After all the chaos that was my duel with Ryder I spent an entire day helping to rebuild North Point. There was a ton of stone masons there to assess the damage and they were ordering people around on what had to be done. I was later informed that the building that got bombed was a school for imperial knights, and apparently Quincy was in the rubble at the time. Man, he’s got some bad luck for sure, I should use the ring on him to see what his luck is, but it's probably sh*t. At least he doesn’t have to go to school now, he should be thanking me for that. Although, he’d probably call me a terrorist after hearing about all the damage I’ve caused.
The next day, Vasavir called me into his workshop, since he said he had something to teach me before I go on my next quest--as well as picking up my new gear from Vulcan.
“Morning, Old Man, what did you want?” I say as I enter through his workshop.
“Will, perfect timing, now that your magic training has progressed this far, I think it's time to teach you something particularly useful,” Vasavir tells me as offers me a cup of tea.
I take a sip and wonder what new tricks he can show me, his training has been a lot of conceptual and mentally draining tasks so I hope it's cool at least. We’ve already begun doing basic training on quite a few different subject matters, like telekinesis, teleportation, magic manipulation, so adding something else would be a bit much. I kinda suck with telekinesis at the moment and it barely helped in my duel with Lilith. I’m afraid of trying teleportation since I heard Vasavir’s last student died when trying to use it. The one thing I’ve been good at is learning how to manipulate magic, I think the results are evident given how destructive the tornado I summoned the other day ended up being.
“I want to show you how to open up a pocket dimension, this is a pretty neat trick that will allow you to store an unlimited amount of objects in another space. From there you can access those objects from pretty much anywhere in the world,” Vasavir states.
“Oh, cool, it's like having your own personal inventory system, just without the limits on how much stuff you can hold in there. I’m totally going to store as many cookies in there as possible, I hope people don’t look at me strangely when I carry tons of dessert with me,” I say as I start daydreaming of sweets.
“Well, it be best if you store objects that don’t have an expiration date on them, but that works too, I suppose.”
“Okay, let's get started, how do we go about learning this pocket dimension thingy. The same way we learned everything else, by gaining a conceptual understanding first and transitioning into magical application?” I ask already anticipating his response.
“Yes, firstly, you need to understand that we’re basically storing these objects in another dimension. Therefore, the spatial coordinates you need to use are basically part of the 4th dimension. I hope that book on space I gave you has taught you how to visualize that,” Vasavir mentions.
“Yes, I think my brain may have exploded when I read about that. I felt as if I were on drugs and I could see through time. I think I was even defying gravity a bit, it all doesn’t make complete sense to me yet,” I reply.
“To keep it simple think of the 4th dimension as space-time, what’s important is that you don’t end up sending objects through time. For example...” he says as he touches a fresh banana that was lying on his desk and it disappears.
Five seconds later he snaps his fingers and the banana reappears, but it looks all brown and wrinkled now. Maybe storing cookies in my pocket dimension isn’t the best idea.
“To make this training go faster, I think I’ll give you a bit of incentive.”
Vasavir makes a request to the servants to bring in a bunch of food and dessert as well as a few bags of imperial gold for some reason.
“Is that all for me?” I ask as my mouth starts to water.
“Yes, but you only get to eat if you store those objects in your pocket dimension and bring them out without any change,” Vasavir answers.
For the next hour I attempt my pocket dimension training, but it's not so easy as I may have caused 1/4th of the food that was brought to expire. Nazuko would hate me right now for wasting all this food. A few minutes later my curiosity gets the best of me and I inquired about the bags of gold.
“What’s the gold for?” I ask as I’ve finally gotten to the point where I’m not causing food spoil instantly.
“Ah yes that’s a little gift from me to you. Did you forget? We’re going to go pickup your gear today. It's a little spending cash if you see something good at Vulcan’s workshop,” Vasavir says as he picks up a gold coin from the burlap sack and examines it carefully.
“I didn’t forget, I couldn’t sleep last night cause I was so excited.”
“In that case, let's head over now, I think you got a hold on this pocket dimension trick, or at least as long as your not putting food in there”
Vasavir teleports us to Vulcan’s workshop where it looks like the large elf is applying some sort of coating to a chestplate. The elf still doesn’t have anything on except an apron, I guess he really hates wearing a lot of clothing. It is hot in here due to the furnace so maybe that’s the reason. Vulcan still hasn’t noticed we’ve arrived so Vasavir goes and jump scares him again. This causes Vulcan to fumble and a hammer drops on his foot.
“OWW, MY FOOT! Vasavir, I swear to the gods, I hope karma gets you back for all the things you’ve done,” he curses.
He sits down on a large chair and continues to rub his foot.
“Ugh, putting aside Vasavir’s childish pranks, let's get right down to business shall we? Now that you're here I’ve prepared the restorer’s gear all color coded and everything. As well as today’s highlight--the weapons. I’ve put a lot of work into these, especially with the materials your goddess gave me,” Vulcan notes.
He takes us over to a table with a blanket covering it and pulls it right off. There’s a purple and black armor set with two weapons lying on the table. One of the weapons looks like a katana that has purple runes on the black blade that occasionally glow. The other weapon is a parrying dagger with a purple hilt, but it doesn’t have any fancy runes on it. The runic letters on the katana appear to be the same language that appears when I can’t read the descriptions that Vienna’s ring give me. For some reason I can understand half of the inscripted runes.
“I don’t know why, but I think I know what some of these runes mean. I think half of this inscription means push, but I don’t know what the other half means,” I claimed.
“Oh, So you can partially understand the language of the gods, can you? That’s probably due to that ring of yours. For your information, the other half of the inscription means build, when read together it means enhance,” Vulcan announced.
“What does it do?” I asked while picking up the sword to examine it closer.
“Exactly what it says there kid, try channeling your aura through the blade,” Vulcan orders.
I do as he tells me and I can feel my strength erupt with energy. This feels way different than when I summon my aura normally. I usually do feel stronger, but not this much.
“Whoa!” I say as I can feel the power surging through me.
“Now try applying wind to it,”Vulcan commands.
I remember the feeling of when I imbued a weapon with wind the first time. For the last few nights I’ve been practicing and I’ve managed to apply wind to a weapon albeit only for a few minutes. I attempt to do it with this blade, and the effect is at least 5 times stronger. There’s like a mini tornado surrounding the blade. This is way stronger than the few gusts of wind that came out when I was practicing.
“That sword’s power is to enhance whatever effect is being applied to it at the time. In other words, you could make it sturdier if one uses reinforcement on it, hit harder if imbued with basic aura, or enhance your wind abilities. One last thing to note though, that sword will drain the users aura if the effect is used so keep that in mind,” Vulcan adds.
“Oh cool, I’ll be sure to remember that, what about the dagger then. Does it have any special effect?” I ask.
“No, I opted to make that dagger as sturdy as possible. You see, kid, imbuing a weapon to have a magical effect on it actually lowers its durability, so I thought it would be a bad idea to put that on the weapon you use to defend yourself. You wouldn’t want that thing to break when guarding against your opponents blows now would you?”
“Definitely not,”
I still remember how one of the junk weapons I used broke in my duel against Lilith. I got a severe cut because of that stupid thing.
I take a few swings with the two weapons in my hands and it feels so good. I could get used to this.
Vasavir picks up the chestplate of the purple and black armor set and hands it to me.
“Here, put on the armor, lets see how good you look,” Vasavir says.
The armor looks like there’s a black chainmail like lining covered by dark silver plates that have been decorated with purple lines.
I manage to put on all the pieces of the armor and surprisingly it feels really comfortable. Its as if I’m wearing silk and its really easy to move around in. I expected the armor to feel heavy and sluggish, but it's as if I’m wearing almost nothing. I bet I could even sleep in this thing if I wanted to.
“The inside parts are made of a special dragonskin alloy, it's tough but flexible. The plates on the outer parts are made of a mixture of orichalcum and ebony that were both forged in heat as hot as dragon fire. I could hit you with an axe to the chest and it wouldn’t even scratch. Although you might feel the blunt force depending on how strong your opponent is,” Vulcan says while admiring his work.
“Awesome, but would it protect against explosions?” I ask.
“Hmm, it should provide an adequate amount of blast resistance. Why do you ask?” Vulcan ponders.
“I may happen to have a party member that gets carried away with his bombs at times,” I tell him.
I notice that the helmet has some kind of nearly see through lining lying over the parts where the eyes are.
“What’s with the fabric over the eyes? Doesn’t that make it hard to see”
“Not at all, in fact that may actually help you to see better. That’s a special fabric that protects the eyes and lets the user see through distortions.”
“Distortions?”
“Yes things, like mystical fog, rain, illusions cast by magicians. That kind of thing,”
This guy has an explanation for every part of the armor, doesn’t he? I guess magical blacksmiths don’t mess around. As I put on the helmet I notice that it tends to narrow my field of view a bit so maybe I’ll only wear it if I know I’ll be in a fight soon. That or I’ll have to get used to having slight tunnel vision. I take a look at a nearby mirror and I see that I look pretty menacing. Wait, did I just say menacing. Oh great, this whole outfit doesn’t look heroic at all, it’d be perfect if I was evil or something. Maybe it's the color scheme. Hey Vienna, since you can hear this, if I get called a villain in the future--it's on you. At least it feels good to wear.
I remember that Vasavir gave me some spending money so I decided to go looking around Vulcan’s workshop for a bit. I don’t really need anymore gear for myself, so maybe for someone in my party. I think both Ryder and Azura had pretty good gear when I met up with them the other day, Lilith is pretty much rich as hell so I’m sure she’s not in desperate need of anything. That leaves Remi and Nazuko. Deciding which one of these two need gear is pretty easy. I’m not having Nazuko run around in cloth and tattered rags again, so I decided to get her some small leather armor, a black cloak and I buy some boots that muffle your footsteps. Perfect for a thief. With the remaining funds on my person I buy a few kunai and a short blade that Vulcan called a wakizashi. It’s almost as if I’m buying gear for a ninja, however Nazuko told me she hasn’t unlocked her specialization yet so who knows how she’ll turn out. I toss all the gear in my possession into my pocket dimension and prepare to head home for the day. I thank Vulcan for the gear and Vasavir teleports us back to Colonus. With all that settled I’m ready for any quest that comes my way.
