Lightforge was sitting in his base, actually using the small desk for once. Well, ‘using’ might be too strong a word. He was sitting in the chair, staring down at a silvery sphere that was resting on the rough wooden surface. He’d been staring at it for at least an hour, considering it and thinking about the item.

It was an AI Core, a fundamental part of any robot more complex than an anti-intruder turret. It represented a gateway, a path toward greater heights of engineering. It was the first rare item that he had seen since coming to this world.

It was also stolen. Twice-stolen, actually. Criminals had made off with it from wherever it was supposed to be. He'd helped to capture those criminals and see them sent to jail. He'd even been allowed to keep one of the stolen items as a reward.

Next to the sphere sat a small, overly complicated camera. Well, it looked like a camera. It was actually a scanner that would help him to build his next invention. While useful, it was only of Uncommon quality. Even getting it as a reward had taken some negotiation, so there was no way he would have been allowed to keep something Rare.

He dearly wished that he could use that as an excuse for why he'd taken the core, but he couldn't. The negotiations hadn't taken place yet when he'd stolen it. He'd seen its quality and had simply pocketed it without a second thought. He couldn't even use it yet; he didn't have the skill to include it in a creation without risking its destruction.

So now he was sitting at home, staring at the pair of items. One gained as a reward for an act of heroism, the other stolen in an act of villainy. He'd done both, and now he thought about the time that he'd spent in this world so far.

When he'd first arrived, he hadn't questioned what alignment he would end up with. He was going to be a hero. It hadn't even been a plan, just a fact that he'd known as soon as he'd arrived. But then things had started to change as soon as he'd met Circe.

She'd opened doors for him, helped him to buy his own shop. She'd been honest with him and open about wanting to work together. Of course, she'd also attacked him with robot spiders, and he wasn't sure if he'd forgiven her yet for that. There were still a lot of questions surrounding her and her motives, but it was unquestionable that she'd been helpful.

If a villain could be such a boon to him, was being a villain truly so bad? Some surely were, like the one that had ambushed and killed him on his very first day. But what if villainy itself was just another means to an end? Then maybe it wasn't so bad?

He rubbed the sides of his head as a headache started to form there. Why was a superhero world so complicated? The whole concept was built on black and white morality! One side was supposed to be good and the other was supposed to be bad. But it wasn't that simple.

The problem was the lack of XP that was available. You had to be strong to feel safe in a world like this, which meant leveling by any means possible. He'd experienced the hero side of that equation: people tripping over each other and getting into fights over a single criminal. Hoping against hope to get a single arrest in a day. It was slow, tedious, and frustrating.

Was it really any surprise that some people would look to do things another way? Crime was difficult to get away with, but it was always your choice when and where it happened. Every time you were prepared was an opportunity to gain experience. It was risky, but the rewards were tempting.

Lightforge stored the items in front of him and stood. For the time being, he would continue to stay neutral. He would keep his options open so that he could keep leveling as quickly as possible. He wasn’t exactly excited about the idea of stealing things, but he was in a world where it might just be necessary.

He walked toward the door to head to his shop, but paused and thought about it. Why did he need to go to the shop? He made all his own tools, and his inventory held the raw materials. The only reason to work in the shop was on the off chance that a customer came in for something. But if he was going to work on developing something new, wouldn’t it be better to do it here, without any distractions?

He went back to the desk and sat down. He pulled the Personnel Scanner from his inventory and placed it in front of him. With a few deep breaths, he began pulling equipment from the air and inspecting the component.

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His hands quivered as he delicately began opening up the sensor and evaluating the mechanisms and circuits inside. It really wasn’t very different from the other sensors that he’d been using so far, just more complicated. He was hopeful that if he could figure out why, then he might be able to convert one into the other instead of wandering around the city in hopes of stumbling onto another one.

Of course, he might also end up breaking the thing and then starting the whole process over from the beginning. That was the risk of trying to reverse engineer something like this. But if he wanted to progress and get better at crafting things, it was a necessary step.

He thought back to a conversation that he’d had with the rest of his team. In the dungeon they’d compared notes and learned a bit about the differences in this world compared to the game. One of the most notable was the role of skills. They weren’t completely automatic. A steady hand could increase the accuracy of an attack, and lost focus could make a sure thing miss. The same applied to Lightforge as a gadgeteer.

When activated, his skills filled his head with knowledge of how to perform the task at hand. But it didn’t tell him how the mechanisms worked or why he needed to perform steps in a certain order. It was like following a set of instructions that was all pictures and no text; it got the job done, but you didn’t actually learn much from it.

He was determined to change that. It stood to reason that just trusting in the system would only lead down paths that the system already had available. That was useful, of course. It would let him make all kinds of items that had proven themselves useful when this was a game. But nothing else.

He considered his current project. A scanner that could identify people and their levels. An item that didn’t exist within the game because it had never been needed. But now he had been tasked with making it. That meant understanding things on a deeper level than he had so far.

He carefully finished disassembling the Personnel Scanner, laying out every piece in an organized way to ensure that he could put it back together later. He knew how to do that, but not what any of the pieces actually did. But he had an idea of how to find out.

He gently moved the pieces off to one side of the table and pulled out another sensor from his inventory. This was one of the simplest that he owned, and all it could tell was how close to obstacles it was. And everything counted as an obstacle, apparently.

With significantly less delicacy he quickly opened it up and took the sensor apart. He laid out the pieces in the exact same manner as the other scanner, leaving empty spaces when the interior parts weren’t quite the same. When he was done he stood from the desk and took a few steps back.

As expected, the two sensors were very similar. Most of the parts were either identical or only different in terms of something superficial like color. Those weren’t the interesting parts. What he needed to see were the differences.

The first thing of note was that the personnel scanner contained everything that the simpler scanner held. Apparently the latter was so simple that it didn’t need any specialized pieces. Did that mean it was the base model that other sensors were built from? It seemed likely.

He turned his attention to the parts that made the personnel scanner special. There were two of them, and he had no clue what either one of them did. They were both circuit boards, and one looked like it might have an antenna? Or was that something else?

With the significant parts isolated, he put the device back together. Well, mostly together. He didn’t put it back in its housing so that he could still see and manipulate the parts inside. More importantly, he only connected one of the mystery parts.

Within a few minutes he had the scanner connected to a screen and tried to scan himself. The device hummed quietly for a few moments before an error popped up on the screen.

No valid targets for analysis.

Huh. That was something, at least. He shut the device down and switched which of the parts was attached. This time the screen came to life without a problem, showing the room that he was in. There was a faint outline around him that followed him as he moved. Just him and nothing else. Beside him on the screen was a single word: person.

He nodded absently as reconnected both parts and tried one last time. The screen came to like and the outline around him was there again, as was the descriptor. Neither had changed, but now they were joined by a little symbol beside the word. It was a yellow circle that hung there, doing nothing. What was that supposed to mean?

This wasn’t what he’d expected, but maybe it should have been. After all, this scanner didn’t have any upgrades to it. It had successfully identified him as a person and was doing some kind of analysis on him, though he couldn’t identify what that part meant. He would have to do more testing with other people.

It wasn’t much, but it was a start. He had the tools at his disposal, and now he was starting to learn. So long as he stuck to it, it was only a matter of time before he could start creating actual marvels. Or at least that was the hope.

He stood and stretched as he considered what to do first. There were a lot of tests to run and only so much time before he needed to start working in earnest on a prototype for something that a person could actually carry around and use.

For now, this was enough. He settled back into his chair and got back to work.