Alex and Victoria were both done eating and he’d tried out his spell, so he quickly said his goodbyes and started on his way back to Mother Edith’s to try to make those 75 potions she expected he could finish. He’d reached level 7 in potions today, which was a huge jump from his previous level and he’d gained the Healthy Ingredients ability as well.

I hope I can reach 10 soon, Alex thought, While making potions can be informative, I’d like to start fighting some monsters so that I can help when the attack from the slime dungeon comes along. Oh! There’s the seamstress’ shop, I forgot that my clothes should be adjusted today. I’ll pop in and see if they’re ready. It’d be great to get out of these rags of dubious cleanliness!

Seven minutes later, Alex exited the seamstress’ shop wearing his new digs. And these clothes really were fancy compared to his noob level rags: the pants were dyed a deep brown and the shirt a dark green. He had a belt made of leather (instead of twine) which held up his pants and his shirt was actually made to be tucked in! With a higher quality linen, the clothes whispered across his skin instead of scratching it as they twisted about his frame. While he hadn’t gotten enough of a loan from Mother Edith for new shoes, he looked quite a sight different in clothes which were minimally tailored to fit his frame.

This feels great! I’ll keep the old ones so that I have something to wear when the new ones are in the wash, but I’ll need to save up enough for a few pairs of clothes as soon as possible. Having something that is fitted is a far different experience from having something which only somewhat fits.

So, Alex arrived at Mother Edith’s feeling refreshed and quite happy. Just a few steps inside the entrance, though, Alex froze and his mouth gaped open and closed like a fish’s. Mother Edith was sitting on a stool behind the center counter and there were several people in line to get potions – but nearly her entire stock was already gone. All the shelves with the smallest of potion vials were completely bare – empty from the front all the way to the back.

She had hundreds of vials there! And a good half the remaining larger ones are gone too!

“Alex, child, quit staring and get to work,” said Mother Edith, catching view of him in her peripheral vision. “With an attack by the dungeon, everyone needs quick healing and with a thousand residents there’s always a few who forgot to stock up earlier or need to replace spoiled potions. Then there’s the main group of people who’ll be fighting. They’ll need dozens or more of the basic potions per person.”

“Everyone knows that the attack will be within two weeks and that these potions won’t spoil before then. Yet everyone also knows that there’s only going to be so many potions we can make and that the Wardens will begin commandeering potions the last few days before the attack so that they have extra for the wounded.” One of the two girls who worked there finished placing the current order on the bar and tapped Mother Edith’s shoulder so she turned back to her customer and said to Alex in parting, “So get to producing more!”

Alex went right to work. First, he activated his Healthy Ingredients ability, then he sorted the herbs roughly into two piles for each ingredient. The first pile contained herbs which had no damage or sickness whatsoever. These were going to make the highest level potions, so he wanted to mix them as quickly as possible to use the freshness of the herbs to their maximum potential.

He was pretty surprised by the quality of the herbs that he had. A very small pile had non-perfect ingredients in it. Nonetheless, he was happy not to have to think about this issue as he made the higher-quality potions. He mixed, mashed, ground, and boiled over and over again always keeping busy by making multiple potions at a time.

After the first three potions, he’d grabbed a second and even a third mortar and pestle but only one more magic burner. This allowed him the maximum throughput at his current speed and level of concentration. He always had two potions simmering down and varied between having one potion ready to boil and two as he ground and mixed the ingredients in the various mortars.

As soon as he got done making a potion, it flew off the shelves. While almost all the customers wanted more than were available at this point, they were perfectly willing to take what they could get immediately. While it was unlikely that the Wardens’ timeframe estimate of “not this week” was wrong, you never really know when an invader is going to take it into their mind to jump the gun and attack.

But, Alex kept count of the potions he’d made. His goal was to make 55 health potions, 10 mana potions, and 10 stamina potions (at least) before the day was out. After four hours and some change, he’d made 48 health potions, 8 mana potions, and 9 stamina potions and was finally left with the ingredients which had been separated out for being unhealthy.

He snipped away the bad portions of these ingredients and portioned them out to finish up the last few potions. He was surprised that he’d ended up with just enough healthy parts to actually complete the number that Mother Edith had assigned him.

She’s sneaky for a kindly grandmother. Or maybe that should be “wise”? She must have noticed me checking out the herbs with the ability before I went for lunch and so figured out how much of these I would throw away. Still, getting almost exactly enough for the potions she requested is impressive. I’ve only got a handful of herbs total across all the different kinds I needed. She’s good. Very good.

Alex checked the time and saw that it was 6:45 pm. He could probably stick around and finish a few more potions, but he needed a break. He’d already tested out his first new spell today, with the attendant surprise, created 125 potions from scratch, and leveled up his potions several times.

Alex checked his potions skill to see if there were any gains – and there went any more ideas about how he should probably stick around and help to fill more of the potions’ orders that Mother Edith had spent all day collecting. He’d reached level 10!

Hmm, so three levels this afternoon. I got to level four Healthy Ingredients so that’s some boost, but I gained another 500 something experience from producing excellent potions. I’ll check the changelog later. I’ve got to go get supper and tell Erin!

Alex cleaned up his three mortar and pestle pairs and the glass beakers he’d used to heat the potions and quickly said his goodbyes to Mother Edith on his way out the door. He hurried over to the West Inn and entered, seeing one of the barmaids at the counter, he asked for his supper and then moved over to the table where Erin sat with a few other ladies.

“Hello, everyone, I’m Alex,” he said, as he sat in the empty seat next to Erin. There was a brunette with brown eyes wearing comfortable looking linen clothes to the left of Erin who Erin introduced as Sam, the leader of the local Wardens; another woman with brown hair that curled around her head and green eyes who stared at him intently named Helen, apparently the tactician for the Wardens; and a third lady who appeared to be a classic gnome: short enough to have a special booster in her seat with long green ears arcing away from her pate and a manic energy visible in her bouncing right leg, fiddling fingers, and rapid smirk upon hearing her name, Esmeralda.

“With the introductions done,” said Sam, “I’d like to talk to you about improving our interfaces, Alex. Having the exact time on the interface got some of our people wondering what all could be done and we brainstormed for most of the day yesterday after Erin left to scout the dungeon. Coordinating attacks, having alerts for the cooldowns of the strongest of our spells, and even for things like reminders for what we phase of a plan we should be executing could all make our battles far more efficient.”

“In the past, we knew that people had these kinds of tight battlefield controls, but a lot of knowledge was lost when men took over and then the goddesses kicked them out of power. It seems that one of the things we were missing entirely was that interfaces could be improved.”

“Only Helen here got the Interface skill to unlock, apparently by poking around repeatedly until she uncovered the search bar in that new tab your system-time work unlocked. And she’s not sure what to do with it either, even after poking around all day. In short, we’ve got lots of ideas about simple things we’d like to have done, but we’re pretty sure we can’t do them yet.”

“We’d like to commission some work from you to get some of these things done.”

Alex’s food arrived and so everyone went on to finish their meals while he scarfed his down. He asked a few questions about their needs and goals and then fell silent as he progressed through his meal while the ladies chatted among themselves. After his questions were answered he started whipping up the scripts right then. They only wanted basic timers, with a simple alert system which could chain them together.

Before he was finished eating, he had the bare bones of the script figured out, though he still had some plumbing to do to get the right data available in the right places as well as figure out the correct visual alerts. He, frankly, had no idea how he could do auditory alerts. He’d searched through a bunch of function names that the scripting language supplied and found quite a few functions related to audio, but he couldn’t figure out what kind of input he needed to supply to get the right kinds of sounds out from the system. Any way he tested the function, the script simply broke because he wasn’t providing the right kind of input.

“Okay”, Alex said while putting down his fork, “I’ve got the basic idea down. I’ll come by the Wardens’ building tomorrow with my lunch and we can talk about some final details then. I know we haven’t talked about money yet and while this isn’t, frankly, worth very much money because of how simple it is, I’m a bit low on funds right now because I’ve simply not gotten my turnips in yet. So, I’ll be happy with pretty much whatever you give, but enough to get another change of clothes, some very basic armor, or even just shoes would be a great start for me.”

“Sounds great!” exclaimed Esmeralda.

They started chatting again about various things and then Alex remembered his excitement saying, “Erin, I’ve gotten to Potions level 10! Most of the experience was directly on the skill, though I did get about a level from getting level 4 with Healthy Ingredients.”

Erin smiled and kissed him right then, earning some giggles and even a small cheer from Helen who joked, “A tactical victory for both sides!”

Erin encouraged him onward by saying, “Showing that you’ve already grasped the information of level 10 potions by crafting strong potions is an okay way to get by these first few levels, but remember to keep thinking about your skills. You should be able to get another couple of abilities pretty quickly! But for now, what second skill do you want to focus on getting to level 10?”

Alex replied readily, “I’d like to try to get Identify up to 10, then follow that with Force Spells. I’ve not got a whole lot of choice there if I want to level up quickly. Not all of my skills have abilities, while the ones which do have abilities all seem harder to level than these two. Cartography, for example, has two abilities, but both of them require a person to travel about and map things – but I’m not really safe to do that over a large area yet. And for Healing spells, while I do want to get some practice, if possible, I suspect I don’t have enough mana regeneration to grind the levels out.”

At that point, all the ladies jumped in with various suggestions and Esmeralda even brought out a chalkboard and chalk so that they could plan Alex’s upcoming days out to help him get to level 10 before the slime attack.

He’d been in Marin four days, and in or about Scottstown for three days. The slimes should attack sometime in the next 13 days, but the Wardens thought they had at least a week left. So, for the next little while, Alex’s rough schedule ended up looking like this:

Friday

Saturday

Sunday

Monday

Tuesday

Morning: Identify

Afternoon: Rats

Morning: Identify

Afternoon: Pots

Morning: Rats

Afternoon: Pots

Morning: Rats

Afternoon: Rats

Morning: Pots

Afternoon: Rats

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday (slimes?)

Saturday

Sunday

Morning: Rats

Afternoon: Rats

Rats if needed,

otherwise pots

?

?

?

He wouldn’t have included nearly as much time working on potions, called pots for short, but the town would need a bunch of them and all the Wardens at the table agreed that this would be the best use of his time before the attack if it arrived on Friday of next week.

Still, it looks remarkably boring until you put it into perspective. I’m going to be hunting masses of level 1 rats in the dungeon to the north all day some days and half the day most days. Only the day after tomorrow doesn’t have any hunting in it and that’s to both give me a rest and push me over the top of getting to level 10 with the Identify skill if needed.

There’s a small party at supper on Saturday as a celebration for getting my first levels, and I’ve got the evenings, after supper, to spend how I like every day. I’ve got lots to do and, while I suspect I’d note this as “and then he spent 4 hours in the dungeon killing stuff” if I were a narrator, I suspect someone a little better would come up with small moments that I’ll forget immediately and make a big deal of them, saying something like “he’d learned his first, and most important, lesson about battles – survive!”

So, Alex copied the chalkboard schedule noting that his future was still unclear past next Wednesday because no one knew for sure when the slimes would attack or where he might best be used. He and Erin stayed for a while chatting with the Wardens, but they left around 9 pm to take care of matters in the bedroom, then clean up with the lye soap and wash rags of the Inn’s washroom. When they went back to bed, Alex said: “Erin, I know we’ve just met each other, but I was wondering if you had family here in town – or what else is keeping you here.”

“Oh, my grandmother first moved here,” Erin said, “Scottstown needed a weapon smith at the time because the slime dungeon hadn’t quite gone feral and people were constantly getting the acidic goop all over themselves. That, of course, led to everyone needing constant repairs and occasionally a new weapon as they trained in the dungeon. Ah – I should mention that the dungeon was one of few in the area which ran from levels 10 to 18, so it was really popular despite the immense costs of equipment repair.”

“You were covered in slime the other day and I cleaned your stuff, but it didn’t seem acidic to me …”

“It’s only mildly acidic. It’s not a huge problem for a single-day trip into the first level of the dungeon, but the dungeon has had up to 20 levels in the past. That kind of space takes time to clear correctly, so people would end up staying overnight in the dungeon frequently. And if they missed a spot when cleaning, or were too tired to clean up immediately, or simply didn’t know any better, they would often leave the slime on for over a day. Wear adds up quickly.”

“Anyway, Grandma moved here and fell in love with an adventurer. They had Momma, but he left pretty quickly on some errand or the other and never returned. Momma learned from Grandma’s mistake and didn’t give her heart away. Instead, she took some time with the occasional passing man in a caravan until she conceived me. Then she was happy to have me in her life, so she stayed here and helped Grandma and raised me.”

“Grandma’s only 51 now because she had Momma at 17. We all live on the north side of town, away from the insane dungeons, even though we had to switch houses back when the North and South gates were sealed to achieve that separation. That’s why I won’t be leaving town. I’m happy here. I’ve got people to protect, a couple of dungeons to watch over, and plenty to see and do. And as time moves on, I’ll always have family around to share the burdens of life.”

Alex thought about that for a bit and said, “I’m glad you’ve found your place. It’s good for people to learn how to be content. Family and true friends help in that endeavor quite a bit.”

“I grew up in a close family. Most all of them have died now. Accidents, bad luck, old age all claimed their parts. Only Mom was left when I … well, on Friday when Phoebe transferred me here. She’ll be okay. She was in a place where they take care of dying people when I left. She had a couple of weeks more at most before she died.”

“Why not just heal her?”

“We don’t have magic there. I’m not sure that magic could have healed her anyway, it was a disease caused by her own body that was killing her. Besides that, though, she also had some mental problems. She didn’t remember herself anymore, much less who I was. While it’s sad that I didn’t get to help her through her last few weeks, she wasn’t really in that body anyway.”

“She’ll be with the gods soon.”

“Thanks, Erin. Anyway, family was close, like I said. I know it’s weird for people to think like this, but in our family we’d have done anything for each other. If someone’s fifth cousin needed their car towed home and a bed for a few nights, Dad would have gone and gotten them without a second thought. I’d probably have been dragged along to help as well. Mom cooked for whoever was hungry and we had people over to the house after going to – the temple – every Sunday to pay our respects to our god.”

“My brother once got into a fight. It was his fault. He busted up some stuff in a bar and beat another guy pretty badly. Dad showed up to the jail and got the story from him. He talked to the officers. Then he got me and we went to the bar with a load of wood Dad had in the barn for some furniture he’d planned to make for Mom. We built tables and chairs there at the bar from that wood he’d set aside for Mom. Dad really took his time.”

“We were there creating stuff and replacing stuff John had broken every night for two weeks and on three different weekends. Finally, we’d replaced everything they’d broken but the bar itself. It was a work of art. Beautifully carved and hand worked. John had set it on fire by knocking over a lantern and it’d caught flame really quickly. We only knew how it looked because the owner had an old pict – ah, a painting of how it looked.”

“Dad told the owner he couldn’t replace that right away, but that he’d work on it and give it to him when it was done. We made a crappy bar out of spruce that would hold up for a year or two and headed home.”

“Dad’s work paid off. We went to John’s trial and the bar owner was there. John was known to be guilty but the bar owner said that for him, whatever Dad suggested as punishment was more than enough. Such a good man would know what his son needed and certainly work to make him a better person. The judge asked Dad what should be done and he asked that John be given a choice between an extremely long parole or joining the military to get some discipline beaten into his head.”

“John chose a special branch of our military and learned just how stupid he’d been. He saw people do stupid stuff and learned. He came back completely changed and helped Dad by spending his whole break carving beautiful, tiny statues to be used in the new bar Dad was making.”

“Family means a lot to me because it meant a lot to Mom and Dad. We may not be headed for marriage, but I’ve seen how you act and how others act towards you. You’re a good person and I’m proud to count you as a part of my family. If you need something, you let me know and I’ll do my best, okay?”

Erin looked at him for a while, then nodded. “I’ll invite Mom and Grandma to the party on Saturday as well as Victoria and a few others. I’ll keep it small, but I’d like you to meet them if you want.”

“Sounds good to me,” Alex replied.

“Alex … ”

“Yes?”

“What was your name on Earth?”

“Marcus.”

“Why’d you change it?”

“Well, 'Carpenter' I chose because my Dad was a great woodworker. I hope to learn half as much as he knew one day. But Dad didn’t take the most expensive kinds of jobs: the ones where his best work would shine. Instead, he took on the jobs that everyday people needed but couldn’t afford to pay as much as people tried to charge. Sure, Dad still made enough money to keep us doing well, but he was a carpenter because people needed floors, walls, and ceilings a lot more than they needed an exquisite cabinet that would last generations.”

“He chose his path to help out the most people he could. I honored that by taking his path as my name. 'Alexander' I chose because Momma always joked that she’d conquer the whole county with her food like an old leader named Alexander. She wanted to get people to help one another and be nice to each other and her Sunday meals were a time for her to reach out and figure out what people needed so that she could provide for them and set an example of by that behavior of how she expected them to act.”

“I always chose Alexander as my name when I played the games people on our world would make, so I’m used to hearing Alex as my name. I’m far more used to hearing it than Marcus, truth be told.”

Erin nodded replying, “That makes sense. I heard that most Travelers changed their names but I couldn’t figure out why a person would do that. Mom gave me mine so I honor her by keeping it and making the best name I can out of it, but it sounds like you were leaving behind one life and moving into another so you chose to honor your parents by emulating their ideals. I can understand that.”

They lay there for a few more minutes before Erin’s soft snoring let Alex know that she was asleep. He knew that he’d be fighting in his first encounter in a dungeon tomorrow, but he wasn’t really ready for it yet. His debuff spells had never been completed so his base statistics were still extremely low.

He wanted to grow those as soon as possible, so he decided to put together those spells tonight and check them out tomorrow morning a bit beyond the gate to avoid the townsfolk getting upset at his exploding parrots.

So, he quickly put together a new spell. He used fragments of existing spells to piece together what he wanted. He took the targeting from the Force Blade spell to choose a remote place where a linkage spell would be created. He then called the Parrot spell feeding it the empty spell text that he’d use to create his debuff spell and the output from the linkage as the parrot’s mana input.

That simple combination should allow him to create the spell at a respectable distance. The linkage spell could receive power from up to 50 feet away and he’d figure out a way to get the parrot to the linkage and himself away from it. He called the spell Radio.

So, with that finished, he turned to the actual debuff spell. Victoria had shared with him several spells which he’d simply recorded but never cast. One was a mana drain spell which tried to pull mana from a target. There were also a health drain and stamina drain spell.

The three spells were, surprisingly, very similar. Functionally, the only real differences were that the mana drain and stamina drain spells were channeled spells while the health drain was an instant-activation spell. Those bits could be ignored, though, because Alex was only concerned with how he could drain the various stats and where their energy would end up.

So, Alex decided to do the health drain spell first. He set the target for the spell to be the caster, and set the spell to run as long as it was fed mana. This made it a channeled spell. Every thousandth of a second, the health drain spell would drain as much health from the caster as it could. If the input was empty, the spell would end. Otherwise, it’d wait around for the next millisecond to try to perform another drain.

A debuff like this couldn’t just hang about in mid-air, but it had to be connected to the caster itself. So, the spell was anchored to the caster by being formed in the casters’ own skin. When the input channel cut the flow of mana, the spell would sever its own connection and dissipate. All channeled spells needed this anchoring, so he simply pulled this bit of spell from the draining spell examples he had.

With one small alteration, he named this spell DrainEnergyType. And the easy bits were now done.

Next, he had to write the spell that should figure out how much mana to feed his health drain spell to allow his full natural healing to constantly be running but not hurt himself too much. He decided that he wanted to have a bit of a buffer so that he didn’t have to worry about the timing of when regeneration happens, so he chose to aim to drain a little more than was strictly needed.

Again, Victoria’s spell knowledge came to the rescue. There were some spells that were intended to tie a person to a familiar which would require the person to set aside, permanently, a certain portion of their regeneration for the familiar to use. As the person grew, the familiar would continue to drain that same ratio of the person’s overall regeneration. These spells accessed the casters’ interface to read information from about their statistics and keep the channeled regeneration levels accurate.

This was huge. Alex could actually read information about his stats in real time and change his spell based off of his current stats. It made this portion of his spell much easier to cobble together. He read off the caster’s current and maximum HP and their HP regeneration. Then he multiplied the HP regeneration by 2 and subtracted that from the maximum HP as a cutoff for the spell: if the caster’s HP ever dropped below this threshold, the spell would stop feeding mana completely and have to be re-cast if the caster wanted to start it running again. The higher end, he selected as the maximum HP minus the caster’s HP regeneration.

So, for Alex right now, his maximum HP was 230 and his HP regeneration was 0.639 HP/minute. So, if his HP ever dropped below 228.722 the spell would deactivate, but each time his HP jumped above 229.361 because of his natural HP regeneration, his spell would feed a bit of mana into the HP drain spell to drag it back down to that target value of 229.361. Since he had to feed some bit of mana to the drain spell each millisecond to keep it from dying, he would feed a minimum of 0.001 mana. He called this spell ThrottleHPDrain.

So, now he had a somewhat self-regulating spell combination. ThrottleHPDrain would try to keep his health at exactly 229.361, but it’d probably do a pretty poor job of it. Because of that, if he ever started to overshoot his threshold and kill himself, the spell would kill itself first as soon as it passed 228.722 HP. Meanwhile, it was unlikely that his HP regeneration would ever be wasted because every millisecond he’d be trying to keep at least one full minute away from being at full HP.

His biggest concern here was that he didn’t know how the mana would translate to HP drain. If he fed 1 mana to his HP drain spell, would it take away 1 HP, 5 HP, or 0.5 HP? According to Victoria, the spell wasn’t used much by casters because its effect on a remote target was very bad – effectively something like 0.001 HP would be drained per mana invested. You could get much better effects by simply using more dangerous spells. He should be safe, though, because he was going to be able to test this out on his parrot first – if the thing squawked and fell over dead he’d be able to adjust before casting the spell himself.

Rest in peace, Polly.

So, his final concern was where to store the energy that he drained. He couldn’t just leave it alone or it’d feedback into the drain spell and he’d have a loop which wouldn’t stop till he died or found some way to break the spell.

When he asked, Victoria had told him how the energy could be dissipated: monster cores would work for large amounts of mana, or Alex could choose some kind of physical energy and try to manifest that in the world. Alex asked if it would be ok for him to charge up a light core like the ones he’d see providing dim illumination around town and Victoria provided him with several drained cores. These were monster cores with a spell illumination effect, apparently.

He could drain the energy into these cores simply by setting the output of the drain effect as the core itself. They had names inscribed into them with magic which allowed them to serve as a target for magic spells. And, boy, do I have some ideas to play around with that concept! If I can really just name objects by using one spell, then target them using another I’m going to have lots of fun soon!

So, that was the whole mess of a combination needed to set up a self-regulating drain on his HP and funnel the energy he drained into a monster core. The MP drain and SP drain spells were identical except for the target to be drained. Those were simple one-word changes to the spell – apparently, they were symbols in Xigun in the latter half of the list he had – so he added them as an input to the drain spell.

So, he’d created the following spells tonight:

* DrainEnergyType

* DrainHP, DrainMP, DrainSP

* ThrottleHPDrain, ThrottleMPDrain, ThrottleSPDrain

* Radio

The DrainHP class of spells were simple wrappers which called the DrainEnergyType spell passing in the single Xigun symbol to identify if the spell should be draining HP, MP, or SP. Then the Throttle class of spells could target their specific type of Drain spell with a unique name so that they had a good destination for the mana to be passed between them.

He’d get to try them all out tomorrow. Hopefully, Radio wouldn’t fail him and blow him up. If that one spell worked, he’d be able to test all future spells relatively safely, even if he deprived generations of pirates of their stereotypical companions.

Goodnight to Polly; to Polly a good night. It might be your last.