Chapter 3-69: Another Wall (1/2)
While the Freemasons had no monopoly on the making of magic items or the foundation items, they set the standard for all crafters and Crafters. Anyone seeking to buck the system by undercutting pricing or doing false QL would come under tremendous, possibly lethal, pressure.
Of course, many crafters complained about monopoly, restricted training, and so forth... but the fact was, with Akasic training via Karma available, there was no way to limit the acquisition of skills. There was Karma, time, talent, and training. BUT... the Freemasons knew how to direct their skills to create synergies, what Feats and Masteries to take, how to take them, what to focus on, and what to let slide and have others handle.
Just that knowledge on what to do was invaluable. Add on the greater lifespan of the demi-humans, even before the Powered Level bonuses, and the master Crafters of the elves, dwarves, and gnomes profited the most. There was no way to stop it if you were a Human, except to Level more and try to equal them.
Elves could easily hit Eight in Wizardry, and with it another Class, giving them a one Rank bonus in pure skill. Dwarves could hit Seven in Expert+Melee, and had a racial bonus when working with stone and metal of base +2, ending up at +4 at Seven with Dwarf/3, which a Human could not equal. Gnomes had a +2 edge in Alchemy and Gemcutting that also increased to +4.
Thus, the highest end of certain professions was held by Gnomes and Dwarves, while the Elves had a one Skill Rank advantage in ANY skill they wanted to pursue.
All three Races also had full Racial Classes, which had no ability prereqs to take, although they had the same problems breaking Six. That meant that thoroughly average members of all their Races could eventually reach Six with time, simply slogging away and putting in their time, something basically impossible for humans to emulate. Granted, humans vastly outnumbered them, and so there were more exceptional humans than there were of any of those races... but when an average dwarf, gnome, or elf hit Four without a problem, the equivalent of a skilled Master or elite human, there was definitely a shift in power.
It meant humans ended up making lower QL stuff, because the other races were better at making high QL. Dwarves sat atop the smithing world, Gnomes led the alchemical and jewelry worlds, and the Elves couldn’t be rivaled in anything, especially making magical items, at the top end.
Except, of course, for the halvyr who had managed to hit Nine, of whom Morningflame had been the first. But their numbers were small, and certainly didn’t skew anything globally.
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I put the book on recent European history down with the others, as it was getting close to closing time. The librarians were looking at me with faces of great respect, disbelief, and some resignation, as I had a crapload of stuff stacked up around me.
With great Concentration cometh great speed reading. My Visual File was chock full of stuff now, and I had more questions I needed to research... which was par for the course.
One of the librarians came up to me, looking at the stacks with some defeat in her eyes. “Are you all done, Miss Traveler?” she asked politely... in Human. She’d seen my video.
“For today. Dewey Decimal System, right?” I asked kindly.
“Why, yes...” Her voice drifted off as I waved my hand and a book lifted off, and headed off towards its proper place in the stacks. A little wide-eyed, she watched as I played maestro, and books, magazines, and newspapers were soon flying through the air, drawing the attention of everyone in delight as they headed back to their proper places.
“Oh, I think I would kill to be able to do that,” she breathed out, eyes shining as a half-hour of traipsing around was accomplished in a couple minutes.
“Cantrip, Prestidigitation. It’s just a slight tweaking to the ‘clean up everything and put it back in its place’ effect, using the Decimal notations as a guideline,” I explained calmly. “You could get it in an Amulet, but it would probably cost half a goldweight... if you could find someone to spend the time to make it.”
“And someone would just want to steal it,” she sighed knowingly, but smiling at the fact that she didn’t have to clean up and file all those books herself.
“I have a question for you.” She straightened up alertly. “Due to being Shroudborn, I can’t manipulate electronic technology without things going very wrong. So, no computers. However, I can certainly read what is on a computer screen, if someone else brings up the information.
“Do you know someone who might be willing to make ten dollars an hour handling the browsing tasks for me while I catch up on things?”
The librarian, a slender bibliophile named Cindy by her tag, lifted her finger. “Let me ask around, and I will be right back with you!”
Saving people work generates goodwill. She bustled off energetically, and was back with a positive reply in minutes. One of the other librarians had a daughter in college who had a day off and could certainly use the money... and would be discreet about it. They would be happy to reserve one of the rooms in the back for my use, too...
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Master Fred pulled up outside right on time at 8 PM. Dusk was an hour away, giving us plenty of time to get where we were going. We stopped in at the Aruan temple down the road, where I donated five vials of holy water I had made before going to the library, earning me a beaming smile from the Adept on duty, and I just spent half an hour in Waking Meditation to get the Valences back.
I was good to go, tracing my lived-line as we pulled out on the highway leading from Baltimore to Washington DC.
Unsurprisingly, the road was not all that modernized, because there was precious little traffic along it. For some reason, heavy traffic back and forth from the ghost town that used to be the capitol of the United States of America wasn’t a thing, meaning the infamous Beltway traffic jams I could vaguely recall had never happened, and those roads had never actually been built.
The DC Shroudzone was actually centered on Arlington National Cemetery, not the Capitol, but when the spectral dead had risen up, they had basically wraith-bombed both DC and Alexandria hard, slaughtering basically the entire central government of the country in one fell swoop, including the upper echelons of the military, and pretty much the whole heart of the bureaucracy.