Starting From Scratch

John poked his head into Daryl’s office, a room more cluttered than his work van. Stacks of documents dominated the desk. Heaps of crushed soda cans climbed up the back wall.

“Hey, where can I find a fire extinguisher?"

Without looking away from his screen, Daryl pointed through his office window towards racks of stock metal and said, “On the far side of the shop. Should be tucked in behind the eye wash station.”

As he hurried off to collect the piece of equipment he needed for his experiment, John yelled back, “Thanks.”

“No problem.”

If the first problem faced by every novice artificer was that of uncontrolled mana flow, the second was the problem of mana only ever flowing downhill. A simple mana siphon would allow mana to flow freely from one vessel to another but only until the charge between them equalized.

John needed a way to force mana to flow uphill, and if the thrumming in the back of his head was any indication, he’d devised a solution, a simple mana pump.

The prototype pump could force uphill flow by applying a set of capacitors as intermediaries between the mana source and the battery, cycling through a sequence of charge, isolation, and discharge.

‘Like bailing water from one pool to another.’

This worked, in theory, by exploiting the capacitor’s inherent instability. Unlike other components of his catalog, whose capacity to hold mana was a function of their geometry and material composition, the capacity of the capacitor was a temporary effect induced by conflicting mana flows. When this conflict got resolved or bypassed, the component’s capacity dropped back to zero, and the mana contained sought escape through any available path, even if that meant flowing uphill.

Unfortunately, this led to the third problem faced by novice artificers, and the need for a fire extinguisher, the phenomenon of mana sear. For every material, there were limits to their tolerance to the flow and fluctuation of mana. Exceeding those limits, even briefly, would damage a component, and if severe enough, could result in their catastrophic failure.

The quartz slabs that formed the core of mana batteries were particularly sensitive to this effect and prone to burning when flow changed too quickly. Shorting the capacitor, dropping its capacity to zero near instantaneously, would destroy it.

When John installed a capacitor in his mage spear, the capacitor’s iron core was fed with mana that first passed through the copper coil. For the pump, flow through the core and the coil would be independent. Once the core had reached capacity and was isolated from the source, the flow through the coil would be lowered slowly. This way, mana would trickle out slowly.

Extinguisher in hand, John returned to his workbench and began one last inspection of his prototype. His design utilized a pair of capacitors, each insulated with a thin layer of lead and clad in bronze shielding, as the primary working components. They operated in staggered sequences so that as one charged, the other would discharge. A small arcano-motor mounted between them kept the systems timing. Conduit ran from the pump's outlet, through a flow gauge, and finally into a small battery. Stuck to the gauge’s glass was a thin strip of red tape marking the maximum allowable flow, about three Maybel per second, or 3 MP in John’s system.

John plugged the pump into shop power and flipped the prototype on. The motor whirred to life, and gears clacked through their turns. Mana rushed silently and invisibly into the first capacitor's iron core and stalled against the emissions of its copper coil. After a few seconds, sharp clacks reverberated through the mechanism as switches flipped. Mana rushed into the second capacitor, and slowly drained out of the first. The gauge’s needle slowly rose, then hovered just below the red tape.

Jaw tightening, he watched the dial hawkishly as the mechanism clicked closer to the critical moment. The dial began to slowly fall. The mechanism clacked. The dial ceased its fall and fluttered back to about half the previous steady measure. It clacked again, and the dial plunged nearly to zero. The dial then gently rose until it found a steady place just below the tape strip.

John sighed, switched the prototype off, and began to adjust its timing. ‘That’s not too bad. I should probably shrink the capacitors and add a third to smooth out that transition.’

After adjusting the timing, he started the test again. The system proceeded through the first charge and transition. The dial slowly rose to the marked limit. The system clacked and the dial rose higher, crossing the tape. Before John could react, the battery popped and hissed. The inlet billowed smoke then spewed a guttering, silver fire.

Panicked, John slapped the pump's emergency shut off, snatched up the fire extinguisher, and then dowsed the battery in smothering foam.

Daryl poked his head out of his office. “Ya good?”

“Yeah, just a small fire.”

John cleaned up his mess and replaced the damaged battery. After a little more tinkering, he started his third test. The pump started up, progressed through its first charge and transition without incident. The dial rose, held steady for a while, then gradually fell back to zero. The system clacked, and the cycle repeated over and over again, until the system clacked and the dial remained still. The battery was fully charged.

John leapt to his feet and yelled over to Daryl's office, "It works! Test fire in two minutes!" Then in a flurry of movement, he disconnected the pump from both power and battery, shoved it into his Inventory, and set upon the last few adjustments needed to complete the first pieces of his prototype power armor.

His Abyssal tutor emerged from his alcove with a lackadaisical grin. "You couldn't give me a better heads up?"

"Nope," John shot back with vigor. "I barely know what I'm doing, so you find out what's happening about as soon as I do."

Daryl disappeared behind rows of raw stock and components and returned soon after, towing a trio of bronze chainmail curtains stretched taut on rolling racks. In a tight corner opposite his office, he arranged the racks so they formed a closed corridor. Again the Abyssal disappeared among the rows and soon returned, this time with a decrepit mannequin which he placed in the center of the corridor.

Finishing his work a few minutes slower than he'd estimated, John cast his artificing spell and evoked a disappointing notification.

SKILL LEVEL INCREASE: [CRAFT] (LVL 2)
Bonus: None

'Well, that's not helpful.' With a full day's worth of bonus XP and loot depending on John raising an active skill to level ten, focusing everything into Craft killed two birds with one stone. Now, he'd have to split his limited mana between it and Observe. Subconscious simmering underscored his disappointment and reminded him that there was another option.

Daryl shouted over to John, "Hey, you ready yet?"

As John rushed over to the Abyssal and his makeshift firing range, he equipped his new weaponized gauntlet. This incarnation was far simpler than his final plans, but it served as a decent proof of concept. He’d mounted the firebolt molding emitter to the top, inline with his arm as if it were a wrist-mounted cannon. To control the emitter, he’d mounted the grip and brake lever from a motorcycle’s handlebars so they floated within his grasp.

Coming to a hard stop next to Daryl, John asked, “Ready?”

“Yep,” the Abyssal replied as he reached for a chain and hook hanging from the overhead gantry.

John equipped his prototype chestpiece, a steel cuirass with a full-sized mana battery fixed to the upper back and the mana pump mounted just below that. The sudden weight of the battery on his back nearly threw him to the ground, but Dayrl caught him. Briefly, John’s feet left the ground as the Abyssal single handedly hoisted him up and hooked him to the gantry, taking the pack’s weight off John's shoulders.

Side-eying the surprisingly strong Abyssal, John thought, ‘That’s disconcerting.’

After plugging his gauntlet into the battery pack and switching on the pump, John pointed the emitter at the mannequin and slowly pulled the gauntlet’s lever. A mote of fire appeared and hovered before the tip of the obelisk. It swelled then shot off. It curved heavily to the right, missing its target and splashing against the chainmail curtains.

“That’s probably why we scrapped that one,” Daryl mused.

“Should I assume that every enchantment in the scrap pile is defective?”

“That’d probably be wise.”

John tried again, correcting for the curve this time. The firebolt splashed against the target, leaving a fist-sized scorch mark. Pulling his notebook from his Inventory, he began to scribble notes. Beyond the emitter inaccuracy, the firebolt it conjured lacked the punch he was looking for, but that was a problem for another day.

“Next on the agenda, I need to work on augmenting my strength and endurance.” He flipped back a few pages in his notebook then handed it to Daryl. “I have some rough designs for an actuated exoskeleton, but I can’t work out a control system.”

Daryl thumbed through the notebook as he hummed his acknowledgement.

“Would it be possible to enchant the actuators so they respond to my intentions?”

“Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that. It’s technically possible, but it's not exactly practical." Daryl’s tone did not boast confidence. “How much do you know about enchantments already?"

John raised his gauntleted hand. "They mold the mana that flows from emitters, and I think they have something to do with these runes. Other than that, I got nothing."

"Right. So, at their most basic, an enchantment is just a spell that’s been anchored to an object. Now, the enchantment can’t change once it’s been applied, so by themselves, enchantments are pretty dumb. They’re only really capable of bang-bang, all or nothing kind of stuff. They’ll just sit inert until waiting for a trigger, and then they’ll just go until then they burn out. Uh… unless another trigger shuts them off. I guess.” Rapping his fingers on the workbench, Daryl paused to think. “Am I making sense?”

”Not really.”

“What I’m tryin’ to get at is that enchantments can’t think. They have to be told what to do. To get anything more complicated than on and off, you've got to chain them together, and that gets complicated real quick."

“That’s the whole point of it reading my intent. I’m the one in control. The armor just has to read my thoughts and follow my lead.”

“But respondin’ to intent and respondin’ to thoughts are different things. For intent it has to read your thoughts, discern what you’re trying to do, figure out what motors to trigger, what direction to point them in, how much effort to give, when to shut them off. Otherwise, you’ll have to mentally trigger every single motor involved in every single movement you try to make.”

Subconscious bubbling roiled to John's defense. “That’s a semantic problem. The enchantment doesn’t need to read my literal thoughts. It can get my intent by reading the electrical impulses going to muscles. Then it just has to control the motors that reinforce that movement.”

“I just don’t think that’s goin’ to be good enough. Even if the enchantments respond instantly, the mechanical systems won’t. Between the system’s delayed response to you and your delayed response to the system, I think you’re goin’ to have a rough time controlling the thing.”

“I deal with bad ping all the time. I’ll learn to compensate.”

“Think you’ll learn by Saturday?”

John paused and silently thought it over. Subconscious thrumming painted visions of a bumbling, metal hulk, swinging its arms wildly and stumbling around.

“Look, I’m not trying to come down on ya. I’m just trying to call out problems while they're still off in the distance. You know?”

“Yeah, I get it. It was just a stupid idea from the start.”

“It’s not stupid. If it was stupid, I would’ve told you so in the van. There’s a way to make your design do what you want it to do. It’s just not practical.” Daryl dug into his pocket and retrieved a cloudy, diamond-like gemstone roughly the size of a grape. “This is an artificial spirit core, basically a magic computer, for lack of a better descriptor. Integratin’ one of these simplifies the problem. Once you’re attuned to the spirit inside, it’ll read your intent and manage the motors just like you want, but there are some cost problems.”

“We can’t use that one?”

“Nope, it’s too crude. I’d barely trust it to work a microwave. You’d need something smarter for seamless control.”

“Ok, then how much would that cost? A couple million dollars?”

“Well, this one cost somewhere in the neighborhood of fifteen million. For what you need, I’d expect it to clear half a billion, easy.”

John groaned. “Yeah, I can't blame you for not wanting to gamble that on a guy you just met yesterday.”

“To tell you the truth, if it were just the money, you might have been able to talk me into it.”

“You’re just saying that to make me feel better.”

“No, I mean it. We haven’t had an interesting project come through here in years. If it meant havin’ some fun at work, I’d roll those dice."

“OK? Then what's the problem?”

“First off, artificial spirits are hungry little mana suckers. I’d bet almost anything that cheap one would drain you, and that battery, dry in seconds. Second, you cannot extract a core once it’s been integrated. It degrades them, makes them dumber.”

“Ah,” John said, thinking he understood. “We’d have to replace the core every time I want to change materials and that gets expensive quickly.”

“You’re not wrong, but that’s not exactly what I meant.” Daryl paused, picking his words carefully. “There’s a point, somewhere on the quality spectrum, where an artificial spirit stops being a computer and starts being a living thing, with its own thoughts and personality. After that, an extraction starts to look a whole lot like a lobotomy.”

“Oh.”

“I think it would be best if we put these designs away until we have a clearer idea of what the long term looks like.”

“Yeah, I couldn’t argue against that if I wanted to. I’ll just have to drop the weight until I can boost my stats.”

“Now that’s a stupid idea.”

“Well, what do you expect me to do? That’s all I’ve got to work with.”

“You’ve been so focused on figuring out a mechanical solution that you missed the obvious answer. We’ll just enchant the armor to make you stronger. You don’t have to worry about controls when it’s your body.”

Speechless, John stared at Daryl for a moment. “I’m an idiot.”

“No, you’re not.”

”I am. It was staring right at me.” John tried to unequip his weighty armor, but was met with a system error.

Warning: Armor cannot be unequipped while grappled.

John looked to Daryl. “Could you let me down?”

“You just had a little bit of tunnel vision. It happens to everyone.” Daryl stood, grabbed hold of the battery on John’s back, and unhooked it from the chain. “You should probably make the battery replaceable. Letting go in 3, 2, 1.”

Nearly as soon as the Abyssal’s hand released the mass of metal and quartz, it disappeared into John’s Inventory.

“Thanks. Will the enchantments be as strong as my design?”

“No, not as strong, but you should at least be able to move comfortably.”

A certain Skill gleefully bubbled away at the edge of John's thoughts. With power armor beyond his reach and enchantment unable to fully compensate, Biomancy revelled in the fact that John had only one option to make up the difference. 'Why are you like this?'

Daryl asked, "So, what are we working on now?"

"Uh, I don't know. I should really work on revising my mage spear design, but I'll probably just salvage some… wait." Mentioning the weapon jogged the memory of its strange deconstruction from his tired mind. Pulling its remains from his Inventory and laying them out on the workbench, he continued, "Last night, I put my spear down on my bed, and while I had my back turned, half of it disappeared. Do you have any idea what happened?"

Scratching at his beard, the Abyssal looked over the remains, a bronze spear and the mana siphon that hung from it by a long, uncoiling length of copper wire. "Yeah, so, when you open an illusion barrier, everything looks real, but it's all just a constructed copy of the place you entered from. It all behaves like the real stuff should, but it starts to decompose once you take it into real space."

Brows slowly furrowing, John asked, "Ok? I guess that kinda makes sense. I got the wood for the handle from my dungeon barrier, so it's not really a copy of anything. But I got the iron from outside, in real space."

Daryl grimaced. "Remember that first barrier I pulled you into?"

Yesterday, when it had become clear that Daryl meant John no harm, they'd talked while John continued his efforts to break down and scrap a motorcycle engine. Realization hit as an orange system panel erupted before his eyes.

New Material Effect Discovered: Illusory Matter
Description: A mana construct that mimics the appearance and material properties of real matter. Components made from this material take constant Durability damage while in real space.
Affected items in the Inventory have been updated.

"Oh, you've got to be kidding me." He opened his Inventory, sighed, and then removed the afflicted items. The little scrap iron affected was no great loss, but sadly, his shield was lost.

"Yeah, that's my bad. Should've warned you, but I was kinda thinkin' about other things, like the late bloomer standin' in front of me."

"It's fine. I've got plans to replace it anyway." John ran his fingers over the shield's damaged face, over the dents and scratches left by the tarnished construct's armored heel. Even though he’d planned to replace it, he'd hoped to at least keep it as a souvenir mounted to his wall above his headboard. He hadn't figured out how to explain it to his mother yet, but that didn't really matter now.

"Should I throw this in the scrap pile or just toss it into the yard when we leave?"

"You can just leave it there. I'll take care of it later."

John shrugged and began to walk towards the heaps of scrap at the back of the guildhall. "Alright, I guess I'll just go work on filling my Inventory then. Let me know when we need to leave."