I had a lot of time to think on my way back to Eastern Tear. I covered it in about half the time since I wasn’t exploring on the return trip. I pondered many things and again was drawn to the concept of change. Everything was burning all of the time, you could fight it or you could adapt to it, but nothing was going to change that. It is the fundamental law of the universe or at least of our experience. We experience change, the time in between is really more meditation than experience. I had been in Region Eleven for approximately nine months at that point, but I had experienced many years by my reckoning. More was different at this point than was the same. Did it even make sense to cling to my old relationships? What was I trying to accomplish?
I don’t always do too well when I am left to my own devices, especially when I don’t have a clear goal, but more on that later. I made it back to Eastern Tear just as spring arrived. The trip back was uneventful and it was actually good to be back in town. I got cleaned up, got some decent food and had my first night in a real bed in a long time. I connected with my party members the next day and I was impressed to see what they had accomplished, but also a little concerned at the pacing.
Over a drink that evening, Jim, Karen and Kelly explained the situation to me and it made a bit more sense. “Harris, the class upgrade is important, but shoring up your foundations before you make the jump is critical,” explained Kelly. Kelly was in a good mood and she took a big draught of elven honey mead, as Jim took over.
“The initial tutorial instruction was very general. We left before we really got into intensive class specific instruction, but I don’t know how strong our foundation would have been if we just continued along the path that the tutorial instructors were leading us down. We had so little practical experience during our tutorial and lacking practical experience in your foundational class can severely limit your options in the future according to Kailu, my mentor on the path of the monk.”
Karen snickered, “Don’t try to get between Jim and Kailu. When Jim is in monk mode his focus cannot be broken. Believe me. I. Have. Tried.” Karen said this with a mischievous smile, but I knew that she was serious.
Kelly picked up the thread, “Yes. All of us have been spending almost all of our time training, hunting, sparing or completing small quests as a team. The wild elves have really invested in our development at this point and they were livid when they learned what the tutorial trainers had done with our first six months. Well livid and suspicious, but they believe we are just about ready to be given ordeals that we can complete together to upgrade our classes. It is amazing how much we have learned. What have you been up to Harris? I wager that you have advanced a ton.”
It was a bit of an awkward tee up, but I wasn’t about to get self-conscious about my questionable life choices now. “I got a new skill when we were working as a party on the way to Eastern Tear. It improves my awareness and I have been trying to use it to help me push the limits of autonomous magic device development. I spent almost two months developing devices and the related control images for my experiments. I left it all running in a secluded mountain valley to see what would happen, but of course I won’t know until I head back.”
Kelly looked deeply into my eyes and said, “I think that is how Doctor Wily got his start. Harris, are you going to be the final boss of this tutorial?”
I couldn’t help but laugh and responded, “I feel like I’m the good guy Kelly, but only time will tell.” I got a full smile and a hair flip from Kelly and I realized that we were flirting. I guess we really were approaching the end of the world. There wasn’t anything romantic between Kelly and I, at least there never had been in the past. However, we were familiar and that was something special now. I felt like we had at least gone from frenemies to true friends, but I suppose only time would tell with that as well.
***
I also spent some quality time with Queakers, Sarah, Delirin and Deldes while I was in Eastern Tear. Deldes and Sarah were apparently openly an item. There was initially some friction in the community with many folks with too much time on their hands also in possession of too many opinions about what was hardly their concern. Delmuth had been difficult to win over at first, but Sarah was a force of nature and everything was currently smooth sailing in that department.
Queakers had already advanced to a full fledged Druid class and she was working on pushing forward still. She had a number of trainers and mentors. The wild elves had realized that she was something special, which I had always known even before her awakening, and they were investing in her future. They seemed almost too into it, but I guess nature was kind of their thing. Mighty as she was, Queakers was still up for belly rubs and head scratches at just about every opportunity, so at least that hadn’t changed yet.
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Sarah was working on leveraging her talents to transition from Red Mage to Summoner. This would be an immensely powerful class for Sarah and she would take it to new heights in the future, but it had an extremely steep learning curve and her focus on this area had reduced the pace at which she was improving her combat power. She was going to have to work twice as hard to keep up until her summoning skill clicked for her. Once she did have the skill and the requisite control to use it properly, Sarah would be able to summon support from the kind of powerful entities that could turn the tide in a battle.
During my stint in town, I also completed the obligatory requests for magic device repairs and replacements. I shied away from anything too close to my experiments back home, but repairing energy armor, magic traps and everyday devices at least kept me sharp. Just like that, two weeks were over and I was resupplied and back out on the trail to the mountain valley that I was now referring to as the Aerodrome.
***
So if the name Aerodrome didn’t already make it clear, I wanted an airship. My plan was to explore the Giantspire Mountains from below and above. If you couldn’t teleport, which didn’t seem to jive with the physics of magic particles, an airship was the next best thing. From my exploration thus far, the Giantspire Mountains were an endless expanse of jagged peaks and to really explore them from the surface I would need some way to fly. In this sense the airship plan was fulfilling an operational requirement of my current plan, but I also really just wanted an airship.
From what I could tell from my magic compass, the majority of points of interest were deep within the earth. My strategy for reaching these deep places, and for the construction of the airship for that matter, were my new breed of autonomous magic devices. It was with great excitement that I pulled up to the door blocking the narrow pass that led to my valley. There wasn’t an army of murderbot waiting for me as I made my way through the gate, which was a good first sign.
As I made my way to the Eastern rim of the valley, I was happy to find much of my plan had been executed. An expansive indoor space that had been crafted in my absence. It was essentially a large hangar style building, which had the benefit of being simple in design, but also very utilitarian. There were also designated storage spaces in the hangar for the diversity of resources that the devices had collected.
The resources were still all piled up outside and the crew building new devices was still working out in the elements near the resource piles, but things were going pretty well. The boring devices had mapped many interesting resource paths, but the construction of a larger boring unit to create standardized tunnels that I could traverse with a specialized vehicle had completely failed. Instead of new devices, there were just a bunch of piles of smashed up materials that were being attended by a bunch of dormant constructor units.
Well not getting strung up in a robot revolt was a huge win and the hangar, resource collection and basic unit production had all worked well. The more complex tasks suffered in my absence though, perhaps because they weren’t well enough visualized or perhaps because there was something that my presence contributed to the completion of these more complex tasks. However, I was happy - this was a result that I could work with and from which I could improve.
I won’t bore you with all of the details, but the problem was in how I linked the tasks and the images that I used. Within the week I had working designs for the new devices and teams of constructor units building an airship that I believed would take me to the other side of the Giantspire Mountains. Unfortunately, I also had a new problem. While exploring the best magic compass hits and the network of resource extraction holes dug by the original mining units, I was surprised to find that the further that once we pushed into the Giantspire Mountains more than about fifteen miles in any direction, things tended to become relatively uniform and present some relatively consistent patterns.
On one hand this level of order was like any popular block based survival game and it made extracting resources from the environment much more efficient. On the other hand this was an unexpected find. It left me wondering about the genesis of the mountains and, in particular, the possibility that they weren’t the naturally occurring phenomenon that I assumed them to be. It was possible that the mountains were created by some intelligence or at least a process that wasn’t originally geologic in nature.
Legitimate as they may be, those concerns would have to wait because I had some treasure to hunt. I had my mining vehicle loaded with supplies, my dark vision glasses and preparations for hostile critters, noxious gasses and a lack of oxygen. I also had a whole bunch of cargo space on my tunnel crawler, which was a lot like a four wheel ATV that could also use positional disc technology to hover if needed. It wasn’t all that durable and it absolutely devoured magic crystals, but it was blazing fast in the tunnels and fun to ride.