Ep. 1107 Homeward Bound Part 16 (Patreon)

Lin says "Oh, I thought it was finished."

"Nope. Not yet anyway. After all, I didn't want to waste time doing everything else until I knew if this much would even work."

Lin says "Fair enough. Anyway, I should get going. I have to go teach the four groups about the shadow plane. I will be taking the kids with me."

"Alright. I think I will take a nap before I do any more work."

Lin says "Good plan. When I get back I will come and wake you up."

Her wink makes me grin, but as soon as she is gone I realize there is a problem. Teaching the groups is bound to take at least a couple of hours, which will be ten for me. I may be fairly tired right now, but I doubt I will sleep for ten hours.

Since I want to be asleep when she gets back, that means I can't take a nap just yet. Luckily, I still have manga to read and as soon as I start reading I no longer feel tired. So, I read for a few hours, have a small snack, and then I go take a nap.

Hours later, Lin wakes me up as promised and I wake up with a huge smile on my face. A couple of hours pass and then Lin and I head downstairs to have dinner with the kids. After dinner I go and move the gate to the shadow plane out to the castle's courtyard.

I have already added the elves that are in the groups from a list that Brightfire gave me. They can now enter the castle, but I don't want them trooping through my workshop. Once that is done, I go back to working on the healer golem, there is still a lot for me to do.

For one thing, I am going to have to give it some intelligence and personality. Casting spells is one thing, but I can't just program when to use those spells. That kind of decision making is something that requires actual intelligence.

If it were a normal golem the programming wouldn't be too hard, but doing it in divine runes is much harder. Unfortunately, the divine rune language is ancient and doesn't have any modern words. I also can't just go and create new runes, I've tried and it was a horrible experience.

Not only did it not work, but trying got me lectured for an hour by Seronia. So I have to use a lot of runes to try and explain each modern concept. This makes the programming a lot more complicated, which also means there are more chances for errors.

On the plus side, I am getting a lot more adept at using the divine rune language. This allows me to spot and correct a few errors that I made in the earlier programming. Hopefully, this will allow me to catch and fix any other errors that I make.

Now I have to figure out what kind of personality I want to give to the golem. I am going to make it female and I want it to be something that cares about its party members. It also needs to be brave enough to fight when it needs to but without being a battle maniac.

The last thing any party wants is a healer that rushes into battle when they don't need to.  Besides, it's better to have a caring personality, it reduces the chances of it going rogue. I don't want to make the golem to be on the level of an artificial spirit, but more like a droid.

I have to be careful and restrain myself, otherwise I will end up with a sentient golem. Instead of trying to program specific personality traits, I keep to general traits. If I get too specific, I will end up putting too much programming into the golem and it will definitely become sentient.

In the end, I decide to go with an anime type personality, but not a main character. A side character, the helpful girl behind the guild counter type of character. After making up my mind, I take a short break to eat some lunch and then get to programming.

Now that I have a plan, doing the programming gets easier, but it still takes time. While I am working, Jarvis comes and informs me that Brightfire's four groups have returned with no casualties. She plans to take the groups into the shadow plane every day as long as the castle is available.

That is fine by me, this will allow the elves in the groups to level up and get stronger. It will also give the kids a chance to get some experience fighting with different people. The kids may not be able to level up, but they have other ways of getting stronger.

What they need the most is practice and experience in using their abilities in combat. This will give them that for sure and they might even find things that they need in the shadow plane. Mulan and Mushu can get stronger by eating strong magical fires from what I have seen.

Albion gets stronger by purifying corrupt things and Nala gets stronger by eating beasts. Other than that, they also seem to slowly get stronger just by growing older. Albion is going to be the hardest to help, he has the hardest requirement to find.

Now that we have people going into the shadow plane, Ekard will be easy to help. However, I have no idea where I can find corrupted things for Albion to purify. I am not even sure what would count as corruption that he could gain strength from.

Maybe he will get lucky and find something corrupted in the shadow plane. Other than that, I don't know of any way that I can help him currently. I will just have to keep my eyes open for any possibility that comes up.

There is nothing I can do for now, so I go back to finishing the golem's programming. Once it is done, I go back through it a couple of times, fixing the errors. I also make the final adjustments to the golem's body, making it have female features.

I don't go as far as making it anatomically correct, this isn't going to be that type of golem. Although, if I hadn't met Lin, I would probably be trying to make something like that by now. I am glad that I met her, for that and many other reasons, I should make sure she knows that.

Even if she already knows, which isn't wise to assume, it never hurts to tell her. Women like hearing things like that, or at least that is what my limited experience has led me to believe. So, instead of activating the golem, I go looking for Lin to see what she is up to.

However, as soon as I go upstairs the kids spot me and run over to intercept me. They tell me all about their trip into the shadow plane and then ask me a bunch of questions. It seems that they are having trouble figuring out how to fight alongside 'normal' people.