The walk over to the Runewriters’ was quiet. In Geria’s case, it was probably just that she was that kind of person, but in Deyana’s, it was because she was already working on narrowing down her options to prevent herself from being taken with choice paralysis.

There were just so many options– even completely discounting the duplicates that Geria had handed her, it still left her with quite a few things to decide to even begin making an item.

It was a bit of a weird collection, though, and she had to think for a minute to really put together why that was: the expensive components of the weapon she’d described were all represented, particularly the two rare minors, but from there it was just a random collection of runes.

Not that that was all bad. She saw the makings of a decent defensive enchantment similar to the type she’d used on Novsha, though a lot more limited. Instead of having disposable enchanted sheets, largely because that would be prohibitively expensive at this point in the new character’s development, she would need to combine the uncommon {Metastorage: Monodirectional Transfer Contiguous} with the common {Storage: Bleeding Kinetic} and uncommon {Storage: Kinetic}…

That was somewhat secondary, though, because she also needed weapon upgrades and to make sure that the way she thought those runes would work was the way that they actually worked.

With her having picked up the quest rewards before meeting with Geria, it was just a matter of pushing their way through the people propositioning them for guild membership at the doors before the quiet of the actual Guild embraced them.

“I appreciate the help getting through the jackals, but you don’t need to stay with me for the boring part if you don’t want to,” Deyana said, looking between her companion and the man standing behind the desk, reading something behind it.

“I’m okay,” Geria responded, “and until this is all dealt with, it’s best if I minimize my contact with people anyways. I’ll stay to watch.”

“If you’re sure.”

Dealing with the man, who introduced himself as Aaro, was even simpler than it had been last time, just a matter of showing the card that Grainne had had made and requesting a room. Like last time, he didn’t request payment. She waited until he was out of earshot to break the immersion, largely because she didn’t want any of the strange NPC reactions to talking like that.

“Did the devs decide that the Runewriters’ should be free or something? I know last time I was in one of these I had to pay quite a bit.”

Geria shook her head. “No, it’s your level. Price scales, but you’re not charged until you hit level fifty or expertise three.”

“You know that you almost handed me expertise three with those runes, right?” Deyana asked. “I haven’t activated them yet, obviously, but…”

“I… hadn’t thought of that. I can pay for it if–”

“No, you don’t. It’s not quite there, and I’ll just hang on to some I don’t need to put that off.”

“If you say so…”

“I say so. Okay, now for the… Well, not boring, but not exactly interesting, either, part.”

She dumped most of the scrolls out of her inventory, leaving a few of the ones she didn’t think would see any use as well as the duplicate {Delay} and {Shape: Cylinder}, but mostly just getting them all out and onto the work area.

First step was to clear the first advancement, the one that almost every player did at some point.

“Any input on my mana color?”

“I thought you said not interesting? Though that choice is your own. I’m obviously partial to certain colors, but you’re the one who’ll be stuck with it.” Geria held out her hand and rippled mana across it, showing it to be some variety of aquamarine.

“You have a point,” Deyana responded. “I just don’t want the same blue as last time.”

Still, it wasn’t as though she were suddenly go jumping into the oranges or yellows. Greens had promise, but…

“I think I’ve got one. Time to lock it in.” She drew out the rune for her first shape and was rewarded with a lot more windows than the single rune would usually justify.

Rune Learned {Shape: Hemiellipsoid} Parameters: Radius 1, Radius 2, Radius 3, Rotation Advancement Complete!

 

Expertise 1 Effect: Mana Coloration Some runes can’t be tested at their full potential in spaces where the runewriter is working. In those cases, stand-ins are used that turn the primary effect to harmless free mana. Coloring this mana allows the runewriter to more effectively determine how the final effect will play out. This process also affects the color of mana when intentionally released into the air, though, like before, it will have no effects beyond the purely visual.

 

Confirming through the windows was quick enough, even with it displaying a number of other, unrelated unlocks, and she finally got to the color screen.

She’d had a midnight blue, before, but she did want to be just a little different.

Midnight purple, then. A bit darker than midnight purple, actually, making it a bit difficult to see that it actually was purple without some other color to compare it to.

She didn’t have an absolute ton of mana at her level, but she had enough to form a small orb of it in the air above her hand, then sweep her hand up through it, leaving the tendrils to disperse as they swirled in the air.

She could see a slight smile on Geria’s face. “I thought you were trying to be incognito.”

Deyana could feel her face redden as she turned away. It wasn’t exactly common knowledge what her color had been before!

Or, at least, she hadn’t thought it was. Maybe she should check what people actually knew about her?

“How many people are even going to see it? It’s fine. And it’s different anyways.”

“Okay. Don’t let me distract you, sorry.”

Deyana waved her off, but she did have a point. She needed to get to work, and the best way to do that was to choose her next ten runes before another advancement window.

Both common material runes, Stone and Water Ice. The two kinetic storage runes, the mana storage one. It was “Bleeding,” or one that lost a variable percentage of its charge per second, but as she didn’t have access to the Rare-level normal Mana storage, it was the best she could do. The para-elemental Sand rune, along with majors [Create] and [Direct].

Those weren’t... exactly for her, but that was fine.

[Absorb] and {Visualize} rounded out the first ten, hitting her with another advancement.

 

Expertise 2 Effect: Multiset Runes By running multiple distinct copies of the same major rune over each other in different mana-conductors and with careful application of the writer’s mana directing them, if they are identical in every way except for their parameters, it is possible to create a single rune with distinct settings. This process increases the use-price of both settings, but allows for the user to change between them. There must be a Control-series minor rune or the user of the item must have specialized in that rune to change settings.

 

It wasn’t useful yet, but she knew that it was one of the most common ways to create some of the more powerful items around, simply because spending too much power for minor enemies could quickly become a problem, and switching weapons in the middle of combat when using something large like a bow or greatsword, was even worse.

It was looking at the remaining runes, wondering what she was going to do for the armor’s discharge of kinetic energy, when she was suddenly struck by an idea of what to do with the Merge usage.

It was a good thing that Geria was there, Deyana didn’t have the credits to buy what she needed.

“Can you buy… a staff, a close-fitting long-sleeve writable undershirt and forearm cover, and a right-handed glove for me.”

Geria nodded and started on the buying process while she pulled out the runes she wanted– {Shape: Triangular Pyramid}, {Control: Proximity}, {Type: Kinetic}, {Metastorage: Monodirectional Transfer Contiguous} and [Impart Energy]. [Bolt] found its way onto the pile too, though that one wasn’t part of her plan.

“I will. What do you want the staff for, though? You tend to use swords.”

“It’s a temporary for you. How do you feel about being a sand controller?”

Geria paused in the order, hitting what looked like a return button a few times before changing some sliders. “That will be fine. Better than being discovered. You should have told me earlier. I am shorter than you.”

“Oh, and if you want the sand creation on a different item get that, too, but it should be fine on the staff.”

“Mmm.”

The two of them finished at almost the same time, the ordered items appearing in the corner as Deyana finished copying over the new runes.

The undershirt that would be acting as armor was the first priority. Not because it was what she needed most, but because it would take the longest, in addition to being the one she’d be applying the |Merge| usage she had to.

First was the part that had been on her old armor. [Absorb], centered on the sternum, with the minor runes around it. {Type: Kinetic} made it limited, but allowed for her to directly put the input side of a high-throughput moderate-storing {Metastorage: Monodirectional Transfer Contiguous} around the Major rune, connecting it to a minor {Storage: Bleeding Kinetic} that was out of the effect range of [Absorb] by way of the left arm, and leaving it for the moment.

The next step required a bit more testing, but Geria’s help, as well as {Visualize} on [Form], allowed her to quickly discover the correct settings for the hemiellipsoid to cover the front half of her body without too much hassle.

From there, it was simple to complete the first part. Adding a {Control: Proximity} would mean that the rune only activated when she was attacked (or, technically, when anything intent on making contact with her from the front crossed the barrier. It was fairly effective, but it did mean that someone throwing an object to her would need to warn her in advance or have it stop in midair.), which would decrease the cost to something her mana regeneration could mostly sustain. Given the choices she’d made, it would be level 20 before the upkeep cost was actually outpaced by the regeneration, but given that going down a single mana point out of her eighty would take more than two seconds of being ready to receive a hit, she wasn’t concerned.

Actually regenerating mana would require her to actively stop supplying it with mana for now, but it still wasn’t really an issue.

Next up: the reason she’d actually planned this and forty minutes of detail work to cap off her first hour. She pulled out one of the stand pieces from the workbench, fitting the arm of the shirt over the arm of it, activating the resizer that grew it out, expanding the shirt until it was no longer slack. The storage rune on the upper shoulder sat there, taunting her.

The metastorage runes were negligibly costed for transfer, when they didn’t have energy stored, and also when they had energy stored but the runes on both sides had energy as well. The upside to that was that she could essentially dismiss them for the calculations she had to do next, determining how much storage she could afford to put in.

The downside was that if she under-guessed on how much she would need before she could use the stored energy, the one-sided storage price would come into play, essentially eating through her current mana stores in seconds and causing the other storage runes to revert to their fuel failure state.

In the case of storage runes, instantly applying everything they had stored in their current position, undirected.

She ended up deciding on a one-three and one-four configuration. The current bleeding storage rune fed into a chained three more bleeding ones, with their bleed turned up a bit in exchange for a decrease in mana cost (both benefits in her eyes), which was then split into a large bleeding rune with the bleed maxed out, moving back towards the shoulder at a much lower transfer rate than the other side, and another chain of four, this time to non-bleeding storages.

It was fairly complex, but it would store quite a bit of energy while also having a safety measure to keep it working effectively even if the primary storages were full.

A lesson she’d learned in full from Hyrd.

The other side was less complex, though no less time-consuming.

[Create] and the {Triangular Pyramid} were first. Not too much tweaking was needed there. The main important parts were getting it rotated to make the longer height parallel with the [Create] rune itself and shrinking it down to a size where it didn’t rip a hole in her mana stores when she added the {Material: Stone}

[Impart Energy] and {Type: Kinetic} with {Control: Mental Direction} didn’t even take that long, only requiring the alignment part of that equation.

Fifty-five minutes in, and she was finally at the part where it could all go wrong.

“Wish me luck?”

“Good luck,” Geria answered, and Deyana jumped. The voice was right behind her.

“Oh, shoot, sorry! I went ahead and completely ignored you for this bit, didn’t I?”

“Yes, but that is okay. I was trying to be unobtrusive. It’s interesting to watch you at work.”

Deyana blinked. “Are you sure about that? I’ve just been kinda diving into math and the drawing for… a while.”

Geria narrowed her eyes slightly, then glanced at the arm, the underside of it covered in the runes she’d been drawing on, then back. “I’m sure. I haven’t seen anyone work this completely. They usually send people out of the room if they’re not teaching.”

That was odd. “Did you want to learn or something?”

“Sometimes. It isn’t likely to be something I would want to stick with. But it is interesting.”

Deyana scoffed. “I don’t even have the right to send you out at this point anyways.”

“If you asked me to leave, I would.”

“Don’t bother waiting for that. Okay. Reset for the last bit. Let’s go.”

This part… shouldn’t be hard, but everything in her brain rebelled against it, remembering the fiery explosion that had taken her guildmate. First, |Merge|. Then, both majors.

It was better to get that out of the way quickly if things went horribly wrong.

When nothing did, Deyana relaxed, filling all the secondaries that had been waiting.

As a test, she slipped the forearm cover over it.

Everything but [Impart Energy] and the energy runes disappeared beneath it.

Deyana grinned. It was time to test it.

Hopefully without dying or blowing anything up.

Well, blowing anything up too badly.