Foundatio
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"So you're from a 2005 version of Earth," I clarified and leaned back behind my eversong desk. It was made from a locally sourced material from the Eversong Woods that had been saturated with the Sunwell's energies for thousands of years, but it was otherwise compositionally similar to magical mahogany.
"That's right, boss." The Merchant nodded as he shifted uncomfortably in his chair.
I steepled my fingers and frowned after the initial excitement wore off. I had thought I could exploit my knowledge of the events to come in the year 2005 to profit off of the Earth of that era. It was near enough to the Earth that I recognized that I could reliably predict the coming sequence of events, right? Anything from the Mortgage Crisis to the fall of Lehman Brothers to the rise of Bitcoin. But it couldn't be that easy, especially if the world had turned to shit as I expected. "Tell me more details about the recent events of your world. The matters that matter, I think you know what I mean."
"The police man was… involved in some events, see. Boss, I looked him up, checked him out. Sometimes he'd just kill me and loot me, but other times, he just don't got no respect. Ah, sorry, boss. I just had to get it off my chest." My subordinate sighed exasperatedly, perhaps having the first opportunity to let loose about something that'd been bugging him for countless loops of time.
"Get on with it," I tapped a finger on my desk, expressing a tinge of irritation that leaked out of me in the form of a pulse of mana.
"Of course, boss." He looked like he swallowed a lemon. "It started a ways back, but I don't got a lot, 'cuz I ain't got the opportunities some people gets."
"I don't want to hear excuses. If you are lacking something, just say it. We work with what we have. That is the way of this company… it's not exactly a family shop, but it's not going to be completely heartless either. If nothing else, you're my first partner, Merchant." I reminded him.
He scratched his balding head. It had been entirely bald before, but having stayed in Windrunner Village for a while and being saturated with mana had… changed him. His type of human was not the native Azerothian human, so if he had not been my only specimen, I would have wanted to see what different energies of the universe could do to his body. Alas. "The police man, he's been around since the Raccoon City Incident. Whole city wiped off the map… death tolls nearin' the whole population, last I heard. It was a bit o' a big deal, sir."
"Raccoon City." My voice fell flat. I knew that name. Suddenly, everything clicked. This wasn't any random merchant, but a specific merchant, and the police man he groused about was no random police man but most likely Leon Kennedy, from Resident Evil. But I wasn't certain. "Does Umbrella Corporation ring a bell?"
"Sorta, boss. A bunch of meddling Brits with fingers in every pie… ah. I didn't know they were so involved." His eyes creased as he smiled a wicked, ghoulish grin.
"Troubling." I concluded. There was little use—Resident Evil was a world that only resembled Earth on the surface… but it was the only place I could get my machinery. Without machinery, there was no way I could ramp up, but at the same time, 2005 was still too early to expect a high level of automation. I would need to improvise with enchanting. Searching the materials he had gathered for me—print-outs from online sources—I found the target.
The mission parameters were set. I found the machine I needed. Problem: it was a prototype, and there was no way that he could do it alone.
Conclusion: I needed to accompany him… to Resident Evil Earth.
I frowned. "Very troubling."
He peeked over as the sheets of paper fell. After reading for a while, he realized what I had selected and nodded to himself. "That's a gutsy plan ya' got there, boss. Future Gen, at the Meredosia Power Station in Illinois. A prototype demonstration device… how'd ya' think it'll last without maintenance?"
"We'll have to make do with what we have," I waved his concern off, knowing that while permanency spells were still somewhat outside of my expertise, I had no qualms with durability extension and repairing spells. It was one of the first things I learned, considering repairs was one of the biggest gold spenders on Azeroth from a certain point of view. "It's been around since 2003, sponsored by President Graham… funded by the Umbrella parent company. Of course it was. But it's still the most advance carbon capture machinery that fits the bill for what I require."
"Boss… I could get it myself, if that's what you require." The Merchant offered.
"Really?" I raised a brow at his volunteering.
If the Ganado could blush, he would have flushed. Instead, he just shrugged after turning his gaze away, unable to meet my eyes. His fingers weaved and stretched. "It's just, well, how'd ya' figure gettin' back, boss?"
"I'll open the door, and then I'll send a simulacrum through." I decided; I didn't have many spells at my disposal, but I took lessons from Naruto in this matter and the fourth Nephalem Wizard spell I worked on was Mirror Image. Mages should have had a similar spell, but for all that I inquired about it, I found no literature on the topic. Either case wouldn't be limited by meager game mechanics, meaning that as long as I could maintain the spell, it functioned. That was its flaw too: if I lost concentration, then the spell would break.
The Diablo 3 spell Mirror Image, at my current mastery of only the two of five runes of Hard Light, which increased each clone's durability to twice of mine, and Extension of Will, which allowed me to assert a sort of 'assuming direct control' mode, required twenty percent of my total concentration to maintain two illusory clones that could act as two extra pairs of hands and eyes, though their effectiveness was limited to each being only ten percent of my power.
I couldn't use it like Naruto and have three times efficiency in training because the total amount of concentration I could have never changed and my total wizard arcane power never changed either. In battle, I could probably only maintain them for a maximum amount of fifteen seconds at best because of how the flow of combat meant even sapping my concentration for a single second would dispel them too.
In the end, this was only useful as a way to send an emissary or a lesser version of myself to accomplish a dangerous mission where I more than expected fatalities to occur. And I did expect to meet with death, despite the remote location and how removed it was from anything else that happened in that apocalyptic world.
Hopefully, it never came to that. Even if that Earth lacked ambient mana and its portal pathways were unknown, I could still rely on the fundamentally reality warping powers of the Nephalem Wizard to plot a course.
One clone to hold the portal open, one to go through and make sure things went smoothly enough, and finally myself watching from a third perceptive.
What could go wrong?
.
Zombies.
Well, no, technically they weren't zombies. I didn't really even know what they were.
They couldn't crossover to the other side of the portal, because after I used the ambient powers of the Sunwell power coursing through my veins to draw the quarantining magic circle that I used to cleanse the Merchant's foodstuffs products, they were one of those things that was specifically targeted and locked out of this universe through this specific path.
The damned creatures burnt up upon trying. But I learned this the hard way, because the moment my clone crossed over, he got teeth clamped down on his neck and he died horrifically. And because of the Extension of Will rune I had already mastered, I felt every second of it—and I couldn't even release the spell, because the other clone was holding the door open.
Lesson learned… it was a good reminder. Kids learned this in preschool; look both ways before crossing the road. I hadn't scryed the other side of the portal after finding the location of the power station.
I reached over and took the control of the portal from my clone. He gave me a pained look. "Do I have to?"
"Don't you sass me. I'm you," I rolled my eyes. "Go."
He tossed a ghostly eye through the portal—one of the versions of an apprentice level mage observational spells that one of the magisters of the kingdom had created. And by created, he had copied it from one of the hexxers of the Amani Empire and claimed he only got 'inspiration' from a 'primitive' 'trick'.
My clone scoffed at the tangent in our thoughts. While the total concentration or processing power was the same, it was like that one media representation of magically partitioning the brain. It was the same brain, but it was doing different things, much like how a baby who had half of their brain cut out could still function as a normal human because the plasticity of their brain allowed them to hand off all the functions to the remaining half.
Not so extreme as to create split personalities, I assumed, but I had always had a modicum of self-loathing.
The clone nodded as he found a safe place of transference, and then he cast my variation of the teleportation spell that had be augmented by my various advantages—rather than brute forcing a wormhole to teleport with, he would find the most efficient 'bend'. His hands rose and violet-navy runes fluttered around his motioning fingers as he incanted the aria and then the trigger, "Through the curves of desire flow the most promising path. Gravity is Desire."
Then he was gone, and I had the distinct displeasure of seeing from two different pairs of eyes looking at vastly different things. I never actually sent a clone this far away; I had only started working on this spell just after I grabbed Prince Nallorath's quest.
The Merchant appeared beside me as he walked through the dimensional hole I was holding up at the other end. Right, that was me and this was me. He smiled, showing all of his yellowing teeth and at this distance, I could smell his breath.
At the other end of the portal, I grimaced as I began to phantom smell things, hear things that I physically didn't hear, and my skin crawled from the sheer wrongness that was an inherent part of the nature of the Earth within the Resident Evil universe.
"Right this way, boss," The Merchant motioned.
"Let's get this show on the road then," my cloak fluttered and immediately became tainted by the ash that flowed around us. Why did I never bother to make better gear for myself? I needed to get on that later, I promised the me who was walking beside the Merchant. "What happened here?"
"Bioterrorist attack," my subordinate shrugged. "You know how it is boss, after the first dozen, people stopped caring because it was a once-a-week event. Sorta just numbed them, see? It didn't even kill a hundred people."
"I can guess," my expression darkened. "It's bigger than the pictures."
"Weren't any people standing next to it in the pictures," he agreed.
"It's not going to fit." I concluded.
The Merchant frowned. "Ya' sure, boss? I'm certain we could, ya' know, squeeze it through the doorway."
I rolled both sets of my eyes. "Not the portal, Merchant. It's not going to fit in the designated work location I set up at the bottom of the spire. I'm going to have to set it up outside… where other people might run into it."
"Surely that ain't a problem, boss? Don't ya' got the whole village eatin' outta the palm of your hand?" He asked.
"They listen to me," I answered and held up a hand as I walked around the carbon capture device. "But there's no way that they won't talk about it to travelers, merchants, or, hell, some traveling journeyman inspector magister. That's trouble I don't need."
"Ya' could just…" He started to say.
I ran a hand through my hair, only to realize that I was reaching my actual body's hand towards my clone's hair. I needed to master this spell sooner. "No, I can't abandon it now. We need to ramp up production anyway, it's not going to be kept a secret longer no matter what."
"This is just the first of the bunch, boss." The Merchant muttered as he flipped through the materials that I had highlighted. "We're going to have to hit up two factories and one research facility if you're gonna get all the building materials ya' need, sir. It'll probably take the rest of the day just to mark 'em all on the map…"
"And we don't have all day. Well, let's just get right into it then." I waved my clone's hand at him.
.
The true strength of interdimensional trade wasn't to export elsewhere, but to import exotic technology. The term 'disruptive technology' did not refer exclusively to new technology, but statistically it referred more to old technologies that were combined in new ways that became more efficient than the mainstream.
It actually took three days to just move all the machines out of the portal. I spent another three days taking them apart and then reassembling them in the courtyard behind Windrunner Spire. Then weeks and weeks into fitting the pieces together. All of these things followed a specific sequence of logic, and I became more proficient in my burgeoning engineering skill as well as inscription and enchanting as I progressed in reassembly, enchanting parts, and carving runes on each machinery.
I needed to make a lot of parts and my society was full of artisans who were so selfish in working that rarely did they wish to collaborate and every piece of work was considered an art piece such that they didn't care for mass production? Fine, I needed to start an assembly line then.
I needed to not just produce complicated items, but I also needed to enchant them but I lacked the strange dust enchanting material or any other type of prepared and gathered magical formula that would allow me to craft even passable enchanted gear that could outfit a decently sized private army of mercenary warrior-mage elves? Then I had to get a type of gathering machine that could be modified to capture particles of arcane magic in the air, particles which were in abundance on Azeroth due to the nature of the planet, let alone how relatively close to the Sunwell we were comparative to, for example, the night elves.
I planned to have an enchanting materials producing machine that gathered and coalesced particles from the air and I had a rough idea of an assembly line in mind but it needed to be versatile so that this entire effort wouldn't just be wasted even though all that this assembly line could produce, even if it were a modular production line, would just be low-tier magical gear—the equivalent of what was probably level 15 green gear in Classic World of Warcraft, which would still be three thousand years of magical development into the future? Fine, then I gathered different types of machinery parts to create an all-purpose smelter and an all-purpose assembler.
What was that? I might be producing multiple products? Then I needed to have a modular mechanical arm for splitting items that could be enchanted or sealed with a low-level intellect so that it could keep the assembly line flowing without causing some kind of chaos that left me wondering where things started and where things ended.
The particles weren't fine enough to have consistency? Then I needed to modify a modern refinery's equipment so that I could use it to refine the collected magical particles, the equivalent of refining strange dust into illusion dust.
Not enough power to keep the whole assembly line running? I built a miniature power station. Then I fed a portion of those refined magical particles—illusion dust—into said miniature power station, which had the side-effect of producing shards of arcane crystals, which could be further refine with modified, enchanted modern technology…
… Infrastructure was boring for the average citizen. Few people cared about how all things worked, and even fewer people cared about how all things fitted together in tandem; how all these disparate programs fitted into a single unified system. Putting all of these parts together, fitting them into said system, was eight parts mind numbing boredom and two parts artistic beauty. Maybe seven-to-three, if I included making the assembly line clean and pretty.
It was like… like playing Factorio, actually.
A lot of time and experimentation went into this, but my mind had long since been enhanced by my starting choices and furthermore by the unique physiology of my current nephalem-quel'dorei hybrid body. Learning how to do things wasn't a problem. Figuring out how to do it wasn't a problem. It was just… eventless. Boring, even.
The most interest time I had these weeks was trying to dodge Alleria's questions about what I was doing that was causing so much banging even deep into the evening.
There were still problems I couldn't solve, however.
I couldn't solve the problem that despite how cheap high quality steel was in Resident Evil Earth, I still could not procure a stable supply of that product. I had no means of procuring Mithril or Thorium on Azeroth, and while using bronze might have been passable (considering that was somewhere near the peak capacity for the average soldier in the kingdom), I wasn't so sure about my automated enchanting machine, so I wanted to compensate with high quality steel armor, which was at this time something specific cavalry arms of the private armies of the aristocrats utilized.
Thus, for all the effort I put into it, I found that my assembly line would often sputter to a stop. The new warehouse I had asked of from some of the carpenters of the village was already taking shape, but I already had several crates of enchanting materials and arcane crystal shards piling up with nowhere to go. I had to come to terms with it: I was really shit at Factorio.
The only plus side to this was that arcane crystal shards seemed to be a rather accepted alternative currency to the coins of Silvermoon City minted on the orders of the Convocation of Silvermoon. This meant I wasn't going into debt commissioning that warehouse.
I could probably make it with six hundred sets of magically reinforced chain armor, weather-proofed temperature-controlled overcoats, magically keen knives, magically true striking scimitars, magically humidity-controlled socks, magically muted boots, enchanted rings of protection, and enchanted drinking flasks with about two months left to spare. I spent a whole fucking half year on this shit, and I still wasn't sure if I could keep doing this afterwards. I might have been able to finish sooner, but some of the less obviously magical goods were sold at a high price to people like Leon Kennedy on the other side to pay for the base materials needed.
I didn't want to be a war profiteer, well, not as a main job, anyway. Just the warehouse management was already driving me crazy. Only parts of it didn't require someone with magic, and obviously I generously delegated that shit to the Merchant.
If this kept up, I was going to start teaching Alleria how to do half this shit just so I could go back to my easy life…
… no, I slapped myself. I needed to remember why I was doing this. All the mind numbing hours of construction, infrastructure, forging, enchanting, crafting and assembly started to drown out the sense of purpose that drove me to this brink in the first place. The truth was, just holding all this enchanted gear left me without a sense of power. It wasn't like having a single artifact of legendary power, I just had a hill of moderately magical equipment.
I was driving myself insane with this repetition.
I needed a break.
.
Alleria shot another shot, splitting the fifth arrow at the bullseye of the targeting mat on the other side of the field. Her brow furrowed into a stormy expression, and before I could approach her, she sensed me and spun around. That look of upset didn't dissipate.
Uh oh.
"Lirath Windrunner!" Alleria hissed.
She never called me by my full name like that. I might have taken a step back in surprise. "Alleria, my sweet sister. You… seem upset."
She took her training bow by one end and waved it at me as if it were a rolled up newspaper, "You! Brother! You didn't… I know what you've been doing! You're… why didn't you tell me you were planning to sneak to the front lines?!"
"Uh?" I blinked. My brain was still sort of fried from overwork and leveling my enchanting and inscription so high that the current work all resulted in just gray level difficulty stuff. I barely even reacted, but… wait, what?
"Everyone in the village is whispering about it," Alleria didn't give me an opportunity to protest. "No one's said it to your face, of course, because no one's so obtuse as you are, big brother. There's a lot of the others who have gathered that you want to form your own ranger battalion. I saw your stockpile, you can't lie to me! You want to go save mother, and you're not even going to take me!"
But that was explicitly what I wasn't going to do! I wanted to shout in frustration—I wasn't going to negate our mother's wishes for me to keep away from the front lines if I could help it. The half-dozen incidents where my Mirror Image clones died to accidents, monsters, or corporate military was enough to convince me that I didn't like being within the range of fire.
Of course, my little sister didn't calm down when I didn't immediately agree with her and acquiesce. Instead, she stomped up to me, her head not even reaching my shoulders, but still poking me in the center of the chest. "I won't put up with this! Mother said you're not supposed to go! But if you are, you should take me with you, don't you know? What if I'm all alone here? Everyone else is going but me? When were you going to tell me? The day after you left, just like how mother only left a letter saying goodbye instead of letting me send her off in person?!"
Ah, there was a lot to unpack there. I didn't catch half of it. I really didn't know how I could break things down for her, anyway. And honestly? She didn't even want logic. She wanted some kind of emotional connection—something that let her feel good, rather than think good. Me wanted to feel good too, though. So I leaned down and put her elven ear in my mouth and sucked. "Om nom nom."
"LIRATH!" Mount Alleria erupted.
Good thing that was a Mirror Image! Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.
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Notes: It's like 7 am, and I just wrote 20k words lol for this thing in the span of less than 24 hours uhhh idk lmao lol right well, enjoy or whatever lol didn't know hwo to end the chapter so like just whatever idk didn't want to write the rest of it so just leave whatever to the next chapter I guess lol
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Feb 14, 2021Report
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