New System, Who Dis?

Thursday, April 4th, 2069

[What would happen if I tried to sell you a Crystal still in the wall?] I asked Smegma, as I bit into a sandwichI’d prepared this morning.

We had just taken a break for lunch. The Mining team was still in the cavern that we began in this morning, but it was nearly entirely cleared of Mana Crystals. My contribution was lackluster, mostly consisting of a space cleared about the size of a large master bathroom.

No one was giving me a hard time over it though, which was likely either because they remembered their first times, or because my father and Willa were here. Those two were responsible for the two largest cleared portions. Still, if my relation to them was protecting me—well it surely wasn’t by physical proximity.

My father was eating his sandwich while examining a golden colored vein in a nearby wall. Looking around I realized that the metallic ore veins were the only reason we were still ‘working’ this cavern. Willa was also studying something near one of the two tunnels leading off our cavern. From here it looked like a massive crack in the wall but could easily be a dark metallic ore.

Miguel and Fat Gary sat nearby quietly eating. I was just glad that they weren’t engaging me in a conversation which allowed me to study the Demonic Vault’s red screen.

Specifically, I was staring at my number of Mana Coins. For every fifteen Crystals I sharded, I had been attempting to mine one that I would sell to Smegma. Thanks to that, and me moving to Mining full Crystals, as my father moved away, my mC total had climbed to three thousand and forty, but my hopes for purchasing a Mining Pick by the end of the day were drying up, fast.

Maybe I could speed up a bit in the afternoon, though. My nerves at getting caught in the morning hadn’t let me go particularly quickly or take as many Crystals as I might have otherwise. Although when the porter came by and started taking the shards, he hadn’t seemed to notice anything amiss.

This could really work, it seemed.

Still I doubted I would get to ten thousand by the end of the day. That was due to the second, far sadder reason why my attempts to collect enough mC were currently below my expectation. Mining was far more difficult than I expected.

The first hour was relatively manageable, but each hour afterward saw me slowing down considerably. I stared at the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, squished between my numb fingers. Squished because I’d dropped my first one onto the cave floor, thinking I was gripping it sufficiently. I didn’t even know that repeated jarring impacts on the object held in your hands could cause this sort of malalignment.

No matter what, I had a new appreciation for what my father did.

Smegma phased through the floor, before floating back to me.

“You can try to drain them while they’re in the walls, but then you’d be leaving the ‘evidence’ of spent Mana Crystals in the walls. Since I could only theoretically buy the Mana inside and not the actual Crystals themselves. I even doubt that would work because they‘re kind of living things, but sure, give it a shot.” The imp said in answer to my mentally thought question from a few moments ago.

Smegma’s tone wasn’t what I would call encouraging. He sounded disinterested, almost angry. He’d gotten more and more like that somewhat slowly over the course of this morning’s four hours of Mining. At first, he’d been slightly excited, but my dwindling efficacy with each hour also seemed to drain something from the Demon Trader. It took me a moment to fully register his words but when I did I nearly choked.

[They’re what?] I said, thankful it was a mental communication, or I might have swallowed a piece of sandwich into my lungs.

“Crystals are essentially Flora. Don’t ask me how that works, because no one knows. They essentially absorb Mana like Sunshine and Gas and grow. They don’t have cells or biological living tissue as the Demon race knew it,” Smegma answered with a shrug. Then he saw the peanut butter and jelly sandwich on top of the bag and covered in dirt. “What happened?”

I took another bite and smeared the raspberry jam and peanut butter around in my mouth, allowing the sugar to wake me up a bit.

[I don’t want to talk about it, my hands are numb.] I responded before changing the subject. [The Mining pick says that it absorbs and stores Mana though right? So won’t it take more when I’m sharding? The excess Mana lost from sharding doesn’t just disappear, right? Do you think the pick could absorb all that extra waste and form whole Crystals out of it?] I said as I studied the screen for the item in question.

Miscellaneous Professions Gear

Miner’s Pick (1)

Durability: Unlimited

Damage: 1-3 (x100% to Mineable minerals)

This miner’s pick will use the Mana run off of the minerals to repair and strengthen itself making it unbreakable. It will also store excess Mana to intermittently create a Mana Crystal of appropriate rank.

Current progress to Mana Crystal: 0 of 1,000 Mana

Cost: 10,000 mC

“You need the Miner’s Pick first,” Smegma said with such boredom in his tone that I wanted to kick him. I definitely would have if I could, and my two lunch companions could think what they will.

Since Smegma was such a bore, I turned my attention to Fat Gary and Miguel. “What’s the usual plan for after lunch?”

“After lunch?” Fat Gary asked, looking up and meeting my eyes with a bit of skepticism. “It’s already impressive as hell that you made it to lunch, kid!” He pointed to the first peanut butter and jelly sandwich. “How can you even feel your hands?”

I blinked and looked at my numb hands. Even as I held them in front of me, I thought I felt some feeling return to them. I was working under the impression that after lunch they’d be fine again. I looked between Fat Gary and Miguel a bit lost.

Miguel smiled at me but went back to eating. I furrowed my brow at his seemingly strange response to Fat Gary’s shock and my pleading look. “Miguel’s English is poor. He only speaks after he’s known you for a little. Still, are you being serious? Are you really going to try to keep working after lunch?”

I nodded, and watched as Fat Gary’s face became defeated. He reached into a pants pocket and pulled out his wallet before handing a twenty to Miguel. He said something in Spanish to the man, and Miguel’s smile grew even bigger. “Miguel bet me you’d keep going, but I thought it was easy money. Most new workers only Mine for the first quarter of an hour.”

Fat Gary clicked his tongue as I watched the two with raised eyebrows. I hadn’t thought about just how physically demanding Mining would be. Surely they were right, nothing I’d done in my life to date would lend itself to this kind of work. Not my gym sessions, or my Muay Thai.

It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what was going on.

“Your Recovery Skill,” Smegma said, finishing my thought for me, just before Fat Gary got over his frustration at losing a bet and turned back to me.

“Usually after lunch break, we go back to work, but in this case, we’ll likely head to another Cavern, and leave the mineral deposits to those two, or the Specialists.”

“Specialists?” I asked, not having seen anything to distinguish Miner’s apart.

Fat Gary raised an eyebrow and then pointed in the direction that my father had been when I last saw him. For a moment I thought my father was considered a Specialist, but that quick glance showed someone speaking to my dad. Fat Gary gave some context a moment later. “That’s Bruce. He Awakened with two Skills. Mana Pool and something to do with Mining, or at least it’s useful in Mining. He’s one of our teams’ Specialists.”

The man looked like any other Miner I’d seen on the way out here. In fact, I thought I could recall him in the ATV and from just inside the Portal. He was smaller than Willa even but had corded muscles that seemed to be trying to escape his tight skin. My father was gesturing to the Golden colored vein, and Bruce was nodding.

Either Fat Gary sensed my confusion at the situation or just felt the need to explain further. “That could be the magical equivalent of Fool’s Gold or True Gold. Right now, your father is asking Bruce his opinion. True Gold is rare and exceptionally valuable, but if mined improperly, useless.”

Without looking back, I asked the obvious. “So, why wouldn’t Bruce just mine the vein just to be sure?”

“He’s got an F-ranked Mana Pool. Sure, it’s growing but he still can’t handle too many ore deposits in a single day. Same goes for our other Specialist. So, if they use their Skills to mine something useless, they’ll be done for the next five hours. Normally, we catalog all the potential minerals first, and have the Specialists work on the most profitable.”

Something bothered me about that. My father had been with this Mining crew for my entire life. “Why don’t they try to hire a Bank or why haven’t the Specialist’s Pools Evolved if they are using them everyday?”

Miguel looked up, startled—saw my genuine confusion on the matter and chuckled to himself. Fat Gary also responded with clear amusement in his voice. “It isn’t that easy to just hire a Bank. Most willing want Hunters—and those willing to settle on Miners want well off Specialists. So here at P-Cubed when Specialists get better, they head for greener pastures. If they manage to find a Bank they’ll get bought out all the faster. No one would choose to stay either. Like why would you stay with a crew of normies when you can join one with mostly Specialists and get higher pay from bonuses?”

“The company can’t provide them with Mana Batteries?” I asked, thinking of the Cores that could be turned into Mana Storage devices. Surely, they’d get a great deal of use out of those, and I always thought they were more common in Mining and other Professions, cause if they broke they wouldn’t cause too big of a problem.

Fat Gary smiled. “Have you met Jagger? Guy’s cheaper than a Wandering Hunter—at least Wandering Hunters realize they need to take care of their teams. Jagger makes his money when the Specialists move on, though—I’m pretty sure of that.”

My lips firmed. That made a great deal of sense—if Jagger had the contracts then he could sell his ‘trained up’ Specialists to others for an immediate profit. Then the new company could get that Specialist set up with Batteries or Banks. Well at least we had some Specialists while they trained up their Skills.

Then another thought hit me.

“Why can’t we just camp out inside the Portal and work until everything in here is stripped?” I asked the question that had been sitting at the tip of my tongue.

Fat Gary and Miguel both hissed from beside me, which drew my full attention back to them. To watch them go from amused to terrified made me snap out of the lethargy I currently felt.

Miguel was making a gesture which crossed himself in the religious way that Catholics did, and Fat Gary was clutching a ring on his left index finger tight enough to cause the appendage to whiten from lack of blood.

“Kid, Portals ain’t safe at night. If the area within is big enough, sometimes entire clearance teams and sometimes, even Mining teams are forced to camp for the night, but our team has strict contracts that state we won’t ever do that. Too many teams and Hunters have died in Portals when they camp overnight.”

If the two hadn’t both reacted so vehemently, I might have suspected that they were hazing the new guy with ‘ghost stories’, but both still looked shaken by my casual question. “How come I’ve never heard about this on the news?”

“You have,” Miguel said, speaking for the first time. He had a very heavy accent that I couldn’t place. “Every tragedy in Portals on da news is overnight campders.”

I blinked. What? But the news never mentioned anything like that, how come?

“It’s the Time Bubble.” Smegma cut in. “I told you this earlier. For four hours at night, Dungeons are synced with the planet’s geography. The process takes down the Time Bubble, which you can think of as the ‘fence’ separating the Portal from the rest of this world. With the Bubble down, creatures from the planet that weren’t originally part of the Portal can enter the area until the System re-establishes the Bubble. You have to remember Brodie that these planets are ones that failed and were overrun by Portals and Monsters. Monsters are not like you Humans or Demons like me. They don’t need Mana to keep growing stronger. It helps sure, but they’ll grow regardless. So, it comes down to luck after that. In some cases, nothing enters. And in the worst cases, a creature far exceeding the zone rank finds its way inside,” Smegma explained, and I transferred my look of shock from Miguel to the Demon Trader.

“It’s all over the Read-it forums and I don’t think the United Nations Monster Hunters Association wants the public to know about it, so of course it won’t be in the news,” Fat Gary said, seeing me seem to have an epiphany. To him it must look like I was staring into empty space with wide eyes when pieces of a puzzle came together or something.

I was, of course, still paying attention and instantly recalled the Snatcher and Cannibal criminal distinctions. Just how much was the UNMH keeping from us?

With an effort of will I looked away from Smegma and that knowledge bombshell he just casually dropped. Somehow the look of the empty cavern and the smell of wet stone was far more intimidating than it had been all morning. It was like the undercurrents of sulfur that had been on the breeze were ignited and turned the place into one giant match, in my mind. It affirmed for me that no Portal would ever be truly safe, whether they’d been ‘cleared’ or not.

Gulping audibly I nodded to the two Miners, showing my understanding before I looked back to my dad and the Specialist Bruce. I found my father returning to the group.

“Willa, don’t bother with that vein either. Bruce says they found a lot of Thorium in a deeper cavern. The Specialists won’t have time for ‘True Gold’ or Necrograph.”

Willa waved from her place near the tunnel, showing she’d heard my father but didn’t make her way back to the group.

My dad sat down with me, across from Fat Gary and Miguel. He pulled out a second sandwich and before taking a bite, addressed the three of us. “You two are going to take the Light Stone deeper and work with another group to begin clearing it of Mana Crystals. Willa and I will remain here and use my Light Stone to attempt to mine a few of the ores.”

Miguel and Fat Gary nodded but Fat Gary motioned at me. “Just the two of us? Kid says he’s going to keep going.”

My dad turned his head to stare at me, looking incredulous. “Brodie, you’ve already done more than I would have ever expected. Any more and you probably aren’t getting out of bed tomorrow. The reason you’re getting paid next to nothing as my assistant is that it will take weeks for you to build up the muscles and resistance to the constant hammer-like impacts.”

I flexed my muscles comically choosing to turn it into a joke instead of a direct argument with my father. “Remember what Jeral said, dad, I might be stronger than you!”

My dad rolled his eyes, and his face morphed into a look that seemed to be questioning if he should just let me learn my lesson. I jumped in quickly to let that be his final thought on the matter. I needed ten thousand mC!

“So, you’re going to try to mine that even if it’s True Gold?” I asked, not understanding how Thorium was more valued than a potential True Gold vein.

“I’ve successfully extracted one usable ingot of True Gold before,” my dad explained, his face still stuck on the last conversation. Eventually he let it drop, firmly deciding that I could learn the lesson the hard way.

Noticing my confusion at that answer he continued answering my unspoken question. “The problem isn’t that we’re not sure if it's Fools Gold or if it's True Gold, it’s that both of them tend to exist in the same place and they’re nearly impossible to tell apart. There’s likely to be some True Gold in here among the fake, but none of the Skills we have access to would allow us to identify what’s what. The chances of extracting Fool’s Gold is too high to waste the Specialist’s Mana. So, the crew would rather get the assured bonus for grabbing what we can of the Thorium vein than to gamble on the less than ten percent chance of finding True Gold in that vein.”

I looked at the vein and then scanned to the open window for the Miner’s Pick.

[Smegma, would the pick be able to help a non-Specialist Miner take on Thorium, or True Gold deposits more successfully?]

“At level one? Unless the guy has a Skill or absurd experience, no husking chance,” Smegma stated, he did give my father a quick up and down, seeming to appreciate that the man had mined a usable ingot without a Skill. “Maybe Thorium at level ten, and True Gold between twenty-five and fifty.” A smile came onto my face, and Smegma did a double take. “What the shit are you smiling like that for? You look like a pedo priest who saw a new altar boy.”

I gave the Imp a warning look for his offensive reference, then wondered how he knew that our world had issues like that. Or did his world also have a similar moral structure? Shaking off that question I looked at the three present Miners and the picks they used.

[What would happen if I supplied all of them with these kinds of picks?]

Smegma narrowed his black eyes. They widened a moment later. “If you don’t hand over the keystone—”

[The what now?] I interrupted not having heard the term before.

“Don’t interrupt me, moron. The big brain is at work. Plus wait till you buy the Pick. It’s husking self-explanatory! Where was I—oh yes—without the key stone, they won’t be able to take out the accumulated Mana as a Crystal. They’ll level the picks and be essentially supplying you with—wait that won’t work. Once they see how beneficial the new equipment is to their work they’ll just take the picks home with them, and that’s completely separate from the little problem of you explaining where a student with no Mining experience and who isn’t some kind of legendary blacksmith got them in the first place. Imbecile!”

Just like that Smegma’s excitement shriveled and died, but not mine. If I started with my father, and claimed I needed to maintain the object with oils or something, would he listen? Then as the pick leveled and became better, would he convince his crew to use my picks? I thought he would, and it wasn’t like I had to buy the picks if he didn’t. I could just buy two. One for me and one for him. Or maybe three if I included Aunt Willa…

An idea started to form. It certainly needed work, but I was about to go back to mindlessly swinging a pickaxe—so, I had time.

I must have projected some of those thoughts to Smegma because he was now grinning evilly. “You little entrepreneur! If we figure this out, it could be huge!”

[I’ve still got to buy the first Miner’s Pick,] I said, throwing his earlier drab words back at him.

He made a rude gesture with his three fingered hand. I assumed it meant the same thing as a middle finger but didn’t want to ask. What was a demonic equivalent of a husk you?