Where was the line between patience and focus? There was none. He plunged his hand into the fire without question, simply because it was the right time to do so. His arm was set aflame, emitting blue sprites as the fire ate into the fabric of his avatar, yet he ignored it, yanking out a stick along with a shower of embers. Any ordinary stick would be ashes after being placed in the heart of a fire, yet this one merely smoldered.
He laid one end of the stick on the ground and the other on the edge of a brick, and he stomped on it as hard as he could. The sole of his shoe sizzled, but just as had happened eight hundred degrees Celsius ago…it just wouldn’t bend enough. It didn’t break this time, at least; the previously brittle glasswood apparently became more durable at hotter temperatures. Theoretically, it should also be turning more malleable, but at this rate, they would have to use a steel forge to get the right temperatures going.
“It’s not enough,” Craft said. It was the physical reality that they didn’t have the equipment to make hotter flames, but beyond that…he strangely felt nothing about it. A normal person should feel defeated, shouldn’t they? Why did he feel nothing at all? The challenge was exciting in the beginning, but neither failure nor success ultimately brought him any measure of fulfillment nor disappointment. This was, after all, just a Hobby.
Lei-rei threw away the fan, sitting on the ground and huffing from the heat. Even if she had been fanning away the hot air, the flame’s light had been enough to make her sweat. “L-let’s retire from this” —
That said, as an explorer of labyrinths, he was a systematic and meticulous person. Exhausted options wasn’t a phrase to be found in his dictionary. “No way.”
She bowed her head and gave up a final huff. It was clear to her that Craft had been taken in by his Hobby. There was no stopping him now, but… “At least let me cook.”
Guh! They both realized the implications. It was one Hobby against Another. No doubt, they would have to fight to the death once again. At least now, they would be fighting to the death as friends —
“Heeey! You two!”
Maybe not yet. There was the familiar trotting of wooden feet, and the two turned just in time to see the mannequin-propelled carriage come to a stop, its dolls standing at attention and saluting like revolutionary guardsmen as Dane hopped off. He walked up to Craft and Lei-rei with a smile.
“Is he the type to randomly drop by?” Craft asked Lei-rei. She shook her head.
“Long time no see! Ya both look hella busy, though.” He came to a stop beside them, watching the fire with them — though, it had started to die down.
Craft hadn’t seen Dane since yesterday, and honestly, he didn’t know what to make of the man. He seemed to interact with everyone the same way, and Craft wasn’t sure if that was because he was wearing a mask, or if it was just the result of everyone knowing Dane, and Dane knowing everyone. Occam’s Razor suggested the later.
“Cooking something big, Lei-rei?” Dane continued.
“You’d think that.” She pointed at Craft with her thumb. “But no, this one’s his.”
“Oh?” He leaned around Lei-rei and looked at him. “Hobby-related? Oh, I don’t think I’d ever asked ya what your Hobby was. Could’ve done that if you’d’ve let me buy ya a drink that time, though — ha!”
Craft chuckled. “Still not letting that go, huh?”
“Not in a hundred years! Casual drinking buddies are surprisingly hard to find, ya know? It’s all competitive drinking nowadays…”
“What are you doing here anyway, Dane?” Lei-rei asked.
He shrugged. “Solace asked me to swing by and check on the newbie.” He clapped his hands together. “Well! I did just that, didn’t I?” He leaned around Lei-rei again. “Ya look like you’re doing okay, Craft. I wanna stay and play hookie, but I actually have a passenger, y’see” —
“I smell…coal.”
The voice that had interjected was deep, grumbling, and wise. The flaps at the back of Dane’s carriage flew aside, making way for a majestic ashen beard. The tail gate dropped down, and a pair of black boots hit the ground with a heavy-footed thud. He was a stout man, his arms nearly as thick as his body; his biker vest was stained with oils, and his black shades and bald head flickered with the reflection of the dying fire. One could feel a solid certainty in his eyes, despite being hidden behind those shades.
A stocky build, that rugged aesthetic — it could only be a dwarf.
“Custom finishes. Industrial power,” he said as he swaggered towards them, carrying a pipe wrench on his shoulder. He stopped before them, looking each of them in the eyes: Dane, Lei-rei, and finally, Craft.
Dane was stumped. He approached the dwarf. “H-hey, we’re about to leave” —
“I can do it all with this hammer.” He raised a balled, gloved fist. “Now which of you has a project worth my leather?”
— “Al~right, s’ppose I’m charging a detour fee.”
Craft was stuck staring at the dwarf. It wasn’t because it was his first time seeing one — it was — but there was a certain intensity to the man that called to him. There was this single-minded passion that kept him fueled like a real machine, and because it was passion, it was flawed, yet the dwarf clearly made it his own.
“Er, right, this fella’s Otto,” Dane said. Otto kept his fist raised. Dane ignored him. “He’s into Blacksmithing… Yea. I don’t know if how he does it qualifies” — he shrugged — “but hey.”
“I understand the sentiment,” Lei-rei said. “Craft was making a bow. Supposedly.”
Dane furrowed his brows and looked at her, at Craft, at the dying fire, then at Craft again. His lips parted to ask, but he shook his head and waved his hand. “Y’know what, if I can have my dolls, you can have that, too.”
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“So you were aware of it,” Lei-rei said. She’d said it dryly, but it still got a chuckle out of Craft.
“Ah,” Craft blurted as his brain cells touched dendrites. He faced Otto. “Hey — er — name’s Craft. So you’re a blacksmith?”
“Licensed Magnesium Engineer.”
The other three let out a collective whoa, looking left, right, and skywards out of a primal need to diffuse the intensity of this guy’s personality.
“T-that’s great.” Even Craft was barely hanging on. “Sounds like you’re curious, so” — he pointed at the fire with his thumb — “I’ve got a temperature-related problem over here.” He picked up the stick that he’d tried to bend earlier. “This type of wood gets stronger as you heat it up. I guessed it’d start bending if I got it hot enough, but that didn’t work” —
Craft trailed off as Otto turned away, seemingly disinterested, but he tracked his gaze to the dying fire. Otto coolly walked towards it and plunged his hand into the coals, raking it with his gloved hand, finally grabbing onto something and pulling out one of the other test samples Craft had left inside.
He examined it. He licked it. “These lattices…are shy.”
“Hey, pal, you okay there?” Dane asked with a chuckle. It was half meant in jest and half a genuine question, but either way, he didn’t expect it to be answered; Otto wasn’t the answering sort. Dane looked to Lei-rei and Craft instead to share the amusement with…only to find them narrowing their eyes in a profound expression that said: what did this man discover?
Dane sighed and stared at the ground. Crafting types. He should’ve known.
“Boy!” Otto’s shout took the three by surprise. He turned around and took off his shades. His eyes were a stainless gray as he looked right at Craft. “Have ye got a dim fire in your spirit, boy!”
“W-what?” The question had put Craft on the back foot, but he resisted taking another step back as he began to understand why the question had affected him so much.
Otto started marching towards him. “Are ye makin’ something, or passin’ the time! Enty’s gonna cry if ye don’t show ‘er somethin’ nice!”
It had affected him…because it was true. Craft had been making bows for all sorts of reasons — because Raffie said so; to pass the time; to keep his mind off of things — but none of them gave him attachment to his creations. He had no concept of admiring his work, and everything was just a by-product to be shelved. Never once had he thought to just “make an incredible bow.”
But it was difficult to learn such a thing at this point, and treating his Hobby as a way to suspend the flow of time was too natural. It felt so good to forget about everything for a while, and when he forgot about everything, he was a better version of himself — but only a better version until he felt the end of playtime approaching, then he would dread finishing whatever it was he was doing, sliding back into the body of the person he hated to be.
“We’re smithing this twig, boy.” Otto took Craft’s stick from him and grabbed his shoulder. The firmness of his grip reminded Craft of a certain sergeant — someone who grinned under fire with a cigar in his mouth, and the ember glow of the cigar would reflect off the man’s shades — but unlike that guy, Otto didn’t have a cigar, but he did have shades, and they reflected the nearby dying flames.
Craft was left blinking. “Mi” — he coughed — “Mister Otto, er, sir” —
“Grandmaster Otto, boy.”
Whoa-kay. “Yes, sir — er — I-I don’t think the fire pit’s enough” —
Otto shoved the stick back onto Craft’s chest.
“Hoooah!” Otto cried and raised his fist; Craft nearly kicked him on reflex. He grabbed Craft by the collar, pulling him down. “What do you think a craft is, boy! A bloody pastime?”
That’s a Hobby, yes, Craft thought. He wasn’t unsettled by being pulled down, but now that he was eye-to-eye with the man, he could see the shaded whites of his eyes flittering left, right, up, down. Otto was reading him, and as someone who usually did the reading, he didn’t like it one bit.
Otto let go and turned around, screaming “Hooooah!” into the sky before facing Craft once more. “We’re smithing this twig ’til it’s burned inta your eyes.”
He screamed again. Just when it seemed like he’d rip his clothes off and transform into a blacksmithing monster, he took a knee, producing a ten-inch bolt from his belt. He swung his pipe wrench overhead — and struck it with a clang, driving it into the earth.
“Have ye ever died without a name?” he said. Clang. “Everyone dies” — clang — “so some people like to leave” — clang — “some kinda proof they’d been around.” Clang. “Make a baby if that’s what you want!” Clang. He stopped. The bolt was buried neck-deep. “But ye ain’t gonna be glad.?”
Craft had heard about that kind of thing — that people had an innate need to leave something behind. As someone who had cared more about his own slice of the world than the rest of it, he didn’t get the hype. It seemed neither did Otto.
“So ye craft!” the man continued. He hooked the pipe wrench around the bolt, turning it around with just a finger. “Ye craft to know yerself better than a lover! Because how ye do it” — the wrench was harder to turn now — “is how ye do everything.”
And how Craft was…was transient and passing. When he crafted, he disconnected himself from a painful world, and according to Otto, that was also the case for everything else he did: fighting, eating, breathing — what a silly theory.
Was it, though? His memories were made of templates, and each event was just a minor deviation from one of them. It was hard to tell sometimes whether something had actually happened, and he’d always had this silly worry that none of them ever did. He could have simply been daydreaming through life; as far as he was concerned, there were very little differences between real life, a dream, and a nightmare.
So, maybe Otto was right.
“So we craft!” Otto continued. He used two hands, veins popping as he struggled to pull the wrench around its last turn. “We’re keepin’ it up ‘til the flames die! We’ll make what we make ’til it breaks! If it keeps breakin’, ye change what yer makin’!”
Click. Otto unhooked the wrench.
“Make and make ’til it breaks into pieces!… And what do you get, boy?” He laid the pipe down and got on both knees. “The wisdom of knowin’ that if what yer doing breaks ye, then you’ll change what ye do — then that changes what ye are. But ain’t no way around the breakin’ bit, boy. We’re all made by breakin’ ’til we’re here.”
He bowed his head, clasped his hands, and muttered a prayer. “Enty up there,” he said, “ain’t no worries down here. This Otto’s exactly who Otto’s oughtta be. Micrometer precision” — he picked up the wrench and raised it overhead — “guaranteed.”
A thunderbolt struck the wrench, and the wrench struck the bolt. Hexagonal cracks in the earth spread out with perfect geometry. The ground shook; Dane stumbled and fell on his butt; Craft wobbled but he steadied himself; Lei-rei was a human gimbal. All the while, laser-light wireframes formed in front of Otto, and the earth around it climbed over each other to clad the wireframe with real walls.
The shaking stopped. An earthen autoclave was right there. “Forge ready,” Otto said and stood up.
The endorphins from constant exposure to heat and Otto’s intensity had finally started to kick in, and Craft started laughing. His worries and all his guilt might not have melted away, but Otto had done a good job of telling him one thing: that his Hobby could be more than escape. It could be a reminder that his better self was always there — that the bows that seemed to materialize from thin air were, in fact, made by someone who had been thrashed around, only to stand up again to sip some coffee and make some bows.
He was already that person. He just kept forgetting he was. It might be better to put the things he made up on display just so he wouldn’t.
Craft put his hand on Otto’s shoulder just as the latter stood up. A Hobby wasn’t something he would normally associate with ‘conviction,’ and yet, why wouldn’t he? “Let’s get to it.”
Otto faced him with a grin of platinum teeth.
A vortex of blue light encapsulated them. It surprised Craft for just a second, but it was a calming, soothing light. A rush of energy popped straight into his head and spread down to his feet. He’d never felt better, and whatever magical B.S. Enthusia had had to do to make this happen, he would absolutely excuse every single bug. Whatever got rid of lower back pain couldn’t possibly be bad.
For Lei-rei and Dane outside the Anima vortex, it was like standing next to a fun little tornado. Dust was flying everywhere and getting into their eyes. Fun.
“Ah, Synergy. Here we go,” Dane remarked. He spat out the dirt he’d tasted from just speaking those few words. Lei-rei was smarter, keeping her mouth shut, closing her eyes, and covering her ears.
Later, the sounds of a dwarf punching wood on an anvil resonated throughout the forest. Lei-rei decided she didn’t know what bow craft was supposed to be, and she left Dane to go back inside the house and bake cookie dough stress balls.
Worldbuilding Notes
[Autoclave] (Skill)