Ember of Invention

As Nothing had predicted, his waste bin had quickly filled with black dust over the next few hours, some of it that had missed the bin now spread across the floor of the workshop. He’d be upset with himself later when he had to clean it up, but for now, he was still locked in on the latest chunk of Pelos in his hands.

He was carefully molding the physical Ethos into the shape of a bracelet, keeping the design simple as he tried to imbue it with magic inspired by the materials he had harvested it from. According to the Soarian merchant he had bought the skin from, Trapster Frogs had the ability to make every part of their body incredibly sticky, which meant people would then sell their skin to use as a kind of adhesive. He wanted to see how he could translate that ability into an item.

Lindle had been searching for traces of ‘stickiness’ ethos hiding inside of it, but it hadn’t proven easy. A lot of the aspects had been unfamiliar to Lindle, he didn’t know if he was looking at stickiness, frog ethos, or some third thing, though, he didn’t even really know what a frog looked like. His mental image was just too unclear. Materials from the Reach were something he had worked with for years as an apprentice alchemist, he already had firm mental concepts of them all in his mind and had practiced learning for months to identify their aspects.

He sighed as he failed to come up with any good way to finish matching the right Ethos to his intent, and he activated the final part of [Artifice Crafting]. Lindle watched as the Pelos in the shape of a bracelet lost its luster and crumbled into black dust. His Ethos sense let him see it empty of Ethos and disperse into the air.

It wasn’t the first time he had failed that night, after his early successes he got confident and experimented with trying to create items with more esoteric effects, the failures crumbling into dust all the same. It wasn’t only if he couldn’t match the correct Ethos that he experienced a failure if the Pelos wasn’t put into the right shape, or if he didn’t correctly convey his intent to the Ethos in straightforward or simple enough way, the Pelos failed to solidify and the Ethos scattered. It happened less when he was working with something he was familiar with, but he failed sometimes even with items he was used to.

Of course, they weren’t all failures. He had amassed a small pile of mostly rings, a few bracelets, and even an amulet, all with minor magical effects. Jewelry seemed like a safe structural starting point to stick with when it came to magic items. They didn’t need to have any functional purpose except to give their magical effects to their wearers. He didn’t know if making them look nicer would have any effect on their magic, but they seemed to work fine as long as they were still usable.

As the Ethos strain got worse however, it more often using his skill resulted in a failure, not to mention the mental exhaustion that came from the mental part of piecing out all the various aspects, as well as the normal physical exhaustion from staying up this late. He let out a yawn as he wiped the black dust into the nearly full waste bin.

I believe it’s about time we called it quits for now Lindle. You’ve done an admirable job, but your Ethos is close to your safe limits.

Lindle paused for a moment. “One more?” He felt Nothing look at him disapprovingly, but after a few more seconds as Lindle waited, Nothing eventually relented, emanating exasperation.

One more. Make it quick.

Lindle smiled and snatched out one of the more valuable items he had in his collection. It wasn’t valuable due to how rare it was, but because how difficult it was to collect, inner core wood from a steamheart tree. As he experimented and had gotten better at reframing how the Ethos of something would be best turned to a magical effect, he had an idea rattling around in his head, and he certainly didn’t want to lose the inspiration after falling asleep.

Lindle activated his skill, and with a slightly hefty tug, brought out the Pelos from the wood. He winced, Lindle could almost feel his Ethos reach unhealthy levels of strain as it sluggishly flowed through his hands. This would definitely be his last use of his skill tonight, success or failure.

He started molding the Pelos first as he tried to make his intent and desires as clear as possible in his mind before he pushed them onto the Ethos. He kept the structure simple as he created another bracelet, the amount of core wood he used created too much Pelos for a ring, but was decent enough for a slightly thick and flat bracelet. Given the extra room, he decided to use his pinky to draw a few simple swirls and shapes into it. Given how symbolic Ethos seemed to be, it certainly couldn’t hurt.

Unlike the other times he used plant material, he almost completely ignored the life and plant aspects of the Ethos except to allow it to act as the structure for simplicity. Instead, he focused on the water and fire aspects he felt existing powerfully in its Ethos and brought them up to the forefront. Additionally, instead of trying to come up with a more basic elemental effect based on the two aspects, he took both of them and attempted to widen them.

He didn’t want simple fire or water magic, he wanted something broader than that. It was different from something like shifting from genetic plant material to wood, it was attempting to branch out to include all the similar aspects of Ethos while still containing the core idea of the original object, and attempting to do it to do both at the same. It was by far the most challenging way he had attempted to use Ethos, but his idea was so strong in his mind that once he got going, he only built momentum.

After many minutes of effort and checking his work, Lindle felt confident enough to solidify the Pelos. He watched in anticipation, hoping he wouldn’t get another pile of black dust, but a second that had felt like an eternity, the Pelos transformed into a humble but pleasant-looking wooden bracelet.

Hotpond Band

Effect: When wearing the band the wearer can rapidly heat up liquids on or near their person while also increasing the wearer's resistance against hot liquids.

Lindle’s eyes practically gleamed as he read the description. He immediately put the bracelet on. It might seem like a niche ability, but being able to easily and quickly bring something to boiling could be very very useful, especially for an alchemist. Of course, it was a matter of scale, if what it meant by heating up topped out at a pleasantly warm drink it would be limited, but based on the amount of energy the Ethos Lindle sensed in it compared to everything else he had made, he was confident he had created something that could come in handy.

Even more pleasantly though, was the tingle that came with the system notifying him about a status change.

You have leveled up! Gained 1 level in the [Artificer] Class. (Level 2)

Stat gains : +1 Con; +1 Dex; +2 Int; +1 Res

Lindle wanted to let out a whoop of celebration as he felt the increase in his stats, far less stimulating than his 1st level. This time it was actually almost pleasant. He let out a heavy yawn before he could do anything though, and he felt Nothing staring at him with annoyance. He remembered the ‘quick’ part of what they had said, which is to say he didn’t remember that before while he was distracted.

I believe I made myself clear earlier. I would appreciate it if you went to sleep now before you pass out and hurt yourself.

Lindle quickly nodded his head. “Yes, I’ll do that. Good night, thank you, for helping, and everything, and-” Lindle rambled slightly before he cut himself off, caught up between wanting to share about the Hotpond band and his level-up, but his brain felt just a bit too scrambled. He just nodded again and went to his room to promptly pass out.

In the morning Lindle was much more acutely aware of his tiredness after he had pulled what essentially had been an all-nighter and only getting an hour or two of sleep.

On his mother’s face, he saw similar signs of exhaustion that he recognized from other times she had stayed up late in her laboratory, but she had higher stats to deal with it unlike him, so she still gave a pleasant smile and good morning like always before pouring him a drink with a small alchemical pop to wake him up.

Once Lindle wasn’t dead to the world, he brought out the fruits of his labors, the small pile of wooden jewelry alongside a garden trowel didn’t seem like much visually, but she reacted enthusiastically as she read all the descriptions, and Lindle and Nothing explained how he had crafted each of them.

In turn, his mother shared her experiments on the heartroot ring, taking different kinds and doses of health potions to map out exactly how much it enhanced her ability to heal from a potion. To her annoyance, she couldn’t determine how the ring did it, but it seemed like the ring resulted in a 5% boost in effectiveness, regardless of how powerful the healing potion was.

To most people it might have been concerning to think their mother had continuously drained her HP in order to heal herself over and over, but, well, his mom was the best in the village for a reason. At this point, even Nothing was used to living in a house with a pair of alchemists only after a few months. The class did provide decent constitution increases after all.

Lindle was just happy that Artificer seemed to provide a similar stat spread based on the stats he had received from levels 1 and 2. According to Alyn Kyte, you couldn’t call yourself a true crafter without being able to safely engage in a little risk when experimenting.