52: Boosting
‘Activating’ Adjudication’s Altar turned out to be just as easy as Eris hoped. An errant thought- a direction of will as effortless as breathing.
Eris could feel it before she could see it. A pulse deep in her chest, like plucking the string binding a crafter to their creation. That vibration rolled down the invisible, intangible thread until the gold-inlaid runes on the surface of the marble plinth began to glow like the metal were being superheated. Thankfully, the ichryte runestones didn’t light up as well, since that would have revealed the one that wasn’t actually part of the craft. Instead, the book carefully set atop the altar started glowing instead.
Eris, Pravala, Bailey, and Elmas stared on as the Deceiver's Codex was suddenly wrapped in pink strings- the magic inside the creation being pulled to the surface as it was (presumably) siphoned into the marble plinth beneath it.
“Well, it definitely seems to be working.” Bailey, who had since put her pants back on, had wide eyes towards the book. The pink light was visibly peeling away like someone untangling a ball of twine, floating weightlessly in the air as the strings then started to dissolve- burning away akin to a lit fuse. That lasted little more than a moment until the light faded away, the altar ceased glowing, and everything returned to normal. Eris tentatively stepped forward and lifted the book off the plinth.
Notebook
Durability: 100%
A standard notebook designed to hold information. Created by Eris Kadell. Made from fish leather and ironwood paper.
There was no false Inspect window to push aside, this time. Eris could feel it. There was nothing there. No more magical notebook with two sides. Flipping through the pages, everything was a cluttered mess. Diagrams of creations were drawn overtop each other, numbers were mixed together, words didn’t make sense, and not a single part of anything was legible. Eris realized then that she was looking at everything she’d written in the book at the same time. A math ratio to determine the length of the chain to pull the Warden out of the ocean was overlaid with a tripwire designed to shoot Pravala in the neck with a crossbow if she entered the workshop. Runes for ichryte covered by the limited stock of ingredients she could make a poison with in here.
Eris huffed and set the book on a nearby table before turning her attention back to the altar. It wasn’t quite an Inspect, but Eris could distinctly sense a small pool of energy held within- not entirely unlike her own cup of Mana, or the wells she needed to fill with Desire in her skills to level them up. Something not distinct and numerical, just a feeling. That same feeling implored Eris to lift a hand towards the Altar and focus as the Altar glowed once more. The pool of energy she could sense in the marble plinth rapidly diminished while the warmth and tingles in her chest grew. Both sensations faded after no more than a second, letting Eris drop her hand and focus inwards.
Desire’s Reap {Passive} {Level 3}
Engage in sexual acts with others to collect Desire. Desire is collected in the following ways;
Kissing
Groping
Oral
Additional Desire is collected based on the arousal of the active participant(s). Current Desire: 221
“Exactly what the Altar says. Pravala’s influence adding the sin of Envy lets me take absorbed energy and turn it directly into Desire. That gave me a hundred and fifty-six points.”
Bailey raised an eyebrow. “A hundred-fucking-fifty? Damn.”
“Yeah,” Eris nodded flatly. “A full gathering session gives about twenty points, or twenty-five per person if there’s more than one. This many points instantly is… that’s a lot.”
Elmas crossed her arms. “You can create items to get level progression, then take back the magic from whatever you create to get skill progression.Presumably, the more powerful you become and the stronger the items you make, the more Desire they give back. A growing loop.”
“Goss ashrani, amoss murthe,” Pravala replied. That made all three other girls turn and face her, causing the older woman to blink. She then thought for a moment, visibly working to translate using Bailey and Elmas’s knowledge of Common.
“Big fish, small hook?” she said with uncertainty. “Err… ah. Your equivalent would probably be ‘two birds, one stone’.”
Eris simply let out a small sigh. “Yeah, but we need pretty much everything I’m making right now, so the Codex was the only non-essential thing I could take from. Unless you’re volunteering to take a nap on the Altar, Prav.”
The woman curled her lip in a tiny grin. “Hah, hah.”
“WAIT!!!”
Eris, Pravala and Elmas all flinched heavily at Bailey, who had slapped her hands down on a table with a wild look in her eyes and yelled sharply. The poofy blonde then settled slightly.
“Shit, sorry. I just thought of something that would be fucking wild if it worked.” She turned to Elmas. “You said that the stronger the items Eris makes, the more Desire points she gets back, right?”
The Lieutenant-Major furrowed her brow. “Presumably.”
Bailey smiled. “Well, crafting is all about trying to figure out the best ways to manipulate different bonuses and combine efforts with other people to make the best crafts possible. Actually, I’m surprised that none of you picked up on this yet.”
She then looked at Pravala. “If stronger items give Eris more Desire, and you can giga-buff the absolute shit out of her crafting, then what do you think’s gonna happen if Eris drains a couple of those suckers?”
The blonde then brought her hands together and pulled them apart with her fingers spread and a mimicked sound of an explosion from her lips. “Wham, bam, thank you ma’am, that’s a big-ass meatball.”
Eris blinked a number of times. There was no way it could work like that. She sighed. “Look, we can’t afford to destroy the stuff we’ve already made.”
Bailey held up her arms in a wide shrug. “At what point did I say anything like that? I’m just throwing out the idea that you two could just make an absolute fuck-load of random crap, pile them on the Altar, then Eris has a damned feast. Actually, if the items end up having enough magic in them, you might just be able to skip using the Warden entirely. You could probably just power what you’re wanting to make with your own stuff.”
Eris bit the inside of her cheek. “We don’t even know if combining like that would make that kind of result. I mean, there’s no way the bonuses could stack in a way to provide that much of a boost, or else the old Echoes would have done way wilder stuff.”
Pravala cocked her head. “Well, they did create a magical prison that halts the process of aging and contains the literal embodiment of the end of the world. Is that wild enough for you?”
A moment of tense silence was interrupted by Bailey awkwardly clearing her throat. “Why not just make something simple right now to see how much magic you can drain from it?”
Eris let out a loud sigh and slumped her shoulders. “Fine.” She walked over to one of the shelves and searched for a few seconds before pulling out a length of wood, then moved to one of the workbenches. “Pravala? Novice Artificer.”
The Summoner calmly stepped up behind the redhead, then rested a hand on Eris’s shoulder. Once again, the sudden and immediate jolt of power rushing through her chest made Eris pause for a single half-second to acclimate to the change. Once the tingling became something she was used to, Eris picked up a nicely-forged knife with a simple handle but an edge that cut through the wood as easily as if it were pine instead of something over three times as dense.
It was an extremely simple job- done entirely for speed of operation instead of the quality of the end project. As the knife carved through the dense material, Eris let the crafting trance take over in this brief moment and focused entirely inwards. Her pool of Crafting Points tingled in her fingertips and beckoned towards the two skills now able to be used. Resilience was completely ignored. Screw adding Durability. Every single point was dumped unceremoniously into Perfection, not that it would matter in the end since the item was effectively being made to get destroyed.
With each CP expelled through Perfection, Eris willed out even more energy to coalesce around the wooden stock being carved down. The pink strings fired out from her hands like exploding spiders, willed into existence with so much force that Eris could practically feel the magic carving paths through the wood. It didn’t matter what the product was, any of the benefits, or even what the imbued sinful effects would be. All that mattered was that the magic was inside the damned thing.
Eris swiped the knife with a final pass, sending a long sliver of wood falling onto the table and willing the craft to finish. The knife was set down, and Eris walked over to the plinth to drop the wood on top while shaking Pravala’s hand from her shoulder.
“There, a club with all my CP, imbued with Lust, and boosted by Pravala.”
“Is it imbued with Envy, too, since Pravala was boosting you while you made it?”
Eris watched Pravala narrow her eyes, obviously Inspecting the club. Eris didn’t do the same.
“It is indeed,” Pravala hummed. “Deviant Theft. When used to strike a hostile target-”
“Doesn’t matter what it does,” Eris said, then narrowed her eyes towards the Altar that illuminated with light.
Alongside it, the haphazard wooden club burst back into pink strings that unravelled no more than fifteen seconds after they had tightened during the crafting process. Pink light dissolved away like mist under the morning sun, and within moments all illumination faded away to leave a normal, ordinary stick that Eris lifted and tossed back onto the worktable. Once again, eyes turned back to the marble plinth and a hand lifted. Eris could feel the magic stored inside. There was noticeably more than with the Codex, making Eris falter for a moment. She let out a little sigh, then willed that energy to pull towards her. It seeped into her chest, flowing as warmth and tingles that eventually abated. Eris focused inwards.
Desire’s Reap {Passive} {Level 3}
Engage in sexual acts with others to collect Desire. Desire is collected in the following ways;
Kissing
Groping
Oral
Additional Desire is collected based on the arousal of the active participant(s). Current Desire: 1094
Eris blinked a few times, curling a few fingers and trying to work out the math in her head. Two-twenty-one before, carry the one…
“Eight hundred and seventy… three? I think that’s how much Desire it gave?”
Bailey whistled. “You managed to take the equivalent to being the center-stage of an all-night orgy and crammed it into the span of twenty seconds.”
Eris let out a little huff. “I now have more Desire ready to spend than I’ve earned in the month that I’ve been an Artificer.”
“What do you plan to spend on first?” Pravala smirked.
It was a little bit numbing- to have so much power and energy ready and available, with a veritable selection to choose from. It felt oddly like being handed a pouch full of moons, released into a store and told “Go nuts.”
Even so, options weren’t completely limitless. Twelve skills, but only six that could be levelled up. Novice Artificer, Crafting Points, Perfection, Resilience, Ally of Artifice, and Desire’s Reap.
Her first-level skills; Novice Artificer, Crafting Points, Resilience and Desire’s Reap. If the first three followed the pattern of Reap, then they would all take two hundred and fifty points to bring to third level. Then if the ‘each level multiplies the cost by ten’ rule was consistent, then each of them would take twenty-five-hundred points to bring to level four. A thousand points in reserve suddenly didn’t feel like so much- especially when looking at her two newer skills.
Perfection hadn’t taken twenty-five points to bring from level one to two like her first skills. It started out as two hundred and fifty, and a few experimental drops towards level three had the exact same feeling as when she first tested with bringing Reap to level four- a trickle of water trying to fill a lake. And lastly, Ally of Artifice.
It had piqued Eris’s interest the first moment she read it- as it would have for anyone. Choosing a person to level up twice as fast, but also getting all the progression they did? Since it seemed like both the number of allies she could designate and the progression boost were increased with level, then that meant the progression she personally received would be multiplicative. However…
There was absolutely nobody to use it on right now.
Bailey and Elmas didn’t have their classes anymore, so they didn’t have any progression they could gain. Pravala did, but even with the reluctant acceptance of the Echo’s presence, the thought of doing anything to explicitly help that woman made bile rise in Eris’s throat. Thankfully, there was the looming knowledge that the skill would do absolutely nothing for Pravala. With nothing to fight and defeat, combat classes couldn’t gain progression. Therefore, there was no obligation whatsoever to designate Pravala as an Ally.
Presumably, it would also take two hundred and fifty points to bring to second level, and Eris was more than a little intrigued about the idea of getting back to Marrix with the ability to boost both Jaxie and Alex’s progression.
Eris bit the inside of her cheek, then started to let the energy of her Desire seep out into her skills. What did Bailey say? ”You two could just make an absolute fuck-load of random crap, pile them on the Altar, then Eris has a damned feast.” As the power evenly flowed out into four skills, Eris wasn’t worried about there being a ‘waste of energy’. She muttered out as the cups flowed over and her skin went clammy. The wells of energy towards the progression of her skills emptied into nothing as the cups expanded and goosebumps rose.
“As much magic as that is, we have no idea how much we’ll actually need in order to overpower the enchantments of the Obelisk. Instead of gambling with magic when we have no idea how much we need, I’d rather take it directly from something as magical as the Obelisk itself- the Warden. If too little magic won’t work, then I want to guarantee that we have too much.”
Leyla’s eyes narrowed. Seeing the way that Eris was putting so little time in consideration of the idea was unusual. If there was anything she learned about Eris after studying her for days back in Marrix, it’s that even if the girl had her idea of how things worked and was stubbornly hard-headed, she was open to alternative ways of solving a problem.
But this fixation on ignoring the safer option and insisting on the use of the Warden made one thing clear- this wasn’t a matter of Eris wanting the option to get out of the Obelisk faster, or guaranteeing that there was enough magic to power whatever weird creation she was planning to get them out. Of course, there was the benefit of having such a powerful source of magic to draw from, but that was little more than a secondary purpose.
Eris wanted the Warden to use against Pravala.
Of course, all Leyla could do was hope that that awful hag didn’t put the pieces together. Just because Pravala was all-seeing didn’t mean she was all knowing. Pravala had all of Leyla’s memories and was pressing in the back of her mind, seeing through her eyes and listening through her ears. Anything Leyla experienced, Pravala did too. However, Leyla had spent years looking for the things that other people ignored. People overlooked so many things- just like the woman in her head. After all, Pravala could only learn her experiences, not read her mind.
From this position, Leyla could look past the two Echoes and Bailey and see the corner of the shelf. About an inch up from the floor, the edge of the wood curling around to the backside was slightly cracked and splintered. Although Leyla couldn’t peek around to check and confirm because then Pravala would get a clear eyeful, Leyla was almost entirely certain that there was a hole specifically carved into the back of the shelf’s leg. Furthermore, the way that Eris slotted that first runestone into the Altar wasn’t the same way she put in the second. It wasn’t properly secured like the other. With the meticulous effort Eris put into her work, there was no way that wasn’t intentional.
That rune was something else- something Eris was hiding from Pravala.
But it wasn’t completely lost on the Summoner. Leyla could see it in the woman’s face. The tension. The analyzing. Pravala knew Eris didn’t like her and was actively searching for any plot Eris was trying to work against her. All that mattered was that Pravala didn’t find out about whatever Eris was doing. Unfortunately, Leyla couldn’t directly do anything to harm that hag who impaled her and left her powerless. She couldn’t talk to Eris or help plot with her against Pravala without ruining everything, but at the very least, she could try her best to make sure the Summoner doesn’t find the right scent. She let out a huff.
“Then you two better get to work,” Leyla stepped forward. “No sense waiting around. Miracles don’t happen unless you make them yourself.”
Thankfully, Bailey seemed to take that as an invite to chime in.
“That’s a pretty pessimistic way of putting things, but it’s on the right track. We aren’t exactly on a limited time frame in here, so cranking out as many pointless magic items as possible and draining them all to get Eris some crazy skill progression before continuing on is completely warranted. I mean, it’ll help in the long run, and it should also help in here at least a little bit regardless of Pravala’s boost.”
Elmas caught the faintest twitch of Eris’s lip. Relief. Good. If Eris was relieved about something, it meant Leyla was doing something that helped the redhead’s plan.
“As much as I want to get out quickly,” Eris began, “having the opportunity to power-level my skills because of how the Altar ended up is hard to ignore.”
Bailey stepped forward, draping an arm over Eris’s shoulders in a side-hug. “So don’t ignore it. Take the day, bring your nose to the grindstone, and make all the random bullshit you can.”
Elmas watched Eris nod and give a small sigh, then cast an errant glance towards Pravala with disdain. The Summoner looked on with a curious eyebrow, but Eris swallowed and turned her eyes to the floor.
“Alright. Nose to the grindstone.”