Finding my way on the stairs leading up the cliff into Grey Quarry was more difficult than I had expected. While I had a rough idea where to find the craftsmen and with them the trainers for other professions, it was only a rough one and the stairs had surprisingly few connections between them.

After a couple of minutes trying to find my way, I asked a nearby guard who helpfully explained how to get where I wanted to go. Sadly, it involved going back down the cliff and taking a different staircase. I considered trying to simply jump from one set of stairs to the other but decided against it. Falling to my death would be a slightly embarrassing way to die for the first time. So, back down I went, before taking a different set of stairs, just a few meters away from the one I had been climbing on. I wondered, not for the first time, just what on Earth the developers thought when making this city so confusing. That the individual steps were sized for dwarves didn’t help, to the point that I considered giving up on direct control, instead using the chip to emulate controlling my character with mouse and keyboard, where the game would take my command of “walk forward” and execute it. But no, I wouldn’t be defeated by a set of stairs, no matter how long or how annoying it was.

Now, with better directions, I managed to get to the right door and entered into the set of hallways housing the various craftsmen and the gatherer that worked for them. Inside, there were more hallways, curiously the hallways were only about two meters high but four meters wide, giving them an interesting aesthetic. Near the entrance, I noticed a dwarf standing around, not doing anything, and approached him.

“Greetings, good sir.” I approached him, curious if he might be a quest-giver.

“Greetings, lassy. What are you looking for?” he asked, sounding quite friendly. It took me a second to realise that he might be some sort of guide to the crafting-area, maybe crafting in general.

“I’m looking for instruction, I want to learn a profession.” I explained, trying to phrase things in a way that would fit the world.

“You are? Well, that’s commendable, so many people think that the only thing they need to know is how to destroy things. It’s good that you want to learn the art of crafting, learning to shape and create new things.” he answered with a satisfied nod.

“Here in Grey Quarry, we have quite a few craftsmen, it depends on what you want to learn. If you want to learn metal, as a Blacksmith, you need to talk to Mosdrun, you can find him in his forge, over there.” he gestured to a nearby doorway with an anvil embossed on it. Part of me wanted to slap my forehead, it was rather obvious.

“But if metal isn’t to your taste and you want to work with supple leather, creating all sorts of armour and equipment from it, you can talk to Dostosli, her workshop is over there, the fourth door on the right.” he gestured to a distant door, further down the hallway.

“Next to her workshop is the workshop of the local tailor, Madame Holmi. Seek her out if you want to learn how to create marvellous clothes from fabric.” he paused for a second before continuing.

“If you want to shape wood, Marlum is the one you want to meet. His workshop is over there.” he gestured to a door on the other side of the hallway, this one with a knife on it.

“Otherwise, the alchemist, Oveat has his workshop over there, inside he’s turning various herbs and other things I’d rather not think about into potions and poisons.” he pointed at a door across the way from the smith’s workshop, the symbol on it was a bubbling flask. I made a special notice for that one, as alchemy was amongst my personal short-list for desirable professions.

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“But if you don’t want to deal with all those strange smells and funky ingredients, I mean, would you want to drink a potion if you knew that it had eyes of a newt in it?” he paused for a moment, looking disgusted, “If you don’t want that, you could talk to Grethra, she’s a great cook and can teach you how to prepare a feast that makes the gods weep.” he looked rather wistfully at that, gesturing to a nearby door.

“If you are interested in tinkering and creating all kinds of strange devices, Khussin can teach you all about that, the old Tinker has his workshop down the hallway, fifth door on the left.” the dwarf continued.

“Or you could talk to Mibena, she’s quite skilled in engraving runes into items, allowing her to enchant them, strengthening them or changing them in their entirety. But that is a tough road to walk, if you are curious, her workshop is back there.” he gestured again, further into the hallway.

“Similar to what Mibena does, there’s Belynn, he’s working on some sort of temporary enchantments that you carefully inscribe onto a piece of parchment beforehand. Then, once you need it, you can draw out the enchantment from the parchment, using it to strengthen yourself or something along those lines. I don’t fully understand what he does, but it sounds interesting.” After pointing to another door, he stopped talking, looking as if he was considering what to say next, so I prodded him a little, there were still professions I was curious about.

“What about those who gather resources for all those people?”

“Oh, they have someone in their shop who can explain that to you. For example, if you are interested in gathering wood and understanding how to treat the wood you harvest to keep it in a good shape, there’s Barim, who works out of Marlum’s shop.” he explained and I thought I had a good idea where to find which profession.

Now, I just needed to decide what to learn, after the problem I had previously considered, namely that whatever I crafted, it would be worse than what a dedicated crafter could make, there were three professions that stood out to me. One was cooking, the other alchemy and lastly scribing spells onto scrolls. Either of those would allow me to craft consumables, to be used at my leisure.

While I thought that I would be willing to put in a lot of effort for, say, an endgame-weapon, I doubted that I would be willing to put in comparable effort into acquiring every single health-potion or food-item. I would need to find out what food actually did in the game, if it was merely a direct control goody, allowing people who directly controlled their characters to experience something interesting, I wouldn’t be too interested, but if it actually did something, I might be.

But that was only part of what I had to consider, another part was actually doing the craft. Scribing sounded like it was incredibly dependant on your manual dexterity, making me wonder if it would be a good idea to pursue. While that was true for all of them, I felt that maybe cooking would be the best fit, especially as it was something I enjoyed in the real world.

What I already had decided was that one of my professions would be a gathering skill, either some sort of herb-gathering for alchemy or whatever was linked to cooking, maybe some sort of butchering or harvesting profession. Either would be fine with me, I just wanted to be able to gather my own resources. I even considered taking two gathering professions but somehow, that seemed a little boring. Sure, it would likely be the best option in the beginning, allowing me to get the most coin early on, but still, there was a part of me that resisted. I wanted to have some sort of profession that I could actually use, not just something that happened while I was out.

“Thank you, Master Dwarf. I will have to consider what to learn, there are so many options.” I told the dwarf who had helped me. He gave me a solemn nod, before adding some more words of wisdom.

“You should consider it carefully, maybe even talk to the craftspeople. They know their professions like nobody else and might be able to help you decide.”

I gave him a nod in reply, before turning and slowly walking away, mentally flipping a coin between alchemy and cooking. After a moment, I came to a decision, I would go with cooking. Part of it was the usefulness, part of it was the fact that I enjoyed cooking in the real world, and finally, there was another part. The incongruity of the vicious, brutal Orc Barbarian, putting on an apron and whipping up some pastries. The mental image alone was enough to make me chuckle, so it was certainly a plus. Of course, the mental image of the vicious, brutal Orc Barbarian putting on a lab coat and thick nerd-glasses, before messing around with delicate glassware to brew just the right potion was just as funny, but I liked the other a little more. So, I would learn how to cook.

Maybe even how to cook humans.