Crafting the Coat of Many Colors requires seven moleskins, one for every color of the rainbow. That’s right—seven monster hides, for one coat! Roy G. Biv, my ass! It’s six colors, Newton, six! Screw you and your indigo! Screw armor crafting! I swear, if Ari didn’t tell me that at level 6 I get to choose between making light or heavy armors—wait. That guy, he wasn’t messing with me again, was he? So help me if I find out I can’t make better armors after this and he left me down here, chasing rainbow moles for no reason...
I don’t know how much time I spend aggroing these little buggers. In the midst of my hunt I pull a ton of other monsters as well, some stronger and scarier than others, though none as scary as the minotaur. I haven’t seen that guy since Tina forced my last log out, and that’s perfectly fine by me. If I never see another minotaur down here again, it’ll be too soon.
Days pass, I think. It’s really difficult to say how long I’ve been stuck down here. I seem to be leveling up here and there. My skills are improving too, a little at a time.
I’m killing so many monsters my inventory is starting to fill up again. In Alucinor I bought the recipe for the bigger travel pack and even learned tailoring over jewelcrafting so I could make it, but I lacked the materials I needed to craft it. Normally I’d be getting concerned right about now as my pack reaches its maximum holding capacity, but this time I have my secret weapon.
This charm Ari gave me had better work!
[Merchant summoning stone
Summons Yock the goblin Merchant. Only works in tunnels of the Highline mountains.]
So that’s the name of the world above. I feel more than a little resentful when I think of all the interesting quests and beautiful mountain scenery I’m missing while I’m stuck in the dark, ugly caves, grinding endless mobs with no storyline to stimulate my imagination. By the time I’m strong enough to get out of here I’ll have already leveled out of this entire area. I’ll have missed everything! Darn you, Ari!!
But I’m getting sidetracked. How do I use summoning thingy, anyway? I check the hotdog menu for instructions.
[To summon Yock, clutch the token to your breast—
My what now?
—and recite the magic incantation. “I wish, I wish, with all my heart—
Oh hell no!
I squeeze the token and grit my teeth together.
“Yock, you bastard, you’d better come out if you know what’s good for you!”
A faint light glows in the center of the token, and suddenly before me the goblin appears with his little cart of goods.
[That works too.]
“Damn right it does...”
I unload my gear and Yock pays me the standard price. I also buy the materials I’ll need to make a new pack, and 104 Coats of Many Colors. I can only make as many as my lowest stack of colored moleskin, which is yellow at 104. A shame since I have so much more of every other color, up to 162 of the indigo. F*cking indigo.
Since crafted items don’t stack, I take a seat beside Yock’s cart and go to work, crafting the dream coats. It’s slow work, each complex rainbow coat taking eighty seconds to craft. Physically, I don’t have to do anything, just sit here and watch the item ‘cook’ in front of me in a bright white light. But that’s over two hours of just sitting here, crafting.
To pass the time, I scroll through the TC forums, looking up info on the area I’m missing. From reading different posts, I can more or less piece together the story of a simple mining town’s struggle with a group of occultists encroaching, threatening to take over their way of life and return the world to its natural state.
As usual with gaming, these storylines that ought to be standard become controversial in the blink of an eye. Of course there’s drama on the internet with environmentalists clashing obnoxiously with the people who just want to enjoy the game without weighing in on the so-called political messaging.
I stop reading the juicy arguments to sell a batch of coats to Yock before my newly expanded inventory can fill up. Then I pull out a cold pork chop and eat it with my bare hands just to have something to do as I continue reading.
“These quests,” I murmur, chewing the tough meat, “what kind of monsters are they fighting up there?”
It seems a common tactic of the occultists is to summon forest spirits to harass the capitalist villagers. Some players are complaining their spells can’t damage them. The spirits are elementals, one clever person explains, and there are different schools of magic. Not all spell types affect elementals.
“My aura wouldn’t affect them either,” I say, reaching for another pork chop, binging them like I would a can of Pringles back home.
Here, another quest; more of the miner’s automatons like they have below the mountain. They get possessed by the occultists and the player has to fight them. Another mob my aura doesn’t work on.
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And look at this. A quest in the forest, a village burned by the occultists, haunted by vengeful spirits. The player must mitigate their suffering and help them achieve eternal rest, but before you can purify the ground, they attack you. Particularly powerful mobs, many players are complaining of dying to these ghosts multiple times.
Undead. My third weakness.
A coincidence? It has to be. And yet...
Ari. Why did he throw me down here, really? For his own amusement, just to watch me suffer? Or did he do it knowing how much I was bound to struggle in area three? Knowing I might have become frustrated by my aura’s inefficiency and given up on the build, dual classing Revelator into something that could damage those guys, a temporary fix that would sacrifice my vision of a purely aura damage character just to beat a handful of pesky mobs...
That guy. Am I giving him too much credit? Or do I owe him an apology after all?
Munch munch...
[Armor Crafting skill has evolved.]
Already?! But I still have 33 yellows... oh well! I’ll never deal with that stuff again! Bye bye, rainbow moleskins!
Selling them at 12 coppers a skin, I get a tidy sum from Yock.
[32sp, 50cp]
Nice. Now, on to more important things.
[Choose your armor crafting specialty. Would you like to specialize in Light Armor or Heavy Armor?]
“Heavy armor.”
[Blacksmithing level 6, you can craft heavy armor out of metal ingots.
Recipes known:
Iron Helmet
Iron Breastplate
Iron Belt
Iron Fighting Trousers
Iron Boots
Iron Gauntlets]
Yes! I’m finally getting out of this area one armor! At last!!
But first—
Forging requires a few elements. Hammer, anvil, and fire. I purchase the first two and build the third. Not a proper forge, but it’s enough for the game.
While I farmed the moles I ran across a few veins of ore, but not a whole lot. I guess first I should smelt it into iron bars. This process is relatively fast and leaves me with 12 iron ingots.
Now then. What shall I make first? I check the pieces one by one. The Iron Breastplate gives me the most armor, but it also costs the most materials to make.
After careful study and consideration, I determine I can either make three or four pieces of new armor with the ingots I currently have. The problem is, my current armor, the completed Battleworn Chieftain set, gives certain bonuses that I’ll have to sacrifice, depending on how much of it I take off.
If I make the iron trousers, gauntlets and helmet, I’ll be preserving more of the Battleworn set. Even though I’d be losing most of the benefits, I’ll still keep +2 to Constitution and +1 to Strength.
If I make the helmet, boots, gauntlets and belt, it will give me almost forty more armor, but I lose out on the Battleworn set bonus, preserving only +1 to Constitution.
Hm. A real conundrum.
I sit there for a while, weighing my options. I eat a few more pork chops, enjoying the taste without feeling anything resembling indigestion or even fullness. I guess that’s one benefit to satisfying one’s cravings inside the capsule. Zero consequences, except perhaps for the bad habits we pick up...
I don’t need Strength, I decide abruptly, tossing a half eaten pork chop back in my pack. And I think thirty-eight more armor will do more for me than a single point of Constitution that gives ten HP. Then, the answer’s simple; my mind’s made up.
[Iron Helmet level 20, a novice blacksmith’s head guard forged from basic materials.
Armor: 126]
[Iron Boots level 20, a novice blacksmith’s sabatons forged from basic materials.
Armor: 117]
[Iron Gauntlets level 20, a novice blacksmith’s arm guards forged from basic materials.
Armor: 105]
[Iron Belt level 20, a novice blacksmith’s belt forged from basic materials.
Armor: 94]
As for the crafting materials, all these need are iron ingots and—leather strips? Wait, I still needed leather? Well, I suppose that does make sense. But I just sold all my leather to Yock.
“Hey, Yock, remember those rainbow hides I just sold you?”
“%&^, ^%#^? &?*?^% !#~?”
I imagine that translates to “Yeah, f*cker, what about it?”
“I’m going to need like…ten of those back. Any way you’ll give me the same price you paid for them?”
“Hihihihihi.”
That, I understood well enough.
Sigh.
Observing the goblin’s leather wears, I realize I have one huge problem. All of these are colored leather!
This is definitely going to show, right? I’m going to look like a fruitcake, running around in iron armor with brightly colored leather straps! Ugh. Whatever. Just pick the most neutral looking color. Green? No, this is definitely the kind of green that stands out. I know my family’s Irish, but I don’t need to look like St. Patrick…
Let’s see, the iron is dark, then next to that, the darkest, subtlest color is…
F*cking indigo… I might have known.
“Alright. Give me ten of your indigo leather.”
“!#@*?&.”
“Twenty-nine coppers a moleskin?! I sold them to you for twelve a piece!”
“^∑β*&%$#.”
“You must be insane to think I’d pay that much for my own loot!”
“@#!π$*****.”
“What’d you call my mom?!”
This goes on for some time. In the end I manage to talk Yock down to twenty-four coppers a skin, but no less. Also, somewhere along the line, I think I started to understand goblin speak a little bit. Or at least to imagine I did. This dungeon does things to a guy…
Sitting back down, first I turn the indigo hide into indigo leather strips. Then, having all the components, I start to craft my new armor. Each piece takes three minutes to create, so I eat another pork chop and browse the forums some more. Then, when the new pieces are complete, I equip them.
I can’t tell what I look like, probably a bit goofy with two half sets, but that doesn’t matter to me so much as the boost this gives me in armor.
With a sense of immense satisfaction, I pull up my character profile for the first time in two or three days.
[Character name: Revelator
Level: 15
Race: Human
Class: Defender
Subclass: None
HP: 845
Constitution: 43
Strength: 6
Agility: 20
Intelligence: 2
Luck: 1
Skills: Aggrovating Aura (3), Baba’s Vanishing Haze Aura (4), Blacksmithing (6), Cooking (5), Greater Shield Proficiency (7), Improved Block (7), Interceptor, Mining (2), Noxious Spores (9), Shieldsmith (8), Tailoring (1)
(total armor 567)]
My armor has gone up by over 60%. Other than my crafting, I’ve leveled up several skills, Aggro Aura, Baba’s Vanishing Haze, Greater Shield Proficiency and Shieldsmith—this should help with survivability. More importantly, Noxious Spores has reached level 9! What was it Ari said? Only two more levels and I’ll be able to get out of here!
I’m excited, but also just a tad demoralized at the same time. I’ve already been here for so long, and two skill levels may not sound like much, but they won’t come to me overnight. I’ll have to keep running these tunnels, aggroing monsters, killing them on autopilot the same way I’ve been doing since I first got trapped down here, who knows how many days ago?
Argh!
This dungeon is taking FOREVER!!!
