Then, something did.
A faint pressure brushed against her awareness, like someone had opened a window in a stuffy room. The channels etched in the metal around her pulsed once, twice, then settled into a slow, steady rhythm.
Outside of her awareness, someone had activated the device and put a couple points of mana into her system. .
Input: 1 mana/s
Stored Charge: 2 / 100
Just as soon as it had begun, the input was cut off.
Luna focused on the inputted mana. It felt weird. She hadn’t ever had direct access to mana that wasn’t hers before. It was much different than when George would use one of her spears. This mana felt like it was owed to her. She could feel the skills of her new Concentrator class itching to do their work on the stored mana. Of course, she was so far away from being able to condense the mana without more input…
Speaking of which, it had been more than 100 seconds since she had been released from the net drain effect.
Mana: 10/10
Luna proceeded to blow her entire mana pool directly into her concentrator and, to her pleasant surprise…
Stored Charge: 12 / 100
“Ohhhhh yeahhhhh.”
Luna could feel the difference in mana between the unknown source of mana and her own, her Luna juice mixing in and overpowering the process of forming an iron coin.
Luna worked her way quickly to 100/100 charges, as it only took 1,000 seconds, or 16 ? minutes, for her to bank the full 100 mana necessary to create an iron coin. She didn’t have anything else to really do at the moment, as it seemed like her container had been forgotten about she no longer felt like she was moving. Probably placed somewhere on a rack in the warehouse to be later shipped and sold…
This must be what my late night online shopping buys felt like.
“Aaaannndd show me the moneeyyyyy.” Luna felt the Concentrator skill activate.
1 iron mana coin created.
“Where one iron created at though?!”
Luna could only groan as she once again tried to trace the lines of magical runes up and through the fancy gumball machine. All the lines came to a head at a small point that no doubt led to the gumball chute and flap that the coins had come out of when she was playing with Beme and Sidd’s concentrator as a bunny.
“I guess that was to be expected,” Luna assented. “Just gotta figure out how to intercept it somehow…”
Luna about went crazy trying to find out some way to kink the hose of rune lines while still allowing the machine to work and spit out a coin on her side before realizing that she had wasted so much time and many iron coins on her experimentation. Whoever bought her would surely find a bonus pile of coins in the coin chute.
Luna kicked herself when she re read over her abilities.
Class: Concentrator
Abilities:
Draw (Passive) — draw mana from a source into yourself.
Output (Passive) — use mana to produce concentrated mana coins.
It didn’t say anything about needing no damn concentrator device… She was her own concentrator….
Instead of putting her mana into the device, she willed the ability to proc on her full mana pool of 10.
*1 stone mana coin created
Cost: 10 mana per 1 stone mana coin. (1 stone = 1 mana)
She had successfully created a coin worth less than the smallest coin she had previously ever seen or heard of. Hell yeah. Best yet, the coin appeared directly in front of her in her chamber.
Looking at the coin through the lens of her Concentrator class, Luna could see some options.
Stone Mana Coin
- Consume to regain 1 mana.
- Combine 10 stone into 1 iron.
- Consume for 1 xp towards Concentrator class.
“Ooooh, there’s my ticket out of here. Fuel this engine one 1 xp at a time.”
Luna promptly popped the coin into her classhole and continued her hard work with brightened horizons.
*Stone mana coin consumed.
+1 class xp (Concentrator).
Concentrator Lv. 1
XP: 1 / 100
“Hell yeah,” Luna thought. “Gotta start somewhere.”
She waited for her mana regen to tick back up, 0.1 mana at a time. Slow, but it was progress. After a hundred seconds, she had a full pool again.
Then right back to 0/10.
*Stone mana coin consumed.
+1 class xp (Concentrator).
Concentrator Lv. 1
XP: 2 / 100
This was going to take a while…
She got into a rhythm. Regenerate 10 mana. Create stone coin. Eat coin. +1 xp every ~100 seconds. Incremental games were the best games in the world after all.
Exactly 24 coins and xp in, something jostled her container.
Luna could feel the vibrations from an external tap on the housing, then a familiar presence on the mana intake lines. The device she was embedded in pulled mana from the new source. This time, a much thicker stream of mana was provided compared to the previous mana donation.
External Input: 5 mana/s
Stored Charge (Device): 5 / 100
“Oh, someone’s getting serious,” Luna realized, pausing her stone making. “I guess I should be a good little appliance.”
She watched the flow of mana carefully as it ticked up, quickly hitting the necessary 100/100 resulting in the production of an iron coin. She felt that if she really wanted to, she could redirect the incoming mana into her own pool and make coins for herself to fuel her xp gain, but then what would happen to her? Would whoever’s using her get mad and retaliate against the machine that took their mana for nothing?
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.
If she diverted external mana to herself, the device would underperform. That could mean recalibration. Or scrapping. Or some “this one’s defective, toss it in the incinerator” situation. She would have to play it cool for a bit until she got cool new upgrades, because of course she would surely get cool new upgrades.
She checked and made sure everything went off correctly, fully independent of her stone coin creation. Through as much scrutiny as Luna could muster, the passive ability of her Concentrator class that the device was borrowing from her seemed to go off without any problems. The user would be able to produce coins like normal and would find a perfectly acceptable iron coin in the chute… or a handful. That’s probably not going to be a problem, right?
Back to work.
…
Finding a concentrator that was overperforming felt like divine intervention.
It had been unnoticed at first. He’d run the standard line test, just make sure the concentrator could hold a single mana. Phase 2 testing came later on that night which entailed running the full 100 mana cycle at 5 mana per second. Emil heard the clink of an iron coin being produced, but it didn’t hit the bottom of the metal chute directly… it landed too softly, running into what sounded like a small pile of metal. Sure enough, when he checked the chute, that’s exactly what he had found. A small pile of iron coins. Finding this, Emil did what any responsible tester would do.
He slapped a DEFECTIVE tag on it, logged it in the system…
…and then quietly moved it to a side bay before writing up a payroll deduction for one iron grade concentrator, employee discount applied of course.
All perfectly allowed. Aside from the not reporting that the machine was apparently printing coins autonomously. Ah well, perks of the trade. Butchers skim bones, bakers skim buns, concentrator techs skim quirky machines that just so happen to have the potential to make them rich.
At the end of his late night shift, Emil collected the squirreled away machine and got outta there. By the time he got home, a small one room flat over a tavern that smelled perpetually like onions and ale, he was buzzing.
“Okay, little guy,” Emil muttered, hefting the round metal housing up onto his only table. “You, me, and a better tomorrow that does not involve Dad sighing at me every time he sits me down to talk about my future.”
He ran his hand over the rune inscribed surface. No visible tampering. Factory markings all standard. Seals intact. This thing shouldn’t be behaving any differently than the others.
Emil had a full mana pool and was itching to get to experimenting.
…
Inside her metal prison, Luna felt it immediately.
This wasn’t the short, clinical pulse of a factory test. This was a steady, personal feeding of mana. The mana carried flavor, a dense earthy flavor. Like wet soil after rain with a hint of static anxiety.
“Oh,” Luna thought, perking up. “You could be an interesting one.”
Her Concentrator class twitched to attention, funneling the external mana into the device’s storage. She let it. She had a reputation to maintain as a boring piece of equipment.
But the line between her and the external source was thick. Absolutely saturated with personal magic.
And she had Telepathy.
She pushed, very gently, along the mana circuit.
Not into his body, that felt wrong, like attempting to push through a locked door, but into the node of magic where his hand met the device. A kind of magical handshake. There, his spellwork brushed against her class, and through that shared channel, she finally heard something that wasn’t her own thoughts.
“…Please work, please work, please just be a little weird and not broken, I cannot handle another lecture…”
“Oh my god, are you alright dude?,” Luna blurted out concerned over the man’s frantic thoughts.
Emil froze.
He scanned his eyes around his tiny room. Bed, table, chipped mug that he couldn’t throw away, night wear laid out neatly on the bed, one concentrator.
He yanked his hand back.
The mana line went slack.
Inside the housing, Luna’s connection dimmed, but didn’t fully vanish. There was still a thin trickle, like residual warmth after touching something hot.
“…hello?” Emil ventured out loud, very quietly, as if worried someone might overhear him talking to his furniture.
Luna couldn’t hear his voice, but the question rode along the little flecks of mana he could not help but leak when he focused on something magical. Intent turned into current. Current turned into context.
“Hey buddy, don’t freak out,” Luna answered as reassuringly as she could through the connection.
Emil stared in the direction that he felt the mental words coming from… right at the coin printing device.
“Don’t freak out it says,” Emil thought. “The mana concentrator is consoling me.”
Luna rolled her metaphorical eyes.
“Yeah, it’s called being nice,” she answered telepathically.
“Okay,” he conceded, voice trembling between awe and terror. “Okay. You are not supposed to be… like this.”
“Yeah, trust me, I was a six foot-tall stunningly beautiful Angelkin with massive muscles and a sword before I got trapped in here,” Luna said spinning a convincing tale. “Can you let me out? I’ll vanquish your foes for you if you do.”
Emil swallowed. “Really?”
“Of course not,” Luna responded. “I’m Luna, a Nothing. A cool Nothing, but still a Nothing. The offer to vanquish your foes in exchange for freedom still stands though.”
“Emil Braxtown,” he said. “Provisional Earth Mage. Former municipal infrastructure contractor. Current… product safety tester.”
“Damn, got laid off because of the economy or something? Office politics? Can’t keep it up? It being buildings, of course,” Luna asked.
“Something like that,” Emil agreed with a tinge of sadness.
“Well, Emil,” Luna said. “Congrats. You just bought the only concentrator in town that can help you workshop your professional comeback.”
He let out a shaky laugh.
“This is illegal,” he muttered. “This has to be illegal. Nothings with classes are supposed to be factory wiped before integration. You should be… you shouldn’t…”
“Yeah, well,” Luna said. “The lady with the soul scan labeled me as having‘sapience: insufficient for personhood,’ then bought me to stuff me into an appliance. All of which seemed legal so I’m not super concerned with legality at the moment.
Emil went quiet for a long moment before his hand gingerly back on Luna’s housing.
“You remember the intake?” he asked finally. “The warehouse?”
“I remember some country bumpkin Nothing hunter lookin’ guys netting me out of a perfectly nice hill, selling me to some warehouse lady, dropping me in a hopper, then locking me in this thing. It all went kinda fast, but yeah, I remember.
Emil winced.
“That’s… yeah, that's the process,” he admitted. “It’s probably not very pleasant but it’s not supposed to hurt… rather, you’re not supposed to be able to feel pain.”
“I wouldn’t say I felt any pain” Luna clarified “However, I am an injured party entitled to compensation so if you could get on that after freeing me?”
He blew out a breath and let out a mental sigh. “You would be killed immediately, I along with you if we even got that far.”
“What do you mean by that?” Luna asked, a chill going down her non spine.
“Concentrator Nothings are able to latch onto any source of power if they are not properly contained. They could power level uncontrollably if they found the right sources or right conditions. With no purposeful thoughts, the random upgrades that they would acquire could result in a volcano’s worth of destruction, the entire sequence of events occurring within a day.
Luna sat with that information for a while, trying to think of alternatives. Thankfully she didn't have to as Emil continued.
“But… we could get you into something portable,” Emil continued. “Though the cost is quite high.”
“How much we talkin’?” Luna asked, sending a mental image of her quirking an eyebrow.
“Well, since concentrators and especially portable concentrators are licensed as high risk devices, you need Guild approval and a certified shop to even touch the casings or you get a visit from enforcement…”
“Oh, so it’s like trying to build a house but you need a permit to dig, and a permit for water, and a permit for the protection of the endangered yellow polka spotted owl that was sighted in the area 30 years ago.”
“I’m going to agree with you based on the sentiment,” Emil agreed.
“Permitting is doubly expensive for people not in good standing with the Guild, sooo 20 silver for the permit and likely 50 silver for an iron level travel concentrator. We would have to start at iron level too, first because higher levels are exponentially expensive, and second, we really shouldn’t upgrade this concentrator more than we have to since it gets harder to work with the higher the level. Finding specialized craftspeople only gets more difficult and more expensive with level. All in all, for the permit, iron level concentrator, and paying the craftsperson to do the upgrade we are looking at close to 90 to 100 silver.”
“Nice…” Luna said taking in Emil’s money rant while crunching the math down. “100k iron?!”
“Yeah,” Emil said, scratching the back of his head. “It’s going to be pricey and I’m pretty much broke after expenses with my current rent and my recent uh… purchase from the company store.”
“Eh, broke we can fix” Luna said schemingly. “Just sounds like we need to get to pumpin’ out these coins.”