Elevation of Mana Chapter 177 Another Set of Hands

Isha was mostly uninterested in my fabrication facilities, such as they were. Most of the things I did I did with purely magic, having neither the know-how or the tools for machining things. Instead a lot of my work was cast or forged, shaped by will and hard blows.

However she was interested in the materials, of which I had many. I'd searched my memories for anything useful, any recipe that I might manage to remake. Most of those had been abject failures, with no ability on my part to find the right things, or just no knowledge of the details that were important to most modern things. I did have glass of many colors though, metals, and fibers that weren't available anywhere else, and paper better than anywhere in this world could produce. There was also a bit of detailed pottery of various types, experiments that I kept mostly because pots were nostalgic to me.

“What are these?” she asked, picking up an attempt at a plastic bottle and looking at it thoughtfully.

“A failure sadly, I made them from cooking oil but they don't work.” It had a stopper rather than a twist cap, but was on one of the tables where I kept my failures.

“Why not?”

“Dissolves, and I don't know why.”

There were a lot of things like that, things that I made but I just couldn't get working. They were neat, very neat, but I was no chemical engineer, and had neither the training nor had I read the reference materials I'd need for that sort of thing. That didn't stop me from trying of course, but more often than not it was just a poor attempt, worse than even a child on Earth could've made with access to the internet and a grocery store.

“I'm sure you'll get it,” she said, patting me on the arm slightly.

We spent a long time looking at gems, she liked them. Pretty much everyone liked shiny rocks, my wife included, even more when they could be made into shape and counted as money. It was an interesting thing money. When I'd first come to Atal beads had been the trading currency, with nicer ones being worth exponentially more, and it was much the same.

The main difference now was that the wood, stone, and pottery beads that had once been the staples were now something akin to nickels and dimes. Replacing them were beads of copper, or iron; these were less decorated, but could be made readily into useful materials. Most were even of an almost standardized size, people being used to a given weight. Still though, particularly beautiful pieces like those I could make if I tried would be worth quite a bit.

Perhaps one day I could convince thee council to go to an actual real currency. Heck, we could even use beads if they wanted to, just make them ourselves at a given size and let people go from there. You know, actually, if I started doing that myself, making them and then using them for everyone...

“What's over there?” Isha pointed, stirring me from my thoughts of changing policy by forcing it.

“Hmm?” I followed her finger to the door on the side, one I kept locked. “Oh, that's my computer project.”

“The thinking item?” she asked, I'd tried to explain the idea to her once, but not really gotten too far before she seemed thoroughly bored of listening.

“Sort of, it doesn't really think, just looks like it does from the outside, kind of.”

“You're bad at explanations. Can I see it?” she asked.

“If you want, but there's not much to look at.”

I had to manually put mana into the door to open it, the lock clicking as I pulled it away from the wall. This room was extraordinarily simple, clean white panels, with a few lights and dials worked into several of them. There was nothing like the screens and visual interfaces that were so familiar to the people of Earth, and there didn't need to be. A few sections that displayed sets of numbers was where I was currently at, unable to get much further until I had something that worked.

The only thing of real note was the small dais in the center of the room, upon which sat a small gem, surrounded by the many lines that connected it to the rest of the apparatuses. The actual computer itself was tiny, since I didn't really need it bigger, and would probably be invisible to the naked eye if I'd not mounted it on a piece about the size of a postage stamp.

“You weren't joking, what is all this?” Isha asked, looking at the very plain room, a big change from what was outside.

“If I can get it working the start of the greatest thing I've ever made. Sadly no matter what I can't get it to do so. I need a way to make it hold and use magic, but it won't no matter what I do. Sure, I can get this whole place to work while I feed magic to it, like the tattoos, but it quickly fades, and doesn't have the... abilities I need it to.”

“The only reason the tattoos hold magic at all is that they are worked into you. They're a part of the person when it's all done, inside the bits that make you up.”

“What!? Where did you learn that?” I asked.

“You're not the only one with friends Justin. I talk to people too, and learn things.” She looked a bit peeved as she spoke, frowning.

“Sorry, it's just, I've never heard that. Makes sense though, since they have to interact with your body...”

“Anyway, what's all this do?” she asked, pointing to the various displays.

“Communicates with the computer,” I explained as simply as I could. “It speaks a language of numbers, so you have to translate to something people can understand. These take those numbers and put them in a form that makes any sense at all to people.” At least I'd upgraded from the breadboards I was using before, something that really didn't look like much more than a collection of wires.

“If it's not intelligent how can it speak?” she asked.

“Eh... it isn't really speaking, that's just the explanation. It mostly uses... something like a card with one color on one side and another on another, by putting in the right set of instructions you get it to put the cards in the right order. The whole thing is modular, with the ability to expand to a limited degree. The one I have here would just be the first section, then it would get bigger and bigger until it could do some truly amazing things.”

“You're losing the point again.”

“Sorry, it's just a lot to explain without getting into the deepest parts.” Trying to find context for something that had no paradigm here was hard.

“Alright, can I help?” she asked.

“Do you want to?” I was a bit taken aback by that question, since she seldom seemed all that interested in my work.

“Why would I have asked otherwise?”