Spending My Retirement In A Game

So, with the backpack, headphones, recording device and small box of disks in hand, Eisen turned toward Serio, "Alright, where are those five right now?" The old man asked him, but the one that answered was Constant instead.

"Ah, they are currently in the gardens, actually. It seems like young ’Samurai’ and ’Zyra’ are speaking to small floating spheres, though. I’m not entirely sure what’s going on, to be honest..."

"Huh... Those might be cameras for them to use..." Eisen muttered to himself, and then swiftly stepped out of the workshop and properly breathed in the air of this garden. He didn’t leave it for a whole day, after all.

And then, Eisen made his way out of the center of the Hedgemaze toward the entrance to the Gardens, already seeing the five of them, Stahl, Alnico, the two streamers Samurai and Zyra, as well as Jyuuk’s younger sister Kyla.

It seemed like Stahl already gave everyone a little bit of an upgrade to their equipment, which was mainly seen in how flashy everything was all of a sudden. He knew that his apprentices never paid much attention to visuals in such a way either, just like the old man himself, so it couldn’t have been anything that they made.

On top of that, Samurai was actually wearing something like a Samurai’s armor already, and had two Katana on his hips, one large and one smaller one. Kyla’s Gauntlets for some reason looked like an animal’s paws, and she was now wearing boots as well, and the old man quickly noticed that the boots had paw-prints on their bottom as well.

Zyra’s bow was now large and flashy, had lots and lots of gems and crystals attached to it, and the arrows in her quiver didn’t seem to be the regular kind either. And then, there were of course Stahl and Alnico, who were the only ones whose equipment hadn’t changed majorly, probably because both of them needed such a large amount of different things, Stahl because he literally had five different professions that he needed different tools or weapons for, and Alnico because she was currently a musician that played a bunch of different instruments.

At least the equipment for one of them would be narrowed down in a few moments. He knew that Alnico maybe wasn’t at the right level yet, but Eisen knew that she focused on her mental stats as well as her agility, which were the only stats seen as a requirement. Other than that, the user needed to have a musician-type occupation, and it was quite obvious that she passed that point.

She might be short a few stat-points, but it would be a nice goal to work toward, and she was at the very least able to use the Recorder to already record a bunch of sounds to mix together in different ways. Eisen still remembered how she so proudly showed him the first track that she made on her first laptop, just using the sounds of different animals, and he was pretty sure she kept that kind of hobby up, using random sounds to mix them into proper tracks that were surprisingly nice to listen to even from Eisen’s perspective.

Either way, the moment that Stahl and Alnico saw the old man, they practically sprinted toward him as fast as they could, because both of them were quite curious about what kind of item the old man had prepared.

"Grampa! So, what is it? Is the item inside the backpack?" Alnico asked curiously and already wanted to extend her hand toward it, but the old man simply held his arm up so that she couldn’t reach the backpack.

"First, what are your intelligence, wisdom and agility values?" The old man asked, and with a smug smile, Alnico crossed her arms. "Intelligence and Wisdom are 150, Agility is 100. Our levels rose really fast, after all." Alnico said with a smirk, so Eisen just chuckled in response and nodded his head.

"Alright, perfect. That’s enough for you to use these, then." Eisen said with a smile and quickly handed the backpack to his granddaughter, who in the first place had a bit of trouble even holding the heavy item, and she immediately tried to open it up, although there was a little issue with that.

"Erm... Gr-Grampa... Where’s the Zipper?" She asked, and Eisen slowly moved his fingers through his beard. "What Zipper?" He chuckled, and Alnico just looked at him confused, so the old man explained.

"You see the slight purple color, right? That’s because the cloth I used to make this backpack is a mixture of spatial-gem and aluminum. The Gem in the front of the backpack is an ’access’ gem, that you can use to take a few certain items out of it, although they’re just that, a few certain items. But, no looking yet." Eisen told her with a smirk, and then showed her the next item, the small USB-Stick Sized recording device.

"Now, don’t be that disappointed, sweety." The old man said with a smile, as he poured his mana into the small item and made the small, floating display appear, before he swiftly clicked on the ’record’ button. "This is way better than you think it is." Eisen said into the microphone-part of it, then stopped the recording, and made it play the sound again. And because of the way it was saved, through magical means, it sounded nearly as if Eisen himself had said it again.

"Wait, what? Is that a phone?" She asked confused and the old man quickly handed her the item, which Alnico looked over with incredible curiosity. "It’s not a phone, it can only record sounds, save a small amount, and then play them again." Eisen said with a smile, but Alnico was still really excited about it.

"Even so, this is so cool! This looks so high-tech!" She exclaimed, while Stahl leaned in with a mixture of Geeky excitement and professional curiosity, "You can say that again, how did you make that?" He asked, and Eisen just laughed and chuckled in response.

"Don’t worry about that. Anyway, because those can only save a small amount of sounds, here are a few discs to save them on. Of course, these can also go into the backpack later, don’t worry." Eisen told her as he handed her the Mana-Crystal Records, but Alnico looked at the old man confused and full of excitement.

"And how exactly do I save things on here?" She asked, and Eisen just chuckled and just winked. "Just wait a little, I’m explaining it in a bit. Here’s another item for you which belongs to the whole set."

And then, Eisen swiftly took the headphones out and placed them onto Alnico’s head, while helping her put the quite heavy backpack on.

"Now, pour a little bit of mana into the right side of the headphones." Eisen told his granddaughter and took a step back, and curiously, the young girl did as told and held her finger against the flat surface, before a small display appeared in front of her. It wasn’t a notification, so others could see it as well, and especially Stahl was excited about what this all was.

"And then, for now, go for the ’Base Mode’. I didn’t really know what you needed, so I put the most basics things in there. You can create new settings with it yourself, just know that that takes a lot of mana to do and properly save everything. And the more windows you have open the more mana it drains as well of course. You can see the remaining mana there in the corner of the screen." Eisen said with a smile, kind of nervous because he really wanted everything to work out properly, and when Alnico pressed on the ’Base Mode’ button, a few different, new displays appeared all around her.

One of them was somewhere that could hold and play records, created by making the mana there especially dense, and the rest was really just the classic ’DJ-Table’ stuff with all of those knobs and buttons. Researching what all of that actually took the brunt of the time of when Eisen was in his Desktop mode, and even then, and even then, most of them weren’t actually connected to anything yet.

Eisen really worked incredibly hard on this, and failed a few times to such an extent where he nearly blew himself up a few times because the enchantment-arrays broke apart, but luckily, he managed to fix a few minor things in everything by adding ’Mind’ Crystals into the mix, one of the parts used to create regular golem cores.

Eisen figured that if they were able to make Golems understand commands and think, they would also be able to at the very least handle the control of all of the different functionalities, so the most central pieces all had those mind crystals at least somehow integrated in them.

"This is just so fucking awesome!" Alnico exclaimed ecstatically, immediately playing around with the different settings and dials to get used to it, and properly put the headphones onto her head. "And how exactly does it work now? Like, how can I actually make music?" She asked, and Eisen just chuckled in response.

"Well, the way I thought to be a good idea was that you record different things using the recording item, and then make one of your remix-things out of it. Then you can save that remix on one of the Records, and reuse it when you need to. Ah, right, just so you know, but it’s made to absorb a small amount of ambient mana, so depending on the area you’re in, the music you’re making might have a few different effects." Eisen warned her, and Alnico swiftly nodded her head in response, basically unable to fathom how awesome this item was to her.

"Alright, then let’s try this out..." Alnico muttered to herself, and then turned toward Samurai, who was also more than curiously approaching her. His pupils weren’t red at the moment, so it seemed like he stopped streaming or recording, or whatever he was doing before.

"Freak, say something." The young girl asked, and with a frown, Samurai crossed his arms and looked away while pouting, "I’m not a freak." He said, and immediately Alnico grinned and made that sentence repeat itself over and over again, before just sending it over to the receivers of her new DJ-Set.

And then, when she did so, she began to twist a few of the dials around, pushed some buttons, pulled a few switches, changed sound-levels of different aspects, and simply began to play around with this new item for a while.

It seemed like she was really happy with it, so Eisen was more than just glad that he made this, and then slowly turned toward Stahl, letting Alnico do her thing.

"So you’ve been working hard as well, huh?" Eisen asked, and the young man slowly nodded his head in response. "Yeah, I was a craftsman for a little while yesterday, and whenever we got the chance, I upgraded everyone’s items, and worked on a few cameras for them. It’s based around your CB’s, though, so sorry about ripping your ideas off. But well, they’re basically just Golems with small soul generators hooked up to gravity enchantments." Stahl explained, so Eisen slowly nodded his head.

"I see, that does seem pretty straightforward. You should think about selling them, though. They might end up pretty popular." Eisen pointed out, before the young Jack of all Trades replied with a smirk. "Well, what do you think I’m planning? I already spoke to Komer about it. He did seem pretty excited about it, but he was worrying about the fact that he has so many items to sell but no actual shop yet."

"Don’t worry, I’m already thinking about something for that." The old man chuckled in response.