Tunnel Rat

Georgie was happy to see him when Milo appeared in his camp after dying. He spent some time playing with the little lizard and ate quite a bit of his stored cheese. He knew the depression and exhaustion would go away soon, but it felt intolerable to feel like crap and not be taking advantage of the downtime to snack on his favorite food.

He also caught up on his experience gains for the last week.

You have gained 500 experience in Mining and 500 experience in STR.

You have gained 100 experience in Identify and 100 experience in PER.

You have gained 100 experience in Poison Resistance and 100 experience in CON.

You have gained 50 experience in Fleet of Foot and 50 experience in AGI.

You have gained 100 experience in Climbing and 100 experience in AGI.

You have gained 200 experience in Bone carving and 200 experience in DEX.

You have gained 200 experience in Rune lore and 200 experience in INT.

You will gain an equal amount of experience in the skills you apply this experience to.

You have gained Enhancement Points.

He made his decisions quickly. If he was going to kill the big snake with traps, he needed the enhancement skill Fiendish Traps. Six points bought the first two levels. The 900 Boss experience went into Weak Poison Resistance, maxing out that skill, and the rest went into Acrobatics.

He was annoyed at the big snake for making him change his plans, but at the same time, excited by the thought of trying to trap or kill it. Milo liked big jobs like fixing habitats and killing bosses. He just had to approach this job like he did others: Create a plan, gather the materials, construct the machinery, and hope things worked and didn’t blow up.

How the different crafting skills, regular skills, and lore skills worked could be confusing at times, but with the help of the old Bonecaster, he was figuring it all out. Rune lore was Lore Skill. It was all book learning and memorization. You could become a scholar in Runes without ever having crafted one yourself.

Bone Carving would let him carve bone into tools, weapons, and parts for an automaton (if he ever figured those out. He lacked the Necromancy skill that would have made that easy) and give him the skill to carve a rune onto a bone. Without Rune Lore, Bone Carving was a practical crafting skill. Together, and backed up by Bonecasting, they would let him produce the magical runes that enhanced materials, held spells, and many other things Cichol hinted at.

The Rune Crafting skill expanded his options to more than just bone. It tied together all the practical and theoretical knowledge. Of course, he still had to go acquire all that knowledge. Milo was excited by it all.

Getting back his pack and gear proved to be a bit difficult. He carefully climbed the cables up to the mining area and started working his way through the corridors. His hopes that the huge copperhead had gone back to its lair were dashed as he saw it moving down a corridor far ahead. The problem was that while he knew where part of its body was and the direction it was headed, he didn't know where its head was.

He quietly moved around for a couple of hours, avoiding the snake as it moved through the corridors. It was looking for ore deposits, battering at the stone until it could absorb them. At one point, he saw it turn a corner far down the hall and move away from him. It looked different. Sharp growths on its head formed a natural crown. He was able to identify it and cursed. Was the snake leveling up? He was going to have to revise his plans.

Queen Salasha the Rat-Slayer

Level 9 Epic Boss, Health: 9000/9000

(Huge size, elemental, constriction, tremor sense, keen sense of smell, hammerhead.)

At least she was heading away from his pack. Her majesty was headed down the corridor towards the blocked stairs. Soon after, Milo heard the sounds of the giant snake smashing through the rubble. The noise and dust she was kicking up meant it was much easier for Milo to get to his grave, recover his stuff, and get back down to his camp. He had plans for how to take care of the Queen, but it was going to take a lot of work and a trip up to the guildhall. He told Georgie to take a break. The little guard lizard nodded his head and disappeared back to where ever he came from. Milo headed back to Harry and spent a day with the troll and then made his way up through the caverns to Shadowport. He had plans to visit first the Miner's Guild and then go visit the Engineers Guild.

***

"Can someone explain to me why we have a human taking the test for Journeyman in the Dwarven Guild of Engineers?" Guild master Rolf Morgenthern was making a rare visit down to the basement of the Mechanics Guildhall. If there was one complaint anyone had about him, it was that he used a pencil too much and a wrench not enough. His hands were suspiciously free of grease most of the time. Still, no one else wanted to handle the contracts and politics, so he was sure to be reelected.

Several of the Guild Elders chuckled or shook their heads. The Mechanics Guild had opened up to non-dwarves over 500 years ago, and the Engineer’s Guild was known to rarely take a gifted mechanic, even if they weren’t a dwarf. Rolf's grandfather had opposed it. His father had opposed it. And Rolf was adamant that the glory days would only return with the 'softies' being purged from the rolls.

Elder Bancroft refilled his tankard and turned to the irate guild master. "All by the books Rolf. He came into the guild, paid for a year’s membership up front, and asked to take the apprentice test. He passed it easily. His schematics on how to solve a few of the problems were interesting and a bit unorthodox, but they worked."

"So, a couple of the brothers ran him through tool knowledge and basic hydraulics. He had some odd gaps in his knowledge of tools. Somehow didn't know what a #9 gangly wrench was. But someone schooled that boy on hydraulics and pressure systems. He's way the hell ahead of the other journeyman. We put him to work for a solid week of double shifts, and he didn't complain at all. Only left the job to grab some cheese from a vendor outside. He slept curled up in the corner for a couple of hours and then got right back to work."

"By the time the week was up, he had helped us take apart the old ore crusher and completely reconditioned and repaired the old machine. Even suggested some improvements to the gear linkage. It's up and running now and is 2% more efficient than the newer machine. As far as I'm concerned, he earned a chance at the journeyman's test."

Rolf scratched at his beard. "Something's fishy, though. Where did he learn all of that?"

Stolen story; please report.

"Somethings always fishy with you." Bancroft rolled his eyes. "But I already checked. He's in good standing with the Miner's Guild. Hell, better than good. He's solo prospecting down in the deeps. Brings up ore bags full of Deep Copper and pieces of ancient machinery. Which explains where the Miner's Guild was getting all the high-grade ore they’ve been sending to us for processing."

Rolf's dislike of non-dwarves was easily swayed by innovative design work and increased cash flow. He was starting to warm up to the new engineer. "Has he said where he's getting it? I might be willing to send a crew down that way to explore"

"Heh, not exactly. But it might be tough to send a crew out. He's been down in copperhead territory. Killed several of them and brought back some fangs for the Miner's Guild. That's a spooky area of old mines and death by poison. Maybe after he's done hunting the big one, we can convince him to show us the area, and we can convince a crew to go with him."

"What big one? Hunting?"

Bancroft pulled out some plans that apprentice Milo had asked him to look over. "Look at those numbers for the tension on the cables. If that's a snake that he's after, it's a damn big one. There’s never been even a rumor of a copperhead that big. Think of the amount of pure metal in its corpse!"

Rolf whistled. "Ok. I’m thinking of how hard it would be to stay alive while you lure it into a trap. Damn, that’s insane. But, he's fine in my book, then. Anyone who's crazy enough to try to trap a monster like that is crazy enough to be an engineer. But see if he'll pay his journeyman fees for a year ahead of time. We might not ever see him again."

Later that day, Milo found himself sitting at a table with Elder Bancroft, Guild Master Rolf, and several of his fellow journeymen engineers who had been on the project to refurbish the ore crusher. It started out as a celebratory luncheon and turned into a long skull session where everyone went over Milo's plans, and many revisions were made. Milo was happy with the changes. His knowledge was lacking about the strengths of materials in the game.

Everyone thought he was crazy. But many journeyman engineers worked on odd projects from mana-powered whisky distilleries to steam-powered mining drills. A giant snake trap was a novel idea, but the level of crazy matched the expected parameters.

Milo continued to work at the Engineers guild for another three weeks. He needed the experience of working in-game with pulley systems and especially smithing. When Milo needed to work with metal in Section E, he used an auto-welder or part fabricator. In the game, he had to use blacksmithing for the things he needed. He programmed one of his search engines to go sift through the old internet for articles and videos on traditional blacksmithing and compared those techniques to what was used in the game. It helped somewhat, although a full 80% of the material his search program found was corrupted with viruses and worms like most of the internet.

The game forums that were on the data network were easier to work with but lacked data. Links and material copied from the internet couldn’t be brought into the data network as a security caution. Any crafting guides on the forums, either real-world or in-game, would have to be created by players.

Some of what he needed to learn was how to work with Deep Iron cables, pulleys, and machinery to run the trap he was devising. Deep Iron was much stronger than normal iron and much more difficult to cut and splice back together. The engineer’s guild had very little Deep Iron machinery, but they did have books with all the information Milo needed. He’d found many of the old machines that had been used in the mines and was sure he could get some of them running with a little work. Maybe a lot of work? Milo didn’t mind work, and he had a snake to kill.

While his body in the game rested, he was at work in Section E, making sure nothing was too badly broken. The new machines helped immensely, as did the replacement parts he’d bought. The habitats built all over the world had been created to use similar parts and systems. This made sourcing parts easier. On the downside, it meant that if something was a problem in one habitat, it was probably a problem in others. The pneumatic delivery system and food processors were notorious for breaking down, and parts were difficult to get.

A month after he had come upstairs to Shadowport, he left again for the depths. In his stash were tools he had purchased from the guild. The money he had earned from the bags of ore, pure copper, and copperhead fangs had been enough to cover his journeyman fees for a year, the tools, and other supplies. He was out of money but ready to fight another round with Salasha.

Guild Master Rolf had complimented his work. Milo and the other journeymen had completely cleaned and refurbished several of the ore crushers, smelters, and alloy furnaces. Milo would have thought working with people would be annoying, but dwarves were different from humans. They talked less, worked longer, and didn’t mind if he stayed focused on the job. They seemed to value hard work and ‘less chatter.’

He'd even been able to gain some knowledge of runes. Dwarves had a system of Engineering Runes that were carved onto their machines. Milo realized they were control systems used for regulating the flow of fluids, the tension on components, or the speed of rotating gears. He carefully memorized each one and practiced carving it onto metal parts until he could do things correctly and within specs. Which, according to all the Engineers, was the only way to do things. Milo liked their attitude. His job keeping the habitat running would be easier if only all the human technicians did things his way. Unfortunately, they didn’t know he existed, so it was hard to teach them.

The time spent had been worth it in other ways. Being able to concentrate entirely on learning skills had raised his stats as well. He earned 500 experience points in Mechanics, Rune Lore, Rune Carving, Tool Making, and Smithing. That also gave him 500 points in STR, 1000 in INT, and 1000 in DEX. As soon as he earned enhancement points from killing the Snake, he needed to raise the cap on more stats. He was rapidly earning enough to push above rank 5 in several things.

The diligent work paid off with an increase in Level as well. At Level 4, he had over 800 Health and over 1000 Stamina and Mana.

And being able to easily experiment with different types of cheese in his diet showed him how to maximize his satisfaction and the effect it had on him. He ignored that he needed to eat more cheese each day. It was cheese, and there was nothing wrong with cheese! The system agreed with him.

Your love of cheese has reached Stage 4! You gain a bigger bonus: +200 health, +3 STR, +3 AGI. Eating less than 2.5 lbs. of cheese a day will decrease your bonus and be unhealthy! Not eating cheese for 24 hours will cause cravings, negate all bonuses, and inflict a penalty of -5 DEX and -5 WIS. Eat Healthy, and don’t let this happen!

He placed a large order with Jethro for the cheese he would pick up next trip. Jethro seemed anxious to please, and inquired about what day and time that might be, offering to get it all ready for him. Milo just shrugged and guessed. He had a lot of work to do, and it might take a couple of weeks or longer. He passed on Jethro's offer to stay and have dinner with his family and headed back down to see Harry, and a day later, started Operation: Snake Hunt.

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