Libriohexer ~ 33!

Sam worked for the next six hours magically infusing ink and chicken vellum, inscribing scrolls, prepping quills, and meticulously binding books. Thanks to hitting the Master Rank as a Bookbinder, he was ten-fold faster, but there were just so many things to do. He worked until his hand cramped, and his fingers bled from countless needle pokes until his back screamed and his legs were numb from the stool beneath him. Finally, when his stomach was grumbling in protest, and his eyes were watering from the strain of candlelight, Sam took a break and headed out to grab a quick bite and to check on the others.

He’d lost all sense of time while working in his Library—walled off from the rest of the world as he was—and was surprised to find that it was early evening already. Sam searched the barracks and kitchen looking for company, but both were empty. He popped by the Alchemy lab next, but it was deserted too. The only pack member he could find was Kai, who was busy practicing a complicated routine on the Dexterity course in the Training Hall. Sam lingered in the doorway for a beat, watching the monk do an elaborate kata while precariously balanced on the top of a set of wooden poles.

The monk executed a series of leaps, strikes, and powerful kicks, all foreign to Sam, but interspersed throughout were a variety of precise turns and thrusts that Sam recognized as Judo techniques. It was impossible to miss the crouch and pivot that were surefire signs of Ippon-seoi-nage, a one-armed shoulder throw, or the sweeping motions of Harai Goshi. The monk finished his kata by turning a perfect handspring on a balance beam less than four inches wide, then executing a flawless backflip to dismount. Kai landed like a comet, golden sparks erupting around him in a halo. He launched a final strike, arm extended, and a shimmering yellow fist erupted from his palm.

“What in the name of a hobo eating a hotdog was that?” Bill barked in shock. “Was that magic? Certainly looked like magic to me. Mana projection if I had to guess.”

“Uh, not sure if it’s magic or not. Uncle Monkey explained it in terms of Ki, not mana, but I guess it could be a similar mechanic.” Kai grinned and stood tall. He tapped at his chest. “I have this ball of power inside me. Sort of this golden energy Core. It’s filled with Ki. I’ve been learning to push and channel it through my body along meridian lines. It allows me to move faster, reinforce my body, stuff like that. Now that I’ve specialized, I can even project it.”

“Yep, Mana Manipulation,” Bill nodded sagely as the others ignored him.

“Wait. You specialized?” Sam’s eyes went wide and he rushed over to slap the man on his back. “Are you kidding me?”

The monk’s grin spread even wider and he shook his head. “I know, it’s totally wild. Our raid against the College pushed me up to level thirteen, but I still wasn’t sure what I wanted to specialize. There were a bunch of bland monk subclasses, but nothing that really spoke to my soul, ya know? But that next day, I went and visited the Monkey Totem, and you’ll never guess who I met.”

“Uncle Monkey?” Bill dryly replied.

“Whoa! Great guess!” Kai clapped in excitement. “Zhen Zexian, otherwise known as Uncle Monkey. I must’ve visited that totem training ground twenty times and never saw him before, but there he was. The dude shot me in the face with a poison dart the second I stepped through, which was pretty uncool of him. But then we had, like…  this epic Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon Style battle. I lost because, ya know, he shot me in the face with poison. But then he gave me the antidote, and invited me to become a disciple of the Monkey Fist.”

“What did you say?” Sam pushed for a clearer explanation.

“Well, like yeah, obviously. It’s totally rad. He walked me through a bunch of new katas to help loosen my Ki and taught me all these new moves. I learned the Endless Fury of the Monkey Fist technique, which allows me to stack multiple blows against a single opponent and deliver them all as a single attack. My new Gorilla Body ability passively restores a little bit of health whenever I land a critical hit. Plus I can use Simian Agility to increase my speed by four-fold for twenty-seconds. Plus, I can dislocate my joints, which gives me a fifty-percent increased chance to evade. Those are the big ones, but I also got this bad boy. Look.”

The rope belt entwined around his waist twitched and moved. It wasn’t a belt at all, but a monkey tail.

“You have a tail,” Sam stared at the new limb as if he had just been shown something very offensive.

“Right? How cool is that!” Kai didn’t seem to catch the leery look he was earning. “Not quite as cool as a talking book, but still not nothing. It acts as a fully functional limb and I can extend it crazy far.”

The tail snaked away from his body like a striking cobra. The most shocking thing of all was that it kept going, and going, and going. It extended out a good thirty feet before slamming into a training dummy like a bo-staff. “I may not be a mage, but I’m really starting to come into my own, I think. I’m glad I stuck with it. But listen to me go on and on. I haven’t seen you since the party. What happened? Everyone was having a blast, and you just sort of disappeared on us. Did you learn what you needed to know about the Totem stuff?”

This time, it was Sam who showed off. He opened his third eye and the doors to his Interspatial Library blinked into existence. “Yeah, you could say that.”

“Dude! That is amazing. Tell. Me. Everything!” The pair of them headed off to the kitchen while they talked. Sam told the monk about his cryptic meeting with the Wolfman Shaman known as the Bakkuo, his subsequent battle of wills against Floof and Blaze, and all the shiny new abilities he’d unlocked. Once he was done, Kai filled Sam and Bill in on the rest of the crew while the Octo-Chef whipped up a meal of fried chicken, buttermilk waffles, and heaps of gooey syrup.

After Finn had bailed on their training session, Dizzy and Arrow had decided to head off to the Totem grounds for a round of training. Their fearless leader was grumpy that Sphinx and Kai had both unlocked their specializations while she hadn't. Dizzy was the leader of the Pack, and believed that meant she should be leading from the front. Not trailing behind everyone else. Velkan and Finn still weren’t back from their errands in New Narvik and Sphinx was out on an infiltration mission—sabotaging another one of the Rabid Inquisitors pledge rushes.

“There’s just one thing about your specialization that I have a serious question about. If you’re Soul Bonded with two chickens, does that mean you’re part chicken now?” Kai nearly choked, so he took a moment to lick his fingers free of grease and syrup while he coughed. His face visibly paled as he glanced down at his empty plate. He dropped his voice low. “Is this… like cannibalism for you, now?”

Sam laughed, then paused for a long beat to consider the fried chicken still on his plate. Was he part chicken? No, definitely not. “That was not the question I thought you were going to ask. Frankly… I didn’t even consider that?”

“I’m a monk, man.” Kai tried to look deep and knowledgeable. “That’s my nature. To ask the tough, introspective questions.”

“Well, I’m not sure what the answer is,” Sam admitted as he thought it over, “but my heart says no, and so do my tastebuds. I prefer to think about them as pet chickens. I mean, I’m bound with Bill too, and I wouldn’t consider myself part book.”

“If only you were so lucky as to be part book,” Bill ruffled himself and stretched. “There’s a lot of benefits to being a book, you know.”

“Yeah, like no hand cramps,” Sam glared at Bill in faux anger. “Although that’s only because you don’t have hands.”

“Hey, hey, hey. No need to get personal,” Bill replied with a sniff.

Sam rubbed at the muscles in his right palm. “All jokes aside, I’m going to need to find a way to automate some of this work. Even if we have unlimited resources, the preparation time is still insane, and that’s even with all of Bill’s production hacks.”

“Dude, I don’t envy you,” Kai reached out and clasped Sam's shoulder. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, your class is awesome, and I’m sure it’ll only get better, but spending all that time scribbling away at paper and sewing books together… it would drive me insane. I’d take training on the agility course over that any day of the week. Too bad you can’t find a way to grow an extra limb like me. I bet an extra set of arms or two would come in handy. Huh. Handy. See what I did there?”

Sam had stopped listening as soon as ‘an extra set of arms’ was mentioned. A thought began to form in the back of his head as he glanced at the Octo-Chef. “An extra set of arms… or maybe eight extra arms. You’re a genius, Kai. Monks really are the embodiment of wisdom.”

“Uh, glad I could help,” he arched an eyebrow. “Not sure what I said. Was it the chicken thing? The cannibalism dealio?”

Sam shook his head. “Nope. I have no intention of skipping out on the chicken and waffles. You did give me a great idea. Not sure if it’ll work, but it’s worth a try. Gotta run.”

He shoved the last bite of savory chicken into his mouth, then turned on a heel and took off for the Irondown library. “Bill. The Library Guardian. It was created to defend the library, but what are the chances that it’s also trained in basic book maintenance and repair?”

“I would say that kind of thing is too complicated for some automaton to do,” the book replied, “but then, the Octo-Chef never ceases to impress me with his cooking. So… who knows? Even if it can repair books, it still wouldn’t be able to ink spells for us or imbue items with mana.”

“Yeah, there’s no way it’ll completely automate the process,” Sam agreed with a sparkle in his eye, “but any place we can cut down time will be a huge benefit. Besides, if our chickens keep evolving, eventually we won’t have to imbue vellum or quills with mana at all—they’ll just naturally come that way. The librarian can probably help us prepare the materials.”

Sam slid around a corner and tore through the gaping hole that led into the library. The hole where doors had stood guard not so long ago. There were still tons of empty bookcases filling the room, though there were no books in sight. Anything of true value had already been packed up and carted off to Sam’s fancy new Interspatial Node.

After a few seconds of searching, they found the Librarian Automaton perched in a shadowy corner where it had built a rudimentary lair of webs and debris. It looked like a large spider centaur—its lower body that of a mechanical arachnoid, its upper body that of one of the maintenance automatons.

The guardian regarded them from its lair of webs, alert but unmoving until it was called on for service. It had stayed like that since they’d captured the Library since they hadn’t had any use for it. Sam reached into the Spatial Flask and pulled free a mundane book with a badly mangled spine—one of the many projects he needed to take care of. He tossed the book on the floor with a loud *thunk*. The spider creature moved almost faster than Sam could see, zipping down a line of spun silk like the member of a tactical swat team fast-roping out of a helicopter, and attacked the book with ferocious intensity.

Silk flowed from its mouth and its legs weaved in frantic motion. In less than five seconds, the damaged text had been repaired, and the spider was already busy placing it on a shelf off to the left.

“Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,” Bill let out a low whistle.

“I think Kai has probably got the market cornered on that,” Sam absently teased. “Let’s see what else it can do.”

For the next two hours they moved their chicken refinement operation into the mostly empty library, tasking the mechanical librarian with cleaning and processing the left-over chicken scraps. The spider was surprisingly good at cleaning the hides, and it even secreted some sort of acidic compound to help cure the vellum. It’s many legs made stretching the chicken leather a breeze, and it could sew and bind loose pages into spell tomes three times faster than Sam could manage even as a Master Bookbinder. The thing seemed custom built for this sort of work.

While the Arachnoid Librarian toiled, Sam got back to work himself, reinvigorated to finish inscribing his legion of spell tomes. Time passed in a blur of ink and paper and at some point, Sam nodded off inside his Interspatial Library. He woke up groggy and disoriented, with a terrible crick in his neck. Sam ignored all of that when he saw that his two new spells had finished combining.

Ink Mire Storm Cloud (Beginner I): Summon a vengeful storm cloud, centered on a point within line of sight and spreading out in a 75-foot radius. A torrent of inky rain falls from the cloud, splattering all those within the Area of Effect. Each target must make an immediate Constitution saving throw or suffer from full body paralysis for 1n seconds, where ‘n’ is equal to the to the spell skill level. All those caught in the downfall are mired by enchanted Ink, drastically restricting their movement rate. Not to mention, the ink is ridiculously hard to get out of fabrics, so even if they walk away from the fight, you’ll still have the last laugh! That dry cleaner’s bill is going to be outrageous.

Ink Rain slows movement rate of affected parties by 12+(n/2)% for 30 seconds. All paper-aligned creatures are immune from the effects of this spell and move freely through the Ink Mire. This spell will effect friendly forces within the AoE. Production Cost: 5 Mana per second until the spell script is completed or attempt is failed. Casting Cost: 300 sheets of ink-soaked paper per spell cast. As only the ink is used when this spell is cast, the paper can be re-inked at a later time! Casting Time: 8 seconds!

Murder of Crows (Beginner I): This ones for the birds! Conjure a vicious whirlwind of origami crows that will peck and tear and slice at any enemy inside the Area of Effect. The conjured crows deal magical slashing damage and may be augmented with elemental effects by layering in additional spells, according to their own mana cost. Damage and range for each crow in the murder is derived from the base skills, Magical Origami and Origami Activation. Origami Crows do an additional 0.5 damage against earth-aligned beings but suffer a 0.5 penalty against fire-aligned players.

A Murder of Crows is a terrifying sight to behold; any enemy caught in the center of the vortex who fails a Wisdom check will additionally suffer 1n psionic damage, where ‘n’ is equal to the skill level, and will be forced to scream, ‘Oh no, the birds are coming! It’s the end of the world’! This one is a doozy! Even better, the summoned crows are capable of distinguishing between friend and foe! Production Cost: 50 Mana per second until the spell script is completed or attempt is failed. Casting Cost: 350 sheets of paper per spell cast.

A surge of excitement washed over Sam as he read over the newly earned spells.

He was going to be unstoppable. He still had all of his Paper Shurikens and his wide array of Book Bombs, but now he’d also be able to augment them with fortified structures, paper minions, and powerful AoE spells. All that was left to do was see all his wickedly awesome abilities in battle, and he knew exactly who to try them on. Preparations were complete. He moved to get the Wolf Pack together and take another run at the Keeper of the Forge.

It was time they claimed the Irondowns as their own.