Cal was glad they were getting started early. He’d not had a huge amount of sleep, but he was excited to be looking at more supplies than they’d ever had before. The coffee from Alyn’s was surging through his veins, and he felt focused, full of energy and potential.
Max was buzzing with anticipation, too, but his excitement was much calmer and steadier than it had been the night before, when his naive tendencies had taken over. Now, Max was standing still, his hand poised over the paper, ready to begin the stocktake of their new goods.
Cal lifted the enchanter’s eyeglass and gazed through it at the nearest core.
Gloomfist core
Monster level: 1
Rarity: Common
Fullness points: 100
Available effects:
Charisma +2
Strength (physical) +4
Strength (magical) +3
Voice volume +2
Cal chuckled. “Gloomfist,” he said. “An old favorite.”
Cal lifted the core and set it to one side, as Max’s pen scratched a note on the paper. The gloomfist core was heavy and smooth in Cal’s hand, and warm as a rock that had been sitting in the sun. It was bigger than previous Gloomfist cores he’d worked with. When he looked directly at it, the core appeared to be colored a serene and dignified gray, a shade right in the middle between shades of dark and light.
When Cal laid it to one side and moved his head to look for the next one, however, he got a surprise. A flicker of rainbow colors danced across the gray, like a slick of oil on water. When he looked back, the strange color was gone.
“What happened there?” Max asked as Cal hesitated, turning his head from the gloomfist core and seeing if he could recreate the effect by looking at it indirectly.
“I thought I saw the core gleaming with color for a moment,” he said quietly, “out of the corner of my eye.”
Max leaned forward and looked with interest at the gray core, tilting his head from side to side and giving the core quick glances from the side of his eye, to see if he could reproduce the effect.
Cal gave a sudden, involuntary snort of laughter.
“What?” Max demanded, frowning.
“Sorry,” Cal said, grinning. “It’s just… Well, when you were tilting your head to look at the core there, you looked like a dog I used to have. He was quite old and a bit deaf, but he’d always do just that tilt of the head when he heard the gulls coming in.”
Cal had been thought that his friend might be offended, but the memory of the dog Griggs, who had been a member of his household when he was a child, had struck him out of the blue, and there is no denying the fact that Max looking for the core colors did look exactly like Griggs listening for seagulls.
To his relief, Max laughed loudly. “We had a dog when I was growing up, too. He used to do that, I know exactly what you mean. Not with gulls, though. We had a colony of Heplings in the woods near the house. They make a funny high-pitched chattering noise when they're excited, and he would always tilt his head to listen when they did that.”
“What are Heplings?” Cal asked as he held the eyeglass up, identified a few more gloomfist cores, and moved them over to sit with the first one.
“They’re really annoying, for one thing,” Max said, noting down the number of cores that Cal had moved while they were talking. “But have you never heard of Heplings before? I’m surprised, they’re not uncommon.”
“Maybe they're less common in the city,” Cal suggested. “I grew up in town, and though I’ve visited some other parts of Roon, I never spent much time in the country. Are Heplings something that’s common around the estates where you grew up?”
Max nodded. “I suppose they’re a kind of tree-sprite. They’re a bit like goblins in shape and temperament - humanoid, pointy features, very mischievous - but they’re much smaller and they don’t have green skin like goblins. They’re hard to get a good look at, because they’re pretty skittish, but they’re kind of a light grey color, like old linen, and they live in colonies of twenty or thirty at a time, up in the tops of old trees.”
“They’re intelligent?” Cal asked.
“I’ll say,” Max replied. “Very intelligent, but in a different way from us. They don’t have much technology, though they do rig up little colonies of simple shelters in the trees and reinforce them against the wind. They have their own language, but they can speak ours when they need to. They have leaders and a hierarchy, but they’re not violent and they never fight with each other.”
“What do they eat?” Cal asked.
“Beech tree nuts, mainly,” Max said. “But they’re not above sneaking into the pantry of a nearby house and stealing sweets. But what’s next on the cores?”
Cal was fascinated by this new detail about the world that he lived in. Heplings were something he’d never heard of before. He’d lived in Jutlyn City all his life, but Roon was a large island and Jutlyn city was only one part of it. There would always be more to discover.
Max was right, though, and Cal put his interest in Heplings to one side for the moment and returned his attention to their audit of the new stock of enchanting supplies.
He raised the glass to his eye again and looked at the stack of cores. There were several which he knew were Level 1 fire cores from their color and size, and as he looked at them through the eyeglass, their details appeared before him.
Fire wylf core
Monster level: 1
Rarity: Common
Fullness points: 100
Available effects:
Warmth +3
Stolen novel; please report.
Light +3
Good Cheer +2
Destruction +2 (Variable)
“Oh!” Cal exclaimed. “That’s new!”
“What?” Max asked excitedly. “What do you see?”
“There’s a property in this fire core that I’ve not seen before. I told you how the eyeglass showed me something new available in the gloomfist cores?”
“The Voice Volume enchantment, yeah,” Max said.
“I think it’s something about the eyeglass itself that allows me to see new possibilities in the cores. Well, this time I can see an enchantment in the fire core called Good Cheer +2. That’s new.”
“What does the +2 represent?” Max asked.
“It’s the amount of boost that the core gives,” Cal explained. “With warmth and light, the enchantment can boost to +3, but the good cheer boost is one point lower. So if you think about the amount of warmth one of these grants to the user from a pendant, imagine two-thirds of that amount of boost, but to this Good Cheer level in the person using it.”
“It’s hard to compare physical warmth to mood,” Max mused. “I wonder what it would look like in practice?”
“I guarantee we’ll find out,” Cal said. “We’ll have to experiment on ourselves first, I think. Maybe one or two of our friends will be up for trialing it too, but I’ll definitely want to know what it feels like and how it works before I start selling it to the customers.”
Max chuckled. “Yes,” he said, “that’s probably a good idea.” He looked at the desk again. “What about those ones there? They almost look like they’re made of polished metal.”
Bronze Bite core
Monster level: 1
Rarity: Uncommon
Fullness points: 100
Available effects:
Durability +2
Strength (material) +2
Shine +2 (variable)
“These are metal cores, Level 1. It’s odd, though,” Cal said quietly, after speaking the data out loud to Max. “There’s a new property here, too, called Shine, but I have no idea what that might do. Metal cores aren’t something I’ve worked with much before, and it’s the one rune out of the eight that I’ve got on my table which isn’t actually working. I’ll put these to the side for the moment.”
Max frowned suddenly. “Hold on a minute, Cal,” he said. “You’ve got eight runes here and seven of them are working, right?”
Cal nodded, suppressing a smile. He guessed what was coming next.
Max’s frown deepened as he turned from the desk to the enchanting table and examined the runes. “If I’ve got this right, there are twelve elemental types, and your enchanting table has runes specific to each elemental type. Each rune allows you to work with that kind of core. Is that right?”
“That’s right.”
“Okay. So here are the four runes for the common category: fire, earth, water, and air.” He pointed to each one as he said their names. As his fingers brushed them, Cal noted that the runes flickered with subtle light in a way they never had for Jason.
“Yes…” Cal said, encouraging Max to continue.
“These four runes here are the ones for the uncommon category: thunder, stone, wood, and the metal rune - that one’s broken. But…” he paused.
“Go on,” Cal said.
Max’s eyes went suddenly wide with confusion and disappointment. “Cal!” he exclaimed. “We’ve overlooked something massive! You need to enchant the eyeglass with a Level 4 scryer core before you can modify the spell with the blank core you got from the spider, but you don’t have a scryer rune on the enchanting table! You’ve got cores, but how can you enchant the eyeglass with a scryer core if your enchanting table doesn’t have the appropriate rune? This is terrible!”
Cal let his smile break across his face. “Well done!” he said, slapping Max on the back and coming over to join him at the enchanting table. “I wondered when you would notice. I didn’t mention it, because I wanted you to work it out for yourself. The fact that you’ve done so shows that you’ve grasped the basics of how this works.”
“Well, yeah,” Max said. “I’d be pretty dull if I hadn’t caught on by now, after hanging around watching you enchant for ages.”
Cal put on a deep voice and laid his hand on Max’s shoulder. “You are learning, my young apprentice,” he said magisterially.
“Never mind that,” Max said, his grin matching Cal’s. “We need no mysterious mentors around here. But what are you going to do about it? You seem very confident it’s not going to be a problem, so I guess you’ve already come up with a solution, but what is it? Tell me, wise mentor!”
They both laughed, and Cal turned back to the table. He glanced through the mess of cores with his eyeglass until he identified the three Level 4 Scryer-class cores.
He picked up two of them and held them up.
“You’re right,” he said, “I do have a solution. It’s made easier - much easier, actually, by the fact that the hunters have brought us three of these Level 4 scryer cores. If they’d only brought one, as I’d expected, then I’d have needed to purchase the other. That was one of the reasons I wanted to establish a relationship with Biddle and Kronk as soon as possible. There’s not an outright prohibition against them selling Level 4 cores to someone at my level, but if they didn’t know me already they might have been a bit wary. Also, the cost would have been difficult to bear, but as it happens neither of those factors are an issue.”
“So, you’re going to use a scryer core to solve the problem?” Max asked.
Cal nodded. “Yep. Look at the enchanting table; tell me what you see.”
Max did so. He ran his eyes over the table, gazing at the runes and the dark polished wood. The table was circular, with a raised barrier of carved wood five inches high curving round the back half of the surface. The front of the table had no barrier, and the edge was gently rounded. Near the center, there were two shallow dips, one on the left and one on the right, where the enchanter placed his core on the right, and the item to be worked to the left.
Around the further away edge of the table, about three inches in from the barrier at the back, the runes were inlaid into the wood. They looked like they were made of glass or crystal, each one complex and detailed. The surfaces were gently rounded, each surface standing a little proud from the edge of the table.
There would have been a complete half circle if there had been twelve of them; as it was there were only eight runes, so their span extended only a third of the way round the table’s circumference. They started at the left-hand side, with the four common runes first, then the four uncommon ones. The remaining space was, presumably, for upgrades to the table adding a set of four runes for enchanting with rare cores.
Including, of course, scryer class cores.
“The runes!” Max said after he’d gazed at the table for a minute or so. He snapped his fingers. “The runes are all the same!”
“Explain,” Cal said.
Max leaned over the table. “Each rune looks different when you look at them at first, but in fact they’re not. They’re all the same shape, but they’re just inlaid into the wood of the table at different angles. And because they’re quite complex, asymmetrical runes that don’t clearly have an up or down, the changed angle is enough to make them look like they’re all different.”
Cal’s broad smile showed that he was pleased with Max. “Well done!” he said. “It also helps that the runes glow different colors, and that they’re all known to be for different functions. They’re already distinguished from each other in the mind of the person looking at them. When you approach an enchanting table for the first time, you’re already expecting all the runes to be unique. But you’re right, in fact, each rune is the same shape. So, where can you take that idea, considering we’re talking about not having a specific rune on the table that we need?”
Max didn’t miss a beat. “If they all start out the same, then it means that they must have their function set later on. You can change the function of one of these, rather than having to get a new one.”
Cal was impressed. “Got it in one,” he said. “And which one will we use?”
“The metal one, because it’s already broken,” Max responded, quick as a flash. “There must be something about the fact that it’s broken that allows you to change its function.”
Cal nodded and took a breath to speak.
Max saw the look on his face and got there first. “Don’t tell me,” he said. “Legally speaking, it’s a bit of a gray area?”
“How did you guess?” Cal asked, and Max laughed and rolled his eyes.
“Seems like a lot of what we do ends up being called that.” He glanced out through the door and out through the window of the front shop. “It’s still early,” he said. “Dawn’s not even here yet. Come on, let’s get to work. I’m looking forward to seeing how you do this.”