Going right back to sleep after my nap was just not going to happen. For one, I was feeling rather energized, and for two, I needed to get some errands done before tomorrow. Most things can wait, but for now I need to procure a proper weapon.

To that end, I'm going to need the triplet's help. They still owe me for all the rare dungeon materials that I've brought them in the past, and even if they did just re-spawn, they always love a challenge. What better than to ask for a balanced sword when all anyone has is sticks and stones? I'm not saying they'll manage it, but they will do a better job than most other crafters would at this stage. They also tend to manually craft everything that they can, unlike some people who rely on system help. In games where crafting was more restrictive they either broke the system or just played raging barbarians hell-bent on ending the world as fast as gnomishly possible.

I say gnomishly because they almost always pick gnomes for the tinkering perks the race usually gets. Leave it to a crafter to min-max everything they possibly can to create the perfect tool for the job. The tool in this case being their characters. Well, some of it might be the aesthetic as well. People often pointed out that diversity in races would help more for spreading out their workload, but the triplets thing was important to them.

That was actually why I had confidence finding them without having seen them outside of their game avatars. Of the people in the guild, they were some of the most open about who they were beyond the little identical gnomes that were running around. In real life, they were triplet sisters who stuck together like glue. One of them went to college for engineering and the other two decided that they should tag along and get degrees too. Not all the same subjects, one was electrical, one was mechanical, and one was a programmer, but they made sure that everything they learned synergized to an amazing extent. When the invite for this trip-gone-wrong came through, they came as a package deal.

More to the point, when they started in on the VR portion of the trip, they quickly formed a pattern. Their first game they tried to specialize as different races, one of them even picked a male avatar for fun. After a few weeks, they had figured out how to polymorph each of them into an identical female gnome because as they continuously repeated: "Not having two mirror images of yourself around was just weird feeling."

Therefor, even if I haven't seen them in real life, I just have to find the three identical women who are likely fiddling with some sort of project and I will have found the best crafters in the guild.

In a camp of a few hundred people, it took longer than I thought to find out where they had gone. The fact that it was slowly getting dark outside didn't help. Eventually I found someone who had seen them getting some soup earlier before the captain had showed up and said something about helping open a door somewhere. The guy who remembered that had been paying more attention to the fact that there were three moderately attractive women sitting around than what was actually being said, but that helped quite a bit.

If this were one of the game worlds that I had been to before, finding them with those clues would have been preposterous. There weren't that many people in the captain's faction by now, most people going back to whatever in-game guilds they were part of instead of rallying under the banner of a ship-captain without a ship. Turns out that years of working underneath someone in virtual reality is worth more than the real-life hierarchy that existed previously. Most people hadn't seen the captain besides the few hours before we left Earth. So knowing what door he was determined to open would have been quite difficult without the basic fact that, in the absence of the normal starter village or even ruins, there was really only one door that anyone even knew about right now.

The cathedral door was the only option. Not the front door of the cathedral since that was pretty much permanently open, but the one that was supposedly in the basement of the place. Even if they weren't there, checking out the basement sounded like a great idea. Even if it was still closed up, there might be more cryptic clues like the mural in the cathedral.

Thus, my search took me back inside and down into the stone depths. Right away, I could tell I was going the right direction. The fact that the air smelled burnt and there was the sound of an explosion from down below was almost comforting. I'm not going to ask how they had found the ability to make explosives already, or why they were setting them off in an enclosed space, but the smells and sounds were almost signature to any gnomish workshop across all the games I had played. There was the one game where the gnome race was only composed of druid berserkers, but that's a big exception. They were more like halflings in that one, just using the name of gnome because of the earth affinity connection.

When I saw ten or so people crouched behind a stone barrier, peeking over to look at a completely in-tact door I knew I had found who I was looking for. The captain was looking gruff and unhappy, glancing at the group of people he had gathered, then back to the door ahead. There were a few people with weapons who looked alert and not particularly useful, and then there was a small circle of people babbling in techno-speak and gesturing at the door or stroking their chins. Among them were a few people I recognized from the ship maintenance crew and three identical looking women who were making very dangerous expressions.

Normally, seeing three raven haired ladies with a slight grin on their face and a crinkle in their eyes would be great. They were around five foot four inches tall, not particularly muscled, and they all mimicked the same crouched posture of peeking over the barricade. The fact that I had seen that look almost every time they shut themselves in their workshop before causing something catastrophic was worrying. Usually it meant some type of escalation in magnitude when they were tapping their right feet like that.

"Yo, Amandelilisa! I heard you three just respawned."

Tactic number one, the one that always worked best, was to evacuate the area and pray for the best. The fact that my respawn point was right above our heads and the fact that I wanted a weapon sooner rather than later prompted a less likely alternative: distraction combined with calling in a favor."

"""Hey Omni!""" Came their response.

"Oh, and hi Dave, Sean."

I waved at my two colleagues from maintenance as an afterthought. I just gave the captain a quick salute. He was up inspecting the door after the blast now, so I tried not to distract him.

A "Hey mike" and a "Yo" were what I got in response to my greeting.

"Anyway, you three, I was wondering, since you always make the best equipment a guildmate can ask for. . ."

"You want us to-"

"-get you something to stab-"

"-things with since you're a shit martial artist,-"

"""-right?"""

Sometimes I think they practice the whole interrupting each other in their spare time. They never even start in the same order all the time. Amanda went first this time, but other times Lisa or Delilah would start it off. The only give-away on who said what being their name-tags. Not normal name-tags for the jumpsuit since those were for crew and not passengers, but little ones carved out of stone attached to their jumpsuits somehow.

The fact that they tended to space phrases out to exactly three parts and didn't stop at the end of thoughts was unnerving at first. Almost makes me believe that identical siblings have some sort of psychic phenomena going on.

"Got it on one. Any chance I can distract you all from your. . .explosives-time long enough to get a sword?"

They give each other a look, then a glance back at the captain. He's cussing out the door, not finding what he wants from the sound of things. Lisa shrugged, then Amanda nodded and Delilah grinned.

Then, about five minutes later, I had a sword in my hand.

. . .

Ok, so that was fast. I expected it to take longer than that, even with whatever super powers respawning gave them. I should have counted on the fact that they have made thousands of swords for me before. Each time they would get better, adjusting to my favored types of crafting materials, fixing the ones I broke, and making starting gear for me so many times in the past. It had only been ten or so game-worlds of being in the same guild, but they really knew how to make the type of sword I liked, which was a thinnish, three foot-long double-edged straight sword.

Lisa had immediately pulled a few bleached bones out of nowhere; some sort of inventory system, probably. There was some wood in there too, but mostly a bunch of bones. That took all of thirty seconds.

Delilah was grinning as she picked them up, twirling them around before grabbing the largest and starting to squeeze it like clay. I'm not saying that she was just squeezing the bone in a way that one would typically squeeze clay, I'm saying that the bone was bending in a way that clay would normally bend when squeezed. I hadn't seen this particular style of crafting often, but normally they had tools to work with. That was probably the only reason that they were letting Delilah shape the bone on her own, assuming the other two didn't get a similar power.

As she progressed, kneading her pale white sculpture, it took on more of a tree-branch shape than the femur-bone shape it originally was. Then, she started wrapping more bones around the ends, shaping a blade. It looked like a twisted piece of rope for a little bit, then began to shift into more of a patterned steel, if steel were white that is. Then came a cross-guard, a twisted hilt, and a pommel. Those were all less smoothed out, containing more of the rope-like quality the twisted bones had to them. Delilah attached the pieces of wood to the hilt, a nice brown against the white of the rest of the sword. Then she sharpened up the blade's edges with her fingernails, drawing them across the length from hilt to tip.

It was magnificent, looked smooth as polished wood, and even looked super cool. That all happened in about three minutes; barely enough time to take in the process and how deft her hands had been in the shaping. Then she handed it to Amanda. She had been the primary enchanter when they were crafting in-game, and it made some sense that she was the one who finished off the item. Obviously, they each had gotten an ability that matched their individual strengths in crafting. Lisa was always to coordinator, planning out what they were going to build with, drawing out plans, and generally putting out the vision of how they were going to go about something. The fact that she got something like an inventory made sense. Delilah getting some sort of sculptor's touch was probably because of how much she tended to put everything together when they combined their individual parts into one item of almost certain boredom-defiance. And of course, the fine-manipulation part of the trio and the enchanter got some sort of magical skill.

For about a minute and a half, Amanda merely stood in place, eyes closed, holding the sword. Everything was still besides the glowing light-show that was happening in her hands. Red light gushed out, spreading like water over the blade before it darkened into a thick black, absorbed into the bone. Then came rivers of blue, an energy that seemed like water imitating lightning as best it could as it surged over the surface before settling in, a faint blue mark on the white blade. Then, at the end, came a thin coat of what seemed like clear oil, shimmering a rainbow hue. This part seemed to dry up, losing the rainbow shimmer as it varnished the blade into an even smoother surface than it already was.

And then, as I said, after five minutes I had a sword in my hands and everyone who wasn't the triplets was gaping at either me, them, or the sword. I mean, most people were running around with badly carved spears at this point and I had what looked like a perfectly balanced bone-sword in my hands.

"It would be awesome-"

"-if you tried not to break-"

"-this one for a while,-"

"""-Omni."""

Leaving me with an entirely different type of dangerous smile than the one they had before, they turned and went back to huddling and gesturing at the door.

"Have I ever mentioned that I love you girls so much?"

They just nodded to me, falling back into their explosion plans with the still stunned mechanics. I heard the words "shaped" and "charge" before I decided to leave them to whatever they were doing and pray that everything turned out fine. The fact that the walls were perfectly fine after the last explosion gave me a little hope. The stone barricade was the only thing with any wear on it, and the stone was a different color than the rest of the architecture, which lead me to believe it was brought in from outside, probably with whatever inventory system Lisa had.

Ignoring the rest of the talking that had started behind me, I had a new sword to put through its paces before bed tonight, so I raced back up the stairs, eager to get outside.