Kaldalis wasn’t sure what he expected from Baimer’s crafting district, but it probably should have been what he found.

There was a layer of warehouses right next to the docks, where Kaldalis had already seen workers shuffling goods in and out between them and the ships. It was a lively place full of the bright colors of sailor garb, and a healthy mixture of shouted orders and blue-collar grabass.

But as soon as he shuffled between two warehouses, the large buildings blocked out the sound of the docks, and he found himself in the first act of an industrial revolution period piece.

There were about a dozen buildings all standing together in a way that clearly separated them from the area around them. They were all made of brick and wood, and three stories tall, making them stand out as strange compared to the rest of the city’s design, even though they matched the style of the city’s construction, with arches along the corners of the buildings’ exterior walls. More than half of the buildings belched clean white smoke, and despite how early it was in the morning, they all appeared to be bustling with activity.

It took him a couple of tries to find the charmcrafting facilities. The first one he walked into was the alchemy workshop, and the choking chemical smell that filled the air made him feel like he’d lost two hours off his lifespan just from opening the door. He didn’t even get a good look inside before moving on to the next. The second attempt was the most depressing. It was the weapon and armor smithing workshop, and true to Gavinkim’s warning, it was full to bursting. Rows and rows of forges filled the air with the din of hammers on anvils. The building was packed with rows and rows of workshops, bringing the word “sweatshop” to Kaldalis’s mind, and not just from the unearthly heat that filled the building. Despite the discomfort of merely standing in the front entrance, the one area clear of forges was packed with nearly three dozen people, standing shoulder-to-shoulder to wait their turn when someone else’s time at their workstation was up.

After what he’d seen, finding the charmcrafting facilities was all but literally a breath of fresh air. The building was still crammed with row after row of workstations, filled with people displaying varying levels of dourness, boredom, and exhaustion. But it didn’t reek of chemicals, the temperature was just stuffy and not stifling, and the only sound filling the air was the gentle scratch of tools on hard surfaces. Kaldalis was going to be here until his dungeon run came up, so he was glad it wasn’t going to be literal hell just to be in the building.

“Looking for a station?” a woman asked. He looked over and was unsurprised to see a counter with a clerk waiting. It was just like every fucking place in this city.

“I was,” Kaldalis said, approaching the counter. “What does it take to get one?”

“One moment,” she said, looking down at a notebook before her. To Kaldalis’s surprise, she actually started doing math on a separate page. “At current capacity, I need thirteen crescents from you and you can take any station you like for an hour. Five crescents per hour after that.”

Kaldalis was suddenly glad that he hadn’t needed one of the more in-demand stations. He imagined that charmcrafting was probably the least-valuable crafting type, since he hadn’t seen any application for it outside of the adventuring profession. There were likely people using the other crafting stations for all sorts of mundane work, clogging up the stations and driving up the price.

He was even more glad that he had divided his workload between himself, Reno, and Ess. He shuddered to think what Balrim would have to go through to keep his myriad skills topped off if he levelled up while the group was in Baimer.

After counting out twenty-three crescents, Kaldalis made his way into the workshop. Despite the low cost, all the stations on the first floor were taken, and so he had to ascend to the second to find a place where he could sit and get to work.

Obviously, no materials were provided to him, but he had an inventory full of random gathering chaff and trash monster drops. Considering he had a few hours to burn, he was going to be able to cap his skill out easily, and maybe even craft himself some new charms that would be current for his level.

Getting back into the swing of it was interesting for the first hour. Carving chunks of wood and chipping pieces of stone down to the right size or shape for the base of the item. Shaping, cutting, and trimming bits of cloth, leather, skin, shell, or bone made monster bits into accents. The most creative he got was when he was making further decoration, which could use literally any valid crafting material, and could be prepared using any tool he wished. Sometimes he just grabbed a tool and a material at random, and improvised. The results were a little hit-or-miss, but they were always interesting.

Once he’d been doing it for about thirty charms, the novelty had long since worn off. After that it stopped being quite so interesting, and he understood why all the people working in here looked so dour. But if he wanted to cap out his skill, he had to keep churning out a bunch of tiny little pieces of crap.

He also discovered that he had the ability to randomly experience a critical success. It boosted the item level of the charm by two, but it included an explicit clause that said it could be equipped by characters two levels below its item level. It reminded Kaldalis of the increased item level of dungeon gear compared to his level, and while those items had not had the explicit clause for equippable level, they had been untradable as dungeon drops.

His critical success rate was low, but considering he got one out of those first thirty charms, it wasn’t too unachievable. He might even have been able to grind out some high quality pieces once he capped out. A full set of gear two item levels above his level could represent a significant jump in power.

By the end of the second hour he finished capping his Charmcrafting skill off at 75. Once the grind to get a full set of high quality items at his current level went from an idea to a reality, the power it offered started to seem less and less worth the effort. Just the same, he had the station rented for another hour, and he doubted they were going to refund him the crescents for the time he didn’t use.

As the grind went on, he found himself missing Cotanaku all over again. The grind would have been the same, but he would have been surrounded by familiar faces. He could have had a nice chat with Reno, Balrim, and Ess as they worked on their own crafting while Myrin tapped her foot impatiently. He could have taken the time to get to know Courbois a bit better at an adjacent charmcrafting station, or shared a few jokes with any of the dozens of other people he knew on the island, like Martok, Aurigeant, or anyone else. Even the people he barely knew, like Droto, Daan, or Yosini. He might even have been able to talk Heluna into coming along just to keep him company. In this workshop, though, he was surrounded by complete strangers.

Kaldalis would have even settled for Voker.

As soon as that thought crossed his mind, he realized just how unlike normal MMO crafting this was. He couldn’t just rewatch a familiar anime from 1998 on another monitor while he absently clicked his way through a series of quicktime events. He had to sit here and go through the motions.

He resolved to never do this again. Every future crafting binge would need to include a friend alongside him. Because he was losing his fucking mind in here.

Kaldalis also felt strangely compelled to try and keep track of Balrim’s crafting schedule. If Myrin was ever busy or indisposed during it, he didn’t want the poor Talsar stuck catching up on every craft in the game at once while all alone like this.

At the end of the third hour, a Bhogad man approached him and told him it was time for him to go. Kaldalis was glad to be done with his time here. Even just stepping outside felt like he was walking out of another world. He’d grown acclimated to the stuffy air inside, and the smell of the ocean revitalized him instantly. The sun was now lighting up the whole city rather than just climbing over the horizon, and Kaldalis believed that it was going to be a beautiful day from here on out.

Once he was outside, he walked down to where he could see the ocean, and found a place he could stand out of the way of everyone and fiddle with his huge pile of new charms. The painful grind he’d gone through to get them vanished into his memory as he sifted through them, separating them into three groups. One group was his high quality charms that were at item level 17 - along with a couple at item level 16 from when he was still skilling up. The other group was charms with desirable traits for his build. His primary focus was to stack Armor, Fortitude, and Resistance, to reduce his damage taken, though having only one of those traits was fine as long as the other was either Hit Points, Earth Affinity to go with his current spear, or Attack. The other secondary stats didn’t appeal to him.

The third category was charms that were both high quality and had acceptable stats, though it felt silly to delineate such a category when there was only one charm that fit the bill, offering 64 Armor and 38 Fortitude.

Kaldalis experimented with his options, watching hit stats fluctuate wildly as he changed between them. Obviously, primary stats seemed to have a sizable effect, but at this low of a level, two levels difference on Vigor couldn’t match the defense increase of plain old Armor on a charm. He decided to split the difference. Obviously the level 17 charm with defensive stats went on, and for the other four slots, he went with two level 17 charms and two defensive charms.

He also set a couple of other charms aside for his friends before he started to make his way through the city to where the dungeon was. One of them even had Light Affinity for Balrim. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do with all the garbage charms from the grind, but he figured he could sell them to an NPC at some point to make a tidy profit.

He took a brief moment to check his stats, knowing that they were what he was going into the dungeon with.

Kaldalis, Level 15 Bodyguard

HP: 3210/3210

Aplomb: 100/100

EXP: 725/4000

Acumen: 281

Clout: 296

Vigor: 482

Armor: 417

Attack: 276

His elemental affinities were all at 175, though Earth was increased to 280, with one of his level 17 charms giving him a sizable chunk. His debuff affinities were all at 179. The discrepancy between the two groups of Affinities came from having one charm with Fortitude and one with Resistance, and the Fortitude charm being one of the level 17s he had equipped.

Properly geared up at last, he only had a long walk and a brief wait before it was time to see how Baimer’s dungeon would treat him.