Finally! I was back at the shop. It felt like it had been ages since I was here. Now that I was back, I brought Rom, Ram, and Shrapnel back out so they could resume their shop posts, and greeted Shiro and Elita. I had been keeping them updated via Alfred so they already knew what had happened but it was good to see them in person.

I got scolded by Elita for a while when she saw the state of Carnivac’s leg and my arm. For the rest of the night I chatted away with Shiro and Elita about what they’d like in the future while I made repairs to Carnivac’s leg and rebuilt my arm. Since my arm would need to be rebuilt from scratch, I took the opportunity to install another weapon into it. I had the arm cannon on the left but didn’t have anything for melee range so I added a blade transformation. The blade was a simple double-edged type that extended out of the forearm after the hand folded away. This way, I’d be able to punch out the blade if needed. I was also able to include an internal mana crystal port, just one though, with it the attacks would do a small amount of elemental damage.

I told Elita about my ideas for a mapping function that would connect to the Adventurer tags and she got unusually excited about it, making me promise that she’d be the first to get the new feature when it was ready.

Shiro, on the other hand, didn’t have any interest in becoming an Adventurer and was perfectly happy to stay minding the store. He had run into some issues of Automata discrimination when customers had come in, but Jada had been around at the time to smooth things over. In particular he was interested in my plans for the Battle Beast disks, that was my rebranded concept for the Illusion Stones that Joshua and Jacob had let me tinker with.

Thanks to his trip with Alfred and Jada, we’d be able to start production of the new products right away. I still wanted to make action figures though, and had some ideas on how I might make small, simple proxies that others could connect to by way of a keyed ring; like how the [Inventory] bags at Loni’s were accessed. My biggest issue was time.

Shiro had a lot of really great ideas on how to market the new product and thanks to Jada’s deal with the Haz Brothers, we might have a way to mass produce them as well as create our own line-up, rather than just upgrade an existing product.

Shiro also had been thinking about this ever since I’d first had Alfred try to order up more Illusion Stones, and what he’d come up with was an illusion of an egg. The owner would then “feed” mana into the stone until it reached a certain point and would hatch as a baby dragon or other monster. Then the owner could send orders to the stone with their mana, the same way I’d set up the test units to accept Fire, Water, or Wood. This time the orders would be things like “Eat”, “Clean”, “Exercise” to grow your baby monster. Once the monster was big enough, it could do battle with other monsters. I thought this was brilliant and would let the kids become more attached to their monsters than simply doing battle right away would. The battle system could still use some work so I’d have to play with that, but I liked where it was headed and resisted the urge to call them anything similar to the digital pet toys from my world.

I didn’t have any models of eggs or baby monsters ready so I couldn’t move forward with Shiro’s ideas, but I was able to upgrade the collection of Illusion Stones that the shop team was able to purchase. Actually, I only did one of them and committed the code to my mental codebase. Rom was then able to finish up the rest of them. I’d have to get Shiro to talk to Merrel about modeling up the new creatures and eggs for the Battle Beast project.

I also would have liked to talk to the Haz Brothers about working on my action figure ideas but honestly, they completely ignored Alfred and Shiro at their workshop so I wasn’t so sure how well they would take to an Automata giving them ideas directly. I didn’t want to put them out of work, but at the same time I knew that we could produce the products faster, cheaper, and better than they could. Merrel had some real talent though. I wouldn’t mind poaching her away for our shop.

When morning rolled around, Shea came downstairs with her coffee to greet everyone and Sparky hopped up to my shoulder to nuzzle me. It had been a while since I saw the little guy so I gave him some extra attention. I knew that he’d been going on quests with Shea but it looked like he had done some leveling up as well. When I [Inspect]ed him, I found that his mana pool had gone up along with his other base stats. He agreed to let me upgrade him so I wrote some new functions for him that would make use of the higher mana available. He now had fireDash(burstSize), which would set off an explosion behind him, propelling him forward in a burst of speed, and glide(), which generates a small pocket of hot air beneath him to keep him airborne for an extended leap. The two new functions should work well together if he gets the timing right.

“Oh! Me too! Me too!”, Shea squealed.

“What’s the normal method of improving your magic skills?” I asked.

“Normally, you’d go to an academy or have a magic instructor that would help you memorize core magic principles until you were able to use them by reciting a keyword chant. It’s all mostly building on top of that process so it takes a while. If you get something wrong, something terrible can happen, but usually nothing happens and your spell just doesn’t work. Then you have to start over and make sure you get everything perfect.”

As I understood it, the people here that could do magic were basically doing the equivalent of writing their own magic scripts from scratch every time using Notepad and without having a monitor. I remember when I was a kid in my old world, my father would subscribe to Antics Magazine which was a nerd magazine for people with an Atari personal computer. In the back they would have pages and pages of code that you could type into your computer in Basic and then save onto a cassette tape to run some small game. One time, he did this without the TV being hooked up and managed to program/type an entire game. I think it was Worms or something similar. I’m still amazed that he was able to do the entire thing without any typos. I imagine this is pretty much how the people of this world are learning and executing their magic functions.

I opened up the [Console] and took a look at Shea, just like Sparky, she’d also leveled up her base stats and had some room to improve things. Currently she had waterGlob(), but that was it. I modified her function to allow a size parameter so she could define a specific glob size. Next, I wanted to give her something she could use offensively so I came up with waterJet(diameter, compress), this would cycle through waterGlob() repeatedly and adjust the glob size depending on the diameter’s size. As soon as it formed a glob, it would super compress the glob then open a hole in the compression field the size of the specified diameter. It should result in a pressurized jet of water pushing outward. When I was done, I closed up the screens and told her about the changes.

“Be careful though, in short, controlled bursts with a narrow diameter, [waterJet] should act like [waterBullet] or [iceNeedle], but if you compress it too much then the release pressure might take your arm off with a continuous blast. Also, remember that you’re pulling water out of the air rather than generating it; so if the air is dry then you won't have much moisture to work with.”

Shea looked at her hands with equal parts terror, and glee. “I can’t wait to try this out! Thank you so much Prime!” She wrapped her arms around me and squeezed me to her chest, it was nice, though I worried that a robot body might not be the most comfortable thing to squeeze but she didn’t give me any indications of being bothered by it. There was a ding as the door to the store front opened up so I went to check on it via Alfred. Standing in the doorway, looking uncertain, was Lily.

“Ah Miss Lily, I presume”, Alfred said, “Master Prime said to expect you.”

“Um, yes. Is Mister Carnivac here?”

“Yes, he’ll be out in just a moment. Just getting ready for another day of adventuring. Would you care for some tea while you wait?”

“Oh, um, no thank you.”

I hopped into Carnivac and closed up the hatch. There were still a lot of upgrades I’d need to make to him to improve my questing abilities but at least he was “back to battery” as my old battleship gunner grandfather would have said. I asked Elita and Shea to accompany me to the Guild this morning and headed up front.

“Good morning Lily. Good to see you”

“Good morning Mister Carnivac”, she said, not quite meeting my gaze.

It was rather strange. Certainly, she knew that little robot me was the one controlling Carnivac, but she still seemed to get flustered by him. Willful ignorance, maybe?

“Allow me to introduce Shea and Elita. They are contracted Adventurers for this shop, I hope to join their party once we get to the Guildhall. Oh, and that’s Shiro”, I pointed out as he made his way through the curtained doorway.

“Good morning Miss, lovely to make your acquaintance”, Shiro said with a little bow and a hand over his chest. He really had that posh butler thing down.