Zach woke up stretching his sore muscles. Looking around Zach saw Grim sitting at the table with a bowl of cereal in front of him. Today, Grim had settled on the brand Boo Berry and was munching happily on blue ghosts and marshmellows. The T-shirt of the day was black with the saying, “I Believe in Silicon Heaven!”, on it. Grim greeted him with a warm morning, which Zach only grumbled at and went over to a clay jug to poured himself some water to wash his face. The cool water hit his face and he instantly became awake wishing for a warm shower, hot breakfast burrito, and a cup of coffee. Instead the breakfast that he was going to have was in a rock stew pot that kept he dumped his left over meals in every day. Pulling out a clean bowl Zach scooped up the thick stew and used the spell Clean Water to add some more liquid to the stew.
“Silicon Heaven… I don’t get it.” Zach said as he sat down at the table.
Grim looked up from his bowl of cereal and snorted, “Its where all the calculators go.” Grim said like it was a inside joke, but all Zach could do is bring his spoon out of the stew and let the thick broth dripple back into the bowl.
“How about we sit down sometime and come up with a spell to make breakfast burritos?” Zach said as he finally took another spoonful of stew. The broth of the stew was flavorful, after all he had been throwing ingredients constantly in it allowing it to become richer and richer. The problem was that it was pretty much the only thing he had to eat for the whole time he had been here. Looking at cereal, Zach wished Grim wouldn’t summon food props as it reminded him of what he was missing. Grim shook his head and then flicked his spoon at Zach. A small droplet of blue milk came flying towards Zach and in a blink of an eye it expanded into a blue screen.
Zach snorted at the screen. Perhaps it was ache in his neck from sleeping poorly, or the fact that Grim could have cereal in the morning and he was basically living on meat and vegetables, but Zach decided to unload a bit of his frustration on the little screen. “Yeah I have some feedback! It’s great that you include Packages now, but how about a search and filter feature. It took me ten minutes of scrolling last night to find beds, and even then, I didn’t really know if I found them all. Besides you need a timer on your Package deals to tell someone how long they have to buy them. Oh and if you want to be like the big websites, an editor’s choice would be nice to show off items that would be useful to the person…. And a wishlist section so people can day dream about buying things.” Zach said to the air with a bit of annoyance and grump.
The metal spoon that Grim was holding dropped into the ceramic bowl with a clattering and he gave Zach a dirty look. Grim opened his mouth as if to say something but then the world just seemed to pause for a moment. Like a video having trouble downloading there seemed to be a moment that should have continued but instead jumped. “Dude, what the fu…” Grim started staying as the time return to normal. But what had stopped him wasn’t the skip but the blue screen that was in front of Zach.
Zach looked down at the bowl and realized that the next time he felt being a little pissy, to shut the hell up. Getting up he poured out the contents of his bowl outside of his door and came back realizing that the message had said stew and not just the stew in his bowl. Sighing he sat back down as the cereal box and bowl disappeared. “I know! I know! I screwed up ok?! I shouldn’t have been an ass and…” Zach stopped as Grim pointed up in the sky like Zach should be apologizing to them.
“I am sorry to whoever runs the menus and screens. I am having a bad morning and took my anger out on you. I will do my best to treat you with the respect you deserve from now on.” Zach said to the air in the room.
Grim nodded and spoke, “Well, if that’s done, perhaps we can talk a little before spending all that DP you have?” Zach nodded as he sat back down. “So I reviewed your thoughts from last night and ideas about how you want to spend them. Thank you, for wanting to including me and ask my opinion. I think we should state our goals in order to prioritize. Short term goals, I have get to the dungeon town, trade what we can and get drops, items, and a few people to come back with us. A personal goal, is to pick up Courtney’s bride price, which I believe that has changed from a couple of milking cattle to either a grain golem for Markus or fence post warding for more pasture land.” Zach nodded and kept quiet about the bride price, to him it felt like he was somehow buying Courtney from her father. Whereas Grim had told him that originally the bride price was because you were taking away a set of hands from the farm. In order for the bride to leave her family it was expected to try and replace those hands with tools if you could. Besides it was a local tradition and even though he could marry Courtney without a bride price, she would expect that Zach would take care of her family.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
Grim continued, “As a medium goal, I think you would agree that upgrading our living conditions would be preferable. We should also get something that could help you with your class, and maybe help complete quests around the city. Long terms goals are work on the runic language to see if it can’t be turned into a programming language, and amass some wealth?” Grim made the last little bit sound like a question instead of a hard statement, but Zach couldn’t argue with him. After all he really hadn’t thought beyond just making a nice house to live in and having enough power to be relatively safe.
Grim thought for a moment and spoke, “Well we do have the Ward Construction Skill, we probably need a book on specific wards to help protect the land from roaming beasts and other things. We may also want to bump up the skill a couple of points but we really don’t know by how much until we get the basic design and try it. As for the cabin, if we upgrade it to a shop we would need seven books and ten pound of an arcane material, you can create the rest of the materials for the quest after the dungeon. I get the sense that if we go above and beyond the requirements we might get extra perks from the quest.” Grim paused for a minute as a blue screen with writing running across it appeared and then disappeared. “Alright, how about this for a couple of packages!”
Zach’s eyes got big at the Rare package. It was a lot of DP, and there weren’t really tangible benefits just the fact that Grim felt like using rarer ingredients would increase the rewards. So Grim and Zach compromised, talking about each package and the books. Grim had apparently used Zach’s skills to find the books, so they both trusted the fact that something within the books had to deal with his class. So Zach and Grim worked out a package so that was little less DP but would still have the Creation Clay as a material. Pushing the accept button, 235 DP went away in a flash.
Zach asked Grim to go ahead and setup buying the Scaling Breastplate, as he wanted the skill of Blacksmithing to help build additional Golems for the next forty years. Grim suggested that they keep at least 100 DP for emergencies, so Zach went ahead and opened up the new package section trying to find a deal. Though there was nothing for Artificer class in the 100 DP range, but he did find something that he liked. Grim nodded at his selection and Zach confirmed the purchase.
Zach smiled, the merchant package wouldn’t help them fight in the dungeon or build golems, but with close to 125 cubic feet of space, Zach won’t have to worry about running around with a backpack. After the purchase Grim just snapped his fingers, and Zach’s packing was done by Auto-Loot. Digging out the Breastplate, Zach wanted to inspect it before putting it on his golem.
Putting the breast plate on his golem, Zach left the cabin to go meet Andy, Milly and Alexa before heading out.
