“I’m not so naïve as to believe that your position on its viability has changed.” Faycez said, tone meticulously even. “Which means that there’s some other set of circumstances in play.”
Geria nodded, slowly. “For general purposes, it absolutely has not.” The word was spoken with a lot more vitriol than Deyana had expected from her. “Even for boss-killing, the time involved with the creation of inscriptions on the fly is far too much of an investment for it to be worth it… or, more importantly, safe. All of which to say that I have a much more positive view of it than most; there is a situation where it may be the best solution.”
Faycez’s single raised eyebrow didn’t give much away, but the tightening of his hand on Symphir’s shoulder and her angry lean forward were much more informative. “Oh?”
Geria just bowled through it, though. “World bosses. Far enough out that things can be prepared from a… relatively safe distance, with a team protecting the crafters. Predictable enough that we can be certain to be in its path. Powerful enough that a hundred meter square enchantment would not be wasted. It would… I think I will not be changing my mind on the efficacy of use in exploration, but for this? It is useful.”
Faycez blinked, then titled his head as a slow, slight smile worked its way onto his face. “Your assessment may change after you see what I need to show you for that. What you’re asking for… ritual magic… it shows up in some of the Olympian-era scraps. A lot of people have spent a lot of time trying to replicate it. It’s… both simpler and much more difficult than people think. I assume you’ll be powering it?”
“I was under the impression that nobody else would be able to,” Geria said, “Though the way you phrased that makes me think it may not be the case.”
“I did the math on this a few months ago. It needs a pure mana-specialized person at least level one-fifty to even stand a chance at powering one of those, and even that is… We make the mana storage rune first, then you pump that while the rest of the crafting happens around you.”
“Ah. I will be powering it, then.”
Deyana stepped in. “We do have other people helping, but one-fifty is pretty high-level. And you know that pure mana specialization is pretty rare.”
Symphir looked annoyed again, but Faycez just laughed. “For good reason! Especially at low levels. I think I’ve figured out why the devs have been so quiet about everything, and–”
“Okay, no sharing the secrets of the universe before we even do one deal! So, y’all are going to get me a rune setup, great. What’s in it for him?”
Faycez turned slightly to look at Symphir. “This is a fairly good deal–”
“The purple’s nice, yeah. But we both know you could do the tattoos, now that we’re keyed onto it.”
He made a face. “I could. I’d need to do quite a bit of research–”
“There’s only two big things,” Deyana said. With the way he was talking, he didn’t seem terribly likely to back out of the deal, which left her feeling it was better to show expertise than conceal a tiny bit of information.
“Still, might be harder to find than I’d like. And I suspect that Deyana here has a much better idea of what we actually need to do for you. Those alone are worth hours.”
“But you’re–”
“I would be doing this either way, so…”
Geria sighed. “What do you want, for him? We cannot even discuss a request that does not exist.”
Symphir went quiet for a second. “It’s tempting to ask for a generic favor, but we do have something.”
Faycez scoffed. “If you don’t want me to give away the secrets of the universe, that’s a poor choice of trade.”
“Where the hell else are we going to find high-level support? We’re sure as fuck not going to the guilds.”
Deyana shook her head. There was obviously much more to this pair than she’d been thinking, but it wasn’t terribly relevant. “This is going to be a lot of work, and we don’t get to schedule the boss, so I’d like to have it done as soon as possible. Geria, do you think he’d agree?”
“Yes.”
“Then sure. Mutually assured destruction means I’d prefer to tell us where whatever this thing is is, but I can understand if you don’t.”
Geria’s message came almost immediately after she finished speaking, without a hint that she’d been accessing her interface.
‘Are you sure about this? It’s pretty far in their favor.’
‘With what Faycez has been saying? 10:1 he’s finally found the world plot.’
‘It has been a year since something big has turned up, I suppose…’
The other two must have been conferring in a very similar way, because all four were silent for a while. Finally, Symphir nodded, and Faycez spoke. “Let’s get started, then. I’ve got tools in the back.”
He stood, walking towards the hallway that Symphir had come out from, heading to the room next door to it instead. When he opened the door (a process that involved him touching three different places on the door and activating runes– link runes, which, combined with the fact that the opposite side of the door didn’t have any visible inscription led Deyana to think that whatever those three sets were, they were on the inside of the door.) it revealed a room that, besides the much smaller testing space and lack of a materials store, put the Runewriter’s Guild to shame.
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
Several workbenches were scattered around the outside of the room, many covered in obviously in-progress projects on a variety of materials. The real shock, to Deyana, was how few of them were anything that could be considered combat-oriented.
One set of wood panels that looked suspiciously like a disassembled door, one metal tube under a strange contraption she’d only seen twice before, that would allow the runewriter a much greater degree of control over their motions than could be achieved with merely steady hands. The collection of multiple styles of geometric implements, stencils of several runes (likely those the two were specialized in), and a cutting machine next to a workstation with four monitors left little doubt as to this being one of the things he focused on in the game.
Less sensible, though, was what appeared to be something close to an entire chemistry set connecting one large barrel hanging at about head height to another on the floor, going through a series of steps she couldn’t even begin to guess at. Actively running, too– some sort of flow chemistry that she couldn’t begin to guess at.
Faycez waved his hand as he walked to the computer. “Don’t mind the mess, please. I’ve been distracted on other things, lately.”
Stepping over to it herself, taking note of the drawing tablet and highly runed hand scanner attached to the computer, Deyana clicked her tongue. “I’ve been messier than this, and I’m in the seventies.” Geria, meanwhile, walked past them both to stare at the chemistry thing.
Faycez chuckled. “Haven’t we all? Are you specialized in this purple of yours?”
“I am.”
He didn’t even pause, just grabbed the scanner and pointed it at her. It beeped, and she saw |Merge| appear on the screen, along with some of the details she’d discovered about it, though significant sections of the notes that appeared were more scrambled messes than anything useful. Faycez quickly highlighted those sections, deleting and replacing them with “n/a” or “unknown” about as fast as Deyana was able to pick them out.
“You know, when I built this she claimed I was being ridiculous about fault tolerances.”
From behind her, Deyana heard Symphir scoff. “It was ridiculous! Half the credits we had went into this thing. And I know you can manually input that!”
“We’re doing her part first, right?”
Faycez nodded. “Hey, Symph. Privacy settings.”
For a moment, the only sound in the room were the operation sounds of the computer. “I forgot she'd need that.”
Deyana turned to look at Symphir, who looked surprisingly conflicted about that for barely wearing any clothes, and raised an eyebrow. “I doubt there’s anything I haven’t seen before. Unless you somehow convinced the AI of something really strange.”
The other girl smiled, wanly, then shook her head. “No, it’s just. Trans.”
Deyana found herself nodding along. “Well, that makes sense.”
“Excuse me?”
“Well, your body shape…”
“What?”
“Um. It’s just–”
Deyana found herself cut off by Faycez’s cackling laughter as he stopped working. “Oh my god. I told you!”
“It’s not my fault!” Symphir responded, visibly reddening. “The… I…”
“It’s shockingly close to her real-life body, Deyana. She didn’t really take advantage of any the many, many ways to be less conspicuous that I recommended. Like shrinking those damn things!”
Symphir was just getting redder, and Deyana decided to throw her a line. “Hmm. Then I suppose it’s good to know about every bit of extra external surface area, but I do hope we don’t need to use it. Unless, of course, you want something specific there?”
Maybe a weighted line.
Symphir didn’t even respond verbally, turning to face the wall, but the friend request she received immediately afterwards told Deyana that it at least hadn’t been too far. It made sense to her; it was much easier to manage individual privacy settings from the friends list than directly in the privacy menus, but if she’d been insulted by that Symphir definitely could have done so. She accepted without a moment of hesitation, turning back to Faycez’s screen as he finished up the work with |Merge|, obviously trying to hold back laughter. Poorly.
“I assume you have a scan of her for armor already?”
He pressed a key, quickly typed something, and a CAD-like view of Symphir’s body, wearing what appeared to be her standard armor loadout, appeared on the center monitor. He quickly split it off, leaving her body in the center and moving each piece of armor and weaponry to the other three monitors, each one labelled with a summary of what each rune group did. “It does help to have, but I imagine I’m going to be redoing large parts of it.”
Deyana shrugged, leaning in to look over Faycez’s shoulder, reading off the descriptions of the different items. “Can you unroll her? Label the parts, too.”
Symphir’s near-whisper of “Unroll?” went summarily ignored.
“It’ll take me a second. The model’s not built for that.”
“At least he knows what it means, apparently.”
“That should not be terribly surprising” Geria murmured, closer to Deyana than she’d remembered.
“I need to read what she’s used to anyw–” Deyana found herself interrupted by a stool smacking into the back of her legs, causing her to fall back into it. “Thanks, Geria. If it’s something she’s too unused to it’ll just throw her off. Probably worth learning. What’s she specialized in?”
“Can’t you ask me?” Symphir said, sounding annoyed. Deyana didn’t check, absorbed in reading the effects of the armor she’d been using.
It was insane.
“Probably. If you’d share, I need to know what you’re specialized in and what your goals are primarily, with a secondary focus on what you think we should export to the armor. The stuff on your skin is going to be relatively cheaper, but it’s going to tingle to use. It’s not terrible, but you’re going to notice.”
Self-repairing. Strength-increasing bound to the limbs– especially near where they connected to the ball joint– and lower torso, with durability much more spread out, needing to be duplicated to the armor itself. No healing, which would usually be a bit strange, but the health-focus of its wearer would have made that a waste. It took her a while to find how she was dealing with more elemental attacks, at least until she got to the strange ribbon she’d seen working its way around the body.
The actual runes were almost too tightly packed to understand, and she ended up deferring to the explanation instead. Each type of energy, it stated, would be absorbed, triggering a timed logic flag, then go through a series of transformations down the back side of the ribbon to turn purely physical energies into mana. An extremely lossy process, it would then spend that mana to increase its wearer’s durability against that energy type by linking to the underclothes, combining with some of the user's mana at the same time– actually, mostly the user’s mana, in a different ratio for each different energy… She didn’t understand it immediately, needing to trace the whole setup again a few times before she finally figured it out.
“It’s adaptive! It’s too small to absorb all the energy, and that’s a percentage…” Deyana paused, then turned to face Symphir. “I’m very sorry. I got distracted.”
Symphir sighed, a complicated look on her face. “It’s fine. Crafters… it should have been obvious. Can you pay attention to me now?”
Deyana didn’t even try to hide her smile. “One could argue I was! But um. Yes. Let’s go over your list.”