“When it ended up getting decided that Eleniah was coming with you, we kept things mostly as they were, me in charge of the actual gun stuff and our lovely spymaster in charge of spy things.” Cindy started explaining, all traces of levity gone as she assumed a much more professional air.

“Security,” Isla sighed, “I’m in charge of the security of the project.”

Cindy waved her off, “Making sure it’s all hidden and no one knows about us. Spy stuff. Anyway, we decided pretty soon after you left that having Quol in his own personal workshop working on this stuff wasn’t a good way to keep it a secret, even if he had been working on making guns before this.”

“It was a hobby to him, right?”

“Ehh, more like a passion that he couldn’t make money on. No one wanted guns since there was no System for them, but he loves ’em. Happy as a clam once he found out about the update.” She paused and pointed down one of the hallways, “That’s the alchemy section. Carrie does all her stuff there, has a completely sealed testing room and everything.” She pointed at the red glow coming from a lamp by the door at the end. “Red means’ do not disturb’, so we’ll come back around.” She started off again. “So, thinking about being more secure, we decided to move everything to a hidden location. Got some Earth Manipulators we could trust, Kenneth being one, and then we squirreled them off to make us our underground lair. Had to sit on Quol until it was done, but then we moved everything down here and really started testing and production.” She stopped and pointed at three more hallways, “Production, where we’re actually making the physical gun bits, firing range for testing, and then the personal area that has rooms and things for the people that stay down here.” She walked down the hallway to the production area.

“How many people live here?” Kay asked.

“Only a handful are here full-time. We have a rotating shift of guards made up of people who already learned about the project before we moved things and a few more that we added afterward. We rotate them topside to let them get fresh air and all that, then switch them with the group down here. They have the same secrecy Oaths as all of the actual workers.” Isla started telling him while Cindy stopped and talked to a few people as they headed deeper into the underground complex. “The workers who don’t have critical jobs take breaks the same as the guards do, but their schedules are a little different depending on what they do for us. The two Earth Manipulators we have are both here all the time because they’re in charge of both letting people in and for a large portion of our defenses.”

“Don’t fight anybody with earth or stone abilities underground.”

“Exactly. Besides the two of them, everyone who works with Quol or Cammie is down here permanently.” She paused and frowned. “No, that sounds more ominous than I meant it. They’re staying down here until we go public with everything and can relax the security a bit.”

“How many people do we have working with our two frontrunners?”

“Quol has four apprentices, two of them were already working with him in his regular smithing before we brought him into this, and the other two were hobbyists like him, that he spent some time tinkering. Cammie didn’t have any apprentices before this, but we found two trustworthy low-tier alchemists that were willing to learn from her.”

Cindy finally finished her conversation and waved them forward. Kay asked a few more questions while they walked, mostly about how they went about building the secret underground base and how they were dealing with things like airflow and moving the smoke and soot from forges up to the surface without being detected. The actual answers were mildly complicated, but they boiled down to “magic”.

The construction was bland and unappealing, with only the floors and the parts of the walls that people could actually touch being smoothed from the rough rock they’d started as, and there were no decorations or furniture anywhere to be seen. It made for a monotonous walk outside of the questions Kay could think of to ask, and thankfully they got to the actual production area before he ran out.

“We put each of the main sections a good distance from each other just in case.” Cindy explained, still in her serious mode, “So it’s a bit of a trek from spot to spot, but at least this way, there’s no danger of one section exploding and taking out the others.”

Kay stopped in the doorway and slowly turned to look at her, “Should I be worried about sections blowing themselves up?”

“Nah. We keep all the dangerous stuff in the testing rooms, and we use as many safety precautions as we can think of. But better to be safe than sorry when it comes to guns and explosives.”

Right as they stepped through a heavy door into the area they were headed for, a young dwarven man with a thin beard ran up to them. “Hold on! Master Quol’s working on something difficult right now; he said not to bother him yet!”

Cindy looked down at him with a confused expression, “What? That wasn’t what we-”

“And that’s why you keep the damn thing clamped!” A shout roared out from deeper inside the workshop.

“- talked about…” She trailed off weakly.

“Keep an eye on your damn equipment, and make sure it’s fucking clamped! Do you understand that!?”

“Yes, sir!”

“What’s the first rule in my damn workshop!?”

“Safety is key!”

“Damn straight!” Kay heard a slight shuffling sound followed by a fractionally quieter voice, “Look, nothing actually went wrong, so it’s not that big a deal. Good on ya for catching that something was wrong before we actually started up the machine. But ya missed it on the safety check and only caught it at the last second. Ya gotta be better than that, alright? Safety, safety, safety. Got it?”

“Yes, sir, I understand.”

“Good. Now get yer ass back in there; Cindy and his big-pants lordship are supposed to be here later.”

The young dwarven man who’d run up to them looked away with an embarrassed expression and coughed loudly.

Quol, the dwarven smith and Class Line Progenitor for the Gunsmith Class Line, stomped into view from around some tables. “What the hell are ya coughing for, Uriol? Ya better have put yer damn safety mask on before ya machined anything! Inhaling metal fragments is dangerous as hell!” His thick busy eyebrows were pulled into a scowl as he glared at his apprentice until he noticed Kay. “…Oh.” He stared at Kay for a moment. “Uriol, go check Erwina on everything, then do me up a few simple barrels together.”

“Yes, sir!” The young man scurried off.

Quol slowly walked over to Kay. “Hello, yer lordship. If ya don’t mind, can we stay and chat here for a moment? When you’re teaching somebody, it’s important to say the good stuff in front of others and the bad stuff where nobody else can hear ya. It’s one thing for the other apprentices to hear me chewing any one of them out since I give them all the same damn lectures all day… but if the lord comes in and hears her getting talked to about a mistake…”

“I get it,” Kay nodded along, “You don’t need any of your students getting embarrassed by me.”

“Exactly! They’re all doing real good, and I don’t need any nonsense getting in Erwina’s head. She’s too damn good a crafter to waste time on jitters or whatever over a small mistake.” He glanced over his shoulder to make sure no one was listening. “Let’s go over this way.” He pointed to another set of workshops set opposite where his apprentices were. “I can give ya the whole spiel there as good as anywhere.”

On one of the tables was a historical-looking firearm; as far as Kay could tell, it looked identical to the ones the dwarves had been carrying when he’d met the first group. Cindy picked it up and held it close to Kay so he could watch as she showed him parts of it.

“This is a muzzle-loading smooth-bore black powder pistol with a flintlock mechanism.” She pointed at the barrel and then the firing mechanism in turn, “It’s pretty similar to the historical pistols from back home.”

“You’d know better than I would,” Kay shrugged.

“Well, talking to Quol about it, seems like in this world, most of the earlier developments for guns that I know about got skipped over. There weren’t any arquebuses developed, no matchlocks, just all of a sudden flintlock pistols exist, and then no one does anything with them.”

“That’s what I got from talking to the few older fol that know anything about it,” Quol said, “Most of ’em don’t want to talk about it, what with the whole ‘it’s not part of the System, so it’s gotta be evil’ or some such nonsense, but I’m pretty sure Cindy’s theory is right. Some Outworlder showed up and showed people how to make this kind of gun, then nobody wanted to touch it since magic and bows were easier with the System.”

Cindy crossed her arms and nodded, “Since then, it doesn’t sound like there’s been much actual development of the tech itself. Most people have been trying to get it to link with the System instead of making better guns.”

Quol shrugged dramatically, “What’s the point if you can do tons more damage with System related stuff and get Classes and Skills to boot? Even the first-wave folk you met and invited in were only carrying the few they had as a symbol of being open to change. Don’t think any of ’em fired a single round.”

“So when we started the project, I got Quol up to date on the advancements in tech that I know about-”

“Not that they were that advanced,” He interrupted with a snort, “Most of its just different ways to use springs and mechanisms. Just a different way to do the work.” He paused and shrugged, “Although that magazine thing ya talked about was smart.”

Cindy glared down at him. “Done?”

“Yeah.”

“So we started making some more modern weapons.” She continued, still glaring. “And that’s where things got weird.” She pointed towards another series of workbenches and led the way over there. On the way, she started arguing with Quol. “You didn’t know shit about fulminates!” She snapped.

“That’s not my department, is it? I make the weapon; Carrie makes the powders!”

“Whatever!” Cindy threw her arms up and slammed to a stop in front of the benches. “Here!” She gestured widely at an array of guns all laid out in a row. On one end was a bolt-action rifle, and the line continued in complexity and modernity from semi-automatic rifles all the way to a large machine gun that looked similar to an M2 which took up an entire bench on its own.

Kay looked over to Cindy with a grin, which faded away as he saw her glaring in rage at the guns.

She glanced up and saw Kay’s confused expression. She closed her eyes and let out a deep breath. “Sorry. I get pissed just thinking about it.” She took another deep breath and let it out before sweeping her arm to indicate the guns. “None of them work.”

“Huh?”

“They don’t work.” Quol groused, poking at one of the rifle stocks, “Each individual piece is well made, there aren’t any flaws in any of it, and believe me, we’ve tested all of it, and the basic principles of everything work just fine when we do each part separately. Powders ignite, mechanisms work properly, all of it’s fine. Put it together into a weapon, though.” He picked up one of the rifles. “Worked on every bit of this one myself. Every single bit of it. I took three days making sure that this is a damn fine rifle that should work just fine.” He pointed the barrel at the wall and turned to look directly at Kay. “It’s not loaded, but watch.” He pulled the trigger.

Instead of the “click” noise that Kay expected, the rifle erupted into pieces. The stock jerked directly upwards, the mechanism split apart into three pieces that clanged onto the floor, and the barrel did a dramatic flip as it hit the wall and bounced off.

They all stared at the head of metal parts on the floor.

“That’s from a fucking fry fire.” Cindy growled, “There’s no fucking accelerants or explosives or anything in the damn gun!” She snarled and kicked one of the pieces, which zoomed off into the workshop, clanging along the floor. “Any gun we make that’s over a certain level of tech just doesn’t fucking work. Anything that can fail will fail. One screw that’s not perfectly in there and flush with the surface? Flies out, and things fall off. One piece of a bolt has a tiny, almost invisible hairline crack? It’s going to snap on the first try every single time. Powders don’t light, barrels jam, hell, we had one gun mushroom open on its first damn shot for no damn reason!” She picked up the barrel of the rifle off the ground and brandished it in his direction. “And if we use a gun that we’ve inspected top to bottom for every single problem, it comes apart in a comical way that defies the fucking laws of physics!” She screeched the last few words into the air. “It doesn’t make any damn sense! Where the fuck did the energy for this barrel to do a fucking flip come from? All he did was pull a trigger, for fucks sake!”

Kay slowly picked up another piece of the disassembled gun and looked at it closely. “Up to a certain tech level?” He asked Quol quietly while Cindy ranted.

“Yup. Rifled flintlocks with bullets instead of balls work just fine, and I’m pretty sure that we can mix in some magical and alchemical stuff from here that will make them better than whatever you lot from Earth could have thought up without those resources, and we might be able to make some kind of percussion cap system work, maybe. But anything that could fire rounds as fast as even a bolt action with a stripper clip falls apart or explodes or fails somehow.”

Kay looked back at the piece in his hand and chuckled. “Well, Cindy’s anger aside, this actually helps me with a theory I’ve been working on for a bit.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.” He tossed the piece over his shoulder. “Cindy. Cindy! Cindy!”

“What!?”

“Stop cursing and come talk to me! I’m pretty sure the System is breaking your guns so you don’t fuck with its experiment.”

She froze in place and stared at him “… I’m sorry, what the fuck did you just say?”