Everyone was standing around when he returned, but no one was really socializing. If there were cellphones in this world, each of the three of his companions would have been tooling around on them. He wondered if they were looking at inventories or character sheets, or what they were doing. But he decided to not ask. If they wanted to be like NPC party members waiting for the PC to return to get shit done, more power to them.

Kaldalis wasn’t going to argue.

He asked them what they wanted to do with the rest of the afternoon, but there didn’t seem to be many good options. They wanted to stay near town because their charms would be done soon, but there were no new quests for a while.

Ultimately, the four of them decided to get some lunch while their charms were being finished. It would be a good way to pass some time, and they deserved the break. It wasn’t what Kaldalis wanted to do, but he wasn’t about to suggest they go wandering around the jungle.

That had gotten him in trouble before.

“So how does Gust work?” Kaldalis asked as they settled in at the table. “It’s on my new weapon, and I assume it’s different from just wind damage, right?”

“It’s complicated,” Haldir said, his voice muffled by a mouthful of seaweed-wrapped fish. He took a moment to swallow before speaking again. “Well, not complicated, just different.”

“Different how?”

“Well, like all debuffs, whenever you strike with your weapon, you have a chance to apply the debuff.” Haldir furrowed his brow, as if trying to remember exact details. “The chance to apply involves the comparison between your affinity stats. It’s why debuffs are better for daggers and swords than other weapons, and awful for greatswords. You need to hit many times to try and proc your debuff a lot.”

“Glad I just got fire on mine,” Myrin said with a huff.

“Right.” Kaldalis nodded, attention still focused on Haldir. “That’s kind of what I expected, but what does Gust specifically do? Say I put a Gust debuff on an enemy. What happens to them?”

“One stack? Nothing,” Haldir said. “The Gust debuff itself doesn’t do anything. But you stack it on them multiple times to get its effect. Gust in particular is really dependent on attack speed and proc chance. The stacks last a while, but if they fall off before you get enough on your target, you get nothing.”

“So how many is enough?” Kaldalis asked, trying not to get agitated by Haldir evading the point. “And what happens when the stacks get there?”

“Every 3 stacks, the Gust goes off,” Haldir said, gesturing energetically with his fishy burrito. “When it goes off, it deals damage proportional to the total number of stacks.”

“Is there a maximum number of stacks? Or could I just keep stacking it and do theoretically infinite damage every three hits?”

“You can keep stacking it infinitely, if the enemy doesn’t disengage or dodge enough for stacks to drop,” Haldir said, but held up a hand, “but the damage caps out at some point. I don’t know where. Twelve stacks? Twenty-one? Some multiple of three. According to the legends, it didn’t used to, and that’s one of the tools the titans used to defeat and cast down the gods, before adjusting the rules of the world. If you’re the religious sort, that is.”

“I’m sorry if this is weird for me to ask,” Balrim said in a small voice, “but titans? Gods? I’m not the religious type, but you can’t drop a hint to old legends on me and then not tell me anything else.”

“I’m not the best one to ask, but I can give you the basics. The sort of thing you’d have learned in school if you weren’t, you know…” Haldir trailed off as he took another bite of his seaweed wrap.

Kaldalis tuned out most of the mythology lesson.

Usually he would have been fascinated by lore, but he had too much on his mind. His chief distraction was trying to figure out if Haldir was an NPC or an Alpha player pretending to be one.

Close runner-up was how Haldir could tell so easily that they were PCs, and if that was going to make things harder for the trio down the line.

After that, he still had to consider what steps might still need to be taken to make the camp into a town, both to help shore up protections against the Infernal Horde, and to make it that much easier to receive reinforcements in the form of new players.

Next to those concerns, any story that started with “when the world was young and the moons lived down here among us instead of in the sky…” felt just slightly less important to focus on. He’d ask about it for himself later. Maybe if Balrim got more information down the line and could paint a more complete picture than Haldir’s disjointed half-remembered account that seemed to boil down to a poorly-conceived explanation for why patch notes happened.

After lunch, the quartet found that another quest had opened up to supply more materials for repairing the camp, this time in the form of more hides and ropes from the jungle. It was a small quest, and the builder who gave it explained that they’d been instructed to not give the adventurers too much to do. This was supposed to be a day of crafting, and those adventurers who wanted to take up the tools and learn needed the time to skill up, while those who didn’t needed the time to gather the.materials to have the league personnel - or their friends who were learning - take care of the task for them.

Once they completed that quest - a trivial matter for four of them charging into the jungle at once - they set about handling the crafting-related matters. Before returning to town, they ventured deeper in, fighting some more of the smaller fare to get additional crafting materials, especially little things like claws and bones, but also the gathered materials like wood and stone. Balrim was the one who had shown the most interest and aptitude for the crafting, so they followed his lead for the most part.

When they returned to town, they picked up their charms from the crafters, and found Balrim a spot to get to work with their remaining materials.

“So what did you get?” Myrin asked Kaldalis as she examined her charms from the league crafters. “Mine are both plus nineteen to one affinity, and I only really want the fire one to go with my new sword.”

“I got a plus twelve Fortitude and a plus nineteen Attack,” Kaldalis said, examining the two new level 5 charms again. “What affinity is your other one? I could trade you for the Attack, since that will be better for you than for me.”

“Earth,” Myrin said, but she was already reaching for the charm he held out. “Sorry that it’s not something like armor or something.”

“I’ll take whatever I can get,” Kaldalis said. “Item level five is the only number I care about right now. And if we’re working together, we should really work together, right?”

Kaldalis traded out his level one wind affinity charm for the new earth affinity one. Since wind affinity no longer matched his weapon, he was happy to replace it. Tentatively, he swapped his level one attack charm for the fortitude charm. The other two were resistance and armor, which definitely seemed like tank stats. The level one attack charm was such a minuscule amount of attack, it just didn’t seem worth it.

“How about you, Balrim?” Myrin prompted as the talsar was picking at the pile of materials the quartet had gathered. “Do you have anything you’d like to share with the class?”

“I got a light affinity one, and you can pry it from my cold dead claws,” Balrim said, not looking up. “The other is HP, and I’m not trading that for anything. I just feel so squishy as a healer.”

“Suits me just fine,” Kaldalis said, “I got the item level seven HP charm from the enhydra, so it’d be a dick move to try and guilt you out of yours.”

“Haaaaaldir?” Myrin said, sidling up to the elbow of the greenish-hued vathon, “What about you? Whatcha got?”

“Nothing you can use,” he chuckled. “Stuff from the league crafters has level requirements on it. My stuff is level 9, so you couldn’t wear it.”

Myrin grumbled at that, but returned her attention to Balrim. “So what can you make, then? Can you just churn out a bunch of straight attack charms for me?”

“I’m trying to figure it out,” Balrim muttered, slit-pupiled eyes flickering from the pile of materials up to a floating menu only visible to the talsar. “I… Can’t? Yet?”

“What do you mean?” Kaldalis asked.

“If I’m reading this menu right, it’s not selecting what traits are on it,” he explained, “it’s selecting what traits aren’t on the random table. And the number of traits I can pick to exclude is scaled with skill level.”

“So what can you make?” Myrin asked.

“Right now?” Balrim looked at Myrin, and then over at the league crafters working away at the materials. “Basically exactly what they make. Totally random.”

“Like I said,” Kaldalis said, “item level is the only number I care about. Those sweet, sweet primary stat boosts are worth more than having exactly the right secondary stats.”

“Uh, about that,” Balrim said. “I think… Well. Let me try.”

He picked up a few materials and started to manipulate them carefully. He used some tools that he pulled from his menu - like the gathering tools Kaldalis was more familiar with - and some that had been set out by the league crafters. In a few minutes, he produced a little charm. It was a little finger of stone with two bands of cured leather around it, and small spikes of bone sticking from it like insect legs.

“Fuck.” Balrim’s scaled lips peeled back from his pointed teeth. “Fuck fuck fuck.”

“What’s wrong?” Myrin asked.

“So, I need to grind up my charmcrafting level,” he said, “because otherwise I’m gonna keep doing this.” He handed the little bit of stone to her.

She took it, and then immediately shared his grimace. “Oh.”

“What happened?” Kaldalis asked. “Is it that bad?”

“Well, it’s item level one,” Myrin said.

Kaldalis found himself grimacing as well immediately. Balrim still had the look on his face as he picked over the remaining materials.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” Kaldals asked. “Keep crafting.”

The scaled skin above Balrim’s eye shifted, giving the impression of an arched eyebrow. “And waste this stuff?”

“It’s not a waste,” Kaldalis said. “If you get skilled at the crafting, then we can all benefit from it once you can make stuff for us at-level.” He looked around at the crafting area. Other adventurers were starting to putter around with their own materials. “Sure, it sucks that we can’t use it right away, but practice now is payoff later. I only wish that this area had been set up sooner so that we could have gotten moving on this before right this minute.”

“Alright,” Balrim said, uncertainty clear on his face. “If you’re sure.” He glanced to both Myrin and Haldir, who were nodding along with Kaldalis’s words.

Emboldened by the support, the talsar gathered another handful of things and got to work crafting with them as well.

“Speaking of things that will have payoff later for practice now,” Kaldalis said, “I’m going to head down to the beach and get to fishing.”

“More of that?” Haldir wrinkled his nose. “Haven’t you had enough of that for one day?”

“Not by a long shot,” Kaldalis said, looking over at his Pale Perch quest counter. “Besides, it seems like adventurers like us don’t need as much sleep here as in…” He coughed as someone else passed close by. Haldir may have already guessed what ‘adventurers like us’ meant, but he didn’t want it spread around too much. “As we would back home. There’s hours of daylight and twilight to spend hauling in stuff that will no doubt be materials for potions and whatever.”

“Speaking of,” Haldir said, tapping Myrin on the shoulder, “After dropping off the materials for the Censer, they have the alchemy stations working. You and I can get to work on getting some of the non-fish supplies for healing potions. With those in hand, we’ll be ready to head into the dungeon first thing in the morning.”

“Given the choice between all of these things,” Myrin said, gesturing at Balrim chipping away at bits of bone with a delicate tool, and then giving a similar gesture to the fishing rod already in Kaldalis’s hands, “I’m happy for the chance to head out in the jungle and go back to killing shit.”