45 – Reinduction

Vivi appreciated Rafael’s interruption, not because she was interested in the quest’s payout, but because she had no idea how to deal with a starstruck, emotional old friend who wasn’t really an old friend at all.

Meeting Winston and Rafael had gone smoothly, but that was because they were social deftness personified. Mae was…not so much that. She was also clearly far more amazed by Vivi’s presence.

She supposed she’d interacted constantly with Winston, as her butler, and with Rafael, the guild’s steward. The craftsmen, she hadn’t been as close with. The luster of ‘hero of the world’ still existed in their eyes to some degree—if no doubt less than a civilian’s. At least, that seemed to be the case for Mae.

And Vivi couldn’t pick up the slack on a complicated social situation. She stumbled with normal niceties, much less unprecedented circumstances like reuniting with a guild-NPC turned real person. So yeah. She was glad Rafael had interjected. Seeing how he was more than aware of Vivi’s quirks, he’d likely done so on purpose.

Jasper slammed his book closed, tossed it aside, and rolled off the sofa, jumping to his feet in a fluid motion. “The quest does sound like fun. Level two thousand artifact with no level cap?” He whistled. “If it’s a bow, I call dibs.”

“Why would you get it?” Mae shot at him. “Just for knowing me?”

He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I do deserve a reward for putting up with you.”

“You! Putting up with me!” the elf sputtered. “You have that backwards!”

Rafael strode over to the quest board. As amusing as watching Jasper score repeated critical strikes on Mae was—he really understood how to get under that woman’s skin—Vivi followed Rafael, far more interested in the quest. Jasper and Mae must have agreed, because after bickering for a bit longer, they also glanced over, paused, and hurried to join them.

“To my office?” Rafael asked, eyes scanning the paper he had unpinned from the cork. They flicked to Mae. “Assuming you do, indeed, wish to rejoin Vanguard?”

Mae sounded almost offended. “I hardly avoided every other guild these past hundred years for some other reason.” She hesitated as if realizing something, and looked at Vivi with obvious concern. “Assuming I’m still welcome.”

“That goes completely without saying,” Vivi said.

A beaming smile spread across Mae’s face, which she tried to hide with some embarrassment. Vivi was struck, again, by how much weight her words held to the people who remembered her.

As a group of four, they walked to Rafael’s office. He pulled out the guild charter and flipped to, presumably, the induction form. He scribbled out several fields, then paused, pen tip hovering indecisively.

“As a craftsman solely, or an adventurer too?” he asked Mae—though also sent a significant glance at Vivi.

Mae paused. “Oh.” She glanced at Jasper, who quirked an eyebrow, then at Vivi. “Is that…an option?”

Rafael said, “Lady Vivisari did mention opening up the ranks.”

Prior to now, only the Party of Heroes had been adventuring members of Vanguard. But Vivi’s logic hadn’t changed, and who better to be the first new member of Vanguard than a former craftsman turned adventurer?

“If that’s what you want, you’re fully welcome,” Vivi said.

After confirming with Mae, who seemed a bit shocked at the development, Rafael finished filling out the form, then handed the clipboard to her. After a short hesitation, she signed it. The process repeated for Vivi, who also hesitated, though for a different reason. She’d never signed something as Vivisari. Nonsensically, she wondered whether the anti-forgery enchantment would flare up. Would her handwriting validate as the Sorceress’s?

Whatever the case was, the system recognized her signature as valid, because the quest lying on Rafael’s desk ignited in golden fire. Heat and brilliant light filled the room, and when the paper had reduced to nothingness, it left neither ashes nor scorch marks behind.

“I take it that means the quest is complete,” Rafael commented with a raised eyebrow. He flipped through pages on the guild charter. “Vanguard is, indeed, a tier-one guild now. The craftsmen quarters should be accessible, and the vault—or a portion of it?—as well.”

“My lab,” Mae gasped. “My lab is back?”

She rushed out the door before anyone could get a word in, and Jasper groaned and strode out after her. “An alchemy lab versus a level-two-thousand unbound artifact from a dead Cataclysm, and she goes for the lab. Alchemists.”

Vivi and Rafael followed. She found the craftsmen quarters through a hallway connected to the common room. Walking in, she was met with a familiar sight: a sterile laboratory filled with shining metal tools, devices, and equipment, of which Vivi would struggle to conjure a quarter of the names for.

Amusedly watching the golden-haired elf slip here and there, fawning over glassware and gasping at every drawer of alchemical reagents preserved over the century, Vivi found her thoughts drifting to the crafting situation.

In Seven Cataclysms, craftsmen helped automate processes and boost the final result. Crafting had been heavily gamified, because while complex crafting systems might appeal to some people, most regulars of an action-VRMMO wanted to tap through a screen, spend their resources, and get back to the real game. Certainly, most didn’t want to go through the rigmarole involved with a crafting system that even approached realism.

Like many aspects of this world, that gamified structure had translated into something better suited to real life. Crafting wasn’t as simple as clicking through screens and watching materials in her inventory disappear. Mastery in alchemy, or blacksmithing, or any other skill, required years or decades of apprenticeship and study.

The system had changed more fundamentally, too. Or so she surmised; this was just what she had put together using common sense, poking through the crafting screen, seeing her ranks, and cataloging what skills she had access to.

Each crafting discipline had two sub-ranks: ‘main’ and ‘collaborative,’ going from zero to ninety-nine. A real alchemist like Mae had ranks in the main discipline. Adventurers typically ranked up collaborative crafting, mostly through supplying reagents or acting as an assistant to various tasks.

Vivi was low-rank in almost all of the main crafting skills. Only enchanting had kept its maximum level of ninety-nine. The rest had been pushed down into the single digits, because Vivisari clearly hadn’t done much solo crafting throughout her years.

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That said, every skill had collaborative ranks in the nineties, no doubt from the sheer amount of resources and joint-crafting she’d done with some of the best crafters in the world. She suspected a clean sweep of 90s was still utterly ludicrous, even if a collaborative rank meant she couldn’t work solo.

She still had a lot to learn about the exact details of the system. Even the obvious parts she might have intuited incorrectly. With Mae’s return, she would be able to confirm her theories soon.

Mae’s enthusiasm for her long-lost lab eventually ebbed enough for her to realize that three people were watching her joyfully scurry around. She froze, her cheeks colored, and she hurried over.

“S-so. We should probably go check the vault first. I can mess with my equipment later.”

Jasper paused, a smirk alighting on his lips, and he opened his mouth to say something. Mae’s hand shot to the potion bandolier on her hip. She gave him a look that promised in no uncertain terms a fate worse than death. His mouth reluctantly shut.

Vivi realized, after a moment, that an innuendo about ‘messing with her equipment’ had most definitely been inbound. She briefly considered setting him on fire, but instead shook her head and walked out of the lab.

Through the common room and down into the cellar, she studied the vault door. A regular tier zero guild—as Vanguard had reverted to—shouldn’t have had a vault at all. When she’d tried to access it yesterday, the door handle had refused to budge.

This time, the door swung open. Revealing the vault storing all the treasures pilfered by the strongest adventuring party in history.

A large blocky room met her, well-lit with bright silver walls. Shelves, boxes, cabinets, stands, and a dozen other containers packed the spacious interior. There was almost too much to pay attention to; the clutter overwhelmed her, her eyes flicking all around trying to identify each marvelous object on display.

A theme she identified, rather quickly, to her interest and mild disappointment, was that there were no artifacts or gear. Nor consumables. Midnight black pelts hung draped over poles; a massive golden scale leaned against a wall; jars of blue-and-green fluid shimmered on a shelf. But they were all crafting materials, and only those. The first-tier restoration quest had returned Vanguard’s vault, but not everything inside, as she’d first assumed. Merely a category of those treasures.

A door on the opposite wall told her that future quests—the future stages of Vanguard’s restoration—would likely reward them with deeper access into the vault. To the truly valuable items.

Not that what she saw now wasn’t valuable. Undoubtedly, the contents of this room rivaled the net worth of a small kingdom. There were materials here, Vivi figured, that were quite literally priceless. With no others of their kind to be found in the world. At least among mortals, only the Party of Heroes had been capable of, in quantity, harvesting dragon scales, jarring phoenix ashes, or plucking out kraken teeth.

There was one exception to the crafting materials, and it lay atop a pedestal situated ahead of the door leading deeper into the vault.