18: Size Doesn’t Mean Strength

With the heart acquired, I next had to create my Spirit Anvil. I had the journal in my hand, ready to get to work. That was easier said than done, but not because the task itself was hard. No, I had another obstacle.

“Keiko, you need to rest,” Elena said, hand on hip. “It’s mid-afternoon, how long will making this anvil take?”

“I don’t know?” I pouted, staring up at her with what I hoped was an intimidating glare. We both knew it wasn’t.

She raised an eyebrow made of pure sass. “Keiko.”

Well, she may have a point, but I had a new secret weapon. With a twirl, I downsized myself to a foot tall and rushed for the door.

“What the fuck?” Elena exclaimed, lunging with her hand outstretched. To my surprise, she actually caught me.

“Hey!” I squeaked, trying to wriggle out of her grasp. Due to my increased strength, I was actually able to push her fingers open and flutter up near her face. “That was super rude!”

“Oh my goodness,” she giggled, reaching up with a single index finger to brush the top of my head. “Your voice is all small and high pitched! You’re adorable!”

“I want to go and make my anvil,” I grumbled, hands on hips.

She snorted out a laugh. “Okay, Tinkerbell. How about you get a good rest tonight, and I come with you to help out tomorrow, okay?”

I fluttered there in midair for several long seconds, until she held out her hand, palm up. I glanced between it and her, then gently landed and pulled my legs into a cross-legged position. “Fine. I’ll stay in tonight. Can we make something yummy for dinner?”

Her hand was so warm and soft. I had to run my fingers over her soft skin, marvelling at the heat of it. Then she leaned down and kissed the top of my head, and it was like being gently bopped by two massive pillows.

“Time to upsize and help me chop vegetables,” she laughed as I stared up at her, a little stunned.

“I can chop them better like this,” I said, although I did what she’d asked and burst back to my usual height. “Holding them would be difficult, though,” I finished, kissing her cheek.

“How in the fuck did you last as long as you did playing guy characters?” she muttered behind me as we made our way towards the kitchen. “You’re more feminine than I am, and I was born this way.”

“I was born this way too,” I shrugged. “I used to love pink things when I was a child, and I was pretty clingy. Dad hated it, kept trying to make me act more manly.”

Handing me a knife and some carrots, she motioned for me to start slicing them. “Your dad doesn’t sound very nice.”

Cutting the carrots into little coins gave me time to think on why I didn’t hate my father. He was a hard-ass through and through, but he was kind at heart.

“He was a bit of a dick sometimes, and he had the emotional availability of a river stone,” I began, watching in my mind’s eye as the thoughts all slotted themselves together into a sentence. “He was a product of the times though. He was born during the Chinese invasion of Japan—The Revenge War, I think it was called—and then grew up through World War Three as a refugee in Toronto. He and my grandfather were always obsessed with preserving the old traditions and shit, all that honor bullshit. They saw me and my brother as vessels to pour all of that stuff into. They were especially concerned because they were pretty old by that time. Dad spent so much money on life extension treatment for my grandfather… that's another story, but yeah.”

“Ah, so just normal, complicated parental controlling crap,” she chuckled, throwing a pan onto the stove, then dosing it with some oil. “My mom wanted me to follow in her footsteps and go into a STEM field. Instead I went into creative ideas.”

“He chilled out a little when grandfather opted out of more treatments to pass peacefully, but not by much,” I said thoughtfully. “He was always caring, though, in his own way. Mom was all hugs and stuff, but if I needed help with schoolwork, figuring out how to fill out forms and stuff, or just generally navigating through the world, he was there to teach me with a godly level of patience.”

Bacon and some sort of fowl went into the pan, and using some tongs, Elena shifted everything so it had proper space. “So like, a typical stoic manly man, then?”

“Pretty much,” I nodded. “I was not what he was expecting out of a son. I liked the swords and bows and shit, but I kept painting pretty pink patterns on them. One time, he gave me this gorgeous katana with a bare wooden scabbard made of bamboo. He came home one day and I’d painted the whole thing in pastel pinks, blues, and whites. I was really proud of it, and you could tell that he was impressed with the skill it took, but also like, so lost for words over the colour choices.”

“Sounds like you were a cute girl when you were younger,” she snorted, reaching over to ruffle my hair. I rolled my eyes. She was being so insistent about the ‘girl’ thing.

Dinner was a yummy stir fry using what we had on hand, and I collapsed on the sofa in a happy little puddle. Having a roommate who could cook was awesome. That night, I read up again on what I needed to do to make this anvil, then went to bed early.

When we arrived at the public smithy the next morning, I saw the guy who’d tried to come onto me hanging around, but he was doing his own thing. Elena and I made our way over to a quiet corner, and together we laid out the materials.

I’d gone and bought a huge fifty pound steel ingot with good stats, rather than mining up my own materials. The gently pulsing turquoise heart of the mushroom boss went down next to it on the rough wooden table. It was kinda crazy looking, with its weird veins and white flesh. Next was the hammer I was going to use, and then the tongs that I would have Elena hold the piece with. Finally, there was the oil and wax mix I’d use to make the protective coating.

“So… what am I doing?” Elena asked, staring at everything like it was going to jump up and attack her.

“So it’s sort of like cooking,” I explained, motioning to the gently burning forge. “I don't have a recipe, or ‘Pattern’ for this anvil, so we're using the experimentation system, which is basically the game’s way of letting you wing it and see what happens. Now, as for the item itself, I have a rough idea of how to go about this…”

I continued to explain my plan for the process,  but her eyes were glazing over fast. “Uh…”

Patting her on the arm, I gave her a bright smile. “On second thought, I’ll just tell you what to do.”

“Alright,” she sighed.

Waiting for the steel to heat took a while, so I explained the basics of what she'd do first, when I’d be asking her to take the steel out of the forge, all that stuff. She understood that just fine. Then, when the steel was a sweet, juicy looking orange colour, I nodded and we began.

Elena promptly dropped the red hot steel when I shrank down into pixie mode, and she blurted, “Are you for real?”

“I get a strength buff,” I told my very large friend with a shrug.

Once the steel was on the anvil, I began to hammer away at one end, thinning it out into a point.  This wasn’t going to be your standard anvil with a flat base, because spirit forging required something else. It needed a spike.

With my size reduced but the hammer staying the same, hitting the steel was like wielding a log with a boulder on the end. Elena did her best not to laugh, but that didn’t stop others from staring at us as we worked.

Once the spike was formed, I had her shove the spike into the larger of the two holes on the big normal anvil, and began to smash down on the top of it. This part took an exceedingly long time to do, and we had to stop for a break in the middle. Funnily enough, what I ended up with looked almost like a mushroom, if the cap was like triple the thickness.

People always think of an anvil as this rectangular shaped lump of metal with a horn at one end, but in reality they could be any old lump of metal that can take a beating.

I kept smashing it with my hammer until it was shaped vaguely like an oversized railway spike with an even bigger spike growing out the side, and then began to shape one end into a horn. When that was roughed out, it was time for the most important part of this whole endeavour.

Putting the half-formed anvil back into the forge to heat once more, I carefully followed it with the spirit heart. Almost immediately, it began to fizzle and pop like frying bacon. A few moments after that, and it was melting into a glowing blue sludge that burned and wisped up like evaporating wax.

The strange spirit mist was slowly absorbed by the steel, turning it an odd blueish colour, but light rather than dark like normal blued steel. When the ectoplasm was entirely gone, I motioned for Elena to take it back out of the forge. From there, it was just a matter of hammering it carefully into its final shape.

“Holy shit, that was hard work,” Elena gasped, collapsing down to her knees when I took the tongs from her.

I grunted, lifting the anvil with my normal, un-buffed strength and dunking it in the oil and wax mixture. It hissed like an irate serpent, and when I pulled it out, it glowed with a vague, internal light. A tooltip appeared, and I almost laughed with glee.

Smithing Pattern Unlocked!Craft this item again using the Pattern to increase your proficiency score with this Pattern.

Crude Spectreheart Field AnvilYou have taken the heart of a greater spirit and infused it into the steel of an anvil. With this tool, you can begin to explore the arcane art of Spirit Forging.

+2% to the quality of the items created using this tool.

“Hell yes!” I exclaimed, placing it down on the larger, mundane anvil. “We damned well did it.”