Vivid Stars Online

As usual, Bradford was free to see me shortly after I arrived. It made me wonder just how few explorers he had left in this region. It can’t be many, I mused as I knocked on his door. I’ve only seen one or two other people around, even when I’ve stayed the night.

His face lit up as I entered. “Jared, good job with that ruin. Professor Henceforthe sent me a most complimentary message. Finding a ruin and exploring it without prompting? That’s exactly the initiative I like to see.”

I blinked, thrown for a moment before responding. “Thanks, sir,” I said, feeling awkwardly formal after the praise. While I hadn’t been prepared for it, it would make sense that the guild and the chief of archaeology for the region would be in close communication.

“I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that wasn’t why you wanted to see me, however,” Bradford continued with a wink.

I nodded in response. “That’s right, I wanted to check up on the payment for the food source mission.”

“Ha, I thought as much. I wanted to inform you earlier, however, I’m not allowed to discuss the schedule of military patrols until they are well underway. Further, I can’t communicate information by message at all until their mission is complete.”

“Since you're here in person, however,” he continued. “I can tell you that the last report I received was that they had landed at the lake. I would expect them to report back sometime tomorrow.”

That was interesting information, it suggested that calls made from my watch might not be as secure as I had assumed. I would have to keep that in mind and try not to talk about anything I wanted to keep secret during a call.

“Thank you for the update,” I said. “Do I need to come back tomorrow?”

Bradford shook his head with a smile. “No need, once the mission is complete, I can send the results. If all goes well, I will send you the payment for it tomorrow. I will also update your ranking at the same time.”

Since I had nothing else to discuss, I thanked him and left the office. It was still early in the afternoon, and I found myself with a significant amount of spare time. Looks like it’s time to translate that armlet I found in the temple. Not to mention that tablet computer.

The three items I had kept back from selling yesterday were the armored leggings, the silver armlet, and the tablet computer we’d found in the control room. The first two items I felt would be useful to me personally, while I hoped that the tablet would have information on it.

While there was a chance that it had been wiped along with the main computers, I hoped that it had escaped that fate. If not, I could always go back and try to sell it, just the technology alone was probably worth something.

To ensure privacy, I booked another room at the guild. While I could have just used a meeting room, I would need somewhere to sleep anyway, and a private room felt more secure.

Once I was safely in the room, I laid the three items out on the small desk it came with. Better tackle the pants first, they don’t have any writing on them, so I just need to do a few experiments.

I had been wearing them for the trip back, though you wouldn’t know it by looking at them. Even though I had been struck or bitten in the legs multiple times, they didn’t look like they had a scratch on them.

This was strange as they had been pierced several times, leaving wounds on my flesh underneath. While they held off most light attacks, more powerful blows or piercing attacks could get through.

So why are they still intact then? I mused as I carefully looked them over. Some kind of self-repairing ability? I hadn’t had the time to investigate the phenomena on the way back. Now that I had the afternoon free, it was time to get to the bottom of it.

Luckily, there was an easy enough test I could do. I pulled out my knife, Attuned to it for a moment to fully sharpen it, then pushed the tip through the material.

While there was some resistance, my now incredibly sharp blade was able to pierce through once I put my weight behind it. With a hole made, I withdraw the dagger and watched closely.

Before my eyes, the material began to repair itself from the edges of the hole inward. Less than a minute later, there wasn’t even a scratch on the material, as if I hadn’t damaged it at all.

Sweet, I thought with a grin as I stared at it. With the amount of damage my clothes took, having at least part of my attire self-heal would be amazing. When you stacked the pant’s utility as armor on top of that, you had something that would be extremely useful.

There has to be some kind of limit, though, right? I thought as my excitement started to settle down. Maybe the guild's database has something on the material.

Sure enough, I found an entry for Arkathian nano weave armor in the database. There were records of it being found at multiple ruins, particularly ones believed to be military bases.

The information available on it said that it was considered highly valuable as armor, though it did have its limitations. In particular, its self-healing was limited as I’d feared, in fact, it was more shifting of the material than actual repairing.

Just like when the pants had reshaped themselves to fit me, they could reform to cover up any damage. Inevitably, some of the material would be lost each time this happened, even if it was just a small amount.

Luckily, this wouldn’t be an immediate problem as they were too long in the legs for me at the moment. It was something to keep an eye on, however, and I was bombarded with the absurd image of them gradually being reduced to a pair of shorts.

I wonder if I can get around that by making more of it. I mused in thought. With no reason to put off trying it, I Attuned to the pants and focused on restoring what was missing. Immediately my energy started tanking, and I stopped, gasping as a throbbing pain grew in my head.

OK, let’s leave trying to replicate super-advanced alien material for later. Maybe when I’ve upgraded my ability or have a far larger pool of energy available.

It was so unpleasant that I took a brief lie down to recover, using the break to log out and have a quick lunch in the real world. I considered taking a longer break to check the forums, however, the mystery of my remaining two items tugged at me.

Deciding that the forums could wait, I logged back in and sighed with relief to find that the pain had dissipated. OK, on to the armlet. Time to figure out how to use this translation database myself.

During our time at the facility, it had been easier to let Elana handle the translations. Since her drone had been disabled at the time, it had only made sense to offload that responsibility so I could focus on combat.

Now I had to figure it out myself, so I pulled up the database and began poking around. It turned out there were two modes I could use. Much like Elana had, I could automate the translation by feeding it data, or, I could use it in manual mode.

While I could probably scan the text in and use the automatic function, I was curious about my Translation skill. Perhaps if I do the translation manually, I’ll be able to level that up.

I didn’t think that I’d ever looked at the skill description before since it hadn’t come up. Curious, I pulled it up now.

Translation Skill Level 1

Covers the users’ ability to recognize and read ancient languages. At higher levels, this skill will allow automatic translation of languages that the user is familiar with.

Huh, I thought as I processed the skill description. So what? It will translate for me without needing to look it up in the database. How would that even work? A pop-up window, perhaps? Whatever the case, it sounded useful, so I decided to translate the runes manually.

As the Arkathian language used symbols rather than an alphabet, from what I could see, that was going to take some time. At first, I just looked through the database, trying to find the symbols that I was seeing on the armlet.

After nearly an hour of this, however, I noticed similarities that allowed me to shortcut the process. Many of the symbols were composed of reoccurring sections that matched general themes.

By recognizing and filtering for these themes, I could drastically cut down on the time needed to find a particular symbol. While it was still slow, taking over two hours to translate the two dozen symbols on the armlet, I felt a massive sense of achievement by doing it myself.

Armlet Psionic Restoration

Increase rate which Psionic energy drawn to the user.

While I had messed up the grammar due to lacking a basic understanding of how the words tied together, it was at least a somewhat coherent description of what the item did.

And what a useful item it turned out to be. I bet they all had these, I thought, slipping it on with a grin. If I had to pick one item that would be useful to give to your Psionic super soldiers, it would be one that gave them more energy over time.

At some point, I would have to test how effective it was by timing how long it took to get my energy back again. For now, all I knew was that the effect was subtle enough that it wasn’t immediately noticeable.

Lastly, I moved onto the tablet, trying to find some way to turn it on. I ended up fiddling with it for an embarrassingly long amount of time before realizing that it was probably just out of power. Who knows how long it was just sitting there after all?

Perhaps Elana could figure out how to charge it. Thinking about that, I should have probably just handed it to her yesterday. It was time to rectify that, so I sent her a message from my watch, asking if she would be interested in checking out the tablet. Hopefully, being out of power spared it from being wiped. Surely, it wouldn’t have been able to receive or process any commands to do so.

While I was waiting, I translated a small set of runes on the back of the tablet. While they eventually turned out just to be a make, model, and reference number, I was pleased to get a notification that Translation had leveled once I had finished.

That was pretty quick, I thought with a smile. Perhaps more evidence that class skills level faster? Next time I’m in a ruin I will have to try and level archaeology as well. Maybe if I document what I’m seeing I’ll get XP for it?

Curious again, I pulled up its skill description as well.

Archaeology Skill Level 1

Covers the user’s ability to search, document, and recover artifacts from ancient ruins. At higher levels, this skill will help locate hidden objects, passages, and traps.

Nice, I will definitely have to try and level that. While I might have gotten some XP when I was looking around the temple, I didn’t really record anything or even search it that thoroughly. I’ll have to do better next time.

Leaving that aside, I checked my watch to find a message from Elana saying she was free tomorrow. I had been so absorbed in my translating that I hadn’t even noticed the notification when it came in.

That left me with the rest of the evening, so I turned to train my Item Attunement skill. I had restored my energy while I’d been translating, so I began practicing Attuning and Calling both my dagger and gun to me.

I wanted to get the process down seamlessly so I could find and teleport either of them to me in an instant. While I wasn’t there yet, every bit of practice I could get helped me get closer to that goal.

Once I had the basics down, I would start training my Empowerment, trying to get more out of those purple plasma blasts I’d been able to produce. Though I’ll probably have to find a gun range for that, I doubt they would appreciate me burning the building down.

Even with those being the most efficient uses of Item Attunement that I’d found, it didn’t take long before I had burnt through half of my energy. That was the same level I had tested my regeneration speed at before.

Since I didn’t just want to sit there, I planned to log out and read through the forums over the evening. As long as I logged back in regularly, I shouldn’t miss the point where my energy pool hit full again.

I doubted even the armlet would drop the time below an hour, so I logged out and set that as a timer. In the meantime, I would focus on looking through the forums. It had been weeks now, so I was expecting there to be some solid information available, even if I had to dig to find it.