“Three low-capacity space rings, two high-capacity space rings, sword, armor, breastplate, boots, and gauntlets of Ganja, Goodja?... giant jackass, and what appears to be a firestarter,” Sam thought to himself after he looked through some of the enchanted items they had taken from the bandits. Sam had put the rest of the stuff in one of the other rings, because he was determined to figure out the secrets of how these enchantments worked.

Sam pulled up his stats to pause a minute and evaluate which of his skills or abilities might help him with enchanting. Joan’s book mentioned focusing on improving and maximizing the synergy between knowledge, skills, and abilities.

Jen felt the best strategy was for them to both grind the support skills that would complement the other person. She would focus on her Psych skill and Sam should focus on his Words of Power skill and Words of Understanding skill for making more enchantments.

“How can any of my skills help me master enchanting? Wait, with almost 30 points in agility, my eye-hand coordination and dexterity should allow me to draw, cut, bend, design, or do just about any type of physical manipulation with great accuracy. At least that should help in creating enchantments.”

Sam moved the firestarter to the center of the table to get a closer look at it.

“Damn, I so want to start with the sword or that high-capacity space ring, Kelly” Sam liked to talk to Kelly when he was working; it helped keep her alive in his heart. He could break some of the most complex voice encryption codes in the intelligence world, and now he was going to break the enchantment code of a firestarter. “Kelly, imagine what Jen’s going to say when I tell her, ‘Hey, I know how to make matches with magic’,” he thought sarcastically.

The firestarter looked like a simple piece of flint and steel connected by a small chain, and initially, that was exactly what Sam actually thought it was. When Sam went to use it to start a fire, he noticed it was not actually flint or steel, but two separate pieces of possibly…. iron? with enchantments in the forms of etched runes, symbols, and words across them.

“To start a fire, all I have to do is rub the two enchantments past one another and a very small bit of fire will spark out – I don’t actually have to strike anything. The small candle-sized flame extends off the flint-looking piece until I remove the steel-looking part, or until I ran out of mana, but even the lowest level mana regeneration can keep this little fire enchantment going indefinitely.

The enchantment is carved or etched directly into the iron, and it is much thicker and heavier than my wire charms, but on the other hand, my charms use more mana than this firestarter. Of course, my charms will burn out rather quickly, and this fire starter will probably last forever. Is that because of the amount of mana used, or the type of metal, or both?”

Sam groaned to himself as he opened his on-board; he dreaded what he had to do before continuing. Last night with Jen’s help, Sam had raised his inventory skill, but he could only get it to level 2. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the immediate recall like Jen did for data in her on-board.

Also, he didn’t want to just recall the data; he wanted to be able to sort, compare, filter, and analyze the data. Sam worked at the tedious task of designing and building an Excel software App in his on-board. “Kelly, thank goodness there are no copyright issues in the Decks.” Sam discovered it was like having a computer, where you had to design your own software, but you didn’t have to code your software.

Sam realized that as long as you understood exactly what you wanted, you could use your mana, focus, and intent, and the “software” in his onboard would write itself to achieve the results. “When I created a calculator in my on-board, since I knew what a calculator looked like and all the functions of a calculator, I just had to mentally explain the results of the functions without writing the underlying code. However, even if I remembered a symbol on a calculator key, like a square root symbol, it would not work for me unless I actually knew what taking the square root of a number accomplished.”

While taking a break, Sam complained to Jen that he was being forced to spend hours designing Excel in his onboard before getting back to enchantments.

Jen was in the middle of her own research but replied a little testily at being interrupted, “Just imagine how many months and years it took the Excel developers to build the code from scratch. Also, use the multi-focus we talked about. You need to use one mind to build your onboard Excel app and use your other mind to meditate, Boomer!”

Sam perked up, “You’re a genius Jen, that’s why you’re the Boss!”

Jen laughed to herself evilly as she thought about how irate he was going to be when she asked to simply copy his Excel app to her onboard after he finished.

At first, Sam decided he would use multi-focus just on building Excel in his onboard so that he could get it done in half the time. He found that he could use multi-focus, but only for about 20 minutes, before he had to drop back down to single focus for about an hour recharge.

Next, he used multi-focus with meditate and realized he could actively work on both his onboard Excel app and his meditation skill simultaneously for at least 3 hours. He only stopped at 3 hours because he had finally finished the app.

Sam discovered that using multi-focus was like driving a car while listening to an audio book at the same time. Your mind is on the road at the same time as it is in a story. Multi-focus was just much more intense. As he leveled-up his multi-focus skill, he realized the higher your multi-focus skill level, and the more competent you are at the separate tasks, the longer you can keep multi-focus engaged.

Sam bragged to Jen, “Nice few hours of work. My meditation skill went to level 5, and my multi-focus is level 2, and now I have an Excel app. Most importantly, I can finally get to these enchantments!”