Lillene

Enjoy!

Serenity watched Klari examine the tile. She started with simple things, like hitting it lightly and touching it with a monster core. It wasn’t long before she tried to remove some of the metal so she could work with a smaller chunk.

It didn’t separate. 

“That’s odd,” Klari muttered. “That should have worked. Must be a strange alloy; that would explain the higher than normal mana flow. Hmm. Melting point next … wait.” 

She turned to look at Serenity. “You don’t mind if I use some of this up testing it, do you? I’m going to have to completely recharacterize it, it’s not the same as the metra I’ve gotten from my suppliers in the past. I’d be happy to pay you for it based on how useful it ends up being; if this is a good alloy and I can figure out how to make more, it’ll be useful. I’m not sure I can figure it out, but even if I can’t, I need to characterize it before I can tell you anything about working it. Unless you know something about how it’s different from normal metra?”

“I thought it was normal metra.” He’d been pretty confident of that, actually, when he put it in his Rift.

Oh, wait. His Rift. It’d been in there for quite a while, hadn’t it?

Serenity bit his lip then decided he ought to come clean about the fact that it might be Skill-modified. She was far less likely to be able to duplicate the effect. “I, er, my storage space has a tendency to alter things that are put in it just a little, to make them more suitable for their task. I haven’t really looked into how or what changes it makes yet. I forgot about it.”

“Your storage skill does what.” Klari’s voice was absolutely flat. “That’s not a storage Skill, that’s an enhancement Skill. What sort of enchanter has a material improvement Skill and doesn’t find out exactly how it works?”

“I’m not an enchanter.” Serenity found enchanting interesting but he knew he wasn’t capable of it. It was a little saddening, really; he didn’t like admitting he couldn’t do some things, but at the same time there were things he simply couldn’t do and crafting of any sort was one of them. 

He’d known that since he attended Blackthorn; the teachers had made it very clear he was incapable. Every time he’d tried after that was an abject failure. It was better to admit limitations than pretend he could do something he couldn’t, even if it was annoying that he kept having to repeat himself.

“You aren’t?” Klari’s expression twisted into an almost comically exaggerated look of confusion. “I thought you said you had a design you wanted to try out.”

“I do, but it’s not for an enchantment; it’s for a runescript.” The difference was obvious, wasn’t it? A runescript was simply a spell made solid, while an enchantment had to be applied to an item, usually enhancing its capabilities.

Klari shook her head. “Same thing, just a different way of getting there. It still makes an item that does more than the parts would otherwise do. The other method you mentioned, inscribing your pattern in a mana-carrying substance embedded in something that doesn’t carry mana? That’s standard for enchanting. There’s a reason I guessed cerreth and tholia; they’re a common pair because they work well together. They have almost identical properties at everyday temperatures except for their mana conductivity, so they tend not to easily separate and they last a long time.”

Serenity stared blankly at Klari. He’d been told exactly the same thing before, probably several times, but this time something about it seemed to click. What was the difference between runes and enchanting, really?

Yes, he could create temporary runescripts that would last only one or two uses. So could enchanters. They could have all sorts of effects. Some could be triggered by anyone, while others were limited to people with appropriate Affinities or Skills; that was also like runescripts. Serenity usually chose to embed the Affinity he wanted to use but that wasn’t necessary. Sometimes it wasn’t even desirable.

Yes, enchanters could enchant items he couldn’t easily cover in a runescript. That didn’t really speak to his ability, though, did it? That simply meant they could either make the script smaller yet carry the same mana or move it to another space or they had some sort of alternate notation that was specifically designed for the situation. Serenity could bet that the third was true and he wouldn’t bet against the first two. There might well be other possibilities as well when you added in Skills and the use of other enchanted gear during the crafting.

On top of that, he’d never even tried to enhance anything; he’d only ever tried to create self-contained spells. A fireflower trap was extremely useful, so he’d never really felt the lack. He’d collected the items used by his enemies after they died and used them or given them to his creations as needed.

When he thought back on the Final Reaper’s life, he couldn’t remember a single time he’d tried to “craft” something, yet he could remember thousands of items, both temporary and permanent, that he’d made. For that matter, he’d built several strongholds with his hands and his magic; how was that not crafting?

Why was he so set in his ways? Why did he know he couldn’t craft?

Yes, he’d been trapped in dungeons that almost killed him and did kill some or all of his companions because he couldn’t craft. Some let him out for the oddest things, while others didn’t. He knew some would accept things others wouldn’t; many of those things could probably be called “crafted” if he used the sort of broad definition Klari had just used for enchanted items, something that was made. Had he always crafted something before he was released?

He didn’t think so.

In that case, why had they released him? While some dungeons could simply be left and others had criteria to kick people out or time limits before they could leave, there were dungeons where you had to finish an area you entered or die. Yet despite his supposed lack of ability to complete those dungeons, he’d always gotten out. Why?

If he’d had Aide then, Aide could have told him. Serenity’s memory simply wasn’t good enough, especially since many of those times were while he was still regaining his sapience after his first death. 

Wait, could that be why? Had the dungeons not fully counted him as a participant? Was he treated like an animal that belonged to the other members of the party? Serenity knew that if the entire party died, many dungeons would release any living creatures they’d brought in with them, even if the dungeon was normally locked. It seemed all too plausible that he’s been considered an animal for a while.

That would also go a long way towards explaining why people wanted him in their group when he was far less competent than an ordinary fighter: if he didn’t take up room in the dungeon’s count, the fact that he was sort of ab le to follow directions, sturdy, and not too incompetent in a fight might well be enough of a reason to take him to dungeons that were either a little too hard or a little too unknown for the group. 

The fact that they could skip giving him a fair share of the loot wouldn’t hurt. He knew he’d been taken advantage of many times during that part of his history. He couldn’t even give them credit for that being decided by the dungeon’s people count; while some dungeons set out loot based on the number of participants, most didn’t. You got treasure by gathering it yourself, completing a challenge such as a boss, or finding a treasure cache. Most of those didn’t depend on the number of people who entered the dungeon.

Okay, so, he understood why he’d survived when the rest of the group didn’t. That probably explained a lot of why some of his creations were accepted and others weren’t; if the dungeon didn’t count him as a person, he probably didn’t have to make anything and anything he made was less likely to count. He didn’t know why some of the dungeons hadn’t successfully completed, then, but it seemed all too likely that he’d taken blame that wasn’t his.

Which didn’t explain why he thought he couldn’t craft anything despite all of his evidence to the contrary. It was such a deep belief that he’d held it for the rest of his life even as he did things that, looking back, clearly contradicted the simple statement. He’d been limiting himself but at the same time he’d proceeded to learn things that fell under the umbrella of “crafting” by convincing himself they weren’t really crafting.

After all, he could do them; in some cases it was persistence and in others it was talent, but he could still make runescripts. Even rituals sort of fell under the umbrella, the same way that spellforms did. When you got right down to it, in some sense any creative activity was “crafting” and therefore forbidden to him. He’d had to work around that limit.

Wait, why did he think they were forbidden? Not just that he couldn’t, but that he wasn’t allowed to? That pointed at something even deeper, but whatever it was, the memory seemed to be gone. He could find no elements of a control spell or curse of any sort; either it hid itself well or it simply wasn’t there. 

Serenity didn’t think a control spell would have survived his trip back through time anyway; the Voice was capable of making mistakes, but that event was cataclysmic to Serenity’s sense of self. He’d even taken a new name because no older name seemed right. Even if a control spell managed to survive the Voice’s actions, the odds were against one surviving that.

In a way, though, the presence of a control spell didn’t matter once it truly convinced him. People could be stubborn. It was very hard to convince most people of new things if they knew something else was true. He was just as susceptible to that as anyone else; yes, he knew about the phenomenon but that didn’t always help him see when it was happening.

Even if he assumed he’d once been controlled, all it had to do was reinforce itself until he was deeply convinced and it would last a long time. A very long time, based on the evidence; as he thought back, his best guess to when he was hit with it was while he attended Blackthorn. He remembered being ridiculed by teachers for his inability to craft, but he didn’t know if that was really what happened or if someone had amplified it.

It was even possible that there hadn’t been a spell at all; it could have been simple repetition. It was easier to believe things that were repeated over and over again even if you knew they weren’t true. Serenity suspected there was a spell, but he wasn’t sure if that was just what he wanted to believe or not. 

Serenity’s mind went around in circles until he felt a hand touch his arm. “Sir? Are you all right?” 

Serenity blinked and focused on Klari. “Oh, yeah, sorry, I was thinking. You’re right, it is a lot like enchanting, isn’t it?”

Lillene

I would say that you have no idea how long I’ve been waiting for Serenity to finally put the pieces together … but I know you’ve probably been waiting just as long as I have.