Lyn:

My fourth day with the Engineer's Guild was going less than swimmingly.

Over the past few days we had worked out how to make my Fireworks more accurate and less explosive, but working out how to reload the things in a timely manner was being all sorts of difficult. The engineers had taken to calling the new weapon a 'rifle', and while it was undoubtedly effective, it was also a pain to use more than once.

While their knowledge of physics and mechanics was a huge help, it turns out that what I'm making isn't actually something that should work. The primarily force holding it all together and allowing these things to go off is actually my power as The Armsmaster. For a while I had almost thought I had found my calling, but it turned out I had been cheating the whole time.

I laid my head down on the workbench and screamed.

Colin jerked at the sudden noise. He'd been working with me most closely, and had been probably the biggest support I'd had, overall. It had been his idea to shrink the whole thing down enough that I wouldn't have to spend as long setting up every shot.

"None of that," he said, "time spent screaming in frustration here is probably better spent working on something else."

"All we've managed to do is move to time it took to set it up to the back-end, after it's fired!" I complained. "That's not actually speeding things up at all!"

"That's not entirely true," he said. "We also made it less likely to kill your brother. Unless you miss. Don't miss."

"I'm so jealous," I continued. "Everyone else got awesome magic powers and I got an enchanted picnic basket that never runs out of bombs but also destroy everything in the area."

Colin sighed, and put down the gadget he was working on. "Well that seems like an awesome magical power in and of itself," he said. "What are the space constraints?"

"None that I've seen," I said. "I fit my brother in there and from what he said it was an endless void with bombs floating everywhere, as far as he could see."

"You fit your brother in there?" he asked. "I've seen him, he's huge. How strong are you?"

"Not very," I said. "It seems to... ignore... weight...?" I trailed off, lost in thought.

Colin picked up his gadget and started tinkering with it again as my thoughts carried me away. I have a seemingly endless extradimensional space I carry around with me, and weight doesn't matter. The only issue is if I can pull something out of the opening, and this rifle was small enough to fit. An idea struck me like a runaway carriage.

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"I've got the answer," I said, starting to gather up materials.

"What's the answer?" Colin asked.

"I don't need to figure it out," I said.

Colin looked up at me, looking a bit lost. "That doesn't seem like a solution?"

"I have the basket," I explained. "I don't need to work out how to reload the rifles in a timely manner. I just need more rifles."

"Oh, I see!" Colin said, understanding entering his voice. "With more rifles you can just grab a fresh one with every shot!"

"Exactly!" I said. "It's so easy, I can't believe it didn't occur to me sooner!"

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A couple days later, I found myself in a cleared dirt training ground at the Acrobat's Guild. I was glad for The Armsmaster's Intuition, because this was definitely not something I would have naturally thought followed the construction of the rifles. Still, I was fairly sure if I learned some of their tricks, it would open up whole new realms of possibility in the abilities I'm able to learn outside of just inventing new things.

The first wooden ball came rocketing out at me from directly in front, easy enough to stop with a shot of my rifle. The ball was quickly followed with another, this time to my right. It very nearly reached me, but I was able to bat it away with the barrel of the rifle, with a satisfying clunk. I struck down a third ball, but the rifle wasn't able to keep up with the pressure, and the barrel broke free of the handle. Shit.

Another ball came flying out to hit me, undeterred by my mechanical issues. I jumped up, kicking it back with a backflip as I reached into my basket to retrieve another rifle. I shot yet another orb out of the air as I descending, spinning with a flourish. This was a mistake.

In my spin, the rifle drug across the ground, catching my attention at just the wrong moment. One of the balls hit me in the back, followed by another in the side. Three more hit me before the onslaught stopped.

"What was that?!" the acrobatics instructor I'd been working with shouted out one the dust cleared. "Why would you spin like that with something that big extended out?!"

"Style points?" I asked more than said. "It seemed like a good idea at the time."

"It doesn't seem like such a good idea now, does it?" she yelled. "Be glad those were wooden balls and not claws or fireballs!"

"Why couldn't we use, like, pillows or something?" I asked. These things really hurt.

"Then you wouldn't learn!" she yelled back. "Let's try it again, from the top!"

"Hold on," I said. "As glad as I am for your help, I need to head back to the workshop and adjust some things on the rifles to make them better able to keep up, here." I looked at the broken rifle, where I had dropped it. Also, I should work on the bindings because they are apparently awfully fragile as far as bludgeoning implements go.

"If you say so," the instructor said. "I'll see you tomorrow for your last day of training, and see what kind of crazy engineer gadgets you bring then."