He made the toilets. And just like that, his mana was low again. 4000 mana points to create 30 toilets. ‘Almost half of his daily mana! That is insane,’ he thought. ‘But, no pun intended, the level of Runescripting on the toilets was worth it. Not to mention the toilets kept him from having to build a sewer system.’ So he resolved to not think about it. Besides whenever he pictured his dad’s face, priceless!

He went ahead and created the mattresses and the bedframes too. The mattresses cost him over 1300 mana points. The bed frames with all the runes on them were over 1500 mana points. What all that boiled down too was that it was after four in the morning, he'd been building for less than 30 minutes, and he was getting close to being out of mana again.

He went ahead and placed all the beds in their rooms. It still gave him a thrill to watch the mattresses and the beds float through Max’s. Then he placed the toilets too. He caused the toilet’s bases to merge with the stone floor of the bathrooms. He was actually a little worried that somebody would steal one. He could see someone wanting to have a private head in their room. The bed’s he didn't attach to the floor. He arranged them in the rooms but left their final position open to the person living there. He would let the people arrange them as they wanted.

He went ahead and created the small round tables too and sent them flying down the hallways to arrive in their rooms.

That just left him with a few things to get done still. He didn’t have many items left on his todo list.

Stuff to build

comfortable chairs 60 chests 64 showerheads 48 shower drains 24 toilet doors 30 mirrors big (6) hot water for pool 3 cold water for pools 3 steps to roof (new floor) 2

He had about 965 mana points left of his daily mana allowance. Plus, about 3000 that he could regain by regenerating or siphoning mana throughout the day. Since he’d been a dumbass and started studying the toilet runes right when his mana had replenished for the day, he’d lost four hours of siphon time. It turns out that he couldn’t overfill his mana pool. He could only replenish what he’d already spent. So, he lost about 600 mana points today because he didn’t time things right. He didn't spend any mana, so he lost four hours of siphoning time. ‘Live and learn,’ he thought.

Looking at the list he thought of something that he’d left out. Hot water heaters for the pools. And, he guessed a temperature control for the cold water pool too. He thought about how to do it and decided that he’d try to create the temperature control runes himself.

It’d be good practice, he thought. He didn’t need to worry about his siphoning reaching its limits. He'd already spent more points than his ability could make up today. Of course, now he was starting to regret the toilet decision, but as his web novels used to say, “there is no pill for regret.”

So he started thinking about how to script the pool controllers. How to script the changes that he needed. He could carve the runes into the base of the pool. That wouldn’t be a problem. And, assuming he got something wrong, it’d be quite easy to fill in the mistaken runes too. It was just knowing what to carve. It turned out there was a big difference between reading and understanding an already completed runescript and creating one himself.

He thought back to his C+ programming experience. One thing that his teacher had always stressed was ‘pseudo-code’ first. Basically, write a description of the program before you start trying to code it. A lot of errors can be prevented that way.

Before he started that, he created the water. It was a lot of water. Fortunately, it didn’t cost a lot since it was well, water. Despite the fact that it didn’t appear on his Create Materials guidelines, he was able to create it without any problems.

It was cool creating the water. He had big puddles of water in the bottom of his pools. He could create a ball of water about every second, so he could see the water level rising. Then, for grins, he created one at the roofline and let it fall seven meters from the roof. It formed a ball and hit hard, splashing everywhere, making this enormous noise, kind of midway between a splat sound and a thudding sound. The floor of Max’s actually trembled.

It was fun so he did it again and again. He thought about when he was a kid playing Water Wars with his brother and sisters. It was this weird game they'd made up, using Super Soakers, the hose, and cowboy hats. The main idea was to protect the water source, the hose. Somehow they’d got the idea of range wars and cattle and water rights from watching old westerns. A secondary goal was to claim territory around the hose. The hose being, of course, the Rio Grande. You needed a river to keep your horses and cows alive. The brief episode of trying to persuade their younger sisters to be cattle was hopefully forgotten. In any case, you couldn’t camp around the hose. There weren’t any Indians, it was a Cowboys only game.

But there were also water balloons involved. His brother Rex was already the star of his Little League baseball and Pee-Wee football teams, so the game was a lot more competitive than Jake liked. Rex was both Pitcher and Quarterback. The little bastard could hurl a balloon the width of the yard easily.

He thought of that as he stared at the big round ball of water he was holding easily in the air over the pool. The ball looked like a perfect sphere. He could look through it, and when he poked it using his manipulation ability, its whole surface deformed and then shook as the ripples moved through its body.

He wondered if there was a statute of limitations on revenge? He thought about all the times he got hit in the head from ambush while playing that damn game. He looked again at his big ball of water. Could he in good conscience hit his brother with a cubic meter of water? He divided it in half. How about now?

Finally though, he decided to let it go. The past was the past. It was enough that he’d control the water temperature of his brother’s showers, he decided.

After about nine minutes he was done. The pools were full and ready to be inscribed. But his time thinking back about the game he'd played when he was a kid, made him decided to go a different way. He decided that the kids needed some fun in the pools.

He created a loot pattern in his head. One plate-sized rock except thicker, about five centimeters, would be chained to the side of the pool. The rock would control the pool it was chained next to using a big bronze chain that mated to a big bronze hoop that circled the rock. On the big pool, it would allow the temperature to range from 10 degrees to 30 degrees. He carved an H on one side of the rock and on the other he carved a C. He put two parallel lines on top and bottom of the letters. Then depending on where you touched in the path, the temperature of the pool would change.

It would increase if you touched closer to the H. Or decrease if you touched closer to the C. He used the same surface color change effect from the fire pits to show where the last place was set.

Then above and below the track, he drew in a cloud, a jet of water, a balloon-like thing, and a circle with the letter one in it and was done.

The jet would cause random fountain-like jets of water to shoot from the sides of the pool to the center. The cloud would cause a fog to happen, restricted to the pool area, and the balloon would cause big balls of water to randomly appear from the sides of the pool and hurtle toward the other side of the pool. At about water balloon speed, he decided.

The circle with a number in it caused a bunch of circles to appear on the base of the pool. Each would show a number inside it which would randomly change. All at once. The most circles that you could have was thirteen. As you held down the circle with the number in it, the number of circles on the bottom of the pool increased and the size of the circles decreased. If you tapped the circle on the controller, the number of circles decreased and their size increased. The closer you tapped to the center track, the faster the effects occurred.

Of course, in the exact center, he put a big letter M surrounded by a circle. That was the mom button. Any adult could reset the pool back to its starting state: no jets, no fog, no balloons, no circles, and the temperature was set back to 25 degrees.

Then he made a second controller plan for the hot pools. It was the same as the other control except the temperature ranged from 30 degrees to 40 degrees. And there was no numbered circle on this controller. And all the effects stayed underwater except for the fog which changed to steam in the area of the hot pool. 'Nobody,' he decided, 'wanted a jet of hot water to the head.'

The fact that he’d changed from inscribing the characters on the pool to creating a loot pattern was Ok with Jake. He wanted to create the pattern quickly and study it. There were a lot of things going on in this pattern. He figured by studying it he could raise his Runescripting skill by at least another level, maybe several.

The two patterns cost plenty. The big pool one was more expensive at 105 mana while the hot water controller was 95. Lots of runes on both of them.

When he tried to create the pool’s controllers, he almost screamed. The mana required was 643, for each one of them. He thought long and hard about whether he needed to create such a complicated pool system, but then he thought of the kids and decided he had to. Forever is too long to hold onto something as sad as regret over not doing something for kids.

It was now around 4:30 in the morning and he had spent basically all his mana for the day. He’d need about six hours to siphon the mana he’d need to create the cold pool controllers. And then another eight hours to create the hot controllers. He was glad that he had his new Runescripting skill. Without it and with no dog or people in well, him, he’d go crazy with boredom.

He started then examining first the toilet some more, then the two beds and finally after enough time had passed, the cold pool controller and then the hot pool controller. As he expected, over time his skill level increased. He received another notification after three hours that his Runescripting level had gone up to level eight, then another notification after another four hours that it had moved to nine, with yet another one following saying he’d reached Copper rank, level one.

Just for grins, he checked his status sheet and saw that he’d gone up two whole levels. He thought about it and decided that it must have been the experience he’d gained from Runescripting. He wasn’t sure how much each level granted, but evidently moving up ranks in a skill granted some serious experience points.

He thought about it where to put his assignable points. Tried to put them into agility to see if he could gain any movement-related abilities back, but was denied. The points would not go, in fact, the plus signs used to add the points didn’t exist.

‘I guess you can’t be an agile rock,’ he thought. His memories of playing Water Wars and running, hiding, having a body came back to haunt him then, but to no purpose. Like the novels said, ‘there isn’t a pill for regret. Besides, given the alternative, being a pink rock ain’t that bad.'

He put the two points into Intelligence and Wisdom. Both increased his mana as far as he could tell. They both increased his Qi also.

He’d spent the whole day immersed in runes and scripting. He had the new levels to show for it too. He might not be able to create a bed or a pool controller on his own yet, but he could make traps if he wanted to. He also could make a simpler heat collection set of runes that would be capable of melting iron or even aluminum. But nothing as complicated as the runescript on the toilet.

He still had about 500 mana points to spend and looking at the remaining items on his list, he had about seven items still to create.

He decided to finish doing what he’d started out to do last night, make the plans. This time, except for the showerheads and drains, there should be no heavy runescripting involved.

He created the chair’s plan out of leather, ash, and some cotton batting for 50 mana points. The chests were simple bronze-plated, ash chests with no locks on them. But they had a hasp and a bronze pin on them that could keep them closed. People could replace the pin with a lock if they wanted to. It wasn’t case-hardened steel, but it would keep people from casually rifling through somebody’s stuff. Their plan only cost 50 mana points.

The toilet doors needed hinges and latches too. He decided to create the doors out of balsa, 6 cm thick, a couple of meters in length, two meters in height. There was no loot plan necessary, he just used his ‘Create Materials’ skill. It only cost him eight mana.

But the hinges and the latches both required a loot plan. He thought about it and decided that he could actually create the hinges and the latches himself using his ‘Create Materials’ skill and his ‘Dungeon Objects Manipulation’ ability, but he didn’t have time. He went ahead and created a loot pattern instead, 25 mana apiece.

True mirrors he couldn’t create yet. He couldn’t create glass or mercury so instead, he created bronze mirrors. Big, square, thin pieces of bronze he planned on adding to the restrooms on both of the short walls. Once again, he used his ‘Create Materials’ skill instead of his ‘Create Loot’ one. The cost was only eight mana, so he just did it.

And then had fun maneuvering the large, thin, sheets of bronze through Max’s. When shaken the bronze sheets kind of made this crashing sound which he thought was kind of interesting. It sounded a little like thunder. He could see freaking out some dungeon goers with the noise at some future date.

Thinking about the bathrooms made him realize that he hadn’t added sinks to them in the plans. Come to think about it, there wasn’t a sink in the entire place. He hadn’t developed the kitchen yet, so there were probably going to be sinks in there, but still, it seemed like a big oversight. Well, since the toilets were handsfree, it wasn’t as big an oversight as it could have been, but something to add to his plans. ‘Crap,’ he thought. “More shit to build.’

He still had over 400 mana left and only five, no make that at least six if you added the sinks to things still to create. He decided to hold off on creating the chairs, chests and stall door latches and hinges. He thought about creating the steps to the roof and making the walls, the crenellations to hide behind, but decided he’d better hold off. He might be needing that space to set up more rooms. Knowing his mom, he’d probably need it.

He finally decided that he needed to create the plans for showerheads and drains. For the showerheads, he opted for something relatively standard. He had a showerhead pattern from the showers that used to exist in Max's before the Event occurred.

He called it up, remade it out of bronze, removed the plumbing, well recreated the pipe as a solid bar of bronze rather than a pipe. Then he went a little crazy when designing the rest of the shower.

The first thing he did was create a bronze saucer-sized disk about 10 cm in width, about 4 cms thick. He created the same Hot and Cold letters on the left and right sides of the disk. Then created a circle button with M in the center as well. The same setup applied. The closer you tapped to the H, the hotter the water became, the closer to the C, the colder it became. The M button turned it off immediately. Above and below the tracks, he put a cloud, an icon of a showerhead with a bunch of straight lines coming out of it, an icon of a showerhead with a bunch of straight lines of varying length coming out of it, an icon of a manikin with a cloudlike ring around it about the waist, a simple cylinder, and finally what looked like a bar of soap.

The cloud button created a steam or a fog depending on how hot the temperature of the shower was set, the showerhead with the straight lines created a normal shower, the irregular lines created a shower with a varying pulsating action, the cloudlike ring created a semi-abrasive cloud that moved up and down your body exfoliating and cleansing your skin, while the simple cylinder actually created a cylinder around the person's body that prevented them from being viewed from outside the cylinder, and the bar of soap simply covered your body with a thin layer of soap. Eyes included.

After some thought, he decided to add an automatic sensor to the shower. It wouldn’t run unless a person was standing in the range of the showerhead. And finally, when the person touched the M, all the water and soap and dirt and whatnot that the shower had accumulated were banished, leaving the person and the shower, dry. The pattern cost 125 mana. ‘Not good,’ he thought. He figured that making the showers was going to cost him more mana that the toilets did. Not to mention, he was planning on making more of them.

The first thing he did was drop two showers from each of the shower stalls. In his original plans, he allowed eight showers in each of the women's and men's sides of the restrooms. Removing two left 36 in all three restrooms. He figured that was enough. Besides removing two spaced the showers out a little more, giving people more room.

The second thing he decided was that the drains weren’t going to have any runes on them. In fact, they were just going to be a small concave hole underneath the showerhead, covered by a thick bronze plate that opened into a bathtub-sized sump underneath the drain. He figured that with the shower enchantment taking care of the water and mess, he just needed a space for the water to run off and be stored before the shower cleaned it up.

He dug the sumps. It only cost him about 75 mana to dig them all and the drains were so little of an amount of bronze that he could almost create them for free. He created a large, very shallow concave depression leading down to the drain to allow the water to run off into. He was looking forward to the days when he could create gold for almost free, just like he’d created the bronze. He’d have to start watching it though. He wasn’t sure what kind of economy would develop but he figured infinite amounts of free gold would not be a good thing. He imagined the Bobs might take note and not in a good way. Besides, something in him rebelled at the idea of giving something for free.

‘If they want gold,’ he thought, ‘they’ll have to earn it!’