The Factory Must Grow - [Book 1: The System Must Live]

Henrietta still firmly believed that making paper was going to be easier than trying to make papyrus appropriately Cardlike, but that belief was being sorely tested.

She was, of course, using reeds as her raw plant matter. Paper could be made of effectively anything so long as it was fibrous enough, and they had an inordinate amount of scrap reed castoff from their various projects lying around First Tower, and nothing really good to do with it. Some of it was being burned, but that was just... wasteful.

So, she'd taken a lot of it to make paper. She'd utilized a large rock to grind the reed castoffs into a fine pulp, then flattened said pulp between sheets of papyrus... but the papyrus, even with holes poked in it, was simply too waterproof to actually work for her purposes. The pulp kept squishing out of the sides instead of compressing properly, and what little did stay under kept sticking more to the rocks than staying together in a sheet of paper.

While she wasn't able to devote her full attention to the project - simply as a matter of course, there was a lot of random tasks that ended up needing her time, lots of times she needed to ensure Oliver was staying on-task and not neglecting to eat, an ongoing effort to make the five of them better clothing using papyrus as a material - as the days wore on, Henrietta managed to eliminate problems one at a time.

If she used reeds split in half instead of stones for her mat, the paper was a lot less likely to stick to it. If she boiled the reeds in lye before shredding them, or even just added unrefined ash to the water, it became a lot better at sticking together. If she didn't pour out the pulp onto the reeds but instead tried to scoop it up with coarse fabric, that worked immensely better.

Granted, 'coarse fabric' was possibly overselling just how crude the material was. It was an incredibly basic weave, just with clumps of reed fibers laid crosswise over one another and only held in place because each end was tied to a frame. But, if she dragged that through a soup of paper pulp a couple of times, she accumulated a thin layer of strands which could then be deposited on the reed drying racks, pressed underneath heavy rocks, which in theory would produce paper... that still fell apart before she could do anything on it.

She kept iterating.

The outer layers of young reeds, which didn't seem to work quite as well for the creation of paper or papyrus, were tough and flexible. With those, Henrietta managed to create some basic sandals. They weren't the most comfortable, but even with increasingly-calloused feet the difference between bare skin directly against The Jungle's forest floor and having literally anything interposed was immense.

Alyssa was the least impacted, simply because of the nature of her [Leafstep], but Oliver had been phenomenally grateful at the creation. He wasn't able to wear them while working on his enchantments, but he went from slightly hesitantly and gingerly walking across stone to confidently striding instantaneously.

Those same moderately-tough straps also made for good belts, which Alyssa especially quite enjoyed. She'd occasionally bemoaned how inconvenient it could be to carry around things like her water jug, her hatchet, and whatever basket she was utilizing for foraging, and the addition of straps and cords helped her in that pursuit immensely.

Clothes more sophisticated than crude leather were still an ongoing problem... but Henrietta was making progress.

Henrietta's paper was slowly taking shape more and more. If she boiled the peeled reeds in lye-heavy water, then dried them and tore them up before grinding them up, she was able to create a much finer paper... that was still falling apart.

Her Sketchbook had grown dramatically. As the byproduct of another world's magic, it didn't fully align with what was sometimes known as 'base magic,' the classes and spells built off of magic's most fundamental elements, nor did the stats the System provided map perfectly to those foreign magics. But even though her inklings weren't sustained by mana she Generated, Capacity still increased the size of an artscape. Cohesion and Mind had assisted her teammates in their own ways, but Henrietta's personal art, about copying and recreating the world around her, didn't benefit in quite the same way.

And even though she was the lowest-level of her team, merely at level five, four points assigned to Capacity and one point to Skill left her in a most excellent position.

Class: [Master Inkscribe] (Card, Rune, Shadow)
Level: 5
Major Stats: Dexterity 10, Aura 3, Mind 3
Regular Stats: Recovery 0, Generation 0, Cohesion 2, Skill 3, Capacity 4
Minor Stats: Strength 0, Resilience 0, Power 0
Skills (1/3): [Refined Calligraphy] 8

She could now easily hold two dozen discrete sketches, or dramatically increase the detail which she copied upon subsuming a new creature. Of course, without her full repertoire of different inks, there was only so much she could do with that added detail, but it still allowed her to add a lot of behavioral modifications trivially.

Most notably, she now had her single pseudowyvern inkling acting as a combination of scout and forager. It flew around the nearby Jungle, tracking down various fruits that Alyssa and Clark had jointly confirmed were edible and bringing them back to their 'nest,' a large basket near the cookpot.

It wasn't perfectly reliable, but it still helped to free up some of Alyssa's time. For their Ranger's part, that new time had been devoted towards a combination of exploring their surroundings, general upkeep while helping Henrietta with her projects, and trying to develop a new tracking skill. In the near future, she intended to send Alyssa and Jacob on a recon mission downriver, trying to see if there was a good water route between First Tower and Shelter, but for now it was more a matter of getting properly accustomed to their surroundings now that she had better mobility, because knowledge was power and there was a lot they didn't know.

A part of Henrietta wanted that new tracking skill to be made as fast as possible, such that Alyssa would be able to start looking for iron deposits... but the return on that was probably a little less than the cost would be.

Not that the cost was very high. She'd consulted with Oliver, and he'd expressed that he probably could create some kind of basic location-spell focus tuned towards Metal and teach Alyssa to use it... but would need an estimated couple of weeks for each. Well, he had estimated a week total, but Henrietta had learned how to translate Oliver's estimates into an actual timeline.

Though in many ways, the actual cost would be to Alyssa. She'd still been rather surly since she'd been able to level, and from what Henrietta was able to glean, it was due to a perception of being overly dependent on Oliver for her ability to do anything. Which, Henrietta supposed, was understandable enough. Though the position was in a bit of an odd situation all told, Alyssa had been recruited as a mobility expert, a light and quick scout, and a survivalist. Well, they were also the secondary combatant, but that was more a legacy station from when the position was known as 'Striker.'

Regardless, Alyssa had been extremely stifled in her ability to do all of those things. Her long-range speed certainly was the highest out of the group, but Henrietta's ability to fly with her inkling wings meant she was better at short-range traversal. Alyssa had been unable to singlehandedly provide all of what they'd need to survive in this eternal wilderness, but that was an unreasonable expectation under their constraints. She had been right to prioritize [Leafstep] in her class selection over [Field Dress], even if the latter would have been ludicrously good in their actual circumstances. On top of that, thanks to her inklings, Henrietta had proven to be a more powerful combatant as well.

And now, faced with the prospect of being outclassed and wholly useless at yet another one of her primary responsibilities... Henrietta understood why Alyssa was somewhat testy.

So, she'd given the Ranger the go-ahead to try and figure out a new skill for herself, before she assigned it to Oliver as a full time pursuit. Her acceptance to the Forerunner Program had been largely based on the sheer proficiency she had with her skills, after all, and Henrietta would be remiss as a leader if she didn't allow all of her teammates' relevant strengths to shine.

It also seemed like the most painless method of getting Alyssa to settle down. She really didn't want to have to scold the young Ranger, in large part because needing to do so felt like a form of failure as a leader.

A good leader should be practically imperceptible, the one arranging their underlings in such a way that their success seemed inevitable. A bad leader was one that constantly intervened loudly and obviously, meddling with things simply because they didn't like how something looked and never trusting those they were responsible for.

Henrietta checked her latest batch of paper. It stuck to the top layer of the reeds as she lifted it up, but a bit of poking got it to fall off... and completely apart.

I thought I was past that stage, she thought with a sigh.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Jacob and Clark were making some truly remarkable progress with their boat-designs. Their latest iterations were plenty capable of supporting both of them standing in it at the same time, a mostly-square barge that was actually watertight, thanks to the layers of papyrus plastered all over the hull. It was still rather fragile, but it was quite stable.

It could be a bit aggravating at times, trying to assess how much progress they were making. Oliver spent three days dealing with a sudden problem that had appeared with the System node, their kiln had half its roof cave in seemingly at random and that had taken her almost a full day to fix, the boat was too delicate for even something like a brick to be placed in it without extreme care, and of course her paper still wasn't coming together.

But... at the same time, she felt like they were making progress. Her paper was failing in different ways, the boat was improving, the kiln was slowly increasing its success rate and its output being devoted towards making Oliver a better workshop, and the System node was so, so useful.

Not that Henrietta had seen much direct benefit from her levels yet. She hadn't filled up her Sketchbook, mostly due to had higher priorities, and the Skill slot had gone unfilled. But simply having something of her System back was so very useful and reassuring. Even during her other Expedition, she'd had constant access to [Status] and many of its attendant functions.

Admittedly, with her preferred style of alchemy, she didn't utilize the System terribly much. When in a lab, she was already utilizing external tools for precision's sake. For human capabilities to match the raw consistency of the tools she had access to required an incredibly high level. Even Cohesion and Dexterity, which enhanced magical and physical control and were therefore stereotypically useful for crafters simply didn't matter as much thanks to modern building techniques. She didn't even need that many Skills, though being without them made much of her expertise irrelevant.

And without the rest of her tools, her other stats started mattering a lot more. Or they would, if she was doing anything precise enough to benefit from them. If anything, Resistance would be the most useful stat when they lacked protective gear, but when the most dangerous thing she was working with was lye, basic safety precautions were more than enough for her.

If she had any of her alchemy skills, then Cohesion would matter, but stuck as she was with [Master Inkscribe], it didn't truly. She had enough Power to use her [Refined Calligraphy], and she didn't use the skill enough to strain either her Capacity or Generation, and that was only more true now that she'd increased her Capacity thanks to its correlation with her Sketchbook capacity. Aura wasn't that useful at the moment, given her overall low stats and lack of a specific use-case for it. As the bridge stat between the physical and magical, she usually used it for helping to apply her stats to the tools she used... but that still didn't matter much.

In any case, it seemed like she finally had her paper working.

Step one was to peel away the outermost layer of the reeds she chose. Something about the exterior interfered with the later processes. Once it was peeled, she needed to chop up the reed into pieces about the size of her knuckle, and then boil it in water for several hours, refilling the water as needed.

Once boiled, she needed to add lye, or just a few handfuls of clean ash, and let it sit for about a day. Then, the pieces were fished out of the water and allowed to dry out on a rock, which took about half a day in total thanks to the eternally-available daylight.

Once they were dry, Henrietta could then half-tear, half-grind the reed bits into fluffy pieces, at which point she needed to boil them all once again, stirring it the entire time it took to heat up. But, once it started to actually boil, she could remove it from the kiln-vent being used for the process and let it start to cool down.

At that point, she would take a frame made out of reeds and with a set of thin reed strands crisscrossed into a basic strainer, and drag it like a net through the hot water. Doing so picked up the pieces of pulp into a fairly consistent layer, and after an average of three collection passes, she had enough pulp that she could dump it out on her reed drying mats, then make a few more pieces of paper out of the rest of the pulp.

Once the batch was done, she would then cover the reed mats with more reeds on the top, weighing it down with rocks, and letting that stand for about a day.

And at the end of that whole process, she had paper!

It didn't look anything like the paper she was mostly used to, of course. It was a faded green-brown instead of pure white, and the edges were quite rounded - no danger of a papercut from these - and the sizes and even shapes of the sheets varied a fair bit, but averaged out to be a little larger than her two hands placed side-by-side.

Physically, it didn't smell like anything too pleasant. A bit like smoke, a bit like cut grass, and a bit like dust. But magically, it gave off the wonderful scent of a library or bookstore, the slightly musty scent that came from hundreds of old books. It was exactly what she was looking for, and the smell of Elemental Card was one of utter triumph to her.

She'd been worried that, without the ability to Attune with her current setup, to translate its form away from 'reeds' to 'paper,' the elemental resonance might not work the same, but her worries being unfounded was the best possible result. It did mean that when Clark tried to 'helpfully' [Unblemish] a spot away at one point the entire thing fell apart, but because she wasn't trying to magically repair her creation and they weren't in a particularly high-magic area, it probably wouldn't otherwise matter.

She made a couple batches of paper before she was really happy with the stack she had available to her. Henrietta expected that unlocking her subskills would take a few tries, and really didn't want to be forced to wait a day or more before she could continue her attempts.

Of course, paper required an instrument, and Henrietta would start with a brush.

Like most of the things they made, it was of course made from an appropriately-sized reed, this one dried out near the fire until it was extra-stiff. Then, Henrietta took some of her own hair - it was more than long enough for the few centimeters needed for this - and bound it into a brushhead using some clay as her glue. That was then stuffed into the end of her reed, and she had herself a brush.

It wasn't that easy, of course, and getting all of her hairs to align proved harder than she'd expected, but it wasn't that bad either.

[Refined Calligraphy]

Henrietta conjured her ink directly onto the brush-head itself, the black liquid coalescing and nearly dripping off before she started writing.

What she wrote wasn't particularly important at the moment. She simply was growing accustomed to the feel of the brush in her hand, seeing the way her ink seeped into the page, and how it all came together into a cohesive unit.

At the moment, Henrietta cared about a single subskill above all others: ⟨Epizeuxis⟩. The subskill was named for the literary technique of repetition, and it certainly lived up to that name. Like all subskills, it granted an additional facet to her existing skill, a new way in which it could be used and would grow as it was used. In this case, a single brushstroke would be mirrored multiple times over, each glyph or word written by her hand duplicated approximately as many times as she had levels in [Refined Calligraphy].

Right here and right now, that would be effectively an eightfold increase in power. Sure, her wings wouldn't benefit from being summoned eight times - she couldn't pass them off to her teammates for their use, not without the [Designate Captain] skill - but eight pseudowyverns, eight ink-flails, eight times as many inklings working in the brick-making production line?

She'd aim for ⟨Amanuensis⟩ at some point in the future, because the two subskills were multiplicatively powerful in conjunction with her Sketchbook, but it wasn't as useful on its own.

Also, earning ⟨Epizeuxis⟩ was easier... though painful.

Once she was confident she had a solid impression of the brush in her hand, Henrietta subsumed it. Because of how small it was, the process was almost instantaneous, and she copied it with as much detail as she could manage. The remaining husk was discarded, and Henrietta quickly used a sheet of paper to conjure the inkling version of her brush, delighting in how smooth the process went compared to finger-painting on her arm.

Henrietta used [Refined Calligraphy] again, confirming that the feel of the brush was the exact same as before, started drawing a circle on a piece of paper, and took a deep breath to steady herself.

Then, she snapped the brush in half.

Normally, when one of her inklings was destroyed, it simply vanished in a puff of Shadow. There was no particular feedback, nothing indicating that it had gone away. It was a part of her, but no more a part of her than her shadow was. If someone shined a light on her shadow, she wouldn't feel it.

But, because she was actively using a skill through it, her mana was far more involved in the process. Enough to make her notice that the mana was suddenly cut off, suddenly disrupted, but still not painful. However, [Refined Calligraphy] was the skill she used to make and repair inklings, so the mana didn't exactly just go away. Instead, her Sketchbook drew on the mana in an attempt to fix the brush, and much like a starfish cut in half, it tried to fix the brush from both halves.

Which was where the pain came from. Her Sketchbook was 'meant' to record and reproduce things in reality. A single item, a single sketch, a single copy. It was a part of her Shadow, a portion of the impact she left on the world around her. For a brief moment, a single part of her was drawn in two directions at once, her soul lightly tearing itself as her Shadow tried to separate from itself. It was like intentionally breaking her own hand, but spiritual.

In the midst of that pain, for a brief moment two brushes existed, both of them drawn from the exact same part of her and both doing the same thing on two different pieces of paper. A circle with a line down the middle. Nothing particularly meaningful, but it was still a very emphasized piece of her legacy.

Then the two brushes vanished, and the section of the Sketchbook it had been recorded on finished tearing itself away. Henrietta flinched and rubbed where her neck met her shoulder for the phantom pain. It would recover in a few days.

But now, she had to test to ensure it worked.

Her new writing implement was much more basic - just a short length of reed, cut in half and notched, making something reminiscent of a crude fountain pen.

[Refined Calligraphy]. ⟨Epizeuxis⟩.

Her pen drew a straight line, and on the piece of paper next to it, two more identical lines appeared.

Complete success.