Chapter 9-287: Meeting Notes (1/2)

There are routine things I did in down time.

There were big cheap gems to cut, mold, and turn from crappy rough chunks of crystal into Energized 5000 gp gems, in essence making myself large amounts of money directly from raw materials via Shaping Stone at VII. Heavenbound Hall had literally tons of said materials stored away, courtesy of The Mick and appropriate business dealings.

I Cast an Exemplar Surge and learned a new spell to fatten the libraries of Silver Magic, which now had the most complete such set of spells in the world. The other Temples and magical forces had no idea where it was all coming from, but they kept buying the ones the Temples leaked for incredible amounts of money. Revenue, revenue, vroom vroom! Support the Good work despite yourselves...

I could Teleport to the ex-Firezone warehouses of smelted metal and harvested raw gems, Itemize or Tapestry tons of them, and Teleport Item them directly to Detroit, bypassing all them nasty transportation costs and the security issues that would rise with them.

As I had all the money I needed, I could work on progressing magic items. As I could work on items with requirements of 12 Ranks of Spellcraft, or I could instead start up an Item, send it off for others to Infuse it up, and then spend a day at the far end doing the finishing, potentially making more powerful items without directly working on them myself most of the time.

I made six Wishes a day: three via Bey ‘Azzar, and three copies from him given to Master Fred.

I administered Blessings. Since I could unerringly return to any place along my Lived-Line, my Allegiance and/or associated Priests would gather together suitable people at different locations so my time would not be wasted when I popped in, administered them at six seconds a pop via a kiss on the forehead, and then departed.

I could use Marrowmeld, Stone Shape, and Woodshaping together with Fabricate to get days of work done on materials in mere minutes. My modifiers and Ranks for such tasks were unmatched among mortals on the world, so I could make things at higher QL than just about any artisan alive.

I mostly used them to generate multiple types of healing Wands for Master Fred to charge up, his standard task while we were traveling, or to make raw Implements for other Casters to use and empower. Metalwork I left to others.

I could also administer the Full Tempering treatment of spells for items, consisting of Bond, Reed, Stone, Iron, and Adamant. This famous set of spells was called the Dwarven Pentad.

Bond was a I Valence Rune, and gave an item a +1 to-hit when wielded by the person blood-bonded to it... overridden by a true magical bonus, but also forming the core link used for Naming an item.

Reed, a II Valence Rune, made an item as flexible as rubber without actually affecting its hardness. Since it would stretch and bend radically while still returning to its original form, it made it very hard to break or shatter it with brute force. You could bend a sword with Reed on it right over on itself, and when the force was released, it would recover to its original form without a problem.

Stone was the III Rune, and doubled the hit points of an inanimate item, increasing its durability greatly. Leaving aside its resistance to deliberate sundering, such things simply lasted longer.

Iron was the famous IV Rune that gave an item the base structural strength and hardness of iron, while retaining its own characteristics if they were superior. Glassteel, or laen, came from using this spell to make glass as hard and ductile as iron at 10 (instead of 2), while keeping its own crystalline nature.

Adamant, or Harden, was a V Valence, and straight up boosted an item’s hardness by +1 for every two Caster Levels. Since I had a crazy Caster level, I could easily boost the hardness of an object to 30+ without too much effort. The ability of such a material to resist damage and stresses to its system were impressive, to say the least, the biggest restriction on the spell being the relatively small amount of material you could work on per spell.

I was running The Map all the time now, of course, and so Markspace had literally the most accurate maps of certain areas in the world now. Naturally my people wanted to map a whole lot more areas and fill in the blank spots. There were people who wanted to get to Nine just so they could Cast Commune with Nature and add that level of detail to The Map... and feel that level of harmony with the Land.

The miners in the Shroudzone would also call me up to very, very quickly work out a vein by Stone Shaping volumes of stone directly, creating a perfect tunnel through the stone following it, and dropping bars of ore or crystals down to be easily carted off. Given the volume of stone I could move and the precision at which I could do it, this resulted in production surges here and there which only took relative minutes of my time to accomplish.

And, you know, I could walk through the stone under Heavenbound Hall and clear out new halls and rooms...

I could also Energize lower-end gemstones or metals, also pure money-making, as I had the Caster Level to make small amounts of adamantine and mithral out of the original tungsten and titanium.

So, needless to say, as long as I had Valences or Pool, there were always things I could be doing, and plenty of things I could be doing even if I went through them all.

The Shroudzones and Cultivators being nice enough to help me recharge was something I was grateful for, of course, but that couldn’t help me all the time.

The V+ Valence stuff was the stuff in highest demand, of course, so I literally could not run out of things to do, because I would never have enough of them to do everything that I and everyone else wanted done.

I did what I could do.

I had twelve Ranks in Logistics, which doubled as the Allegiance Management ability, among other things. My base check at that was 49, which could spike another twenty or more after Casting Allegiance-related magic, enabling me to assign duties and coordinate efforts between disparate members and locations with, well, magical speed; let individuals know what they could do to contribute to maximal effect; smooth out flows; get different personalities working together; and sideline those who didn’t contribute or caused problems, and then give them the chance to help elsewhere... or simply leave.