Coffee Shop Author Kit

System Message. Posting Book 8 spoilers will result in "acceleration" per our rules.

Donut looked at the cat art with distaste. “Am I a joke to you, Carl?”^[1]

The Coffee Shop Author Kit is a crafting tool consisting of a magical sheet of paper, a quill pen, and a little capped jar filled with black ink. It allows users to copy information from a second (or third) page of their scratchpad onto the magical paper or from the magical paper to their scratchpad.^[2]

AI Description

Coffee Shop Author Kit.

Alcoholism and crippling self-doubt not included.

So you want to be a writer. It started with sappy poetry in middle school. You soon graduated to Naruto fan-fiction. By the time you crash landed face-first into adulthood, your brain swelled with the misguided notion that your shitty novel with a self-insert protagonist sporting a traumatic childhood would change the world. Spoiler alert. Nobody is going to read your autobiography disguised as a space vampire and minotaur romance. You and every other half-wit out there with a nearby Starbucks and a laptop is writing the same bile. What you’re really doing is inadvertently live-blogging the story of human mediocrity, and the universe is now a better place that the Syndicate has put a stop to it all.

Anyway, this is a magical sheet of paper. You will find you now have a second tab on your scratchpad in your interface. You can write something on this paper, and it will appear in the scratchpad and vice versa. If the proper spell and glyphs are accurately copied onto this paper, you can present the sheet at a market kiosk, and a scroll will appear for sale. Or if you have a printing press, you can make your own scrolls. Or even your own tome if you think you have the chops.^[3]

Description

Typically used by scholar and arcanist classes with skills related to scroll-making, the Coffee Shop Author Kit's stated purpose is to allow crawlers to profit from mass-manufacturing scrolls or tomes. When a spell or glyph is correctly transcribed onto the magical paper, the paper is classified as a "scroll" and can be sold for profit in the marketplace. As long as the spell is written on the magical parchment, you can sell unlimited copies of the scroll in the market; however, once you erase the spell from your scratchpad (and therefore from the paper), it is removed from the market. With a magical printing press, you can presumably make an imprint of the spell and produce multiple types of scrolls.^[2]

The owner of the Coffee Shop Author Kit can add text or drawings to their mental scratchpad. The cap of the inkwell will pop off, the magical pen will dip in the ink, and automatically begin to transcribe the information onto the paper. When the crawler erases their scratchpad, the information fades from the paper.^[2]

Story

Book 4

Carl receives the Coffee Shop Author Kit in a Gold Makeup Sex is the Best Sex Box awarded for the You're the Reason Why Daddy Drinks! Achievement on the Fifth Floor. His immediate response, after trolling Donut, is to laugh and say, “This is both cool and completely useless.”^[1]

It is not completely useless.

Carl, Donut, and Katia Grim begin communicating in secret by leaving messages in the Personal Space toilet stall, which is the only place shielded from both viewers and the Borant Corporation. They started by writing on the inside of the metal door with Mordecai's dry erase markers, but the Cleaner Bot erased it. Finally, Carl used a magnetic clip looted from the Juicer's boss chambers to affix it to the door.^[4] He notes:

If Katia wrote something using the magical pen, It’d appear in my scratchpad, and I could respond right away. Donut could also use it, but it required her to jump on the shelf housing the ink and to write on the paper using her mouth. She’d only attempted it once. She wrote, I AM NOT USING THIS, CARL, and that was it.^[5]

References