The Return

by Nathan Valerio

  “Currently not for sale,” I said while connecting to the PC and letting the information appear. A window appeared with several requirements.

  Crew Name:

  _____

  Captain Name:

  _____

  Members

  _____

  _____

  _____

  _____

  Add more

  It was rather simple. First the crew name I had decided on long before. Then my name as captain and then I added the members. It ended like this.

  Crew Name:

  Einherjar

  Captain Name:

  Techno Gear

  Members

  Nova Gear

  Bulk Steel

  Victor Belkon

  Blaze Brisingr

  Ena Hono

  Brock Stone

  Annabeth Redscale

  Greer

  After I hit enter the window changed to ask for the flag which I submitted before it finally closed and appeared on the monitor of the console.

  “Please what would it take to trade for the robot. An air unit would make our lives that much easier especially one with so much possibility for development,” Rust begged.

  I pointed to the screen with an annoyed expression which told him we weren’t negotiating. He sighed defeated and turned to the screen and started typing for a while before the screen vanished. Soon after, someone arrived and handed Rust a small device.

  “This is the device we told you about. You install this to your ship or even to the captain himself and you can automatically add who you want. As an official crew, anything that causes you to gain fame or infamy will be spread to your crew mates. Also, we are going to be making a mission board that only crews can access as a whole.”

  I looked at the object. It looked like a small receiver that you could install into your circuit board. I didn’t waste time and brought out a tool drone and had it open my head and find a spot to plug it in and install it.

  It was done easily and my systems unpacked the files and installed the software. When completed, I could see an addition to the small menu bar that floated on the far-right side of my view. I brought it up and saw a new bar on it saying ’crew.’

  I opened it and it showed a screen with the name of the crew, the flag and all the crew members with levels.

  Shockingly enough it also included the number of ships we owned, the number of clockwork worker robots, scouts, protectors, air model protectors, all of them. Every robot type we had was displayed.

  “This is rather detailed. How did it know how many robot clockworks and protectors I own?” I asked.

  “The system runs a search on your own system to see which robots have been with you the longest.”

  Made sense and I was betting it did a search of the crew mates as well through the game system.

  “That was all we needed. Thank you.”

  Rust made a sad expression and looked at Strato with longing eyes.

  “Hey Techno, did you think about being a village leader?” Gaia asked.

  “Answer is still no.”

  “Then can you transport the settlers at least. We located some more gates around the scrapyard wall and want to make cities around them like South Gate City,” Gaia said.

  She pulled up an image that showed a poorly pieced together map of the scrap yard. It was really huge to say the least and was circular more or less. Not perfect but you could see the intent for sure.

  I looked at the map of the scrapyard. The points that showed the gates was the representing direction they faced like the city here is the south gate and at the dead center was also another dot.

  “What’s this dot for?”

  “We want to make a capital city there as well as a waypoint between the gate cities,” Rust explained.

  “A trade city then?” Beth asked.

  “Yes, but the capital so the goods would pass through there before going out. But because the entire scrapyard is so large it takes nearly weeks or even months to reach it through the scrap mountains on foot,” Gaia said.

  “But we have ships so transporting stuff will be easy,” Greer said.

  We all made a wry smile at her comment.

  “There are actually few ships to tell the truth. It takes a lot to prepare a ship and most people who have one are part of the town's workers. Techno has one because he had a connection to us and… forced our hand,” Rust said.

  He said that with a frown and looked at both of me who grinned back.

  “Well we can just spread the elves and gnomes around to all the villages and clean the area using the metal to build the buildings and then use magic to make the tree life,” Annabeth said.

  They both nodded probably having thought of doing that from the beginning.

  “We have a problem with wildlife though. As we clean the trash, we will get attacked more and we will also push more robots to extinction,” Rust explained.

  “Then make new animals,” Delta suddenly messaged.

  The room froze instantly and I gulped as I looked at the two who read the message.

  “Who is this?” Greer asked.

  “The text name is Delta. I don’t remember meeting someone with that name,” Annabeth said.

  Gaia said nothing as we looked at each other.

  “How mean you guys are. Not even telling them you know the god of the artificial races,” Delta openly said with sarcastic sadness in his text.

  The two girls paled reading the message.

  “H-h-how d-do y-you know him?” Annabeth asked trembling in fear.

  “Near the end of the first awakening, we went to look for a place to hide Techno and his things and by chance encountered where he was buried,” Rust said rubbing his metal head.

  “I’m quite thankful for that because through them I could spread a program into the clockworks so I can see the outside world at my leisure,” Delta said.

  “Shut up brat, it’s a pain to have everyone knowing. You guys, lips tight understood,” Gaia shouted and glared at them

  The two nodded vigorously seeing the pissed off Gaia.

  “What do you mean make new animals?” I asked.

  “I said what I meant. Make the animals. If the pests that live in hive mind die off that's for the better. Take those parts and make robot animals with some capacity to make basic parts for repairing and making their bodies. I can make programming for these creatures and soon they would become wild robot creatures that live like any normal one,” he explained.

  It was a really interesting idea. If they had the capability to make parts themselves, it would mean that they would be able to evolve in their own ways and eventually we could even harvest different kinds of parts from them which would be easier.

  “I will… research this possibility of this,” Rust said.

  “I’ll pick it up some other time. As for the request. If it's just transporting them to the locations, then I can do it. But only after 10 days or more. I will be busy during this time,” I told them.

  “That’s fine. We were going to wait to see the reaction of all the races of our nation and go from there. Thanks to the long-range transmitter we have, we already got the elves consent and we are waiting for the dwarves, gnomes, goblins, humans, ogres and demons to decide,” Rust said.

  I nodded and after some talking, we grew tired and left. The two girls were obviously conflicted with something. My best guess was Delta since knowing a god wasn’t something simple luck could make happen.

  I didn’t care much. To tell the truth, even if Delta was found and revealed at best a small cult of creeps would appear and that was it. If it got really bad, then extremists would appear but then a few bombs and mortar shells would work nicely to quiet them down.

  I took the three around and looked for materials I needed for filtering water. I planned to make a tank and filter to make pure water to wake up that undine I got from Menthol. She would be important later on as well as for our water supply.


  It took a bit but I was able to find a few people who mined and gathered the items and minerals I needed for the filter. Since they were dwarves, I traded blueprints to a good pressure fist and a gauntlet rifle. The models were for level 30 so it was a good trade since they were just arriving at that point.

  We took the items back and found that most of the coal and iron had been transported in, and the clockworks were enjoying their time looking through the scraps taking apart some parts and replacing some brain parts. I took what I got inside and dropped it in the storage. Near the door I saw the large mana crystal that Brock gave us.

  I was wondering what I could do with it and thought a bit. The idea to combine it with an elemental core came to mind so I broke a small part off of it and took it into my workshop. I pulled out a fire elemental core and carefully crushed it into a powder inside a small bowl. Then in a separate bowl I did the same to the mana crystal. Finally, in a third bowl, using a few tools, I scooped all the powder from both bowls into the third one and started to mix.

  It didn’t have any great reaction except for a small bit of fire shooting up as the mana from the crystal was used by the powdered core to burn.

  Since it was a failure, I thought of it differently. My eyes fell on the blast turtle. I looked at the paste that was left. Little was usable so I sent it to the fire below the chamber in the turtle and watched it melt. Soon it just vanished as the fire powder with mana crystal powder was eaten by the flames.

  I then went and got a new piece of mana crystal and did the same with a new fire core but this time I mixed them in a bowl before quickly dropping them inside the blast turtle and watching them burn. Unlike the mix that burned outside in the air, the powder turned into liquid and started to fuse. I was kind of shocked by the different reaction.

  I took a stone mold that made a simple sphere inside and took the chamber out. I tipped the little bit of liquid crystal and core into the mold. The heat coming off it was more than enough to melt the stone but when the stone mold melted a small red radiating ball remained.

  To be safe, I pulled out a pair of tongs that I made with fire steel. I grabbed the little ball and in a large tub of water we used for cooling the parts in, I dunked the ball. It instantly made all the water start boiling but the radiating stopped and soon the ball cooled. I pulled it out and what was left was an orange ball. As I took it to a work bench and was about to put it down, something happened. From around the ball, a small transparent film began forming. I put the ball down and slowly the transparent film expanded until it was nearly three times the size of the small ball. Then it began to radiate a yellow glow in a slow rhythm like a heart.

  I blinked several times and looked from all angles wondering what it was. When nothing else happened, I tried to scan it and came up with something rather irritating.

  Unknown

  A new item recently invented and with unknown uses. Research must be done to determine a proper name and proper use for this item.

  Normally when you found something like that you would trash it but it was just another challenge which might bring out some delicious reward.

  That said, since I had nothing particular I was researching I put the item away in my inventory before I started to collect the base materials for the large water filter.

  I started working fast since I only had five more game days to build it.

  I used wood to make the box and rubber to make a good tank. Then I started working on several pumps and filters which would throw the water into a second tank and flow to another tank then another.

  The plan was to go through eight tanks with the final hopefully being pure water. The filters were made with net filters of various sizes that would collect oil, and mineral filters to slowly remove impurities.

  To build it all, I took four days and the result of collecting so much water was that the water purity went all the way to 2% of impurities.

  By then everyone was already back and I had Brock use earth manipulation to remove any dirt particles. With that the water was purified and with scans I found it below 1%. It was impossible to get it completely pure at least for the moment but doing so much was quite enough.

  I had told the others already about what I was going to do, so when I pulled out the small pearl from my inventory no one was surprised. I took it and into the last tank of water I dropped the core.

  As soon as it hit the water, it began to glow a blue light. It started to get stronger and soon it lit the entire cave inside Brock’s whale body.

  The reaction was much more intense compared to golems or fire elementals.

  After the glow stopped, we looked at the water and slowly it began to lift up in several different currents that soon converged and started to entwine and hit the ground while twisting and slowly forming a new body. As the body formed, we could see the small figure of what looked like a 10-year-old and from the excess water, it gathered in her hand and stretched into a pole and at the top part it separated into three spear tips and formed a trident characteristic of undersea creatures and affiliated gods of water and what not.

  She blinked once, twice and more, then looked around glancing at both of my bodies before bowing.

  “‘Greetings and thank you for giving birth to me. I am one of the queen undines, by chance are there any large bodies of water near here.’

  We shook our heads, but her eyes fell on the tanks.

  With a flick of her hand the water flew up and formed a ball in the air. At the bottom, dirt, oil and impurities gathered completely until they formed a solid object that fell down. Then the girl put her hand on the water ball and it was sucked into her body before she sighed with relief.

  “Woah,” Brock muttered.

  He wasn’t the only one to say that but it caught her attention and with an attentive glance she saw he was an earth spirit and moved close before kneeling.

  “Greetings greater earth spirit. Forgive this one for being selfish but can I take up residence within your secondary body?” she asked.

  “Um...”

  “Miss, you’re in it. He recently made the body so it’s small,” Bulk said.

  She looked at Bulk surprised and looked around.

  “Um if you want to stay then it’s fine. We could use your help but I just became an earth spirit some days ago so as he said, I am small,” Brock said.

  “I see. I shall choose to stay anyway. I hold the core of a queen so I must be the leader of my kind that comes after me,” she said.

  It was interesting to see her like that. Well for the moment, we took apart the water tanks and built one large tank for her to live in. She filled it up using magic before jumping in by turning her solid human like body to water.

  From there, we spent the last day finishing her tank and finally were logged out.

  We told her along with Annabeth and Greer to watch over the whale body which was left floating above the ground and gave orders to the clockwork robots to defend the whale and the ship from intruders that didn’t identify themselves as friendlies and were in the list of friends we had from NPCs to players.

  With that we were allowed to log off. I woke up inside my virtual room which was the same as before. I sat up and looked around already hearing the noises Nova was making.

  Your achievements have been calculated.

  Basic package (+100 points)

  Mission: Monster Mayhem Complete (+50 Points)

  Mission: Guardian Rampage Complete (+100 Points)

  Mission: Pirate Genocide Complete (+50 Points)

  Total redecoration points 300 Points

  Nova total Redecoration Points 500 Points (Max)

  Total amount of money earned from achievements $6,000

  Wow, it was impressive. Still, I didn’t know our missions gave us achievements. It was possible that it was something for the second time and beyond.

  I got up and exited seeing my normal little sister already watching TV and I sat with her to watch and let her snuggle close. Moments like
this would always be the best ones, simple is best.