Jake awoke with a start.
The blackness that met his eyes startled him until he looked up and saw the moon staring back.
He carefully listened for any sounds of movement or anything that may have caused him to wake, but after a few moments of absolute silence Jake relaxed and rolled over into a sitting position.
He didn’t trust himself to stand up on the platform while so high in the air without being able to see clearly.
He began to contemplate what happened before he fell asleep. “I probably should have grabbed more from my car than just these energy bars, but it's too late now,” Jake thought as he ripped a bar out of its wrapper.
While snacking on his bar Jake considered the fight he ended up in the day before, if you could even call it that.
“I really need to learn how to not freeze up and rely so much on involuntary reaction when fighting, I'm really lucky that my elemental pool decided to manifest itself.”
After about fifteen minutes of berating himself mentally, Jake figured that he had beat himself up over the situation enough already and could make better use of his time.
At this point, the sky was becoming brighter and Jake pulled out his phone to check the time.
Clicking the power button impatiently, Jake saw the screen of his phone light up in the waning darkness, unfortunately, it was only to display a “battery low, please plug in your device” screen.
“Great, my phone is dead…” Shaking his head in exasperation, Jake decided he might as well experiment with his abilities until it was bright enough to climb down the ladder safely.
Looking down at his arm Jake was pleased to see he was able to summon up the ability screen again by willing it to appear.
----------------------------------------
[https://imgur.com/a/XRHTnqz][https://i.imgur.com/8O8encg.png]
Enchanting (Programmatic): - Upgrade Points:0
Allows the wielder to enchant objects
(Programmatic): One of the most powerful modifiers for the enchanting ability, if you can think and type it out you can do it. When enchanting an item a holographic window and keyboard will appear before the wielder, the wielder can then program the specific effects, triggers, or other modifiers he/she wants onto the item. The programming language required is generally the one that makes or would make the most sense to the wielder.
[https://i.imgur.com/lDsn2rJ.png]
Beast ability Capture (Loot, Passive): - Upgrade points:0 - Ability Slots:0/2
When defeated, enemies have a chance to drop a beast rune that contains one of their abilities, when slotted the wielder can use this ability. Runes can be removed once per day.
(loot, passive): Nothing is required to enable the effects of this ability, enemies will drop modified loot because of this ability.
[https://drive.google.com/thumbnail?id=1iv2GtZLhmJSwm6cVrJjd1XZWkmdRHR1T]
High Improvised Magic (Source): - Upgrade Points:0 - Sources:1/2
Give the wielder access and control of a small pool of pure elemental power.
(Source): Rather than being assigned randomly, the user can select an object representing an element to attune a pool. This selection is permanent, however, the object can be traded out for an object that represents the same element but differs in power at any time.
[https://i.imgur.com/Ho4CgvV.png]
Material Moulding (Intent): - Upgrade Points:0
Alter the shape, texture, makeup, or density of any material
(Intent): Exert mental force towards an end goal to use this ability.
[https://i.imgur.com/X9BoO4d.png]
Organic explosives (Elementally Susceptible): - Upgrade Points:0
When activated plants a quick-growing flower that fruits a single magical explosive, about equivalent to a hand grenade per day, at random the flower can grow extra shoots that will each produce an extra explosive per day.
(Elementally Susceptible): The grenades produced by this flower are highly susceptible to ambient elements, as such the explosive will take on the properties of elements in the surrounding area.
----------------------------------------
Carefully rereading his ability screen Jake noticed a few subtle changes, specifically with his High Improvised Magic ability. The first thing he noticed was that the previously dull rune on his arm now featured a bright yellow patch that filled half of the central diamond and a few of the legs that branched off of it.
The second thing he noticed was that his “sources” now showed 1/2 instead of its previous 0/0.
Other than that he saw no other changes to his ability screen.
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
Looking through his ability descriptions Jake decided he wanted to try enchanting before anything else. It sounded extremely powerful if used correctly, he hoped that one day it would become one of his most powerful abilities.
Looking around using the moonlight as much as he could Jake picked up a thick branch that must have fallen out of the tree that kept the platform aloft to try enchanting.
Sitting with his back against the center tree like the day prior, Jake tried to figure out how to activate the ability.
Starting with the most intuitive possibilities, Jake tried saying “Enchanting” out loud, and mentally. With neither of those working he began to try increasingly obscure methods to attempt to activate the ability.
After another fifteen minutes of frustration, Jake reread the description of the enchanting ability to make sure that he didn't miss anything.
“You have to be fucking kidding me” He almost instantly picked up on what he had missed.
“Enchant”
Jake's entire vision suddenly became tinted purple and the stick in his hand began to flash a brighter purple than everything around it.
----------------------------------------
Enchant “Wooden Stick”?
Yes or No
----------------------------------------
Jake was relieved he had been able to figure out how to use his ability, but he was also pissed off that he had managed to miss such an obvious clue.
He mentally selected “Yes” on the purple box and another screen popped open.
----------------------------------------
Exit Interface Un-enchant Object Documentation
Open enchanting interface
----------------------------------------
“Huh,” thought Jake as he selected the “Documentation” button.
What opened before him was a documentation sheet similar to what a person could find before the world got “helped” by the extraterrestrial A.I.
The main difference that Jake noticed was that where you would normally find programming commands in regular documentation, there were instead glowing runes. Luckily for Jake next to each rune was also an English translation of roughly what it did.
For example, the first four runes on the sheet were a flame-shaped fire rune, a swirly air rune, a rocky earth rune, and a flowing water rune. Each a relatively simple rendition of their element in the real world with odd half-moon shapes attached on the sides.
Next to each rune was a description. Fire for example said, “A rune that allows for the combustion of oxygen within a variable number of set parameters. Classification: Elemental.” Each of the four elements had a similar description, defining that parameters could be used to manipulate the element in some way.
Jake had a pretty good idea at this point how the enchanting system would work, but just to be sure he typed “and” into the search bar at the top of the documentation.
----------------------------------------
[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ToJvxniuOMIBHE3NIgtxUaOuXgAmE7Ou/preview]"AND" RUNE
[https://drive.google.com/thumbnail?id=1ToJvxniuOMIBHE3NIgtxUaOuXgAmE7Ou]
This rune serves two functions. Logic: When both inputs are true, the output will also be true. Combination: Both inputs are condensed into a single input, some specific functions may be lost.
----------------------------------------
“That makes sense, I guess these modifiers are used to control how the elemental runes function. The shape certainly makes sense. The little domes line up with the half-moons on the elemental runes and act as variables.” Jake surmised.
Jake thought about what would be a good test, and in the end, decided to make a basic weapon.
Scrolling through the massive list of different elemental runes, Jake stopped scrolling when he came across a rune called growth.
“Im totally making a size adjustable club, that would be awesome, and probably not too hard”
Jake clicked into the enchantment creation window and was pleased to see that he could keep a documentation window open at the same time.
Jake picked through the documentation carefully for runes that would work for his club, adding each to a bar at the bottom of the window called “favorited”. Once he was pretty sure he had everything he needed rune wise, he began to put everything together.
RUNE SCHEMA
[https://drive.google.com/thumbnail?id=1EJhjENGElgeFt3R9wf2LHRzu4Rlj-9iF]
<
AND
[https://drive.google.com/thumbnail?id=1ToJvxniuOMIBHE3NIgtxUaOuXgAmE7Ou]
INTENT
[https://drive.google.com/thumbnail?id=1ssrD3tnDzuNDvYBIGFViedt42zPmbbzT]
SELF
[https://drive.google.com/thumbnail?id=1hElffDPfJvo-mWUJDHxuxn1MiiDsNiqW]
POWER CONTAINMENT
[https://drive.google.com/thumbnail?id=1PoQxOXadNQbWAd5LPdW2GUKH7Ky0_wP9]
GROWTH
[https://drive.google.com/thumbnail?id=1KUivGR0FV1H3_sbwsnxZe54TrE_bSS4j]
IF
[https://drive.google.com/thumbnail?id=1ps8EmopQWcNrwx8f4kBPiViNMqKp_I2E]
>
Looking over his rune schema Jake noticed that some of the empty spaces had been populated by odd shapes that filled in the gaps. Figuring it had something to do with how enchanting worked Jake excitedly clicked the apply button at the bottom of the screen.
With a bright flash, all the screens in front of him disappeared and a blue glow began shining from a relatively flat area at the bottom of the stick Jake was attempting to enchant.
This bright blue settled down a few seconds later into a black engraving of the rune schema at the base of the stick.
Jake inspected the schema now engraved onto the stick.
The growth rune was a bit more complicated than he thought. In the end, it required three things, a power source, a target, and a size.
There were many options Jake found to provide the rune energy, but in the description of most energy runes, it was noted that the specific type of energy generated by the rune worked better for powering other certain types of runes. Essentially, you would have trouble powering a healing rune with the chaos of the universe as an energy source. After thinking about it Jake decided to try and power the growth rune with ambient light as that was something that all plants needed to grow.
Target and size were a bit easier, he simply used a self rune to designate the target of the rune as the stick, and an intent rune to set the size the growth rune would increase the stick to with his mind.
The last thing Jake needed to do was control the activation of the growth rune. The documentation said the only way to control the activation of a rune was by cutting off its power source. He did this using an IF rune attached to an intent rune. When he mentally commands it the IF rune lets energy into the growth rune kicking off the stick’s growth.
After making sure everything looked exactly as it had in the rune schema editor, Jake ordered the stick to grow to a diameter of five inches as a test.
Jake actually found it surprisingly hard to activate the enchantment. He had trouble focusing on activating the rune and setting its size at the same time.
However, after a bit of time and with a bit of persistence, a solid, six-inch diameter gnarly club sat in Jake's lap just as the morning sun peeked out over the trees of the forest.