“Stress is a normal thing, guys. You don’t have to work yourself to death! Take some time off every once in a while to work through your issues and come back ready to give your all!”

-Quote from Fifak Diak, voted the best boss in Nikolan eight years in a row

*=====*

It felt good to be in the swing of things, Fara thought. Nothing trying to kill her, no gods to listen to, no distractions. It was her, her tools, and her project. Granted, she was in the middle of teaching a group of undead how to make runes, including the one who happened to have taken the notice of the Creators, but that just made it all the more fun. 

“From here, you can add any modifier you want. Personally, I go with a ‘Quiet’ mana shell around the integral runes, but it’s up to you,” she said to the three listening to her. Mori, Jel, and Pride stared at the runic patterns she had carved into the metal with differing reactions; Mori looked excited, Jel looked fascinated, and Pride looked intrigued. The pure range of emotions displayed by the undead never seemed to get old. She was used to undead being simple, creatures of a singular emotion. The fact that three undead, reanimated by the same mana type, had entirely different personalities despite the only difference between them being the bodies they were raised from; apart from Mori, of course —she was a whole other enigma. A lovable, funny, friend of an enigma, but an enigma nonetheless.

“So…” Mori began, a glint in her eye-flames. Fara quickly learned that Mori’s emotions showed in her eyes and her voice, making the glint that just flashed by slightly concerning to her, “If I were to add that booster mana type to it, what would happen?” she asked. 

Fara looked between the basic runes she used for her personal skiff and Mori. ‘Mori… why?’ she thought to herself. The lich, while brilliant, also had a tendency to ask whether or not she could over whether or not she should. Or at least that was what Fara thought of her frequently reckless magical exploits. Before Fara could ask her brash friend the very question she thought of, Pride spoke up, “It would likely break,” he said, pointing at the carvings in the metal with his spike-arm, “The power of your mana would make it go so fast that it would tear the clocksteel apart.” 

Fara mentally shook her head. Clocksteel was one of the stronger metals available to them. It rivaled steel in durability and iron in weight; while a small difference, it made clocksteel just a bit lighter than steel and a great amount stronger than iron. That meant that something that pierced clocksteel would have to be able to pierce normal steel. It was for that very reason why Clockworks were so dangerous to the average person. Most used guns as a means of self defense and when a creature made of something made of enough what was basically steel to ignore most bullets. Even Clockwork scouts had a decent half an inch of Clocksteel plating on their chest and head and the armor only became thicker from there.

Fara realized that she was daydreaming over the frontal armor of a headhunter and how it could be used and forced her attention back to the conversation at hand. “I doubt it,” Jel replied, “If we’re going that fast, then whoever would be sitting on it would be thrown off first, before anything happened to the steel. Besides, I doubt even a little bit of that mana would tear the steel in the first place. But if we need to test it as the mistress described, then why don’t we use it on something like a rock?”

At that moment, another of Fara’s ‘sand-spike’ skiffs was placed on the ground next to them by the massive clocksteel arm above them. Fara, taking a glance over to the control booth of the assembler, noted that Avarice seemed to know exactly what he was doing. He seemed very proficient in using the mod dock’s assembler, even if it was his first time using it. She assumed he must have picked [Manufacturing Affinity] and smiled once again knowing that the booth somehow interfaced with an undead, despite not having functional brains. Knowing what she did about souls from Mori, which was not much all things considered, she wondered where the soul of the undead was if not in the brain. She had long guessed that the booth interfaced with a being’s soul to control the assembler, so it made sense that most would have their soul in their brains. Thinking that, she wondered if the control booth would work with Mori as well. Her soul was, obviously, not within her head. The solution was obvious if that was the case, but it was intriguing to think about nonetheless.

“Hey, Fara?” Mori asked while poking her on the shoulder. She snapped from her thoughts and looked toward the lich, who was wearing a face full of worry, “Are you alright? You’ve seemed a bit out of it since we started.” She should have expected that. Mori, for all of her flights of fancy and obvious immaturity, was exceptionally emotionally intelligent. So much so that she wondered if the lich had taken a Trait to boost it.

Fara sighed, “I… am. I’m just taking my mind off things,” she said. How could she not want to, after becoming a magnet for unwanted attention?

Mori returned her sigh, pulling her into a hug. It was warm, friendly feeling, one with nothing but care and compassion, “You shouldn’t worry about it so much Fara,” Mori consoled, rubbing her bony hand in a circle on her back, “Whatever it is, be it a Hive, a pirate army, or your worries, you can rely on me. Alright?” It was impossible not to smile, not that Fara would stop herself. She realized how incredibly lucky she really was. Despite her first real friend being a lich, she understood her. “You’re thinking of something sappy, aren’t you?” Mori asked. 

“Yeah, kinda.” Fara pulled out of the hug, “Why do I feel like it’s been so long we spent together while it’s only been a few days?”

Mori laughed, “I don’t know if you’ll understand me when I say this, but I’ve been friends with you for just about my entire life. That might be why,” Mori guessed.

“Anyway…” Pride cut in, standing to the side, “I don’t think adding your unique boosting mana would be helpful. It will make the skiff too fast and, even if it will not tear the clocksteel, it will cause damage to the runes.”

Mori returned the pyrausta’s words with a smile, “Alright then, that makes this a lot easier then. Let’s just go with Fara’s normal design. So, Fara, how do we actually enchant the runes?” 

Nodding, Fara walked to the side and picked up a bucket of paint she had prepared for the lesson. With a small ladle, she filled a few cups with the paint, “Like I said last night, you need to paint the runes to actually have them have an effect. You could fill the carvings with pure mana runes, but it cuts the lifespan of the runes down significantly. To actually use runic paint, you need to do one thing: fill the rune with mana.” Fara held a cup in front of them and began to imagine the mana she wanted.

She was ten when she had made it. Her father was home for a few months, a woman trailing him like a love struck puppy. It took the woman only an hour to get her mother to love her like a sister. One night, they all gathered around their workshop and tried to make something together. The woman who followed her father, a chimeric woman whose only difference between her and a human was the furry paws she had for hands, was a warrior. She was not known for her cunning or imagination, the two determining factors of a good runesmith. Despite that, she had an idea that had them all working hard. 

She had said something about how earthquakes move stuff and how shaking a table was like a miniature earthquake. She further said that, if you can move something the way you want it to if you shake the table the right way, then why couldn’t the earth do that? It took a few days, but they came out with two pairs of self-propellant boots that fed off of the user’s mana throughput. Fara loved the idea of it, and put the mana on her first and only skiff, making it able to run even with the extremely old power cell she had stuck in there. 

“Hey! You’re spacing out again,” Mori said in her face. Fara almost let out an embarrassing squeak as Mori grabbed her into a crushing hug, “Take your time,” she said. 

Smiling, Fara channeled the thoughts into mana. Her thoughts flashed by, all in a second. Earth. Shake. Move. Direction. Small. It came together in the blink of an eye; while she had not had much practice in making the mana type, she knew it like the back of her hand after that fateful night with the late chimeric woman. She wasted no time in shoving the mana into the paint and letting it take hold. She was sure that it was the exact feeling she had when she used pure mana runes, but those got knocked out of place with just a blast of disruptor-type mana. The runic paint, by contrast, did not have that issue. 

She held the cup of brown-colored paint out to them, “This is what you should get,” she said, turning her gaze to Mori, “I’m fine now, Mori. You can stop hugging me.”
The lich, with visible reluctance, pulled away from the hug. Fara could see a faint glimmer of worry in her friend’s eyes, “Alright… but if you start to get upset, come to me, alright?”

Fara could not help but smile, “Of course, Mori. Now then, let me show you how to do this. Obviously, you need to paint the carvings,” she said, taking a dainty brush from a small pile beside them and painting one of the carved rune arrows that pointed behind the skiff, “But you need to be very careful. If you spill the paint into another part of the rune, it may mess with the effect that comes out of the other side. The best way to stop something like that, though, would be to paint most of the line in the rune you want to have, then make a gap between lines. In the end, it will make it slightly longer, but almost impossible to mess up. Who wants to try first?” 

They spent the next hour carving and painting the runes on the bottom of the skiffs, making sure that they were properly aligned and properly painted. By the end, they had a full twelve basic skiffs, running on the rider’s mana throughput. While it may have been a bit overboard to have, making a skiff also increased the top speed and comfort of the thing over putting it on a pair of boots. “We did it!” Mori cheered, waving her arms and gesturing to the many skiffs.

Fara smiled to them all, “Yeah, we did. Though, they aren’t really skiffs. They’re actually MEDs.”

“W-What’s a MED?” Jel asked in her usual stutter. 

“It stands for Movement Enhancing Device, but as the old saying goes: if it walks like a bug and looks like a bug and acts like a bug, then it’s a bug.”

Mori turned, “I thought that one was about ducks?”

“Mori, I don’t know what a duck is,” Fara replied. 

“Oh.”

Just then, another clawed arm came down holding a small plate of metal. As it came closer, though, it became more obvious what the plate was. It was a mask. It was partly blank metal with two holes cut out for eyes. At the forehead, however, a wavy pattern that looked like it came straight off of the Creators’ Shrine was carved. Meanwhile, the bottom of the mask was a stylized carving of dragon’s teeth. It looked like some sort of amatuer mask given to the particularly pious. The claw dropped the mask into her hands and she noticed the carved circles at the top and bottom of the inner part of the mask. ‘Someone was paying attention,’ she thought, amused, “Thanks Avarice! I’ll enchant the paint for it in a minute!” she called out to the pyrausta still in his control pod. A single thumbs up was all the reply she needed. 

“Woah, nice mask,” Mori said, looking over Fara’s shoulder, “Looks like they can be nice after all.”

Pride rolled his eyes, “Oh, no, mistress. You’re breaking my heart over here.” Jel simply slapped him on the back of his head, to the amusement of them all, save Pride himself.

Mori nodded to herself, “Alright, I’m going to head to the- wait, they have a hunter’s guild here, right?”

Fara nodded, “We do. It’s in the bazaar.”

“Good then. I’m going there! I’ll see you guys in a little while!” she said, walking out of the warehouse.

A moment of silence passed before Fara shrugged, picking up a cup of unenchanted runic paint and beginning her work. It took all of five minutes for Zubov to walk down the stairs and turn to them, “Hey, how long ago did… Mori… What the hell happened to you!?” he shouted, pointing at Fara.

The pyraustas turned to her with pitying eyes while she stared at Zubov with anger.