Saintess Summons Skeletons

“Any suggestions for which enchantments to pick?” Sofia asked.

“You’re funny. Asking a tool for suggestions, tehehe. I can help when you know what you want to do but… I don’t have an arm so I have no clue what you would want to do with it!”

“Can it be given interesting effects outside of the enhancement enchantments?”

“Of course! With that much space… It wouldn’t be too little even if you wanted to turn your arm into an engraver!”

“...”

“Well, huh, don’t look at me like that! Jin never enchanted his arms, I don’t know what you want! I- I can draw flowers on it if you’d like.”

“No thank you. I do have a few ideas for things to do, but I lack the enchanting experience to know if it’s doable or how much space it would take.”

“Oooh! I’m listening!”

Sofia placed Delicate on the bed and started to explain, “Alright, so… My first idea was: to just carve it full of mana storage units. I’m always starving for more mana, so if I could have it passively absorb ambient mana and store it for me to use for whatever later, it would be really nice.”

“Hmmm… But you already have a lot of mana…”

“It’s just never enough,” Sofia said with a shrug.

“I don’t… Hmmm… Eeeeeeh… This… A static storage is bad, no matter how big you would outgrow it in a filter or two at most… You would need a mana amplificator rather than a battery, so it can scale your mana heart’s total capacity, but… With only this much blueprint space, and it being located on your arm… You can maybe get a five to ten percent increase?”

“Five to ten? Honestly that’s pretty good. In that case it would work like my earring and augment the regeneration as well, right?“

“Uuuuuh. Yes, I think so,” Delicate answered, slightly hesitant.

“I’d be satisfied with this if you can make it work.”

“Eeeeeeeh… It feels like a waste. Such an opportunity, just for more mana…”

“Alright, let me tell you about my other ideas, then. What about this: Spell storage. I know pre-loading a spell into an item is a thing, if I could use this arm to keep a channeled spell ready to trigger at any time, that’s as good as having that much more mana for a fight and I get an instant spell. I know that normally that heavily damages the item, but it’s my arm, it’ll just heal back up in no time. Opinion?”

“That… It could work? I’m not sure… even if it works there’s a good chance the trigger backlash could rip your arm right off… What kind of spell are you thinking of storing?”

“The violently exploding, mana-intensive kind, if possible.”

“Uuuuuh… That makes things a lot more complicated…”

“It does?”

“Of course! Do you think this kind of volatile energy is easy to contain? Stored spells are usually for utility not exploding! And we need to add safety enchantments too, then, because imagine if it triggers when you don’t want it to! And anti-leaking barriers, or the channeled spell would just unwind and burst! And- and–”

Sofia picked up the engraver, causing a yelp, and bringing it close to her face. “What I’m hearing is that it’s not impossible.”

“I- We can try but- but I’m not promising anything!”

“Good enough, want to hear my other ideas first, though?”

“There’s more?!”

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“Of course, I’ve been thinking hard about it. This arm cost me a whopping hundred million gold coins, you know? Next in line, this one I don’t even have a basis for, but I thought I could use this space as protection for my physical blueprint somehow. Surely countermeasures like that must exist since erasure attacks do, right? I really cannot afford to suffer the same kind of injury a second time, but if the arm could protect me, then…”

“Well… Maybe it could be possible but it’s not something that I have much knowledge of at all, sorry…” Delicate apologized, “But I do think it’s a good idea!”

“Right? I could always just try finding an item that does that otherwise, but I have a feeling if it exists it won’t be cheap. I should probably ask Leverle while he’s still here, actually… Uh, anyway, the next one is a bit out there, even more than the previous one. I was thinking, since I have missing pieces for two different item sets at the moment, and that number might go up in the future, maybe the arm could function as some kind of item set mimic? Like it doesn’t do anything by itself, but counts as part of any set I want to activate the set effects? It’s a bit of a narrow-use function but it would be quite nice to have. If that’s even possible.”

“That, uh… I– If it was an external item I cannot imagine that working but since it is a part of your body, as long as the blueprint can adapt… Set effects are just a complementary resonance of the items’ enchantments,” Delicate started to explain, “Do you mind if I get a bit technical?”

“Please do, I’ve been curious about this for a while but information on item sets is very hard to come by.”

“Understandable, well, stop me if you cannot understand something. So, for item sets, if you are missing a piece, then you need to work out what the missing part was and recreate it, no shortcut possible. In physical terms, that just means recreating the item, or at least the resonating portion. It’s basically impossible guesswork, even knowing what the original item’s effects were, unless you have the exact enchantments used, you would still need to craft thousands if not millions of prototypes just to get the enchantments just right to where it works with the rest of the set. Do you follow?”

“So far, yes.”

“Hmmm. So to say it plainly, normally recreating a missing part of a set is basically impossible. But, since it’s your arm… The enchantments don’t have to be exactly definitive… It would need to be a new type of enchantment-iterating enchantment, it would shift your mana pathways directly, trying all the possibilities until it finds the correct pattern for set resonance. Finding the right one might take a while, but then you don’t need to do anything, your arm could passively try combination after combination by itself!”

“So it’s not something that you would know how to do at the moment?”

“No. But… I could try!”

“How long would you need?”

“How much free time do you have?” Delicate answered with another question.

“Now not much, but I guess I can find about a year to work on this on and off when I’m done with the other things, maybe six to ten hours a day?”

“Then never mind… A project like this, even if you were an experienced enchanter too, it’s too complex, it might take us a decade…” Delicate said, sounding genuinely disheartened.

“Yeah. I might have just gotten the two missing set items I need by then, honestly.”

“Well… If you lose another arm in the future…”

“... I would rather not, thanks.”

Delicate fell silent for a bit after that, Sofia stared at the immobile engraving pen, until it shivered under her gaze.

“Did- Did you not have more ideas?”

“Well, I did, but now I’m almost scared to disappoint you.”

“No need to worry about me… I’m just… A bit too enthusiastic when it comes to my hobbies…”

“Alright then. The next idea was just to try to copy the effects of Pestle’s body-enhancement skills. They’re powerful, look relatively flat enough that they might fit on a two-dimensional enchantment with some adjustments, and already power themselves using ambient mana directly. They’re almost begging to become enchantments, from what I’ve seen. The only issue is I don’t understand the slightest thing about fairy magic, and Pestle really isn’t a good teacher. So the best I can do at the moment is blindly copy the spell patterns.”

“Maybe…”

Sofia continued to pitch crazy ideas to Delicate for several hours.

Later the same night, Sofia was out to buy a snack before getting to work on her palace, when she stopped in front of a newly opened shop.

Champion’s charms and crests? Charms?

Wait… I did approve several shops from the Arege union…

One look at the finely painted letters above the storefront and one could tell that the paint was still fresh. The showcase displays behind the windows were still empty, but an ‘open for business’ sign hung from the door.

Sofia could tell that there was someone inside, too curious to pass the opportunity, she entered the shop.

The person inside, who could best be described as a huge ball of white wool with two short legs and four barely visible shining orange eyes, immediately turned and lightly bowed toward Sofia.

“Welcome to our first customer! We only sell the best quality items shipped straight from the union! Please feel free to have a look around.”