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More than anything else, you'd like to pick up some supplies for a new hobby you've been interested in for a while, but you'd also like to find some gifts that your friends would appreciate. You decide to put everything else left over after that towards getting your hands on some rarer materials to work at a forge with; things you're unlikely to just come across by chance. With those goals in mind, you make your way to the Central City Mall, a bustling hive of activity, wares, and entertainments.
After making sure you've bought everything you think you could possibly need for cooking some decent meals on the road, you take your time combing through every inch of every shop of the mall to try to find the perfect gifts. You actually had to put a lot of thought into it, considering not only what interests your friends had, but what kinds of things they'd appreciate the most. With Azalea, you know that she prefers things that are natural as opposed to anything processed, and that she's not one for material goods outside of food...so you actually got her a rather tall body of some supposedly rare type of honey that never crystallizes for some reason. For Barbar, you know that practicality trumps all with him, but that he also appreciates comforts even if he usually eschews them on principle - you got him the most comfortable pair of high-end boots you could find, knowing he'd wear them if they were a gift and would secretly enjoy them. As for Harum, he's something of a nerd-of-all-trades as you learned from your time with him, and so you opted to get him the entire collector's set of Basements and Basilisks...which has something like 12 different books and some pretty cool looking toys for it.
After hiding your stash in the truck, with the gifts subtly tucked out of sight under the cooking supplies, you get Harum's help to find the materials and workshop needed for your plan to create some better gear. He seems excited at the prospect, and though you weren't able to get everything ready on the first day, by the second day you were at a PROPER forge with some VERY well refined rods of rare metals to work with. Although you weren't entirely with some of the tools available there, Harum apparently was. As a way to familiarize yourself with their use, and to make sure you didn't mess anything special to you up, you spend the second day creating some armor.
You wanted to preserve your mobility while protecting key points with the armor, and you didn't want to sink too much money into raw materials since you still wanted some left over to improve your claws with. In the end, you and Harum were able to come up with a design that gleamed with a golden sheen, so reflective that you could see yourself in it if you looked straight at it. It was layered, with the outer layer apparently designed to protect it from the elements and decay, while the inner layers were all about maximizing durability with minimal weight. It seemed pretty dang sturdy to you!
