Chapter 3 – Scarcity

“Tell me, Sal. Do you understand why it takes most Crafters months on end to create a piece of equipment?” Upgrade asked as Sal continued to sketch out the details of the tracker blueprint.

He glanced at her and saw that she was seated on the table, looking at his blueprint. He thought about the question for a moment and shrugged. “They’re really meticulous in crafting every component of the piece?”

Upgrade shook her head with a slight frown. “No, that’s not it. Most of the crafters don’t have crafting-related abilities. They’re learning through practice and effort, which is a slower but still rewarding path. If I asked you to stitch two pieces of leather together or to smelt an ingot, you’d likely have no idea where to begin. That’s not a criticism of you or your ability; it’s just an observation that you should be mindful of.

“My ability was hated by my peers when I studied here. Upgrade as an ability takes the painstaking work of others and upgrades it with essence to turn it into something even better. The craftsmanship gets lost somewhere along that journey, and I don’t want you to be blind to the effort that goes into this profession.”

It was clear that Upgrade was choosing her words carefully, but she was invested in this topic and Sal got the impression that she had wanted to talk to him about this for a while now.

Upgrade pointed at Sal’s chest with a smile. “Your ability is the blend of Appraisal, Restoration, and Upgrade. You’re able to see every detail that you set your eyes on, which would take countless years of studying to learn without the skill. Restoration allows you to use your essence when bringing an object back to the best version of itself. Upgrade, in a similar way, allows you to channel your essence into improving an existing object. All those skills were professions, long before they were essence-based abilities. The teachings that we give here are the fundamentals of those professions, and that’s why it takes our Crafters a long time to produce pieces of equipment.”

Sal looked at Upgrade, not sure what he was supposed to say in this situation. Did she want him to apologize for having an ability that allowed him to skip a huge part of the grind?

Upgrade shook her head as though she had read his mind. “I’m not trying to make you feel bad, but rather, I want you to understand the incredible gift that you have. An actual Crafting skill, which allows you to use essence to make mechanisms work, blend materials together, remove impurities, enhance performance…those factors alone make you incredibly valuable to society. The fact that you can potentially create up to the Mythic grade is a whole new beast that we’re going to explore in the months and years to come.”

Upgrade sighed as she pointed over at the tracker. “Now, we find out that you can replicate essence and incorporate it into your designs? You’re no longer bound to the logic that we thought was irrefutable. Materials were the limitation of our designs, but you’re able to bypass those limits with essence. I’m genuinely happy for you and excited to see how far you’ll go, but I don’t want you to look down on your peers.”

“Is that what you’re worried about?” Sal asked in confusion. “I’ll somehow outgrow this place and resent everyone who can’t do what I can?” He chuckled at that with a shake of his head.

“I’m not wired that way, Upgrade. If anything, I’d rather make items that solve problems instead of creating things that set me apart from everyone else. That sniper rifle was a fun thing to build, but I couldn’t have made it without the help of experienced crafters. Right now, I’m putting my ability in the back seat and trying to create this blueprint the old-fashioned way. Just as you taught me. I’m here to learn, so don’t worry.”

Sal was genuinely confused with Upgrade’s sudden shift in tone. He didn’t want to leave the thought in the back of his head to fester. “Did I do something that upset you? I didn’t mean to.”

Upgrade’s trademark grin appeared, and she waved her hand as if to dismiss the topic. “Sorry, I’m just repeating what I was told when I first started. I was a bit more hot-headed than you, and I definitely wanted to leave my mark. I don’t think I properly understood the meaning until I was sitting on the other side of the desk. You’re going to be thrown into the Advanced course for Crafting, which means that you’ll be attending some classes with second- and third-year students. They have a very different mindset than you, and they’ll have a different skill set too. You’ll want to break the system when you see what it’s like, but for a lot of those students, that system is all they have.”

Sal put down his etching tool and looked at Upgrade, waiting for her to continue.

With a laugh, she hopped off the desk. “Sorry, didn’t mean to make that sound so ominous. The senior crafters tend to take little to no risks, which makes a lot of their projects safe bets. They’ll be averse to trying new things, so you’re likely to meet a lot of resentment from them if you try to disrupt the status quo. Ingenuity and imagination are secondary to feasibility and protocol. This workshop is going to transform tomorrow when they return, and you’re probably not going to like it. My attempts at a serious conversation just now were a primer for that experience. So, please don’t hate them for being boring and methodical crafters. They’re trying their best, the only way they know how. Got it?”

Sal nodded and picked up the etching tool. “Got it. But I think you’re overreacting. I’m not really the type to step on the toes of others, so I doubt I’ll get into much trouble with the other students coming back to the workshop.”

Upgrade smiled as she picked up her stuff from the table. “We’ll see!” With that, she left Sal in the room to work on his design.

As much as he wanted to throw himself back into the sketching of the blueprint, he couldn’t help but think about what Upgrade had mentioned.

Were the other students really that bad? Was he going to end up resenting them in the long run? With a shake of his head, Sal tried to focus on the task at hand. He’d deal with whatever issues came up from the second-years when they actually happened, rather than worrying about it now. Activating his eyes, Sal looked at the Quest tracker and restarted his drawing.

Despite the fact that it used few materials, it was a complex construct, with fine runes engraved over the silver surface. His normal vision wasn’t able to pick up the details on the smokey-black visor, but the Mythcrafter ability could see the embedded runes clearly. Each of them pulsated with an incredibly efficient weave of essence.

Sal stood there for close to an hour, marking down everything that the blueprint in his head had to offer. He double-checked all the details before finally putting down the etcher and taking a step back with a steadying breath.

He started to think about what he wanted from his own tracker. The Analysis ability was a no-brainer, but he didn’t need the Appraisal skill in there. System seemed to be useful, but he wasn’t sure if he’d be breaking rules by having access to the academy’s network of information. He had to admit that the idea of having Divinity’s power tied to it was tempting, but Sal knew that constantly seeing into the future would be chaotic. He’d be second-guessing everything, and he wasn’t prepared to live like that.

Sal made a few notes at the side of the blueprint, putting down ideas of which abilities would work best with it. He went through the list of everyone he knew, and if there was a particular skill that would be useful to add to the tracker.

After a few minutes of debating what to do, Sal shook his head and smiled to himself. He was unconsciously doing the one thing Upgrade constantly warned him against: being too ambitious with his designs. He only really needed the tracker to work on Analysis, so it didn’t need a stack of additional abilities.

If he could focus on that one attribute and pump everything else into the grade of the item, maybe he’d get something close to the one that was on the table? That was his thought, anyway, so he got to work and activated the Mythcrafter ability again.

Sal almost sighed in relief as he stopped holding back the Upgrade side of the ability. It had been gnawing at his subconscious the entire time he had been drawing the blueprint, and letting it free was incredibly liberating.

Just to make things easier on himself, Sal moved the tracker to the other side of the table so it wouldn’t interfere with his eyes. When he looked down at his drawn blueprint, Sal let his power find the defects in the design and let it roam free. He picked up the etcher and made a list of corrections to the original design, removing redundancies and reinforcing areas that would accommodate the Analysis ability.

Mythcrafter pinpointed each of the conflicts between the attributes, and Sal only had to allocate space to the dominant attribute he wanted. It was a slow process, but it was also quite fun. He was prompted with all sorts of materials that he had never worked with, but they had somehow been catalogued in his brain from previous appraisals.

Each time a new material was checked against the blueprint, a series of outcomes were generated. They didn’t account for build quality or human error, but rather stated the facts of what was possible.

Sal was reminded of the ability indicating to him that the Legendary sniper rifle could successfully hold an evolutionary trait, and it had turned out to be right. He had no reason to doubt the ability now, so he noted each of the best combinations that Mythcrafter showed him.

“Hellfire titanium and lord crystals. What are the chances they sell that on the Credit floor?” Sal muttered.

He incorporated the Analysis essence into the hypothetical design, and it adapted ridiculously well to the lord crystal. Apparently, it would give him a massive boost to his essence control as well as a minor amplification to Psionic-based skills like Analysis.

The hellfire titanium, on the other hand, bumped the final product up a few grades just by being there. It had to be a premium material to have pushed its way up the grades like that.

Sal decided that there was no harm in seeing whether he could acquire any from the Credit floor. Without looking away from the design, he pulled out his tablet and navigated to Vanessa’s name. He tried to open his messages, but from the ringing sound, he guessed he was calling her instead.

“Hey, not like you to call. What do you need?”

Vanessa’s voice came through clearly and Sal was inwardly relieved that she went straight to business. He checked his notes before speaking.

“Hey, Vanessa. Just in the middle of a design for a personal project. I need some hellfire titanium and lord crystals. Does the Credit floor stock any materials like that?”

“I can answer the lord crystal question immediately. That’s a no. It’s appeared on a few appraisals, but the benefits of it as a component far outweigh its value as a raw material, so we don’t tend to break it down. You could try to bid on a few different items that contain the lord crystal, but they go for pretty high prices, even for you. I’ll ask around and see if there are any good listings, but you might want to ask the other team captains from the tournament. There was a crown that had the lord crystal. Only other thing I can think of is asking Jez. He has backroom deals happening all the time and might be able to pick some up for you.”

Sal grimaced as he crossed out the name on his list. “And what about the hellfire titanium?” He figured that he’d try to get obsidian glass to match the current tracker, as it would likely be more common.

From what he knew, it wasn’t a portal material. Hellfire titanium, on the other hand, came from a portal. He wasn’t going to hold his breath for its availability but found himself doing exactly that.

“We actually have quite a few ingots of that in reserve. It’s not cheap, though. You’d be looking at around two hundred and fifty Q-Cred per ingot. However, if we were buying it for Myth…that could be something we could throw to the Reavers Guild. I’ve been keeping them in the dark and sweating for a while now, and they’re eager to close the guild partnership deal with us. Winning your tournament added to your value with them, so let me know when you want to make a decision and we can go through it together.”

Sal grinned. He was worried that he was going to have to negotiate with Vanessa for a better rate on the ingots, but she had already taken care of everything.

“Don’t suppose the Reavers have access to a lord crystal that they’d be willing to part with?” Sal didn’t really have anything to lose from asking, and it seemed that Vanessa shared the same opinion.

“Let me check in with them. I’ll tell them that we’re close to the deal, but that Myth is distracted with a new project and blocked with those two materials. I’ll see what they come back with, and then we can finalize the agreement with them. Just a word of warning—I’ve spoken to Villa a few times over the past few weeks. She’s at her breaking point, so after this, we’ll need to give them a decision. Otherwise, she’s likely to murder me in my sleep. We don’t want that to happen, do we?”

Sal laughed as he hovered his finger over the disconnect button on the tablet. “No, Vanessa. We certainly don’t want that. Thanks for your help. I’ll talk to you later.”

When Vanessa’s voice left the call, Sal tapped the button and pocketed his tablet. The downside to their tactic was that he’d have to put his design on hold until they came back with a verdict. Sal looked at the design again and smiled. He was genuinely excited to start working on it properly.