Devourer Class

Galahad walked into moldy living room of Regin's hidden workshop, using the same low positioned keyhole to get through the new door.

It was just as empty as the previous night he spent there. He looked into the trash bin to see someone had gotten rid of the broken canister, so there was evidence of Regin coming in at some point.

He didn't have anyway of opening the bas.e.m.e.nt's giant door so he sat on the floor meditating for a few minutes. Galahad still couldn't get used to the feeling chi running through his body, but he tried manipulating it the same way he did with mana.

At first, it was an unfamiliar energy to his body, more active flushing itself out when activated his skill, but it seemed to be getting better and less uncontrollable with every level up, he could see the proficiency of it when Fury and Fyre increased in duration of time.

He had gained about half a minute to his original three minutes and that was certainly a decent feat after a few weeks of claiming his new class.

'Okay, now unless sitting here swishing foreign energy in my body will make me magically stronger; I might as well start doing something else productive with my time.'

Galahad pulled a few items out of his bag and sat on the floor with a pen and journal in hand. He began writing out a bit of catch up on the details of his last few days.

Soon three more pages were filled with the events that took place in the dungeon, his new home, and a few extra thoughts on the Black Orb's voice as he called it. After finishing up, he decided it was time to use all his attribute points that didn't have a place yet.

He finished applying just in time to hear the sound of short, heavy feet clomping up the building's sidewalk. A small click of the dark metal door indicated the arrival of Regin Prodo.

Regin came stomping in with various boxes in his hands, each containing materials for that day and a unhappy expression to top off his entrance.

He made no mention of Galahad's drastic change in appearance or the disappearance of his bandages.

He didn't even seem surprised that Galahad was sitting on the floor with a journal on his l.a.p, he just look around the room and started off their conversation with some loud questioning.

"What the hell is that? Ya think its a good idea to start drinking on your first day?" Regin was already raising his voice, pointing at the three empty bottles Galahad left on the collapsing coffee table.

It seemed Galahad had so much time on his hands waiting, that before meditating and writing out the last few days of events, he picked up a few potions meant for temporary boosts when fighting in the dungeons.

Galahad had found a potion stand that was open early enough to purchase them and haggled his way into spending only a little over a hundred credits on a bundle of different enhancers.

The three bottles each had a specialized property and color that Galahad chugged while sitting in the dark living. The ice-blue sweet one was fire resistance; the brown, caramel tasting was electricity defiance; and the spicy orange one was meant for antifreezing. (Potion of ice resistance, not the undrinkable coolant.)

Each time Galahad drank a potion to completion, a timer would pop up. Once he was sitting back down, bloated with three heavy vials he chugged; the three timers were now sitting in his bottom corner view.

[ 38:47:12 ]

[ 76:46:34 ]

[ 53:45:51 ]

"Ahh, no." Galahad clarified. "I finished up the last of my medication and now I don't need to deal with anymore bandages and worrying about healing."

It had been three days since he got rid of the aging bandages, but it felt like that happened an eternity ago. He figured since the dwarf was more of a crafter in machines than alchemy or potions, the lies about what he drank would only help his case of lies.

He need the dwarf's full support on using the machine, otherwise the whole plan of moving to Diagon will have gone to shit. The moment Regin didn't believe a word he said, he knew his chances would be as good as gone.

"Darn, here I was thinkin you and I would getta long real swimmingly." He said as he seemed to pulled a flask out of nowhere and took a swig. With that last comment hanging in the air, he started walking down the stairs with just a few of the boxes in hand.

Galahad grabbed a few others and

'O joy, he's short tempered and a drinker too.' Galahad thought as he followed him downstairs.

*****

Galahad started to realize why the previous assistant had been having such a rough time. Regin had given him a list of thirty seven things that needed to be done throughout the week at different times on various days and for certain lengths of time as well.

It wouldn't have been a difficult thing to manage if the dwarf gave him a sheet of paper, but he only shouted each order and left him to his own devices. When Galahad tried taking to him about the items on the list, Regin was completely deaf and too fixated on task at hand.

'Well at least this helps.' Galahad thought as he went through his list of new tasks he made in his head.

The task board he discovered on his way up to Bluewalk had a few handy reminders to it, but now that he needed to memorize an entire list of intricate chores, it was the perfect tool to prevent mistakes.

Galahad knew for certain that his memory wouldn't keep the detail of his list perfectly in order and would have ultimately result in an explosion of chemicals or something breaking. Task board became his most useful skill that day.

'Well nothing is going to explode in the next half hour or so," Galahad thought and he went through the list. "I can probably start with this one.'

[ Clean up aftermath of previous dimwit. ] [ Complete ] [ Discard ]

Galahad went around the room for the whole morning with a brush and mop he found in the corner. There were small craters and cracks in some sections of the stone floor or black soot that meant an experiment had gone very wrong from a brief moment of neglect.

Between his cleaning, he adjusted the jet blue flame to a less intense setting and moved a few things around at the requests given to him. Eventually Galahad had cleaned up most of the messes and was on the last piece of the aftermath.

An alchemist table, once engraved with a large array and countless runes, was now leaning at its side, covered in fragmented metal and black charcoal that smelled strongly of sulfur. Galahad looked at the sorry state of the table and just shook his head with a sad sigh.

'A creation class dwarf is going around tinkering in classes he doesn't belong too, how could he not expect this to happen . . . Actually, maybe he is an alchemist, I still don't know what his class. He doesn't carry a Karmic plate with him.' Galahad stopped scrubbing and pondered that for a moment.

He looked over at Regin's feet from his kneeling position of the floor and tried focusing on him again, seeing maybe the black orb would let him identify him anway. Nothing happened and Galahad quickly forgot about it as he needed to add more fire puffer dust to a crucible that was about to go out.

Galahad spent a good portion of his day just talking to his own inner voices and enjoy the fact that his presence in the workshop was meaning progress to save his friends. The added bonus was the Black orb's voice decided to suppress itself for an unknown reason and left Galahad feeling so much better about everything than before.

He may have still been desensitized to actually committing murder to a large group of bandits, but the constantly irritated voice was no longer egging him on to kill. The days were far nicer without the influences of hunger and rage ramming at the back of his mind.

Meanwhile, Regin had been going back in forth between the shop floor's many experiments as well, not bothering to take notes on any of his experiments. He just watched the experiments proceed as if they meant very little.

In reality, his skills as a creation class gave him the ability to memorize all forms of numbers, values, and details if he fixated on them, and he'd never forget them till he was dead. Regardless if he wanted to forget it or not, everything sat in his mind with a single misplacement. It was a common and practically standard skill among creation class dwarves, giving them the upper hand in crafting for centuries.

Their thought process and development of technology was so vast and unrestricted, that they nearly brought a genocidal war to the kingdoms near the States of Norkellia.

The continents of Gylantra and Luminote may have some powerful kingdoms of elves and humans, but the dwarves that developed independent states in the continent of Antradaren were accustom to machines of everlasting war and defense.

Their technology would have made them rulers of many kingdoms and turn them to great conquerors, yet the threat of such things disappeared long ago when a treaty was signed with the Etherite kingdom and the leaders of the Dwarven States.

No one knows exactly how the treaty came to fruition; most only knew it existed after a small peace talk between the Human King and council of Dwarves. The words spoken that day were never told outside of the room they spoke in, leaving so many theories about that talk as only assumptions and speculation.

When Regin checked once again on the sheets of stone inside a strange incubator, he felt something was off.

'Why do I feel like I need to yell?' He pondered as the stone in his hand began crumbling to pieces and hit the floor in a puff of dust.

He ignored the broken clumps in his hand and started looking around the room to find some kind of error in Galahad's work, he always knew their would be a problem with his assistants work, he just forgot to start yelling at him.

Regin found himself surprised at the sight before him. Everything he assigned to the new assistant was done. It wasn't perfect little adjustments like he wanted, but the jobs were done well enough to prevent anything from failing to the point of restarting or blowing up the samples.

Soon after, he recognized the disaster from previous mistakes were mostly cleaned up and organized. Only cracks in the stone or missing sections of floor remained.

It took him a while to find his new assistant, yet he didn't know what to say. Regin couldn't yell at the human for doing everything on the list without even needing to bug him about the detail, but he certainly couldn't praise the boy for his efforts either.

In his mind, compliments were meant for those who believed that they achieved perfection when they were being appraised in their work. Never understanding that nothing ever achieves perfection, regardless of all the time and effort.

"So how's the first day seeming? Am I an adequate hire here at the house of probable explosions?" Galahad asked as he didn't look away from the black he scrubbed from the walls.

Regin didn't like that Galahad was capable noticing him staring without looking back at him. He kept to a few grumbles before voicing the nicest thing he'd ever said to Galahad to mask his embarrassment.

"Well you were here on time, ya didn't start blubbering tears about everythin, and you haven't blown anything up yet. That's all slightly better than my last assistant; who always acted like coming back here was like entering Hell every time I opened the damn door."

Galahad chuckled at the substitute compliment as replied with his own snark.

"Ehh, I've been through an assortment of various hells. This place though, sees more like a school lab with a splash of a home forge. That is if you can avoid blowing it up." Galahad showed the brush he was using was already blackened from just one spot of the explosion.

"You can blame that last walkin disaster for that. But yeah sure, call it 'homey.' Speakin of which, how was gettin situated with a house? What could you possibly afford in a over priced properties of Diagon?"

Galahad put the brush in a bucket of water to soak out the black he was just smearing along the wall at this point and stood up to talk with his boss.

"I actually found a cheap little place on the outskirts. You can kinda see the over priced freak shows from the hillside that everyone thinks is cursed."

Regin almost seemed to change his thoughts on something and starting asking a less rude question. "Was it the house where they found assumed they last resident was murdered not too long ago?"

"I was told it was a more than few years ago, but yeah, that's the one."

Galahad thought it was odd that the dwarf knew of the house and considered its history recent. Then he thought about how the story of its history was what kept everyone but troublemakers from visiting there. It made sense now that Regin knew of the place, it was a big part to Diagon's growth over time.

"Hmm, here I was thinking ya were a bit strange. Now I know your just a full blown lunatic. Haha haha!" The dwarf walked off holding his stomach in laughter and leaving Galahad to go do something else. Galahad watched him walk away with the feeling that his boss was too much like his father in some way.

'You know what? The more I think about it; it's more like my father is too much like a dwarf. Oh he'd certainly kill me for thinking that.' Galahad chuckled to himself and went back to cleaning.