I decided to spend my two weeks in residence in Eastern Tear for this season immediately. The elves were actually very accommodating to all of us and quite hospitable, if they were a bit patronizing. Don’t get me wrong, there were our patrons in a real way and they weren’t being insincere. I think that they treated us like children sometimes because from their perspective we were. Anyhow, riding that sentiment made it easy for the whole party to arrange mentors, tutors and training to help them round out their skills and path progressions.

Each team member also had their own living space in Eastern Tear. We were close together, but we also had privacy. The spaces were tailored to our needs and the costs were extremely reasonable.

I had an apartment with a couple of rooms that was essentially hollowed out of the rocks beneath the roots of a giant tree. It was a cool spot that had space for a workshop and materials storage, but not entertaining. It was also extremely low maintenance, so I wouldn’t need to worry about upkeep when I was not around. The team all understood that I was planning to leave for some solo adventures, though I don’t think that they really understood the scope of the trek that I had in mind.

Jim and Karen had a treehouse that spanned multiple levels and several tall trees. Kelly had a more open air affair on the ground with those gossamer fabric walls and an amazing garden space within which to practice. Sarah had her own Treefort, suspiciously close to the Perrie estate and Queakers had accommodations in both the Aenorin and Perrie estates proper. Queakers was living the life in Eastern Tear and I felt good that she was going to be so well supported in my absence. You gotta take care of your dog right, even if she grows up and moves out and tries to start her own cult or whatever she was doing with her adoring elven fans.

I spent a handful of the days before Galan and Leirin were due to arrive working through my preparations for expedition into the Giantspire Mountains and repairing or building new magical devices for the wild elves of Eastern Tear. Apparently, word had gotten around about the magic compass and the shields and energy armor were a big hit. It also seemed like the wild elves didn’t have any dedicated magic artificers in their camp, so there was pent up demand for more complex jobs. I had brought plenty of materials with me on Reginald and his fellow mounts, so there was nothing to prevent me from staying busy. I didn’t really need the money, but the goodwill with my new neighbors was worthwhile. As I worked I actually got to thinking that this was why the council had stipulated that I spend a couple of weeks in town a season.

Galan and Leirin showed up right on time and Eastern Tear was one big party for the whole week. One thing that I have come to respect about the elves is that they have a long term perspective and they aren’t addicted to being busy. They can be frustrating sometimes, but they also throw some long, slow-burning parties that I can get behind.

***

I had taken care of my party and connected with my friends, old and new. I was in a good place and I was actually excited about taking the next steps. The axis of my life had been obligation for a long time, way before the awakening and my time in Region Eleven. This trip was more selfish than usual because it was something that I wanted to do rather than needed to do. I had every expectation that it would benefit my friends and allies significantly, but that isn’t why I was doing it. I felt like I finally had enough runway to get off the ground and really choose my own path and I was choosing that path based on instinct and desire, rather than maximizing utility.

I had prepared things in advance in line with my goals, so when the day came I loaded everything up on Reginald and his stable of giant ground sloth mounts and I headed north. My plan was to work my way from the plateau on which Eastern Tear sat into the foothills of the Giantspire Mountains. I wanted to find a secluded and relatively safe area in which the sloths could be self-sufficient to put together a first base camp. I actually had some relatively ambitious plans on how to explore the mountains using my magic compass after that, but first things first.

The seasonal temperature extremes in Region Eleven weren’t actually all that extreme, but it still got quite cold at high altitudes. The mounts and I all had temperature regulation devices built into our energy armor at this point, so we weren’t suffering as much as we might across the slow trek. I took an occasional peek at the magic compass, but mostly we just worked our way through what we found with plenty of backtracking and exploration. The sloths weren’t in a hurry, ever really, and I wasn’t in a hurry either, we were having tons of fun.

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We also got attacked constantly. Mountain goats with iron horns and, I think, rocks for hooves tried their luck plenty of times. There were also some giant birds that were either territorial or just dumb. Fortunately, there weren’t any serious threats at this point. In fact, as we pushed forward the area seemed much emptier than I would have expected and as peaceful as I had hoped. Those were good days.

After about two weeks of working our way around the foothills and lower elevations of the Giantspire Mountains, I found what I was after. A narrow pass opened up into a diamond shaped valley that terminated on the far side in a navigable pass into the mountains proper. The valley had plenty of vegetation, natural springs, mountain fed streams, few natural dangers, excellent access to the rest of the Giantspire Mountains and, most importantly, absolute privacy.

I unloaded the sloths on the eastern side of the valley and put together a temporary camp. Within the first few days I set up a small workshop with some of the equipment that the sloths had hauled to the valley. I also prioritized blocking off the narrow pass that led to the valley. I constructed a basic log stake barricade to cut the valley off from the area outside and let the sloths go free range after reconfirming that nothing too dangerous was living in the valley with us.

I had the basic design of my first project done before I left Eastern Tear, but I had been thinking about it for much, much longer. My primary goal was to thoroughly explore the limits of autonomy in magical artifice. How far could you get with a visualization or intent? What affected these limitations? Could you chain these elements together to do more? Could skills or attributes or other factors influence these limits?

These weren’t new ideas, either here in Region Eleven or on Earth when you considered robotics and artificial intelligence. For example, Magic artificers and mages had experimented with these concepts to create golems that could perform a variety of tasks. I was thinking bigger, especially after understanding Galan’s magic compass and experiencing my own epiphany by way of my Heightened Awareness skill.

***

It had been five weeks since I completed my first set of prototypes. I couldn’t be one hundred percent sure on the time because I had shifted from an RPG to a real time strategy simulation and those were always my weakness. I was beyond engrossed in the project, I was pretty close to a fugue state, but fortunately I was because I was just about to complete the initial phase and it was all downhill from there.

The real trick was in how you linked the devices together. There was an overall limit to what I could coordinate under my own power, at least with my current skills. At the time, my limit was maintaining about 25 independent visualizations or intents. However, each intent could apply to multiple devices or a complex intent could apply to a group of devices. For example, I could have a relatively simple intent to dig for treasure, but that intent could apply to many similar devices, like the mining golems that I had honeycombing the mountains. I could also have a more complex visualization, like a group of different devices working in concert on a particular task, like the crew of golems that I had constructing a stone and metal fortification to replace the wood stake barricade at the pass.

First off, I am confident that this was working as seamlessly as it was because the person creating and controlling the devices was yours truly and I was in possession of a Heighten Awareness skill that only seemed to grow more potent with use. Second, the devices that I was making and controlling were relatively simple. Humanoid golems were more complex and took more complex images to control individually, than say a rotating drill on a tubular body with a collection port. Third, well defined functions for individual types of devices could be referenced in more complex images, making it easy to team them together effectively.

There was a great deal of trial and error in getting the visualization and intents to in concert properly to achieve a desired result. I had a lot of failed projects in the valley. The surrounding mountains were also currently riddled with collapsed tunnels, as getting even something as simple as digging tunnels to the level of consistent success took quite a while to accomplish. There were also many more functions that I needed to figure out to really reach my goals. What magic could make happen in this context was intoxicating, but I had seen enough science fiction to know that I was teeing up a classic, obsessed scientist who is destroyed by his own creations scenario.

Nothing that I created at this time was weaponized or designed for combat. I had plans for some devices with functions that could enhance my combat effectiveness, but that wasn't the purpose of my endeavors in the valley. I wasn’t going to be the one to bring Skynet or the Repilicators down on Region Eleven, well at least not intentionally and not right now.

I had perfected using the magic crystals that I found in relative abundance in the Giantspire Mountains to power my devices. This allowed them to continue to operate on assigned tasks while I slept or in my absence. I had groups collecting some base resources, groups tunneling to locations with high magic particle concentrations, construction crews and a group of specialized devices that generated additional units of each type of magical device. I left it all going as I led the sloths back through the pass toward Eastern Tear.