(tentative) Play It

Letting my golem crumbled away into a pile beneath me that my body sits on and falls back from to lean on the professor, i find myself staring up into Doc's proud gaze beaming down at me before he finally patted my head again and released a wave of warmth through my body that simply erased my injuries as it passed. "Now, let's go claim the remaining prizes. The skin itself is actually very fire retardant, which is how it and its slime managed to survive for so long until you guys started utilizing your own electric discharge," he goes on, holding me by the back of my restored and even cleaned jack as he steps over the side of the slate.

"The reason Plasma is Plasma and not elecity or lightning is because its a repeating blast of x amount of energy to propel each other in a sustained form, unlike Ignition which is nonstop consumption," Doc seems to explains as i struggle to regain my senses well enough to walk and simply stumble along with his grasp. "To make an actual lightning attack, you have to generate x amount of specific static energies to travel across y amount of space, like the eel did with the friction of its movements being collected and channeled forward in the conductive spines of its sail to the conductive spines in its face that correspond to the teeth in its mouth. Making an organic substance that can repel electricity well enough to direct all of that lighting away from itself at all was tricky, but the solution was simple. I made the sea dragon's mouth the source of its EMF."

"Dragon..." i parrot weakly, slowly walking forward to catch up with the professor's pulling. "You... made us... fight... dragon?" i ask with breathless frustration.

"Yeah... it was only a young one, though," he says as if that were any real reassurance. "Just hatched among the thermal vents under the islands a few months ago during the last etherfall, females like this one dont get much longer than one-forty feet in length, but they get fat. Big enough around to swallow small trading vessels. Males only get about as big around as she was in the body, but they get to around two hundred feet. Adults also do not have to charge between sustained attacks because their bodies are so big, but cannot stop moving during a sustained attack and thus rarely leave the water where they can corkscrew for perpetual charge. She was actually chased from her nest and siblings during a crocodile migration before your shipwreck and has been trapped among the islands by them."

"I don't want the... damned dragon's life story," i croak and groan, finally able to pull free of the professor's grasp. "I don't care about me, but... the rest of the group don't... need to die, don't need to... experience this kind of pain. Even in a game... eighty percent... of the population will stub their toe... and rage quit your life's work."

"Excellent feedback," Professor Harlen says as though i had not just told him his idea for pain was ridiculous. "Exactly what i wanted to hear. How does seventy-five percent sound? I need options to trial and error. Most of the company plays on the child server where pain is only at twenty percent, everybody else has diminished settings of sixty-percent. It's not necessarily optional, but a support ticket can be filed to have your pain sensory mitigated. The most we allow an adult is fifty-percent."

"I don't want mine changed, honestly," i grumble childlishly. "And i guess with that now in mind nobody here could have known about pain mitigation, but still. Shouldn't you start people at sixty or seventy-five?"

"Some people don't mind being at one hundred," Doc remarks with a knowing wink as we near the others. "And we don't know who do or don't until they experience it. Now, everybody," he adds loudly to the ground as we come within twenty yard of the eel's charred head and neck, "let's all crowd in for a magical biology lesson."

When we were all gathered at the head of the eel that could have filled a large living room, Professor Harlen finally points about the teeth and crown of spines and says, "As you can still see, the dragon's actual EMF is no longer being produced, but these areas of the body still have auras because they are still magically charged with elementalism magic. There would be areas of the spine with coils of connective tissue that are incredibly valuable for magical conductivity just like these teeth and the spines adorning the dragon's head, but they were all destroyed. In any mage's hand, these spines of the dragon can be used to cast whatever electricity remains at visual targets, but in a good mage's hands they can be refueled or even used to craft an even more powerful artifact. The teeth, however, only retain a feedback of energy from its final attack which mages can draw upon for their own lightning or use the residual energy to charge the spines or convert the energy into other objects.

"Even empty, the entire jaw and skull of a dragon will fetch close to its weight in gold," he goes on as the spines pluck themselves from about the dead dragon's head and collect in a pile at Doc's feet. "Most of the skin we see is charred from all of your magics, but the skin touching the ground was grounded enough to keep from burning by the killing barrage or the other attacks. As reward for your victory against this boss creature, i will be preparing the body and some surprises from it," he announces at last, turning to face us as the skin and muscle begin peeling back from the remains of the dragon right before our eyes. "I don't know what you will collectively decide to do with the teeth and spines and skull, but i am making magic resistant coats for everybody!"

"What about the meat?" Harold asks while everybody else just sits around and recovers.

"The lactic acid produced by these dragons is actually poisonous to anything that does not filter oxygen from hydrogen, so it's pretty much useless except for all of its tendons to make magic-conductive sinew from. Healers and mages of all types pay top dollar for such connective tissues, as i mentioned, so i will also be collecting all of this for you. If everybody would just remain still a moment while i retake your measurements and start treating the skin, your coats will be ready in just a moment."

"I say we push him for more," i say to Harold softly. "Between the make up of the island and the biomass wasted because we can't eat it, we could easily milk this for something like a real gemstone weapon at max hardness or a piece of diamond jewelry for everybody that he can drain the power of the teeth from. The skull- if we can carry it- and that fat spool of sinew at his feet should be all the money we need, but we need to be able to defend ourselves not just from random crazy monsters but from his random crazy monsters. Between an accessory or weapon paired with a spine, we can probably take on other forms of dragons with ease, but do i push or you?"

Giving me the straightest poker face i had ever seen, Harold states, "You're the favorite right now."

Giving him a withering glare in return, i walk up to the professor and say, "I will leave you and the techs to discuss pain mitigation with the others- except Harold, he be fine- but there is something i would like to ask of you."

"Bound to your characters," he says with a grin, taking one hand from behind his back as the rest of the gory dragon vanished. "Unlike your coats that can be traded or sold in the future, these rings containing the divided power remaining in the dragon's mouth cannot be removed from your character until they break. The spent diamond is still worth a small fortune, though," he adds as i hold out my open hand to his closed one and he dumps a dozen slender crystalline bands into my palm, emanating dense auras of blue and white light. "It's not like i can't read minds or anything in the game, without magic even."

"I'm so tempted to just wear ten and run with the other two, i could be at the volcanoe island by shadow," i say wistfully, begrudgingly on putting one ring on my left middle finger and walking back to the others. "Everybody gets one," i state simply, dumping the rest of the rings in Harold's hands while reaching out to the pile of spine with my aura and claiming two spines for myself to study while i waited on my coat to be finished.

After only a few moments of study, i conceded defeat to the unknown in-game elements making up the other half of the spine's keratin and calcium make-up, but it was not until the others were walking forward to accept their thick hooded coats from Doc that i calculated there was enough energy in every spine for a single bolt of lightning to travel a full mile and exactly four reloads of the same energy in the rings we now wore. I was actually impressed with the hooded military styled trench coat that the professor gave me when i at last came to get my coat at the end of the line, admiring the thickly woven padded of cured and boil-tightened silvery blue and white dragonskin before actually putting it on. The aura that emenated from my coat was clear like my perception of my energy before the etherfall, and it even seemed to distort my aura's flow from its anti-magical properties, but after a brief inspection i realized that the clear magic was not simply the magic of my coat's enchantment but simply foreign energy.

Integrating my coat with my aura was simply, just eveloping the foreign energy to force my awareness inside and then connecting the sourceless energy to my own suns so that the coat shown with its own aura of amber and amethyst exhaust. "You like? They're everyone's minigames." Doc laughs, watching the others performing their own versions of integrating the foreign enchantment.

"I love," i admit gratefully. "The weaving around the forearms is a perfect fit to my wrists and the weaving from the back around to the front to act as clasps is now how i am going to design most of my armor pieces. What's the deal with the clear energy, though?"

"In all honesty, integrating the enchantment is not something you actually have to do, it's just what they saw you do," he says without even looking at the others like i was. "People without magic don't have auric signatures larger than the object's, so it would be their only defense against other magics. If you guys had been attacked with magic while wearing coats, anything that reached the aura of the coats would have been mitigated damage even further than what your auras do on their own. Yours is exceptionally strong not only because of your two sources but because of your stats. Willpower and focus are the defensive magical stats while intelligence is the capacity for magic- an explanation for the differences in your auras, many of the employees are actually jealous because few of them had starting auras as big as the others- but all of your starting stats are at the top of the charts for the game. Strength for attacks and how much you can carry, Endurance for how long you can fight or how much pain you can endure before going into schock, Charisma that determins your likability as a person, Focus which is based on your speed of thought and reflexes, Willpower that reflects your ability to make unstable spell processes work, and Intelligence that determins your overall energy capacity and regeneration and strength of your attacks. Even as a wizard or sorcerer, you would have the same sized aura and you would not have gone into shock from being crippled."

"Despite any complaints or reservations i might have had or may come to have, i want you to know i really do appreciate and value the opportunity to experience this," i tell the professor softly before walking off to rejoin the others. "I'm going back to camp with the skull, I'm hungry and tired and we have honestly gotten next to nothing done in the way of work. Time to get back in the game, folks."

I only had to stop once to rest while magically charging my body to carry the ether bleached skull by its closed snout back to camp, which was a surprise even to me in a fully healed condition with over two hundred pounds of bone perched on my shoulder. I left the skull on the back of the slab where i had originally arrived from, the closest point to the marina, and immediately headed to my shelter where i split the current canes making up my roof for more coverage against the etherfall while i take out my boar shoulder and just lazily stretch out and nom away. I was meditating on spreading my awareness throughout the entirety of my aura when the others arrived back at camp, carrying most of the goods they had left with or with trunks of hastily harvested oxides added to the rolls of sinew and small box of crown spines, my goal being to find a way to permanently change the flow of my aura except that tracking all of them back to their individual sources was still far too immense a task for me.

"For someone who got onto everyone for not doing anything before running away, you certainly seem to be getting a lot down," the outline of Harold's body within the distortions of his aura within my field of awareness call out to me as he makes his way across the camp circle toward my shelter.

"I carried the skull, stoked the fire, and worked on my shelter," i retort lazily, emphasizing my slothlike behavior by slowly bringing my boar shoulder to my face and just as slowly taking a bite. When i was one slowly chewing and swallowing, i add, "Not to mention, i killed it."

"Using the arrows i strategized with Emma," he counters.

"And magic that i taught everybody else how to use, don't think i didn't see everybody synchronizing their coats to their magics after me," i dismiss with a smirk. "You would have never figured the Plasma spells out if you hadn't seen me use them, either, but the projection of your magic through your spear? Beautiful, nobody else was utilizing the energy being absorbed by their equipment in the same."

Shaking his head tiredly, Harold concedes, "That trick you pulled with drawing your daggers in a slash and converting their energy to motion and air to project a literal cutting edge is was reminded me of the weapons you reminded everyone to bring along. This spearhead was a gift from my minigame with the professor in making flint and obsidian flats, so it was already overflowing with the professor's energy, it just wasn't until not that i could use it. And, i already knew how to sync magic. Now, get up, break time is over, you're either on the away or construction teams rebuilding the rafts destroyed by the dragon- your raft and my barge that were parked off to the side are the only ones still functional or you're out using your super magic to mine ore."

Sighing in mock form of his exhaustion, i roll over and climb out of my A-frame bed and say quietly, "The beam i cut in two? Didn't really do anything, just guided the energy up and down around my aura that buffered as much as it could. What it didn't got filtered and hit me like a Plasma spell, fused my clothes to my skin and my skin to my superficial bone, you saw that ugly charred heap lying there on the ground, the only reason i could move is because i was putting myself inside the golem. Doc says the arcwelds severed the ligaments and tendons on my spine, but i bought you guys enough time trying to figure out what magics worked on that thing that you guys could formulate a defensive and offensive strategy- and even after that i saved your life with my sand snake. And. Kept. Going. I've been through a hell of a lot, today, but sir yes sir i will get right to work," i finish with, not even wondering what the look on his face was after i walked off toward the edge of the slab closest to the area of oxide boulders around a massive surface deposit of degrading iron in the side of a tall slate rise near the back of the island.

I still wore the inch-thick flat-faced flint hammers i had taken to the beach with me, but my chest had been disintegrated in the blast that had all but killed me, which was not a problem because i no longer needed a chest for holding harvested oxide. Stoping at the edge of the slab to cast Ignition in the palm of my hands, i reach my awareness into the slate and pick out a clen, faultless area to burner away boy making a spearpoint with my fingertips and projecting the Ignition flame through the tiny space in between. Cutting away and stabilizing not only a large box of slate, i carve out a melting bucket, several molds for different types of weapons and tools and sizes of ingots, and wait to recharge by aura before drawing out several large urn-like pots with outstretched, funnel-like mouths and matching lids for catching the etherfall.

Magically arranging these urns about the shelters in camp with halved canes for rain gutters, i place the rest of my slate equipment in the slate box and magically drag it over the sand on my way to the actual iron deposit. Raising myself on a platform of frozen sand and ether to the densest area of natural iron, i once again cast Ignition and hone it to a fine lazer to carve a place for my spouted bucket in the slate under the deposit before taking the time to piece together the halves of the weapons and tool molds by melting them together. Licking the etherfall from my lips to ingest the energy and boost the recovery of my aura, i spark a flame between y hands and use all of my fingertips to project a fanning beam of concentrated thermal energy into the iron that quickly reddens and then glows orange and yellow as it reaches critical temperatures before it starts slagging down the deposit toward my bucket.

Carving a widening chute in the iron over my bucket to help the flow of molten metal, i slowly fill the bucket till i could not magically sustain its weight before pouring the molten iron into the molds i had laid out standing about the area under the bucket and seated in the icy platform. I had to stop for breaks to recharge my aura as well as refill the heavy bucket as i handled it, but i eventually filled not only twelve small, one-handed pickax and hatchet molds, but also twelve single-edged, twenty-inch bladed sword molds whose curving tops denoted the blade side of the blank, twelve large wood ax molds, twelve twelve-inch bladed double-edged dagger molds, twelve three-foot shovel molds, twelve boar style spearhead molds, twelve large, thin blocks containing molds for tens of several different types of arrowheads, and twelve molds for thin-bodied machetes just in case the others had the same preference for chopping tools that i did. After over twenty minutes of hard labor, i had finally done several days' worth of work in one with my magic and sat down on the edge of my slate box to watch the molds finish cooling in the melting ice of and wet sand of the platform.

Taking out all of the open-topped slabs containing multiple rectangular ingot molds of various sizes from the bottom of the box after several moments of meditative breathing, i start pulling all of the cooled weapon molds in their place fitted as best as i could with the shovels filling the bottom before i get back to work melting iron into the bucket. Not long afterward, a familiar aura came walking up the side of my thirty-foot platform where at the top Emma asks, "Do you need any help? I got stuck with cooking duty even though my leg is fine, now, but Billy said he could handle the cooking since we don't need to grind out tools anymore."

Using the half full bucket to fill two of the ten-pound ingot molds, i put it back in its place and say, "If you want to melt the iron for me, i will handle the bucket. Telekinesis drains my energy more than Plasma spells."

"Okay, sure," Emma says a little hesitantly, looking at the inches deep chute that was still glowing a bright red from its previous burning. "How, exactly?"

Smiling a little, i take her hands and lightly pinch the knuckles of her thumb and pinkie finger in toward one another until they make a small hole in the space between them when i bring the heels of her palms together. "Cast Ignition in your hands just in front of this airhole and channel all of your power through that tiny space when you project the heat and fire past your fingertips. I keep all of my fingertips but the middles touching and use that even tinier space to concentrate the projected power like a lazer. Normal oxygen fire will only get up to around five or six hundred, forced airflow like what we use with our energy is around eight hundred which is the softening point for raw iron. Concentrated into such a tiny force-flow space, the heat ray or beam is around a thousand degrees and somewhere between there and eleven-hundred is boiling for iron, so you can't let it sit for too long. Start at the bottom of the funnel and work your way up and down while moving a little higher with every pass- coming back down in the same fashion will be what gets the iron flowing even though i tend to let it get melting on the surface because there is so much here and it's a toxic so try and stay at least ten feet back over here by me."

"How do you always back everything seem so simple," Emma mumbles as a flame appears between her hands and the current of her aura begin focusing into the air hole, telling me it was time to take a step back no matter how strong my aura might be. Copying my usual actuals of deep breathing to steady myself, Emma extends her hands toward the deposit of iron and sends forth a beam of concentrated thermal energy that she carefully measures and tweaks to fit the reddening chut i had already melted from the natural iron. "It really isn't that hard..." she says more to herself than to me as she follows my directions of slowly rising back and forth sweeps up the glowing and softening surface of the otherwise dull gray iron, "I just never would have thought of it."

"Necessity is the mother of all inventions," I tease her gently. "You guys already had a process to follow and using magic around camp seems to be frowned upon, but i am sure you would have all been using magic to speed up the harvesting and burning process if not going straight at the motherlode like i am. I'm a soloist at heart, so in games with player-creative systems i have be on my toes to stay ahead of clans and guilds and all kinds of little groups who work together to... equal me."

"Okay, at first i thought you were just a smartass, but now i know you really are conceited," Emma says with a laugh as the iron begins flowing down toward the bucket with her descending sweeps. I could not help but notice that even my fire burned hotter than hers and that of many others, leading me to wonder if they were just using natural airflow and not compressed gasses. "No, i never would have thought to change the way i hold my hands to change the projection of fire. I would have just thrown more and more fire at it until i burnt myself out."

"Somebody else probably would have," i reassure her as i pick up one of the faintly glowing amethyst and amber dagger molds at the top of the the box to smash open and revelt the one-and-a-half-inch thick blank piece of shaped steel. The handle was a universal seven inches in length and as wide as the iron was blank underneath twelve inches of narrow stiletto style blade with a thin spine of the metal's thickness with narrowing blade areas stretching out for two thirds of an inch to either side, and the entire piece of metal seemed integrated with a searing heat version of my excess amethyst and amber aura. "Soon enough, all of you will get competitive, and then it will be my turn to sit back and learn from all the things you guys come up with."

"Everything we came to this island to work for days for, right there in your hands," Emma says after her second descending sweed, coming to a stop to let her aura charge as the bucket slowly fills to about one-fourth of its volume. "How much iron do you think i managed to melt?"

"These daggers," i say as an experienced, guess, getting up to hand her the dagger i was holding before producing a one-handed Heat Ray with which to continue melting the iron into the bucket that should be the last one we needed as the sun behind the thinning clouds overhead came within only two hours and some change from the top of the volcanoe. "There is one of everything for everybody, whether they want it or not, these ingots are just to make whatever we need as we need it while traveling, but God only knows what we'll need. I have actually been thinking about the magic i have been leaving behind in all of the objects that i make and how you guys figured out how to store a specific energy and purpose into something as quick and simple as glass... maybe after you guys synchronize the energy i left in this gear you guys can turn it into some nifty enchantments- though i suspect they will have be thermal energy related because that seems to to be the purpose of the energy they absorbed.

"Something else i have noticed in the igneous stone tools is that the energy not only fills the structure of the stone on a microscopic level, but it also seems to fill in the spaces between them... on a subatomic level," i muse as my arm gets tired two thirds of the way through the bucket and i have to switch hands for the rest. "This bonding of the energy seems to turn the object from millions of tiny bits, to one giant bit more cohesive than its original state and structure. My daggers would probably need to smashed with over a ton of pressure, but just imagine what that does to metals! The difference between metal and stone is stone is a single crystalline microstucture that, even with other minerals present like granite, still retain their own structures fitting into place among all the other minerals after being sorted out in x amount of mass during cooling while metals have a polycrystalline microstuctures made up of one or multiple minerals in an allow that bond on an atomic level instead of just a structural level and allow the shape of those structures to be changed and manipulated.

"If magic inside quartz or obsidian creates a second bonded structure within the original structure, that would make it a polycrystalline structure, thus making my daggers a quartz-magic and amethyst-magic alloy. This iron, which is heavier and denser than titanium, probably now has an equivalent strength-to-weight ratio of titanium with its alloying magical structure that actually makes it stronger than titanium because of its greater density. I doubt we could ever break these swords and axes except against an exponentially greater magical force, the exponent decreasing as we use the energy of the weapons- which i presume will be rechargable depending on enchantment- by enchanting it or just changing the energy beyond synchronizing."

"The only thing i really got out of that was quartz is iron and iron is titanium," Emma says dryly after my rant as i stop beaming the iron deposit with heat and let the bucket finish filling on its own while i let my aura recharge in the downpour that seemed to be slowly softening to a drizzle. "But, would that make a diamond titanium or titanium diamond?"

I could not help but stop and laugh as i actually tried to make a formula to find the answer, giving Emma a wry grin. "You have a bit of a mean streak on you, did you know that?"

"I know these molds won't fill themselves," she retorts, looking up at the sky as she too seems to notice the change in the etherfall. "Is it really ending?"

"Yeah... we probably have until the sun reaches the volcanoe until the storm is over," i reply sadly, watching the bucket fill with brightly glowing molten metal that hisses softly in the etherfall. "After this, i am going to pick out my preferred weapons and tools and focus on storing energy until the etherfall is over. I set out some pots to catch ether, but... probably too little and too late even though i set most of my roof canes on my pot. I don't know if we can overcharge ourselves with it in the future, but i know it'll recharge my aura in under a minute and we could probably throw herbs and stuff to give it extra benefits. Maybe, if i soak some of my gems like this one garnet i found, the etherfall will be absorbed into a crystal as converted energy."

"Okay, so dump some herbs and rocks in my etherfall before i drink it, i think I'm following," Emma says while tring not to crack herself up and finally giving in loudly when she finishes talking.

Pretending as if i had never heard her, i decide to share with my only current friend more of my thoughts on the subject of magic with, "The best part is how, every time you place yourself in your awareness and strengthen its bonds, the easier it is to trance and use magic and the stronger the overall affects of your magic becomes as it reflexively becomes more efficient. From what i learned using the mist to recharge my aura after my surgery in the bath, we can't necessarily see our magic and others until later on. I was honestly either oblivious or only subconsciously aware of everybody else's auras and magic before the actual etherfall, and my aura was only like ten yards in any direction, but your aura and magic itself is like a muscle, the more you flex it and use it and reach your critical limits it will recharge with a little extra juice and a little bit faster almost every time. If i were you, i would focus on this aspect for as long as the etherfall lasts so that you have more overall energy to play with in the future- one of the reasons why i will be collecting and storing energy after these molds cool."

"Then hurry up and pour the iron so we can go be lazy," she urges me, gently pushing me forward toward the awaiting bucket and away from the slate box where she was taking a seat.

Shaking my head with a tired sigh as i wonder if i had chosen to befriend the right person, i quickly set about the task of filling the ten-pound mold brackets with over half of the bucket's contents before moving on to the eight- and then finally the five-pound ingot molds that quickly settle into the melting platform of frozen ether and its displaced sand. Cheating in my own plans by gathering the steam from the melting platform in my aura and storing it as condensed liquid, i manage to acquire over a gallon of etherfall before the slate slabs and ingots within were finally cooled and continue gathering the etherfall that enters my aura from above while directly using some to manipulate the contents of the crate onto the platform before lining the bottom of the box with cooled ingots. Proceeding to smash the rest of the weapon and tool molds by hand with Emma's help when she quickly joins in, we both practice auric collecting and conversions the ether into our magic while organizing the weapons and tools we free from their slate containment into the chest.

Breaking down the platform into ether and loose sand in a slow descent, i use several gallons of the gathered etherfall to transport the small armory of blank equipment back to the slab and then over it to drag a long grayish white streak of scratched stone all the way to camp where i leave the chest in front of the storage building after picking out each tool with the strongest of my auras. "Weapons and tools, here!" I call out to the few people still at camp. "Get your weapons and tools, here! Swords, axes, hatches, daggers, shovels, spears, and a pick for every nose! Come and get it!"

Heading back to the back of the slab after checking to see that my pot was only a third of the way full even with more trickling in from each of the canes resting on the outstreched rim, i use more of the many gallons of ether i had collected from my platform to boil away a deep conical pit in the slate while picking out all of the quartz and iron in the evaporating slab in my aura , i condense my molten rock and metal into a hollow orb and then pack it in tightly by surrounding it in all of the cooling slag remaining in the bottom. Freezing the layered ball that was larger than my head with a brief stripping of its temperature down to zero fahrenheit, i let the surrounding pit that was still glowing a dull red with head thaw the orb before stripping the thermal energy from the pit itself and store it within the structure of the outer shell that simmered with the heat it struggled to contain. Carving a lid from the neighboring area that i can slide smoothly over the pit with magic, i deposit my stored ether into the pit where it immediately begins to boil away in a fierce cloud of vapor that i cut off a split second later my telekinetically shoving the new lid over the bit before combining Telekinesis and Ignition to pyrokinetically fuse the edges of the lid to the slab with a long, continuious stream of manipulated Lazer that arcs perfectly about the lid.

Laying out my citrine spear and crystalline daggers and all of my magic iron equipment about the perfect circle of slate lidding my geode experiment, i lay out in the middle of the array of weapons and stretch my aura out thin like a sheet in all directions for almost eighty yards in every direction as far as i could stretch my awareness. Dividing my attention between zen breathing and converting all of the ether that comes into my aura into energy, i store this wild energy about my equipment and simply bide my time while constantly pushing and pushing at the edges of my straining EMF. I had to break trance and let myself recover from the mental strain of pushing at my empty mind and maintaining my state of nothingness at such a superficial level, but it was not long before i could return to my practices on and off until the etherfall finally ended when the sun met the rim of the volcanoe in the distance and the ether clouds had ben spent to vague patches of vapor in the air.

Harold and the current away team arrived from their outing not long after the end of the storm as the shadow of the volcanoe stretched out, hauling pallets of wood and fruit and even a small pile yellow berry and purple stalk herbs. The others lost their composure entirely when Emma and Billy showed them the crate of tools that i had made, but Harold seemed to be able to put a dark cloud over any party by complaining about not having weapons and tools to the style he would have preferred to which Emma surprisingly said to use ingots and his own magic. Everybody else was more than satisfied with their thick, Japanese style swords with round, bulbous handguards above hexogonal naked tangs, setting to work in the dimming light on grinding boulders all around the camp at grinding their weapons down to edges without magic to preserve what they had left of their overcharged auras.

I could only sense the presense of the others auras when they were close to my own after having spent my overcharge on maximizing the pressure within the geode chamber, but even after losing the extended capacity affects of the etherfall my newly thirty-one foot aura still recharged at the same rate as it had in the mist before the etherfall despite the clear air and skies. I had already ground my sword, dagger, the horizontal blade of my hammer-faced pick, my larger ax to use the hammer-backed hatchet as a blunt wedge, and even my spear to the appropriate bevels by walking along the sides of the giant camp slab while holding my tools to the top of the three-foot tall slate, but now i was waiting until it was dark to temper my iron with magic and not hopefully not only increase the amount of bonding magic in the weapon but also strengthen the alloying energies themselves before sharpening it to a final edge. Only then would whatever edge i made be at full potential, but Emma and Billy earlier had no problem with going stright from broad, dramatic cutting edges similar to the Japanese style and the style of blades we had been putting on our slate tools and now it did not seem like any of the others seemed to think of it or care. I could have went ahead with the tempering then and there in the dark shadow of the volcanoe, but i wanted to see if anyone actually knew about making these weapons.

During the magic lessons, it had been interesting to see the others copying my use of magic, but seeing them trying to copy almost everything i did was beginning to grate at my nerves. Whenever i had friends in a game, i had no problem carrying their characters because eventually i would need them for aspects of a game that required multiple people, but i had yet to make any connections with most of the people here and they had yet to do the same with me so why should i be handing them everything? For this group project, i was more than willing to tank the big bad beasts that we come across because that benefitted me, but at this rate i would have to start doing all of my personal projects in private.

My boar leg was dwindling down to the lower shin meat by the time Harold came up to my shelter where i had been lounging for the past few hours since their arrival back at camp. "You really do enjoy doing nothing, don't you?" He asks as i set my boar leg aside and roll about in my furs.

"Look, man, I'm a retiree, give me a break," i groan from within my furs. "What do you want this time? I made the weapons and equipment, saved everybody a couple of days they can spend on their magic and hunting for hides to make armor. It's the last day of the grace period, we all get ratings when we log out or back in. The game is going to get a lot harder from here on out because mobs will start spawning in on us without the professor, everyone deserves to relax while they still can because it wouldn't be until today or tomorrow that most people would even be meeting or learning of each other- we are leaps and bounds ahead of the future competition."

"No, i was actually coming over here to thank you, i expected you to break down some oxide boulder and fill all the chests," he says somewhat awkwardly, unable to look at me when i stick my head out of the roll of furs. "But, as it turns out, you're a giant asshole, so get up and find some way to make yourself useful. Try coming up with a way for us to defend ourselves against stuff like that baby water dragon without etherfall."

"I'm working on that as we speak," i argue childishly, knowing i was going to regret my next words. "I am currently channeling twice my recharge rate into my ring to convert it into electricity while draining my aura to critical before cutting the flow of stored energy to only my recharge rate to stretch my critical mass. When i let my aura recharge, it is usually an inch or around it larger than before, you should tell everybody that we have a way to specifically train the capacity of our magic. Otherwise, look back on historical weapons like the scorpio and make some for the rafts and camp yourselves, i want to get my aura to its overcharge size before i make any next moves."

"People listen to me because i was trained for situations like these, but you... you just breeze through everything. Worse, people like you, and they would probably like to work with you instead of around you," Harold states simply with a bitter undertone. "I was trained for situations like these, magic and otherwise alien world aside, and to lead people, but i have never actually done that and this is a group of civilians that i simply wasn't raised around. Strict military family and education all my life, so i could really use some help in this because you either already know or learn on the spot everything about this game we all need to know to survive out here. Plus, i can't make a crossbow!"

"Neither can i," i shrug from within my coccoon. "Just something about the trigger mechanism, we have nothing but the bow for tension and idk how to make something that isn't one shot only. Maybe a repeating bow mechanism, a second bow underneath that is primed by the second bow firing so firing the empty or fitting an arrow through a cane body would allow for a semi-semi-automatic two-shot and first reload when the second shot fires. But then you would have to replace both arrows. Handheld crossbows, small versions the lesser combatives can use to support each other and a greater combative team member, but repeating scorpios would be valuable assets in any setting when the shooter would have to change positions anyway. Make it happen, claim it, people will like you."

Scoffing loudly enough to attract the attention of the others, Harold asks, "Is that your way of trying to be nice? You're completely missing the point!"

"What am i supposed to do, seriously?" I ask as i retreat back into my furs as my aura finishes recharging. "It's, like, five hours til nightfall, do you want me to take a team off to some uncharted island and see what animals attack while we gather firewood and coconuts? Everybody else is just out practicing magic, which is what I'm doing, and i can't make people reliant on me by teaching them everything like i told you earlier, and I honestly and both physically and mentally exhausted no matter what anybody says about health and magic recharge rates. Next session, We'll do something fun as a group like go out in bulk to attract numbers with our overall rating and farm everybody some skins so we can all make armor as a group. Stop worrying about connecting with people, too, it's too late in the day and there are no set meal times yet."

Harold said nothing after that, just turned and stalked off in frustration in the general direction of where the others were all practicing elemental variations of the thermal lazer that i had shown Emma and stretching the limits of their magic. I knew i was probably going to regret blowing Harold off, in some way shape or form, but i really was only interested in my current pursuits and those i would have to perform later before finally settling in for bed with some introspective meditations. Right now, i had to finish working on calculating the increase of my aura per hour spent stretching it while i still had access to this kind of recharge rate.

Thirty-three was the amount of reach in feet that my EMF flowed outward to when i stopped alternating between my different weapons with my draining storage, long after the others had given up their combat related practices and retired to their shelters to perform the same auric training i was finishing. Getting out of my sweltering cocoon of furs over two hours after settling in, i collect my iron weapons and tools to take out beyond the the shelters where i sit down to meditate. My first step was to incorporate my energy into that of the alloys and separate the blades from the spines of my sword and dagger before wholely encompassing the rest of the tools that required overall hardness for functionality, then i raised all of the spines and tangs and whole tools to critical temperature before sharply stripping them down to one hundred degrees to quench them at maximum hardness.

Raising the blade portions of my sword and dagger independantly, i quench them gradually from the spines to the edges at a slowing pace so that it vaguely softened toward my weapons cutting edges that needed shoftness over hardness to thin out appropriately. Because of the relative perfection of my tempering, there was no hamone or line of differentiating steel scales between the spines and the blades, but the gradual process of quenching i had used made the entire blade areas differentiated slightly by their fifty-degree quench changes. Now all i needed was to make suitable sheathing, which was a project better suited for tomorrow than tonight as i brought my equipment back to camp.

Most of the others were reliving the fight against the water dragon around the fire, listening to Harold and Sasha talk about regrouping during my golem snake fight with the dragon and then splitting up a rescue detatchment and offensive distraction while the snake fought with the remains of my golem. Everybody quietly cheered as Sasha talked about watching a giant watery hand knock the living hell out of the 'water snake' like everybody wanted to, and even i could not help but smile as i quietly stowed away my belongings and prepared for meditation. I could not help but relive my own awe and amazement after my thirteen arrow barrage that 'even obliterated the hill behind the damn thing' by Emma's words, but by that point everybody was running out of things to talk about except to start breaking down the way that Doc had made our coats in two layers of skin woven together about the body for armor and the close the hems and cuffs as well as speculation on how to replicate this process in making their own armor.

Even in a trance drifting along the currents of my aura as i tried to follow a single path back to its source sources, i could hear them make serious and joking and even a few scandalous designs with their plans for armor once they all finally had enough materials to make some. Probably thinking that i had gone to sleep and logged out instead of gone into meditation, Harold waits until the conversation gets to different animals and dividing hides to say, "Zai and I were actually talking a little bit about this, he said that he magic-crafted these weapons and tools for us to celebrate our newfound powers and success as a group in our next session by going out hunting. This is the last day of our grace period, we get new ratings now and as a group we would attract either the biggest or the most enemies to gather hides to make leather from. Not only these iron weapons but also these full-body coats afford us the edges we need to take quick leaps and bounds while here at the island."

Because the conversation was about me, it only seemed natural that Emma was the first person to cut in, saying, "Zai has honestly told me a lot about crafting things and magic and just stuff in general from reality about the game that has seriously helped me out a lot, especially for future crafting and magic use. If he thinks we're ready and capable to go out looking for trouble, i say we do it. Sure, getting ambushed by a giant serpent was scary, but that was the most insane experience of my life and i want to do it again. Who's in?"

The vote was quick and unanimous, even the troll of the group who has used some of the strongest wails during the fight, in favor of going out as a full party to an untouched island somewhere with remarks about how if i was leading the hunt we were sure to find another dragon or that if anything worse should show up i would be there to buy time to escape. It was honestly a little moving to be held in such high regard, in some way shape or form everybody here- even Harold- looked up to me, and i was both brought nearly to the point of crying out how i would never let them down and screaming in frustration for having got myself mired in the positions of tank and role model. Giving up on my meditations after cycling in and out of myself and my range without ever reaching the nova-like sources around the same time that the others finish their campfire talk and begin retiring to their structures, i quickly find my way to sleep.

*