CC 9: Tenacity ~ Twenty-One

One of the perks of owning the smithy was that he was able to skip the line. Even so, standing over the cold forge and doing math was causing the Dwarf that he'd budged in front of to ever-so slowly-turn dark crimson as he tried to contain his vitriol. Which made Joe move extra slowly on his calculations. Absolutely because he was… nervous. Yes.

“If I want one hundred rituals under the Student rank, that means I'm going to need a thousand cubes.” Joe paused in his calculations as he realized that this would be a perfect test to see what his percentage bell curve looked like. As he needed a perfect one thousand of these cubes for his short-term plans, and there was a forty percent chance of the item he created being turned into goo by the unstable building, he could assume that at least four hundred of his projects would fail. “That's not great… time to kick this into high gear.”

After talking to Smitty for a few minutes, Joe was now the proud owner of half a dozen smithing-specific blank blueprints. He carefully recreated the technical specifications of the cubes that he needed, eyeing them critically as he finished each one. He was no artist, but luckily this wasn’t considered art, seeming to be governed more by his mathematical abilities than anything else. “I'm going to start making this item, if there are any smiths in here that can create this stabilization cube, I'll give you free usage of this building for a month if you help me complete a large order.”

“It's already free to use this place!” Another Dwarf brusquely growled at him. This made Joe's head snap to the side, and he glared at Smitty, who gulped and couldn't meet his eyes.

“It's not supposed to be free. Your free trial has expired. The use of this building requires that every fifth completed item is handed over to me.” At that moment he realized that he hadn't made it an official quest with the Dwarf he left in charge, so he stared her down until he got an answer.

Eventually, she cleared her throat and seemed to find her voice. “You see Joe, when people are used to doing things a certain way, change is really difficult. I hadn't been charging them, so a sudden shift of one in five completed works coming over-”

“I understand. It's difficult to be in charge, but don't worry. You don't need to think about that anymore.” With a mental *click*, Joe removed her as the manager of this building and took full control back. “Whoops… I think I forgot to count this building as one that I owned back when Cleave was warning me about the new law.”

He did the math, and realized that technically he owned six percent of the buildings in the area. This caused him to break out in a light sweat, and he cast around for a suitable… his eyes landed on Smitty once more, who seemed appropriately flabbergasted by her rapid shift in fortune.

Immediately, he saw a way out of his predicament. “I'll give you ownership of this building, not just management, so long as you create an actual contract, or issue me a quest to get you ownership of this building, for my percentage. I understand metal is extra-precious here, so we’ll drop the fee to one in twenty items, a mere five percent.”

Every person in the room who was listening flinched, though it was noticeable that no one jumped in to offer him a different deal. Smitty considered her options for a moment, nodded, and Joe gained a quest alert in the next moment. Quickly scanning it to ensure it covered all of the pertinent details, he transferred ownership of the building back to her and completed his portion of the quest instantly.

That small issue taken care of, he got back to the offer he was trying to make in the first place. “Back to my offer to the group at large, if you help me with what I need, I’ll give you the right to come in and immediately get to work without having to wait in line. For whoever works with me on this, I'll grant permission for Smitty to let you keep the percentage of goods I’d otherwise take.”

Although they were slightly malcontent, he still had three Dwarves take him up on his offer. Then Joe got to work immediately, creating his cubes and handing off any of the failures that melted down into misshapen lumps of cold metal. The Dwarves could work with those, even if he could not. Since the metal was perfectly pure thanks to being created directly, they simply needed to melt it down and reshape it.

Hours passed, and the artificial night-time that Joe had created for the town shifted to daylight, then ever so slowly back—then did so again—before he finally stepped back from his forge. Between himself and the other smiths that had cycled in and out, he'd finally been able to complete the first one thousand cubes that he needed for his project. Looking at the tally that he'd kept, Joe realized something interesting. “My approximation was off…? With a thousand cubes to make, we should've had a nearly perfect distribution of two in five failures. But it only failed three hundred and three times?”

Looking through his skills to see what could've affected that, Joe decided that it was due to his Ritualistic Forging. As it stood, the skill specifically gave him a thirty-one percent increased chance to succeed when creating items for stabilization. “One in three of my failures was forced to succeed… interesting. If we were to put that in terms of a dice roll, all of the fours that should've been failures turned into fives, meeting the minimum requirements to let it be created. Interesting.”

He had also kept a tally of the number of cubes that had gotten the ability to heal from minor damage, being pleasantly surprised at finding that two hundred eighty-six of his personal creations had been successful—slightly higher than expected—and ninety of his failures had been completed with that bonus after the Dwarves reworked the metal that kept failing to hold its form upon completion. “Not sure what I'm going to do with three hundred seventy-six cubes that can heal themselves, but I don't think there's going to be any detrimental effects from using them.”

Thanking the other Dwarves for their help, Joe dragged himself out of the smithy and over to his personal reflective bubble. On the way, he noticed that he must have missed at least one general Beast Wave, because there were dozens of groups hauling bodies toward the warehouse he'd made for their storage.

“See, that right there is the issue with using bladed weapons to kill these things. Giant creatures like that are basically giant sacks of blood.” Joe hopped over the near-literal river of monster juices that led from the entrance of the city all the way to the warehouse in a straight line. Getting to his bubble, he wrapped himself up and immediately fell asleep.

Sleeping was always an interesting experience when thought of from an academic perspective. The mind refreshed itself, chemicals and hormones were rebalanced, and oftentimes people were able to make intuitive leaps that had been evading them. When Joe woke up an unknown amount of time later, his eyes flew open and he sat bolt upright, shouting, “The blood! It wasn’t frozen!”

He dashed out of his tent-bubble so rapidly that the entirety of the structure popped, but the Ritualist couldn't be bothered to fix it at the moment. He sprinted to the warehouse, noting that the ground was more frozen, but was still a thick, stomach-churning mud. Pushing through the open doors, he ran around like a basilisk with its head cut off until he found the owner of the warehouse.

“You! We never exchanged names!” Joe shook his head wildly, sending the filtered light in the area reflecting as glistening rainbows off his bald pate. “Nevermind, that's not important right now. There's an enormous trail of blood out there!”

“Yes, it's a hazard of needing to collect every body that's produced.” The building owner stated dryly. “You’re welcome to send your complaints to the complaint department. Oh wait, somehow none of them managed to survive our cities being destroyed. Crazy how that happened with them, lawyers, and anyone holding a political science Profession.”

That made Joe blink and close his mouth in surprise as he attempted to think of how the logistics of that would have worked out. “What did you all do, send those people to the front lines at the last minute? No, wait, never mind. The blood! What is it being used for?”

“Beyond providing job security to my janitors?” The Dwarf slowly shook his head in confusion. “Nothing. Samples have been sent to the Alchemy Hall for testing on if they have uses in the creation of remedies or the like, but as far as I know it’s inert. Useless except as decoration and lowering morale, in other words.”

“Now there's a specialty shop I’d only want to window shop at. Bloody good decorations!” Joe laughed at his own joke, which was good, because no one else did. “That's all I needed to hear. I'll see what I can do to clean all that up for you, and the city, free of charge!”

“Thanks?” The Dwarf shrugged non-committedly. “You worded that somewhat suspiciously, but I just don't care enough to pursue it.”

Not saying anything else, as he didn't want to give his plans away, the Ritualist simply flounced out of the building as mysteriously as possible. As soon as he was outside, his pure white garments—the set of the Silkpants Mage—practically made him invisible in the lightly blowing snow. Only when he leaped over the bloody trail did he stick out as a stark contrast, but only for a moment. Then he was sprinting toward his workshop.

Quest complete: Don't dig your own grave. You gave the people in charge the information they needed to save the Town from nambly-pambly civilians, and they figured out how to get an off-site mine working properly. As most of the work was completed by a separate group, your only reward is not having monsters pop up from the ground while you are walking. Within your city walls, at least.

That was perfectly fine with Joe, as the rewards for completing the quest had been essentially the ability to shop for metal. Not particularly something he cared about either way, but having his eventual defensive rituals ignored wasn't something he wanted to have to figure out a workaround for. With that small, nagging concern out of mind, Joe got to work putting his inspiration into a ritual.

“All I really need to do here is shift the water collection into blood collection, then add a secondary circle here… that’ll separate the water out from everything else in the blood and plasma. Bring it up to the Apprentice rank by having it pulled over to a specific location… bring that ri~ight to the upper edge of Student rank by having the liquid and solid portions fill different containers. Okay. Last part, cleaning it up and testing it out!”

Knowing exactly where he wanted to put it, the Ritualist hurried out the door… and stopped. “I knew setting up my workshop right next to the exit was an awesome idea. Great thinking, past Joe!”