The day after the Brotherhood of Peace was officially formed, Greg woke up to find Felix pacing back and forth in the workshop, talking to himself, and Bork sitting nearby looking sad. Greg already knew his day was going to be challenging, even though it was only a little bit past sunrise.
"What's happening now?" Greg asked, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.
Felix spun around with a lot of energy. "Sensei! I thought about it all night and came up with something wonderful!"
Greg said, "Every time you have a plan, I already can think of many scenarios of what would happen."
"No, no, listen to me!" Felix ran over and waved his arms in the air at Bork. "Isn't our little dwarf here in trouble? He hates blacksmiths and yet still wanted to feel what it's like to be a blacksmith, but the sound of hammering makes him sick. That's the whole problem for him!"
Greg said, "I know. That's why I told him to file."
"But that's not a real answer! That's just putting off the problem!" Felix was almost shaking now. "What if we could completely block out the sound so Bork could forge without actually hearing the hammering?"
Bork looked up with a little bit of hope. "Is that even possible?"
"In my world, yes!" Felix said. "We had these things that were called headsets or headphones."
"You put them on your ears, and they play music or sounds that drown out everything else. Some of them even had special noise-canceling technology that could get rid of certain frequencies."
"Headphones?" Lylia had come out of her cooking area, even though she didn't want to. "Like earmuffs?"
"It's similar, but much more advanced!" Felix took out his notebook and started drawing quickly. "They had padded pads that fit around your ears and had small speakers inside that could play any sound you wanted."
"People used them to listen to music while they worked out, studied, or traveled."
Seraphine walked over to look at his rough sketch. "The idea is excellent. If you could make a sound barrier that also gives Bork pleasant stimulation, it might stop him from reacting badly to hammering sounds."
"That's right!" Felix pointed at her with excitement. "Lady of science gets it!"
"Don't call me science lady," Seraphine said, but she was already looking at the sketch. "The hard part would be making the internal sound generation mechanism without using modern electronics."
"That's where Sensei comes in!" Felix looked at Greg with hopeful eyes. "You can make anything!"
"You made a person out of a ladle! You can definitely make magical headphones!"
Greg looked at the drawing, then at Bork's hopeful face, and finally at Felix's crazy excitement. "I don't even know where to begin with that."
"That hasn't stopped you before!" Felix was adamant. "You just make things and hope for the best, don't you? That's how you do things!"
Greg muttered, "It's not really a method," but he was already thinking.
The idea made sense. Maybe Bork's body wouldn't react so badly if he could wear something that blocked out hammer sounds and gave him other sounds to focus on.
Greg said, "The problem is that I don't have a plan."
"I can't just make something this complicated without knowing how it should work."
Felix's face lit up as if someone had just allowed him unlimited time to play games. "Oh! Oh! I just thought of something about my Infinite Luck System!"
He began to wave his hands around, as if he were using his invisible system interface. "When it turned on yesterday, I didn't read this whole part because I was too excited about the cat summoning."
"Let me look at the full description..."
Everyone waited while Felix read quietly. His face went from confused to surprised to overjoyed.
"SENSEI! My system doesn't just call cats!" Felix looked like he was going to burst with excitement. "It says here that my Infinite Luck ability can sometimes bring back useful information from my past life!"
"It only works when I really need it, and it's very rare. It can show up as blueprints, recipes, or technical information."
Marina came to the door with her morning coffee and said, "That's very helpful, feels almost too suspicious."
"That's how luck works!" Felix was already paying close attention to his system. "Alright, okay, let me give it a shot. I need to focus on what we need, see it clearly, and hope my luck stat is high enough."
He shut his eyes, took a deep breath, and held out his hands as if he were trying to call up a spirit. For a long time, nothing happened. Then, slowly, a faint golden light began to shine between his hands.
"It's working!" Bork said something in a low voice.
The light grew stronger, twisting and coming together to form a solid shape. Felix was holding what looked like a rolled-up piece of parchment when the light went out. It definitely hadn't been there a second before.
"Wow, it really worked!" Felix opened the parchment to show detailed technical drawings of what he called headphones, along with notes in a language that looked like modern English but that everyone could read. "My luck system really worked!"
Greg carefully looked over the blueprint. The design was surprisingly detailed. It showed not only the outside of the building but also the inside, with parts labeled as things like "speaker diaphragm," "cushioned ear pads," "adjustable headband," and "sound isolation chamber."
"This is amazing," Seraphine said as she read over his shoulder. "The idea is simple, but putting it into practice would need very careful work. To make sound, these speaker parts would have to vibrate at certain frequencies."
"Can you do it, Master?" Elwen asked in a low voice.
Greg looked at the blueprint for a long time, but his mind was already working through the steps. He'd need thin metal for the diaphragms, soft leather or cloth for the padding, some kind of magic to make sound without electronics, and a frame that could fit Bork's head comfortably.
"Maybe," Greg finally said. "But I need some unusual materials to accomplish it. That blueprint says something about a sound crystal, Felix."
"Do we even have something like that?"
"Oh!" Everyone was startled when Mira suddenly appeared.
Elwen said, "Mira, stop doing that, or you'll give us a heart attack!"
"Hehehe~ sorry, force of habit."
"Master-forger-darling, I found some beautiful singing stones in your scrap pile last week! I put them in the third drawer from the left and sorted them by pitch."
"Singing rocks?" Lylia looked like she didn't understand. "Those are very rare. They are often used in expensive musical instruments."
Greg shrugged and said, "They were in the scrap pile. I thought they were just rocks that made noise."