The campsite was chaotic. The placement of crafting stations was available within a radius of 30 feet. That was plenty of space since the stations were built with five feet on one side and six feet on the other. However, the tent, surrounding trees, and campfire interrupted the allowable placement area. So, all told, there wasn’t much space once five crafting stations were set up.
Sarah, Ken, and Jenny had found a location where they could be near each other, so they could chat while they worked. Carlos was in the corner of the available area, far from everyone. Taylor Lynn found a separate place where Lester joined her.
Jay started out by joining Taylor Lynn and Lester. Both watched him approach, and he got a strange vibe. He thought about calling them out but was distracted by another part of the scene. “Is Carlos praying?”
“Yes,” Lester confirmed. He didn’t laugh, but his smile was knowing. Carlos looked pretty strange, praying on his knees before an altar. Jay wasn’t judgmental of personal choices in the real world, but such things were usually optimized in gaming. They didn’t involve hours of meditation.
Jay glanced back over at the Cardinal player. “I’m maybe going to regret this question, but why?”
Lester dropped a small metal rod tool, part of Taylor Lynn’s Enchanting table, to offer an explanation. “Prayer is a skill unique to some of the holy-oriented classes. By praying, he’s able to accrue several randomized buffs. Obviously, that’s going to be helpful in our coming fight. He gets a buff every fifteen minutes, and I think he can stack up to eight of them.”
“Eight buffs?” Jay was flabbergasted. He was rethinking whether or not he was the only broken class. The random element was a weakness, but with the ability to accumulate eight buffs, Carlos was bound to run into something useful. “How long do the buffs last?”
“It varies from buff to buff,” Lester said. “But, as far as I understand, they tend to average around thirty minutes. He also needs to be within a campsite or town. So once you factor that in, a Cardinal can get a few monster kills or one dungeon boss before needing to re-up.”
That made more sense. Though the buffs were high in utility, the overall benefit would be marginal. The Cardinal needed to pray for two hours to get thirty minutes of buffs. It seemed to Jay that it would rarely be worth it.
“What happens when his skill levels up?” he asked. He even looked to Carlos, hoping the player would chime in.
Carlos didn’t react to the question since he was still absorbed in prayer. Lester shrugged the query off. “No idea, to be honest.”
“Give me your equipment,” Taylor Lynn cut in. “The sword, the crossbow, and the armor. I think the armor’s enchantments are already as strong as they will get. But I want to check. Most of all, your crossbow needs some love. It’s really cool, but we need to pack some more punch into it if we’re going to take down this snake.”
“We’re not going to take down the snake,” Lester argued. “It’s way too risky.”
“Give it time. You’ll come around,” Taylor Lynn said, giving him her most charming smile.
Taylor Lynn was just as interested in killing the elite sea snake as Jay was. Situations like that were why they got along so well for so long. Both players were deeply interested in being challenged and pushing their skills. Between the two of them, they would find a way. And hopefully, get some loot for the challenge. Every bonus was going to help on the island.
“Absolutely not,” Lester said. But Taylor Lynn turned to Jay and gave him a wink.
Jay removed all his main equipment pieces and placed them on the Enchanting table Taylor Lynn was using. The table was made of polished oak wood but featured a large crater in the center. In the wood surrounding the cavity, there were harshly carved runes.
“Oh yeah,” Jay said. “Can you use any of this?”
There were so many items that he opened a trade window with Taylor Lynn. He placed the various crafting items he’d acquired into the window. He included the small pile he had stocked up over two days of farming to keep his mind off Claire.
Taylor Lynn took her time sorting through the ingredients, talking about each. Her skill gave her more information on what ingredients could be used for, even if she was missing the actual Enchanting patterns. She took a lot of ingredients but ultimately told him to give the rest to Jenny.
“Thanks,” Taylor Lynn said once the transfer was completed. “I’ll make good use of all this stuff. I want to enchant all our gear that isn’t already enchanted.”
“While you’re at that,” Jay said. “Since you need to hold onto my equipment, take this.”
He pulled a small vial from his inventory labeled “Blade Oil.” He put the vial on the enchanting table next to Lester. “This oil needs to be applied to the blade,” Jay said. “I’m going to talk to my sister, but I’m sure you can handle it.”
With that, he navigated his way over to Sarah and the others. He could hear the voices behind him calling to handle his own maintenance, but the trick was walking with purpose. Under no circumstances did he want to be murdered by Bernard for mishandling Purple Haze, but he didn’t want to deal with it.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
Jenny sat in front of a table similar to Taylor Lynn’s, though it was made of mahogany and lacked any sort of crater in the center. The runes on her table were more patterned and had a little refinement that the Enchanting table lacked. She was holding a long needle made of silver, using the tool to slowly etch runes onto a sword.
Sarah’s table was utterly plain but littered with equipment that Jay couldn’t comprehend. He wasn’t great at science to start with, let alone chemistry. At least, he thought those were chemistry lab tools. His resolute decision was to leave the alchemy to Sarah.
Ken’s table was made of metal. Half of the metal was a flat surface, which would allow for hammering the material. On the other side, the metal was hollowed and contained a red-hot bubbling mixture.
“Your weapon?” Jay asked, directing his question to Ken.
The other player simply nodded.
Jay took the volcanic remnants and beetler metal out of his inventory. Small, neat piles of items materialized in front of the table. “Wanna make a new one?”
While transferring items, he added the items specified for Alchemy to a pile in front of Sarah. Then, he piled the remainder, which Taylor Lynn had passed on, in front of Jenny’s table.
“It’s good having a big brother,” Sarah said. “Especially one who is too lazy to pick his own crafting skill.”
“I’m not lazy,” Jay said. “The thing is, I already have the Bestiary. Collecting monsters is basically my crafting skill. Also, I get paid for it in cold hard cash. So there.”
Sarah was in the process of bubbling two liquids together. The separate vials had tubes that threaded into a central vial. So the bubbling mixtures, which were converted to gas, flowed into the main chamber. Instead of being heated, the central chamber had a cooling element underneath it. There, the gasses condensed into a combined liquid.
The combined liquid was steadily forming into a potion. Jay could tell from the color that it was some kind of health potion. He watched as the others went about their work, trying to track how long the brew took to make. The process took about five minutes, and Sarah spent most of the time working on her homework. That made him a proud older brother.
“So you can make about twelve potions per hour?” Jay asked, a bit enthralled by the alchemical process.
“Depends on the potion, of course,” Sarah said. “But yeah, about. Usually between ten and twenty. Mostly it takes a minute to set up, and then I’m bored. It actually suits me pretty well since I need time to study. The constant cognitive switching is annoying, but it’s almost similar to making pharmaceutical drugs.”
“Really?” Jay asked. He was surprised to hear that the game would be so realistic. He expected the developers to simply create what was easiest for them to program or was the coolest thematically.
“No, dork. This is a video game,” she said, causing the twins to chuckle. “Besides, I’m a med student, not a pharmacologist.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Jay said. “So anyway, when Sarah was a baby–”
“Shut up,” Sarah cut back.
“Then: leave Jay alone,” Jay said, emphasizing the words.
“I’m going to smack whoever taught you that meme.”
“It was you.”
In response, Sarah smacked herself on the back of her head and set about making the next potion. Jay didn’t want to distract her, especially knowing she was doing schoolwork too. He turned to see the process of Jenny’s crafting instead.
She was working on etching runes into the same blade she had been working on before. Jay felt terrible that she would probably need to do it all over again once Ken crafted his new weapon.
As Jay watched, she moved on to the next part of her process. Using a mortar and pestle, she powdered some ingredients from the pile by her table. Using that powder, she coated the blade in it, allowing the powder to sink into the carved crevasses of the runes.
After the runes were coated, she began chanting a spell. The chant was obviously the most essential part of the process; power was imbued into the equipment through the chant. Everything else was to create the opportunity to imbue the runes. The name made perfect sense, watching the process occur.
Jay observed for several minutes until Jenny completed the chant. After finishing, she picked up the small blade to inspect it. As she peered at the metal, Jay asked the question that had been in the back of his head.
“Aren’t you going to have to do that again once Ken finishes his new weapon?”
Jenny dropped the blade, and her hand went over her heart as she jumped in her small seat. She looked at him with bug eyes but quickly readjusted. “You scared me; I was so focused. I’m just using this blade to practice. Runes take a while, so I don’t want to mess up on important equipment. The more I practice, the more runes I unlock.”
“That makes a lot of sense,” Jay said. He was making progress on his own skills but was curious about how the others were doing. “Do you have a lot of runes unlocked already?”
They’d only been playing about a week, but they’d spent plenty of time not grinding. Jay felt a little guilty they weren’t pushing harder since the money was meant to help Sarah. Once the party understood the island better, he planned to propose a couple days of grinding. Hunting the elite sea snakes would be fun grinding, too, if there were more than one.
“I’m not sure,” Jenny frowned. “I have a few, though. Let’s see, I have Defense, Health, Strength, Speed, and Fire.”
“I need you to put Speed onto my crossbow once Taylor Lynn is finished,” Jay said. The words spilled out faster than he meant them to. He was so excited by the prospect of getting an additional Speed buff from some gear.
Jenny’s eyebrows raised in surprise at the little outburst. “Sure. It’ll take a little while, but I have all five of those runes at the novice tier.”
She was already in the C tier for five different runes. She definitely was more diligent about practicing her skill than Jay was. Jay didn’t notice her shock since he had his eyes on the prize: 100 Speed.
Finally, Jay went over to monitor Ken’s process. The Blacksmithing process made the least sense. Chunks of metal were dropped into the vat of bubbling red liquid, which heated them up. Ken used a ladle to pull the molten metal from the heating area. The hot metal was dropped onto the flat metal anvil part and seemed to solidify automatically.
Afterward, Ken simply hammered away at it, reheating it when necessary. When he was done hammering, he dropped the hot sword into a bucket of water. The whole process only took him about fifteen minutes in total.
The least sensical part to Jay was using the forge area to form the metal ingots. The ladle just looked ridiculous, but it did streamline the process and eliminate the need for molds. The developers probably had limited options for how to create a genuinely portable forge.
“Check this out,” Ken said proudly, pulling the sword from the water bucket. Water still dripped down the sides of it, but Jay could inspect the item all the same.
System Message: Volcanic Beetler Sword. This weapon was crafted using a blended alloy of beetler carapace and volcanic remnants. The volcanic remnants have burned away the carapace, absorbing some of its toxin. This weapons deals no physical damage, but attacks with this weapon deal 50% poison damage and 50% fire damage. Missed attacks have a 5% chance to deal 20% of the original damage as fire damage. Damage: 75-125.