Phanya, to mollify Ricky and his threats to start hunting ratbirds for XP, agreed to head back out in search of a direct path to the mall. She enlisted Steffo and the jitney for help, and when Ricky still begged to come along she gave him an additional challenge: Take those gauntlets he made for her and turn them into weapons, not armor, that the system would let her use. That should keep him busy for a while.
Ricky tore through his work in no time flat, especially anything that related to his background. And the system was quite generous with what it counted as blacksmithing — anything that involved shaping, reforming, or repairing with metal gave Ricky a hit of both pride and XP. Now he studied the gauntlets, aghast at his earlier work and now acutely aware of what a difference it makes to be a novice over his pre system knowledge. He could remake these gauntlets at twice the quality, but the challenge was to remove all defense and leave only offense.
He started by removing the plates around the wrists and hands, leaving little more than a hunk of metal on the back of the hand. But that would get in the way of punching, and his external instincts guided his blacksmithing to a solution. Ricky assembled overlapping plates into a hinge midway across the palm, so that they'd cover the wearer's knuckles when they make a fist but otherwise leave their fingers free to move. Similar treatment for the thumbs left two awkward pieces of handwear that looked like metal boxing gloves, but with a happy chime the system recognized the new weapons.
[Weapon identified: Knucklebusters
Unarmed, blunt, ld4 + Strength damage]
Strange that Ricky couldn't name the weapons and he wasn't sure what the description mean, but he smiled all the same. Phanya was going to love them.
The day after, the exosuit's battery died with Ricky still locked inside. Tapper found Ricky more embarrassed that he forgot to charge it than distressed, but Tapper suggested an alternative to dragging him over to the charging station. Together the two found the universal port on the hauler suit and Tapper plugged in, feeding it his own mana for energy. Here Tapper discovered that each one point of mana meant 10% of the suit's battery, and he filled it without any explosive overfill. Much more fair than the jitney's battery! Once he disconnected, the suit powered on and Ricky received a surprising system prompt:
[Equipment identified: P-1000 Powered Work Loader
Damaged, 0/0 armor. Would you like to claim it? Y/N]
Ricky didn't see the point, but Tapper assured him that the system only intervened for good reason, and when he mentally accepted the suit dinged and opened up for him. He was free! And apparently he owned the hauler suit now, depending on where the system ranked in authority. But now Ricky could stretch his aching body and examine the suit from all angles, confirming that it really was badly damaged. Only a single strut supported the arms and legs; and he couldn't find any length that wasn't dented, or rusting, or improperly repaired. It was a wonder that the suit could hold its own weight, let alone help Ricky haul anything. It would be irresponsible to return the suit to the miners without at least trying to work on it!
But if Ricky was going to repair the exosuit then he wanted to do better than reclaimed scrap. The increasingly small pile of Drillbert's remains refused to give any information with close examination, giving Ricky an odd mental haze that told him this loot belonged to someone else. He'll need to talk to Tapper about that later; by all means anything his robot claimed should give Ricky and Phanya de facto ownership as well. But underneath the pile of Drillbert lay something purple and unclaimed, the arm of Rethar's exosuit lighting up in green wireframe once Ricky noticed it:
[Relic identified: Right Hand of the Zealot
You are not high enough level to equip or scan this relic. Would you like to claim it? Y/N]
Ricky snatched up the claim, level or no. Eventually he'd get to use the relic, right? Tapper was already level 3 in a few short months... because he beat Zero. No one is tougher than Zero between here and CyraCity 13, so how long would it take Ricky to even catch up? He only received one little point of XP the first time he did something new in blacksmithing, so he might have to safeguard this relic for years before he could use it.
Subconsciously, that blacksmithing knowledge started to feed Ricky alternative ideas. There was still energy stored within those struts, thrumming with potential. Or Phase Shift Instability radiation, or magic. Whatever it was, Ricky could reshape it into something within his level to wield right now. All it would take is accepting that this process is a one-time thing; if Ricky disassembled the relic then it could never possibly exist again exactly as it does right now.
Waste not, want not.
Ricky broke off one of the struts and felt several links break. Not within the physical rod, it was designed to be disassembled, but the energy that made the difference between weird tech and a relic broke. The dull purple metal rod had the tiniest amount of give when Ricky squeezed it, he could even shorten and lengthen the rod slightly with its middle mass expanding or shrinking to compensate. Like the middle point between a mechanical piston and an organic muscle, with all the best points of both. And he bet they could support a great deal of weight.
Fully disassembling the relic yielded a dozen metallic rods, two for each limb and four to strengthen the torso of the hauler suit. Then the hand, which Ricky really wanted to keep because his own suit didn't have extension for his hands. But disassembling that hand gave him over twenty short rods and small articulating pieces to give his suit more comfortable fine movement. There would even be enough pieces left over to possibly repair Tapper's broken hand as well!
The question became, how to actually assemble the finished products? Ricky had a decent idea of what he needed to do, thanks to the system knowledge, but that meant also knowing that he needed better tools. While giving it his best effort — that is, trying to hammer the rods in place as gently as possible — Ricky slipped and banged on the suit's front panel.
It cracked open at the top and Ricky bit his tongue in frustration, only it wasn't broken. It was a hinged compartment, containing a small emergency repair kit hidden right in the middle of the chest panel! And it looked brand new, did Belvidere even know whether the suits had these kits?
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
Ricky grinned to himself. When he returns this exosuit to Belvidere, that old man is going to beg Ricky to return as a proper engineer.
----------------------------------------
Okay Ricky, you can do this. He took a deep breath to steady his nerves. Just get it over with. Wouldn't have to if you just remembered the damn lesson from before. He groaned at his nerves and their refusal to steady down. Ricky knew that he just had to take the first step, but sometimes that felt like the end of the world to him. Just do it now, right now! She's walking by, do it do it do it —
"Ms. Uxral, can you, ah." Ricky swallowed hard. She was giving him nothing but patience, and somehow that made it even worse. "Can you show me how to make a book again?"
Tapper had grown used to the surprisingly effective sound dampening in the library, and yelped when the door suddenly opened without a polite knock. Ms. Uxral ran her check-ins on a schedule that the robot appreciated, but she returned earlier than expected and kept making tiny bounces on the balls of her feet. And she dragged Ricky behind her, broadcasting the universal body language of a teenager that really didn't want to indulge a maternal figure in their hobby.
Ms. Uxral didn't notice Ricky's attitude, neither did she notice Tapper pretending to copy the textbook from a tablet with a blank screen. She was just too excited. "Oh it's been too long since I've done some good bookbinding, thank you so much for suggesting it. Let me just grab my things, and don't you let us get in your way Tapper. You just keep on writing, we'll work over here."
She leaned over Tapper to pull open drawers in the tower cabinets standing next to the desk, pulling out bundles and boxes and setting up a secondary workstation. With practiced motions Ms. Uxral unfolded a small table and made small piles of her tools. Cloth satchels, needles, thread, glue, three different types of scissors and blades, press clamps, and separate paper bundles folded in half. The entire process covered the table in short order, and Ms. Uxral finished with a satisfied humming sound.
Ricky, despite his best attempts to grouse through this entire experience, always admired Ms. Uxral's capacity for organization. Everything had its place and there was a place for everything, whereas Ricky usually considered it a win whenever his stuff made it into any container at all. He knew it was a terrible habit to have, but organizing his own tools occupied a permanent spot in the I'll do it later category of his brain when there was always something more interesting to do in the moment.
"Ms. Uxral, are you repairing garments?" Tapper asked, eyeing the needles and cloth. She even had quality thread wound into an actual spool!
The teacher chuckled, but not with any condescension. She loved this part, where she gets to surprise a newbie with all the intricacies. "Not at all! We're binding a book, and we're doing it the proper way. You know, in all my years I've only seen a brand-new hardcover journal once, and it was a special order with the pages bound together by some atomic laser doohickey. Every page refracted light in a different way, it was beautiful but it missed the point of journaling because it was just so expensive. The whole point of journaling is that anyone can do it, you just have to give it a little bit of care. Isn't that right, Ricky?"
"Hrm?" Shit, he spaced out again once Ms. Uxral started rambling. Ricky tried to recover with, "I mean uh yeah, totally," but he was already caught and they both knew it.
Ms. Uxral grinned and held out a tool, a thin metal rod with a sharp point at one end and a thicker handle at the other. In any other context Tapper would register it as a weapon, maybe an improvised shank, but she flipped it over and handed it to Ricky handle-first. "Sweetheart, why don't you show our friend how humans made books before robots even existed?"
Ricky groaned. He really hoped she would get lost in her own hobby and just do the whole process for him, but Ricky grabbed the awl and started punching holes into the inner crease of each paper bundle. That much he could manage, but Ms. Uxral had to step in and instruct him on the proper pattern for sewing the bundles together. And she never wasted a moment to talk about the good old days, either.
"You see Tapper, back before we had tablets. Before we had molecular binding and diamond-edged paper, we used a combination of thread and glue to hold books together, and we made them to last. You weren't going to just read a book once and then throw it away — no Ricky, loop the thread here — books didn't get tossed, with care you were expected to cherish a good book for generations."
Once he finished the sewing, Ms. Uxral helped Ricky tie off the thread and held up the bundle of bundled pages. "Excellent, good work! This part is called the text block, and next we are going to reinforce the thread with some glue." Ricky inserted the text block into the press clamp sideways, so that the spine was pointing straight upwards, while Ms. Uxral pulled out a small bottle and foam brush.
"Maybe I'll do this part," Ms. Uxral said with just a hint of sheepishness. "It's difficult to source proper archival-quality glue, we don't want to waste a drop of it." She gently brushed the glue over the spine and pressed a button on the clamp, invisible machinery whirring with quiet life. "...And this is the one piece of technology convenience I use, otherwise we'd have to wait until tomorrow for the glue to set."
After a minute the machine dinged and Ms. Uxral pulled out the text block. It looked almost the exact same to Tapper, but the teacher's practiced eyes gleamed with satisfaction. "Almost done! Now we get to make the cover." An entire drawer of Ms. Uxral's personal storage was dedicated to fabric swatches, and she insisted that Ricky pick out a good one for his own personal journal. Ricky settled on a grayish-purple fabric, and with a few pieces of sturdy board they started gluing the cover together.
Tapper watched the bookbinding process completely enraptured. His proprietors either didn't notice or didn't care that he was copying the museum tablet from his downloaded memory, so his hands never stopped writing while his head turned backwards and watched the two work. The measuring, the cutting, the sewing, Tapper never would have estimated that so much work could go into manually creating a book. And although it did not make much sense to him, Tapper did understand that bookbinding was to the felinoid what crafting the perfect mixed cocktail was to him.
This was Ms. Uxral's true passion.
[New supplemental skill learned! Bookbinding (novice)]
Tapper's hand slipped when the notification hit his vision, ruining the page he was midway through copying. The people of Fableton had walked Tapper through many different procedures, but this was the first time he learned a new skill that the system recognized. Ricky reeled back and shared a look with Tapper and silently mouthed, "You too?" How interesting!
Ms. Uxral was too busy appreciating the finished volume to notice. "There we go, this is a proper book. Nothing else quite like it in the world, young man." She handed the tome to Ricky, and he made a half-hearted attempt at mirroring her reverence. He did respect the craft, honestly, but not that much. "What do you think you'll be writing down in it?"
For the first time since they entered the library, Ricky flashed a smile. It was warm and genuine, but also just a little mischievous. "Oh you know, just whatever comes to mind."
Ricky wiggled his eyebrows at Tapper, and the implication flew right over the robot's head.