The team had headed up the stairs to the desert floor to say goodbye to James for a little while, Teddy and Kyra had to say goodbye over Lucy’s shoulder as she wouldn’t stop hugging him. They hadn’t been separated since he had graduated a month before her at the annex. She had worked hard to stand next to him in combat and now he was off to unknown risk without her. After a few words with his brother and sister-in-law James peeled Lucy off himself. Wracked with emotion himself he smiled casually.

“I’ll be back soon, without having to carry Teddy as a dead weight I’ll move quicker.”

“I have the swift essence, it’s me that has to wait for you chunky.”

James smiled at Teddy and rolled his shoulders. He leant down and kissed his wife one last time and backed up a few steps.

“Yeh? Try keep up with this.”

He started to shift, a few rumblings under the skin at first then suddenly all at once he erupted into shape. His whole body, including clothes smoothly grew to a bird the size of a bus standing on end. His wings then unfolded, each as long as he was tall with a thick brown and white plumage, the feathers along the edge of the wing were a rust coloured metal that moved a little stiffer than the rest but looked almost natural. He had the head and beak of a huge eagle, but his power didn’t make the creature he was transforming into any bigger so he couldn’t be an eagle.

Inner beast

Ability: [Inner beast] (Animagus)

Special ability (animagus, shapeshift)

Base cost: Very high mana

Cool-down: 24 hours

Current rank: Iron 7 (20%)

Effect (iron): Transform into an animal of your choice for one hour. The animal of your choosing will be the prime example of that animal.

Effect (Eagle wing) [Vambrace of Menagerie]: When making attacks that involve a wing it will sheathe the wing in metalled blades. The attack will be much stronger than without this item. Attacks will have resonating force, disruptive force and trace transcendent damage. Any transformation to wings will include these effects. Ranged effects will be augmented by this accessory. [This effect cannot be improve until silver-gold ascension but will still need upgrade materials per ritual of ascension]

“What the hell is that?!” Teddy asked as the now giant bird James looked down at them imperiously, using that one eye side look that eagles do.

[[Thunderbird] A magical creature native to Pallimustus and mythical creature on Earth.]

The interface that the team shared threw out some interesting quirks every now and then, the fact that it would explain somethings and not others was something they had never figured out, in this case Teddy assumed it was because James was still connected to their interface.

[Watch your eyes.] James said over the interface.

He then screeched and launched into the air, kicking up a swirl of sand as he did. The huge bird had an extra long two feathers from its tail whipping in its wake. Since coming into the desert Teddy had been wearing the amulet they looted when they fought to get Lucy’s Furious Magus awakening stone, the amulet filtered sand out of the air nearby to Teddy and the girls kept close to his clean pocket of air.

James climbed high in a spiral and circled over their heads for a moment, joined by Lechuza from on high, she spent her time hunting while Lucy was underground. He then peeled off flying fast into the distance. The girls made their way downstairs to get out of the dust and the sand, Teddy only took a moment longer, gazing out at the desert and the moon shadow of his brother disappearing.

“I could keep up with that.” He muttered to himself before heading downstairs.

Downstairs he saw the others sat in the common area. They had taken the near end of the cavernous space for themselves, there was only one bedroom and it was Charlie’s, the workbench was at the far end and there were sofas and a little kitchenette near the door, they figured there was a chance of kaboom at one end, hot drinks at the other. They travelled in comfort as they had a storage power each, they envy of many teams that might only have one or none, having to rely on buying dimensional storage. Each of them had a cot bed and essentially a mattress to go on it with all the creature comforts. The girls had already settled onto each of their cots and Charlie was no where to be seen so he was in his room. Teddy hit his bed and hoped his brother winging his way over the dark desert would be ok.

They were woken by a small explosion at the end of the cavern. None of them were particularly alarmed by this, when Charlie was left to himself he was normally blowing something or the other up. They had found that it was a good alarm clock as they settled into routine, Charlie would wake them with whatever he was doing at the workbench and Teddy and Lucy would go join in and help. Kyra found herself cooking most of the meals as she was mostly doing research or what advanced healing she had been reading on Charlie when he could leave Teddy and Lucy to work on the project.

As they got to the far end Teddy and Lucy moved to the end of the workbench they had left a series of panels the night before. The crystal material they were working on was called Fourth Stage Crystal, incomprehensibly expensive, a silver rank material bought in gold coins, the only means by which it was affordable was that Charlie was able to make it himself from raw materials, to buy as a construction material would cost a fortune and so only the most rare vehicles and tools were made of it. He had explained that it was fourth stage because it had length, width, depth and imbued with size manipulation magic. Due to the magic of the item it couldn’t get bigger but it could become smaller like the models Charlie had them choose from, when it did it lost the magical properties it had at full size. He had shown Lucy the type of magic she had to imbue into it but she couldn’t work on the material as she didn’t have the necessary skills, that’s where Teddy came in.

Rolling his neck he grabbed a hammer and studied where they had finished off the night before. They were joining two panels and Lucy had to seal it in with the magic. When Charlie did it he could use his crafting essences with his magic essences to fuse the two together with each hammer blow. Teddy and Lucy were using a combination of her magic essences and Teddy’s swift, void and dimension, both pulling on their skill book knowledge and what Charlie had taught them. Lucy started streaming runes and trickling mana into it, the timing of the ritual had to be perfect with Teddy’s hammer blows, luckily he could cheat.

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Aura of the void

Ability [Aura of the void] (Void)

Aura (time, dimension, void, physics)

Base cost: None

Cool-down: Nil

Current rank: Iron 9 (50%)

Effect (iron): enemies within the aura have a slowing effect. For every enemy that is affected you have a slight speed increase.

By actively manipulating his aura power he could slow the time the magic from Lucy actually activated on the panels, this was made easier to see by another power from his swift essence Eyes of the Swift, this slowed real time to his perception for an ongoing mana cost, compounded with this was another power of Teddy’s; Winged Feet which even though it was a mobility power added a significant increase to his speed attribute meaning his blows were incredibly fast. His swift essence was tied to his speed attribute that was almost bronze rank. All in all he was a blur as he worked as fast as Lucy could produce the runes, having to wait for her setup each time. The way they worked was much like a blind man with no taste or smell mixing the ingredients of a cake while a woman with no arms but had eyes, taste and smell was guiding him. Between the two of them they can have a pretty good go at baking a cake but wouldn’t have a chance on their own.

They were under no illusions, they were doing the menial work that was mechanical and repetitive. But this freed up Charlie to do the truly artisan work at the other end of the workbench, holding multiple sections in the air as he did some truly incredible magic that not even Lucy could understand on a theory level and Teddy had no idea how it went together. Every now and then the three of them worked together to put some of the superstructure together with what Charlie was overjoyed to call the engine after finding out what they were.

Kyra called them over for a basic breakfast of mushrooms, there was a collection that grew in the shade of the rocks nearby, the few weeks they had been there they hadn’t seen much other food nearby, Charlie admitted he often forgot to head back into town and they only delivered for a few months before he had to go back and renew his food order, he was happy to make do on spirit coins rather than interrupt his work. Even though he grumbled about pausing the work Charlie was fascinated by the conversations they had while they ate.

“So yous tellin me that its cyclical? The expansion of the gasses in one piston turns the crank and another pulls in this ‘fuel’ into another? And how fast y’all making this explode?” Charlie asked around a mouthful of mushroom that grew into the texture of bread.

“Eh, depends, if you put your foot down, thats how you control the speed, then it speeds up the engine, petrol maybe cruises at three thousand rpm, diesel at one thousand?” Teddy replied.

The girls were having their own conversation, neither interested in cars when they were in their own world, let alone now in a world of magic. Lucy had warned Teddy about the goddess Knowledge not being a huge fan of passing on duff information from their own world but so far there had been no indication Teddy was crossing any lines.

“Nah, you told me the stick thing and the gearin controlled the speed.”

“No that helps, but putting your foot down is what gives you the speed in the first place.”

“Well without magic y’all made it work I guess.”

“Millions of them, basically a rite of passage as you became legally old enough you would get a car and learn to drive. Every country did it slightly differently, some countries used the sticks for gears like I told you, some cars were clever enough to do the gears automatically.”

“Oh yeh?! Tell me about these automatics then…”

The girls were only half listening, glad to have each other’s company so they didn’t have to talk about cars and engines and all the stuff that Charlie found interesting from their world. They once found Teddy trying to explain why plugs had three pins in the UK when Charlie had no concept of electricity. They would let them chat for a while before they would give a nudge for them to get back to work. They were sympathetic as Lucy was getting a mana headache from the amount of mana she was pumping into the construction work and they had spoken to Teddy as he looked burnt out at the end of the first week, between all his abilities he was using for precision his perception of the time passing was making his days a lot longer than the rest of them, he too was getting burnt out magically by using so many powers.

After they’d all eaten and the girls had let Teddy and Charlie explore the wonderful world of internal combustion locomotion they dragged them back over to the workbench. It was one of the times they were working together, Teddy and Charlie were moving parts into place while Lucy was doing and incredibly complicated dual layer ritual that Charlie had shown her, it was used in repetition over every time different sections met that they were joining, he explained that it was to reinforce every section to overlay all the magical joins to make sure there was no one single point of weakness. He could do the work himself but this freed him up to manipulate the pieces more closely, he then would feed his own magic though the rituals Lucy laid out to add silver rank strength to the construction.

After a while, before they got to the end of the sections she had to stop due to feeling more than a little mentally bruised from all the magic. She apologised and went and had a break. Teddy stayed to help Charlie with the rest of it, without Lucy the work slowed down but Charlie used to be able to do it himself, even in his fancy floating wheelchair he didn’t have the same way to manipulate the pieces around so Teddy was still very helpful. Lucy went and had some of her dwindling fruit from her dimensional rune space. She checked in on Lechuza who was still out hunting, they had worked out what range they could still communicate out to and they had a hard rule about the familiar not ranging further than this. The giant owl was a demon of the desert, preying on any iron rank monsters that were attracted to the faint trace of magic from the underground workshop, relying on stealth to avoid any higher rank monsters. Lucy sat with Kyra for a while, silently helping her with her studies, they used the interface to communicate and Kyra essentially had a digital whiteboard of ideas from her studies on a scratchpad in the interface. Lucy had a firm grounding in magical theory so even though healing magic wasn’t her area of study she could lend an educated opinion to the work. After a while she was feeling refreshed, the mental fatigue from the magical heavy lifting had dissipated and she was ready to go again. When she headed down the other end the boys had finished the parts they had been working on and like all the other parts they had been shrunk and stored. They were cramped around some craft designs on the workbench discussing some changes.

“Go on, what brilliant idea have you had now?”

Teddy spun in his stool to look at her.

“Well it turns out that earth mechanics might help us out, I wont go into the details but did you realise that between this technically being a silver rank equivalent vehicle, us not being silver rank and the low magic of greenstone area that it was going to cost us dozens of bronze rank coins a week just to run this thing? Charlie doesn’t normally have this problem as the clients that commission his work are normally higher rank and rich so don’t generally have to worry about money, but we’re new adventurers and very much have to. We came up with a solution, have a look.”

They both moved apart so she could get closer to have a look. She peered over the thin paper to look at what they had added. She still loved the sleek lines of the stealth luxury yacht they had gone for, not too big to be overly ostentatious but big enough to be comfortable, the high prow gently curving back and blending with the top deck structure. What was new was eight big wheels on either side. They looked like something on a lunar rover.

“Wheels? ‘Earth mechanics’, Teddy are you basically claiming you’ve just reinvented the wheel?!”

“No he’s not claiming anything of the sort, we have wheels here as well.” Charlie interposed. “The novel idea is teh use them in a way that is much more efficient then a hover and much more cost effective.”

“It means we will only have to feed the beast dozens of iron rank coins a week instead.”

“Well it’s a good job that all four of us can punch coins out of monsters then!”

Kyra saw that they were discussing more than building so wondered down. The others let her look at the drawing and waited expectantly to hear her thoughts.

“How long until we can use it without the wheels?” She asked disdainfully.