BECMI Chapter 461 – Luck of the Pyramid
A Potion of Master’s Luck allowed a person to set the result of a single die roll or lucky chance to whatever they wanted. Perfect hits, perfect dodges, perfect saves, perfect success; it was all possible, stuff that even Wish might have a hard time duplicating or messing with…
Absolutely messing with Luck like that required some powerful forces, and doing it alchemically needed the strongest and rarest of reagents and material components, along with the incredibly high skill required to do the all the intricate steps required to make something like that.
“We’ve got so much Mu Goop it would take us years to process all of it,” Thor agreed, “and it’s magic, so can’t let the machines do it for us. Yeah, that’s a good use of our time we usually don’t indulge with. What about the rest of the materials? I know the Mu Goop is the big one that empowers all the rest…”
“For some reason, rare Energized materials aren’t all that hard for me to stockpile, as I’m sure you also do in your downtime.” As Forsaken, for them Energizing stuff was usually a Crafting check to make the appropriate Rune(s) on something, drawing in the power and Infusing it into the appropriate substance. There were also alchemical methods to do the same kind of work, and basic ones could even be set up to automate, to some degree, much like machinery for making the most basic Potions existed.
For me and most Casters, it was Casting the Energize spell out of whatever Valence was required to make what I was looking for, using various degrees of Widen Spell to increase the area affected. Given I had access to Valence XV+1 right now, I could generate some pretty large quantities of Energized Materials all by my lonesome now. Caster Level was naturally not a problem, so if I wanted to Energize Deathless Void Eternal Pulsarheart opalite, well, I could do it! After I refined the opalite to QL 40, of course...
“My Sims collect stuff for me from all over the place, hold it in stasis until it is needed and raid it as they contribute to it for purposes, too. My personal stores are in my Sanctum, and I believe I have enough to make at least twenty of the Master’s Elixirs, with raw materials that can be Energized for at least a dozen more.” I paused significantly. “My apologies. If I had known there would be Mu Spores here, I’d have actually stocked up on such things.”
“Auntie Edge only has enough to make THIRTY ninth-level Potion equivalents, Fuzzy,” Sif said sotto voce, kicking her long legs playfully while hanging behind Thor. “She’s definitely slipping. We need to chide her harshly for such lack of resources and miserable forward planning!”
“She’s got Great Gold Wyrms giving her scales for these things, Sif. It’s just spare change that happens to be useful to us!” Thor grunted with a smile. “She’s giving us her busywork while she goes and makes Pyramids!” he added.
“That’s because we can be just as fast as her since she can’t use Fabricates for alchemy!” Sif just sniffed, rolling her pale green eyes. “What we should be doing is making super-abusive Stone Shape devices and putting up Pyramids, too!”
“360 goldweight and six months of devoted Investing,” Thor rumbled with a sigh. “Minus what we put into it Crafting, and we’re not nearly as good at whitesmithing and gemwork as armor and weapons, Sif.”
“You were both intending to make Rings of Primal Elemental Command at some point, right?” I asked them both archly. “Seventy days here is an hour on the Prime. You’ve got all the time you need here. That’s why I came here, after all. Even after it’s realigned, we should still have a ten thousand multiplier, a week in an hour. Also, why don’t you have Legendary Crafter yet, able to do twenty goldweight of Investing a day?” I sniffed.
“Oh. Right.” Thor blinked. “Lot of Karma for that Feat, given it’s Eternal grade. Hadn’t thought about it, we’ve been so busy running Brightmoor and building it up…”
“You DO know I can tell when you’re lying, right?” I just half-sighed.
“Them Words is so unfair, Fuzzy!” Sif stage-whispered, and the big hairy brute threw up his hands.
“Fine! We don’t have the goldweight!” he admitted helplessly. “Ten thousand in goldweight a day doesn’t mean anything if you don’t have the goldweight! Mu Goop can’t be used for basic Investing! The amount of mundane crafting we can do isn’t much better than just using basic goldweight, it just lets us stretch our resources!”
“Which is very important when you have unlimited time,” I went up, unperturbed. “And you’re hesitant to inquire if ‘Moneybags’ is one of my Titles or something, now.”
“You’re sitting on the biggest cash cow of a Dungeon in the whole world. It literally spins money out of nothing but dying monsters and adventurers!” Sif sniffed. “You don’t have the expenses of building a nation out of nothing! Dragons like MAKE money for you!”
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“Yes, yes, I’m not nation-building here, because I don’t need to. That’s the job of you and the Gallivants,” I pointed out directly. “Are you saying you need money? Because I still have metal and gems from being sucked over to Delpha I haven’t used up, other than melting it down and raising the standard of living for three different dwarf clans on the Far Shore making craftcoins, jewelry, and raw gems for me!”
“Tripling the value of your loot…” Thor murmured thoughtfully. “Don’t have enough men with the skills yet to do that on our end, either. How’d that go with the dwarves?”
“It astonished the heck out of them…”
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A few weeks back…
Shmeideburg and the clans allied to it had joined the Eismark Federation reluctantly, fearful of being relegated to drudge workers and slaving away for humans without being properly recognized and respected. After all, we treated their sacred ancestral Forge as nothing special, and had even had to give them tips on how to upgrade it to more modern standards and efficiency, which made them feel very inferior!
Of course, then the orders for work started pouring in, along with the deliveries of metal to start doing the work.
Then the locations of every single vein of ore within ten miles of the respective holdings were given to them in three-dimensional coordinates, and a certain elfin had even gone and walked into existence the first access tunnels down to them, if the veins were buried, to give them a head start on the work.
The Eisrock Alliance of Dwarven Clans, as they were formally called, found themselves overwhelmed with good, solid, well-paying work, as much as they wanted or needed!
The new dark-skinned dwarves arriving in the area were even happy to volunteer families to take over the above-ground farming and herding activities, having absolutely no stigma against such things. If anything, they took their agricultural duties even more seriously than other dwarves did mining and smithing!
“A starving dwarf does not smith,” was all they grunted. “A dwarfhold runs on its stomach. We are the most vital and essential part of any dwarfhold. The hold dies without us. We take our duty very seriously, cousin. We fight more than you, for our foes come from all sides. The soil has our blood in it, our wheat grows on our sweat, the roads are packed by our bones.
“You trade for food, and that is good. Good food means we can work harder, longer, and our children will be stronger, healthier. But we both know we cannot rely on just the work of others.” Bright eyes gleamed. “And besides, those who work the land make far, far better distillers of beer and mead than those who work the stone.”
The new Shmeideburg Clanholder Riksburl Leadfoot had no way to refute that, even if the sacred words of Clangyr emphasized that dwarves should not be reliant on the surface for anything. These new dwaves did not worship the Stonefather, after all, astoundingly hearing little of Him, and paying little mind to what they did hear. Attempts to bring them to the joys of the Stonefather fell on completely deaf ears.
They knew how to gods-damned farm, however!
It was in this atmosphere that I was sitting down with new Clanholder.
Commander Briggs had emphasized to his face that the Federation would have little to no respect for a dwarf who could not fight like a demon and work metal like a master. He had rather unceremoniously packed the dwarven warrior off to the Bug Farms and Fort Brightmoor for some very, very necessary lessons in combat, Level-gaining, Named Weapons, Dispatch team operations, and Weapon Mastery training.
Six months later, he and his fellows had returned hardened beyond what they’d ever imagined, and Shmeideburg had experienced the greatest turnaround in its entire clan history.
They owed Eismoor a great deal for the refurbishment and upgrading of their ancestral forge, but the terms were light, and paid more in trade value than hard metal. Still, the dwarves were conscious of the terms, wanted to get out from under the debt and stand tall, contributors instead of charity cases… and that was starting to happen now as the new mines began to haul out their rewards. New wealth in turn bought new technology and magic to further the speed of their production and purity of product, and all the Eisrock Clans were doing well.
“You want to employ ALL of our finesmiths, Lady Edge?” Clanholder Leadfoot asked carefully, frowning at this unusual request. His clan didn’t have the most skilled whitesmiths, as they had not the metal to practice with over the generations that would have driven such skill to the heights other clans possessed. With the new mines and the education available from the Federation that would be changing rapidly, at least by dwarven standards.
“Yes. I have no use for machine-produced goods for what I need done.” I waved in the direction of Brightmoor City, our main center of industry. While we produced consumer goods that were shipped all over, most of the higher-end industrial output stayed at home.
There were plenty of uses for the noble metals in industry, but Nown was replete with the stuff, and production way outstripped industrial demand at this point. That left the older uses of gold: coin, jewelry, and embellishment.
I held up two gold coins in my fingers, and slid them across to him and the two elders with him. He reached out and picked them up gravely.
He was familiar with the one, of course. Standard Eismark gold crown, printed on demand for the member states without muss or fuss, very hard to emulate.
The other was plainly not one after a glance. It bore none of the marks of a government or business, plainly more a collector’s piece and work of art than anything else, as if a goldsmith was playing around and had made a personal coin with custom engraving than anything.
“Two gold coins, one forge-stamped with some of the finest die-work in the world, from the vaults of Brightmoor’s main exchange,” he said gravely. The dwarves had been considering farming out production of their own coinage to the Exchange, and were mostly conferring over the emblems to use at this point. It was just drudge work, requiring only the metal be supplied. The shavings off the coin blanks basically paid for the work once the proper dies were made. “The other… a hobby piece, or a custom coin for a collector of such things?” He knew many dwarves, as well as humans, liked to collect odd and unique, or very old, coinage.