As the party began to walk down Potions Block, yells about the best items and prices in town came from the street vendors. “Elemental Cultivation Pills! One silver to breakthrough through the foundation stage!” “Heal Potions! Three Silver, the next life it saves might be yours!” “Stat increase salves! One gold for three stats!” “Slime counts Increase! Ten Silver, get that special ability!”

Zach’s head turned at the sound of potions and what they could do. The cultivation pills and stat increase salves sound like something that could increase his power significantly. Zach looked at this Pocket wallet and a little blue screen showed him that he had two hundred and three silver in which he could use, and the nice thing about a pocket wallet was that if a person placed dungeon coins in it, they could convert the coinage in any manner that they wanted. It also help merchants by allowing them to trade coins through their wallets instead of having to carry around large chest of coins.

The group walked out into the tee intersection, a large bank looking structure sat at the entrance to the street as the electric feeling of mana surrounded the building. Above the stone steps, runes were etched into the columns as blue screens floated between them. Andy, Zach, and Alexa approached the building and saw price lists floating in the air for ingredients and quantity wanted. There was even a quest board that seemed to be floating between the central pillars. Taking a step onto the bulk apothecary’s stone entryway made a blue screen appeared.

Auto-Loot and Extra-dimensional Space Detected!

You have discovered the following Quests!

Herbal collection (Quantity possessed/Quantity willing to buy):

Wild Lifestem (13/5)

Blood Bonnets (3/7)

Mana Tears (34/8)

Blindrot Mushroom (4/1)

Shadow Stalk (24/17)

Murk Lilly (2/1)

Modark Root (6/18)

Voidcone (13/1)

Firebloom (16/7)

Wolf Moss (2/1)

Ingredient Collection:

Earthhorns (24/2)

Lighthorns (8/9)

Darkhorns (3/18)

Firehorns (7/21)

Lifehorns (19/10)

Waterhorns (2/15)

Airhorns (17/4)

Deathhorns (1/25)

Iron Hoofs (6/12)

Shadow Claws (7/25)

The appraised value of your items are 12 gold 13 silver 93 copper and 2 iron bits.

As you possess several items that are hard to find, a total of 1500 Exp will be given on turning in the items.

Would you like to turn in all items?

YesNo

Zach pressed no and stepped back to examine the building.

Building Screen Name:Bellmare’s Bulk ApothecaryMaterial:GraniteSpeciality:UnknownTier:4Abilities Auto-Trade; Core Communication; Dungeon Link; Extra-Dimensional Space; Job Board; ???Building Description:Bellmore’s Bulk Apothecary handles the massive amount of herbs and components gathered from the dungeon by Adventurers. Additional permissions needed for more details.

Looking at the screen, Zach realized that the rulers of the city didn’t want anyone receiving more information about a building then absolutely necessary. However, the fact that the building had abilities made Zach wonder more about what they actually did and how they were affected by the quality of ingredients. “Grim, did you get the pricing information?” Zach said as he thought over what his artificer shop would become if he continued to work on it.

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“Yes, I did.” Grim said, “I also started looking into the buildings spell structure. Its massive and more complex than the simple Hide ability, but it is a little helpful to compare the two different rune structures. The building gave me access to some more of its rune structure when it try to auto-trade with us. Its almost as if…” Grim voice trailed off as the party continued down the street. Looking left and right, shops were selling wards, enhancements, spells, skills, books, food, maps, weapons, armor, golems and even mana cores. Zach truly felt overwhelmed by the amount of goods that he wanted to look at, but Andy had told the both of them that shopping was to be done after one got out of the dungeon not before.

Finally taking the left on to Iron Street, the sound and smell of weapon and armor smiths filled the street. Slate slabs were hung up above the customer heads with a crude chalk price lists. “Grim, you have been really quiet, what the hell are you thinking.” Zach said after waiting several minutes for Grim to complete his thought.

“Zach, do you remember the Melissa Virus?” Grim asked. Zach had to briefly go back into his cyber security history to even vaguely remember what it was. “Its ok, there were a lot of popular trojan viruses that you were quizzed on.” Grim said when Zach didn’t answer, “The virus was an email attachment that briefly rewrote security protocols on operating systems email program and then sent itself out again. I was thinking that if we could inject a curse in the aura of one of the herbs that the building auto-trades, you could technically curse the city core.”

Zach stopped in the middle of the street at what Grim was proposing. “What?!?” Zach said loudly enough that people stopped and looked at Zach.

“Calm down and continue walking.” Grim said in his ear. “Listen,” Grim continued at Zach once again started walking, “its not like I want us to go black hat and destroy a race or something, but when you asked the question about what kind of specialty and abilities the building had, I started thinking about the job board and inventory system. What if the inventory system moves the item and tracks the item like giant database, but in order for it to do that, it has to read the item’s aura. If you could setup a virus in its aura, like the Melissa Virus, you could then curse the core of the city. As far as what type of curse, I was thinking what if the curse merely transported a few herbs, mana, gold, or whatever once a day to our city. It wouldn’t amount to much at first, but eventually it would accumulate over time.”

Zach started thinking about it for a while, and a memory came to him. “Your taking about the plot of Office Space.”

Grim laughed, “Actually, I was thinking more of Bx1 where he stole from a lot of banks and gave it away, but office space works. Additionally, I was thinking that if we could see the actual changes that occurred because of the ingredients, we could start creating our own information database and even publish it. Besides its not like I can whip this up in ten minutes, I would have to spend years figuring out how to do this.”

Zach nodded at Grim’s last comment, a computer virus took a lot of research and understanding the system you were invading, that’s why the movies had it all wrong. Usually they would have a guy type on a keyboard for a few minutes and then hit the ‘enter’ button before launching some kind of attack. The truth was that the guy typing would have spent week to months getting to know the system and then writing a program that would take advantage of its weak spots. Of course, Zach did know where he could find a curse that was effective against a city core and clone some of it to speed the process.

As Zach was thinking about spell firewalls or quarantine spells structures; Zach heard a loud bang that jerked his head up. Andy and Alexa had stopped in front of a three story building that had chipped plaster on its sides revealing interwoven twigs underneath. The loud bang came from the inn’s door crashing open and two individuals were brawling on the ground. Zach had to say individuals because the person on top was perhaps 4 to 5 feet tall, thick muscled body with a mohawk on his head. Zach had to assume that this was a dwarf, but instead of a thick growing beard, the dwarf had a mustache and what appeared to be a weeks’ worth of growth on his jaw. His skin also had a weird shine to it and when the dwarf brought up his fist, Zach caught what looked like fine wire running through the dwarf’s skin.

As the fist came down, Zach heard a loud crunch and then a hiss. Lifting up his fist, the dwarf gave Zach a view of a lizardman down on the ground. Zach would have thought that it would have a lizards head, Instead it appeared much more human in appearance accept for the fact that its nose was flush with its cheeks. Black oil seemed to spread across the lizardman’s blue green scales, and just as the Dwarf was about to continue his ground and pound; the lizardman slam a large scaly fist right into the dwarf’s crotch.

The dwarf quickly rolled off the lizardman while holding his groin, as a round of loud laughter burst out from the crowd. Looking to where the laughter was coming from, a bunch of dwarves with large mugs of dark liquid were laughing and exchanging coin. As the glint of yellow light caught Zach’s eye, he looked down at the dwarves hands and realized that unlike the downed dwarf, their entire hands and forearms seemed to be made of metal. Some of the dwarves had the brown bronze that was Zach’s golem, while others had silver or steel. Another difference was that they all had long beards with rings woven into the hair. Each ring seemed to be made from the same metal as their hands and had intricate Celtic patterns on them.

A dark shadow went over the two fighters and Zach looked up to a see what appeared to be a large human but with jarring points of stone coming out of his face, neck, shoulders and arms. “Enough,” the half-man half-rock elemental bellowed, “Jason, get back to cooking!” A large stone finger pointed down at the dwarf without a beard. The hand turned towards the lizardman making him freeze in fear as the finger leveled itself with its chest. “And you! I don’t give a shit if Jason is clanless! You don’t go around beating up my staff! Now you can pay up and leave, or I can take up the debt with the city guard?” As the lizardman looked down he began reaching into his pockets for some coins.

Seeing as the fight had been broken up, the crowd began to disperse. As people started moving away, Zach overheard one of the dwarves speaking as he paying off the bet he had lost. “Damn Silverveins, never should have bet on him winning the fight!”

You have discovered a hidden Quest! Death of the Silvervein Clan Part 1!

Having read the journals at the abandoned Dwarven campsite, you know that the expedition was comprised of several Silvervein members. The reason why they were seeking the capital city of Yrasis was to recover something critical to their clan. Jason seems to be a member of the Silverveins clan, talk to him about the death of the clan and the abandoned campsite.

Gain Jason’s trust and speak to him about the abandoned campsite. (0/1)

Reward: ???

Do you accept the Quest?

YesNo