Blood Shaper

“So, you’re a vampire now?” Cindy asked, leaning in and trying to pull Kay’s top lip up to see his teeth, “How are you outside right now, then?”

He smacked her hand away, “Stop touching my mouth! And by being the not melting in sunlight kind of vampire.”

“I wanna see your fangs, though.” She reached for his face again, “Show me!”

“For fucks sake,” He stepped back and bared his teeth at her, flicking his fangs down with a flex of the new muscles in his mouth. “There, happy?”

She scooted closed, her eyes locked on the new additions to his mouth, “So you drink blood now?”

Kay sighed and prepared himself for an actual question-and-answer session. With vampires not being native to Torotia, the only people that would be able to question him about how his new species stood against other versions of vampirism would only come from other Outworlders. “Yes, I drink blood now.”

“Like drink blood?”

“What?”

She poked him in the stomach, “Does it actually end up in here, or are you one of those weird vampires that use their fangs like needles and suck it up into their veins directly?”

Kay stared at her, a look of discomfort on his face, “There are vampires like that? That’s weird as hell. No, it goes in my stomach.”

“I read a couple of books that had them like that,” She shrugged, “Do you pee?”

Kay groaned and started walking away from her, “Why are you asking me about that?”

“Because I’m curious! Do you still eat regular food and drink water and stuff, or is it only blood? If it’s only blood, do you pee blood? Wait, no, pee is the leftover bits. Do you digest, like, the hemoglobin and piss plasma or something?”

“For-“Kay stopped and glared at her, “I’m eating real food still and drinking regular drinks. I still get hungry and regular thirsty; there’s just a new extra thirsty that I have to drink blood for. And yes! I still go to the bathroom, you nut!”

She opened her mouth to keep talking, but Kay cut her off.

“No! I’m not doing any analysis of my pee to see what the waste product of blood is; stop asking me shit like that!”

“Fine.” She pouted.

“Ugh, how bored have you been?” He demanded as they resumed walking towards the R&D section of the facility.

“Meh,” Cindy waggled her hand back and forth, “A bit, mostly recently while we waited for you to show. There’s been quite a bit of work, and I’ve been doing a lot of training and hunting monsters to try and level my Skills.” She grinned up at him with a glint in her eye, “Care to spar with me?”

“Later, let’s finish this walkthrough.”

“Welcome to the Research and Development section, then!” She nodded at the two guards, one of which opened the door for them, and they stopped inside a small room with two more guards. There was a brief examination with a few magical items, expensive ones that had been imported specifically for this, and the two guards checked over their identity badges, Cindy’s permanent one and Kay’s guest pass.

“Quol spends about half of his time in here and another half overseeing training for his ‘bevy of apprentices’.” She made air quotes and rolled her eyes as they walked deeper into the complex. “We’re not really set up for large-scale manufacturing, for all number of reasons. Lack of properly trained people, we need more resources, we haven’t developed a weapon good enough to start giving to anyone we can, and we’re delaying training new people in my Class Line so I can grab a few more of the low-hanging Classes, the entire setup of this world promotes craftsmanship over assembly line style manufacturing because multiple people working on a single item can lead to no Class bonuses working if you split it up too much… All kinds of stuff. So it’s a lot of Quol working with his ‘apprentices’, me training, and us working together to make the best guns we can.”

They stopped at another checkpoint, this one with less magical tools but more personal scrutinizing, Kay didn’t remember everything from the various security briefings, but he was pretty sure some of Isla’s people she’d trained to see through disguises and illusions were here as guards.

“Why do you keep using air quotes for apprentices?” He asked Cindy after they made it through into the actual facility proper.

“’Cause they’re all those pen pals he told you about, the other gun enthusiasts that didn’t care that it wasn’t a Class before. All of them but one rushed over here after they got the letters you let Quol send to them.” She looked over at him with a grin, “Semi-related side note, good job jumping on the issue when you did because three of them showed up with the Novice Gunsmith Class, and from what I heard, at least one of them might have gotten it the same day Quol got the Class Line Progenitor Title.”

“Damn…” Kay froze in place for a moment, his eyes wide, “That would have been…”

“Something. Not sure what kind of something, but something.”

“Yeah…” He shook his head after another moment of shocked silence, “Damn. Well, good job me.”

They resumed walking, now heading between workbenches and around forging setups that reminded Kay of the secret underground they’d originally been using beneath Avalon.

“Anyway, Quol’s been calling them his apprentices, and they’re mostly putting up with it, but they’re really contemporaries. I’m straight up assuming that all of them are going to end up with one or more Class Creator Titles before too long, just because they’re all working in different directions most of the time. They’ve all got their own passion projects, and their life experiences are a bit different. One’s a bowyer, and she’s trying to make a bow-gun hybrid thing, which is weird to me, but whatever, it’s a fantasy world, let’s see what happens; one’s a jeweler so he’s making really intricate detailed work, which will be great for ceremonial pieces, and so on and so on.”

“Does Quol have any problems with that? Most of the books I’ve managed to read about Class Line Progenitors say they mostly try and horde as many Class Creator Titles as they can.”

Cindy shrugged, “We talked about it; he said he’s fine, and I believe him. He’s been so excited to have this dream of his finally come true with benefits, and now he gets to share it with his friends who shared the same dream all while working together in person when they were limited to letters before. I don’t think he begrudges them any ‘lost’ Titles.”

“That’s good to hear.”

They stopped at a specific workbench near the back of the building that was tucked away behind a small wall. Sitting on it was a wooden box that had been shaped to sort of resemble a handgun case from back on Earth. Cindy stepped forward and flipped open the lid. Sitting in it was an interesting mix between a modern gun and a historical one. The handle was polished wood that curved like a stereotypical image of a flintlock, but there were grooves carved out for someone’s fingers to rest in. The barrel was a standard metal cylinder that stuck out from the blockier portion that contained the firing mechanism. The lever was to the side of the mechanism instead of above, and it was positioned to swing in towards the side. The end of the lever wasn’t a flint or something else to make sparks fly on striking; it was a thing needle that had a slight orange tinge to the metal. Its trigger was a long curved piece of metal with a tip that pointed at the barrel, but it had a trigger guard around it.

Cindy picked up the gun and grabbed a small protrusion at the very back of the mechanism. Pulling backward on it after a slight twist on the protrusion had a portion of the gun pulling back out of the mechanism, revealing a small hollow that was roughly bullet-shaped. She held out the weapon in her hand to show it off.

“Introducing the Dovomoss Mark Three.” She turned it around so he could see all the sides of it, then handed it over to him to hold, “Quol named it; he called dibs since he’s the Class Line Progenitor. It’s an interesting combination of knowledge between Earth and Torotian ideas and technology, with a bit of magic and alchemy mixed in as well.”

Kay tested the heft of it, finding it noticeably heavier than his own gun back home had been but not much heavier than he’d expected. “Show me?”

“Of course,” She grinned excitedly and took the gun back to close it up in its case, “Let’s go to the range. I’ll explain the interesting details while I show you how it handles.”

The demonstration and the explanation that went with it were enlightening, both on how the gun worked and on how Earth ideas could be mixed with Torotian ones to make something badass. Kay wasn’t the inventive type, and he hadn’t had much time to do anything crafting-related outside of his Cartography Skill and doing things with transmutation, so he’d not really realized the levels it could reach.

The first thing she explained was why they’d made what was essentially a breach-loading handgun. A lot of the reason was that the better options weren’t allowed, thanks to the restrictions the System had. Magazines and clips both failed to work, as did every other method they could think of to make a gun that could hold more than one bullet at a time, including revolvers. So they’d had to work with single-shot options, and they’d tried quite a few. In the end, the option they’d chosen had succeeded over the others for a simple reason that Kay admitted he’d never have thought of.

While the breach loading mechanism they’d gone with was bulkier and a little more complicated than a bolt-action, that was actually a good thing in this case because it meant that there was more material in the weapon itself, which made enchanting easier. Kay had never really learned about ‘standard’ enchanting too much, and that was the kind that they had access to. That type, as compared to runic enchanting, one of the many Class Lines that the Rune Master controlled, involved the enchanted directly imparting mana into the item, and what enchantments ended up being part of the item could be affected by different circumstances, including the enchanter’s experience, knowledge, and power, the materials used in the item being enchanted, and the circumstances the enchantment took place in.

Have an enchanter that’s done a ton of fire enchantments, enchanting something with fire that contains lots of fire-related or fire-aligned materials in a fiery place? Powerful fire enchantment. Same circumstances but an ice enchantment? It would be much weaker.

So a slightly bigger and more complicated mechanism meant that they had more options to put different materials in to make better magical guns, plus more mass of the object meant there was more to push mana into, which meant stronger enchantments in general. All of that, combined with the fact that Torotian crafting meant more time on individual items to make them of higher quality instead of faster, less precise work to push out more and more items, meant that everything had pushed towards the bulkier answer over the more streamlined one.

Plus, Cindy had added, it meant that the mechanism could pull back the gun’s lever as you reloaded instead of doing it manually each time, which saved a couple of seconds every time you reloaded.

That lever, with the needle on the end, actually worked through magic as well, although in this case, it was the magic that was part of the material itself, combined with a bit of alchemy. The needle was made out of a specific type of iron that naturally radiated small amounts of heat. Combined with a quick alchemical processing and the swinging motion of the lever moving made it heat up to the needed temperature just long enough as it pierced the paper cartridge they’d developed and light the powder.

All in all, it was an interesting, fun weapon that worked quite well during the demonstration while Kay fired it himself.

“Well!” Cindy exclaimed after they’d each shot off a few dozen rounds, “Wasn’t that fun? That concludes today’s tour and the demonstration of our newest product! Up next on our itinerary me kicking your ass in a delightful sparring match!” She hurried him out of the range and towards the other edge of the building. “Hurry up! I want to try shooting through your armor while you’re in it!”