As I walked down the hall, which had long since been overcome by nature, I couldn’t help but think of the last time I had been here, it must have been five or more years at this point. John had called me asking me to meet him here as he had something he wanted to show me.

When I arrived John was waiting in the parking lot, he greeted me and I returned the greetings. Then I asked him why he had asked me to come here.

“Well, me and some people I know have been working on a project in our off time, and it’s finally at the point where it makes sense to show it to people.”

‘Well that’s interesting’ I thought, there really weren’t that many reasons to show me something he’s working on, he must be rather proud of it.

We arrived at a door, he gestured to it and said “here we are, it’s right through here.” He opened the door and I saw what he had wanted to show me, It was a suit of armor. This wasn’t just any set of armour however it was a suit of armour I had designed that was based off of the Iron Man armour, the thing about it and why I considered it a foolish notion was the sheer detail the design required yet there it was, I stared at it in frack amazement,

“why? Why did you make this of all things?” John laughed “yeah, I thought that might be your reaction. As to why we did it, well I really really just had the urge to do a metal working project and I remembered that you had dome this design a while back and I thought yeah that seems like a reasonable project.”

I just stared at him, my head spinning, “so this is what you chose to make?” I spluttered, “it has several thousand pieces, it was just supposed to be a thought experiment.” This might have continued had John not decided to go ahead and explain, “it took us a couple of months to get it done, I have a whole shop back here, so it was relatively easy to source parts, go into the back and cut out the piece you need then sand and fold them into shape.” While he talked I got over my shock and walked up to take a closer look the armour, “what’s it made of?” “We used Steel for the interior support structure, copper wire for connecters, and aluminum for the outer plating. We made it as a show piece really not for any practical purpose. Though I feel if we were to put it up for sale we might make a really nice profit.”

----

As I walked down the hallway, it felt somber, that was the last time I had seen John. It had been less than a day after the meeting with John that the world changed.

We called it the Sundering, there was no warning, no sign we just started seeing things in the news or out our windows that defied common sense monsters, beasts, horrors. In the first days no one knew what was going on conventional weapons were useless against them. We were losing badly before we found the things that did work, the main thing was that there were those among us who could wield magic.

With the arrival of magic and monsters modern civilization collapsed, and society became something new, strength was the only respected thing. The times following were turbulent and bloody, yet humanity survived. People organized, grew, and fought groups came together and began hunting monsters or they grouped up to create settlements and survive. In recent years the situation has stabilized, a balance of sorts was reached between humans and the environment and then humanity took the initiative adapting to the new world and they began to thrive. People who had gained great power lead the charge against the monsters retaking parts of the world, most of those that led the charge were those who worked in groups or had backers. However not all of the powerful fought in that war, those who did were those who believed in humanity or had an obligation to. By the time of the campaign I was one of if not the single most powerful people on the planet, and I had grown bored, so I began to look for new things, new frontiers to explore and conquer. In the end I found my answer at my roots.

When magic came no one knew what to do, but some lucky or talented individuals found their mana, their magic. I was one of the lucky few and through diligent exploration and a bit of luck I found I had an aptitude for the magics of the earth in particular magics relating to metal. With the knowledge of my affinity in hand, as well as my goal of surviving, I became one of in not the most powerful on the planet.

In the early days I learned many things for one the monsters that came with the Sundering would give up a part of their strength to whomever killed them. The power gained from hunting the beast was shared between all those who killed the beasts, I never worked with others this allowed me to gain power at an incredible rate as I never had to share the spoils, I could never hunt some of the most powerful beasts as I worked alone but this method worked for me and eventually I was strong enough, their were no reasonable challenges left.

As there were no challenges left for me to face I lost my sense of purpose. What was there left to do with my days, if not hunting and gaining strength? Before the sundering I had loved designing things and built my career around building, I had also loved reading, but where did these things fit into a post-Sundering society? In time I had an epiphany, I was limiting myself, by conforming to standards of my fellows, so I left the hunt of beasts and turned to other things. I pondered long on what I might be able to do with my talents and once I realised that I had never cared about people. With this realisation I found a purpose, if my advancement through hunting had been moved beyond my reach I would change. I came up with a grand vision I would find a way to create monsters, for if I could create monsters I would be able to once again enjoy the hunt, it would also help my fellow man by giving them a worthy foe, or perhaps an early grave.

I turned to ways I might create monsters and found the fields of artificing and golem creation. Artificers imbue technology with magic creating wonderess devices; they make everything from wands to devices that produce mana. Golem makers on the other hand create automata that can follow commands and even become sentient. So I set about learning these fields, I had an easy time with it as I related closely to what I had done before the Sundering, I was an engineer. So I searched for information on applying technology to magic several people had done some work on it and I found several tomes on the subject, Tomes were the name given to magical books, another phenomena of the Sundering, the tomes had the basics. I then left to come here. Back to where I had last seen an active metalshop and one of my last pleasant memories of the time before and I hoped, A model I could experiment with.

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As I reached the door I looked around, there were sheets of metal in the back as well as an old school manufacturing area, there was a writing desk next to the door at which rested a corpse, likely John's corpse, and along the side walls there were assorted cabinets and shelves. On the opposite wall was a loading bay door. I decided the first thing was to bury the corpse, looking at the corpse I determined it had been John. My brief exertion of my Mana allowed my Mana to claim the metal in my surrounding, allowing me to manipulate it. Another act of magic opened the loading bay door and brought a sheet of metal over to me, this allowed me to load John’s corpse onto it and form a coffin. Then I used the surrounding metal to dig up a part of the pavement so that I could bury john there, this done I filled in the grave and formed words upon on of the sheets of metal using my magic to create a gravestone, one final exertion of Mana to shove the gravestone into the ground and I was ready to begin by work in earnest.

I walked back to the shop, closing the door behind me. I quickly used my magics to clean off the equipment and clean up the clutter in the workshop, I moved all of the dirt against a wall. I would be rebuilding the entire space anyway so a bit more mess wouldn’t really matter in the long run. The next task was to make the space workable. As I first needed a plan I began by reorganizing and remaking the room, first I formed a lot of the metal into ingots: shelves, cabinets, and the spare metal in the workshop. With my materials sorted for the moment I moved the suit of armour in the center of the room to the side of the door. The desk was expanded using the ingots to form a rather fancy adjustable desk system, this was then placed opposite the loading bay door. I smoothed out a portion of the remaining metal and used it to line the wall above the desk to create a makeshift bulletin board. After that I used the remaining metal to add several shelves to the corner of my workshop. Then I began furnishing the newly remade shop, I took my tomes and books out of my dimensional storage and placed them on the shelves I made for them. Paper followed the Books large graphing paper for my design and lined paper for notes, with the paper came writing utensils and my enhanced laptop. Some basic rune scribed lights from my storage finished my temporary office.

I decided I might as well make a plan as there were most certainly many things that needed to get done if I wanted to become a competent Artificer. I set a custom pencil to transcribe my words. “First I’ll need to determine where I will need to learn more, which in turn necessitates me defining my goal and what I'll need to accomplish it. While I'm here there are several things that need to be done. First I need to determine where I am going to settle down in the long term so I won’t be disturbed while working. Second, I feel as though there must be a way to create technologies that produce mana, and mimic the benefits of killing beasts. Finally I need to be able to get building once I get to wherever I’m going, this will require both materials and designs for a workshop. Off the top of my headI’m going to need plans for my quarters, a storage facility, a manufacturing area, a test area, and research facilities.” This much I thought was obvious and manageable. I'm relatively remote where i am so i’ll have some time to work uninterrupted. “Location will be important, I haven’t interest in all of my ‘fellows’ trying to steal my work, I believe that the more remote and harder my facility is to get to, the better. Another thing that should be noted is that humanity is well on it’s way to reclaiming the earth, barring another significant event it’s unavoidable really so earth’s surface really isn’t viable. This leaves two options, A deep underground facility or a facility off planet. Out of these options off planet seems the most effective though it presents several issues, the big one is there’s no Mana in space. O is i want to do this i’ll need to find a way to produce mana, this should be a relatively simple task, well comparatively. We know Mana is foriegn to this plane, so all that I’;; need to do to produce Mana is design a device that allowed regulated access to the Aether as the Mana plane is called.” The second goal I have has been smoothly translated into, The second goal I have relates to producing Mana and replicating mechanically the process by which killing beasts strengthens the killer. While I have several ideas I don't have the background knowledge to determine a workable feasible strategy, I will need to experiment and research to figure out how I’m going to do this so in the short term I should focus on research and producing mana. I can’t help but think it’ll take many years to figure out the second part of that. “The final task was for design, this will be a bit complicated. I don’t yet know where I will be moving. If I go to the asteroid belt I’ll have to design for a near 0g environment or if I would rather go to mars I'll need a sealed environment but not many other special requirements. Quite frankly if I can produce mana, working in the asteroid belt makes more sense and I'll have access to a lot of metal.” I had the pencil stop writing and used a bit of magic to stick it up above the desk. From what I’ve thought out, I should try to find a way to produce mana, this will give me more options to create things. To produce Mana will require connecting to the Aether, preferably in a controlled manner. Dimensional magic always requires an [Anchorpoint], a portal if you will. From the example of earth several things can be deduced: First, Mana only spreads so far from the source or anchor. Second, the density of Mana varies over locations on the globe. From the observations the next steps are clear; First I need to find where Mana enters the planet from and study it, so that I might learn to recreate the process. To find where Mana enters the planet is a tall order, but I have several ideas I can try. The core concept behind my plans is the fact that Mana density, while always present on the surface, varies density based on location ‘Zones’ or ‘Regions’ if you will. If I can map these Zones I can find a small zone to search so that I can find an [Anchorpoint] in a reasonable time. After giving this some thought, I divided a plan. I have Mana scanners so I can measure Mana density without having to travel the whole globe if I can automate the process. Creating platforms that record Mana density and location and then transcribe it onto something I can use shouldn’t be all that difficult. As long as I know the location of my metal and can see it I can control it, this means that what I need on the drone is a form of Simucoume spell to transfer the recorded Mana density, a locator spell, and maybe a viewing spell so I can keep direct track of it.

I start by forming a large sphere in the center of the room, this will represent earth, then after moving outside, I use my magic to rip some metal from the earth and refine it. I pull some Mana sensors and a set of rune carving tools out of my storage,I form a dish out of some of the metal and bring it down in front of me. I cut a hole out of the center to fit the mmana sensor, then brought a Mana sensor up before me, I disassembled the the sensor and rebuild it so that it scans in a narrow arch beneath the scanner and emits Mana based on the Mana density that it scans, his signal is produced in the side opposite the scanner so once the scanner is installed I create a transmission spell so that I can transmit the Mana level to myself A locator spell and a spell to lock lock objects relative to each other and the drone is done, I then begin work on it’s counterpart, the ‘Transcriber Drone’. The Transcriber Drone will record the Mana levels that the drone records onto the globe in my workshop. A spell to change the color of the metal beneath the drone based on the recorded Mana and the locator spells and simulacrum spells will allow me to create an accurate map by projecting recorded Mana levels onto the map I have. With creating the drones done I place the transcriber drone at the northernmost point of the globe in my workshop. Then I activate the survey drone and send it to the north pole of the earth, once it arrives there I activate the spells.