Book 2 - Chapter 6: The Jankiest Stuff

“Not a bad spread, really. Is going all in on MAG really a good idea? You’ve tested it?”

“Sort of. Every long shot I’ve pulled off has been because I could do weird shit with Hard Time. If I’m going to take down guys like Breca, I don’t think it’s going to be in conventional ways.”

Brett considered this carefully.

“I guess that’s true. Whatever swordsman class he has is probably a good one, maybe a rare one. You can’t fight a great conventional class with an unconventional class without going unconventional, probably.” Having finished his food, he took his bowl over to the shower and rinsed it. “So my job just got harder.”

“Why?”

“I can make you armor, sure. But that’s going to have serious limits in terms of how much it helps you. And I can’t make you weapons. That’s not something I’ve focused on, but it’s something I thought I might be able to learn to do.”

“So where does that leave us?”

“Well, first, it starts with us switching bedrooms. You might be tired, but I’m not on the same schedule yet. And I have a lot of notifications from the system about my new role to get through.” He went and sat down at the worktable, verifying that a few tools were present before dismissing them. “Go sleep in the store room. I’ll get to work. Maybe by the time you wake up, I’ll be able to tell you more.”

Sean grabbed his pack and weapons and walked to the store room. Really, besides shower access, it didn’t matter much where he slept. Of course, that was if he could sleep. It had been a long and dangerous day, and he still had the vast majority of the Tells in the space left to kill. Sooner or later, chances were he’d catch an apple to the forehead and that would be all they wrote about him.

Before laying down, he ran back into the workroom and retrieved a couple of screw-top sports drink bottles. He thoroughly washed them before cutting one of his Tell-apples up and putting half of it into one bottle, then mashing the other half and putting it into the other. Filling the bottles up with water, he screwed the lids down tight and left them sitting on his shelf.

“Making potions with that alchemy skill?” Brett asked. “The cellblock brew master thing?”

“Yup. I haven’t messed around with it much, if you don’t count poisoning a god’s foot with it. Thought now would be a good time.”

Brett blinked a bit at the “poisoning a god” part before shaking his head and moving on.

“Well, here’s a tip for you. Don’t close those lids all the way. If your skill makes that shit ferment, you’ll wake up covered in that shit. Pressure explodes.”

Shit, it does. I knew that.

Sean loosened the lids up immediately before sitting back down on his bed.

“Thanks for that. I really did forget.”

“No problem. Long days will do that. Talk to you in the morning.”

Brett left, closing the door behind him. Sean killed the lights. It turned out he shouldn’t have worried about falling asleep. He was out almost the second he laid down.

—

The next morning, Sean woke up to not one but two completed potions. Unsurprisingly, they weren’t enough to make him level. He was guessing this was the most basic alchemy he could do, and given that it was entirely possible that pure alchemists spent all their time and money leveling their skills, he didn’t expect a whole lot of progress from his day-one efforts.

That said, he’d take what he got, and gladly. His two bottles gave him the same thing, showing no difference in whether the apples were mashed or not. The bottles were now filled with a uniform, golden liquid, with interspersed apple chunks floating here and there in the juice.

Apple Drink

You’ve put some apples in water, producing apple water. Honestly, this shouldn’t do anything at all, but you have a magic alchemy skill and you’re using magic apples, and that’s something.

Your primitive potion-making attempt has succeeded in drawing out a bit more of the power of the Tell apples, producing a kind of liquid breakfast that will keep you going all day. An entity that consumes a bottle of this stuff will have no hunger and no energy problems related to food for 24 hours.

Besides that, you don’t get much. No stat increases, no magic apple powers, no nothing. Try harder. Do better.

Apple drink is shelf stable for one month, at which point it will revert to gross apple water.

It wasn’t much, but he had almost doubled the effectiveness of the apples. For now, he left the bottles alone, banking them against future food emergencies.

Brushing his teeth and splashing some water on his face, Sean walked into the common room. And although he had no idea how long he had been asleep, he could tell Brett had been busy almost the entire time.

“Oh, good, you’re up. Get in here. I have some stuff to show you.” Brett was in full work-mode, and surrounded by pile after pile of shredded garbage. “Don’t worry about the mess. I’ll clean up later.”

Sean started picking through one of the piles, which appeared to be entirely made of painstakingly shredded paper.

“What even is this? Confetti?” Sean picked up a handful of destroyed tin-can labels and paper trash and let it flutter to the ground. “Are we going to have a parade?”

“Ha, no. Trust me, there are a lot of ways to use that kind of stuff. But not right now.” Brett stood up, picked his way through the little piles of trash, then selected two of them to transport to the table. “This is the stuff that matters for today. Check it out.”

Sean walked up to the table and took a closer look at the piles. One was entirely long strips of plastic cut or otherwise harvested from various sources. At a glance, Sean could see pieces of milk jug, shopping bags, three-ring binders, and plastic food storage containers like would usually be used for leftovers.

“So, you know how you’ve been getting pin cushioned by arrows? That stops today.” Brett held up one of the strips of plastic, then laid it on the table. “You can’t count on dodging all the apples, and even if you could, you’d be slowing down too much on the approach to do it. You need to be able to bum-rush into range to kill these things. This is how you do that.”

“With a pile of shredded vegetable juice bottles?”

“Yes, basically. Bear with me here. I don’t know how great ancient weaponry education was in your time, but it became sort of important to know as the Apocalypse kicked into gear, especially for crafters like me.”

He started laying out strips of plastic parallel to each other, then started layering in other strips parallel to them, like he was building a gross pie crust.

“If you go back far enough into history, you find there was a whole period where metal was pretty expensive. Things like shields take a lot of metal to make, so you’d see wood, or linen over wood, things like that. But one of the coolest things to me were rattan or wicker shields.”

“Wicker like the chair?”

“Yeah, same sort of stuff. They wove shields out of it, like a little tight bush they’d carry around on their arm. And don’t get me wrong, they weren’t the greatest shields. But I think we can do a little better, and I think it’s worth it.”

Sean looked at the pattern of rubbish Brett was laying out and suddenly realized what he was saying.

“You want to forge a garbage shield? To stop arrows with? That’s never gonna work.”

“Not forge. Weave. And it is, for several reasons.”

Brett held up his index finger.

“First, modern plastic is way lighter than wood. We can do a dozen layers of this stuff. And it’s all going to be slightly irregular, so any weapon is going to have to punch through each layer in turn, with some hard layers mixed in midway. I worked out the weight last night, and we can make this sucker six inches thick, or more, before it starts to be heavy enough that you’d even notice.”

He stuck out his thumb next.

“Second, you don’t even really need to stop the arrows. Mostly you just need a surface to catch the apples on, one that isn’t your body. You can still dodge the easy apples, and for the ones that aren’t, you can try to get on the edges of the shield, just to keep them off your body. Then you don’t have to care about the arrows because unless they get behind you and double back, they’re headed at the shield.”

Brett’s middle finger came up.

“Third, I’m not the one making the shield. Even if I had the skills for shields, and I don’t really have those, these materials are the lowest of the lowest grade. It would be shit. The system would make it be shit, just because in the context of my class it should be. But if you make it…”

“Then it’s a magic garbage-improv shield, and the system loves it?”

“Something like that. At the very least, it shouldn’t penalize you for it, and that’s all you need. I think the physics alone works out to stop the arrows here, or at least slows them down enough you don’t need to worry about them. As long as it doesn’t intentionally nerf you, you should be good.”

Sean considered what Brett was saying, hating that it made sense. But it did. “I only see two problems here, one little, and one big.” Sean said, wincing at the admission.

“What are those?”

“First, the system might not like you designing my stuff. We have no idea how it feels about that.”

“True, but we should know now if that’s the case instead of later. That’s not the kind of thing the system keeps quiet about.”

“Fair.” It was true. When Sean had pushed the limits of his crafting, the system made sure to tell him. If it wasn’t cool with Brett being part of the process, it would either tell him or it wouldn’t give him a project-complete notification in the first place. “It would probably tell us. So that’s not a problem exactly, I admit it.”

“What’s the second problem?”

“I have no idea how to do any of the shit you are talking about. The craftiest I usually get is tying my shoes.”

“Oh, Sean. That’s where I come in,” Brett said, laughing. “If there’s one thing the system never penalizes, it’s teaching people how to do stuff.”

—

“I can’t do this, you old bastard.”

Sean had been at it for hours now. The morning was shot. He had finally managed to figure out how to weave a pretty tight layer, then got hung up on joining layers together. When he finally figured out how to weave two layers of plastic fabric together, he then had to then duplicate it tons of times. It was a pain in the ass, and he hated it.

“Yes, you can. You actually are getting better at this, believe it or not.” Brett said. “There are a couple more steps that won’t be fun for you, but it doesn’t matter. You aren’t on a clock, and not dying is important. I can’t overstate that enough.”

“This is bullshit, though. I don’t know how you handle it.”

Brett shrugged. “I have skills that help, and I work with better materials. But everyone’s first couple projects are this way. Stick with me, Sean. We’ll get you the basics you need to make the jankiest stuff this world has ever seen.”