The sounds of birds chirping, the winds whirring, and water rushing nearby wake me from the surprisingly restful sleep I was having. I don’t remember there being water nearby, so where is the sound coming from? I look over to see Gus’s foot as he is pissing behind a nearby tree. Yuck. “Couldn’t you have gone further away. You woke me up to the sound of you peeing”, I say, shooting him an irritated look, but he simply replies peering around the tree with a smug look on his face saying, “I just didn’t want to let you get lost again”. God, he is such an irritant. He’s missing something. “Did you shave your head?”, I ask. “Yep, if you aren’t gifted then you have to make due with your next best option”, he says while rubbing his shaven head. “Now that you’re awake though, let’s get a move on. We have at least two more days of walking to get to New Dale”. Looking around, I see everything has been packed up and is ready to go. Gus must be an early bird.
The day passed on without much commotion. As both of us walked, we talked quite a bit about many different subjects. The main subject was what gems both of us had. He said his gem was create: armament: battle axe. With battle axe being a part of the armament class, and all armaments are a part of the creation class. The base powers available at the start are the ability to create an energy axe that he can control. The means of control differ for each person, but the style he uses is the flowing blade. Apparently, there are multiple different styles for controlling energy weapons, and his style is designed for fast, accurate strikes. The main weakness of it though is that it heavily lacks power. The counter style being that of the sanguine blade. The sanguine blade got its name from the fact that the stance cuts into the users hands since it is the only stance that actually grips the energy weapon, and when being used by someone inexperienced it can lead to the person harming themselves in the process. Most of these self-inflicted injuries occur by accidentally cutting off or through their own hands due to the hilt also being formed from the energy that the blade is. Each energy weapon still deals damage when in contact with anything it can harm, but the blade of the weapon is where most of the power is focused in each strike. The main benefit is that wielding the weapon in direct contact with the gem arm greatly increases its power. There are a few other stances to note, but those are the two most popular stances.
The battle axe gem also benefits heavily in the ability to create magical items through the create class that aren’t just tied in with the battle axe class, but the further away the item is from the main identity of the gem the harder it is to create anything of quality for those items. When I was trying to get more information of what he meant by magical items and such, he told me to just wait for us to get to New Dale. It would be much easier to see what he meant than to have it explained. Aside from the ability to create magical items, he was saying that his gem was overall quite weak. He kept talking about the upgrades being rather useless for his gem.
He said that gems get rated on their power, mobility, durability, utility, application, and progression. This is how he rated his gem:
Power: 4, Mobility: 3, Durability: 4, Utility: 6, Application: 8, Progression: 2
It got a 4 in power because while it is able to do damage and be offensive it gets trounced by any and all actual offensive gems. Only the extremely skilled swordsmen are able to compete with other gems.
Mobility was rated as a 3 because there are no mobility advantages to be had except at the expert level. This meant that there was an expert level mobility technique to be learnt. When I pressed him to try and show me he gave in and attempted the technique. Materializing the axe at his feet he hopped onto it, and raised it a few feet into the air. The whole time he was wobbling like crazy. I asked him to try and go forward which he did. Moving slower than a walk he haphazardly inched forward and then came down. He said if you are able to master that you can go crazy fast and have a lot of maneuverability, but that still would only amount to a mobility rank of 6. I had asked if he had seen anyone capable of that technique and only a handful of eternals could, but one of his previous teachers of the flowing blade style was capable of it.
Durability earned the same rank as power due to the same reasoning being defensive styles provide a ton of defense against anything that isn’t an actual offensive gem.
Utility earned a higher score of 6 due to the fact that being a part of the create class allows the creation of many magical tools that can provide utility in and outside of combat.
Application stood for the gems ability to be applied to different roles, such as you could be a soldier, blacksmith, carpenter, lumberjack, sell sword, and many other roles. Compared to the fire gem I had previously which wasn’t the most employable. That is why his gem earned such a high score of 8 in application, but progression was the worst rated stat for his gem, with a score of 2. Since his gem allowed for the creation of magical equipment as well for some reason it meant that upgrading it and progressing the gem to anything specialized was a major pain and a waste of resources. I asked him to go further into how upgrading and progressing a gem worked, but he said once we get to New Dale we would visit a 'stem' of the tree and I would see for myself. I hate how he tries to be mysterious at times, it's really annoying.
After that I had asked him what my gems would be rated, and he really didn’t know. My left gem was the one that activated with my voice, and apparently he hasn’t seen that one used much really, he just remembers reading about it in a book. My right gem I still hadn’t used yet and I really hadn’t looked at it much. The gem seemed to have the character for lens, reflection, and light in it. Gus was very interested when he saw the gem. He said he had this gem for around two years a long time ago, and it was a lot of fun, but kind of hard to use. He had rated my lens gem the following:
Power: 2-7, Mobility: 0, Durability: 2, Utility: 10, Application: 4, Progression: 8.
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The offensive power depended heavily on how skilled the user was. The main offensive technique people with this gem would normally use, was utilizing multiple lenses to create a strong laser to blast through their foes. Creating a laser was easy enough, but due to the dynamics of battle it was very difficult to be able to land a lethal blow. This is why the power rating of the gem varies so much.
Sadly, this gem provides no additional mobility to the user, so it earns a score of 0 in mobility.
Durability earns a 2 because it provides nearly no defensive techniques that boost you as the user. The only defensive technique that it has is the deployment of lenses as shields. The lenses are durable enough to absorb one hit each, but they are typically destroyed after that hit. Utilizing a lens as a shield creates a lack in power due to the time the lens is used as a shield and the time needed to materialize another lens. Creating a new lens after one is destroyed is typically around ten seconds of full concentration, to a minute while engaged in combat.
Utility is able to get a max score of 10 simply because of how limitless the amount of tools are at your disposal with this gem. Gus walked me through how to do a few of his favorite tricks that he still remembered when he had this gem, such as creating a mirror, creating a one way mirror, blinding an individual, and even having yourself be perceived as nearly invisible. Each one of these techniques built upon the previous. The mirror takes the light waves it is hit with and absorbs them, it then shoots them back out providing the same output a mirror would have. The main difference is that a normal mirror doesn’t absorb the light, it just reflects it back, and this gem mimics that through a different method. The one way mirror works by having the data of the light hit on the mirror side copied and displayed on both sides. The fact that light data is able to be absorbed, recorded, and output rather than actually being reflected allows for the ability to appear invisible.
In order to appear invisible to a single target you need a lens behind you and one in front of you. Both of these lenses are one way mirrors, but the light each is outputting is the light data from the other. Therefore, all the light between these two mirrors isn’t displayed. Which in short, means that you can become invisible to whoever you want. This along with many other techniques easily allows it to earn its high rating of 10 in utility.
Even though it has great utility, the applications for this gem aren’t very high. Outside of combat the best thing it has going for it is the ability to create high temperatures. You most likely won’t see anyone having this gem. Since the power, mobility, and durability all start off so low no one really takes it for combat. Outside of combat there are gems that are able to reach higher temperatures easier than this gem, so no one really takes it for that either. The only real reason I could see someone taking this gem is because they’re a peeping tom, and even then there are better gems for that. Don’t ask me how I would know such a thing.
Lastly, the progression for this gem is actually pretty good. Gus didn’t delve into it too much, he said that I’d be able to see for myself in New Dale. All he said was that he got a huge upgrade last time that was able to store light in a lens to be used later. I actually can’t wait to get to New Dale to see what he was talking about with upgrades and such. It sounds really exciting.
Most of the day had flown by while we were walking and talking. We had traveled about half way down the mountain and New Dale was now in sight. Flowing down the mountain parallel to us now was a decently sized river. The water was moving too fast for us to be able to cross, but luckily we wouldn’t need to cross at any point to get to the city. The sound of the flowing river helped to provide a calming background sound as we progressed our trip. During the time we spent walking, I was able to test out how to use the lens gem with the help of Gus.
The maximum number of lenses I could create was three. Gus said that later on I could upgrade the number, but really anything past five lenses is really hard to use. Each one of these lenses could have their diameter, focal length, shape, and type of lens changed. The larger the diameter, the harder it was to move, but it allowed for more light to be absorbed and output by it. Changing the focal length changed the magnification of the lens. The further the focal length the greater the magnification. The higher the magnification the greater the heat from a light ray. The main issue with applying this was that the further one of my lenses was from me, the slower and more effort it took for me to manipulate it. Changing the shape of a lens was a little difficult and took some time to get used to, but in the end I kind of got it figured out. It would only take me around a minute to turn any of my lenses into a kind of complex shape. The easier it was to imagine in my head the quicker it was. I don’t really know what use turning these lenses into a random shape would have, but I can do it, so I guess it doesn’t matter much. Changing the lens type wasn’t too bad to learn. The main things to learn was how to make a flat, diverging, and converging lens. Each one of these didn’t absorb the light as data, but worked as normal lenses. This method required the least amount of effort to produce a light ray that could cause some damage.
In an effort to test out how to make a light ray, I used one of my lenses on a rock while we were taking a break from the walk. It wasn’t very difficult to heat it. I did multiple tests to see which one was easiest for me, and which one provided the best results. Each time I made sure to alter the focus of it on the center of the rock, so that it would achieve the most heat. When trying to heat from very close it didn’t work too well, but once I sent the lens to the sky, it really did the trick. It still took a few seconds to heat the rock before it was red hot. Trying to test out a few different things, I took two lenses and having the two separated heated the rock again. The time it took to heat was faster, and the rock also was able to get hotter. I tried again, this time having the light from one lens magnify into the other, and then into the rock. This provided an extreme result. The rock quickly melted into a slag like material, bubbling as it did so. After that experiment, I had asked Gus if I could try to cut a tree in half with the laser. He said no…, but he did allow me to laser the river. I started with just one lens, and didn’t really have any good results. After that I pulled out the big guns with the two lenses, with one beaming into the other. That only resulted in a bit of steam being released from where the laser was on the raging river.
Gus said the river would be similar to any opponents I would have. In a fight, no one is just going to stand still and allow themselves to be lasered to death. Instead they would be constantly moving, and even if they graze the laser it wouldn’t be enough to kill or even seriously injure an opponent. The set up to even aim the lenses at the stationary target took about a minute, which when talking in terms of combat, sometimes it's over before a minute has even passed. I was a little skeptical, coming up with excuses as to how I could set up ways to get the enemy when they are unaware, but he reminded me of the crucial fact that we aren’t always the ones hunting. Sometimes we are the ones being hunted. To prove his point, he insisted upon a mock battle.