Henrietta's arrival drastically changed how well he and Alyssa were doing, and Oliver was loosely in awe of his superior as she shook the ground once again.
It wasn't like he'd never seen the work of Expedition veterans before, but he'd also been told that Henrietta's inklings were on the lower end of power as far as those things went. And yet, at level 0, the strength of her magic was on par with that of an Execution-type class ten or twenty levels above her.
In the coils of her reclaimed flail, Henrietta easily held aloft a quite substantial tree trunk as though it was weightless, having already torn off many of its upper branches and forming it into a jagged wooden spear. Then, in the pursuit of creating an exterior wall enclosing one of the open sides of the Shelter's archway, she simply... slammed the point repeatedly into the ground until the soil gave way.
She was already most of the way through, and though surely every bird in the jungle had been scared away by the sound, she didn't even look winded.
"Can they do anything beyond base physicality?" he asked once Henrietta seemed content with the latest tree's position.
"Not these. It's a bit more involved to subsume immaterial properties, that I didn't bother with because I don't have any of the materials needed to bring them to life," she directed her flail to adjust the way one of the tree's branches laid against its neighbor. "And I dread to think of how much space that kind of detail would take up in my sketchbook. It's so small."
That was the other thing that he'd learned! Not only did she already have the equivalent of a quite robust and high-level skill that was always on-class and didn't even take up a skill slot, this was how she was when weakened. What it would be like after she leveled and could put some free points into Capacity, he didn't even know.
Seemingly satisfied with how the whole thing looked, the modified tongue uncoiled from the tree it had planted into the ground, then snaked back to wrap around Henrietta's arm while she went off to find the next tree they'd need.
As their squad leader returned to the woodland, Oliver and Alyssa scrambled over the newly-installed tree, breaking poorly-angled branches off with stone 'hatchets' and weaving them into the primary wall. So far, they had seven decently-straight tree trunks lodged into the ground at an angle, with the branches of those trees entwined to create a sort of fence-like structure. That fence was then filled in with more branches to create a mostly-solid wall, and would be even further reinforced over time.
The end goal, which would still require another tree or two to complete, was going to be an essentially solid lean-to wall against one side of the archway with only a single person-sized hole to allow passage on the end furthest from the cliff face itself.
The side facing their pond would remain open for the time being, so it would remain almost unbearably bright inside at pretty much all times, but even a single wall should substantially reduce the amount of wind that blew through it in addition to the general protection it would provide against the wild and its creatures.
Oliver was also hopeful that in conjunction with the First Flame still burning inside, still outputting a thin but steady stream of Technology mana, he could actually build up the Shelter into a proper bastion of civilization and progress. He might need Henrietta's help, given she had an enchanting-adjacent skill in [Refined Calligraphy], but he needed, just needed somewhere to shelter from the raw and painful exposure to Nature he'd been enduring so far.
It wasn't just that his Class was Technology-based. The chaos of the wilds, the turbulence of the Tapestry as countless individual forces all vied for prominence was something that he'd never truly been comfortable with. Some people called the extreme variation in magic it could produce as 'liberating,' but Oliver had always felt those people just weren't good at casting to begin with and liked it when things just so happened to work out for them.
Enchanting wasn't like that. If storms were to happen, they ought to be in bottles, and if blood was to be spilled it should be at the center of a runic circle.
"Watch your head," Alyssa called out, and Oliver ducked as completely as he could, dropping off the lean-to and to the ground below. Where he'd been a moment before, a sizable branch flew through the air to land near the top of the trees. Alyssa followed it a moment later, her arm bound in a bandage of ink, and she set to affixing the leafy branch in place.
Henrietta returned about half an hour later, another fairly straight tree trailing behind her, some broken-off roots still attached, and she set it down to begin methodically shearing off the extraneous tree limbs and forming the top into a sharpened point.
It was going to be so great when they figured out what kind of magic this new world came with. Unless that also went wrong, but he wasn't going to go there. It wasn't productive to think about 'what if the main reason I agreed to this whole thing was actually a lie,' so he focused on other subjects.
I really need to get a scanner set up, he mused. While trying to use [Appraise] normally gave him the same blinding headache that attempting to reference his [Status] did, he could somewhat-obliquely use the skill through his arcanoception and get a sense for the information he wanted. Something to help focus that would be tremendously helpful, and was liable to even help boost his leveling in the skill if he built it right. Though... could his skills level, with his System broken? He'd kind of assumed so, but was that really a safe assumption?
Henrietta finished affixing the final tree into place, and leaned against its trunk to catch her breath. Oliver shot her a thumbs-up and a smile as he tried to ascend it, only to slip after a piece of loose bark detached from the tree as he stepped on it. Instinctively, he dropped his rock and thrust his arms out to catch himself, but all that accomplished was a spike of pain in his sprained wrist as he hit his head and sank to the ground.
"Ow…."
"You should probably sit this out," Alyssa reassured him, "I've got this."
"Thanks," he groaned.
"Ride," Henrietta said.
"Sorry, ma'am."
I really miss [Perceive Emotions], Oliver pouted. It was so frustrating, having something just beyond the grasp of what he could know. The knowledge that there was additional information just sitting there waiting to be gotten drove him mad, and he knew from experience just how important emotional information could be!
Regardless of whatever all that had been about, Alyssa sprang up and down the tree branches with ease, taking her slightly-sharp and comfortably-shaped stones to the branches and turning the wild tangle of wood into a properly woven branch.
His wrist was still sore by the time Alyssa was done, but… he could probably push through it? Maybe? If it really came down to it, he could use his left hand, but that would distinctly undermine the foundations of the wards he was going to use. And yeah, the wards he was going to set were as basic as basic got, but he'd be using even more basic tools, so he couldn't really afford to play fast and loose with basic magical principles.
To set right, fling what's left, he mildly mused. While the basic mnemonic was naturally drastically oversimplified, the core idea of 'offense with the left hand, defense with the right' was still applicable here, and he wished he could heed the truism.
Henrietta's magic was barely healing magic, whereas Clark was their actual specialist. Something like a sprained wrist would be trivial to fix, and as soon as their team was all together, he'd be back to full capacity.
Well. Not full full capacity. But he'd at least be able to make the appropriate hand signs to bend the elements to his will. Force mana was only the first element which physical motions could manipulate, with Sanguine, Life, and Song playing their own respective and obvious parts in moving his body. Rune actually wasn't a part of most hand signs, unless he was casting a spell to create a runic array which would play a part in a subsequent work of magic. Mostly, he manipulated Rune and Name via his speech alongside Sound and of course Song. Song came up so, so much in casting.
Where was he?
Ah yes. Planning out his enchantments.
Normally, when designing a building that he'd be inhabiting, Oliver would be absolutely brimming with ideas and have nowhere near enough room, time, or budget to implement them all. [Scrollcast] was a casting skill that took direct reference from enchantments, so the more powerful and varied the enchantments he had access to, the more his casting could do, and in turn meant he could create stronger enchantments more easily, and...
Well.
Right now, he was just trying to figure out what he could do.
And it was looking pretty sad.
Symbols, the generic term for glyphs and runes, broadly worked by mimicking the interaction a given object had with the Tapestry. A Candleflame glyph would pull and push on mana in a way that could be directly correlated with the flame of an actual candle. Now, most glyphs tended to only act identically to a single type of mana, so he would have to choose whether that Candleflame was irrrikik in Pyric, the most common Elemental Fire runic language, leleshe in Lumic, the primary Elemental Light language, or something else like znefgn or shotisamin. Unlike a real candle flame, it in general couldn't interact with multiple elements simultaneously.
In general. There were always exceptions.
Magic was complicated.
But he couldn't do complicated right now. Hells, he could barely do basic right now. And magic, at its most basic, was about getting the Tapestry to act the way you wanted it to. The better you could pluck the threads of reality, the better you could make it play the exact song you wanted it to right now. And Oliver... could do the equivalent of hitting two rocks together to make a 'clack.'
"I need some runes," Oliver wandered up to Henrietta, who stopped what she was doing and motioned for him to continue, "Wand, Sapling,Leafy tree in summer,Rusting iron, and Oxidized aluminum. All on separate totems."
"Are you looking to weave all those into a spell together? Would that be... thermite related?"
Oliver shook his head, "No. [Scrollcast] can't do compound spells until level fifteen or so, and even that's only combining two. Other than the Wand, I mostly need them for testing purposes."
"Okay. Well, you'll need to give me a minute, and also need to help me with Sapling, but the rest of those are all Parengelic, right?"
Parengelic was the primary runic language for Technology, and the one Oliver had the most experience with by far. He confirmed, and then returned to scoping out their shelter while he waited.
Getting what he needed was pretty easy, in the end. Henrietta's skills weren't limited in the same ways Oliver's were, and while finding something suitable to write the runes on wasn't the easiest, they eventually went with short chunks of branches. They weren't quite wands, but the fact it wasn't a flat surface was easily offset by the fact they were cylindrical. Circular objects of all kinds worked excellently with enchantments.
He placed the six around the First Flame campfire, trying to gauge how exactly they all interacted with the Technology in their surroundings, and formulated a plan.
He wasn't going to be able to accomplish anything more complicated than a basic push or pull of his elements, that much was certain. If he got really fancy, he might be able to treat mana a bit like a fluid, but doing so would be an absolute pain given how radically different each element's mana acted even under normal circumstances when he did so. Air mana was swift and ephemeral, but Storm mana was potent and sudden, building up power until unleashing everything in a devastating single blow. For now... he was just trying to manipulate Technology, which was absolutely the easiest type of mana to manipulate. It was solid and strong, and liked to follow patterns that it was given. He'd just need to get it started, and its own nature would take it the rest of the way.
In the future, once he had better foci, he could probably branch out a bit more. Arcane and Technology would be easy, given he could sense them. Fire and Metal, their tight Associations to his elements, might be in reach. If he worked with his teammates, he could test with the elements their classes were comprised of and accordingly, the elements they produced. Even if he couldn't fully use them as sensory proxies, he could still test basic versions of his enchantments with them... yeah.
So that also opened up Wood, Force, and Air thanks to Alyssa's [Ranger of Far Lands], Shadow, Rune, and Card from Henrietta's [Master Inkscribe], and then... whatever elements Clark and Jacob had. Water was a given, but beyond that he didn't actually know what classes they'd gone with before the Jump. They'd all been wearing divination blockers that had made it nontrivial to [Appraise] them as a basic precaution, after all.
In any case, all he really needed right now was to push and pull enough Technology from their campfire that he could catch it along the edges of their lean-to and turn it into a shielding ward. He didn't think he could do that without seeing the Technology actually acting as it was supposed to while he worked, and that meant he'd need to get the mana flowing in the right direction from the campfire.
That, in turn, meant he'd need to cast a spell to focus the general radiance of the campfire, and to cast a spell he'd need a wand that he could cast with, and to make a wand... well, that's what he had his Wand rune totem for.
He found a good twig that had been cast off from the pruning the three of them had done, one that was straight and sturdy, without too many leaves or knots, and he trimmed it to a more manageable length.
Then, he brought it to the campfire, stripped its bark, held it above the Wand totem, and activated his skills in concert.
[Scrollcast] [Cogniprint]
This twig had its own existence, one unguided by anything save its own whims, and it wasn't happy that Oliver was suddenly coming in and intruding on it. It was perfectly happy being chaotic, being Natural, but that wouldn't be allowed for very long.
"Behold the advance of civilization," Oliver intoned, cupping his bad hand around the wand and gently running his fingers down it. "No more will you stand mighty and tall, for that which you once were has been severed by the might of the [Master Inkscribe]. That which you grew as once is no more, and now if you desire to thrive it must be as one of my branches, the baton by which I pull upon the weave of reality. You shall be my finger, my scribe, and my wand."
It didn't like that. It wanted to be its own master, to be a grand tree scraping the sky one day.
"I offer you such potential now. Should you submit to me, I shall use you as the cornerstone upon all of my advancement, the first stone laid upon which an empire shall be founded. The jungle shall strike your parent, and it shall be your work which causes your parent to overcome the forest itself. Your handiwork will outweigh the might of the trees, and withstand the storms of Nature that may yet come. That solidity shall be your legacy, and in due time you shall know the might of not bending to the whims of the breeze, but of bending the breeze to your whims."
The branch wavered. At risk of anthropomorphizing it, it was fond of the idea that it might be capable of becoming greater than the great sky itself, and before it could properly settle into a new means of objection, Oliver struck at the wavering mana around it with even greater force.
"I name you Seedling," he said, and a symbol of magic matching the reference totem branded itself on the base of the wand. Where it had done so, the bark flaked away, revealing a bit of polished wood underneath, glowing with power, "For you are the start of something great. You are the first being offered a place within the new worldly order, for the time of man has come, and you will aid me in this quest, as I master the winds and empower that which you once called home, forming unto myself shelter and protection. I impress upon you the Order," an iridescent sheen overtook the middle of the wand, and more of the bark flaked off to unveil even more perfectly ordered wood, "and the Mastery for which you shall be my conduit."
Light gleamed from underneath the bark, though it didn't flake off yet.
"So, my Seedling, my wand, behold my magic. Behold our magic. Be ready, to wield the powers of the universe and to transcend your former existence, into a rod of Order, of Technology, of Oliver Smith, the [Erudite Enchanter]."
There was a soft crack, and the bark on top of the wand exploded off in a shower of blue sparks, consuming the bark entirely before it struck the ground, and also sending a jagged crack down the middle of the wand.
"Damnit," Oliver cursed, then sighed.
He left the shelter once again, found another branch, and sat down next to the fire with an involuntary groan.
[Scrollcast] [Cogniprint]
"Behold the approach of civilization," Oliver intoned.