“Well, I don’t know really.” Jen looked to her fists again. “I tend to rely on bare fist strikes, they’re the best way for me to deliver my attacks. I’ve tried some brass knuckles, but it seemed like they diminished the power.”

The librarian flowed forward again. “Do your attacks have any sort of elemental attunement to them?”

“Uhh.. yeah,” Jen said. “Normally I combine my meteoric aura, which is pretty much entirely fire, with a flow-like-water technique as the foundation, and then call upon other abilities within either water or fire to extend my reach or do particularly potent blows.”

The librarian nodded deeply and stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Hm, water and fire, yes. Meteor technique you say? I assume that involves large leaps and falls?” When Jen nodded, the librarian continued. “You could use some air attuned leggings, and to bring that incorporated into your overall fighting style, some lightning gauntlets.”

“I can build something called piston fists, would those work?” I said.

The librarian nodded several times in quick succession. “Yes, yes, that would be perfect! Oh it’ll increase your fighting capabilities at least two fold!”

Jen looked at me and I offered an apologetic shrug. She said, “Well that sounds good to me.”

“Would you need any body armor?” I said. “I know you’re mobile enough by and large but if you get clipped by an attack it could go very poorly.”

“Well,” Jen began, “my arms are pretty tough, they have to be in order to carry the full power of my punches, and my aura does a decent job of protecting the rest of me.”

“Decent isn’t good enough.” I shook my head firmly. “But, I should be able to make some light armor out of a fire attuned metal in order to protect your torso in unison with your aura.” Jen nodded and I leaned back thoughtfully. “Anything else you think we’ll need?”

“I’m not sure what’s available,” Artemis said. “But something in a smoke bomb would be real useful.”

“If I can make a demo-bomb, a smoke bomb should be possible, though it’ll probably be more of a steam bomb,” I said.

“Cool, cool.” Artemis steepled her fingers then, thoughtful. “Comms. We’ll need to be able to stay in touch.”

“That’s a real good idea, and I think I have some ideas of how that could work, but I’ll need to see if I can actually make them happen under the system.” I stood up then, brow creasing for a moment. “If there’s nothing else, I think I should get to work.”

“Not so fast, Placid,” Jen said. “First we need to get some food in you.”

“Oh yeah.” I sat down swiftly. “What’s up with the food?”

“Well, okay,” Jen took in a deep breath as she began, “you know how you level up, right?”

“From defeating monsters and completing quests,” I said.

“I mean, those are things that get you level ups, but the way you level up is different. You level up by building up excess ergon in your body which then extends these sort of pathways that hold the ergon, allowing you to hold more and also to control erg in more complicated ways, which the system then systemizes into path points.”

I nodded slowly. “Yeah, okay, that makes sense.”

“But that’s not the only way that you can extend your pathways. While killing monsters and performing quests extends and fills them simultaneously, leveling up your skills is another way of extending your pathways. But!” She lifted up a finger. “And here’s the important part, leveling up skills doesn’t fill your pathways.”

“How do you know this?” I blinked once.

“From my Vestiges.” Jen shrugged. “I wish I hadn’t told everyone in town though, Chad would almost certainly be less powerful if he didn’t know. I’m surprised that the librarian didn’t tell you, though.”

I shot a glance over to the librarian, who at least had the good graces to look embarrassed. He said, “It would have come up when you had the cafeteria built, I didn’t think it was necessary to go into too much detail about everything.” I extended my look at the librarian, before finally offering a nod of forgiveness.

“Anyway,” Jen said. “You fill up the pathways doing your ordinary processes of erg generation, like breathing, drinking, sleeping, and eating. Normally this takes a long time, but if you eat something really dense in erg-“

I interrupted. “Like a monster.”

“Like a monster.” Jen nodded in agreement. “You’ll get a much bigger boost. With how fast everyone has been leveling up their skills, only eating monsters has come close to filling up people’s pathways.”

I considered for a moment. “I wonder how that would interact with evolved skills.”

“What’s an evolved skill?” Artemis asked.

The librarian interrupted swiftly. “You have an evolved skill already? What exactly happened in that dungeon?”

“Oh, as a reward for completion, it evolved four of my skills.” I said.

The librarian’s eyes widened for a moment, before he sat down in a suddenly present chair, letting out a breath. “Okay, alright. You should eat something as soon as you can.”

“Where’s the best place to set up a fire?” Jen said.

“Probably outside,” I said. “At least until I have the cafeteria opened up.”

“Yeah, makes sense. I can set up my fire pit out there and get some grilling going. Plus, these deer-things don’t taste too bad, all things considered.” Jen stood up slowly then. “Oh, and we’ll talk about the Vestige you’re carrying later. He doesn’t seem like he’s ready to talk yet.”

We all exchanged our farewells and I headed out of the library, crossing over to the entrance to the research lab. I swung the door open and followed its hallway over to a room of a similar size to the library, but here the outer circles were filled with desks like the library, but the center was a dais with a standing sketching table in front of it. I descended down to the table and placed a hand onto it, feeling it pulse in time with my own circulation, reaching a ready rhythm in tune with one another.

My mind opened to the table and I envisioned the first thing on my list, perhaps the most complex of my potential inventions, the truck. Instantly, I realized that a truck was not what I actually needed, I needed a bus, more seats, slightly larger, nothing to prevent me from reinforcing the chassis. The chassis itself came along easily enough, it was just a case of metal. As I thought, the image of my design appeared on the table and as a hologram rotating slowly in the air above the dais.

The rest of the structural elements, those needed an engine and there was no point in designing the rest until I had finished that. I waved the chassis off to the side and began working on the engine. The easiest method would be to create an ergonic engine, powering it purely by the erg of the driver. What this possessed in simplicity, it lacked in endurance, I could already tell the drain on the user would be immense, especially for a vehicle of its size.

So, I went back to the concept of a steam engine, a simple turbine but with a relatively small amount of erg it would generate a considerably large amount of work, but that work would be spread out over a long period of time. Unless, if I expanded the size and number of turbines, I could even go so far as to put turbines for each wheel well, allowing for the driver to have an even greater degree of control over the motion of the vehicle.

The turbines appeared as separate from the chassis on the drafting table, with lines showing their connecting points, but in the 3d display, they simply incorporated into the whole, being invisible from most angles. With a hand, I could rotate the display and get a better look at the turbine locations. I zoomed in briefly before nodding and returning to the default view. The concepts flowed with a surprising amount of ease, my mind remembering dozens of miniscule details that I had forgotten over my years of study, now brought to the surface with the aid of the system.

Mobility Boosters definitely played a role here, and I could also feel the tug of Basic Production Tools strangely enough, but also more powerfully Automated Tools. The three skills combined to unlock new ways of looking at the design process that I hadn’t previously considered, expanding the way that my understanding of materials and processes combined into the act of creation before me. My sense of self floated in a conceptual void, loosed from the moorings of my body and left to exist as a pure object of thought.

Next, the axles slid into place, simple cylinders to help keep the wheels aligned, with cabling attached to a central driving column for the sake of allowing for steering. From there, I attached the central column to the steering wheel, and also keyed in erg receptors into the wheel itself, before tying those receptors back to the turbines. All the pieces clicked into place and hung in the air for a moment. I felt this enormous weight, a mental pressure pushing me down, trying to crush me in the wake of the realization.

Finally, the epiphany broke and the design clicked forward. I let out a heavy breath of success and then set to work with furnishing the interior with seats, building the door and the door controls. I considered the windows briefly, before realizing that the aerogel would serve perfectly for that function, with the design even altering the opacity to make the substance more transparent.

From there, the wheels are a simple matter, planks becoming rubber and wrapping around a hub connected to the corresponding axle. I finish up the design with reinforced walls and bumpers, and then infuse the drawing with a little energy, causing the hologram to move into life. The numbers flash and trail in front of my vision, showing pressures and velocities and force allowances and fuel efficiencies. From that, I tweak the turbines to be a bit more powerful, before finally finishing the design and clicking accept on a prompt that appeared.

The schema formed in my mind and while the pain of the information forcibly being crammed into my awareness was palpable, it was not overwhelming. I simply breathed through it and nodded as the information appeared in my crafting menu. It required a lot of materials, but nothing I couldn’t source from my inventory. With a heavy breath, I leaned back and, sweating a little, walked to a desk to begin recovering my strength.

Despite the exhaustion, it felt good to be back at the design process. If there was anything I was good at, it was figuring out how to use the tools I had available in order to build what I needed. Ultimately, that’s what engineering was all about, making the most effective and efficient tools using whatever resources were available. Being able to use that knowledge, that training, in this new space with its new tools and techniques, felt like a blessing that I should not be ungrateful for. The voice in the back of my mind whispering that I was going to mess it all up remained quieter than normal, for which I was quite grateful.

I rose back to my feet and started working on a demo-bomb. The problem here was that none of my skills were a perfect fit; I pulled from ranged weaponry and basic production tools as they were the only ones with anything resembling a resonance, but it took more forcing than I liked to get them to begin singing properly. I understood the basic principles of a bomb though, and I knew how to make the casing, all I need was a simple pipe for that, albeit one sealed at both ends. The system relented and allowed the case to form.

Before I could begin work on the internals though, a voice whispered from behind my ear. “We need to talk.”