-Robert Fayn-

It’s been two weeks since my Enigma has gotten three new areas, four if you wanted to add RV Dazzling Desserts to this mix even though it was ten days old, although I definitely lumped them together. And it was probably time to start adding some monsters for them and also set up resorts in Galactic Imports and RV Dazzling Desserts, especially since Reagan Road was getting us a frontier core ready with the expectation of us making a resort in Starport Cyber. I would have had the others do the bulk of the work for me but Mita and Ras were still dealing with the Glyirian nobles last week and I was letting Sous grind in Sins of the SteelStar so he could get his desire of relations model up to level 5. As for Neo Draceld Z, she was a no go cause no way Ras was going to let me use her for making monsters and stuff outside of the Tyrian Island of Blackcurrants, besides she was relishing in the fact we were letting help manage the other resorts, not just the Mocktail. So that just left me with Louella helping out along with Umi, Sal, and even Beath: although he was mostly just playing with Sugar and Spice and watching Umi do stuff. 

“Don’t you want to play with us?” Beath asked my primary spirit halo as he pet my shamanic cat familiars, levitating a few inches on the ground.

“Yes, play,” meowed Spice, stretching out his back so the magecraft spirit could pet it more.

“Yes, rreellaaxx,” followed up Sugar as she did the same.

“I’m busy right now, give me a second,” complained Umi with an annoyed look on her face as she went to help terraform the area in front of us into a resort with the Enigma’s terraforming and generation protocols.

“You really do have some interesting spirits,” noted Louella with a curious but entertained look on her face as she also went to terraforming through the Enigma’s protocols. 

“Thanks,” I replied as I tried to ignore the subtle feeling of electricity coming off the spellman that I kept picking up with my manalogical senses: it’s only been more pronounced since she became one of my underling blackzone managers. It only made sense though I guess, that independent asset-tower-dweller race-hybrid of a noblewoman was completely geared toward lightning mana: supreme ranked cleric and witch-doctor, a class specialty and extra class specialty in elemental lightning, advanced lightning class specialty, and even some racial feature mandalas that increased lightning mana generation. Combine that with the fact she was now hooked up to my Enigma? Literal live wire, and not necessarily in the euphoric spellcasting sort of way. “What about your spirits? Are they usually active?”

“Mine? Not really. Tomyris-Osyris-Anayris was always able to keep herself company, and now that I have Zenobia, Elizier, Himiko, and Iris they have plenty of company. Not that I don’t mind chatting with them.”

“It is good company to keep,” followed up Iris, in her conjured simple-dressed soldier form. God, Louella is so lucky, a system assistant that can conjure itself a body to use, I thought to myself a bit sour that the spellman got such a good system assistant despite it being a faux variant; the fact that Louella got a System Assisant Com-Booster sub-feature only served to make Iris an even more perfect secretary. 

“So have we decided on the name of this resort?” inquired Louella as she went to finishing the final touches on her end of this part of the project.

“I was thinking the Alexander,” I explained, inspecting the towering resort’s futuristic metallic-marble body with beige and gold trimmings: a great contrast to all the dark and dull colours of the surrounding expansion and Hidden City.

“That’s the name of the apothecary entity you like so much isn’t it? The bartender?” 

“He makes a good drink.”

“That’s it?”

“Well that and I want to do something special for him. I guess as a sort of test.”

“What’s that?”

“Mutating him into a legendary entity since we haven’t actually had a natural case of mutation yet and I want to make him stronger. And don’t mention this to Sous but I do want to do some research on magi-sentience and partial-magi-sentience since I don’t exactly know that much stuff about the distinctions. And I guess also all the pros and cons...” I explained as I had Sal prep everything for me. I know Sous was doing a lot of research and analysis on this sort of stuff in his free time so it wouldn’t be too hard for Sal to grab me what I needed. Plus it would be nice to have another part of the Enigma’s ecosystem that didn’t change too much from the reviving process: I know Fuhrer Vel wouldn’t care cause he had his Greater Swarms of Hundreds & Thousands, Queen Tara was perfectly content with all the Glyirian that she talked with, and well the Enigma of Enigmas I had zero clue about. But Harper and probably even LeChiff would likely enjoy another companion.

“That is an interesting idea,” mused Louella as she moved onto the next task I gave her: making a new type of slime-variant for the resorts since the low tier and even some of the mid tier delvers were enjoying the variety my Enigma had going on. Made sense, we had the base living flans plus their chromatic and twin integral counterparts, then the curse variants made by Mita using the ten chromatic curses and a basic curse one, and finally all the Five Powers ones representing the systems we had connections to: Obscurial Glyphs for the Obscurus System, Vox Cast for the Vox System, Circulation Tech for the Halo System, and then Odd-Shape for the Game System. Not to mention Ras’s living gelatos with their chromatic and Five Powers presenting the systems counterpart also. We really are slime heavy, although I guess we also are pretty knight heavy.

Shaking my head a little and focusing my own goal, I had Sal open up the Monster Creation Menu and feed the entity information of the caketopian apothecary into it. As countless translucent screens started to appear in front of me, I went to isolating Alexander’s soul along with his other pieces of being inside the pool of caketopian apothecaries. It felt weird handling the whole process and interacting with the cycles of reincarnation that were connected to my Enigma: this sort of spellcraft was a bit beyond, I didn’t have any colour attunement to samsara and barely anything to the related manas except for white, and my situation wasn’t that much better with the non-chromatics that the sixth dark will, corruption, governed.

Gah, why the hell am I bothering to think about this? I’m not a mage like Louella, I quipped to myself, sort of annoyed that I was drifting toward thoughts about the technicalities of magics and spellcraft. I swear ever since I got that magus qualification Sous had been slipping me suggestions to start focus on my style of spellcraft, and Ras wasn’t any better about that: the two of them kept putting magic on my mind and now I couldn’t help but think about it cause I’m stuck dealing with freaking spellmen and other pinnacles of mages. Why couldn’t I just enjoy making potions and taking vacations at my resorts?

Sighing a tiny bit, I went to make the quick changes for Alexander to become an epic entity: slight improvements to appearance and height so he was a bit taller and more suave looking, changing his tier from 1.9 to legendary tier 1.3, adding affinities to Obscurus Glyphs and Spirits-Commerces so he could better manage the resorts and the other entities, a second astral heart to house the two extra affinities and serve as a potential drop for the psychos that decided to try and kill him, and then funneling the rest of mutagenic experience into improving his attributes and abilities. The Enigma would use a good chunk of it while the rest went to improvements in managerial capabilities, adaptability, and growth. Not to mention I made it so he could survive outside the environs of Historie Pastoria Sweets for a bit like the caketopian courier-merchants. Of course there was the downside of stuff gained from adaptability and growth would be reset every time we had to regenerate him, but he was a non-combative entity, he shouldn’t be a target for delvers in the first place, even when he ventures outside of the Enigma.

“Everything is in order. Formalizing template variant. Entering entity information into Enigma’s monster generation protocols as ‘Apotherical Resort Super-Manager.’ Shall I generate him here?” proclaimed Sal after I sent everything off to him.

“No, just generate him at the second apartment block in Final Cut Caketopia,” I replied as I went to see what the Enigma decided to give Alexander in his new form. Living to a blackzone to give a legendary entity was interesting abilities to interact with itself: some basic spellcasting with the five class specialties he was given affinity to and the ability to access the systems that the Enigma was connected to via Aux cores. Taking a closer look at it, it looked like Alexander’s spellcasting was evenly split between the Five Powers with his affinities and system cast with accessing the systems. Weird…

“Hey Louella, what’s your opinion on the Five Powers and system cast? Especially in a place like our Enigma,” I asked the spellman as she worked with Iris to make a bunch of variants of fodder monsters.

“As fields of magic? Well, they are both common in terms of spellcraft. System cast is useful and easy to use, although they still have potency based on location downside. And as for Five Powers, despite the fact it is harder to use in the six primary special locales, the secret places of the outer between space, or anywhere the Restrictive System is in play and it is easy to be hit by cross-karmic retribution while using it in a proxy body or the likes, it is still a metaversal constant,” explained Louella elegantly, even getting Iris to conjure up some infographic in translucent screen to make it easier to understand.

“So you don’t have a preference for either of them?”

“Oh, I do have a preference toward the Five Powers, but that is only because I’m an elementalist.” So Louella was a Five Powers user? Go figure. At least having her around gave me an alternative to talk about the various fields of magic in terms of spellcraft; I didn’t have to deal with Sous pushing being an oldmaker on me or Ras doing the same with being a system caster. Still didn’t have someone to talk about being a magecraft user or true magic user though...

It was much longer until Louella finished up creating our new variant of slimes. You got to be kidding me, I internally moaned as I saw her creation: living cocktail pods, animate gelatins with liquid alcoholic centers that housed their magical core and two fake translucent eyes. Apparently, the base version had affinity with slime dungeon-mana and low-attribute mana with the variants gaining another based off of the elements and wellsprings using yellow mana minus eclipse, fey, arcane, domain of faith, and holy. 

“You’re seriously right? Haven’t you heard of the Tide Pod Challenge? What the hell are people going to think when they see these guys?” I half-shouted half-complained, already seeing Umi, Beath, Sugar, and Spice eyeing the new mid tier 1 fodder monsters. I mean yeah I knew there were some worlds where cocktail pods were popular, but come on, we’re on Summer-6!

“Vaguely from my housemates,” answered Louella with a small nod, folding her arms before continuing, “Although I would say this isn’t related, cocktail pods have been popular back on Mugin for decades now.” That’s besides the point…