Chapter 140: Amplify
After five minutes, the woman sighed, setting the stone down on the table. She stood, stretched, and then seemed to notice the group for the first time.
"Oh, hello." She waved. "Welcome. I didn't see you there."
"I'm not surprised. That was something," Elisa said. "I don't think I've seen such fine control of magic before."
"It's the nature of the business." The woman inspected her needle, flicked it as if to test that it was still whole, then set it down on the table. "What can I get for you?"
"The mapmaker sent us. He said you would probably be able to help us with this." Elisa set her parchment map down on the table. "We are going here, to a historical site. We want someone here, at the docks, to be able to message us."
"That's a long way to send a message without skills. Neither of you has a messenger class?"
"No. And we want to make sure it's someone who will be at the docks all day, so there's no chance of delays. If we need to get back quickly, seconds will matter."
"I think you'd better tell me what you need it for." The old woman lifted both of her feet, cracking her knee joints before she settled back into her work stool. "This seems like a situation where details matter."
Elisa gave her a basic rundown of the situation. The old woman nodded along, not entirely unconcerned about why these young people were taking it upon themselves to guard the docks, but not asking too many questions about it, either.
"That is an interesting need. Luckily, it makes things simpler, not more complex." The woman held up the stone she had just been working on. "Making something like this takes power, and I'm limited by how much power I can manifest during a single job. If you wanted to send words or images, we'd be right out of the range of what I can do. Messaging isn't my specialty."
"But you can do this?"
"I can make a stone buzz when someone hits another stone with a hammer." The old woman said. "And I might not be able to do that. Let me see if I can't find a better map."
The old woman rummaged around the back of her shop for a bit before finding a larger, better-drawn map than what Elisa had with her, then carefully measured out the distance from the docks to the location Elisa said the temple occupied. After a few minutes of looking and measuring, she sighed and shook her head.
"Can't do it. It's close, but just outside of my range. I'd need just a little more power than I have. Another level would do it, but at my age, levels aren't easy to come by."
"Oh. Darn." Elisa looked downcast, then suddenly perked up as another idea hit her. "But if you were just a little stronger, you could do it? Because I think one of us knows someone who could help with that."
"Elisa…" Riv seemed to be catching on to what she was saying and liked no part of it. "I can't just…"
"Yup. That would do it."
"Good, then." Elisa looked at Riv. "Sorry, buddy, but we need you to use your connections today. It's important."
Riv looked, for a moment, as if he was about to cry. Finally, he turned around and wordlessly trudged away.
Marco waited until Riv was gone before glancing at Elisa. “That wasn’t exactly nice.”
“I know,” she admitted, folding her arms. “But it might not be all bad for him, either. In any case, we need Jane for this.”
At that, the old woman, who had gone back to idly polishing her needle, looked up. “Jane?” Her weathered face creased into a smile. “Oh yes. She’ll do fine. I’m glad she’s the one you were talking about. That saves me the trouble of asking awkward questions about whether or not your helper will ruin my work.”
She gave a little wave of dismissal. “Now, excuse me. I’ve got another project that won’t finish itself.”
She shuffled off toward a stack of stones at the far side of the workshop, humming faintly as she set to work. Left alone, the crew drifted toward the low wall of the open-air shop and settled there. The sun had crept higher, warm on their backs, and for a while nobody said anything. Marco leaned against the wall, eyes half-shut, letting the warmth soak in. Elisa pulled out a notebook and scribbled idly, while Aethe stretched out full-length on the stone floor of the workshop, basking in the sun like a lazy cat. The quiet was companionable and finally helped Marco feel like he was really fully awake.
Time passed drowsy and easy until the sound of footsteps returned. Riv came back down the lane, shoulders still slightly hunched and with Jane beside him. She looked just as worn as he did, her hair messy and walking in steps that were just as slow.
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"You made it." The woman set down her workpiece. "Good. You understand what you will be doing?"
"Yes, ma'am. It seems to me the experience from the project will benefit both of us about equally."
"That's my thinking too. No need for payment, then." The woman clapped her hands. "Just give me a few minutes to recover my magic, and we should be ready. I'll talk to you in a few minutes."
The woman closed her eyes and breathed deeply, giving herself a restful moment of recovery. The crew regrouped near the gate to her workshop, trying to give her room and peace during that time. Jane awkwardly joined them, clearly feeling out of place.
"So," Aethe said to break the ice. "Do you do this kind of work a lot?"
"A person like me is an accessory class," Jane said. "I know people with similar classes who specialize, but I'm about as general as they come. I do whatever work pays best, day to day. Or at least whatever seems like it will offer the most experience."
"This is the second?"
"Oh, absolutely yes. You don't have to feel bad about calling me out here at all. It's much better than the work I thought I'd be doing today. Riv said it was for some kind of buzzing stone?"
"Of course he did." Elisa rolled her eyes. "It's a messenger stone of sorts. We want to leave it at the docks so they can alert us if there's danger while we check out an old temple."
"The cliffside temple?" Jane's eyes lit up with interest. "My grandpa used to talk about that before he passed. I always wanted to go, but there's nobody around here who could take me that wants to waste the time, and Grandpa was too old to take me by the time I realized I wanted to go."
"You are interested in that sort of thing?" Marco asked. "I would think it would be boring."
"Boring is sitting around an island while someone builds specialty crates using your stats to make sure they don't leak," Jane said. "Magic temples are fun."
There was an awkward little silence after that, broken only when Elisa elbowed Riv in the ribs.
"Huh? Oh. Jane, do you want to come with us?" Riv asked. "We can take you. It's just that our ship tends to run into trouble more than you'd think, and…"
"Trouble?" Jane's eyes got even brighter. "What kind of trouble?"
"People try to kill us a lot," Marco said. "More than you'd imagine."
The look in Jane's eyes was now so excited it was almost unsettling. Marco moved back a small amount, unconsciously. She didn't seem to notice.
"And what do you do then?" she pressed. "How do you handle it?"
"We mostly kill them," Aethe said. "I shoot them with arrows."
The old woman stood then, something they were all aware of the moment it happened via clicks from several of her joints.
"All right, children. Let's do this," she said. "It won't be free, of course. And it won't be cheap."
Elisa handed her a bag of gold about the size of a baseball. The old woman chuckled and pocketed it.
“I see now why you think you can guard the docks yourselves. That's a lot of money to think of as nothing.”
The old woman returned to her bench and set the stone in place once more. Her silver needle scratched steadily, etching a new web of lines, one side and then the other, until the surface shimmered faintly with restrained power. The crew watched her work, and Marco found the rhythmic scrape oddly soothing, if a little boring.
Marco looked over to see Jane's part of it and found she was watching just like them, seemingly unoccupied in any way. Curious, he leaned closer and whispered to her, trying not to disturb the old woman's work.
“So what exactly do you do to help?”
Jane shrugged, her expression more embarrassed than proud. “Mostly I just stand there. Letting her draw passively on my stats gives her about a ten percent boost to her productivity. It costs me nothing so long as I don’t try to do anything else at the same time.”
“Then why were you so drained yesterday? You looked like you could hardly stand.”
“That’s different,” Jane said. “I was helping a friend. She was trying something that was a really big stretch for her. In cases like that, I can spend my stats temporarily—lend them out in a way. It gives the other person a big buff to one of their stats, sometimes as much as fifty percent.”
Marco blinked. “Fifty? That's huge.”
“Yeah. But it burns. It hurts the whole time, and you can only hold that for so long before you collapse. Even then it takes a while for everything to come back. It’s why I looked so bad yesterday. That wasn’t a normal day’s work. I had been in pain for almost the whole afternoon.”
Elisa’s quill paused in her notebook as she jotted down the explanation. Aethe gave Jane a longer look, reassessing her with new interest. Marco found himself filled with a similar newfound respect for the class. Anything any of them did that was really worth doing tended to hurt in the same way, and almost all of them had been forced to get used to overdrafting one resource or another.
"It's also task dependent. For most combat scenarios, my passive abilities are much more efficient than my active ones. If I try to help out with one big thing, that's usually it for a while.”
“That makes sense. Still, maybe don’t push yourself that hard on our account,” Marco said. "And let us know if you need to get paid."
Jane shook her head. "This is great experience, for once. And it's interesting. I don't need money. I will tell you what I'd like, though."
"Yeah?" Marco noticed everyone else was listening in by this point. He was glad of that. It would save time later.
"I want to come with you," she said. "To the temple. I've always wanted to see it, and I'm bored out of my skull."
"Jane…" Riv said. "That's a bad idea."
"Oh, shush, you. If it's not too dangerous for you, it's not too dangerous for me. Besides, I can stay below decks, if it comes to real danger. I'll be fine."
"Unless the ship sinks," Aethe said. "But that's never happened before."
"There's a first time for everything." Riv sighed. "You promise you'll go hide if something bad happens?"
"Of course," Jane said. "I'm not stupid."
"Then fine. I can't really tell you no."
"No, you can't," she said. "Well, you could, but you won't. I can tell."
An hour later they were halfway across the island. The old woman had finished with the stone, wiped the silver needle on a rag, and handed the slab over without ceremony.
“You’ve got what you need,” she said, already turning back to her bench. “Go on now. Sunlight’s wasting.”
The steady scrape of metal on rock began again behind them. She seemed like the kind of person who kept busy, and Marco left her to it while he and his four friends tromped back towards the ship.