A stream of notifications piled into Lorelei's mind.
She stood, shadows flickering around her in the campfire's light, and absent-mindedly rubbed at her split knuckles. The warmth of the fire seemed to mock the cold, brutal reality she’d just embraced.
You have defeated [Kobold], Level 2
20 XP Earned
Quest Update: Fuck Shit Up! 3/5
You have defeated [Kobold], Level 3
25 XP Earned
Quest Update: Fuck Shit Up! 4/5
You have defeated [Kobold], Level 2
20 XP Earned
Quest Update: Fuck Shit Up! 5/5
Congratulations, Level Up
New Skill Available: *Charmed Life (Active): You seem to spend a lot of time getting hurt. Have a heal skill. But, to make it interesting, let's randomise how much healing it does. Oh, and just for shits and giggles, it will give you a random status effect for 2 mins. 30 MP cost. No cooldown.
Lorelei Norton: Fortuna's Herald
Level 2
Experience 6/200
Health 250/250
Mana 220/220
Primary Stats
Strength 8
Agility 15 (+1)
Stamina 13(+1)
Intellect 18(+2)
Spirit 15(+1)
Secondary Stats
Critical Strike 5.5% (+0.5%)
Haste 7.5% (+0.5%)
Mastery 4.5% (+0.5%)
Versatility 3.5% (+0.5%)
Skills
Lucky Strike (Passive)- Sometimes you hit, sometimes you miss, sometimes you accidentally help the enemy. It's a surprise!
Coin Toss Conundrum (Active)- Flip a coin to decide your next move. Heads, you unleash a devastating attack; tails, you heal your enemy. Bonus points for dramatic mid-air coin flipping. Mana Cost: 50. Cooldown: 2 mins.
Random Resilience (Active)- You might shrug off a dragon's breath or trip over a pebble. Life's a lottery! Mana Cost: 100% of available pool. Cooldown: 24 hours.
Charmed Life (Active): You do seem to spend a lot of time getting hurt. Have a heal skill. But, to make it interesting, let's randomise how much healing it does. Oh, and just for shits and giggles, it will give you a random status effect for 2 mins. 30 MP cost. No cooldown.
Equipment
Double-Headed Coin of Fate (Nerfed)
Professions
N/A
Talents ***(1 choice available at Lvl 2)****
Fortune's Blessing: Reduces the cooldown of
It turned out that no matter how angry you were or how many times
Title Update: Kobold's Worst Nightmare. I created this as a useless gag, but you seem to have something... personal against these little fellows. Which I absolutely dig. So, let's turn it into a proper title. 35% increased damage to Kobolds. Fuck Those Lizards.
This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.
Quest Completed: Fuck Shit Up! 5/5.
Rewards: I don't think anyone was quite expecting anything that... well, primaeval. It wasn't what I had in mind in terms of 'style,' but I suppose Early Tarantino-esque is a 'style.' Go on then, have a [Cloak of the Wanderer] for your trouble, you little scamp.
Lorelei felt something soft settle around her shoulders, and a notification that her Stamina had moved up (+2) flickered in her mind. The cloak was warm, a comforting weight starkly contrasting with the bloody scene she had just created.
She still didn’t move.
After an intense—and loud—few minutes, it was silent in the underpass now. The only sounds were the crackling of the fire and the occasional drip of something viscous hitting the ground, a slow, morbid metronome to the end of her first real battle.
How often had she walked through here to and from work? The first few times, she’d been terrified she was going to get mugged—either by the busker blasting out an awful ‘90s acoustic setlist, one of the many homeless guys wrapped up in their sleeping bags, or by the horny little gangs of teenagers that whistled and hooted at her as she passed.
Was there any version of reality where she could have imagined herself fighting back against them if they had tried to take her handbag? Of course not. And now here she was, standing over three bodies, and she didn’t feel anything.
"Guide?"
*** Help Message ***
So that you know, you have spent more time interacting with Guide than 97.4% of your planet's population. Now, it might be that number is artificially high because of, you know, the colossal death toll. Perhaps all the people most likely to ask-questions-first-then-shoot-later are the ones currently lying in pieces worldwide? In fact, that's a pretty solid theory. Let's run with that. Where was I? Oh, yes. Basically, I'm calling you needy. I'm pretty busy, so make your own insult based on that.
Lorelei ignored the snark. "Can you turn off my emotional dampening, please?" There was quite a long pause. So long, that she was about to make the request again when the ticker tape started running.
*** Help Message ***
I don't think that would be a very good idea.
"Why not?"
*** Help Message ***
Look, sweetie, Player-wise, you're not doing too badly. I mean, I don't think I've ever heard of the bar for a 'pass' being so low as 'still-alive-two-hours-in,' but that's the situation during this integration, so let's run with it. Since suppressing the automatic response to abhor violence, we've started to see things stabilise a bit out there.
Lorelei opened her mouth to protest at the absurdity of that statement, but the Message continued to spool out.
I know that seems counterintuitive, but those opening few moments were a clusterfuck. You had a bunch of people with no conscience, no morals, and no scruples go balls-to-the-wall crazy when their powers came in. We've never seen anything like it. There's an Assassin in... what was it called, France? Funky name for a Kingdom. Well, he's already Level 20 based purely on player kills. I had to create a bespoke Dungeon just to keep him off-grid for a while.
"But what does that have to do with stopping the rest of us from caring about the violence?"
*** Help Message ***
The powers-that-be miscalculated the integration's impact on . . . let's call them 'normies'. People who choose a Class and didn't immediately think 'Fucking A, let's kill things'. It would be fair to say that the 'normies' were overwhelmed by the situation. Now, that's not too much of a problem. It happens. But, whereas things usually smooth out, you had a bunch of people run absolute riot at the same time. Dampening intense emotions leveled the playing field a little.
"Leveling the playing field to the lowest common denominator? You've made us all okay with killing things!" As she said this, Lorelei was painfully aware she was standing in a puddle of Kobold blood, the thick, coppery liquid soaking into the fabric of her shoes.
*** Help Message ***
Hey, don't get pissy with me. It's your fucking species! It's not my fault you're basically an even split between psychos and snowflakes. Should an integration have begun on a planet where people still enjoy Reality TV? Absolutely not. That's our bad—lessons to be learned. Someone will be sent for an away day and some intensive training. But we are where we are, and we're dealing.
"By making us all as bad as each other?"
*** Help Message ***
By giving you all a fighting chance to make it through alive. Look, as I'm sure you can imagine, I've got lots going on, and I cannot spare the bandwidth to argue with a Level 2 who is one lousy coin toss away from expiration. You're doing okay, Player Norton. Better than some. Not as good as most. So, I'll tell you what. You've finished your first Quest and are not as immediately squishy. I'll turn your emotional dampening off for ten seconds so you can get the whole 'oh, fuck' experience, and then it's going back on, and you need to leave me alone. Deal?
With reluctance, Lorelei nodded. "Deal."
Instantly, she felt the emotional dampening rise, almost like a physical thing. It was like a wave that started at her toes and washed up her body, leaving her panting in pure revulsion.
The full impact of her day hit her like a truck—how early had the Guide begun the suppression effect?—her blazing argument with the Prick in her bedroom, opening the email at work to learn of her firing, realising she was homeless, Steve the Sparky, the integration, Steve the Sparky Orc...
Pulses of horror lanced through her. She felt the comforting (odd choice of word, but it had been an odd day) pretence this was all a psychotic break, shatter and fall away.
This was real. It was happening. And, my God, it was awful.
Tears streaming down her face, she clutched at her heart, feeling it beat faster than she had ever experienced in her life. She collapsed to her knees, the hard ground beneath her offering no comfort, only the cold, unyielding truth of the situation.
She remembered having a panic attack at school once. She hadn't revised properly for a French test, and when she looked at the paper, she couldn’t answer any of it. That sort of thing simply did not happen to her, and she had begun hyperventilating. Madame Allard had taken her out of the room and given her a biscuit. One of those posh ones the school kept for visitors. This was as bad as that, multiplied by a thousand.
How was she going to survive? There were people and things out there doing awful things. They had powers beyond her understanding, and—what had the Guide said?—some were already up to Level 20!
She was going to die.
Lorelei looked at her hands, remembering how she had attacked the Kobolds. And even if she wasn't immediately slaughtered the moment she popped her head out of the underpass, she couldn’t possibly do such a thing again. She beat a living thing to death with her bare hands! And it wore trousers and was carrying a little notebook. How had she done something so appalling? This was a living nightmare. She couldn't possibly...
The dampening switched back on.
Lorelei took a few deep breaths and stood back up, dusting... stuff off her knees. Okay. So, she was okay with having the emotional dampening for now. Just whilst all the massive changes in the world bed in and she worked out how she fitted into things now. But the second she felt up to it, she would ask for it to be turned off permanently.
A little voice in the back of Lorelei's head—the one who had tried to warn her about the Prick, the one who knew when she was about to eat one chocolate too many, the one who always recognised when she was in danger of missing the bus—shook its head sadly.
As she tended to, Lorelei ignored it.
She puffed air out of her lungs as if trying to expel the bad energy and looked around at the carnage she had wrought. The remains of the Kobolds lay scattered about her in grotesque poses, their blood and viscera painting the ground in shades of red and black. She found she did not need to touch the bodies to loot them (that was the right word, wasn't it?). She just had to linger close by and think, ‘Loot.’
It turned out they weren’t carrying anything she wanted. They each dropped a few copper coins, which vanished when she touched them, but nothing else. Frowning, she wondered out loud, "Where did the coins go?"
*** Quest Awarded ***
**Money, money, money**
Objective: It’s not a glamorous life, but you’ve discovered you can earn cold, hard cash by slaughtering creatures. Earn enough to buy something useful.
Quest Description: Everything you kill drops money. The greater the challenge, the greater the bounty. Your money is stored in the Great Bank in the Sky, and you can access your balance by thinking . . . I probably should have put more thought into this, but let us say ‘Balance.’ Your mission, if you choose to accept it—please accept it, there’s a whole quest tree that grows from this I put quite a lot of time into—is to get enough to buy a nice [Uncommon] robe you can wear with your cloak.
Collect 50 copper coins: I don’t mind how you get them. But, you know, killing things works...*
Rewards: One entry token to the Mystical Market.
The words faded away from Lorelei's vision. She bunched her hands together for a moment and then took her Double-Headed Coin of Fate out of her pocket. "Looks like I need to make some cash," she said, striding toward the underpass stairs more confidently than she felt.