few hits, though,” I said, as I heard some horn noises inside of the skin of the ship, followed by a voice, the XO, stating ‘General quarters, general quarters, this is not a drill. Orks in attack pattern sighted.”

She smiled slightly, “Good. Perfect. Stand right here okay? If you hear Brittany or me yell ‘ammo’, grab a box that looks like this out of ammo storage and bring it to us. If you hear Carley or Raven yell ‘refill’, grab one of the bigger boxes and drag it to them. The thirty mike shells are a lot heavier, but orks are a bitch to penetrate.”

“If they crest up here, try to use a boathook to knock ‘em off and start yelling your head off. You aren’t a fighter, but there will be harpooners here in just a minute and we will be shooting.” I saw the first girl, Carley or Cowler or whatever, swivel her gun, not towards the side of the ship, but towards the rear deck. That actually sort of made sense, since if the ork whatever were climbing up the sides, the big guns would be useless for firing straight down.

I finally saw giant hands reach up from the water and start sticking to the sides of the ship as foul-looking scaled arms, almost five feet long, started hauling the orks, whose glowing purple eyes I had seen under the water, up the sides towards the main decks.

“What the fuck?” I said out loud as I started hearing one of the guns chatter, the fifty-cal controlled by the blonde… Brittany? Was perfectly capable of declension to fire along the sides of the ship, and the thing was pounding hard enough that the railing hummed with the vibration, bits of salt and dust flying around her feet from the muzzle blast alone as she opened up on the boarders towards the front deck and trying to scale the superstructure.

Another woman, a heavyset brunette who was part of the ship’s master-at-arms, stepped out of the watertight hatch beside the ammo locker with a long polearm, called a bill-hook or spetum or something, and stood near the two gunners, Brittany and Carley, as Carley took a single shot at the rear deck. The ork-whatever she must have been aiming at nearly exploded, which was absolutely amazing, but past him, there was a nasty furrow on the rear deck that I bet I’d be fixing later.

“Ammo!” Brittany yelled, and I dived into the reinforced ammo locker, pulling out a metal lockbox that matched the one she was using. I doubted very much that Carley would need a refill soon, though, since she was being careful with each heavy shot.

I saw a huge webbed and suckered hand lifting over the rear railing where an ork must have climbed up from the afterdeck and grabbed the boat hook off the wall, charging it the same way that Renee showed me how to charge with a halberdier’s lance behind a shield. It was not pretty, it was not elegant, it was a simple push and smash, but when at range against an opponent that couldn’t defend themselves it was very, very effective.

The hand came apart, and I heard a loud croaking followed by a thud coming from the rear. Orks were NOT like those near-human boar men from Tolkien's books. They looked a lot like a cross between a frog and the creature from the Black Lagoon, with gorilla-like arms, and webbed and suckered hands and feet the size of delivery platters.

And apparently, they sucked at jumping. Good thing, their legs were designed for swimming and lunging, not catching themselves after a fall.

After a few minutes, and another call for ammo from Brittany, both me and the woman with the bill-hook were smashing away at creatures trying to get over the sides. Carley hadn’t been joking about how tough their scaled heads and bellies were, but while they had fangs, they weren’t really frogs and were not very good biters despite having giant mouths. I suspected that they were swallow-and-digest feeders, and we were just a bit bigger than their usual prey, but they made up for that with their giant hands and hooked claws at the end of each finger.

Which I discovered the hard way when one of the bastards missed the tall dark woman, Erin, and wrapped their hand almost fully around my chest instead.

I didn’t have a short weapon, and the boat hook was useless, and after a second the croaking monstrosity was trying to drag me back towards the edge of the railing, so he could throw himself off with his prize while I uselessly beat against his thickly scaled arms with my fists.

Finally, in desperation, I tried to do something that I had been thinking about since I first got mend. I absolutely had an upper mass limit on things I was trying to fix, but as long as the part in question didn’t exceed that bulk, I could fix it, even if it was attached to something much bigger. Mend could also disassemble items quickly and cleanly, which helped a lot when figuring out which piece of an assembly needed to be repaired.

Mend had a problem with auras, but I’d already figured out my way around that when touching someone and using their own skeleton as an anchor for my deep scan and recognize. Honestly, I was kind of terrified that I was going to get dragged down under the water and eaten if I didn’t drown first.

So I took the ork apart.