Explorer of Edregon

The three of them stared at the strange artifacts, the silence stretching over them broken only by the gentle snores of Reginald coming from the other room. After a moment, Scule looked up at him.

"Well… Here you go."

"I have absolutely no idea what those boots do," Shia admitted, her tongue flicking out as she tasted the magic of the artifacts. "But I can taste the fire coming from that knife handle."

"Might as well start with the obvious," Vin shrugged, picking them up one after another.

New minor artifact discovered! 1,000 exp gained.

New lesser artifact discovered! 5,000 exp gained.

"Huh. The knife is a minor artifact, but the boots are lesser," he said, turning them over and looking at them. "I know enchanted rings seem to shift in size slightly to be able to be worn by anyone, but are boots the same?"

"Should be," Shia nodded. "Unless the size difference is drastically different. Like with Scule and his bag."

"Come on, don't just stand there, try them out!" Scule egged him on, visibly growing more excited after hearing one of the artifacts was the same tier as his own bag. "What do you think they do? Make you run faster? Let you jump a hundred feet up?"

"Only one way to find out," Vin shrugged, yanking off his shoes and tugging the boots on. Just like Shia had promised, he felt the artifacts shrink slightly once he'd gotten them on, and the leather molded perfectly around his feet, somehow without becoming uncomfortable. They fit so perfectly he didn't think he actually had to lace them, but he did just to be safe.

Getting to his feet, Vin hopped up and down a few times before pacing around the room, grinning at the fact that it felt like he was walking on bouncy clouds. "Well at the very least, these things are comfortable as hell. No clue what they do though."

"Maybe they're enchanted to be more comfortable?" Shia offered, narrowing her eyes at them and flicking her tongue out again. "I swear, the taste is so familiar, but I just can't place it."

It wasn't until Vin got a little too close to one of the walls that he felt the boots seem to vibrate ever so slightly. Curious, he stepped closer, and the sensation grew even stronger. After a moment, he stepped fully up to the wall, and jerked as the boots came to life.

Rather than his foot landing right up against the wall, his foot was tugged upward by the magic boots, and Vin found himself suddenly stepping onto the wall, his entire orientation shifting in that moment to the point where the wall had suddenly become the floor.

"Woah!" he laughed, taking a few more steps forward and turning to look back at his friends. From his perspective, Scule and Shia were now standing not only on a wall, but standing above him, staring at him with shocked expressions. The limited furniture their living room currently held was also stuck impossibly halfway up the wall, which made sense seeing as that wall was actually the floor of their apartment.

"It's gravity magic!" Shia said, snapping her fingers as it finally came to her. "I knew I'd tasted it before! The fragment with the floating library and all the floating rocks had the same flavor!"

"This is so weird," Vin laughed, walking in a quick figure eight along the side of their apartment. "It's not like I'm hanging sideways. To me, this wall is the floor." To prove his point, he walked up the wall and stepped awkwardly onto the ceiling, whirling his hands as his orientation shifted a second time. Now, he was face to face with Shia once more, albeit she was completely upside down from his perspective.

"Your hair and clothes aren't dangling or anything," Scule commented, tilting his head as he watched Vin walk around on the ceiling. "Damn, I wish I could wear those things. You have no idea how useful that would be for a Rogue."

"Trust me, I think I have a pretty good idea of how useful they'd be," Vin said, rolling his eyes. "I wonder if I can-"

Vin had intended to deactivate the boots, flip around in midair, and land right-side up like a professional gymnast on the floor once more.

Instead, despite his high dexterity, when he deactivated the boots and the entire world did a one hundred and eighty degree flip around him, he found himself crash landing onto their floor as he slammed his head into the ground.

"Fantastic landing. Eight out of ten," Scule said, clapping as Vin laughed in embarrassment.

"The shift in orientation is beyond weird and is going to take some practice to get used to, but these boots are awesome!"

"Why do you think that Artificer kept them tucked away instead of wearing them himself?" Shia asked, examining the boots more closely.

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"Are you serious? He was surrounded by a bunch of hardened criminals," Scule scoffed as if the answer was obvious. "One of them probably would have gutted him in a heartbeat if he walked around flashing magic boots. Not to mention they lived outside. Not exactly a lot of places to bother using them."

"Good point. Let's see what the knife does," Vin said, picking up the second artifact. What he'd originally thought was a broken knife he now realized was simply the hilt of a knife, and he had a good idea as to what the artifact might do.

Despite that, he still nearly dropped it a moment later when a small but concentrated flame burst out of the hilt.

"Oh come on, you got a fire-knife?!" Scule whined, stamping his foot as he stared at the artifact with jealousy. "That is so not fair!"

"Blame the Gods that artifacts don't shrink down to petian size," Shia laughed, watching the knife carefully as Vin held it up and turned it this way and that. No matter how quickly he moved it, the fire burning out of the hilt didn't shift in size or flicker. The flame formed a six-inch-long blade, and burned hot enough that Vin could actually feel his hand warming.

"I'm pretty certain I'd be burning my own hand right now if I didn't have my flame protection amulet on," he admitted, wondering who on Earth the knife had been designed for. "Or my Total Resistance skill."

"That doesn't surprise me. Normally, elemental-based artifacts are designed with specific users in mind," Shia explained. "That one may have belonged to a Pyromancer, for example, or a race of people largely immune to fire."

"That makes a lot of sense," Vin muttered, thinking back to the water sphere artifact Lumel had taken from her people. "I guess the Red Dawn got their hands on someone that fire doesn't bother all that much."

Deciding to put the knife away before he accidentally set something on fire, Vin deactivated the artifact and went to swap out the utility knife he kept on his belt with it when he realized there was a problem.

"Huh… How do you sheath a knife with no blade?"

"You're probably going to need to get something specialized made for it," Shia pointed out. "I bet one of the crafters can whip something up for you. Also, don't just go throwing away your standard knife. You haven't even tested if the artifact is capable of cutting things yet!"

"Then what are we waiting for?" Scule grinned, dragging what looked like an entire iron ingot out of his cape and letting it crash down onto the coffee table. "What?" he asked, looking at their questioning faces. "Come on, I have way stranger things tucked away in here."

Despite the late hour, the three of them had a grand time coming up with different things to try testing his knife against as they pushed the flaming blade to find its limits.

For starters, although it clearly wasn't solid, the fire-knife did in fact act like a regular knife. If Vin pressed it against something it couldn't cut, like the thick stone wall of their own apartment, the fire wouldn't just waver and dissipate. For all intents and purposes, it felt like he was trying to cut through a stone wall with a butter knife.

They also discovered that, as Vin had noted, the blade of the fire-knife was shockingly hot. Shia tried to use it at one point and nearly threw the artifact across the room as she hissed in pain. Despite only having exposed herself to the artifact for a split second, she'd badly burnt her hand and had to spend a few moments casting Renewal on herself.

It was thanks to that extreme heat that, while the artifact couldn't cut through the thick stone walls that had been reinforced thanks to Witherson's Architect class, the knife was in fact capable of cutting through just about everything they had available to test. In fact, the blade even managed to cut through the iron ingot Scule had pulled out of his cape for testing, even if it had taken a bit for the fire to actually work its magic.

Vin couldn't shake the feeling that he'd found his own tiny laser-sword, despite the fact that he'd already proven there were plenty of things the knife couldn't cut, and plenty more that took quite a while to get through.

So it was that when they received a knock on their door and Scule shouted for whoever it was to come in, Myers walked in to find Vin standing upside down on the ceiling, slashing through vatos after vatos that Shia was tossing at him with his fire-knife. They still had a number of the small fruits that Peter had given them the last time they were in Sakis, and they had proven to have a surprisingly long shelf life.

To her credit, Myers barely even blinked as she cleared her throat and nodded toward them.

"I just finished up the truth-gem interrogation for Trod," she explained. "He was quite polite the entire time, and his answers all checked out. He's definitely loyal to Curash above all else, but Curash is loyal to Golrim, and Golrim of course is with us now. Curash also distinctly instructed him to stay with us and help us out, so that shouldn't be a problem regardless. Seeing as Alka volunteered to take him in and help him get settled, I thought I'd come grab her. We've assigned him his own room for now away from the other former prisoners."

"Alka is doing some late-night training with her trainees over in the dungeon," Vin explained, extinguishing his blade and attempting to drop down from the ceiling yet again. This time, he managed to flip around correctly, and he only wobbled a little bit as he landed on his feet, beaming at his body's superhuman dexterity. "I can help you find her if needed."

"I wouldn't want to interrupt… whatever it is you're doing," Myers said, giving them a small smile. "Though I will say, be careful not to use those around Spur unless you want him to start hounding you to let him have a turn. I'm well aware he was quite the fan of a certain movie series back in the day."

Wishing them a good night, Myers left them to their own devices as she went off in search of Alka. Yawning, Scule turned to look at them.

"You know, maybe we should call it a night. I'm supposed to meet Casper bright and early tomorrow to search a meadow he found for poisonous herbs."

"The two of you finally met?" Vin asked, remembering how he'd recommended Scule introduce himself to the Herbalist awhile back.

"Yep, he's a pretty friendly guy. Really good eye for detail as well. Much better than Bill in that regard."

"Sleep's probably a good idea," Shia agreed, rubbing her eyes. "This has been fun, but I've been running Split Focus for the past few hours, and the dual focus is starting to give me a headache."

"You couldn't stop working for one evening to play around with magic?" Scule scoffed. "You can't work all the time!"

"I have to if I want to keep learning new spells," Shia shot back. "Or would you have preferred I didn't have Living Giant to help us?"

"And on that note, I'm turning in," Scule said, shoving the last of the random things they'd cut in half back into his cape. "Housemates," Scule muttered under his breath before the petian went to his room and closed the door.

Chuckling to himself, Vin bid Shia good night as well as he retreated to his own room. Flopping down on his shimmerwing mattress and pulling his silk blanket over him, Vin was asleep practically before his head hit the pillow.

He didn't even bother to take off the new boots.