Alexa Drey- Hero Hunting

by Ember Lane

  Lincoln scratched his chin. “How much to upgrade the forge?”

  “16000 food, 128,000 lumber, 76,800 stone, 153,600 iron.”

  A whistle came from Lincoln’s lips. “Whoa, these higher levels cost.”

  “You could build ten level 4 taverns for much the same, but you’d get no work done again.” There was a twist of sarcasm laced into Bethe’s voice.

  Lincoln grunted a laugh. “Let’s do it. If nothing else, it’ll free up some warehouse space. Besides, what building isn’t high level now?”

  “I thought the wall was the priority?” Bethe asked, but Lincoln told her that he’d give her the rest of the day’s works once he’d introduced me to Jack. He said it fast, a little too fast.

  “What wall?” I asked, as a load of the coppery things started to descend on the forge. A grizzly looking dwarf tried to hound them out at first, but he gave up and grunted as the a huge piles of lumber, stone, iron, and food appeared in front of us. The dwarf stormed over to Lincoln.

  “Now jest what do yer think yer doin’? We’re not needing a posh new forge, not yet…” His eyes lit up as Lincoln held the scarletite before him. “Now that’s a damn fine reason. What are we lookin’ at? Ten, twenty? Tell me twenty. Have yer got twenty of the little beauties?”

  “In all, I’ve got one hundred and twenty-four,” I announced proudly.

  The dwarf’s arms stretched out from his stocky frame. He was all brawn and sinew, a powerhouse of muscle. His long, blond hair was braided in a fat ponytail that was drawn so tight it looked like his eyes were being pulled toward his temples. His beard was braided too, but was black with soot, and singed, and stank of burnt hair. If I’d ever imagined a dwarven smithy, he’d be it. “And would you be the lovely Alexa Drey that I’ve been hearing all about? I’m Thumptwist, on account…” And he pointed at his forge. The copper bots had already stripped its roof off and were extending its walls. They were crawling all over it like a swarm of locusts. “Tell me, Alexa. Shall we turn it all into ingots?”

  I looked around to see Lincoln walking away, deep in conversation with Bethe, and I realized I’d been dumped with Thumptwist. “Is there any use for the ore as it is?”

  “Only to hold the mountain up. I hear shock-blasted ore is the best going.” He laughed a deep and throaty laugh.

  “You might as well have all of it then.” I threaded my way toward the workshop, the dwarf in tow.

  While the forge was made up of stout beams and chunky rock, the workshop looked a lot daintier. I think that would describe it best. Dainty but large, it definitely reminded me of Greman’s house back in the Vale of Lamerell. It had a quaint, blue front door and windows on either side. A pitched and thatched roof hung down like floppy, straw-colored hair parted in the middle, and little window boxes held fragile-looking, but pretty, blooms that spilled over in a riot of color. Thumptwist knocked on the door, and though he didn’t look capable of it, he did it gently as if the door was made of fine china. It’s handle twisted, and the door opened a little.

  At first I thought there was no one there, and then I looked down. A little boy looked up.

  “Thumptwist? You set fire to our roof again?” he asked.

  Thumptwist shook his head. “Nope. Yer dad around, Rob?”

  Rob pulled the door open, and Thumptwist strolled in. “Say, Jack, yer’ve got a visitor.”

  The inside of the workshop was all stained wood, filtered light, and dust motes, and my immediate impression was a mad inventor’s study. Jack, I presumed it was Jack, was sitting at a desk at the room’s end. He looked up. “What’s up?”

  “Scarletite, and lots of it,” said Thumptwist.

  Jack paused, smacked his lips together and clapped his hands. “And I suppose you want ingots…the hard way?”

  Thumptwist wagged his finger. “The only way at the moment, my forge is gettin’ a wee upgrade, so I can’t work the stuff in quantity. If we want to play with it today, it’s up to you, my friend.”

  Jack stood up and marched around the desk. He was a tall, spindly man with cropped brown hair and a neatly kept beard. He wore a long, brown coat, with a white shirt underneath, and once he’d rounded the desk, he walked straight up to me. “I take it,” he said, leaning in, “That you’re the source of this metal we knew was buried in the mountain, but just couldn’t get to until we’d worked out a way to do it…carefully?”

  “Yes,” I said, in barely a whisper. The workshop had that library air, and I had a “Just gone back to school” feeling.

  “Lincoln told me he would send you here so that we could repair your clothes, not mess around with metals.” He harrumphed and looked down. “And boot, you need another boot. Boots should match, unless you need them like that to identify which foot’s what.”

  “I’ve been busy,” I mumbled.

  Thumptwist shifted on his own feet. “Yer know, I think I might just get meself some breakfast.” He shot out like he’d already had enough of the place.

  “Now,” Jack said. “Have you any other clothes? We can’t repair them while they’re on you.”

  I twirled my finger in front of them, and both him and Robert turned away. I quickly changed into the clothes Zybandian had given me, matching my boots ‘n all.

  “So, crafting, what do you know of it?” Jack asked.

  Shrugging my shoulders, I said, “Nothing.”

  He took me over to a workbench that ran the length of the place, and offered me a stool. We both sat, and he huffed and stretched. “It’s much the same as magic, much the same as smithing, just a differing approach. So, crafting. This should help you understand.”

  Congratulations! Jack has granted you the skill, Crafting. You are a level 1 novice.

  “Now,” he said, trying to look over my stat board but failing miserably. “Could you tell me your skill cap? My perception, well, don’t ask me to judge someone…”

  “Five,” I told him.

  “Is that it?” he said, screwing his face up. “Oh well, no prodigy, but not everyone can be. Rob’s got a 14 cap. Adequate, but he’ll be no ring crafter to the Guild of Reavers. Still, I should be able to teach you enough to do running repairs as you get into mischief. I take it you get into trouble quite a bit…”

  He took my mauve tunic and laid it on the table, picking up a lens and studying its fabric. “Hmmph,” he said. “Where the heck did you get this? Best guess, bark fiber and spider silk infused with some kind of fine hemp. Right. Rob, can you go get me a couple of leaves from that new tree that’s sprung up. It’s about the closest color.”

  “No!” I said. “The tree won’t give it…”

  Jack turned to me and frowned. “It will if we ask and tell it what its for. Off you go.” He shooed Robert out. “So, what we have here is a fine-looking tunic, but quite the weak piece. Often gets damaged, does it?”

  In fairness, I thought, it wasn’t everyday that a demon’s tongue speared me, but on balance, it had seen better days. “Yep.”

  He nodded, sagely. “Then this is what we’ll do.” He muttered some words that I couldn’t make out, and my tunic dissolved into three piles. One was like a bushy ponytail—a better-kept version of Thumptwist’s. Another was like a little cloud of cotton wool, and the last was made up of fine leaves of bark-like material. “There,” said Jack. “Three piles, three differing things that make it up. To strengthen, I think we need some leather and some of your scarletite ore. Right. Yes, coincidence, maybe, but not to be dismissed.” He scribbled on a piece of parchment and gave it to me.

  Deseperification: How to reduce simple things to their base parts.

  I read it all, and the paper crumbled to dust.

  The door opened and shut quickly as Robert slunk back in with a handful of jaspur leaves. “Got them,” he sung, cheerily.

  His father tutted at the intrusion, but then carried on. “Now…now you can reduce stuff to its parts—but just simple stuff, mind you. Your tunic was clearly imbued with some stat magic.” He looked around
the room. “It’ll be buzzing around here somewhere. If you ever have to separate it again and want the stat back in, you’ll have to find someone a higher level than you, but as long as you don’t completely wreck it you should be okay just patching it up until you get to a proper crafter like me.” He winked at me. “No offense.”

  “None taken.” He was a strange man, was Jack. I, however, was more than a bit put out that he’d shredded my tunic into three piles of pieces. Surely he could have just used a needle and thread?

  “Robert, pass me a square of leather and the ore pot.”

  Robert duly fished out a piece of leather, about the size of a small table, and plunked it next to my ruined tunic. I looked around the room and tried to spy my stat magic, wondering if Jack wasn’t actually crazy. The ore pot was about the size of fruit bowl, made of hollowed-out wood and had a small hole in the bottom. Jack held his hand out. I dipped in my sack and brought out a lump of ore.

  “Now,” Jack muttered, eyeing it closely. “I’d say this is about sixty percent scarletite and forty percent dust—or it will be soon.”

  He dropped it into a pot, muttering a load of words I couldn’t quite hear again, and began turning the lump of ore over and over, over and over. At first, I wondered what he was doing, but then I saw a fine coating of dust covering the inside of the bowl. He began to tap the lump against the side of the bowl every now and then, and more fell off, much like the way pepper falls from a pot. After a good half an hour—probably longer because it was quite mesmerizing—he was left with what looked like a big ball of pink solder blobs.

  “There,” he said. “Scarletite. Not a tidy ingot, but good enough for what we need.”

  He took the ball and held it out on the flat of his palm. “This is where the trick is. Again, this metal is too advanced for you to do, but trust me; I’ll get to the part where you help, in a minute. First, we need to make it into wire.”

  His hands started rolling the ball around and around, teasing it, making it spin and spin. When it was nothing but a pink blur, he set it over the bowl, then held one of his palms flat against its spinning edge and thin strands of pink metal just flowed from between his fingers, curling like hair, and into a ball of what I could only describe as scarletite wool. Then, he chopped the strands with his fingers in a scissor-like motion, cutting the strings off.

  “There, that’ll be enough for the front and back. I think I’ll add some upper arm guards to it. It’s all well and good having a smart tunic, but you clearly get into a lot of fights, so we best up its armor value.”

  He spun the now smaller ball around and brought it back to blurring speed again. This time he took a knife and held it against the orb as if he was scraping a lump of butter. The scarletite curled into ribbons and fell onto the bench’s top. I picked one up. It was cold and as hard as a dwarf’s forehead, and my mind cramped trying to imagine how he’d worked the metal as if it were paper.

  “It’s the crafting,” Jack muttered, as if he could read my thoughts. “The words help, a little, but mostly only to focus the mind. I will it to do what I want it to do, and applying the skill, which is little more than an educated feeling, I picture the end product.” He snipped off another ribbon and set the ball down. “Leather, it’s one of the basest and commonest materials used in crafting and has a manipulation value of 1. Let’s start you on that.”

  He stopped the now tiny ball of spinning scarletite with the tip of his finger, and set the bowl aside. “Right, take hold of the leather.”

  I grabbed it, wondering what was next. It felt stiff, hard, not like the soft leather I imagined.

  “Now,” Jack had lowered his voice to barely above a whisper. “The skill is in the imagination. You project what you want the leather to turn into, and the purer your thought, the greater your focus, the better your end result. So, we need strips of leather, like bootlaces. While you’re doing that, I’ll prepare the scarletite.”

  He scooped up the ribbons and metal wool and swept them out of my way. I sat and stared at the leather…the simple, single-value-leather…that a child could reduce to strings, but all I saw was leather, a flat, stiff sheet of leather.

  “No closing your eyes,” Jack murmured, just as I was about to.

  I redoubled my efforts, trying to sink into my subconscious, but I felt a peculiar nudging within my mind. It coaxed me to stare straight at the leather, as if my eyes were lasers. My vision bore into it, and I saw the sum of the skin, and it dragged my imagination with it. I thought of bootlaces, leather bootlaces, in small, square strands. Bit by bit the leather fell away from my hands.

  Congratulations! You have made leather strings. These can be used to bind pieces of material or metal and still retain movement. You have leveled up. You are now a level 2 Crafter.

  “Very good,” Robert’s voice caught me by surprise. “But look.” He held one up. It was irregular, fat in places, thin in others. “Look,” he then said, and creased his forehead and narrowed his eyes. Like a pile of writhing worms, the strands of leather wriggled, turned, intertwined and blurred. He held one up again. “There,” he said. It was perfect.

  “Showing off, Robert?” Jack asked, looking away from his own endeavors. “What you just achieved, Alexa, was fine for a novice. With those strands you could have repaired most leather or material armor. You should now be able to fashion base items like flax, hemp, leather, cotton, and even husks like coconut shell, tree bark and the like. By level 3 you’ll be able mold simple, soft metals like copper.” He smiled. “And yes, you’ll get better. Now for the magic…”

  He shuffled back over. “Right.” He grabbed my shoulders and turned me toward him. “So, we infuse the scarletite wire across the front and back, weave it in with the leather, the spider silk, the bark and hemp-like stuff. Once more, his hands blurred, and I tried to follow them but failed dismally. Slowly, a shape began to form, and I recognized it as my tunic. His hands slowed.

  “There, that’s now much stronger.” He winked at me. “But we can make it even stronger.”

  Taking the metal strips, his hands quickly fashioned them into two sleeves of braided scarletite and then wove more of the new fabric in with them. He then attached the sleeves to the tunic with some of the leather laces. “There,” he said, and he tossed it to me. “What do you think?”

  Now, it actually looked like armor. “I can’t see its stats,” I said.

  “Not in there yet. Robert, can you mix the leaves into a dye…no…on second thought, give it to Alexa to do.”

  For the second time in as many days, I found myself grinding away with a pestle and mortar. I began to wonder where this slotted in with the promised action and adventure of this land of Barakdor…but it was quite fun.

  “So, what do you need? I’d say vitality, it already has +6 floating around here somewhere.” Jack looked around the lofted ceiling. “Somewhere,” he muttered. “So, as you grind the leaves into paste, think of the vitality you’ll need when you’re up against some brute or another. Pour your skill into it. Pour your mana into it. Let’s see if we can’t get a few more stat points imbued.

  This, I knew how to do. I concentrated hard, focusing my mind, imagining my mana was a pool, and then I tried to spill some of that pool into the bowl, just bits. But I had two pools, and another began to fill with its black liquid, my shadow mana, and that leached out of its pool, clawing its way into the bowl before me. I thought about holding it back but knew it would be futile. Pushing the bowl away, I ran my fingers through my hair.

  Congratulations! You have imbued vitality stats and magical resistance into the jaspur paste. You are granted crafting, level 3.

  Jack studied me for a while, lofted his eyebrows and said, “Yes, well…”

  He jumped off his stool and disappeared out the back of the workshop, soon coming back with a bowl of water. He scooped some of the paste into it, then stirred it around. “There. Robert, do the honors.” Robert dunked my new tunic in it.

  Congratulations. You
r tunic has been reborn. It is now +10 vitality and increases your resistance to all types of magic by 15%.

  “Not bad,” Jack said and smiled at me. “Now, I’m sure you have plenty to be getting on with. I’ll finish the rest and get your boots sorted out. I’ve enough paste left so it’ll all be nice and matching. Pop back at dusk?”

  I knew when I was being thrown out. The shadow magic had clearly freaked his sensibilities, so I thanked him, said goodbye to Robert, and scampered out of the door as quick as I could, and ran straight into a returning Thumptwist.

  “Ah, Alexa. I was just coming for the ore.” He winked at me. “Caused a stink and got them to finish the bit of the forge around the smelter. That Bethe-thing said she was used to Lincoln’s cheating ways anyhow.”

  I gave Thumptwist all the ore, then marched to the tavern, but Thumptwist held me back and grabbed my forearms, studying them, then my calves, and finally sized up my head.

  “Good,” he muttered. “Should have something ready for you for tomorrow.”

  I scampered off, a little weirded out, and breathed a sigh of relief when I saw Star, Shylan, Mezzerain, and Cronis sitting at a table. It had been a great experience, and yes, crafting would come in useful, but intense? Wow.

  “Ah, there you are,” Shylan called. “We’ve all been waiting for you. That infuriating man you claim is a friend will not tell us what he’s up to, but apparently, he’s got something to show us.”

  “I despise surprises,” Cronis barked. “I voted to grind his bones to dust, but no one had the spine, and to be honest, we’d lose the ale, so we decided against it.”

  I hopped up onto the stoop and burst through the doors of the tavern. Lincoln was behind the counter with another elfish-looking girl.

  “Ah, Alexa, this is Elleren. Do you want a drink before we go? A swift morning ale?”