Book 2 - Chapter 21: Blueprinter

Sean blinked.

Three fucking levels? That’s… double. Two times as many levels. Fuck.

Scrambling nearly every moment of one’s life and spending the rest of what little spare time he had left passed out from exhaustion didn’t leave much time to meditate on the nature of things, sure. But it burned Sean’s ass that he had apparently been sitting on three whole levels of advancement, lacking a little bit of peace and quiet to think about the concept of time.

But there it was. The only consolation he had was that it had been less than a month since time had been relevant at all. A normal person approaching this competition in a normal way would have had much, much more time than he did.

For a few more hours, he did his best to try to think of all the timey things he could. If he could use both his speed-up and slow-down powers on one object at the same time, would it be unaffected? If he had a clock inside one of these time-warped spaces and dragged it back out into the real world, what amount of time would it show?

It wasn’t any use. It was all stupid stuff he mostly thought he knew the answers to anyway, and even he didn’t feel like it had increased his understanding of anything. He was left with the improvements he already had, which at least were substantial enough to give him a whole new skill description.

Hard Time

By focusing, you can affect the flow of time. When you push something against the flow of time, it slows it down, allowing time to flow faster around it. When you push something with the flow of time, it goes faster.

But is that it? You know it’s not. Time is probably the most confusing force. This was at least arguably true in your old pocket dimension, but it’s also considered to be a hell of a thing to try to understand well in the greater system universe.

You’ve recently hypothesized that there are more “angles” to push things at than towards and away from time at a flat angle. The system is glad to confirm that this is true enough to work given your current understanding of time in general. That said, your current understandings of time are mostly bullshit and misunderstandings, so that’s not saying much.

Don’t feel bad. The System’s understanding of time isn’t perfect, either. It’s just much better than yours, but we are all of us on a journey of learning.

When you use Hard Time, you now have the opportunity to put what billiard players would call “English” on the ball. So to speak. You can still use it in an unguided vanilla sort of way, of course, with slightly improved results compared to how things used to be. But you can also now try to finesse things, inject intent, and hit weirder targets than before.

Will this always work? Who knows. Probably not, honestly. But it’s a chance to improve, at least.

Hard Time scales with MAG, and advances based on MAG, your use of the skill, and your understanding of the forces that drive it.

And that would have to be good enough. For now.

—

“Done already?”

“Yeah. At least as done with thinking about my skills as I can be right now, apparently.” Sean plopped down on the floor. “I took a short nap, and it reminded me that I’ve only been awake for several hours. I’ll try to sleep again later.”

“Got it.” Brett turned his attention back to the table, where he had laid out a bunch of shredded trash in a way that indicated he was trying to work on improvements to the jellyfish shield. Sean had no way of knowing how that was going, really. Brett’s mind was a storm of crafter mysteries to him.

“What about you? You’ve been doing a lot of weird crafting lately. Any progress on that?”

“I thought you’d never ask.” Brett set down all his tools. “First, I think you already know being a crafter is pretty boring, usually. You have to like crafting a lot for it to be worth it, and how much you like it has a lot to do with how good you get at it.”

“You seem to like it fine.”

“I do. And I like working with leather a stupid amount. Which means I think a bit harder when I’m planning a piece, and I’m willing to put more work into a project. That helps me advance.” Brett scooped up a cup of water from the workbench and took a swig. “People who get into crafting without liking the fundamental task of creating things generally don’t get very good at it because they don’t grind as hard. Grinding hard is the big, important part you can’t replace. The system can help with the skill parts, system ingredients can sometimes make up for a lack of knowledge, but the rest is up to the crafter.”

“Okay. And…” Sean glanced up at Brett, who had the look of a man with a surprise to share. “And that’s different here how?”

“It’s different here because you’ve made shit really weird for me. You know how many crafters make recipes for other people to build? Almost none of them, at least on Earth. Crafting skills are usually too different for that to work. I’ve only met a handful of leather workers, and their approach was too different for me to be much use to them. And vice versa.”

Brett pointed at Sean with his cup, accusingly.

“But your shit, your crafting shit? It’s broken. Basically anything you try works, at least a little. So when I made you a shield design, and you built it out, it got a full, system-named success. When I made you a thermite recipe, the system modified it to fit your class.”

“That’s not normal?”

“Who knows?” Brett shrugged. “Nobody ever tries it, at least. Nobody even has the opportunity for it. Much less for the person who uses these new design to then go out and kill things with it. You’ve been proving these things work in the field by not dying with them. And I’ve been getting little achievements that make me better at making plans for other people, helping with prep work…”

“You are saying that part like it’s even less normal, you know.”

“Sean, do you know how rare it is to get an achievement at this point? I’ve already mined out all the easy ones, and most of the hard ones. I basically shouldn’t get any at all unless I’m working with some kind of legendary material. Crafter achievements affect everything a crafter does, usually. They make every piece of armor better.”

Sean stretched out his legs on the floor as Brett stood up and paced, letting him rant for a bit.

Brett continued, “Not all these achievements do that, but some of them do, and they make the rest of the stuff you do with your weird crafting skills better if I’m involved.” He motioned at the worktable. “I’ve been cutting little strips of garbage all day. They’re still garbage, sure, but the strips are better than they should be.”

Brett came and sat again, looking at Sean dead in the eye.

“I want you to know it’s weird for me to be showing you this, but there’s no point it holding it back.”

Blueprinter (Class Skill)

Your class has deviated from pure crater to something different and more confusing. Where once you did 100% of the work in transforming raw materials into honest-to-god armor and accessories, you now sometimes play a support role. You plan. You guide. You process materials for someone else to use. And when it’s appropriate, you go hands-off, allowing the other person to take control of your projects.

When a person builds a project that in some way utilizes materials you’ve prepared, designs you’ve contributed to, or advice you’ve given, the end product gets a small buff to performance. This buff grows based on how much better your contributions madme the finished product.

The effectiveness of this skill scales with your own primary crafting stats, and with your pre-existing crafting skills where relevant.

“That seems…” Sean was flabbergasted. His own weird crafting was already pretty good, in its way. It let him build things he shouldn’t be able to build without practice, and gave stat buffs he absolutely shouldn’t be able to get. “That seems good. I was already surprised when the system didn’t penalize me for letting you help. But…”

“Yeah, it’s paying you for the help instead. Technically, it’s paying me, but still. That’s one hell of a weird class you have.” Brett stood up again, and went back to the workbench, where he finally seemed to settle down a little. “You have a class that runs on both jankiness and sophisticated design and skill. That shouldn’t happen. Which means we now can, well…”

“Build exquisite garbage?”

“Something like that. The general direction of every project should still be yours, really. Which is why I haven’t bothered you about whatever you have there in your pack, so far. I wanted you to have time to think about it.”

Sean really hadn’t shown Brett his loot yet outside the Tapple Tree which had just materialized in the hallway in a big pot. He wasn’t trying to hide the heart, either. There had just been more important things on his plate.

Fighter’s Heart (Crafting Material)

The fighter’s heart is forged through training in tough conditions, and carries the weight of every bit of pain it’s endured in pursuit of its goals. It’s noble, strong, and tough. It’s also really gross.

Looking a lot like an actual heart you cut out of somebody, the fighter’s heart is a mid-high tier crafting material carrying elements of toughness, resilience, and weight. Fold it into your favorite high-grade metal to insert that extra oomph your strikes have been missing, or get real creative with it and do something weird. It’s up to you!

“Huh. Yeah, that’s… interesting. Inconvenient, a bit.” Brett scratched his beard.

“Why? It seems pretty good to me.” Sean walked over and thumped the heart on the table. The system wasn’t kidding about the “carries the weight” bits of the description. The sucker was heavy.

“It’s just that the system clearly wants this to be used in an alloy, or something like that. Neither of us are smiths, and even if we were, it feels like doing traditional smithing stuff with this thing would go against what the system wants for your class. I think this is a more general piece of loot that you just… got. It’s not tailored for you.”

“So it’s useless? I don’t believe that.”

“Neither do I.” Brett looked at the heart for a few moments, before dumping it into a bucket. “Do me a favor. Think real hard about how you, Sean Lawrence, want to use this. As an experiment. Once you come up with a direction for it, I’ll help you make that a reality. We can see how that goes.”

Sean was fine with that. The shield had been Brett’s design, and was fine. The hand had been almost entirely his idea, and was a bit better. If Brett wanted to experiment with something that was almost entirely Sean’s concept refined through Brett’s superior design skills, that at least seemed like the next logical experiment for them.

Brett was getting something out of this too. Growing. Since that was the case, Sean was going to lean into the collaborative crafting process hard. And if he got weapons better than any crafter could usually make by themselves, at Brett’s level?

That was just fine too.