We settled in that evening near the forge, using it for heat and cooking rather than setting up a campfire. I was busy reading the rune book that the stoat had found for me and occasionally interrupting Juniper’s card game with Shrek to ask her about things I wasn’t quite grasping. Which is to say, Juniper occasionally interrupted her tutoring me in runic reasoning to play cards with Shrek. Juniper, for her part, was actually a bit more chipper than usual. It was logical, once I thought about it for more than two seconds – she had put in quite a day’s work.
First, she absolutely demolished almost a full dozen automaton soldiers. Then she found a way to free Therin Oreclaw from his imprisonment in a spirit crystal, which in turn defeated the Forge Wraith that had been using poor Therin as a sort of living battery. Then, she talked me into helping to find a way to give Therin a body once we were back on the Plains. Oh, and a job. She also volunteered me to find him a job amongst the Eidolon. Talk about exceptional capacity utilization…if Henry were here, he’d be sploojing his pants over Juniper hitting her superhero KPIs in a single day.
We had all done fairly well for the past couple of days, though, and it was showing in both our battle performance and our stat sheets. Juniper had jumped even further ahead of Shrek and me, having killed so many high-level automatons and then getting several achievements for killing the wraith and saving Therin. She’d gotten the majority of the available XP for the second floor and, honestly, I couldn’t even be mad about it. Shrek and I barely did anything in comparison. Juniper ended the day at level 18, hovering dangerously close to nineteen. The stoat was keeping pace with her, sitting at level 16. Meanwhile, both Shrek and I were level 15. He was mildly irritated that I’d managed to catch up to him, but even he couldn’t discount how much my mapping skills carried us through the first floor.
In addition to all that XP, Juniper also got the best loot of the floor – the Talons of Turmoil gauntlet:
They weren’t super powerful yet, but we could all see the potential for them. She’d be slinging lightning and fire bolts in no time. Shrek’s Copperplate Bracers were pretty decent, but they certainly weren’t on the Talons’ level. Meanwhile, I didn’t really know what I had in my Crafting Kit. It had a high rarity, so that had me hopeful, but it was certainly no guarantee. I decided to test it out. I had some ideas in mind, after reading some of the rune book, anyway. So, I excused myself from the group and wandered off to the opposite side of the boss room to set up shop. I enabled the kit and a crafting table appeared before me with UI screens overlaid here and there allowing me to pull out certain items, tools, and materials whenever I wanted them. That was certainly convenient.
I pulled out the second pattern I had made out of the Burrow Tyrant’s pelt and got to work. The sewing I was able to pull off on this pattern was quite a bit better than I’d managed on the holster I’d made. I ignored Shrek’s laughter and jokes about me becoming a professional seamstress and focused in on the details of the work since these were going to require a much higher level of intricacy than I was really confident I could accomplish. The job got easier as I went, though. Of course, the mere fact that I was able to use an actual sewing needle from the Crafting Kit rather than one improvised from my infiltration tools was likely feeding my success to a degree. In the end, it didn’t matter as I was able to craft a pair of fingerless gloves that were registered as Rare by The System. I wasn’t quite done, however.
I opened the rune book to a page I had dog-eared and sketched out a couple of the runes onto the back of each glove. Then, I pulled some of the required elements from my Crafting Kit’s storage and dusted the runes with them. I had the stoat heat up my dagger and used that to sear the runes into the leather. When I finished, I had two tan-colored gloves with metallic runes etched into their backs. I needed one final element to fully complete the rune binding, and that was to read the spells from their respective pages. I chanted the words aloud, trying my best to imitate the intonation and pronunciations Juniper had taught me.
Now these, I was excited for…and they actually made me feel a little better about the Crafting Kit. I’d had a much easier time creating these than I had the holster. I closed out the Crafting Kit and slipped on my new gloves before meandering back over to join Juniper and Shrek.
“The game is stupid,” Shrek complained. “That’s all. If we had brought a proper orcish game, I’d win easily.”
“Well, obviously,” Juniper countered, “if you brought a game that none of the rest of us knew how to play, you’d probably beat us at least once or twice.”
“I don’t know,” I said, as I sat down next to her. “The stoat didn’t know how to play cards at all and it was still beating Shrek every time.”
“It beat you, too, idiot.”
“Yeah…that’s fair.”
And that’s what we did for the rest of the night. We sat around joking, making fun of one another, eating good food that was cooked over a likely carcinogenic heat source, and just generally enjoying the camaraderie. Fighting to the death was a funny thing in how it could unite three utterly different people with completely different backgrounds and cultures – if not in friendship, then at the very least in an implied understanding that we were all in this thing together. I even caught Shrek grinning once or twice…though it may have just been gas.