[a brave young priestess' journal]

This will be a short entry. I'm writing this while Mister Tinpot explains the new gun he's developed, so I need to write fast and please excuse the terrible blotting.

He's explaining how I need to clean it. There is oil, a little brush that looks like it is twisted wire with bristles along it, and he's saying I need to make sure it is cleaned every evening after I use it. It's such a small thing, too. The handle fits easily in my palm and there's a little piece that is curved back toward my hand that moves as I pull the trigger.

And the trigger! It's smooth until I hear it release the mechanism that Mister Tinpot says will fire it, but then it's stiff after that. I then have to lever the hammer (that curved part), which rotates the chambers, to ready it to fire the next bullet.

It's a surprise, really. I've heard about the two guards that Travis normally uses for this sort of work, and they carry a lot of guns to do what this little one does. The slowest part is reloading it. Mister Tinpot says if six bullets doesn't get me out of the situation, I'd do better to draw my spear than try reloading. He's also most insistent about collecting the little steel cups that hold the bullets.

There are three kinds of bullets and he made me write them down.

Red ones are for people in armor.

Yellow ones are for people not in armor.

Blue ones are normal.

Miss Felna gave me the details of some of our people I should talk to in the capital in case I can't see the Prince or if I am in trouble. She says she hopes I won't need them, but that if I need help, they will give it.

Our people. It's nice to know that I will have people who recognize me for who I am now and will help me. Thank you again, Lady Sandwalker.

Mister Tinpot is still talking. He explained why the yellow ones work so well, and it's a little terrifying. They have tiny enchanted stones in them. Being fired isn't enough to set them off, but when they hit something and stop, that will. There are twelve of those. The red ones are a solid bullet of adamantine that Mister Tinpot says will punch a hole through anything.

I can't write any further. I have to go now. I'll get to test a few shots on the way, but I promised Mister Tinpot I wouldn't use more than one of the red and yellows. From what he said, they aren't trivial to make.

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A whole week of trundling along in the rain had Elanor feeling terrible. It was cold, wet, and though her armor had several layers of cloth and leather, the cold wind kept getting past her coverings. If it weren't for the long coat and hat, the rain would have been leaking in too. "Less than a day? You're sure?"

The young woman riding the horse beside him made the merchant chuckle. "You're worse than my daughter. One turn, a long straight, and then the final bend that leads to Far Reach. You keep your head down and don't tilt your head back and keep the brim of your hat forward a little. Your name will be Anne, if anyone asks, and you'll be my daughter."

The subterfuge rekindled Elanor's excitement for the job. She nodded to the merchant. "I can do that." Slowing her horse a little, she waited until she was at the back of the wagon and edged to the side to look within. Pelts. Two huge piles of pelts—or so it looked. "Not much further. Are you fine in there?"

"I'm laying between two fuzzy furnaces with a deadly cave scorpion. I'm just peachy," Brevity said. "I'm surprised you didn't bring your pet wyvern."

"I did. Ripper is flying above us and circling around lower at night. When the train is out of sight of Far Reach, I'll get her to hide in the wagon, since you'll be able to get out." It was all about planning, from Elanor's point of view. She would have all her friends and no one was going to stop that. "If things get bad, we can ride her to the capital."

Brevity wanted to scoff at first, but then she pondered the situation. "A wyvern? Could it—she—hold both of us?"

"I might have to take my armor off, but if a wyvern could hold Miss Fife in one layer of adamantine, she should be able to hold both of us." Lifting her head and looking around, Elanor saw that they were halfway around the first of the bends the merchant had mentioned and were onto the long straight path that she'd heard the last ambush had been on.

The ride all the way to the gates, however, was uneventful. Elanor had been looking around at the trees and the underbrush, but couldn't see anything to mark where the fighting had been. Remembering her time leaving the gates of Far Reach, she felt far less trapped and far more ready to act than she had in her whole life.

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It was the best fun of Fife's life. Her innate regeneration, combined with Breath of Spring's healing meant that the firestorm raging around her did nothing but heat her armor. She bashed and slashed at the shamans, their fungal spells not lasting more than a moment in the conflagration that Katelyn had conjured.

"You were right, Captain. If there were ever anything akin to a god of battle, it would be her." Njal stared in open admiration of Fife as she laughed among the slaughter of hobgoblin shamans. "We'll need to learn the bow and gun at this rate."

"We won't be doing battle with this dungeon too many more times, Njal. Travis is seeking permission to destroy this hole." Astrid longed to run into the inferno and dance alongside Fife, to kill and kill and kill more. Leader of a pack Astrid might be, but Fife was Travis' chosen war leader, and she could well see why.

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Katelyn was relieved that her levels in mage would be going up at last. She'd had Travis swap her class back after getting Expanded Slip and had noticed a boost to her magic power. Her magic was barely humming in her senses and she had the entire boss room flooded with fire. "She's really into this, isn't she?"

Nodding, Breath of Spring giggled. "She's using up a bit of mana to heal, but not as much as I would have thought."

"Are you forgetting that you're the dungeon boss of a pretty huge dungeon?" Katelyn asked. The green blush on Breath of Spring's cheeks, even as she cast her next heal spell, almost set Katelyn giggling. "I'd meant to ask earlier, did you pick up a class before coming here?"

Glad for the distraction from her home's reality, Breath of Spring nodded. "I took Priest. I didn't need to focus on a god, like Brayden, Felna, or that new priestess did, but that's probably because my home is all I need. Well… my home and Fife."

"Speaking of that, where does she keep getting those shirts for you?" Katelyn liked the gags, mostly, and even understood most thanks to her time spent reading Travis' books. Today Breath had hers covered by some light leather armor, but it had Queen of Fertilizer on it. She had earlier seen Fife walking around wearing a matching one that just read Bullshit.

"She makes them, kinda. Fife has been"—Breath of Spring took a moment to feed another heal spell to herself and, by the ability binding them, Fife too—"buying dyes and shirts from a merchant in the city." Sighing, she shook her head. "But, she made me promise not to tell anyone about how she was making the letters."

"And now she'll never tell me, right?"

"I think she's done. You can stop the fire now." Pointing at Fife, Breath of Spring waited for the flames to die down before running over to her.

"Whoa! Hold up. Don't touch me!" Fife had to step back from Breath of Spring. "I'm so hot right now, I'd burn you. I'm kinda burning me."

Blinking in surprise as she was warded off, Breath of Spring nodded sadly. "Tell me when it is cool enough to touch. I want to hug you so much!"

The pain, Fife had to admit, would have staggered her back when she was human. The plates of the armor seared her scales and, with the adamantine that was part of her, seared deeper still. Her regeneration was taking care of it, though, so she could brush it off as not important. "Those guys were annoying, but that is definitely the safest way to deal with so many fungal-spewing assholes. How is the mana drain on that?"

"Practically nothing," Katelyn said. "I use more mana making Tinpot his tiny runestones."

"I don't make runestones," Breath of Spring said, now finding her curiosity piqued, "but I could keep up with that healing all day and night."

"Great. So that will be our tactic whenever we fight the shamans. Now, let's see if they have any loot in here that wasn't flammable." Fife rubbed her hands together and made a few white sparks by doing so.

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"That should be fine." Travis was paying close attention to Tinpot's progress, at the gunsmith's request, to see if there were any obvious flaws. "So you keep working the slabs of granite against each other, swapping them out for their opposite, until they're all smooth."

"And each should wear down the inconsistencies in the other until they are flat." Tinpot had acquired three small slabs of the rock that had been mined in the city's quarry, and now he intended to put the plan into action on an initial scale. "It's a little more than that, though. I have to do it in a specific order to match concave and convex, and work them all to the same flatness. I know I've asked before, but this isn't something you have even an inkling of?"

"Next time I get turned into a dungeon in another world, Tinpot, I'll make sure to memorize all this stuff first, okay?" Travis let his mirth show in his voice, and earned a chuckle from his friend. "Remember, I was an entertainer."

"Right. Well, we have time, and I can't keep making revolvers to the precision I did Miss Elanor's. That was mostly luck, I'm sorry to admit." The three slabs were only the length of his arms in one direction and half that in the other, but they would do for a start. "Now to get to work on these. If nothing else, I'll have three nice stone tablets to… I don't even know what I'd do with them."

Travis had to keep reminding himself of that having time thing too. Forever seemed daunting, but it didn't seem to be right there all the time for him to worry about like everyday events were. "They'd still be mostly flat, though, so you could use them as a—"

"Stepping stone?" The gag made Tinpot smile.

"You'll get this figured out."

"We'll get it figured out. You have an analytical mind perfectly suited for solving problems. Don't sell yourself short." Lifting one of the granite slabs up, Tinpot once again marveled at the new body he'd gotten. It might not be stronger than he'd been in his heyday, but it was such an improvement over how he'd been when he'd come into the dungeon that he couldn't think of a reason to regret his deal. "And once I'm done, we'll find out if making tools will give you an unlock that lets me make guns like that revolver with the dungeon system."

"Any higher quality guns, with that, would be good. Even still, if you can make them reliably otherwise, that would make Northridge and us the most valuable asset in the kingdom."

"So we'll only sell them, then?" Tinpot asked.

It was a big decision, and one that Travis didn't want to screw up. Giving the designs and tools away would mean the whole kingdom could push into an industrial revolution of technology to rival its magic one. But, giving them up like that would also only buy him the favor of kings so long as they remembered where their toys had come from. "At first, yes. Once I get the more exotic materials, divinium and platinum, and we come up with more exotic weapons, then I think we could give away the designs to the older things."

It made Tinpot sit back from his workbench and look at what he was doing, and think of the future. If this worked as he hoped, it would give him a huge step-up. He could make perfect things. He could make perfect tools. His thoughts fractured for a moment at the reminder of what he'd read in Travis' books. Knowing it was all possible was the biggest motivation of all. "Every year we will make better things. I won't stop until I have remade everything you remember, and hopefully more beyond."

"You know," Travis said, "I'd like to see that."

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