The voice belonged to the only person resident in this small space – a dwarf who wasn’t as tall as Crusher, but certainly as wide.
Grum, Level 28 Artificer, Renowned.
He wore a heavy brown leather work suit, with heavy chainmail gauntlets protecting his hands, and a strange peaked metal helmet that Dean guessed must double as safety wear, as rondels of glass had been swung down over his eyes. The dwarf was hastily batting at these, winching them back with a creak into their upright position.
“Well? Who are you?” the dwarf said through acres of red beard.
“Dean, I, uh – I was told by the Iron Hall that you might be looking for an apprentice.”
The dwarf heaved an impressive sigh, setting the giant set of tongs he had been holding down on the stone anvil and squinting closer at the thin-looking human.
“You’re not a dwarf, human…” he said and, just as Dean was expecting the worst, the dwarf shrugged and continued. “Not that I’m prejudiced – I just don’t see too many non-dwarves coming this way. So, you want to train with me? Why?”
Dean opened and closed his mouth. To get better. To heal. How could he explain all of these things to the virtual character?
“It’s important to me,” Dean settled for. “And I think that I can be the best in this world.”
The dwarf raised an eyebrow. “Oh, you do, do you? Ha. They all say that when they come here, and they all end up leaving my service before the moon is up!”
“Not me,” Dean said, determined to prove him wrong, as he remembered what the clerk had said. “I’ll sweep up around here for you, if you like.”
Grum paused, his face unreadable for a moment, before he broke into a wide grin. “Sure! This place could always do with a clean. There’s a broom over there, and you’ll find hot water in the pumps.” The dwarf hummed and whistled, turning back to his tongs before waddling over to one of the several large furnaces, its coal glowing red and belching smoke up past the vines above.
Many others might balk at doing a bit of manual work, Dean thought, going to pick up the broom and start work. But not me. His years of training at art college and later in his own shop had showed him a few things. One; that any job doing was worth taking your time over, and two; it was all in the preparation. If he had kept his own workspace untidy or disheveled, then he would soon have started to lose as much money as he made with diamond and gold dust disappearing into the cracks on the floors. The precision and the concentration that he achieved was only possible by having everything ordered, exactly so, and knowing where every tool he needed could be. He approached Grum’s workshop with the same careful examination, moving from one area to the next.
Storeroom. Inventory: 214 Items.
The store room was open on one side, but filled with shelves on three walls, carefully constructed around a door that Dean guessed must disappear into the house. Inside the wide mahogany shelves were jars and dispensers of multicolored fluids, as well as metal and wooden crates stuffed with ingots of coal, pyrite, and strange minerals that he had no name for. Racks of tools held hammers, chisels, tongs, and all manner of different instruments – and it was a mess.
Dean’s feet kicked lumps of strange green-blue minerals, which he picked up and returned to the tray that his almost eidetic memory had already catalogued.
Task: 3/15 Complete!
In the tool rack were axes that clearly belonged outside in the heavier blades box.
Task: 5/15 Complete!
And all through the shelves there were bottles and minerals stacked haphazardly in the wrong place, or else mislabeled next to others of the same type.
Task 7/15 Complete!
Task 10/15 Complete!
Task 13/15 Complete!
By the time Dean thought he must have finished, there appeared to be only two items that were missing, although he couldn’t understand what they were. All the shelves now bowed with their replaced goods, and every stack appeared full. The only object which hadn’t found a home was a discarded fish head he’d found in a darkened corner under one of the tables.
Well, there’s plenty of fish in the harbor, Dean thought, wondering if he was meant to throw it back in there. He examined the object again, noticing that it had a small, neat semi-circular bite out of it. Too small a mouth for Grum, and he didn’t get the sense that Grum would feast on half-rotten fish heads and just throw them into dark corners. So what was he supposed to do with it?
“Is there anything else missing from this storeroom?” Dean counted, going through the stacks and shelves once more. “Nope,” he said, throwing the fish head back in the corner, but his task bar remained stubbornly the same, uncompleted at 13 out of 15.
“Of course! The cat!” Dean realized, remembering the small feral beast that had run up the side of Grum’s house as he had approached. He picked up the fish head once more and went back out into the courtyard, where Grum was busy stoking one of the furnaces with gusto.
“Grum? Do you own a cat?” he called to the dwarf.
“Huh, what? Hephaestus, you mean?” Grum grunted over his shoulder.
Great. The cat that was last seen heading across the street… Dean shook his head, running out of the courtyard, up the small alley at the side of the house, and back to Storm Pier.
“Where did you go?” He scanned the street, seeing that there was another alley almost directly across from Grum’s house, wedged between two squat warehouses looking like they hadn’t been used for a long time.
“Hephaestus!? Here Kitty!” Dean called out, surprised when he tried to make his avatar whistle, and it performed a little trill of perfect notes.
“Mrowl!” a feline voice called from further down the alley. Dean looked up to see there, on the edge of the roof of one warehouse, was the straggly black cat, sitting on the corner eaves as daintily as if it did this all the time.
“C’mon Hephaestus, come on down now. Look what I got you!” Dean said, waving the half-eaten fish head in the air.
“Mrowl?” The cat looked interested but it also looked stuck.
“Really? Come on – give me a break!” Dean was annoyed, reaching for the nearest boarded-up window and starting to haul himself up. It was an easy task, one that didn’t tax him in any way, but, standing on the sill he still couldn’t reach the cat. “You want me to climb on the roof, is that it?” Dean grumbled, reaching for the edge of the guttering, gripping where he could, and pulling—
Snap!
“Aargh!” Dean fell to the ground with a solid thump.
-2 Health!
“Dammit,” Dean grumbled, checking his health bar. 18/20. He could do this a couple more times yet, unless Grum had even riskier challenges in mind… Once again, he climbed up to the window sill and reached for the roof – this time grabbing onto one of the joists, and not the gutter, before he hauled himself up to the sloping tiles to reach for Hephaestus.
“Hsss!” But the smith’s cat wasn’t having any of it, even backing away from him.
“Okay, I get it. The fish head?” Dean took it from his pocket, and as soon as it appeared the cat stepped cautiously forward, sniffing at it, before leaping onto Dean’s shoulders and beginning to purr with a deep engine-like rattle.
“Hey – steady there, little guy.” Dean managed to wobble back down to the window, with Hephaestus performing circuits from one shoulder to the next before he got to the secure cobbles of the street. “The things I do…” Dean sighed, heading back to Grum’s to return the still-purring cat and half-eaten fish head to the warm corner at the back of the dwarf’s storeroom.
Task 15/15 Complete! 3 XP!
“Ha! I see you found him in the end?” Grum startled him by appearing behind him. “The little terror likes ranging up on the roofs of the warehouses opposite, and I’m not exactly the right size to get him down.”
Grum sighed and began inspecting Dean’s work in the stores.
“Huh. I guess you’ll do. You�
�ve got a good eye for detail, son – even if you are a human. Now, follow me to my office, where we’ll talk over the particulars of your apprenticeship.”
His ‘office,’ as it turned out, was the courtyard itself, where three large furnaces sat on the three sides, alongside stalls where wood and stone tables held tools.
Each furnace sat at different stage of glowing life; one white hot, one red, and the other stone cold. In the center of the space was a large iron anvil half the height of Grum himself. To it, he pulled up two wooden stools as he laid out scrolls and demanded a signature from his new apprentice.
Grum has accepted your apprenticeship! New Specialism Added: Artificer+1
“Good. I could do with an extra pair of hands around the place. I’m not going to pay you, mind… Anything you make with my materials you have to sell for me, but I’ll give you a take. You’re welcome to buy your own materials and make whatever you want here yourself, of course,” Grum negotiated. “Just so long as you don’t either blow up my workshop or get in my way when I’m working. Understood?”
“Yes, boss.” Dean nodded.
*
Artificer Specialism Level 1.
Shape Material – simple.
You are able to heat, reshape, and work non-magical metals, woods, and cloths into simple forms (e.g. crowbars, doorstops, rugs). Attempting a complicated or larger task will require further levels of Artificer.
Fix Arms – simple.
You are able to add an edge to any non-magical bladed weapon, or to fix any simple piece of armor (shield, breastplate, helmet). Weapons receive +2 Damage, Armor + 2 CON.
*
Handy Dean thought as he examined his first set of skills – but still nowhere near what he wanted to be able to do.
“What about gemstones?” he asked the dwarf.
“Gemstones? You want to work with gems?” The dwarf looked at him fiercely. “Why on earth would you want to do that?”
“Because I reckon I could be damn good at it,” Dean said, but the dwarf’s stare was withering.
“Not yet,” Grum said flatly. “You’re going to need to prove that you can work all the simple stuff first before I let you loose on gemstones. You’re going to need a lot more practice!”
A lot more XP. Dean sighed. How many times could he tidy the storeroom – and how long would it take to get enough XP to do what he came here to do?
“There aren’t many people who work gemstones in King’s City.” Grum frowned heavily. “That’s probably because of all that business to do with the Ouroborax Stones.”
“The Ouroborax? What are they?” Dean asked. No one had mentioned them to him…
Grum leaned back in his chair, pulling a small, grubby pipe from the recesses of his leather work clothes and striking a flint over the bowl as he took a deep, satisfying puff. “The Ouroborax are bad news, that’s what they are, boy. Powerful crystals that they said were fashioned in the dawn of time by some sect of ancient sorcerers – although no one’s managed to find out if they were dwarves, humans, elves, or even Darklings!” He coughed a cloud of cherry-smelling smoke.
“That’s the legend, anyway. Five ancient crystals filled with the beginning light of the cosmos, holding untold magical power… They were lost to the mists of time for centuries, but every now and again – if someone is particularly foolhardy or unlucky enough to find one – they get found, and terrible things follow. They said that the dwarves found one of the crystals deep in some ancient underground ruins, and King Ullar thought that he would set it into his crown, making him the most powerful dwarfish Under-King that has ever ruled under the earth… But his entire clan”—Grum stopped, pulling out the pipe to stab it into the air at Dean—“his entire clan perished in a cave-in. No one ever found that stone again, nor wanted to.
“And then there was the case of the Elvish Priestess – I can’t remember her name, but she found or summoned one of the Ouroborax stones and decided to set it into a sword, so that she could drive the humans out of Aldaron. It turned her into an unearthly devil-queen, beautiful, but able to kill you just by pointing that hell-blade at you!”
“How did the humans survive?” Dean said, shocked.
“It’s the Stones themselves, boy – they’re cursed. No mortal was ever meant to have that much power,” Grum snapped. “The Priestess became convinced that the only way to get the job done was to lead her faction of elves into the Far Realms, and through the portals into the Darkling realm – the gods alone know why, and that was the last the world ever saw of that Ouroborax Stone. Some clerics have claimed that they are some scheme of the Darklings themselves; make us all go mad and kill each other perhaps, making it easier for them evil little things to come in and take over what’s left.”
Grum heaved another exaggerated groan, returning the pipe to his mouth. “So you can see why there haven’t been many people interested in gemstones over the last few centuries.”
“But that’s not me,” Dean said, even though he had felt his heart quicken at the mere mention of powerful magical crystals. Just imagine it. I could make the most powerful items ever seen in the world. It would be like forging Excalibur or something…
“No, you’re a long way off doing anything with gemstones, lad!” Grum laughed. “You’re going to have to help me get some ore from the Jodo Canyons for the new range I’m working on first.”
New Story: The Jodo Canyons
Accept? Y/N
Y.
“We move at first light, but until then…” Grum pointed to the three furnaces. “I want the one that’s kept lit, and the one that’s warm kept warm. But the one that’s cold – I want her roasting!” Grum said gleefully, directing him to start shoveling coal and pumping bellows here and there across the courtyard.
Training Task: Keep the Furnace Hot!
Dean got to work, running back from one of the bellows to the other as the cat Hephaestus watched him from his place in the storeroom. It didn’t take long for Dean to work up a virtual sweat, and to feel a tightness in his chest as he threw himself with abandon at the task.
I guess I really AM getting some exercise after all, he thought.
Chapter 10: The Lead
“Mr. Winters?”
The voice of the surly detective woke Dean out of his reverie, where he had been thinking about his character in Aldaron. If I get enough XP at the Canyons, he reasoned, I’m going to pile it all into my Artificer’s Skill.
“We’re here, Mr. Winters,” the voice said again, a bit louder this time from the front seat of the black sedan car that Dean was in the back of. It was raining here in San Maria, and it had been easy for Dean to drift off into a daydream as he watched the rivulets of water hit the thick glass of the detective’s car.
“Oh. Great,” he said, not very convincingly.
But Detective Abrams was right, they had indeed arrived at 1, Police Plaza (San Maria) and had parked in one of the bays next to legions of other similarly non-descript cars. As the detective got out, Dean felt a blast of chill air – unseasonal for this time of the year, and nothing like the constant, balmy temperature of his online world.
“Where I would much rather be right now…” Dean muttered as his own passenger side door opened, letting in more of the cold.
“You need a hand there, sir?” Abrams was standing on the pavement, pulling his jacket collar tight around his neck to keep out the wind’s icy fingers.
“No, I got this,” Dean said a little snippily, first leaning his cane on the outside of the car, and then swinging his bad leg out, then the good one. With a groan, he used the cane and the door to lever himself up into something close to a standing position, wobbling in the sudden blast of wind before staggering forward a few paces.
“Here you go.” Abrams caught his elbow to stop him from falling.
“I got it!” Dean said a little more forcefully, feeling shame ripple through him. I’m a cripple. I’ll never walk properly ag
ain. His mind kept on playing the same caustic remarks over and over.
“Suit yourself, Mr. Winters.” The detective let go of him and led the way to the set of glass double doors, swinging outward and into a metal scanner.
“Oh, balls.” The alarm bells rang off as Abrams held the door open for Dean, the guard at the side of the scanner waving the detective through (with a high number of metallic items on his body, several of them deadly). “Now you, Mr. Winters,” Abrams said.
“Ah… You’re not going to like this…” Dean began as the sensors went off. The guard looked at his accompanying detective uncertainly, and Abrams gestured that it wasn’t a problem.
“Just so long as you’ve got nothing offensive on you, sir?” the guard said casually.
“Only my stick.” Dean waved his cane. “And the metal pin holding my shin together.”
That had come as a surprise to Dean – when the consulting surgeon had come around to see him just a few days before, and informed him that the damage to his leg was far more extensive than he had previously thought.
“It’s not just the issue of the cracked kneecap, you see,” the man had said – young and handsome and clearly paid far more than Dean ever had been. “But there’s an aggravating fracture running down your shinbone as well. We can leave it, with casts, of course – just to see if your body will reknit it back together – but I’m afraid the chances are that your body won’t, and the fracture will be in danger of completely splintering the bone in your lower calf the next time you have a fall.” The next time. That was what the consulting surgeon had said. Like it was a foregone conclusion for him now, Dean had thought miserably.
“But luckily for you the fix is quite simple and will only take about an hour of surgery time. Three metal pins – or brackets, essentially — which will hold the fracture together until the bone is sufficiently dense enough for them to be taken out.”
When Dean had woken up, he had fully expected to see his lower leg with massive, Frankenstein’s monster-level metal bars going through it – but instead all he saw was one, smooth Dayglo-blue bandage. When he had prodded it suspiciously, looking for the tell-tale metal plates, he had felt a vague ache from somewhere inside his leg, but nothing more than a swelling and the numbness of the anesthetic.
Tales of the Gemsmith - Chapter 01: A LitRPG Adventure Series (Aldaron Worlds) Page 8