“Another storage item you say… Hmm, I have plenty for sale still, you can buy one at the reception on the way out. Unless…” Richard gave a sideways look to one of the human spare bodies floating in their columns.

“Unless?”

“Heh, I wouldn’t be offering that to someone else, but if anyone, you might just be the one to accept. Crazy is crazy, after all.”

“Insulting someone isn’t usually how you get them to accept something.”

Richard stared at Sofia for a few seconds, hands on his pelvis.

“See. You’re still here, waiting for the offer. I am starting to get a good read on you. You’re hungry, just like I was. Hungry for possibilities. Hungry for power. It doesn’t matter what I call you. The incentive of getting something from someone as powerful as me, you just can’t miss it.”

“Yeah, huge news. How did you figure that out? From the story of how I accepted a death quest from Sun to go to a Solar orbital station? Oh, right, I didn’t even tell you about this one. So, this ‘offer’ of yours?”

“Tssk. I can do without the sarcasm, is this how you treat a helpful old man? I was just-”

“You were just stalling for time because you’re about to give me a bad deal. Look, I’m not great at many things when it comes to social matters, but reading a skeleton’s body language is right up my alley.”

“Quite the annoying skill, if you ask me. Well, my offer’s not bad… It’s just… Come here, let me show you my latest storage item prototype. I need someone to try it out and come back with feedback. Afterwards, you can keep it, of course,” Richard walked up to the male spare body he had been glancing at before.

This guy is completely naked… I don’t see… “Is it hidden in one of his teeth? Old Orvod had something like this in the trial.”

“He did? How would you have found that out… Anyway, close, but you missed.”

“Where is the prototype, then?” Sofia asked, scanning the body with her mana senses, failing to pick up anything weird.

Richard walked up to the column and leaned his back on it. “Tell me, how much do you care about your eyes?” he asked, poking at his empty eye socket.

Sofia took a step back. “This is going in a direction that I am not sure I like…”

“Ke heh heh. That’s right. This body’s ‘wearing’ the prototype storage item. Left eye.”

“I- I’m not sure… Ripping out an eye certainly wouldn’t be the worst thing I’ve done to my body, not by a long shot, but it does make me a bit uncomfortable, somehow…”

“Before we get on to the specifics of that, let me give you the good points, alright? Good first, bad second. Please.”

“Nothing’s ever free… Go on. I’m listening.”

“You would be a real bonehead not to. I know the pajamas, slippers, and overall carefree attitude aren’t selling it well, but I am still one of the strongest in this tiny world, alright. You’re really lucky most of us old ones are not very uptight. With interesting people, at least. So! The prototype.”

Richard teleported into the glass column. His bone fingers reached up to the floating body’s head, and with precise and careful movements, ripped out the left eye, then teleported back out, wetting the floor with some of the column’s fluid dripping from his pajamas.

“There you have it,” he proudly told Sofia, holding up the wet and bloodied round eye. “The first edition modern scar-less body-insert spatial storage! Just the materials to make this thing cost more than it did to build this entire underwater complex. Not that it’s much to me, but it’s still something. Took a lot of efforts to make this first functional prototype, but I can only stay in the spare bodies for so long, and it’s not quite the same as having your own body, so I need a volunteer to try keeping it on and using it for long periods of time, to be sure it’s all fine before I start ripping out the eyes of… My more dangerous customers.”

“Riiiiight… Wait… Can’t you just rip this thing out and heal the eye back?” If the runes can regrow my entire body, just an eye should be fine… That might be annoying, even, if I have to rip-out my left eye every time I die to get that thing back in.

Richard scratched his skull. “Nope. Not something you can undo. No healing. You’re stuck with it. Well, you can always replace it with something else later, but your real eye is gone. Linking this to your soul modifies your own ‘template’ if you will, just like your other body-modification skills do. Like your half-empty insides. Don’t think I don’t see them. Clearly no matter what you did, it doesn’t look reversible. This is the same. No amount of healing magic can help you there. Hence why this is a deal I can only offer to someone like you.”

“I’m sure most human farmers out there would kill for a storage item to make their job easier, let alone sell an eye.”

“As if I would entrust my prototype to a random nobody! I need someone who’s really going to use it and bring back good data, not some farmer who’s going to end up murdered by a jealous neighbor.”

Sofia took a second think, walking in circles under the watchful non-eyes of Richard.

“I have a few questions.”

“Fire.”

“Uh?”

“I mean, ask away.”

“Oh, alright. First question : why?”

“Easy, I wanted to try a new technology, and the usual ring and baubles weren't cutting it. So it’s an eye-”

“Second question, why would anyone ever pick this over a regular spatial storage item?”

“If you’d just let me finish what I was saying…”

“Sorry.”

“So, the eye. The idea was to extend the effective range of my spatial items. For convenience’s sake. Tell me, what is the range of that ring of yours?”

“You made it, don’t you know?”

“I do, you numbskull, this isn’t about what the values actually are, I’m just trying to illustrate a point!”

“Sure… No need to get so worked up over this… So the [Rubedo’s Tail Biter], which you made, can pick up items that I touch, or with some trickery, up to a few meters away, if nobody else is holding the thing. It’s able to unload items anywhere in a sphere of about ten meters of diameter around the ring. So how much range does the eye have? As far as the eye can see? That would certainly be worth an eye.”

“Do you have any idea ‘how far’ your eyes can see? If I want to be facetious, I can say it only sees what it can touch, and that wouldn’t be completely false, but that’s also not very interesting. Else, well, we can ‘see’ stuff so far away in space that we couldn’t ever hope to reach them, so you can always dream to have that kind of range. No, the range is more like, as far as the eye can see that your mana can reach.”

“That’s… Pretty incredible already.”

“Isn’t it? But it’ll cost you an eye, can’t use the tech unless we replace a real eye. It’s also race-specific so this prototype is human only.”

“Wait… Human-only? Our eyes are nothing special…”

“Yeah? That’s the point. Other races have different eye shape, muscle implementation, natural magic paths, and other such annoying things to work around. Human eyes are the easiest to work with, which is pretty nice, made for easy preliminary testing. I need someone to give it a real run, though. It’s got other quirks besides the range and the lost eye, but that’s less important. So, what do you think?”

“I’m going to need the specifics, and a lot more details on how that thing feels to have in your head… I also want to know what are the things you expect could go wrong, considering you believe testing is needed. And I want Erredis’ opinion.”

“You’re not making this easy.”

“Free stuff is free, I’m rarely against taking it, but losing an eye forever is still a bit of a big deal.”

“Oh, trust me, I know. Give me a second to edit the description. That should be enough for you to understand the features. All experimental, don’t forget. We can go over the stuff that could go wrong with your Dragon witness, if you want. Can’t let you have the thing just yet anyway, I will have to tinker with it some to adjust for your lack of proper optical nerves.”

“Well I haven’t accepted yet.”

“Just have a look, it’s nice, isn’t it?”

What do we have here…

[Relocation-Eye Prototype implant V0.1]: A peculiar new generation storage item prototype by craftsman T.L.D.R. It was completed a few years ago but never made it to the next stage of production for a lack of proper quality assurance testing. The space inside is a ten meters sided cube but its real appeal comes from the many experimental features.

• Pickup and deposit range up to 3km

• Enhanced deposit location precision

• Lowered mana usage for pickup at short ranges

• Up to 100x optical zoom

• Heatmap vision layer

• Dynamic Target tracking

• Visual anomaly spotter

• Low light and High light vision

• Can record and store up to 10s of visual feed

Be warned: will permanently replace your eye.

Compatible with most vision-altering magic (no current conflict).

Passive mana cost : 20/ second

“Oh, wow. You never mentioned the mana upkeep…”

“A minor detail…”

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