The work was, as before, a nice way to occupy her hands while thinking more than a successful way to not think. First off was just making sure that her idea wasn’t entirely stupid.

There were two real primary ways to do teleportation targeting. One option was to have the item generate an area, where every other item and/or person in that area was grabbed up and moved somewhere else. The other, to target the caster themselves and move them, which had the bonus of moving the user of the item and everything they wore or carried, with the downside that ground-mounted weaponry and allies couldn’t be moved with it.

She had an idea for solving that second one, at least for a fairly tightly-knit group, but it would need to wait.

The idea for tattooing the runes was, after all, a decision based primarily on the fact that {Target: Caster} was a Rare-level rune she’d need to buy, where {Target: Self} was both Uncommon-level and in her inventory.

|Merge|, [Bolt] with {Control: Mental Direction} as a placeholder and {Water} for visibility, combining with [Transport] using {Target: Self} and overlapping over {Water}. She wasn’t sure if that overlap was technically necessary, but given that it made the design smaller instead of larger, she as at least planning to start with that.

Putting the runes on a piece of paper, she placed the finished product on the worktable, then faced it towards the wall.

With only Mental Direction instead of Position, a Bolt was just going to keep going until it hit something or dissipated based on the settings of the rune. It was possible that by multisetting [Bolt], she’d have been able to emulate the effects, but that seemed like a method that saved her a small bit of setup cost in return for losing quite a bit of time and a lot of effectiveness in combat.

Which very much was not a good trade.

Activating the runes by touching the paper with a single finger and channeling her mana into it, Deyana watched as the whole thing flashed into water, gathering up and flying at the wall in an instant. And, aligned with her guess, splashed against the wall, turning back into paper as it did and sliding down vertically for a moment before the air tilted it enough to start drifting down more slowly.

Two more tests confirmed that it worked as expected. And because Geria would likely still be a while, she cleared her inventory out of rune scrolls, learning them all.

Expertise 3

Effect: Control Logic

While there are a large number of Control-series runes, it is sometimes the case that no single rune could cover the necessary situations. This expertise level will allow you to use logical operators to combine the effects of Control runes.

Example: A runewriter using the [Burst] Rune might want to have it on a proximity trigger, but such would make it unhandleable by the user. By combining the Proximity control and a Time control with AND, the burst could be set to go off when in contact with something, but only if it has been two seconds since the burst was created.

It was a fairly basic bonus, technically, but it also opened up so many other options as to be a little bit ridiculous.

It made sense, though; requiring fifty runes, expertise three was about the point at which you could be sure if you actually liked the crafting system in the game or not.

With that complete, the rest of her time preparing was spent on making sure that she didn’t mess up at the application stage. Buying a Runic Tattooing device, stencils, the associated inks and transfer materials, and the use of a practice dummy was about ten thousand credits out of her now substantially-buffered account, even after she’d given Don the larger share.

The nice thing about the credits scaling this early was that it was essentially meaningless to her to buy basic runes by this point, though the downside was that the actually rare runes would be completely out of her reach for a while yet.

Without the need for it to be quite as accurate when it wasn’t going to be actually in use, she just drew the tracing lines directly onto the dummy instead of using the stencils.

And yet, even while doing all of that, she couldn’t quite manage to ignore the fact that half of her thoughts were elsewhere and that featherlight jump-bounce of her heart refused to let her forget, even when there really were higher priorities at the moment, and so very many reasons to ignore it.

Hard to be annoyed, though.

The practice had been a good idea. The weight was more than she’d expected, and she’d already drifted off the target line by the third rune, when the final version of it would be six.

And when she was doing it on herself, it would come with a bit of pain on top. It wouldn’t do to mess up, if only because it would cost an annoying amount to get it fixed.

A second go-around saw her taking a short break after every other rune, checking the numbers on her planned designs a few more times in-between, and the mistakes were gone, perfectly matching up to her plan even after wiping off the tracing ink.

And just in time, too, for Geria to get back.

She didn’t even say anything, instead knocking on the doorframe before tossing a rune scroll over the middle of the room for Deyana to catch.

Deyana made an aggrieved noise. “What would you have done if I’d still had the device in my hand?”

“Not thrown the scroll, obviously,” Geria replied, lazily. “That’s what the trade window’s for.”

Deyana scoffed, opening the new scroll and starting the fairly short process of transcribing the decorated crossing staircases.

Rune Learned

{Control: Mental Positional}

Parameters: Default Relative Position (Optional)

When she was done, she pulled out the stencil paper, laying it flat and pausing. “So, options: I can make it just about as large as it’ll go, but that’s a bit of a waste– both of skin-space and ink, but small’s got issues with mana costing and by extension health costing. On top of that, it should probably be somewhere that it won’t be uh… typically visible. Using Merge and all.”

Geria smirked at her very slightly, though it was a little bit difficult to tell if that was on purpose. “Oh? The upper arm would usually be covered.”

Deyana rocked her head side to side slightly. “That’ll work for you, if a bit on the smaller side. Can you give me the measurements so I can stencil it?”

Geria flushed just a little bit, and Deyana had to keep the grin to herself. “I was trying to get you to ask to put it somewhere else.”

The grin came out, now. “I know.”

“Oh, you’re going to be like that, then.”

“Yup!” Deyana chirped, then laughed. “That’s what you get for being high enough level that you could actually use that. Plus, you’ve got to actually say stuff.”

“Where are you planning on putting yours?”

“Upper half of the thigh. I don’t usually wear anything short here, so it’s as good a place as any while leaving the waist open.”

“Leaving the waist open?”

Deyana debated telling for a moment or two as she started the stencil, but it wasn’t like it was such an important secret anymore. At least to her. “That’s where I’m probably going to put the strength and speed passives. Novsha just had speed there, but… well…”

“It is an option to mix them, now.”

“Yeah. Strength gives some speed, mind you, but not as much as a dedicated speed tattoo will.”

“You know, there are a lot of people who would kill to be told that.”

“Oh yeah!” Deyana laughed again. “I’m well aware, and so is D-S. They’ve got to keep some secrets, though.”

Geria blinked, then groaned, rubbing her eyes. “They use invisibility and speed, right? Then set privacy settings to permission-only and…”

“I don’t think it’s an intended consequence, I’ll give you that much. It’s only the ops that get them, though. It’s stamina-expensive to use physical changes like that and would most likely already be out if there were more than ten people in each group that knows about it. I’m sure some other people figured it out independently.”

“Sure. Not sure why I managed not to.”

Deyana shrugged. “For most people, it’s burning a quarter of your health and a fifth of your mana in a fight for a marginal benefit, particularly if you’re backline. Frontline, they usually prefer to prevent the damage to begin with, maybe mix a little bit of health in there for efficiency’s sake, but mana transfer is usually just more efficient.”

“That is true. In the same place you’re getting yours, then.”

“Mmkay. Last thing.”

“What?”

“Do you want to make yours Manifested Force or one of the elements? The bolt medium, I mean.”

Geria blinked once, then smiled. “As long as we don’t count it as the other item you promised to make for me, Force is what I have the best use for.”

Deyana rolled her eyes, filling in the last rune and starting the reasonably quick, but important, process of checking to make sure all of her runes were right.

They were.

By the time she turned around, Geria had somehow already changed into, of all things, sort of front tie tank over a side slit mini skirt, and Deyana outright stared for a few seconds.

“If… Y’know, if I had to make a list of things that I didn’t expect you to have…” Deyana paused, not really able to string words together in the way she’d intended. “Top ten. Easy.”

The twinkle in Geria’s eyes hung around for a moment in silence before she responded. “I thought about going shorter, but I decided it would be a bit trashy.”

“Shorter than–” Deyana cut herself off, then coughed. “Probably the right decision. When did you even get that?”

Geria’s mouth flattened. “I would rather not say?”

That was specific.

Still, there wasn’t a much faster way to lose someone’s trust than to push for an answer that they weren’t comfortable giving.

“I’m curious, but won’t push you for that. Ready to get started?”

Geria nodded, once, and sat down in the chair by the workstation. “Yes. I may tell you eventually, but not right now.”

With that, she started the process of the tattoo.

An enchanted cleaning cloth that also dealt with any body hair, followed by a numbing solution, then the stencil. As soon as that was done, it was simply a matter of copying the tracing she’d done before, just on a living person this time.

While she might have preferred a little bit of talking, Geria’s complete silence was decent enough, and helped her focus the whole way through, and the stillness was even better than the practice dummies. Fifteen minutes later, it was done.

Talking started up again after that, with Geria choosing to demur on testing until after Deyana finished her own copy, but neither of them were really bringing up anything important. Deyana because she didn’t really want to lose focus, and her best suspicion was that Geria was doing the same.

Her own was almost exactly the same but replacing the {Manifested Force} rune with {Electricity}, the reversed form of {Earth}. Mostly, the issue there was that while either the [Transport] or {Manifested Force} could be explained to Don or any other curious people nearby, using both would very quickly out her as having a backer.

That or non-guild connections and a fairly powerful prior character, and if anything, that might be worse.

The testing process was fairly simple, with both of them activating the teleport simultaneously, going only a short distance at first and then extending it. There was one mishap where she’d gotten “clever” with it and twisted herself in the air, ending up landing on her butt for her trouble, but otherwise the tattoos worked exactly as expected.

Pressingly, though, she needed to use |Merge| again, but Deyana didn’t really have anything she wanted to add on with until she’d had a bit more time to think about things.

While it wasn’t terribly expensive to rotate out an item given that she was making them herself, it was still a cost in time that she really didn’t want to use.

Looking over Geria’s gear, once the other girl had changed back into it, gave her the idea.

The confirmation on it was a fairly quick process, and just a few minutes later she had probably the simplest use of |Merge| she’d made so far.

She couldn’t wait to see it in action.