Once again, Lightforge found himself surrounded by a cluttered mess of mechanical components inside his shop. But this time was a little bit different from the other times so far. He wasn’t aimlessly wandering from one idea to the next, trying to think of things to build. Instead he was focused and methodical, slowly working his way towards the next step forward.
He was wearing his new armor and had his shield emitter strapped to one arm. Honestly the name of the latter was a little bit misleading; it wasn’t the source of his shield. It just allowed him to enhance the hard light shield that he could already produce. But he hadn’t picked the name, so he was stuck with it.
In addition to his new gear, he had leveled up and even gotten a new ability. While he was eager to test it out, he didn’t want to waste the creative flow that he found himself in. There was plenty more equipment for him to improve, and it would be best to have it ready the next time things got hectic.
With his shield and armor upgraded, he had needed to make a decision. He could try to continue upgrading his goggles, but they were already useful as they were. He would get a lot more from his efforts if he focused on the equipment that had yet to receive any enhancements. That meant his boots and his gloves, and he wasn’t sure what to do with either.
There were a lot of options available to him. His original thought had been to start with the gloves, as they seemed like the obvious place to add some damage enhancements. But since he’d just received a new special attack, it felt unnecessary to put more focus onto that part of his repertoire. With that in mind, he turned his attention to his boots.
Thanks to the enormous frame that he’d gained in this world, he also had enormous boots. Plenty of space to add multiple gadgets if he wanted to, and there were plenty of useful options. He took a look through his inventory to check what parts he had on hand and paused.
Right there, sitting all by itself, was his Pinwheel Flier. One his earliest efforts to grow accustomed to the crafting system, and a reminder of simple days spent building and testing. It didn’t have anything complicated to it, but it did work. In fact, he would occasionally pull it out and toss it around the room. It was oddly calming to watch it gently float back and forth as it bounced off of the walls, the floor, and anything else that it happened to run into.
And he’d been considering upgrades to it as well. Where gloves could help with power and boots with mobility, the little drone had the potential to provide something even more important: information.
The worst situations that he’d been in so far always came as a surprise. He’d been jumped multiple times and the lab dungeon had dangerous things around every other corner. Of his deaths and near misses, they all could have been prevented with enough foresight and someone watching out for him. Or something.
At the moment it was just a motor with a propeller. It would be easy to view it as an item with no functional use, but there was another option. It was also a blank canvas, just waiting for him to turn it into a masterpiece.
Well, maybe not a masterpiece, as that would have to wait until a much higher level. But he could make it into something incredibly useful.
Naturally, the first step was to completely disassemble the existing device. It was cute and he liked it, but it didn’t have the carrying capacity that he would need. While he might have been able to handle it this time, it was setting himself up for failure in the long run. The best gadgets needed the strongest foundations, and that wasn’t the case with the existing flier.
Of course, that didn’t make him heartless. He was fond of the little device and was grateful for the lessons that he’d learned in its construction. The parts wouldn’t go to waste, either. A plan was coming together in his head that would put them to good use.
Once the parts were all laid out in front of him, he added to them from his inventory. It wasn’t long before he had a respectable pile of rotors, motors, gimbals, sensors, and other devices that may or may not come in handy. The plan was slowly taking shape in his head, but he wasn’t sure about the final form. That would only come with time and work.
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In principle, the drone that Lightforge was trying to build was simple. He just wanted something that could fly and detect people near him. That was all he wanted, and how complicated could that be?
As it turned out, it was extremely complicated. And nothing typified that complication more than the navigational systems. The original drone hadn’t had one, so he had to build it from scratch. In order for the drone to know where to go it needed three things: a method of controlling its flight, sensors to detect the world around it, and a brain to connect the first two together.
The controls seemed like the easy part, so he started there. He didn’t know how to make a control system, but that hadn’t stopped him before. It did mean that he chose to use a design that he knew worked: a quadcopter. He’d seen dozens of those types of drones in the real world, and some had been dirt cheap. So how hard could it be to make one?
If Lightforge were a little more self aware, he might have realized just how hard he was tempting fate with that line of thought. But he wasn’t that self aware, so he was caught completely by surprise when the project kept falling apart in front of him.
As there was no electronic brain to run the four motors that he’d connected together, he had to rely on his meat brain instead. Each was connected to a voltage controller that allowed him to manually adjust the amount of power going to each motor. That way he would be able to experiment and figure out how to manipulate them in order to get the most controlled flight. He hadn’t anticipated just how complicated that would be.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
The first half dozen attempts had the thing flip and spin wildly as he struggled to keep each motor’s output aligned with the others. Even when it was finally hovering flat, it was still spinning unsteadily as it hung in the air. It took more time than he cared to admit to realize that he needed two of the motors to turn in the opposite direction to cancel out this problem. Discovering which two it needed to be was its own special little adventure.
Once he had that figured out, it was pretty straightforward to get the drone to hover flat. He grinned and made the fatal mistake once again: he thought that it was smooth sailing from there on out.
That confidence lasted until the first time that the drone went crazy and crashed into him. Some part of his enthusiasm might have survived even that, if not for the fact that it happened again less than two minutes later. Eventually he simply put his head down on the top and rested it there for a few moments to try and think more clearly.
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When all was said and done, it took more than four hours to get the drone ready to fly. By comparison, getting the electronics connected took almost no time at all. Apparently the game engine expected him to figure out the physics of his gadget but not the circuitry for it. That seemed deeply unfair, but it was unquestionably better than having to do both by hand.
It was after lunch when it was finally finished. Luckily it was easy to tell when he’d successfully crafted something, because all he had to do was just keep working until…
New Item Crafted!
Name: Scouting Drone
Type: Robot (Aerial)
Quality: Uncommon
This flying drone is a handy little assistant for the solo hero. It is programmed to observe the area around the user and report back any suspicious activity.
You have crafted a complex item without blueprints. Bonus XP gained!
Well that was a welcome sight. Apparently all the extra work to put the thing together hadn’t gone to waste. And the description wasn’t doing the device justice; it would be more than useful. He had even managed to add a transmitter to it so that it would feed information directly into his goggles.
The new drone still contained all the pieces of the old one. He’d reused the motor, gyroscope and batteries to construct the new drone. If he was being honest, he preferred the original orb shape, but he had no clue how to make that work with the requirements that he needed. But one day he would revive it.
Little by little, his arsenal was coming together. He still had plenty of ideas to work on, and he had a good one that ought to build nicely on his newest skill. All he needed was a length of chain and a few other things.
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As evening fell outside the Gadget Forge, Lightforge was still working. He’d made a few tweaks and adjustments, but now he thought that he may have had a brilliant insight. He was sitting beside his multispectral analyzer, patiently waiting as it scanned one of his summoned daggers. Unlike the more complex XP potion, he expected that there wouldn’t be much to this one.
He was mostly right. The scanner finished its work and showed that the dagger was, for the most part, exactly what it claimed to be: light. It was a specific wavelength of blue light, but it wasn’t entirely alone. It was surrounded by a thin aura of something else, something that was giving it its shape. It was labeled as “Ability Energy.”
Huh, so that’s what AP looked like, at least in this case. It was a much simpler situation, especially since both types of energy were all around him. And his current plan was to use them in his shoes.
He ripped into his boots, jabbing strips of wire through the sole and looping it around the inside. Now when he put it on he would be standing on loops of metal, which was exactly what he needed. The other part of his plan was possible thanks to something that he’d found in his inventory by chance.
Item
Name: Mini Energy Emitter
Type: Component
Quality: Common
This small device can give shape energy that is sent through it. It cannot convert between types of energy and has a low overall capacity.
He had dozens of the small emitters, and it had taken him a few moments to realize their capabilities. After all, what was the point of them if they couldn’t convert the energy? Put in fire, get out fire? That didn’t sound all that great on its face.
But what if you put in fire and got out a fire arrow? Now that was starting to get somewhere. These devices might be the key to reproducing a wide variety of powers that he didn’t technically have. Of course, he would need a way to generate those energies in the first place. And the ones he had explicitly had a low capacity, so they probably couldn’t handle a swarm of arrows or something.
The key to overcoming those limitations was to use a whole bunch of them in tandem. Or at least that was the hope. He had carefully placed a number of the emitters on the bottom of his boots, cutting away sections for them to slip smoothly into the bottom. He held his breath as the last one slid into place and he waited for a few painful moments.
New Item Crafted!
Name: Hard Light Cleats
Type: Equipment (Footwear)
Quality: Custom (Uncommon)
These custom shoes can project spikes of hardened light from the bottom. These spikes can be used to gain additional traction on most surfaces.
NOTE: This item functions as an alternate use of your ‘Light Dagger’ Ability. While this item is active, you will be unable to use ‘Light Dagger.’ If you activate this item while ‘Light Dagger’ is already active, it will fail.
That was a tedious restriction, but it would hopefully be worth it. Extra traction would always be helpful, even if it was in mostly minor ways. And, depending on how strong the traction was, they might be even better than he was hoping for.
Every piece of equipment that he had available to him was an exciting possibility. They all could use some tweaks or adjustments, and there was plenty more left to build. After all, he hadn’t even touched his gloves yet, and that was just to get to the end of his basic gear.
But now he’d spent an awful lot of time crafting, and far too little testing. Now that he had all the shiny new toys, it was time to take them out on the town. His drone had been wandering the local neighborhood for some time and had noticed several different groups hanging back in hidden places and preparing for some action.
It seemed that the reprieve had come to an end. People were getting ready to have the next fight that night, and he was ready for it. He grinned as he stepped out of his shop and into the cool night air. The soft whir of electric motors filled his ears as the drone returned and began to circle slowly above his head, keeping a careful watch over him.
He should have called for backup, but he didn’t. He needed a proper test, and that meant pushing himself and his gear to their limits. And besides, he had a scouting drone now. The extra set of eyes would help him steer clear of any major fights that broke out.
What could possibly go wrong?