Back in the shop, Edison led Solace to her private crafting room, unlocking the thick, solid metal door with a key. He hadn’t ever been in here before, as she brought out anything she wanted him to clean, rather than let him in. It was a privacy that he respected, and he hadn’t bothered to learn what was inside since he started working for her.
That didn’t stop him from looking at everything now.
The room was on the larger side, some twenty by twenty feet in area by his estimation. Racks of tools and various machines sat close to the walls, essentially lining the entire room. In the center sat a metal table, cleaned and bereft of anything on top.
“I have to go get the materials out of storage, so wait here,” Edison said. “Please, don’t touch anything. A lot of the equipment is sensitive.”
“Alright,” Solace replied.
As she went to retrieve whatever she needed, he took the time to look at everything more closely. He could name a few and could guess the function of several others. There were saws, mills, chisels, hammers, and clamps. He was pretty sure that one of the machines was a waterjet cutter, or something similar. Stopping at a different device several feet to the right, he frowned at it in thoughtfulness.
At first glance, it looked like a display case. Metal box with a glass screen to see the interior. Only there were several dials on the side, wires connecting it to something in the wall, and a button on the right hand corner. He spent several minutes trying to guess what it did, looking around and trying to understand the dials, before he heard the sounds of footsteps.
Edison came back in with something moderately thin and half her height in her arms. The object was covered with a blanket. She laid it out on the table.
“Hmmm,” she hummed.
“Something wrong?” Solace asked. “I didn’t touch anything,” he quickly added.
“No, I’m just thinking about what tools I’ll need…” her voice trailed off.
After a moment, she moved to several of the things near the wall and pulled them to the table. He hadn’t noticed it until that moment, but everything had wheels.
When she was done, there were two racks of carving utensils and a device with several clamps on metal arms and clips on wires within arms reach.
“Let’s get started now,” she said with a clap of her hands. “The first thing to know about crafting is—well, actually, the first thing is knowing what you want to make, but the second thing is gathering the right materials. In this case, the client commissioned a scabbard, and I will be making it using this. Behold!”
Edison took off the blanket.
Solace stared at the item. He looked between it and Edison, and then back again.
“It’s a plank of wood,” he said at last.
“Look closer.”
He noticed something laying next to it.
“... And some metal wires?”
“With your spiritual senses,” she said, a bit exasperated.
Oh, right.
He still wasn’t used to using that sense wilfully and all the time. It was a lot of input for something that didn’t matter for most everyday things, so he kept it on the lowest possible “setting,” as it were. Now, he turned it up to take a look at the objects. They were…
“A high tiered plank and some metal,” he reported. They were probably around tier 7.
A sigh. “You need to develop that sense more. Even at Tier 1, you should be able to see parts of an object like the grain of the wood and other obvious features.”
The grain?
Now that he thought about it, he couldn’t actually see many details with his spiritual sense. To “look” at something was to receive information about its shape and tier. He wasn’t able to “see” the color or major features of any object.
It would be something to think about and train up later, as Edison was still talking.
“This is wood from a Tier 9 Ascan Willow. In addition to transporting mana through channels in the spirit like most living things, these Willows also physically move their mana through the heartwood. It’s an easy example for the first part of actually crafting: finding and then preparing materials with the desired physical and spiritual properties. I’ve dried it under a specific temperature, humidity, and atmospheric pressure such that none of the wood’s vasculature has been damaged.”
From a rack, she grabbed a chip carving knife and a hook knife while continuing to speak.
“The next step in crafting is often assembling the pieces into a cohesive whole, but here I need to do enchanting. What do you know about enchanting?”
Solace shook his head. “Nothing at all.”
“Nothing? Okay, well, the basics of enchanting is that one inscribes runes onto the spirit of an object to cause an effect based on what the rune actually is. There’s a lot more to it and various methods on how to do it, but that’s the really abstracted version of the process. For this commission, I’m going to be taking advantage of the connection between an object’s spirit and physical shape to carve a rune. Unlike living things, transformations of an object's form will directly and almost immediately correlate with identical changes in the spirit. This means that—”
She used the hook knife to carve a light gauge on one end of the plank before lifting it up and presenting it to Solace.
“You can carve enchantments into something, see?”
Solace could, in fact, see the missing sliver in the wood’s spirit with his senses. “Yes.”
“This is a cheap technique since it doesn’t use any mana, but it does have its downsides,” Edison continued, turning her back on Solace and placing the wood back on the table to properly carve the rest of the rune onto the plank’s end. “Physically damaging the rune will ruin the enchantment on the spirit, and there are nuanced crafting benefits that making the rune only on the spirit can provide. But, right now, I only need basic functionality from the split rune.”
“What does a split rune do?” He asked. “Make it divide in half?”
“You’ll see soon, just give me a moment.”
Silently, he watched as the crafter deftly began to carve an intricate but tiny symbol made of swirls and hard lines onto the end, such that its entire pattern could be covered by the palm of a hand. It took only a minute before she was finished.
“And… done,” Edison said, slicing a line through the rune and towards the edge of the plank, cutting over the end and onto the side, finishing with a shallow cut at a ninety degree angle on that side. She then moved the plank onto the machine, securing its bottom half with one of the clamps such that the wood was now suspended. He listened as she then demonstrated the use and purpose of the rune.
With a pulse of her mana, the carved lines of the rune began to glow blue. Edison then grasped the top of the plank and pulled. The wood parted easily, as if she had sliced it into two thinner pieces.
“When a split rune has mana, it will, as the name entails, split the object along the indicated direction,” she elaborated. “But what makes it useful here is that, when it loses charge, the object will return to being one whole thing. Thus, with a flexible variant of the split rune that allows for spirit alterations, I can carve out the interior of the wood to make room for the sword without having to actually cut the plank in half.”
She proceeded to do just that, after attaching two of the clips, which apparently provided mana from an artificial mana stone at a steady rate, to the half with the rune and securing the piece in her hand with another clamp.
Solace watched as Edison then began to carve out the “interior” of the plank halves. She was sure handed and precise, quickly scooping out much of the wood with a hook knife before using other tools to widen the indent. When done, she began to smooth it out with sandpapers of increasing grit.
A thought struck Solace.
“Is this scabbard going to do anything else besides hold a sword?” He asked.
“Yes…” she replied, voicing trailing off. There was a silence punctuated only by the sound of paper scraping on wood for several moments. “I guess I can tell you, since you signed the nondisclosure agreement, afterall: with a certain combination of post crafting enchantments, the scabbard is going to coat the blade in textured air that will reduce the drag coefficient. This will result in an opening slice that is immensely faster than normal, without adding any enchantments to the blade itself.”
“Is that important?”
“Yep, beyond the fact that there’s limited space on an item’s spirit, using too many active enchantments strains a person’s own spirit. This is basically a workaround to increase cutting power, provided you fight in a way that takes advantage of putting the sword back into the scabbard multiple times; the air coating is destroyed on impact.”
Edison, now done with carving out the plank, detached the clips and clamps, began supplying her own mana again as she moved the pieces back together, and then cut the flow to allow the halves to fuse back together. Once done, she retrieved a saw from a rack and then cut off the end where the split rune was located.
“The design of the rune allows me to do this without destroying the wood,” she commented. “Normally, a messed up enchantment can cause the whole spirit to shatter and the object to disintegrate. Here, only the cut off end will be affected.”
True to her word, the nub exploded into sawdust once cut free from the main plank.
“The enchantments for actually coating a blade with air are proprietary and not something I’m allowed to let anyone see regardless of NDAs, so there’s only one more thing that I can show you right now. Can you sweep up the floor while I prepare it?” Edison asked.
“Sure,” he replied.
He walked out of the room to retrieve the broom and dustpan. When he came back, Edison was scraping out channels into the side of the plank. The grooves were irregular, spidering along the length of the wood.
“These are for the metal wires,” she explained. “Specially forged Tier 8 steel. They absorb ambient mana which will flow into the wood’s channels to power the enchantments.”
“Is there a reason why the scabbard isn’t made entirely of this metal? Steel is normally lighter and tougher, and materials of a lower Tier are cheaper,” Solace asked. He moved to brush up the sawdust and frowned at how heavy it was. Not physically, though it was a bit hefty, but spiritually. Like moving rocks instead of flecks of wood.
“Metals are actually harder to enchant, runes don’t take as well and you can’t do as much,” Edison replied.
There were more flecks of wood as she finished carving out the grooves. When done, she began to manipulate the wires into them, clipping the ends of the steel wherever there was excess. The end result looked like shiny filigree.
“No glue?” Solace noted.
“No, I made the grooves precise so that the wires are wedged in there. In addition to that, there’s that last thing I wanted to show you which will make it cohesive.” She lifted up the plank. “But first, here’s a question: is this thing one spirit, or two?”
Solace squinted at the wood and steel, focusing his spiritual senses. “Two,” he said after a moment, seeing the spirit of the wires as distinct from the plank.
“Correct!” The crafter said. “And that causes an issue. Enchantments can only be made on a single spirit. So, if I enchanted the plank right now, it would only affect the wood. What I have to do is get the two spirits to merge.”
She walked over to what Solace had thought was a display case. Flicking the latch, she opened the glass screen and placed the plank of wood inside. With a smile, she closed the lid and turned to Solace.
“This is a spirit annealer,” Edison explained. “It will create the optimized conditions to accelerate the fusion of spirits between the items before safely returning the environment to atmospheric conditions.”
“Accelerate? So spirit fusions happen naturally.”
Edison nodded. “Ever wonder how man-made things have one spirit? If you make something cohesive, all of its parts will eventually fuse into one spirit.”
“But what makes something cohesive? If an item is meant to be easily disassembled, would it still share one spirit?”
“Yes.”
“But…”
How?
“Yes,” Edison chuckled. “The specifics of spirit merging in inanimate objects and what causes it is a study of intense research — like most parts of crafting actually. There’s a lot of theories I could go into, but that’s not important right now. As a beginner, all you need to know is that, once the parts fuse, the wood will have one spirit which will prevent the metal from falling out.”
The crafter turned some dials and hit a button, causing the annealer to start humming.
“And… that’s it for now,” she said. “We just have to wait until it finishes fusing, which could take up to two days.”
Solace nodded. “I’ll get back to work.”
“Good man,” she patted him on the back. He had to stop himself from shirking away from the contact when she did so, masking any motion with his efforts to clean up the wood shavings.
There was a chiming noise, the sound of a customer, and Edison said to Solace. “You finish cleaning up, I’ll go deal with them.”
Once gone, Solace was left in silence, save for the soft humming of the machine. He looked at it, and then at the plank through the glass screen, thinking. Even with this bare bones, simplified, basic introduction, he could tell crafting was a complicated process. It would also be an invaluable skill for various reasons, the least of which being that fact that rifts future rifts would require real gear to properly clear. In that moment, he decided to learn all he could from Edison about her occupation.
But first, he had a room to clean.
—
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Six days passed, each much the same as the others, save for one variable constant.
“Xu Wei? Xu Wei!” Solace said, mildly annoyed.
The two were in their housing floor’s community kitchen, where Solace was supposed to be teaching the boy the Corporation’s language during their daily session. Supposed to be, because his charge had somehow dozed off.
“Xu Wei!” He said again.
“Huh? Yes! I’m awake! I mean, I was always awake and was just thinking really hard — I mean —” Xu Wei lifted his head and looked around in a daze, as if unsure of where he was. After a moment, there was a flash of clarity on his face, which quickly reddened. “I’m so sorry Solace.”
Solace frowned. “This is the fifth time you’ve fallen asleep in these types of lessons. It seems to me like you’re not very invested in learning the language.”
A flicker of panic passed through Xu Wei’s face. “No, no! I’m just… just tired from my jobs. They are pretty difficult for a person as young as me. I’m not disinterested or lazy, I swear!”
His frown deepened further. It was the same excuse the boy had given for the other times. And while it may or may not be the truth, Solace didn’t care. All that mattered was that the obligation was taking up more time than he thought it would due to this complication. They had already rescheduled lessons to different times of the day to try to circumvent Xu Wei’s sleepiness, but apparently the boy was tired at all times of the day. It was clear that the typical lecture style in a block of time would not be ideal. He drummed his fingers on the table as he thought of a solution.
“Very well, let’s try something different,” Solace said at last. “From now on I will be giving far briefer lessons and using that extra time to help you create efficient notes. Then, you will be given assignments which will include both written and verbal practice. The next lesson will not take place until you are finished with the last. This way, you can learn the language on your own time and at your own pace.”
And I can waste less time when the lessons aren’t daily.
“Yes! That sounds like an excellent idea, let’s do that!”
So Solace spent the next hour patiently detailing out the pronunciations of the Corporation’s alphabet along with several common words which exemplified each letter. Once done, he assigned Xu Wei the task of memorizing the pronunciations.
“And that is where we will stop for today,” he said as he stood up. “I have some other things to do today. Knock on my door when you are able to do what I assigned and we will schedule another lesson.”
“Thank you!”
Solace nodded, picking up his pencils and loose leaf papers that he had gotten from his job at Edison’s for the lessons. They were spare things that she had confirmed she didn’t mind him taking. Once done, he went back to his room.
He had his second delve in the slime rift today, which would be in roughly an hour. Before then, he had to prepare for what he would do in the rift. Stowing away the pencils and papers, he began with a change of clothes into the slime resistant ones, then a retrieval of the mop from underneath his bed, and then closely inspected his weapon to see if it was still serviceable. When finished, he made his way out of the building and to the train station, stopping only to purchase his dinner at a restaurant and taking that with him on the train too.
I need to buy the tools to cook for myself at some point, it’s so much cheaper in the long term.
But that was a thought for later, when he had more money to spend. There were so many other things that needed investment first. So, he pushed the thought aside, and focused on what he could do in the moment. As the train bulleted down the track, he used his Talent to first shift all of his essence into his physical core and then into one of the seven spots within that physical core. It was one of the categories that he was unsure about, but could test while in the locomotive.
His Talent now took ten minutes to transition essence completely between places, and he watched the objects outside blur by as all of the essence moved. As he had suspected, the more essence that entered that area of his core, the more he was able to process the details outside the train.
So this area is responsible for mental acuity.
It was an exciting confirmation, to be sure. So exciting that Solace gave an involuntary chuckle out loud at the implications.
His Talent meant that, eventually, he’d be able to have a mind that made him think so very, very fast computationally in non-combat situations. And that, that was new to him.
He’d never been smart before.
Witty? Maybe. Creative? Sometimes. But by and large, every lesson had been at a slow or average pace, every technique he ever learned beaten into his body.
It’d be… nice? Nice, to not have to toil over something to understand it. Failing was good for learning, but he’d prefer success earlier and faster. It hurt less.
So far, he had discovered the areas in his core involving strength, endurance, recovery — or possibly outright regeneration — the five senses, and now the mind. Solace spent the remainder of the trip continuing to test out the other areas, but made no more headway. It didn’t bother him though, there was further testing to be done at the rift.
“Now stopping at… Oddenway,” the electronic speaker in the train said.
That was his stop. He promptly stood up before stepping off the train. The path to the rift from where he had arrived was only a few minutes walk, so he made the trip with his mop in one hand and a bag with his meal in the other. Steadily making his way down the paved road until he saw a familiar glass dome with someone guarding the entrance like before.
“Oh, it’s ya again,” the man said as Solace neared the entrance.
He squinted at the stranger. “Do I know you?”
“What? It’s only been a week!”
Solace quickly deduced that it was the same man guarding the rift as the last time he had been here. It would make sense, if the guards were doing shifts kept on a strict weekly schedule. He checked his memory for the man’s name.
“Oh, right,” Solace said, “Carter, from last time I was here.”
Carter shook his head. “And I see ya still haven’t brought any gear besides that mop. Unless…” He did a quick peek into the bag and then gave an incredulous stare at Solace. “Ya decided to come with food and water this time. What, ya think the rift is a picnic?”
“No, but clearing the rift takes time, and being able to properly refuel is important to taking it on safely, isn’t it?”
“Yes but—!” The man cut himself off, looked into the sky, and sighed. “Fine, whatever. Ya’ve proven to be able to handle what’s inside already, and yer on the schedule. Just go in already.”
Solace nodded and did exactly that, entering the glassy dome and into the rift.
Past the jagged distortion, he was met with the same small room as the last delve. Plaster walls stained with yellow streaks and trash littered across the dank, uneven floor. Immediately, he set down his bag with his dinner in a dry spot and focused on what he had come here to do.
It was time to explore the depths of his spirit.
The slimes were the same in pattern and combat capability, so they served as an excellent control. The first two rooms, he cleared with all of his essence in the spiritual core that governed mana to get a feel of what it was like with zero essence enhancing him physically. Like his first delve, the slimes popped like bubbles when struck with his mop.
He then fought with all of his essence in the first of the seven sections in his physical core. It was supposed to be strength, which was quickly confirmed when he found himself able to not only dispatch the slimes with less force, but able to manipulate the mop easier due to it being lighter relative to his enhanced muscles. The spiritual strain from manipulating a Tier 3 mop was still the same though.
With how the rift was organized, it was possible for him to test each section with an entire round of slimes, which went from one to eight before resetting and increasing in volume. So he began to do just that.
For the strength area of his core, it seemed to only enhance the output of the muscles. It meant he struck harder, ran faster, jumped further, but it also meant that it was much easier to pull muscles and hurt himself in other ways through overexertion. He had nearly done just that by fighting the room with eight slimes without properly scoping out the room and abusing the entryway like he was supposed to. After the fight, he was much more careful.
The next rotation of slimes were fought with his essence in the second section. It was confusing at first, the section seemingly doing nothing. It was only until he combated the room with four slimes did it click. When dealing with that many enemies, keeping the spacing perfect and one’s aim true was paramount to success. The second area seemingly allowed for a much easier time at doing so, which was interesting because it wasn’t the area that affected the mind. If he had to guess, what it was enhancing was dexterity.
The rift had ten rotations of slimes that he could use to test, so he allowed himself an extra few rooms to confirm his guess. Indeed, it was exactly right. With the improved kinesthetics of his muscles, his fighting became fluider — though not by much, he was already quite adjusted to the natural limits and motions of his body at this point.
The third section was confusing in a different way than the second. Rather than doing nothing, it seemed to be doing the same thing. He found his strikes being just as precise and his footing just as easy. It was only until he hit the rooms with slimes big enough to launch projectiles did he realize what was being enhanced. One of the two larger slimes in the room immediately spat slime at him as he entered. Because he was mid step, the transition of his center of balance made dodging it awkward.
Or would have, normally.
His body was able to contort in a new way that still felt comfortable, easily sidestepping the glob of goo without making him feel like he was in a poor stance to fight at all. Standing up, he quickly realized what the third section was: flexibility.
It was this enhancement that Solace thought would be the key to his victories in future fights. Attacking enemies from odd angles they wouldn’t expect was a huge boon in close combat. He quickly closed out the rotation and moved onto the fourth section.
However, when fighting the singular large slime, which went past knee height, he accidentally allowed his shoulder to be hit by a projectile because of how drastically different it was to fight without the enhanced flexibility or dexterity. Despite this, he hardly felt a thing as the glob smashed into him and then wicked off of his clothing. The fourth section seemed to enhance his physical durability as well, in a way that Strength didn’t.
It was a good discovery, but a useless one in a lot of contexts. Better to avoid a hit than to endure one. Still, it’d be necessary to balance it with his other sections in a true fight. He wouldn’t be able to do much if his fist shattered just because he was hitting too hard for his body to handle.
He cleared the rest of the rotation after that before deciding to take a break. Solace walked back to the beginning of the rift to collect his dinner. As he moved, he channeled his essence into the fifth section, the one that he discovered before to govern recovery.
His meal was a box loaded with potatoes, cheese, and beef. It was cold at this point, but he didn’t really mind it. He washed it down with the bottle of lukewarm water he also bought.
If I can get my hands on a massive amount of food, I could do an insane training session to build muscles: maximizing my strength enhancement to tear them down and then enhancing the recovery to build them back up, rinsing and repeating in a short timeframe.
It was a good idea, one he’d try to implement after this rift. Until then, he settled for filling his stomach and giving himself some time to digest and recover. During that time, he also began to allocate the essence he had received from killing all of the slimes so far.
Twenty minutes later, he felt as fresh as when he entered. He left the box, bottle, and bag where it was, next to the rest of the rift’s refuse, and walked back to the rooms still uncleared.
After that, he cleared the next two rotations of slimes, using the sections that enhanced his five senses and his mind. With those out of the way, he had officially identified and tested all seven sections of the physical spirit.
At that point, he was close to the boss room, so he decided to try to find optimizations for himself, changing the percentages of his essence across his core. Strength was not as important against the fragile slimes, so he elected to put only a fractional amount to bolster his speed. The rest went into proprioception, flexibility, mind, and recovery, changing percentages between each room as he sought the golden ratio.
When he did finally reach the boss room, the boss inside was revealed to be the second variation possible in the rift: sixteen knee high slimes. Dealing with them was no issue, as he quickly retreated to a previous room with a much tinier entrance than the boss room’s and abused it to safely kill them in trios. His enhanced physique made it so that he didn’t even break a sweat.
The gray distortion near the rift’s exit rewarded him with eight mana stones this time. All in all, it was a good delve, and Solace left satisfied.
—
On the train back though, he had a realization that left him extremely dissatisfied. The amount of essence he received from each delve meant that it would take him roughly 60 or so delves to Tier up. At the rate of once per a week, that would take over a year just to go from Tier 1 to 2.
Way too long for a single tier.
Especially since the amount of essence needed to go from one Tier to the next increased by a factor of ten. And, while rifts did give more essence the higher Tier they were, the amount they scaled was not ten times as much, meaning that Tiering up would be even slower.
When Solace had first come across this factoid on the internet, it had blown his mind. The sheer time frame implied that, to reach something like Tier 20, it would take over a hundred years — even if they delved almost nonstop. The discovery had begged a second question, one with an answer that he had pushed to the back of his mind because of its implications.
How long did a person live in this reality?
The short answer: forever. One’s lifespan increased with each tier until Tier 15. At that Tier, apparently one’s spirit was capable of supporting one’s physical body in such a way that it was functionally immortal. Which was crazy. Solace had been in realities where immortality was an ephemeral pinnacle. He’d witnessed atrocities done by people who believed that a ritual would grant them everlasting life. Here? It was just a byproduct of progression for those with the skill and determination to delve at a solid pace.
And he had that skill and determination, there was no doubt. No, what troubled him was not the feasibility but the time frame. He could easily imagine himself stuck in this reality for an eternity, aimlessly wandering around and progressing through the Tiers to try to search for the Token. It was… not a pretty picture.
There was a moment of sinking dread as his mind went down the rabbit hole of possibilities and what-ifs, before he forced it to slow down and shut out all of the useless thoughts. That was in the future. What he had to focus on now was the immediate problem: the amount of delves he was able to do.
He could try purchasing more delving slots, but of course that cost money. If he sunk his current savings into the slots, then he wouldn’t be able to afford gear or get supplies like food to fuel his growth.
It was a conundrum that took up his mind, occupying him for the train ride home. It plagued him as he exited the station and made his way back to the housing complex, and then onto his floor.
Before he entered his room, however, he noticed an elderly lady struggling to open her door.
“Would you like some help?” He asked her.
She startled at his voice and turned to face him, giving him a better look at her. She looked to be in her sixties, on the thinner side but not quite frail. His spiritual sese told him that she was a low Tier 1.
“What?” She asked him in the language of the Sects.
“Would you like some help?” He asked, changing his language to match and gesturing at the door.
“Please,” she said, moving to the side.
The key was already in the knob and he turned it before giving a pull. To his surprise, it was almost as heavy as his instead of being jammed like he had assumed.
“Will you be able to open this later?” He asked. If she was struggling trying to get in, she would have difficulties trying to get out.
“Ah, yes,” she replied with a hint of embarrassment in her voice. “This one has merely had a long day. A little rest will bolster the spirit.”
He noted that he understood the dialect of the language that she used and filed it away for exploration later.
“Have you tried to request a transfer of rooms?”
“Yes, but apparently the building is full and the process to change to a different complex is long. This one is stuck here for at least another month more.”
“Then maybe…”
‘Maybe cultivate,’ he almost said. But that would be extremely difficult for her to do. On a Tier 5 planet, ambient essence was extremely thin meaning that the best way to progress was by delving—a dangerous prospect for her.
Then an idea struck him.
“If you’d like,” he said. “I can help you through a rift. As you probably know, we are offered free delves once a week.”
She stared up at him with a questioning look. “Why?”
“Well, I imagine they want us to Tier up and contribute—”
“No, not that. Why help?”
He paused, mouth slightly open.
Why am I offering to help? It’d be a huge time sink.
It took him a moment to come up with a reason.
“I’ve been wanting to cultivate faster,” he told her. “When I help you, I will kill a few for myself.”
She seemed to be satisfied with his answer. “Then I accept. When shall this happen?”
He thought about it for a moment. “Schedule it for tomorrow afternoon. I have some things I need to get which will help.”
“Very well.”
—
The next day, Solace was talking with a familiar man with the elderly woman in tow.
“By the Chosen,” Carter exclaimed. “Now there’s two of ya!”