CC 10: Thesaurize ~ Twenty-Nine!

Standing at the door of his workshop, Joe looked between the normal-size door, comparing it to the enormous sheets of metal that had, until recently, been part of a vault. “Yeah, no way I'm getting these through there without putting them in storage and taking them out inside. Even then, I think they’re going to be a little too long for the ceiling.”

Pondering his options, Joe walked around and decided that the best option was actually going to be to demolish a section of his workshop, place the sheets of metal to create a better-secured area, then rebuild the walls around them. “There’s no way I'm giving up these super-cool sliding doors. That has to be added to something I’m gonna keep.”

That raised a fairly significant issue that he needed to take into consideration. If he wanted to change the underlying structure of his building, he needed to find an Architect that could draw up the plans; then have them actually built by construction workers. Joe was unable to work directly with this material by himself, though once the design was completed, he could scan the building and make as many copies of it as he wanted.

Socar was an Architect, but his specialty was in abnormal styles of buildings. Joe needed something functional, sturdy, that didn’t impact the ambient flows of energy in the world. In other words: he needed to get Daniella. That put a wry grin on his face, “The reasons to rescue you just keep stacking up, don't they?”

Certainly, he could try and get in the queue for a Dwarven Architect, but as a part of the council: he knew exactly how long that line was.

After going to the warehouse and convincing Maximus to let him put his walls into a secured corner, Joe walked toward the shrine to finally finish his self-set goal of rescuing his friend. He was slightly nervous about the functionality of his fast travel system; his recent journey to the mysterious ruins had been calamitous to that area.

Initial reports indicated that nearly a hundred feet of snow had accumulated atop the area they had been working, in a radius of over two miles. Hundreds of monsters were already assaulting the area, slowly stomping the fallen snow flat.

He was hoping that the mountain of precipitation that had been dumped on his shrine wouldn’t impact his ability to use it in his travel network. It hadn't been an issue in the small Hamlet that he’d managed to get destroyed, but that was a handful of dirt in comparison.

“It makes me wonder if those clouds are really just floating mountains of snow up there…” He looked up, only to meet with the false sky that he had created, which showed a bright, cheery, sunny morning. “I doubt it, but maybe when an explosion like that sucks them closer to the planet, all of the condensation falls as snow?”

Not having anywhere to go with that line of thinking, his mind skipped over to the quest that he had issued. Frankly, Joe was relieved at how well everything had worked out there. The Council of Novusheim had agreed to hold all of the Jotunheim Alloy, and was distributing it as the quest reward to the people that had participated. The overall contribution of most of the Dwarves was fairly high, thanks to the monsters that they’d needed to fight against.

Even so, Joe himself had been considered as a thirty-percent contributor all by himself, thanks to being the one to crack the final layers of the outer vault, as well as the inner vault. He’d seen the chance to earn some brownie points with the Town as a whole, so the Ritualist only claimed the broken walls that he was going to use in his workshop. Even the recipe for the alloy was going to be handed over as soon as he managed to create his own aspect-based recipe. So, really, he wasn’t even taking that as a reward, he was just exercising his right as a councilman to examine it.

That had left a substantial amount of the upper Expert-ranked material for the Town's usage, and even the most human-leary councilman had given him a bright smile and pat on the back as he walked out without requesting any further reward for donating his portion.

Joe had earned a major favor with his actions, and he already knew how he was going to spend it. “Get Daniella back here, convince the council to let her work for me and put her on the same community service track that Master Stu is on. Unless she somehow gained a whole bunch of combat ability, the usual path toward citizenship is going to be a massive hardship. Solid plan. Let’s go!”

Moments later, his mana pool was near empty, and he was over nine thousand miles away. Joe shivered as he set up his bubble once again, ready to brave the skies of Jotunheim. By the time he was done with his initial setup, his mana pool had recovered well enough that he was able to easily power the ritual.

Flying through the air, lounging in his bean-bag chair and wrapped in warm blankets as he drank his coffee, Joe watched the ground level of the planet as the night deepened. “It's a tough quest, but I’ll finish it soon.”

*Slurp.*

“Mmm. Good choice on the brew today, Mate. Is that Kona coffee? If not, it’s close.” The Ritualist idly commented while pulling out his notebook and going over a few changes that he wanted to make to his routine when he was done with this project. “How can I harness the odd qualities of Jotunheim's energy fields to my advantage? The magic in the air is dense, but far too chaotic for standard usage unless I'm able to alter it from its violent state. I wonder what the gravity is like here… it feels like Earth normal for me, but so did Alfheim after I figured out how to push through. I bet if I go to Midgard, I could practically fly by thinking really hard at this point.”

He began writing his ideas out, centering them around how to harness the chaotic mana in the air, and find a way to utilize what he assumed was greatly increased gravity for various training purposes. “Maybe I could lighten the gravity across a large area by creating a ritual to focus it in a single building? If I did it well, I could create a training zone to push even the strongest individuals to their limits. That would allow them to adapt and grow stronger even faster.”

The idea was fascinating to him, but he knew that it was nothing new. People had been trying to figure out ways to get stronger since the dawn of time, so this went on the low priority list. Still, there was one aspect of the plan where his mind kept returning.

“I need to destroy one more Elven settlement in order to get Havoc to finish creating the plans for a Mana Battery recharging station. With how dense the power in the air is, I don't think it’ll be any issue to put the stations almost anywhere and have them work without any additional input. Part of me thinks that’ll have an effect on the rampant power in the area, at least if I make strong enough versions of the enchantment. What do you think, Mate?”

The elemental declined to answer, instead quietly filling up Joe's coffee mug and unsummoning itself. Joe bobbed his head, “Totally agree, nothing more to be said on that subject for now.”

With plenty of other work to do, Joe didn't slack while he was traveling; making what he deemed as acceptable progress on his rituals. He landed once, and on the second bubble flight prepared himself to return to Novusheim and get Heartpiercer to join him.

After creating the second shrine of the day, he placed his hands on its surface and attempted to teleport back to Novusheim. When he didn't move, Joe initially panicked, thinking that one of his shrines must have been destroyed along the route. It was only when he saw the message appear in his vision that he was able to take a deep breath.

Mana cost for transportation is too high for your current mana pool!

“Maybe I should upgrade the shrine in town to something more… impressive. Maybe that would help mitigate some of the travel cost.” Quickly deactivating Retaliation of Shadows and Neutrality Aura allowed him to pay the necessary cost, and in only a few minutes he was activating his Ritual of Communication to get Heartpiercer’s attention.

As they’d discussed this plan ahead of time, the Archer came running over, dressed and equipped for the bitter cold of Jotunheim. “I'm ready if you are, which shrine are we going to?”

“That depends on how much mana you have.” Joe offered a weak smile at her questioning look, “Reaching the end of the road just yoinked eighty-five hundred mana out of my mana pool. If you have less than that, you might want to break up the trip a bit.”

“Abyss, Joe.” Heartpiercer seemed to be rethinking her agreement for this mission. “Whatever, just give me the coordinates I need to bounce to first.”

Both of them put their hands on the fast travel shrine, and Joe set up the path that she should take. “If you go to shrine twenty-three, ‘Aurora six’, ‘not Avalanche three’, then to ‘one hop out’, I’ll meet you there.”

“Please tell me these names were automatically assigned and you didn’t name… never mind, of course you named them. How else would you be able to figure out the pathing this easily?” She rolled her eyes at Joe's stricken expression, concentrating for a moment before vanishing, hopefully along the path that the Ritualist had set out for her.

“It's not my fault that I need to name things in a memorable way.” Joe grumped slightly at the situation, allowing his mana pool to top off before teleporting all the way back to the end of the line.

Nearly fifteen minutes later, Heartpiercer finally arrived, heaving for breath as her mana once again nearly bottomed out. “That sucks, and I’m not doing that more than one more time. You better hope that she’s where you think she is.”

“I’m… let's say eighty percent certain that she’s within three hours of travel from here.” Joe was still lamenting the fact that his enchanted shirt had been torn, but so long as the settlement that Daniella had been imprisoned in wasn’t destroyed yet… he cut off that line of thinking, knowing that he had no other options for attempting to track her down if she wasn't in the area.

It was a tight squeeze to get into the bubble, at least compared to how Joe was used to traveling at this point. His teammate declined the use of his bean-bag chair, which made him uncomfortable with bringing it out and taking up the majority of the space. Then, when he tried to get some work done, she glared at him and thrust a finger directly at his face.

“If you think I’m going to sit here for hours on end and be ignored, you have another thing coming. I will pop this bubble so fast.”