The day after the battle, Lightforge didn’t spend much time actually crafting. There were a couple of outstanding orders that he made, but after that he spent his time cleaning up the shop and thinking. He hadn’t stopped to do much of that recently, and it was starting to show. He’d been losing track of things and forgetting plans that he’d once made.
Now was the time to slow down and get such things back on track. He’d been helpful in the battle, but it would have been a lot easier if he’d had more plans and better equipment to spread around. Unfortunately, he’d already learned that just building things as fast as possible wasn’t the right way to go about it.
He needed a plan, and that meant taking the time to think about his next steps without feeling pressured to keep moving as quickly as possible. And with the streets as quiet as they were, it seemed like this was the opportunity that he’d been waiting for.
He hated to admit it, but he hadn’t actually crafted much. Well, he’d done a lot of crafting, but most of it hadn’t resulted in anything useful. His list of useful creations was much, much shorter. That was going to change.
The windows of the shop were freshly cleaned and ready for more notes. He stayed away from the front, where shards of glass were slowly reassembling themselves to repair the damage Sunbird had done to it. That incident felt ancient, but it had happened less than a day earlier.
What was his first priority? That was easy; he’d once planned to recreate the game’s HUD, which he’d partially accomplished through his goggles. If he could add the rest of the missing functionality, they would become invaluable tools. Even if he could only get alignments and exact levels, that would be huge. So that would be his first big project.
Next? He looked around the empty shop and found himself shaking his head. Using it as a glorified workshop had been useful so far, but he needed to face facts. This place was meant to be a shop, not just a workspace. If that was all he wanted, he could use his base. Waiting for people to come to him for his services was working, but it was also slow. Some people would need upgrades and equipment sometimes. But what did everyone need all the time? Consumables.
He’d already started on that with his grenades. The real trick would be putting them up on display so that anyone passing by knew that they were for sale. And grenades alone wouldn’t be enough to bring in customers. He needed equipment and consumables that anyone could use. When he was playing the game, what items would he have wanted to have on sale?
That got the ideas flowing. Temporary shields, stat boosters, healing items, XP boosts, there was no shortage of items that people would find useful in a place like this. And if he was the source of them, people would come in and buy whatever they could get their hands on. So that would need to be his next priority: research and development of consumables that people would be talking about. Things that would fill the shelves instead of being crafted to order.
Of course, that also had its drawbacks. What would he do with the stock on his shelves? He had no idea if it would be safe if left alone. People could very easily break into the shop and steal the items right out from under his nose. That might ruin him, or at least ensure that Sam cut him off from their current “take now, pay later” agreement.
Ok, so maybe security would need to be higher on his list. That was good to keep in mind. Not everything he made had to be for general consumption. In fact, he should probably keep the best goodies for himself just on general principles. After all, who would trust a gadgeteer who wasn’t decked out in every sort of gear possible?
His hands continued to move, taking notes, writing and rewriting as new ideas came to him and he had to adjust his plans. Slowly but surely, his plans for the future became clear. Some of them would have to wait for the moment, but he had plenty to do.
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It was late in the afternoon when Lightforge stood back from the windows of his shop and looked it over with a smile on his face. Right there he had a plan laid out for how he was going to make his shop bigger and better than before. The notes would be utterly nonsensical to anyone else; at some point he’d started using his own shorthand that he never bothered to explain in writing. He knew what it said and that was all that he cared about.
As he was studying his work, he heard the front door ring as someone entered. The front windows had finished repairing themselves as he’d been planning, and he found himself wondering if there was a way to build that functionality into his own creations. Maybe.
Gray Guardian walked into the shop, nodding to the gadgeteer in greeting.
“Hey, Lightforge. Are you busy?”
“Hey Gray. You’ve got great timing, I just finished what I was working on. What’s up?”
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He waved at the windows full of notes, and the healer followed the motion. The cloaked hero stared blankly at the scribbles for a few moments before shrugging and turning back to their friend.
“Do you remember a while ago when I asked you to find a way to help me level faster?”
Lightforge froze in place, eyes darting back and forth as he searched his memory. That sounded vaguely familiar, didn’t it? Or maybe not? He definitely would have remembered that. After all, this was one of the closest friends that he’d made in this world. Surely he would remember a request from someone like that? Right?
No, he would definitely forget. In fact, he had forgotten. Now that they were bringing it up, it was starting to come back to him. He put on his widest grin and did his best to look completely innocent.
“Right. Of course I remember that. I’ve definitely been working on that in the background all this time.”
“It’s fine. I know things have been busy around here.”
“Oh, good. Then were you coming to remind me?”
“Sort of. Look, it’s kind of a long story, but I got my hands on something really useful.”
They didn’t go into the details. Instead they simply pulled out an item that they had stored in their inventory. It was a small glass bottle filled with a glowing blue liquid. Lightforge’s eyes nearly popped out of his head when he saw it. His hands were shaking when Gray Guardian held it out and handed it to him.
Name: Exquisite Experience Potion
Type: Consumable
Quality: Super Rare
When consumed, increase XP gain by 100% for 12 hours.
The mystical energies contained in this elixir drastically accelerate the rate of growth for a person. Use it wisely.
“How did you get an XP potion? Especially one this rare.”
“I helped someone out and they gave it to me.”
“Woah. Must have been quite the favor. But why are you giving it to me?”
“I was hoping you’d be able to reverse engineer it somehow.”
That one hit him like a ton of bricks. Such powerful items were made into potions for a very simple reason: they were explicitly magical. With no technological component, there was no way for a gadgeteer to duplicate the item. At least it theory; it was possible that this world was a bit more fuzzy on what the limits to his crafting was. He couldn’t help but grin.
“I have no idea if it’s possible, but I’ll try everything I can think of to find out. Do you mind leaving this with me? It’s probably going to take a while.”
“No problem. Just don’t forget this time.”
“I promise I won’t.”
He was already studying his notes on the windows, mentally moving things around to fit this into the top of his priority list. More scribbled shorthand was added to the mess, which made perfect sense to him and him alone. He nodded at the new notes and grinned at Gray Guardian.
The healer was just staring at the writing, clearly confused about what they were looking at. Then they seemed to give up and turned to leave. Lightforge said his goodbyes and began to stare at the small bottle in his hand. It was worth enough money to buy everything in his shop at least a dozen times over. Who in the world would just give something like this away?
No, there was no point to that. Maybe he would find out some day, but it didn’t change the task that he had in front of him. This had leaped to the front of the line as far as he was concerned. As useful as the HUD would be, it paled in comparison to the value of something like this.
He put the bottle safely in his inventory before pulling out every scanner he could think of. In his dreams, he would shove all of them together into one super scanner, like the tricorders from Star Trek. So far his one attempt to combine items together had been a total failure, but it had been attributed to his low level. One day it would be possible for him, but not yet.
Instead he satisfied himself with creating an array of more than a dozen devices all taped together so that they were roughly pointing towards the same place. Wires and batteries were next up, getting slapped together into a truly terrible mess that was completely horrifying to look at. But it was functional, which was what he cared about at the moment.
He took the mess of wires and connected everything to a computer monitor. He gently placed the potion in front of the scanners and held his breath. The electronic mess in front of him wouldn’t work in the real world, and it probably shouldn’t work here. But that didn’t mean much in his estimation, so he turned it on.
And he nearly had a stroke as the screen strobed through hundreds of different colors and flashed masses of overlapping data that made it impossible to use any of the information that the sensors were gathering. He flinched back from his own creation and stared into a dark corner of the shop until his vision came back to him. Random colors were still swirling in front of his eyes, but it was manageable enough for him to turn off the input and reconsider his approach.
Everything was working, but the screen was trying to show all of the inputs at the same time. The conflicting data formed into a mess that he couldn’t make heads or tails of. As he thought about it, he considered a few possibilities that would be able to remedy the situation.
The first idea was to build the sensors into a more proper structure with computers to sort and clarify the data. It would be elegant and incredibly useful moving forward, but building such a thing would take a lot of work and effort all on its own. Definitely worth it in the long run, but he’d been trying for a quick and dirty solution.
Which was why, in a fit of laziness, he decided to go with the second option. He tore out the wiring and only connected one sensor to the screen. He would check the potion through the eyes of each scanner one at a time. With more than a dozen sensors involved, it really shouldn’t take too long. And maybe he would get lucky and the first one would give him what he was looking for.
He was not a lucky man.