The following day, the creation of his guild was on the first page of both of the newspapers.
‘A Magus’ Aid’ put the headline as ‘Athena’s Forge, A Guild Full Of Mystery’. The article stated some of the known facts about Villin. It also mentioned the rumors but didn’t confirm any of them, focusing more on the facts at hand.
As for ‘Todays Oddities’ their headline was ‘The Traiterous Student’s Guild. Athena’s Forge.’ Their article was focusing heavily on his suspected affiliation with Elinoire Decorus, it was clear the paper wanted to rile people up so they would keep buying from them.
Ignoring this, Villin made his way to the guild hall. The room had slightly expanded to one side and a wooden stall was now standing there. All it said was ‘Athena’s Forge’ on a wooden sign above the open window. Villin immediately commissioned the guild ‘The Silver Stoneworkers’. It was a small guild that focused on building things. They were the ones generally commissioned to create stone constructs, Villin paid them a thousand magic crystals, a stellar amount, in return they would create a great building according to his conditions.
Since the ceiling was so high up, Villin decided to go with a tower design. Each floor would house a different team for a total of four teams. In actuality Villin would’ve preferred to expand horizontally as well, making a grand workshop, but in order to expand the guild needed to have a certain amount of reputation, a newly formed guild obviously couldn’t do this.
Having four floors was already quite good, the building would be visible from large parts of the room. There was plenty of space to make more floors as well but Villin was afraid that any more might affect the stability of the construct.
The top floor would be Villin’s private workplace, he would probably be spending most of his time there once it was completed. The third floor was for runology. Anything to do with runes would be practiced there. Since Villin was specialized in this field, it was important for him to have it close, after all, he would also be the head of this division, and Rein would be vice-head for when Villin wasn’t available.
The second floor was for the studies of the web. Anyone working on spells and trying to class nodes would be at work there, Kayley would be the head of this division. Kayley also decided to buy and place two stations used to make pills there. Villin was glad about this because he didn’t have a floor yet to practice other non-runic arts.
Lastly, the first floor was the combat and sales floor. Once more Villin was forced to put two different arts together for a lack of space. They decided to pretty much just split the floor in two, one side would have a window where members of the guild would place their products, these would then be sold. As for the combat team, they discussed ways to increase overall combat prowess, not just using certain spells but also by combining all the divisions within the guild.
This would mean that they might say that member 7’s enchanted sword would be extremely useful when combined with the new pill made by pill-maker 2. The division would be led by Amelia, people in this division would probably also belong to different divisions. This way Villin hoped they would be able to create unity while still having different decisions.
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Overall Villin estimated every floor would be able to allow four people to work comfortably, up to six if they didn’t mind being in each other’s way every now and again.
Of course, everything he had planned was still a pipe-dream right now. After all, they didn’t have any members other than the four of them. But honestly, Villin wasn’t too worried about it. He decided to just focus on doing their own thing, for now, once a month had passed and the rumors had calmed down a bit he would be able to give the guild proper attention. He honestly thought he should be able to make this thing work, even with all the disadvantages they had.
Villin was also glad the group wouldn’t have to be in a room with Elinoire anymore soon, ever since she tried to steal from them they felt uneasy when she was around.
The two weeks that followed passed by quickly. The tower was finished and looking good, the only thing that was missing was their crests, but this very same day, the grade-holder handed them their new crests, they were of Kayley’s design.
The crest was rather complex, In the front were a wand and a pen crossed, behind these two was a cauldron with a pill inside it. And connecting everything and rounding the crest up into a circle was a silver halo.
Villin thought it looked nice and so they went with it. And now they could finally wear their own crests when walking about.
Despite this, there wasn’t exactly a lot of walking around. Villin and Rein were working on the new puppet alongside their spells. Villin had to do most of the work on the puppet but there were a number of things Rein could do while he was practicing his spells. Rein actually proved himself to be very capable when it came to magic arrays, he was very fast in making them shortening the time more than expected.
Villin figured that if he had to make the puppet on his own it would take around twenty days. He had already made it once after all. But with Rein’s help, this number was shortened to two weeks, hell, they would probably be able to make a second puppet if they wanted to.
Villin actually considered doing so for a bit but decided against it, in the upcoming event he wanted to show the quality of his work, having one or two puppets had little difference.
And so, the two set out to improve the puppet further. Rein focused on finding ways to improve the magic arrays that stood on their own, some of which worked and others failed, Villin spent time using the technique he had gotten from professor Crumb to hide the runes beneath the surface, this way nobody would be able to easily copy the puppet without properly studying it.
While they were doing this, the two girls were also extremely busy. Kayley spent a lot of her time working on pill-making, she didn’t have any practical experience in the mortal world and wanted to make up for that, her tests provided great results.
As for Amelia, she did two things. For one she managed to join the ‘Cut and Crease’ team and spent a decent amount of time practicing this. Other than that she also worked on the guild. She used some of her crystals to buy more things the guild tower would need, she also started talking to a number of students, increasing their reputation in the eyes of other students.
There were only two weeks left until Villin would have to go to the Lannister household to take place in a little competition and meet other runemasters. He was feeling quite confident about this until two days ago when professor Crumb told him something.
He would be expected to bring along a date.