At the appointed time, Emmet nervously walked up to the building specified in the tab. Coincidentally, it happened to be near where he had first met Maisy, when he had gotten horribly lost. The building was medium sized, and labeled as a student activity area.

Opening the door and tip-toeing in, he saw a crowd of other first years sitting in a clump on the floor, in wait. He joined them and sat down criss-crossed, facing a board.

The door opened and a jet-black haired girl walked in. “Welcome, welcome!” her voice rang out, and she raised her hands enthusiastically. “You are all applicants for Maisy’s Debugging Depot, correct?”

Most of the applicants nodded hesitantly, but Emmet was the opposite, nodding energetically as if greatly anticipating the job. His eyes were bright. That jet black hair and easygoing smile - it really was Maisy!

Maisy panned her gaze around the crowd of applicants and landed her eyes on Emmet. After a brief moment of surprise, she gave a slight smile, and then continued to pan her gaze.

“This job isn’t glorious, I’ll be the first to say it. It involves hours of painstakingly inspecting formations and spotting oftentimes nearly invisible bugs. The pay starts out at 5 points per hour, and upon promotion, reaches 10 points per hour. However, you will also receive a commission for every formation you debug, about 10% of the total payment from the client. Sound good?”

Everyone in the room nodded. They had all seen the flyers, and knew the wage. It wasn’t the best job in the world, but since they were first-years, they didn’t have too many better options.

“Great! Now, I’d like to give you all a simple test,” Maisy gestured to her side, where there was a pile of simple-looking array formations on a floating baggage carrier formation. “Each of these arrays has some sort of simple problem. Let’s pass them around, and I’ll give you each an hour to debug what you get. However, don’t feel pressure! Even if you fail, as long as you’re willing to learn, you’re up for recruitment. This is just to give you a taste of what the job is like, and to gauge your initial skill.”

Another girl, who seemed maybe 13 years old and had green hair, stepped out from the side and began to pass out the arrays. Soon enough, everyone had one.

“Ok, to debug what you have right now… I’ll give you an hour, starting now!” Maisy tapped the mini clock contraption on her wrist. “Feel free to move around. There’s plenty of workstations around this building.”

Everyone hurriedly stood up and began to spread around, finding various workstations to work at. Emmet joined them, finding his own private workstation.

He marveled at this ‘workstation.’ It was a nice little enclosed space, with a large desk, some cheap mending materials, a slot to purchase more advanced materials, and some tools for construction, like a hammer, soldering pen, tweezers, etc.

Sitting down, he brought the contraption he had received out onto the desk, his eyes glowing. The formation seemed complicated! He could distinctly see that inside were various multilayered runes, interleaving jade circuits all over the place, and various glowing mana flow channelers. It was completely different from any type of contraption he had previously personally built! In fact, this was the first time he had seen a mana-powered formation up close, so close he could inspect it! He had only previously built contraptions powered from sunstones, and it was only after he had set off with Torhah and Tauruk that he had awakened his mana, so he had no chance to attempt to build one.

He put his hand on the power introduction socket, and with a deep grunt, channeled his mana!

Fisss…

A tiny flow of blue entered the formation, causing it to light up. The flow funneled through the circuitry of the device in one line before splintering off, reaching a series of chain-links... and then anticlimactically fizzled out.

Emmet frowned. The mana fizzled out? He was pretty sure that wasn’t supposed to happen. Was that the problem with it?

Emmet grabbed a small tool from the station and pried the contraption open. What actually was the contraption? What was it supposed to do? He had to identify its purpose and mechanisms before he could attempt to fix it.

Staring down at the complicated interleaving series of jade circuits, Emmet was momentarily confused. Everything looked so foreign! How was he supposed to fix this? All he saw were a a dense thicket of completely unrecognizable runes, threaded lines, and weirdly organized microcircuits.

However, within moments, he had a realization. If he thought back to the puzzle diagrams inside his picture book, the basic structures of some of these microcircuits were actually familiar - he had experimented a lot with them before, although using simpler quartz circuits! After reaching this realization, he began tracing the paths of the microcircuits, and then suddenly had another lightbulb moment. This structure… wasn’t this just a double-layered sun beam?

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The more he thought about it, the more he was sure he was correct. It had all the correct components, although they were formatted slightly differently, and although the circuits were confusing and superfluous, the basic structure was at least somewhat similar. The primary difference was, there was only one mana source instead of multiple sunstone sources, and there were also a lot of accessory parts that Emmet couldn’t quite identify purpose of. Looking at it through the lens of a sun beam, Emmet observed closer, and within moments found the problem.

Producer consumer… that term lingered in his head. He had first been introduced to this dilemma through his picture book, and he had later discovered first-hand how without a proper producer consumer lock organization, a beam would work spottily at best. As he looked closely, in this fancy double-layered sun beam he held here, the locks appeared to be set improperly, and thus, the mana inputted could only fizz out. Knowing the problem, Emmet immediately got to work.

Almost an hour later, Emmet finally looked up, relieved. He had finally finished the repair. It was much harder than expected - he was not used to the more expensive material of the array at all, and wasn’t aware of the proper procedures to deal with it. It was also hard to spot out the different components of the formations clearly since they were so different in appearance from anything he knew. All he could do was a misguided brute force method of ripping out and soldering, hoping that they were put back in properly. In fact, there was a lot of finesse to constructing - Emmet wasn’t aware that there was an entire course at the school on proper methods of dealing with jade circuits.

His crude fix done, Emmet took a deep breath, put his hand on power source socket, and sent his mana in!

Fuoosh! The contraption lit up, and a bright yellow beam shot out of the end, giving a person a warm feeling!

“YES!” Emmet pumped his fist. He had succeeded!

Within this hour, Emmet had fallen deeply in love with debugging. The whole thing was like solving a puzzle. Identify the problem with the formation, and then solve it. There was nothing more familiar to Emmet, and there was nothing he loved more.

He found that in many ways, it was even more stimulating than solving puzzles from his picture book - all of that was purely theoretical, simply printed on a page. But fixing actual formations was in physical reality!

“Time!” Maisy’s voice called out. “Everyone bring your arrays over.”

“Ah…” Some distant groans sounded out. Clearly, some people weren’t ready yet.

However, everyone obediently left their workstations and brought their hopefully debugged formations over, handing them over to the green-haired girl. Everyone crowded around Maisy again.

“Alright, first up,” Maisy grabbed a random formation from the top of the pile, holding it out. “Who fixed this one?”

“Me…” A hesitant hand raised from the front. It was a brown-haired boy wearing a thick grey cloak.

“Let’s test it.” Maisy promptly placed her hand on it and quickly channeled her mana. A flowing blue light went down her arm and shot into the formation!

FUOOSH!

The construction lit up with a bright brown glow. Then, a moment later, a steady beam of earth shot out from the end!

However, a mere moment after that, the beam promptly sputtered out and died.

“Hm…” Maisy rubbed her chin. “It’s a good attempt, but the circuitry is still flawed. My guess would be with the producer consumer locks. Next!”

The boy nodded slowly with a sigh. If he had just a little more time…

Maisy proceeded to pick up formation after formation, testing them out. Some would be complete duds, some would partially work, and some would work perfectly. She would give out criticism or praise accordingly.

Finally, she reached Emmet’s formation.

“This one?” Maisy raised the formation up.

“M...me…” Emmet shyly raised his hand. He felt his heart pound loudly. Would his repair be good?

Maisy met eyes with Emmet and nodded slowly. She glanced down at the formation, unsure of her expectations. Although she thought the boy was cute, she was dubious of his actual capabilities. In the end he was only a squire, right?

“Alright, let’s see what this can do.” She placed her hand on the array and channeled her mana!

FUOOSH!!!

The formation lit up virtually instantly, the outer end shooting out a steady stream of yellow energy! Even after a few moments, the yellow beam stayed steady, even increasing in intensity!

“Whoa!” Many exclaimed out. Some of the other arrays had worked as well, but none with this kind of speed or intensity! The device had lit up nearly instantly, and was even still increasing in power.

“Very nice!” Maisy praised, her face full of surprise. She glanced toward Emmet with an impressed look. “Very, very nice! You not only fixed the main operational problem of the double-layered Dijorbian-switch design, but made optimizations to increase the speed and efficiency through cordonian balance! Very good, I hope to see you here in the future!”

Emmet’s face beamed, and he couldn’t help but blush. He had actually passed! …although, he didn’t really understand what Maisy had just said.

After Maisy had gone through all of the formations, she told everyone to come back the next day to start work if they were still interested. Each day one would work from 7-10 in the evening. However, it wasn’t a set time. If one was busy, they could work less hours.

Emmet left the building, feeling completely giddy. He had finally found something he was good at! Maybe he wasn’t a talentless hack, after all!