90: I Love It When A Shop Comes Together

Bad news: Dzhemehal was apparently one of the ‘need to know’ individuals that would be given the information about the necklace.

Incredible, amazing, better-than-anything news? Eris wasn’t going to be the one that had to deal with the info-dump woman. At least, not yet.

Kull had written out the whole description of the necklace Azris word for word, then gave that paper to a porter who would bring it to whatever poor, unfortunate researchers that would be working with Dzhemehal to figure out what all of it means.

Eris could count that as one blessing of being on a time-crunch. While a whole team of other people worked somewhere else to try and figure out information, she could focus on her own responsibilities. Namely, getting her workshop set up by remaking every single tool within the four walls.

As predicted, some simple tests did seem to prove that Adept Artificer seemed to be limited only to things that directly interacted with whatever Eris was crafting. Without spending any CP on any skills and having the entire strength of the item be the bonus of Adept Artificer, all Eris needed to do was make a couple of wooden clubs with twenty seconds of whittling and then pass them to Professor Kull who would break them in half with his bare hands. It took a few minutes to make a little whittling knife that was as weak as Eris could possibly get it, and that was enough to finish up the tests.

Using the new knife to make another ‘weak as possible’ club resulted in one that was drastically more difficult for Kull to snap, proving that Adept Artificer was indeed providing the second bonus. It seemed to continue doing so even after Eris put on the Ophthalmic Quadfocals, since they doubted that the Major boost to Durability that the goggles provided would equate to the three-hundred and seventy-five percent that the Quality bonus of Eris’s skill would give when the secondary effect was triggered. It was even more difficult for Kull to break- forcing the man to apparently use some Pugilist skill that drastically increased the power of certain attacks on top of his augmented Strength stat. Still, it snapped away, with no noticeable decrease in the Durability when Addison did half of the carving, first. Or when Rocky made a leather grip that Eris affixed to it. Or when Rachel had metal studs affixed to increase the lethality.

It didn’t seem to matter what Eris was wearing, or how prepared any given part was before being assembled. As long as Eris was the one to put it together and put those final touches, that seemed to count as enough of ‘her’ craft for Adept Artificer to be happy, given the fact that Kull could still break the club, but only with a lot of effort.

When Eris put on Azris though, that wasn’t the case. Kull couldn’t break that stick, not even when he took a magical meat cleaver from the pile of gifts and hacked away at the wood. The table underneath it split into three pieces before the club even showed the first scratch.

The necklace wasn’t cold against her neckline while she wore it, and wasn’t cumbersome in any capacity. It was simply a little bit of warm, almost tingly pressure against her clavicle with a glint of silver whenever Eris would look down. As for the functional effect of the item, it really was hard to tell just how powerful it was other than the fact it made an item she spent zero Crafting Points on so durable that even Charlotte, a level nineteen combatant with the best magical items that the entire Syndicate had to offer, took a noticeable amount of effort to hack the club in two with her sword. Eris wasn’t even sure she wanted to try and figure out how hard it would be to break if she actually started using CP. After all, the stated stat bonuses on an item were more like multiplicative modifiers being applied in specific ways the base item didn’t naturally account for. What may have been one of the most powerful objects in the world directly giving her a benefit to Craftsmanship, which equated to how powerful something she made was? The fact that she was making an item that powerful despite having a comparatively low Craftsmanship stat of D (and the passive benefits of Adept Artificer just went to show how powerful the item was.

Potency was often regarded as one of the most important factors for an item, simply because it made it so that an item was better at doing what it was designed to do at the most basic level. A sword made with high Potency would cut deeper, while armor with high Potency would reduce more force of incoming attacks. However, the stat bonuses of an item, if any, took a portion of the magic in the item and provided it directly to the bearer as a multiplier to their stats or even some other undefined aspect such as Crafting Speed from Eris’s new goggles, or the ever-strange Pleasure stat Eris could seemingly manipulate.

By the Syndicate’s best guess, a Minor effect had a ‘value’ of approximately twenty-five percent of the full item’s power, which was applied directly to the bearer. Grace provided a lovely analogy.

“Now magic and magic items don’t have such strict numbers at all, but it makes this a lot easier to explain by pretending they do. If we say that an item has a magical value of ten, and provides a Minor boost to Vitality, with Minor being a twenty-five percent effect, then it would take twenty-five percent of that ten the item has. So, it takes a magical value of two-point-five, and puts that directly into the Vitality of whoever is using it.”

Grace dragged her knife through the bundle of leather resting on the table in front of her, carving away strips much faster than Rocky beside her who was only level four.

“A Moderate effect seems to be about a fifty-percent value, so it would take half of that overall magic value of ten and give five to Vitality instead of the Minor’s two and a half. Greater is about seventy-five percent, so it would be seven and a half, and Major is about a hundred percent, so in addition to the item having ten points of value towards whatever it was designed to do, it naturally gives ten points of value in Vitality to the person using it simply because of the stat bonus.”

The tenth–level Artisan then swivelled in her stool the instant that her knife cut the last of her leather into strips, turning to pick up a needle and thread from Hima beside her.

“But again, that is based on the natural magic of the item itself. If that ten-point magic item has a Major boost to Vitality, but Eris makes an item with a value of a hundred and a Minor boost, the total boost is going to be twenty-five points. Two and a half times higher than the boost that the other item did despite having a Minor value instead of Major, and that’s not including the fact that the base item itself is ten times as powerful at what it was already meant to do.”

“Yeah, but what does a ‘Legendary’ value even mean? I never knew there was even a multiplier higher than Major.” Ophelia chirped up from the kitchen section of the workshop. Although there wasn’t a whole lot of baking to be done when making new tools for Eris, there was a veritable mountain of stuff just outside the workshop that she was dragging inside and sorting, one bin at a time. The fact she was also making brownies was just an added bonus.

Addison, dragging her rasp over a piece of wood being shaped meticulously into a handle, hummed.

“There isn’t- at least, not that we’ve ever found. It might just be the next step up from Major though, so maybe a hundred and twenty-five percent? Twenty-five percent higher than the previous level like all the others?”

“Or it could be two hundred percent,” Bailey said from the other side of the table Eris was seated at. The flat-chested blonde was organizing a bundle of sewn leather, a few small amethysts, and a flattened blade shaped like half a disc with a stem protruding for a handle.

“Or three hundred percent, or five hundred. We have no way of knowing, and we don’t really have any way of finding out since we don’t even know how big of a ‘magic value’ the necklace would have on its own. Right now, it’s just a crazy-high multiplier on an already crazy-powerful item to send Eris’s stats through the roof. With Grace’s analogy, that necklace could have a magical value of a thousand or something. If a ‘Legendary’ bonus is like… two hundred percent, then that would mean Eris is effectively getting a bonus to both her Craftsmanship and Control of two thousand some-odd points when any other item made by the Syndicate could probably do like a hundred at BEST. By the way, Addison, she’s gonna need that handle right now.”

“I’m not done yet. Two more minutes-”

The woodcarver was cut off as Eris flashed a hand to the side, leaning from her chair and snatching the unfinished handle right from Addison’s fingers with a surprised yelp. Sliding back into her spot, Eris brought her own knife against the surface of the wood and it nearly sank into the material like water. There simply wasn’t resistance anymore. The slightest shift of the blade in her grip sent little slivers of wood fluttering down. Well, not fluttering. Wood was practically blowing back in her face as Eris swiped it off the base with so much speed that she couldn’t even properly see her hands wrapped in pink strings, or comprehend what she was doing.

A very powerful pair of goggles giving a Major boost to Crafting Speed, and an incomprehensibly-powerful necklace giving an even stronger benefit to Eris’s Control, which also accounted for Crafting Speed. Bailey even took a step back from the cloud of sawdust and pink light that wafted from Eris’s side of the table, laughing.

“I guess in the meantime you can start working on the handle for the…” Bailey squinted down at the hastily-scrawled list of tools Eris needed. “Duplex Rabbet Plane? The fuck even is that?”

“A hand plane with two adjustable blades, so it can cut pre-measured grooves and corners,” Eris chirped quickly.

She slid the rounded blade into the holes on the already-finished handle, hammering the securing pegs into place with a single hit each since they were already lined up perfectly. Then, the leather almost seemed to glide in the perfect spiralled grip up the handle with the amethyst beads fitting into the proper grooves. The knots in the leather practically tied themselves as Eris tugged on the strings to secure everything together. Meanwhile, Addison finished the statement, grabbing another piece of wood that Ophelia tossed her way.

“You can use it as a normal hand planer to flatten wood, or you can almost use it like a chisel on a block so you get perfectly straight edges along the entire length of the wood.”

“Doesn’t really matter what it does,” Rachel chirped up over the sounds of her hammer on metal. “It just matters whether it’s something that’s necessary right now so that Eris can make whatever equipment those five are gonna need before they go off fuck-knows-where while still getting that extra bonus from Adept Artificer.”

Hima’s soft voice squeaked over the noise. “I don’t think that’s a problem anymore. With that necklace and those goggles, Eris can probably build half of Marrix over a weekend. A few extra tools is barely gonna take minutes.”

“Yeah, but she’s still gonna be crazy busy,” Bailey chuckled. “Having all of you set up the basics for her cuts down the time that this takes by a good amount, but it still means that she’s only getting handles, grips, blades and runestones with your benefits on them, not hers- and hers are a damned sight more powerful.”

Bailey shrugged, taking off her glasses to clean a smudge of sawdust from one of the lenses. “Normally that’s a good thing, because then you can try to optimize the best bonuses with the skills of other crafters that are about your level of power, but Eris’s raw values just blow everyone else out of the water, even if she doesn’t exactly have versatility in what she can do. The most efficient way to do this would be to have Eris do literally everything while we just hand her the raw materials, but that would take up too much time that’s better spent doing more important things.”

Eris paused, set the newly-completed round knife down, and flicked her eyes up at Bailey. “Do you mean what I think you mean?”

Bailey nodded with a sly grin. “Yep. Eight consecutive hours is a lot of time investment.”

“Well, we don’t even know what exactly qualifies for that part,” Ophelia spoke up while carefully looking over a very, very nice filet knife from the pile of gifts. “Intimacy is a suspiciously vague term, so it could simply mean spending the time with someone in a full-day date would be enough. You can just do a crafting date or something.”

“It’s the sin of Lust,” Tatum grunted over her extremely meticulous runecarving. “It’s gonna be eight hours of sex.”

“You can still do it while crafting,” Rachel chuckled. At that, Ophelia smiled too.

“Yes, you definitely can.”

Eris’s cheeks were burning, but the worst part was that they were in a conversation that she herself was actually very intrigued by. The best thing she could do was divert to the other part of the enchantment.

“And afterwards… what? I just pick a skill and take it?”

“Copy it,” Professor Kull clarified from his sitting position in the corner with a pad of paper. “It says you replicate and gain the skill, not take it from the person.”

“If it works on Gifted to begin with,” Charlotte stared blankly at her helmet resting in her lap. “That would have been meant to work on Echoes, not Gifted. Who knows what it’ll do?”

“But if Vojemala made it exclusively for me, she might have known that Echoes weren’t really going to be a thing anymore and designed it with Gifted in mind?” Eris lifted the goggles and rubbed the bridge of her nose. Then, she looked down and held the pendant between her fingers. “I mean, the necklace is literally called ‘Future’. My name translates to Hope, Light, Soul, and the description talks about it being designed for a hopeful soul to bear when the world needs their light.”

Bailey nodded. “Yeah, that is disgustingly direct. At this point, it isn’t hitting the nail right on the head, it’s balancing a second nail on the first and then hitting that nail. It’d be more of a coincidence if Eris wasn’t exactly who it was referring to.”

“I’m afraid I have to agree with that sentiment. It does seem like Nima’s earlier theory about Miss Kadell being chosen as an Echo before the Sundering even happened has been almost completely confirmed.” Professor Kull nodded, writing down on the paper. Although he wasn’t a crafter who was helping to replace Eris’s workshop, he could at least be the notetaker to summarize all their ideas and theories for researchers later. Towards the other end of the workshop, Grace spoke up.

“But the question stands of how exactly gaining a copy of someone’s skill would work. For example, if you copy my Versatility skill that gives me a fifty percent bonus to the Potency of creations using three or more methods of crafting, would you get the exact same thing, as is? Or would you get a version that’s weaker because it’s a copy?”

“Or would she get a version that’s even stronger because she’s an Echo?” Hima spoke from beside Grace. “If she gets a version of your skill, could she then use Desire to level it up just like her other skills? What if she can evolve it into something even better?”

“I think the more important question here is if the same skill can stack,” Rachel said. Ophelia rested fully on the counter she was using to sort gifts and nodded.

“She’s right. If Artificers are every single one of our crafting classes put together, then she’s probably going to get any skill that any of us have completely on her own, and then some. If that’s the case, then anything any Gifted crafter can offer her is going to be nothing more than a temporary bonus until she gets that skill naturally, unless the skills can stack.”

“Like… copying someone else’s Crafting Points?” Tatum asked. Rachel nodded, opening the latch on the small forge to pull out the piece of red-hot metal inside with a pair of tongs.

“Yeah. Eris has her own levelled up, evolved version of Crafting Points that gives her like a hundred some-odd points. Mine gives me four points. If she and I fuck for eight hours straight, could she then theoretically copy my version of the skill to get four more points? If so, would that just add to the total of the points she already has and gain the benefits of that side effect where spending a certain amount on one skill grants extra points to spend on something else, or would it count as a separate source that doesn’t have that passive benefit? If so, could she then level up that new skill, gaining more points until it does have that benefit, or would it be stuck at four points permanently?”

Eris’s face was starting to burn, but she coughed out her words. “I don’t think we’ll know until we try it.”

Rachel smirked. “Are you offering to fuck?”

Eris’s eyes went wide, and she stammered. “Wait- I didn’t… that’s not what I-”

“I’m messing with you, Red.” Rachel laughed, lifted her hammer, then brought it down against the orange metal she held against the anvil. “Well, a little serious, but mostly joking. Plus, after that show in the classroom, I wouldn’t think you’d be opposed to a little bit of fun with us.”

“Can we please just focus on making the tools?” Eris pleaded, desperate to change the subject.

“Not much left to actually make.” Bailey adjusted her glasses, looking over the pile of finished tools in a bin beside her and the list of everything Eris wanted to create. “We’ve already got five different culinary knives, four leather ones, eight different chisels for either wood or stone, a mortar and pestle, three saws, four rasps with different grain sizes, an alembic, three varying sized cauldrons, multiple different pots and pans, a couple of beakers, about three dozen sewing needles for some fuckin’ reason, more hammers than I can count on my fingers, and enough nails to build an entire carriage.”

“And a fresh platter of brownies,” Ophelia added with a smile, laying the delicious-smelling treats on the counter.

Hima immediately perked up. “Break time!” To say she dove for the counter would have been an understatement. Thankfully, it seemed that everyone was more than willing to embrace a brief brownie break amidst the crafting chaos- including both Kull and Charlotte. With a mouthful of chocolate and a bit of smithing sweat sticking to her exposed arms, Rachel huffed.

“I’d say that pretty much the only things left to actually replace would be the big stuff, like the forge, the oven and the loom. Then from there it’s just up to Eris to make the gear for them. Unless she immediately wants to start replacing all these tools with brand new ones made only by her, that is.”

Kull swallowed a bite from his brownie, revealing that it was much harder to see someone as a figure of authority when they were actively eating a chocolate dessert.

“I believe these tools, along with the larger ones, should suffice for getting her Wonders equipped before their deployment. With the speed that the necklace and goggles grant her, I have no doubt that Miss Kadell could indeed replace every single one of the tools that all of you just made, and craft all the necessary equipment for the party before the deadline. However, as Miss Geriege stated earlier, there is now a new, very large consumer of time that needs to be addressed.”

“Copying skills,” Eris surmised. Kull nodded.

“Correct. I assume you would like to be as powerful as possible when making your allies’ equipment to ensure their safety?”

Eris paused, then bobbed her head. “Yeah, I do.”

“Then we would need to set aside time for you to obtain whichever skills you wish and deem most vital. Before that though, is determining which skills would be best for you to receive, considering the fact that you can only get one per person and it cannot be changed.”

The room went a bit quiet. Hima raised an eyebrow. “Like… we all just say all our skills so that Eris can pick which ones she wants?”

Kull nodded again. Bailey chuckled with a brownie hanging out of her mouth and waltzed over to where the Dean had been sitting, grabbing the pen and pad of paper. She flipped to a new page, then pulled the brownie from her mouth. After she bit down to claim a large portion, that is. When she spoke, her voice was muffled from chocolate.

“Geth we thood rite thith down.” Bailey chewed for a moment and swallowed. “Gods, that’s good. Alright, who wants to go first?”