The building itself was easy enough to find, but the far larger problems was actually getting in.

 

Given the massive disparity between the number of fighters over crafters, her newbie gear, and generally unaffiliated status, Deyana found herself barely able to continue moving between a press of bodies yelling out all the benefits of joining their various guilds.

 

As she moved through them, however, she did find herself unexpectedly grateful for the fact that with so many of them making offers, none of them would attempt to kidnap her. Even if one of them tried to pull her away, one of the others would call the police on them, even if it would only be to prevent some other guild from gaining the extra crafter. They also, luckily enough, kept each other distracted for long enough that she was able to slip by, walking through the door to the Runewriters’ Guild only slightly traumatized instead of extremely so.

 

The woman at the front fairly quickly glanced up, then hit a button on her desk. From behind her, Deyana heard a click, and a quick glance behind confirmed that the door was indeed locked now.

 

“I see you made it past the vultures,” she sighed, “It’s a damn shame more people don’t join us, but the mysteries of magic do not appeal to all, I suppose. And even those it does appeal to must go through that, of course.” The woman nodded at the door behind Deyana. “Let’s get you registered.”

 

Deciding not to question how the NPC knew her registration status, given that on Novsha she’d had to specifically ask for registration, she instead just nodded and followed the woman to a small alcove of the front room. When they were both seated, the woman in front of a small terminal and her on the other side of the banker-like setup, she asked, “What do you need to know, again?”

 

“Name, Runes, Level, Specialization, if you’ve got one, which…” she glanced over Deyana’s new player gear, “You don’t. And techniques.”

 

“Deyana; level ten; Majors, Eight elements, [Edge], [Durability], [Form]; Minors are the Elements again, and {Shape: Cylinder.}” She paused. “And I’m having a friend bring me Minor {Durability} within the hour.”

 

The woman nodded. “I’ll mark those down, to make this quick. Any techniques?”

 

“Mirrored Runes and Reversed Runes. I feel like I’m forgetting one of the basic ones, though…”

 

“Link Runes. There’ll be a primer on it in the room.” She shook her head, “You’ll be fine. Mirrored and Reversed are harder, honestly. Much easier for something to go wrong and melt your whole project.” Typing as she spoke, the woman finished and swapped to using the mouse for a few seconds before abruptly standing up and sticking her hand out.

 

“Welcome to the Runewriters’ Guild, Deyana. I’ll set you up for a room, but you can come up to me if you have any questions. Grainne, by the way. I’m the day manager for this branch, but it’s small enough that I’m usually the only one in.”

 

Deyana took the offered hand, shaking it. “Nice to meet you. Where do I get the card?”

 

 

“I’ll bring it to you. Room five’ll be open by the time you get there.”

 

Thanking the woman, Deyana began to walk down the hallway she was pointed to, checking the labels on the rooms absentmindedly while trying to space out how she would go about fitting the runes she had to make the boots.

 

She could easily rely on the durability of the shoes themselves to be enough for many levels, because true elemental casters wouldn’t show up until level fifty, but the air cylinder itself would be difficult to control. Stacking too many or too large durability runes would increase the mana cost beyond what would be valuable, but too little and she’d go crashing through it, to say nothing of the heavier Henry.

 

Resigning herself to the pain of just testing it, she opened the door to the room and was glad to find it mostly unchanged from the last time she’d been in one. It was basically a large, white space with a single large table in the middle, with a circle inscribed in the corner and a tablet computer built into the wall near it. On the table was a small booklet that she picked up, with an explanation on Link Runes.

 

Once she read the primer, though, she was mostly just exasperated with herself. She’d used link runes before, specifically on her dagger bracelet. They essentially functioned to either tie rune groups together (either on a single item, or across multiple) with simple circles and lines. A double circle around a unique design would allow for the wireless transfer of mana, though exponentially more lossy as the range got larger, and the Guild even had a request feature for a unique stamp, accessible only to people she allowed to have it and herself.

Putting the book down, she went over to the tablet. It had a list of items on it, and a few short searches later she was forty credits lighter but had her first unique stamp, two pairs of shoes, and a stack of test papers sitting in the circle on the floor. The double circle on the floor. With a white panel covering the center section.

 

Deyana sighed. She had absolutely no idea how many of these she’d missed, but she was beginning to suspect they were everywhere, and that that ubiquity had somehow erased them from her memory. Or perhaps she’d just never paid enough attention to her surroundings, caught up in all the fighting as she had been.

 

The first step, though, was to begin testing.

 

It only took a few moments to open her inventory, pulling out the rune scrolls she’d picked up. Shape: Cylinder was first, and she unrolled the scroll on the table.

 

Shaped like an oblong rectangle, its short edges cut off and replaced with half-circles, it was, like most basic runes, a fairly simple construction. Listed to the side of the diagram were smaller, partial images of the rune, breaking down what each section of it controlled.

 

The length of the base rectangle, the straight lines in the image, controlled the height, at a 1-to-1 scale; with the radius of the half-circles affecting the radius of the cylinder, at a 1-to-2. Fairly quickly, Deyana copied the simple shape to one of the papers, earning herself a notification in the process.

 

Rune Learned {Shape: Cylinder} Parameters: Radius, Height. Runes until next advancement: 4

 

After the notification appeared, the scroll the rune had been originally written on flashed with red light, leaving it blank. As an experiment, she ran her mana through the rune on the paper, but was unsurprised when no effect appeared beyond the slow consumption of her mana.

 

Taking out the [Form] scroll, she repeated the process. This one was only slightly more complex than the last; essentially an isosceles triangle, one of its longer, equal sides having a single line perpendicular to its midpoint. On each of the angles there were circles with small gaps in them that the text on the side told here were rotational controls, dealing with perpendicular rotational axes. The length of the piece sticking out controlled the face-aligned displacement, so lengthening it would pull the cylinder it created out of the surface it was a part of.

 

Copying it to the paper rewarded her with another notification that she quickly swept aside.

 

Rune Learned [Form] Parameters: X Rotation, Y Rotation, Z Rotation, Projection Distance Runes until next advancement: 3

 

This time, after the orange flash cleared the rune from the sheet, she was left with a mostly-transparent overlay in her vision, showing a circle around where she had laid out the new rune. Luckily, though it had of course been the plan, the shape rune was within it. Placing her hand on the new shape, she once again put mana into it.

 

Immediately, a cylinder sprung into being around her hand, though strangely off-kilter, based on where she’d placed the gaps in the triangles. The one on the small angle didn’t particularly matter, given that the axis it rotated around was a circle, but the other two had caused the disk to be at somewhat of an angle.

 

A quick glance at her menus revealed where the default position was, and she felt the system’s nudging hand help her as she realigned the circles on a new copy of the rune on a new paper. That done, she activated the new copy, checking a few things, like making sure that moving the cylinder rune relative to the Form rune wouldn’t affect the final orientation, which it didn’t.

 

From there, it was relatively easy to put in the air rune, creating a small, slightly viscous bubble of air around her hand. When she tried picking it up, the paper clung to her hand slightly. It wasn’t enough to swing her hand at full speed, but it mostly kept the paper attached for the low, low price of one mana per five seconds. She knew that most of the real price would come from the durability rune, but was still glad to see the base price this low.

 

Given that Henry wasn’t back yet, she also got to play with a few other ideas bouncing around in her head, starting with costing out the various elemental runes she had at her disposal. It was in the middle of that experimentation that a sudden voice coming from the panel on the wall that she’d ordered from resulted in blasting herself in the face with a cloud of steam, lowering her health by a few points.

 

“Deyana, would you like me to let a ‘Henry’ into your area? He says you were waiting for him.”

 

She had a moment of annoyance, wondering why he hadn’t just sent her a message through the Friend interface, but a glance at it made her cringe slightly. He had. Three times.

 

She walked over to the panel, pressing the voice button. “Yes, absolutely. Send him through.”

 

She was glad for the extra time that his walking gave her to formulate an apology, because it managed to keep her from rambling as she opened the door for him. “Hey! Sorry I didn’t see your messages, I got a little absorbed with the runes.”

 

He nodded to her, once. “Makes sense. I’ve got some Runewriter friends and it ain’t exactly rare. I’ve got your durability. Guy insisted on bundling it with a {Delay}, so you’ll get that too.”

 

She smiled, a little pained. “I don’t know what else I’d have for you with the credits I–”

 

He cut her off with a trade popup, showing both of the runes. “Don’t bother,” he said, “I got it cheap. Just give me a deal on your prices later, yeah?”

 

She nodded, accepting the trade and walking over to the table. Because he was there, she focused in on learning the rune, copying it as quickly as she could while still maintaining accuracy. This one was fairly simple, the outline of a simplified kite shield with a line going through it vertically.

 

Rune Learned {Durability} Parameters: Base, Multiplier Runes until next advancement: 2

 

The size of it was directly related to its base effect, linearly increasing the price as well as the durability, but the vertical line was slightly different. It multiplied the base durability, but scaled the price of the rune to run with the gamma function. Where an effect 10 rune would be relatively inexpensive with a 5-base, 2-multiplier, a 2-base 5-multiplier would be significantly smaller, but also about twenty-four times more expensive to run. Sometimes the space gain was worth the price, but it usually wasn’t.

 

Using her air paper from before, she lengthened the displacement slightly, then took her best guess as to the durability before placing the paper on the floor.

 

“Can you step on this real quick for me?” Deyana asked, gesturing in the air above the paper.

 

Henry quickly nodded, then placed one foot above the paper, pressing it down after he saw her activate it. His foot obviously met resistance, but as he put more weight on it, his foot began to slowly sink through the swirling air.

 

“Thirty percent, maybe?” Henry said, and Deyana nodded, taking the paper back to the workbench.

 

While she couldn’t erase, it was a simple matter to copy over the set of runes, increasing the size of the durability rune to match his guess. From there it was a quick process to confirm that he was right, tested by having him stand on the single foot on top of the newly generated surface, then jump off. There was a little bit of give with the jump, but given that the final product wouldn’t leave the surface floating statically in the air, they decided that that would be alright.

 

With the main usage group decided, Deyana copied the runes over to a set of boots bought from the terminal, then added a similar major-Durability group to the one she had on her sword. Done, at that point, she signed the sole of the left one, then handed them to Henry, popping up a trade window as she did.

 

“And, as promised, one set of run-on-air boots. Thanks for the help.” She said, accepting the trade.

 

A moment later, she saw fifty credits pop into the window, then, before she could react, the window quickly closed as Henry accepted it. “Nah, thank you. It mighta been a bit more expensive, but you also did it quick instead of giving me to the guild apprentice queue.”

 

“You also didn’t get a guild’s guarantee on it,” she pointed out.

 

“But I did literally watch you put ‘em together. I know what I’m getting.” With a small wave, Henry left the room, closing the door behind him.

 

Deyana’s eyes locked on the door for a few seconds after he left, before she went back to the table to learn the new rune.

Rune Learned {Delay} Parameters: Time Displacement, Mana storage Runes until next advancement: 1

 

This one was a set of two straight lines, connected at the base, and an arc that went around the outside of them. The length of the arc determined the length of the delay, with a full circle being ten seconds. It was possible to add durations longer than that by drawing a full circle within the confines of the original arc and centered on the same point, but only up to sixty seconds’ worth of time. Meanwhile, the mana storage was determined by the length of the lines.

 

She wasn’t sure she’d be using it, but the rune was incredibly useful for making ranged weapons so she didn’t write it off out of hand. With the rune learned, though, she went back to testing a little bit with her runes, adding a delay of five seconds with enough mana to last ten to the first set she’d had Henry test. While it hadn’t been enough for him, she was significantly lighter than he was, so she expected it might be enough.

 

Sure enough, she found her weight supported by the cylinder that sprung into being above the ground, and a quick bounce off of it told her that it would hold even as she actively used it. For a moment, she thought about decreasing it even further so as not to waste even a little bit of mana, but she eventually decided that it was better to have that safety margin.

 

From there, she began writing the new runes onto a quickly-acquired pair of boots.

 

With the left one finished and the right one mostly complete, she was beginning to be excited about testing them out when a huge crashing sound came from the ceiling above her suddenly pulled her attention away, and only the years of training to avoid falling rocks and other various deadly objects saved her as it partially collapsed.

 

Standing in the middle of the destruction, glancing around as if slightly confused, she saw a player she recognized. It was LJay, from that group that she’d run the last portal with. She tried to get out the door, but before she could, he jogged over to her.

 

“The chest’s a bit big, but you managed the aesthetic pretty well. B+, A-.” he said, with the affected air of a high-class wine critic.

 

Deyana gaped. “Excuse me?”

 

“Novsha impersonator, yeah? You’ve gotten way closer to the height than most people do, but your uh… chest area… is a bit on the larger side for one of you.”

 

“Fuck you, dude, it’s not like I remembered what changed about my default!” she snapped, then her eyes went wide. She hadn’t meant to give him as much information as she had. Getting killed again now would seriously set her behind.

 

Surprisingly, LJay just looked thoughtful. “Hey, what was the last boss Novsha fought yesterday?” The last moments with the character flashed in front of her again. He’d been there for that travesty, so she wasn’t sure why he was asking.

 

Hesitantly, she answered. “A Giant Moderate Ogre. Why?”

 

“Kay cool.” A trade window opened up between them, and a rune scroll appeared there while a goofy grin appeared on LJay’s face. “I believe this is yours, then.”

 

Her eyes tried to get wider, again, but with the shock from the whole encounter still very much present, it was a tall order. She swallowed. In the trade window was the whole stupid reason she even had this character in the first place.

 

|Rune Scroll: Merge|.

 

She didn’t even know what the bars on the side meant. Usually they distinguished whether the rune was major or minor, but this one was not either of the bracket types used for that distinction.

 

“How the fuck do you have it?” Deyana asked, leaving the trade window open.

 

“I took it,” he said, glibly. “Was gonna try to find Novsha and give her it back, so here we are. Honestly, expected it to take longer.”

 

“Again, excuse me? It’s not like The Alliance is just gonna let you walk out with this thing.”

 

He pointed at the caved-in ceiling. “Well, they aren’t. Which reminds me, accept that so we can both run. And add me to your friends list. Me or Geria’s gonna help you with the followup when we get free of the chasers, so we need to be able to find you.”

 

Deyana swallowed. She’d lost this before because she didn’t think she’d need to fight for it, then lost it permanently because she didn’t want to make the effort to get it back, but… she was getting a third chance her. And, staring into LJay’s eyes, she finally decided that she’d at least give it a shot, this time. One more shot at this whole stupid thing.

 

She accepted the trade, then sent the friend request.

 

“You know what?” she screwed her eyes shut for a second, feeling tears try to form inside her eyelids, but she opened them before they could manifest. “I’ll give it a shot.”