Once again, our team breaks up while in the city, pursuing differing objectives while in town. Joaqim will be trying to locate a mage with suicidal tendencies, and Regina will be taking over Jims role of developing our next expedition plan. Bucky and I don’t have much to do, so I suggest to Bucky that he invests his gold towards materials for full plate armor. Full plate is notoriously difficult to make, and incredibly expensive. It will take months if not years to complete. So if I have to invest that much time and effort, I suggest that he invests in a suit of quicksilver full plate. Quicksilvered metal is something specific to this world, it's lighter than normal metal, sort of like Aluminum, but it's every bit as hard as steel. It is a great material if you plan to wear armor often, and it is also such a high quality material that it never has any problems accepting enchantments, which I would like to eventually place on any equipment we have.

There is no way that Bucky could afford to buy a suit of quicksilvered full plate, but if he only has to pay for the base materials and doesn’t have to pay for time and labor it becomes affordable courtesy of the wealth we just stumbled onto. Similarly, I offer my services to the rest of the team, though aside from crafting higher quality versions of their existing equipment I don’t have any specific suggestions or immediate plans for what I can improve of theirs. To my surprise, Joaqim asks me for a list of materials that would be required for a suit of full plate.

Are you kidding me?! Priests can wear heavy armor too?! I’m not going to turn religious but I have to admit, they really do seem to get the best of a lot of different worlds. I make the quicksilver recommendation to him, as well. There are certainly other options, and there are even nonmagical armors I could theoretically make which would be strictly superior from a defensive standpoint… But only if you are preparing to wear it for a limited time and a specific purpose. When you're looking to wear something day after day, being light but strong is a pretty big deal.

We continue to follow the “meet up for dinner” formula, and plan to stay in town for at least one week, possibly longer depending on how much success we have in recruitment and coming up with something else to explore.

As for me? Having already been to the library our last time in Diamond Lake and having behaved in a completely appropriate manner, I don’t experience a confrontation this time, though the librarian Keaton continues to follow me around keeping watch for misdeeds, and the middle-aged boss regularly pokes his head in to check on me as well. I do not enjoy having people treat me like the only reason I am not doing something horrible is because they are there watching me, but it is what it is. Lizardfolk in the wild tend to be renowned for their kill on sight approach to problem solving. As for their operations in the context of this or any other city, though? Well, Lizardfolk aren’t common, so rather than drawing on deep personal experiences to establish expected behavior, they instead just operate on instinct and preconceptions. Pretty understandable since the most well-known thing about us is that we think humans taste delicious.

From my vantage point, as long as they aren’t stopping me from getting what I want, there’s no need to become overly concerned with the overtly racist tendencies of the smug librarians. Striving for peace and harmony and brotherhood the world over is a bit above my paygrade, I'm still trying to figure out how to turn smelly weeds and flowers into something useful.

Right now my short term goals are simple: Get stronger, craft better. If I can take those two far enough, I believe that over time I will be able to start shaping the world to better fit my tastes, and hopefully forward my long term goals. There's no benefit in thinking too far ahead or in an overly concrete and absolute fashion when I don't know any details on what my future progression and options will look like. For now I am going to focus on what is in front of me. I have always preferred to focus on what I can do, not what I would like to see done. Identify your long term objective yes, and then establish and execute on short term objectives which bring you closer to that desired end goal. By following a process of incremental and achievable steps, eventually, the nigh impossible goal will sometimes become possible. Not always, but even on earth I managed to pull off some pretty impressive things. Here? There's magic. Who knows what I can accomplish?!

Having added a few items of interest to my desired skills list after that last foray, I review titles and subjects to see if I can find anything new. There is a book on the history of alchemy I saw before but which I did not think would provide any notable insights due to it being about the history rather than the practice of alchemy. This time around I will check it out, I've got a solid baseline for knowledge now, but maybe it will provide insight into additional tools or advanced processes used and so on, albeit probably indirectly, and even if it does the utility of that information will probably be very limited. Still and all I think that it's worth a try, it's just reading a book, the amount of time required is marginal so the potential benefits don't have to be significant for it to be a worthwhile endeavor.

As for herbs, natural remedies, hunting, fishing, and so on? I have little success with finding what herbs are used in what ways, but I do find a couple books relating to surviving in forests and deserts after things go wrong. Who would have thought that even in a medieval context, preppers and survivalists would already be a thing? Well, this isn't a strictly medieval world, is it? Goblin and Orcish raids, Giants, Dragons, Slimes, Sentient diseases and spells, Undead, and much more beside are supposed to be relevant matters and current threats here, so as much as I would like to dismiss preppers as being silly, it probably is best to be prepared. Not that a Venn diagram would show much of a correlation between people who are likely to benefit from survival books like this and the people who are likely to read them in this world, but I'm not one to turn my nose up at potential new knowledge, and frankly most of the survival tips I'd learned back on earth were more appropriate for a couple days or at most weeks in the wild, but would be woefully inadequate for long term survival, and that's completely discounting that while much of the flora and fauna I am accustomed to exists here, there are many things here that don't exist back home.

Up until this point I've mostly avoided engaging the librarians as their distrust and low-key hostility is painfully apparent, but since I'm running out of things to read I check in with Keaton the Librarian and ask if he has any advice on books relating to my list of desired skills. To my surprise, Keaton actually has a few recommendations that I hadn’t already read or even earmarked for perusal. Being a librarian, at one point or another he has read most of the books in here, and a number of the titles and descriptions do a poor job of explaining the contents. For instance, “Musings, by Gideon E.” I would not have guessed would have anything constructive towards learning how to build or sail a ship. Apparently, it has a fair amount of information relating to both. I am back to over a dozen books to read, and I throw myself into the task of learning.

A week passes with me doing little more than beginning a carriage and reading, and we still have no mage. This surprises no one; mages are not terribly common in the first place, with unemployed and desperate mages being even less so. Up to this point Regina had been coming up dry on appropriate jobs, but as we are having dinner on the night of our 1 week checkpoint, she says she has identified a job that might work well for us. Rather than exploring ruins, it is to find out the source or cause of the larger than normal number of Orcs that have been seen in recent months.

The reward itself is only 500 gold coins, which is apparently a slim reward for the potential danger associated with the job, but since there is no explicit combat requirement her thought process is that we only need to capture a squad leader and torture him into spilling the beans, and then chase that lead to a point where we can get any additional evidence required to support their claim. This sounds to me like the sort of job where the desire to provide evidence leads to the next thing which leads to the next thing ad nauseum, but I am still willing to back this plan as long as I can do a bit more shopping first. Orcs made for good loot on my last run in with them, and my goals are sufficiently served if I am gaining both combat experience and wealth. We agree that in 1 week’s times, we ride.

Apparently, "we ride" is literal, because everyone except me wants to buy horses. Great. Another animal to care for, more feed, and all it even carries is me. After a bit of back and forth discussion, this ends up being the cause of the delay in timeline where we wait a full week rather than setting off in a couple days. If I am going to have to buy horses anyhow, I will be doing some more travel upgrades.

I spend the next week building a carriage and shopping. I also sell off the mules and replace them with some draft horses to haul around the newly built carriage. My feelings are a bit hurt that I feel like I’m being forced into purchasing more animals, but to be blunt I probably needed to make this change anyhow if I am to make better use of travel time. Still, it’s insanely expensive. If you were curious, those draft horses run 200 gold each. But, the carriage itself is covered, and more importantly since I’m designing it to my own specifications and I finally have appropriate skills for everything except the wheels which I once again simply purchase, this carriage is built for working.

The interior of my carriage has spaces for the new alchemy related equipment I purchased, the blacksmithing equipment goes into purpose-built storage along the lower back side of the carriage (externally accessible rather than internal), the woodworking tools are mostly contained along the upper back side (external accessed), the alchemy equipment is on the front interior, a generic work table is on the back interior, and so on. There is some room for a couple boxes worth of loot or loose cargo, but aside from having 2 relatively normal seats for the driver location of the carriage, this is an abomination of a carriage that no one would ever want to ride in. Except for me, of course. And I don’t plan to ride, per se, mostly sit or stand at the tables. This is a mobile crafting station.

Based on the current design there are things I can reasonably do inside the carriage while we are actively traveling. For instance, I can work on small wood carving projects, or on brewing potions: Yes I accounted for and utilized the natural air circulation along with strategically placed holes to avoid choking myself to death should I accidentally stumble upon a new way to create mustard gas, and yes I accounted for the ridiculous quantity of bouncing that tends to happen in a carriage by incorporating a large number of modular, thoroughly padded clamps, as well as implementing a spring suspension system on the carriage itself to maximize shock absorption, which I once again sublet for part creation while I focused on the carriage design and woodworking. It is not perfect since I have a limited timeframe and I'm also limited by technology levels and material accessibility, but it should be sufficient to allow basic crafting tasks so long as they do not require extreme precision or particularly large tools or products. In other words, while the coach is in motion is when I plan to do things like potions, planning, and “roughs”. For those tasks or steps that require precision or large tools or simply tools that there is no practical way to make safe for use within the carriage, such as the forge, those can be lowered and used after we stop for camp. It is not a total solution, but this carriage should be a significant benefit when it comes to production efficiency.

Once again, I spend myself into the poor house. Even accounting for selling the hides of everything we killed except the dragon parts, and even counting the things I was able to resell to recoup costs such as the mules and the completed but disagreeable cart, I pump everything I can into the animals and carriage first, and then into tools. Specifically, I target the things I cannot immediately craft myself, such as chemicals to make paper with, but not the frames that I would use as molds to make paper, because I can make the frames while in transit. I get an alembic and beakers and vials so that I can start into potion brewing, as well as acids for etching and even graphite so that I can put my portable forge to use as a kiln to cast or blow my own glass to get the additional glass tools I will want. Finally, I get materials. Sand and Iron and acid and so on. As for the costs? As far as I am concerned, so long as this carriage is not destroyed the expenses are well worth it. I am down to 4 gold, 7 silver, and 12 copper, but I do not begrudge having gone broke again, because with few exceptions, from now on I either already have a high-quality version of the tool I need, or I can make one to accomplish a specific task.

When we hit the appointed morning, I show up at the front gate. Once again, I get to experience the incredulous, disbelieving gazes of my companions. I hope they never get used to this, because these moments make me happy.