It was only two days later that Pat approached Johan with the rings once more. At this point she had gotten them sized correctly, and had made them a good deal smoother than before. From what Johan gathered, it seemed that she had gotten some help from Jen and Markus to figure out how to put a sort of finish onto the rings.

"Oh? These are quite nice. I'll imbue them when we get done walking today." Johan nodded at her handy work. "I would also like to ask if you think you could make a necklace for me. I don't need anything too fancy, just a circular disk of wood with a small bump for where the string would go. I want to try my hand at imbuing an active spell into something. I need the blank piece of wood so I can carve the spell form in. I think I'll attach Wind Blade to it."

"Um... I guess. That seems pretty simple to do." Pat nodded at Johans request. It would at least give her something to do. She had also started to learn a bit of melee combat from both Markus and Anne. Johan was hoping it would help her become less of a liability in a fight, but he also knew that training came slowly.

"Thanks. Also, I have a question for you. It's regarding magic engineering."

"Oh? I'll hear it at least." Pat looked a bit brighter at the prospect of discussing magic engineering.

"I want to make a few enchantments and imbuements to create a weapon, I have a good idea of how I want to do it as well. But I'm wanting your help to do it, since you have a good idea about things like how much force certain metals can take, as well as how some spells can interact with materials." Johan tried to explain.

"Oh, are you talking about the 'gun' that you were thinking of making?" Pat asked.

"Yeah. Yeah, I was." Johan laughed a bit. "I wasn't sure you knew what a gun was."

"Well, it is unfamiliar, but Anne drew one for me and explained that they work by using combustion to send a small object or pellet forwards at speeds that can pierce skin and flesh. By her understanding they use the tube to contain the combustion and prevent the wielders fingers from being taken off."

"Yeah, that's roughly it, though with what I want to do, I don't think I need the combustion effect. Instead I want to engrave the barrel of the gun with the spell forms to be able to cast Bullet on the object in the chamber. I'm not sure how to go about it yet though. I'll need to find a blacksmith that has enough skill to get what I'm talking about as well before I can really get started on it." Johan explained. "I also plan to try and enchant a mana gathering circuit onto the handle, or maybe inside of it so that anyone can use it. I'm almost certain that others have done this before, but I don't know anyone of those who have, unfortunately." Johan sighed.

"Hmm... I guess you could do that. From what I got from the other day, it seems that Bullet is strong enough to take off a normal persons fingers, so I'm thinking iron... No, steel would be better since it is stronger... You will also need some way to carve into the metal, so some engraving tools are needed, unless you can learn a spell that can help you with that aspect of it. As for a way to gather mana... You could use monster cores, or, alternatively you could form your own mana crystals. You will need mana based crystals either way since you need a way to store the mana. You would also need a way to prevent mana overflow as that could cause the crystals to explode. Perhaps the crystals could be in the handle? You should be able to create them in the handle with mana sense right? After all Mana space is entirely separate from real space..." Pat paused, and looked at Johan who was watching her just rattle off various things. "Sorry. I just got a bit too into it."

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"No, it's fine. I brought this up to you because of this. I wouldn't have even thought of the need to use steel, nor realized that I needed mana crystals. Sure I probably would have thought of some things, but you managed to think of all of that so much faster." Johan laughed a bit, "It really shows that you enjoy magic engineering. I'll leave the specs for you and I'll let you know if the design is feasible or not. If it isn't I'll try to help you figure out why, even though I'm not great at actually doing things like enchanting and imbuing. And make no mistake, we have to enchant this, I am not going to be imbuing it every week, not to mention I already have to put a way for it to gather mana into it for it to work the way I want."

"I see... Alright, well, I'll try to get a general idea of how it should be done. It's going to be a bit pricy to get this made though, you know that right?" Pat said.

"Well, yeah. I'm going to have to buy mana reactive materials and get a blacksmith capable of handling them to help me out. If I'm lucky I'll find someone like the blacksmith who made my bracer back in Northwind. He was skilled, and did his work for rather cheap. Even included mithril which means I could probably enchant this with something." Johan paused and though for a second. He *could* do that. In fact, that'd be a good thing to look into. Maybe he could find a spell similar to a force field, like what mages in comics usually had in some way. It'd probably be in the pure mana spell category, which he had yet to mess with.

"That'd be good. Either way, I need to think about this for a while, I'll probably talk to Adv about it. He is quite useful for making designs with, since he has a drawing program on him." Pat sighed. "Thanks for giving me so much to think about. I'll try to get that wooden circle done before the end of the week."

"Yep. Thanks." Johan said, waving her off as she went to do some thinking.

Around 5 or so minutes went by before Jen sidled up next to Johan.

"So... What did you two talk about?" She gestured to Pat.

"Well, I got the rings to imbue later today, I'll probably hand them out before bed, then we talked about getting a disk made of wood that I could use as a necklace. I plan to put something else on it. Trying to make myself more useful in combat, yeah? I think Wind Blade is a good candidate for putting on it, it's decently strong, especially when you catch someone off guard with it. Then I asked her to help with designing my gun idea, flesh it out a bit more, you know? I figured she likes engineering and wants to be a magic engineer, it ought to be right up her alley. It's going to be expensive to make it though." Johan debriefed her.

"Ah. So you're going to give me a ring?" Jen teased a bit. "Also, I think getting some battle magic imbued into an object is a good idea, makes it so you don't need to wait to cast."

"Yep. I can also charge it out of battle, For a disk it should be able to have at least 2 charges, one for each side. Though if I really wanted I could learn Nature Control and carve more spell forms in between the surface of the disk. That actually isn't a bad idea, now that I think about it. It'll be a bit before then though, since that also requires me to learn how to use nature mana. Man... My list of things to do is just continuing to grow outwards." Johan sighed.

"Yep. Hopefully we stay in the next town for a while... What was it called? Hammer?"

"I think so. Yeah. It'll be nice to sleep in a bed rather than on the dirt won't it? Also, From what I remember they have a lot of blacksmiths there." Johan responded.

"That's good for you."