Taylor and the Twisted Game Part 23

Taylor glanced up from the engineering book she was reading when Armsmaster and Dragon walked into the lounge. "How did the run go?"

"Efficient and frustrating," Colin replied as they walked over so they didn't have to talk across the room. "Wings flew up in the sky in Zul'Gurub then grabbed all of the trolls she could see and compressed them into a ball for us to shoot."

Taylor glanced at Dragon then looked back at Armsmaster. "Let me guess, you wanted more of a challenge?"

"It feels like cheating," Colin admitted, his desire for efficiency conflicting with his desire for a decent fight.

"To each their own," Taylor replied with a grin.

Dragon glanced at the diagrams covering the page of Skitter's book it was open to. "What are you reading?"

"It's basically notes on blood elf engineering with a bit of Legion 'science' tossed in to patch some of the holes," Taylor replied as she pulled a bookmark out of her inventory and stuck it in the book to mark her place.

"Archeology or theft?" Colin asked.

"A bit of both," Taylor admitted as she gestured at the stack of engineering manuals she'd pulled out of Gnomeregan that were stacked haphazardly on the table. "The engineering schematics are annoyingly vague, it's like following a script or doing a lab experiment in grade school, you do this and this and get a predictable result, usually but you generally don't know why."

"Welcome to tinkering," Colin replied, knowing that was how a lot of the tinkers felt.

"Do you mind if I take a look?" Dragon asked hopefully.

"Go for it," Taylor offered as she slid the book over that she'd had her puppet write. "Everything in here is a copy."

"Thanks," Dragon replied as she started carefully flipping through the pages.

Colin glanced at the stacks of books on the table. "How many times have you run Gnomeregan?"

"I've sort of lost track," Taylor admitted. "It's reasonably low level and my puppets can just run through blasting things while invisible. I sort of needed the parts for my mech."

"You're making a mech?" Colin asked in surprise.

"I was bored and talking to Leet, he suggested using the fel core from the demonic blaster I built to power the mech on the off chance that I'd get a better schematic," Taylor replied with a grin as she pulled her notebook out of her inventory and showed him the hand drawn schematic for her mech.

"Isn't that dangerous?" Colin asked warily, thinking about the lecture Clockblocker gave about the world and demons as he looked at the schematics with Dragon looking at it over his shoulder.

Taylor nodded. "Yeah, it's nasty. Flip the page, that's the fel engine was just the prototype. I replaced the fel core with a magical core because it was cooking my test subjects."

Colin shivered as he glanced over at the pair of identical looking teenage elves that were sitting on the couch reading then looked back at Skitter. "You cooked a puppet?"

Taylor shook her head. "No, Leet's modified geiger counter freaked out when one of my cloth puppets started it up so we swapped to using an imp."

"Faulty shielding?" Dragon asked as she studied the schematic.

Taylor gestured at the notebook. "No, skip a couple of pages. I basically stole the design from an insane tinker that thought radiation was a good thing."

Colin flipped over the next couple of pages showing various drawings for metal plates that looked like they'd go on the inside of a cockpit. "In other words, he was flooding the mech with radiation and the fel energy was a lot nastier than it was designed to handle?"

"Basically," Taylor agreed, slightly annoyed that it'd taken a couple of hours and several prototypes to figure out the problem. "One of the pipes for the ventilation system I'd salvaged wasn't properly shielded, mostly because it 'wasn't' supposed to be."

"At least you caught it before anyone got seriously hurt," Dragon offered, making a mental note to help Skitter with some safety equipment when she had the chance.

"If you fixed the problem, why did you swap to a mana core?" Colin asked after checking the results of Skitter's tests and finding out that the fel core test had shown more impressive results.

"I don't like using fel energy, it requires shapeshifting into a demon to avoid potentially long term side effects and the cores are basically large batteries. Batteries, I don't have the means or desire to recharge outside of the simulation," Taylor explained.

[Some of these could be improved], Efficiency offered.

"Makes sense," Colin agreed as he looked the schematic over. "I can see a couple of places where things could be improved."

Taylor pulled a blank notebook out of her inventory and conjured a marker then handed them to Armsmaster. "Feel free to offer suggestions."

"I'll see what I can come up with," Colin replied as he walked over and sat down on the couch and set the notebooks on the coffee table, needing a break from running dungeons.

Dragon smiled at Colin then turned back to look at Skitter. "What else are you working on?"

"A go-kart, a bunch of almost see-through halter tops for Vicky, an enchanted hoverboard for Kid Win and a decent sword that doesn't look horrible…" Taylor trailed off as one of the puppets managed to move the bonus spell damage from a dagger to a teardrop tourmaline, creating a gem that boosted spell damage by 73 and healing by 79.

"Is something the matter?" Dragon asked, having noticed the look of surprise on Skitter's face.

Taylor shook her head. "No, I just made a decent jewelcrafting discovery."

"Speaking of extra skills, are you planning on sharing your skill trick with the rest of the group?" Dragon asked, curious if she could pick up a couple more skills.

Taylor grinned at Dragon. "I used a symbiote and had the trainer replace the temporary skill. It torched that part of the symbiote but I managed to pick up the skill permanently. If you want, I can teach you the basics of most of the professions."

"Most?" Colin asked, wondering which of the professions she hadn't managed to pick up.

"From what Tats said, whoring isn't really a profession, it's a collection of talents. Either way, I don't have it so I can't teach it," Taylor replied.

"Can I get blacksmithing and jewelcrafting?" Colin asked, choosing to ignore the whoring profession entirely.

"Sure, I'll even fix whichever skill you lose when you drop your race…" Taylor trailed off when she realized they'd missed a major exploit. 'Fuck, we can probably just walk through all of the classes and talents if we temporarily swap our races to the two headed ogre.

"Thanks, I'm tired of being short," Colin complained.

"Upgraded void elf for the win," Taylor joked as she had the puppet working on gems stick two of the cheaper meta gems into the belt to test things then filled the sockets with cheap common gems until the meta gems activated. 'Great, the meta gem requirements stack. Ah well, it's probably for the best, it's already going to be broken as hell.'

"How many professions can I talk you out of?" Dragon asked, figuring she might as well ask.

"How many do you want?" Taylor asked with a grin, trying not to break into giggles at the idea of being able to help the best tinker in the world, even if it was just in a game.

"All of them," Dragon replied with a grin.

"Easy enough," Taylor replied as she cast her teaching spell and started sharing professions.

"Do you have any idea when Panacea will get back?" Colin asked, wanting to swap to a void elf now that he could keep his professions.

Taylor finished unlocking all of Dragon's basic professions then turned her head to look at Armsmaster. "We just killed Fankriss the Unyielding so we've got a couple of bosses to go before we're done with AQ 40."

"Did he drop anything good?" Colin asked absently as he wrote down his ideas for improving the golem.

"Sort of," Taylor replied with a shrug. "It dropped a libram that decreases the cost of a paladin's cleanse spell by 25 points and pauldrons that increase your chance to dodge by 1% which should stack with our dodge rating."

Dragon glanced over at the girls sitting on the couch. "If you can drop the spell's cost to zero, could your puppets cast it?"

"Probably, they can use magical abilities that don't have a mana cost but I've swapped to using mana emeralds for all of the puppets I'm not using the enhanced golem cores for, it gives them a halfway reasonable pool of mana their gear can boost," Taylor replied.

"What's the difference between using the mana gems and the mana cores?" Colin asked.

"Between seventy to eighty thousand mana and they don't have," Taylor paused when Dragon's cell phone beeped at her, letting her know that she had a text message, "healing, consecrate or holy fire," Taylor replied

"How the hell?" Colin sputtered, wishing the stuff he could make was even half that good.

"If I use the special cloth that Amelia helped me create, spellthread and the best gems I can, we're looking at about eighty thousand mana and an insane amount of health and durability," Taylor replied with a grin as Dragon checked her phone. "If I turn them human and Amelia modifies them into improved void elves, we can push that up to over one hundred thousand mana."

"At which point you can teach them various skills and spells and you have your own raiding group," Dragon mused as she worked on replying to her counterpart's message, 'Thanks for the update, I'll send more.'

Colin glanced at Dragon's phone. "Problem?"

"No, I sent one of the more interesting engineering schematics that relied on familiar materials to a friend last night, they were able to reproduce it on Earth," Dragon replied with a grin.

"It's nice to have proof that we're not wasting our time," Colin admitted.

Dragon glanced at the books on the table then looked back at Taylor. "Do you mind if we scan the books?"

"I wouldn't mind having a backup," Taylor replied as she walked over so she could look at Armsmaster's changes to her mech schematic, glad that the shards weren't wrong about the knowledge being useful. "Can you walk me through the changes before you get sidetracked with taking pictures?"

"Of course," Colin replied, then started pointing out the changes and explaining why he made them and how his changes would boost efficiency and power.

[If you don't make the change to the intake valve, it would last a couple of years rather than a couple of months], Analysis suggested.

[It would save .2% more energy], Efficiency complained.

[They can recharge it, replacing the value would cost them hours and parts every time they have to replace it], Analysis argued, fairly sure Efficiency was taking things too far and losing sight of the cost of maintenance.

[What if we replaced it with a better valve], Efficiency asked thoughtfully.

[We'll have to run some tests], Analysis replied and tossed several schematics to Dragon's engineering prototype folder for testing.

Dragon glanced at the notices for new schematics then opened her engineering page and looked at the new schematics as she walked over. "I might have a couple of ideas."

"That would be great," Taylor replied as she pulled out another notebook and started taking notes as two of the best tinkers in the world started tossing ideas back and forth about her project.

0o0o0

Void shivered and stopped walking past the engineering workshop when Skitter started laughing, hoping one of her minions had found something interesting and that she hadn't cracked. "What's up?"

Taylor grinned as she turned and looked at Void. "I found a recipe to turn someone into a dragon."

"How?" Void sputtered.

"Minions of doom and countless hours of digging," Taylor replied with a grin as she opened a void portal and handed herself the recipe for the Vial of Sands.

Void stared as the ancient looking scroll turned to dust in her hands. "Please tell me it was supposed to do that."

Dennis glanced up from the page of vellum that he was drawing a rune covered cat on. "This is when you're supposed to shout curses dramatically or fall to your knees screaming no."

Taylor grinned at Dennis as she let the portal close. "I'll leave the dramatic stuff for the jesters in the group."

"Probably for the best," Dennis replied with a grin. "Joking aside, how much is it going to cost to pick up a dragon form?"

Taylor opened her alchemy page and looked at the new recipe. "No clue, it takes 1 pyrium-laced crystalline vial, 8 Sands of Time, 12 bars of truegold, 8 flasks of the winds, 8 flasks of titanic strength and 8 deepstone oil to create a single vial that gives someone the ability to transform into a drake."

Sherrel glanced up from the motorcycle she was working on. "Let's hope it's not as expensive as the parts for the bike."

"Hopefully," Taylor lied, knowing that Admin had stolen most of the bits and pieces that she'd given Hyper so it hadn't cost all that much. "Don't worry about it, you helped me improve my go-kart and helped with the golem."

"That doesn't change the fact that I appreciate the help," Sherrel replied as she finished crafting the part she needed. "Now I just need to put everything together."

"Do you think you can upgrade it so you change into a real dragon?" Void asked hopefully.

Taylor considered the idea then shook her head. "I wouldn't know where to start."

"What about having Amy scan upgrade your drake form?" Dennis asked thoughtfully.

"I'd probably just transform back," Taylor mused as she considered the various ways she could upgrade her drake and directed twenty five of her new and improved mana core puppets of doom to void portal into the Crimson Hall wing of the Lich King's castle to see if she could get one of the wands to drop. "Okay, technically, I might be able to come up with something but I'm not particularly worried about it…" she trailed off as one of her other puppets found a spellbook.

"Figure something out?" Dennis asked.

"No, one of my puppets found a spellbook," Taylor replied as she opened a void portal to her minion and handed herself the book, letting the portal close as soon as her puppet's hand cleared the portal. She opened the book and learned the new spell, causing the book to turn to ash and fall apart. "That's still annoying."

"At least you can share, right?" Void asked eagerly, a touch annoyed that he hadn't picked up archeology.

Taylor opened her spell list and looked at the new spell as she dusted the ash off her hands, fairly sure the director would strangle her if she shared her new spell. 'Void Storm: Creates an unstable vortex of shadowfrost magic in front of the cast that travels in a line, inflicting 10,000 plus double your spell power in shadowfrost damage to everything it touches. Certain types of magic may cause the vortex to explode. This spell will be checked against the lower of the target's Frost and Shadow resists. Yeah, because that's not terrifying.'

"What does it do?" Void asked.

Taylor gestured and conjured a flickering orb of light that floated up and slowly spun in a circle above her head. "Let there be light."

"Nice, can I have it?" Void asked, figuring it would be useful for patrolling when he got back and as a party trick.

"Sure." Taylor cast her teaching spell and taught Void the light spell she'd picked up from one of the spellbooks in Dire Maul.

"Are you coming with us?" Sophia called out from near the gate to the mansion.

"Yeah!" Void called out then smiled at Skitter. "Thanks."

"No worries," Taylor assured him as he ran off to join Stalker and Ember on another dungeon run. She had her puppet standing near the gate open a void portal to the Magister's Terrace for the group, knowing they could take it with their gear and it would give them a decent amount of experience.

Dennis waited until Void and the girls left then gave Skitter a look. "A light spell?"

"I never actually said I got the light orb from the book I just used," Taylor replied a touch defensively. "The book gave me a Void Storm spell, it basically creates an unstable vortex of shadow and frost magic that rips through the area in front of the caster and might explode if it hits certain types of magic. On the off chance that we get to keep our magic when we get back, I'm not handing that out until I've run a bunch of tests."

"How much damage does it do?" Dennis asked, curious if it was as dangerous as it sounded.

"Ten thousand plus double my spell damage bonus and that's not taking into consideration the possible blast," Taylor admitted.

Dennis winced as he considered what something like that would do to a warehouse or a crowd of people. "I'm suddenly glad that leveling archeology should be a nightmare."

"Same," Sherrel agreed as she stood up and stretched, drawing Dennis' attention to her breasts that were almost but not quite falling out of her overalls. "Speaking of villains and trouble, we should probably grab your last couple of levels while we've got time."

"I could use a break." Dennis glanced down at Skitter's belt filled with mismatched gems. "Question first, what did you decide to go with for your metagems?"

"Stamina, magic, haste and run speed but I also grabbed some magic damage reduction and a percentage based boost to my maximum mana," Taylor replied, figuring that covered the basics without getting into the fact that she'd used Tats' ability to stack things so she'd get extra power from her gems.

"Reduction in magic damage? That seems like a waste…" Dennis trailed off when he realized that she'd probably cheated by combining the gems. "You're terrifying, you know that, right?"

Taylor grinned as a group of her puppets managed to kill a giant in the Serpentshrine Cavern and got a trinket with an ability that would boost the amount of mana she'd get from mana gems. "Speaking of being terrifying, I figured out that I can teach my puppets weapon skills."

Dennis laughed at the idea of her dressing all of the minions as ninja. "It would certainly give them more options."

"Is there a reason you avoided improving your critical strike rating?" Sherrel asked.

"Yeah, I'd rather have control than extra damage. If I'm trying to punch a hole through a dumpster or building, I'd rather not randomly blow it up," Taylor explained as Chevalier walked out of the mansion with the director.

"What are you blowing up?" Emily asked warily.

"Nothing, I was explaining the reason I wasn't sticking crit on my belt," Taylor replied. "I'd rather have more control than extra damage."

"Same," Emily agreed. "Have you had any luck tracking down less lethal options for dealing with people?"

Taylor shook her head, almost wishing she had a way to delete some of the lewd spells from her collection. "Nothing I'd want to use, they're either lewd spells like the water tentacles, annoyingly short duration like earthshock or they'd cause mental trauma," she finished the sentence in her head, 'like the void tentacles that pull people into a shadowy pocket realm.'

"If you find something," Emily paused when she remembered that Skitter didn't work for the PRT or Protectorate and she couldn't order her to do anything, "I'd appreciate a heads up, we're going to need them when we get back, the gangs are going a bit crazy."

"I'll let you know if I can find something useful," Taylor assured them as one of her puppets forced an elite humanoid fish creature to teach her his water spells with mind control. 'As long as you won't use it as an excuse to railroad me into the wards.'

"Thanks," Chevalier replied as he headed over to the forge to work on his blacksmithing. "Can I talk you out of more ore?"

Taylor laughed and gestured at the expanded bags filled with metal that were next to the anvil. "The supplies are in the bags, the enchanted vellum is in the box in the enchanting station. We'll have Amelia vendor trash anything you can't recycle or disenchant, she gets a better deal because of a perk."

"We're off," Dennis said as he headed towards the gate with Sherrel.

"Have fun." Taylor turned to look at the director. "Do you want engineering?"

"What's the catch?" Emily asked.

"The 'catch' is that I'd get the finished parts to sell or disenchant, it doesn't really matter to me who makes the low end stuff because I'm not learning anything from it and I'm pulling in a fantastic amount of ore so I don't mind sharing," Taylor explained.

"How long until you'll be able to do the same with the Pandaria and ore in Kul Tiras?" Chevalier asked as he glanced over the mithril bars he was planning on using for his sword.

"No idea," Taylor admitted with a sigh. "I've got a group of puppets charging cores at Mount Hyjal and I have a group farming cores in Karazhan. I'm hoping the cores from the Return to Karazhan dungeon will be more impressive but they're more than forty levels higher than I am so I'm trying to be careful. I also need the wands to drop from Icecrown if I want them to have a halfway decent weapon which means getting moderately lucky."

Emily nodded. "In that case, I wouldn't mind engineering and enchanting since I've almost hit level seventy and we're stuck here a week. If I have to spend the entire time fishing, I'm going to shoot someone."

"Technically you could probably kill the 'last' boss yourself at seventy with the right gear," Taylor pointed out as she used her teaching spell to give Emily enchanting and engineering, as well as a couple dozen of the lower end patterns for each skill.

Emily shook her head. "I'd rather leave with the group and not give the GM a reason to investigate the rest of you."

"Fair enough," Taylor replied as Alec came running through the gate holding an unfamiliar fishing pole with Aisha following behind him. "What's up?"

Alec tossed Skitter the fishing pole as he ran over. "I need you to move the bonus to something else."

"We found a magic fishing pole," Aisha said cheerfully.

Taylor caught the pole then stared at the description for a couple of seconds when she realized the fishing pole gave a 1,000 points to her fishing skill. She opened her transmogrification menu and changed it to look like her darkwood fishing pole to get the transmogrification pattern then opened Tats' ability and grabbed one of her extra fishing poles out of her bag of holding and moved the bonus to it. "Is there a reason you stole a fishing pole?"

"It's a really nice fishing pole and no one was using it," Alec replied with a smug grin.

"Screw it, not my pole, not my problem." Taylor turned to look at the director. "I'm going to enjoy the hot tub while my minions finish clearing a couple of dungeons. Let a minion know when you need more patterns."

"Have fun," Emily replied as she walked over to the engineering station to get started on her new skill, deciding that a stolen fishing pole wasn't her problem either.

"That's the plan," Taylor replied as she headed for the mansion, looking forward to having one of her puppets give her a massage while she tried to relax and not worry about who Alec stole the overpowered fishing pole from.

0o0o0

Joe stopped and paused when he teleported to the GM island and he saw Harry sitting at the picnic table with a stack of books in front of him and a frost covered scythe leaning up against the table next to a ghostly fox that was curled up under the table. "Are you abusing the GM tools?" he asked with a smirk.

Harry glanced at his fellow GM as the green haired troll walked over. "No, I'm just copying some interesting books and doing some reading," he replied, not sure where the hell Skitter had acquired the books he'd copied as they weren't in the game files.

"Did you get a note from the company about the idiot that you banned?" Joe asked as he sat down on the bench opposite Harry.

"I got an automated message about the company being in lockdown and that we should keep doing our jobs," Harry replied as he held his hand out with his palm up and conjured a ball of fire over it.

"So you decided to give yourself magic?" Joe asked.

"Nothing in the contract says we can't use our powers for amusement," Harry pointed out as he dismissed the ball of fire and went back to reading, trying to make heads or tails of SKitter's engineering book.

"Do you think he's dead or back in the real world?" Joe asked warily.

"Considering he threatened to kill me and had managed to hack the server, I'm sort of hoping he's dead," Harry replied with a shrug.

Joe winced when he realized his friend was serious. "That's cold."

"You didn't see his stats, he wasn't some kid with a couple of programs and a script, he was something nasty," Harry complained as he looked up from his book.

"Parahuman?" Joe asked warily.

"Or something," Harry muttered, thinking about the creatures he could hear whispering in the wind now and then. "Or maybe he just hacked the simulation to get an impossible collection of tricks. Either way, I wasn't going to wait around until he decided to hack my GM tools and kill me."

"We're supposed to be immortal," Joe argued.

"Considering simulation is modeling parahuman powers to the point that someone can hack the GM channel, I'm taking my so-called 'immortality' with a grain of salt," Harry replied as he opened his GM tools and brought up a floating window of one of Skitter's minions that was raiding the Return to Karazhan dungeon, a touch surprised that her group was doing as well as they were considering the level difference.

Joe rolled his eyes. "Did you know that a couple of people have already hit level seventy?"

"I noticed, parahumans are bullshit," Harry replied with a grin as he watched the army of clones kite the giant golem around without letting him even get close before they demolished him.

Joe checked his player list. "Any idea how Skitter has three hundred and twenty seven minions?"

"We've covered this, parahumans are bullshit. I wouldn't worry about it, they're not causing trouble and I doubt they're sticking around," Harry replied as he watched the girls rip the core out of the golem then continue on their way down the hallway, not sure how she had the ability to control her puppets as well as she did.

"What makes you say that?" Joe asked, not sure why anyone would want to leave after only a couple of days in the simulation.

Harry glanced at Joe. "Most people actually like their families."

"Most people have never met my folks," Joe replied as he stood up and headed towards the dock. He frowned when he noticed that his fishing pole wasn't where it was supposed to be. "Did you move my pole?"

"Nope, it probably just glitched," Harry lied, not seeing a point in mentioning that someone had walked off with it. "Just spawn another one or a couple of fish."

"Heathen," Joe muttered as he opened his search function and ran a search for his fishing pole, a bit annoyed when he couldn't find it. "Screw it, it probably just glitched," he muttered as he respawned the fishing pole in his inventory. "If you need me, shout."

"Sure," Harry replied absently as he went back to reading the engineering book.