[A Day in the Life of Aelryinth] - 1830 hours

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            My team had already flitted off home. Little says ‘high fantasy world’ like the ability to Teleport, to travel across a continent in a heartbeat and come home from your day job thousands of miles away without skipping a beat, not even having to put up with traffic.

It was even funnier when doing those skips a hundred or more times a day was your job, as Snap Teleport allowed us to go retrieve people back to a Cache without spending Valences, as long as the Warlocks were handy to charge the Primary Seal Focus up. It gave us unprecedented ability to move stuff and people around from Cache to Cache, without having to put up with the problems of road, transportation, time, and drivers as we might.

            We only had so many Perpetual Motion Devices to drive vehicles around, and so many people who could zip around at speed towing Disk Trains. Low magic/Weird Science was working on the problem, and the first few steam engines had been around a while, but they took time to enchant. If at all possible, we wanted such things to be as low magic as possible, even none if possible.

            It would keep the cost down, right?

            Relying on animals for the fallback was the historical method, but that method was dirty, slow, and low power compared to vehicles.

            The main floor Armory of my Cache, located inside Grand Central and dimensionally expanded after the Pyramid was established, was long cleared out and basically turned into a private tower for me and the Nobles of the Allegiance to meet in. Arms and Armor and other Artifice being worked on were stored elsewhere now, since we had next to no reserves of the stuff any more. When it was made, it was for a direct purpose 99% of the time, even if it was a first-time thing. Not many people had the money or time to indulge whimsy, leaving that to the Priesthoods who could afford it.

            There was just too much that needed to be done. If you ever were out of work, I could bury you in enough to keep you busy for the next decade in literally a heartbeat.

The entry level had thus been turned into a kind of working lounge. People who needed to meet with me could find me there for the next half hour, and there was always a small line of them built up. Stargrove managed the queue, as a lot of Casters drifted in around this time.

            It was Energizer Time.

            The hugest and heaviest demand for stuff in the Allegiance was for magical items to do this or that, and making such things all ran on goldweight, in all of its forms.

The second highest demand was for high Quality Level stuff. High QL not only required master Craftsmen to make the things, they required extremely valuable and quite uncommon Energized materials we simply had no reserves of. As fast as the stuff could be mined, there was someone finding a use for most of it.

            At the most basic level, Energized Materials could double the value of a goldweight material towards its purpose. Thus, Energizing Fire into some gold to make atargold doubled the value of that gold for purposes of magic that dealt with fire. 

            Y’know, like smithing instruments, engines, anything for fire resistance, Fireball Wands, Flaming Weapons, and so forth and so on.

            Unfortunately, Energizing was a very slow process for mass production. A single Valence I spell only energized a cubic inch at a time, and of the lowest Concepts. More powerful Isotopes required high Caster Levels, and rarer Isotopes embodying higher Concepts required higher Valences to isolate those Concepts.

            There were still puh-lenty of Isotopes we simply couldn’t make, because nobody had the Valences yet. We could trade for them with Celestials, as Urlhmenuus could create at least small amounts of them, but bothering a World Angel to make stuff was just gauche.

            On the other hand, it cost him and his Celestial Host nothing but time and the raw materials we’d provide to do it, and the requirement that they only be used for Good purposes was a given.

            There was a chest up by the Altar that stood above Grand Central, the dais that changed the default spell active throughout the Pyramid Power Field (normally Resist Disease). It opened up into a table, and on that table were always heaped different kinds of metals and crystals in discrete little piles and arrangements, and there was a list of what was needed by us and for what purposes.

            There was always more stuff there than bringing in every single Celestial under Urlhmenuus could do in one day, and there were plenty of things only the most powerful Angels could make.

            Archbishop Clarence emptied that chest of things and filled it with new materials every morning without fail, wind or snow, rain or shine. Sometimes there was almost nothing Energized, sometimes there was a king’s ransom. 

            It usually depended on what kind of fighting day the Host had. But we had the goddamn toughest Heavenly Host imaginable watching over us, so their days weren’t as bad as many others might be.

            The Steel Lounge was basically the same kind of place for Steel Casters who worked elsewhere, but came through the Cache in Grand Central at some point. They could stop in, grab some gems or metals or wood or leather or whatever from the stuff piling up here for attention, dump Valences via Energizing materials, and effectively make goldweight and incredibly rare Isotopes from the base materials out of time and energy.

Valence I, a cubic inch. Enough to slowly accumulate for even an apprentice over time, enabling them to build up valuable raw materials they could sell for compensation. Easy to Assay, easy to use, basically a form of alternate currency and income.

            It also helped our limited supply of such materials go twice as far if the only thing that was going to happen to the stuff was being Burned for magical items. Craftcoins for the common Concepts were the first things we Energized.

            Higher Concept stuff was more valuable, but was more limited in use, often to the point that its value multiplier was moot. If you needed a Life Gem worth 10 goldweight to power a Raise Dead, it didn’t matter if you were getting a x4 multiplier, since you needed a Life-Energized Gemstone worth 5,000 gold, end stop. Sure, it was only worth 1,250 if you Burned it for something inappropriate, but who was going to do that?

            It also took a Valence V to Energize, the Good and Healing Domains, Good Alignment, high Faith Levels, Divine approval, and other hoops to jump through, which meant not everybody could do the job.

            I was one of those who could.

Argos looked up as I entered, waving once, a slew of bright metals and crystals on the table in front of him and Weirdboy, the seat opposite him at the table still empty.

Argos’ ornate miter was on the table next to him, his colorful robes dimmed down and not so impressive. He liked being showy but effective, people underestimating him because he liked attention, often forgetting that the Eternal Helm was the single largest Allegiance in the game, and had the most Powered people by Levels directly under Banner even today.

            Despite the fact he was the Headmaster of Grand Central, he ran his Allegiance tight and true, and the Eternal Helm was a workhorse. Argos took pride in doing all he could to contribute personally, too, even if I had to make his schedule and keep him on track to do it.

            So, every day he was down here, especially if he hadn’t dumped a bunch of Valences charging Wands or Staves or something. Students of Grand Central regularly came into the Cache with supplies of Isotopes they Energized, a regular supply of income for them to spend Valences on.

            What everyone saw was me wave to him casually and sit down in that seat as I nodded to Weirdboy, the latter’s electric mop of silky white hair standing out in contrast to my drifting straight locks, and to Argos’ jet-black trimly cut head with silver tips. What they didn’t see was the blizzard of quiet exchange between us over who was doing what why, only some minor rearranging of metal bars and glittering gemstones as the thousands of goldweight between us was reallocated.

            That was because the first supplicant for today was also directed by Stargrove to sit down next to me, and as I Cast, I listened to what they had to say, be it a request, ideas, information, viewpoints, or sometimes even a thank-you as a story.

            The first person was one of the women who’d delivered a brand new baby girl to the world today, looking exhausted but determined as she came in on one of the Cache Disks, pushed by one of the Cache’s eternally patient Phantom Servants.

            Her firstborn daughter was named Atoya, after her father who died in the Fall. I put my hand on her to give her my blessing, and Assayed her as her mother looked at me with pride and hope and gratitude.

            “She has the potential for great Faith,” I told her quietly, and her dark eyes lit up with fierce pride as she realized what that meant.

            Atoya, daughter of Chanee, was Powered! She might become a powerful Priestess, and from there, who knew what?

            “Thank you, Master Aelryinth!” she said, giving my hand a quick squeeze. I gave her a happy and sincere smile, and the expressionless Phantom Servant in a phantasmal butler’s suit whisked her away, the new mother still beaming.

            Having one Powered child increased the odds you’d have other Powered children, although the chance was never one hundred percent. 

            The only one hundred percent chance was that if you were Powered, none of your own children would be born Powered. That included Diana and I, and all of our gamer friends who got the quick power-up lottery ticket win.

            None of our children had been born Powered, and there were no exceptions to the rule known for the last eight years.

            It didn’t mean they couldn’t become Powered by other means, but they hadn’t been born that way. There had been a couple times where the children were born Powered, but it turned out the non-Powered spouse had been unfaithful.

            It also meant a guaranteed stay in Michigan, as we taught all the Powered here, not moving to the frontier/borders.

            A diamond in my palm glittered to pale white-gold life, invested with Life Essence and empowered to return a soul to the living through sacrificing it via a Raise Dead spell, effectively costing two Valence V’s to bring someone back from the grave.

But this part was done ahead of time, so it was prep work, and so at a vastly reduced material cost because of it.

            +3,750 gp contribution to the coffers of the Allegiance, one life back from the dead.

On my day off from Pyramid Making, I could use Stone Shaping for other things. The least obvious of those was purifying gemstones. A Valence VII Shape Stone, Dawnstopped, was enough to manipulate most gemstones and metals slowly, allowing them to be slowly reshaped and importantly, melded together.

            On my day off, I’d sit out in my yard, watching the kids play, with boxes of dirty diamonds, junk sapphires, crappy rubies, worthless amethysts, and any similar stones sitting next to me. I’d dip a hand in them and start purging the impurities from them, then melding them together as I stratified their crystalline patterns to an ideal configuration, forming them into rough shapes suitable for further gemcutting… and sizes large enough to use.

            Dirty diamonds were easy to find. Purify them, meld them together, and suddenly we could make large enough diamonds to serve as Life Diamonds!

            More goldweight contributions to the Allegiance.

            Argos and Weirdboy did much the same thing as I did, both having reached Thirteen and being Favored. Weirdboy had taken over a lot of the road-making from me, and Argos handled a lot of the raw volume purifying and melding gemstones, trading back and forth with other Allegiances at a decent profit, as well as quietly putting up houses and drainage systems in his free time… and pretty much every local Church of Heaven in the Allegiance had been built by him at this point.

            We preferred to use Death Coins for the Resurrection-type spells, but the Life Gems were the reserve, and we never had enough reserves of them, because people were killed faster than they could be saved. There’d been a few cases of people stealing Life Diamonds for cash for themselves. So far, they’d all been caught, as trying to resell the things was just asking for trouble, singular-usage as they were. Burning them to Invest or Infuse was just stupid, as the Karmic weight of them clung to the person doing so, and the fact could readily be appraised in both what you worked on and your own Aura… especially if you wasted the Life side of it and squandered 3,750 gp of Karmic value. 

            Those people who’d done the stealing had been Cursed to never be able to benefit from Raise Dead or Cure Deadly Wounds/Revivify, meaning that if they died, they were staying very dead. Two of them had ganked others in the thefts, and were sacrificed to Harse as punishment to bring their victims back, providing their own material components to the spell.

            One of the Feat Mastery Chains we Powered had access to involved giving up a Spell Engram or Spell Slot in exchange for the ability to Cast a specific spell as a Spell-like Ability three times a day.

            On paper, it looked good at first glance, triple the firepower from one Slot, trading a little versatility for more staying power. Then you took a second look at it and realized by default that it didn’t want to include a Meta’d version of the spell, which was extremely inefficient. A Widen’d II Energize covered the area of four normal spells for the same Slot if you were Practical and Efficient in Casting it, which any diligent mage totally was, and a Meta’d attack spell like Fireball could easily do three to four times the damage of a spell that was not Meta’d.

            If you had the Stat line, Caster Level, Spellcraft, and invested a whole bunch of extra Karma, however, you could indeed compress a Meta’d spell down instead of the default and swap it in. It could be a LOT of extra Karma, depending on how many Metas you were cramming in there, but since it was worthless to do it otherwise, and if you had the Karma, why not do it?

            Argos, Weirdboy, and I, and pretty much all of the senior Casters of the Allegiance, had spent the Karma for Energize I-V for this SLA Exchange Mastery. Sure, sure, we could have used combat spells instead, but why? You didn’t use combat spells every day. Energize, however, you could use any day and every day, you just needed raw materials, which were easy to come by.

            So it was that I was using Widened Holy Vivic Fiery Thundering Frost Shocking Rapid Earthen Energize spells as SLA’s, and then complementing them with extra Valences from my lower Slots as I had to spare.

            I generally had a LOT to spare.

            Tungsten and titanium were the highest demand raw metals, beyond just rote gold and platinum as Burned goldweight for value. Tungsten required a Caster Level of 15 and ten Ranks in Spellcraft and Alchemy to advance to Earth Tungsten, also known as adamantine, which was THE best metal we had for Arms and Armor and most any other asset requiring strength. A few cubic inches at a time in no way satisfied the demand for the stuff, and the waiting list for adamantine Arms and Armor was tens of thousands of people long.

            Mithral, or Water Titanium, was the next Isotope of monstrous demand, being as strong as the highest grade of steel, half the weight, gleaming butter-silver in hue, and qualifying as silver for purposes of harming certain magical creatures. Finesse fighters loved the stuff, and for high-end lighter Armors it was definitely the best material, with applications anywhere strength and lightness were required together.

            So, there was never enough mithral around, either. Goldweight value x25 that of gold by mass, while adamantine was x40, too!

            Since Energize was based on volume instead of ‘value’, naturally the best things to work on were high-value objects. Platinum was the most precious of the base metals in terms of goldweight value, but always fell behind compared to any decent gemstone, so we always preferred to work with precious stones if we could.

            That said, specific Isotopic requests for metals with Concepts of Fire, Earth, Water, Air, Dimensions, Holy, and all sorts of other Traits were always piling up for constructing specific magic items that needed them as requirements, or simply would be the most logical to use. If you were making a fire-resistant conveyance, you could enchant the whole thing to Resist Fire, and you should and probably would, but making or coating the whole damn thing in gildensteel, which was nigh impervious to flame, only made sense, and it was one of the easiest things to Energize.

            The list of Isotopes for Artificing and the need for magnified goldweight were always warring, and the Want List of them in the Markspace was always moving, always being added to as new things came up, and always being whittled away as multiple people contributed towards the volume requirements of projects. Even multiple tons of Isotopic metals could be supplied when enough people focused on making the stuff, and it was the best and easiest way for younger Casters to earn a steady income.

            I could easily spend a hundred different Valence Slots on Energizing stuff every day, and sometimes I actually did, the needs for Isotopes being that bottomless. It just took a long time to regain that much mana from the world if I did it, requiring an hour or two more in the Ringsong Pavilion to get all my juice back.

            Argos was giving training advice to an earnest young woman who wanted to know which way to take her Karmic gains and downtime studies. Weirdboy was reviewing an older man’s Spellcrafting attempt, his attempt at the Wizard Title, making a variant of Plant Growth designed specifically for rapidly putting a grassy lawn in place. The latter really needed some Natural Mana to keep it at a III Valence, which was why it wasn’t working properly for the fellow. Using only Arcane mana bumped it up to a IV…

            In their hands or under their fingers, metal glittered and changed colors subtly or overtly, gemstones winked and glittered with internal lights or also changed hues and shades to sometimes wildly different colors. Gray granite flowed into a purest white circle that would become an Amanan Healing Trap.

            I’d asked Urlh about all this once on our monthly chats about stuff. The Solar had told me that he had never really seen a mortal society rebound so quickly from an apocalypse at the level we’d suffered. The joint efforts of everyone from high to low, the sacrifices of the current generation to rebuild and prepare the road for who would be coming after us… it was all very impressive, if not quite to Heavenly standards.

            But Heaven didn’t have to worry about food, shelter, and having children, either, which the World Angel acknowledged. The concerns of mortals added many layers of complexity to what was going on.

            Not many mortal worlds actually bothered to coordinate with Celestial efforts on their behalf, either. We valued our World Angel and his underlings, and one of the things that we did was make stuff for them to help them in their own tasks. We simply phrased it as ‘proper equipment for our world’s defenders, to be passed to your successors if you are assigned elsewhere,’ and instead of personal rewards they became trappings of their offices, a nice little workaround to the whole bribery angle of things.

            We had the goddamn best-equipped angels around, we did, and we let them know that if they needed Buffs for a fight or Healing after a fight to come on down and we’d fix them up. The Sylunar Temple in town had quietly played host to over two dozen heavily-wounded Celestials of the Heavenly Host a few times.

            The best kind of partnership around, eyes wide open, mutual aid given unstintingly.

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