Chương 9: Three MacGyvers out of a possible ten

>>This is fun. George was clicking the button with one hand and grinding his draw skill with the other. He found that he could push the trike away with his foot and then think draw, and it would swivel around and roll back toward him.

"Not having a voice, it is a little hard to tell when it's sarcasm," George said. >>This is fun. [Sarcasm] The range of the draw skill was at least as wide as the cradle—so twenty feet. Maybe it was his imagination, but it was harder to pull the tricycle back from across the room. About half the time, it just tipped over and went still. If it landed on its side, he could only make it lurch an inch before it stopped. >>Bonus coming in 20 seconds. Level coming in about five minutes.

New Milestone Achievement: You've reached 50, 000. Bonus unlocked: +5 gold. >>Whatcha gonna get? You'll only have five gold after your big spending spree against spider's orders.

"Hang on," George said.

"I'm thinking about something." >>Literally all I can do is hang on. George cast draw again, and the tricycle rolled over to him. It looked cheap—bright red with three black wheels, white pedals on the front. It was built around a thin metal chassis with a footplate between the rear wheels. It even had a bell, which felt like a two-for-one amenity. He stopped clicking and tipped the trike onto two wheels and the seat. Focusing on one pedal, he tried draw. The wheel spun.

He mistimed it and the wheel stalled, trying to reverse. After a few tries, he got it—catching the pedal at the bottom of the spin and making it go faster. >>George. While I respect your novel training method, to the untrained eye it looks like you are playing with your trike.

"I have an idea," George said. >>Your idea has thus far failed to cure my boredom—which is bad enough—but it has also interrupted your clicking. You have broken Nod's First Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Stop Clicking That Button. Which is followed closely by Nod's Second Commandment: Lest Thou Get Eaten by Werewolves. George had experimented a bit with the bind skill. He could make things stick together so that it took a little force to pull them apart.

He tried binding his blanket to the wall and it stuck there but he could still pull it off the wall with a quick jerk. He turned the tricycle over so that the handlebars and the seat were on the ground and all three wheels were sticking up in the air. He tried draw again, and the front wheel spun. He scooted the whole thing closer to the wall so that the pedals on the front wheel were revolving about two inches away from the wall.

Then he cast bind at the handlebars and the seat so that the trike stuck to the ground. He put the button on the wall at the point where it would intersect the spin of one of the pedals and used bind on it. Next, he tried to draw the pedal again to make it spin and, sure enough, as the pedal spun, it struck the button on the wall, producing one click.

"It's a start." >>I'll give it three Macgyvers out of a possible ten.

"Jerk." >>Don't break your button. That'd really cramp your whole style.

"Something tells me I could do a lot worse to that button than this and it would be just fine," George said as he practiced drawing the pedals around. >>You know that level-up that was five minutes away is now 11 minutes and 37 seconds away. Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation. >>And your trial timer is now ticking down at an alarming rate. >>But keep doing your thing…

>>It isn't like our mutual survival depends—for some inane reason—on you clicking that button faster than what the Trike-O-Rama currently seems capable of.

"You have no imagination. Think about the possibilities here." George kept missing the timing on drawing the pedal and making the wheel stop. >>Don't talk to me about imagination. I am basically squatting in your prefrontal cortex. >>Level in 13 minutes 45 seconds. 79 clicks a minute. Down from an average of 270. George tried it for a few more minutes and then started to get the hang of it. He could draw the pedal consistently at just the right moment to keep the wheel spinning. >>8 minutes 9 seconds.

122 clicks a minute.

"Hush." With the trike upside-down, the two back wheels and the bar connecting them were doing nothing, so George took the whole thing off the wall and tried to break the back wheels off of the trike. George jumped on the thin metal frame. It bent. He stomped again. And again. The trike snapped in two. >>This is why we can't give you nice things.

On the last stomp, the seat, handlebars, and the front wheel were flung to one side of the room, leaving the two back wheels, the middle bar connecting them, and the bottom bar in a pile at George's feet. He picked up the back half and leaned his whole weight into it, rocking up and down until the metal started to weaken and bend. >>That separate skill would come in handy right now. Be it noted.

When the joint between the wheels and the bottom bar became so weak that he could bend it with his hands, he gave one final jerk, and the two pieces came apart. The two back wheels were held onto the bar by small nuts that he could unscrew with his fingers. He took one wheel off and left the other one connected to the bar. When he had disassembled the whole thing, he gathered all the pieces back together and started to rebuild his button-clicking machine.

He stuck the handlebars and seat back on the ground so that the front wheel could spin freely next to the wall, but now it only had a pedal on one side. Next, he used bind to assemble the pieces of the trike as he wanted them and attach it to the floor and wall. Then he stood back and looked at his creation. The trike contraption was stuck to the wall just as it had been in the first version. But now the front wheel had an axle sticking out of one side, with the far side stabilized by the other wheel on the wall.

>>But what is it?

"A button clicker," George said. >>I don't see any hamsters around here to run on that wheel, buddy. And what you were doing with the draw skill wasn't cutting it. But, oh, look. There's the button on the floor there. Maybe you should just click it with your hands.

"Watch this," George said. George picked up the flight blanket, bit one edge to start a rip, and tore it in two. He tied the ends together into a long cord, used bind and a knot to attach it to the axle, and spun the wheel so the cord wound around the bar. He set the button back on the wall where the pedal would hit it each rotation. When he pulled the cord, it unwound, spinning the axle. The front wheel turned, the pedal struck the button—click. Click. Click. He wrapped the cord again and pulled harder.

The cadence increased. George refreshed bind on the joints, wound the cord tight, and yanked. The pedal blurred, rattling against the button in a rapid-fire burst. The axle spun fast enough to rewind the cord on its own before slowing. All George had to do was pull hard again to reverse the direction of the wheel's spin and repeat the process. Within a minute, George was yanking the cord repeatedly as the contraption made a noisy, machine-gun burst of clicks faster than George could even manage by hand.

>>New level in 3 minutes 12 seconds. 372 clicks per minute. >>Color me impressed, Eli Whitney. >>You managed to significantly slow the trial timer with that click rate. It isn't as slow as it used to be, but this helped a lot. Then George pulled again. The wheel ripped off the wall and the contraption clattered to the ground.

"Still needs some work." George said and bent down to set it up again. Then he saw a new notification. New Milestone Achievement: You've crafted your first device Bonus unlocked: +5 gold, +2 Skill Points, and Skill Tree Unlocked Courtesy of his identify ability, a tooltip popped up over the former tricycle with a label that said: <George's Ramshackle Trike Clicker>"I assume that name is coming from you." >>Nah, bro. I think that is just the universe calling a spade a spade.

"Whatever," George said.

"What is the skill tree?" >>Skills upgrade by themselves if you use them enough. Or you can take a shortcut and buy skill upgrades with Skill points. So draw 1 becomes draw 2. It branches out to a bunch of different options too once you get into it. Hence, skill tree. George put the button clicker back together and started using it again. He found that if he mentally refreshed the bind skill on all the joints, it fell apart less. Slightly less.

Nod kept him apprised of his clicks per minute until George told him to stop.

"It's about the concept, not how fast the machine is clicking the button. The point is: I might be able to build an even better button clicker. I can't see any other use to put these crafting skills to," George said. >>Forget about your broken trike for a minute. It's…. level-up time! Cue the confetti.