Tamako knocked on the lightly glowing casino door, and snatched her hand away as she was gifted a slight shock by the System for her efforts.

Gambling Quest:

While the System casino resets, break in and steal the owner's casino token.

Chances of failure or Death 99.999999999%

Upon failure or death, lose all ability points.

Accept Quest? Yes/No

******

"No! No! No!" Tamako quickly answered as she backed away.

"What's that?" asked Jen.

Tamako forwarded the quest to Jen as she said, "look at the crazy quest I received when touching the door."

Jen laughed, "from all the messages I'm intercepting, it sounds like everyone else is having a similar reaction as yours. We're pretty much stuck waiting until the casino opens back up."

Tamako could see that Jen was intercepting messages from all around her, and asked, "Have you found out anything?"

Jen shrugged, "Just tons of different 'rumors' as to what will happen tomorrow when the casino opens, but I didn't hear any messages of someone claiming first-hand knowledge of ever seeing someone win a token. However, several messages confirmed that Sam had won a ton of platinum from the casino."

Tamako replied with a grin, "It sounds like we need to go shopping and get our wish list ready! Sam is doing a good job making up for his total lack of fighting skills."

Jen ran her arm around Tamako's elbow, and said, "Onward to the merchant district!" she paused for a moment before saying, "well... let's not be out too long. I need to do some more healing on your arms and legs, and I have an idea about Old Man Pudding. I want to see if I can make some headway with his mental condition."

Jen complained to herself, “Kelly, Sam has it so easy, he has enchantments everywhere that he can just copy, and Tamako has training partners to practice combat techniques with every day. They just don’t appreciate that I have to invent and create all this psych skill ability from scratch!”

****

Frustrated, Jen looked down at action-man while using her psych skill in combination with her normal voice, and said, “I need your help. I’ve tried everything that I know to help Pudding get his sanity back, and nothing has worked. We’re at a bad crossroads if I can’t get through to him. Speak to him, make him receptive to the spell I’m going to attempt and infuse into his mind. It should work just like a technique spell scroll, I hope. I’m sure he has used one at some point in his life. The only difference is, I’m going to push the skill to his brain directly, instead of using a scroll to immediately teach him the skill.” As action-man simply turned away from Jen and starred up at Pudding, Jen said to herself, “That’s not very reassuring, but here goes.”

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Jen entered multi-focus using only her meditation and psych skill. She focused on her meditation skill and its code that she had Sam break out for her. She then accessed Pudding’s stat screen where she could see his level and stats, but she couldn’t gain access to his skills’ screen. This is where she’d failed multiple times. Even though his mind was in shambles from the trauma he experienced, he would actively block her from accessing his skills. However, this time she was going to use her psych skill to bring Pudding over into her onboard headspace. “Pudding man, do you want me to help you or not?” She received an emotion that felt like a confused yes. Jen’s heart leaped. This was more of a response than she received in her last attempt. “Pudding, come with me. I’m going to show you a wonderful skill of mine.”

Jen felt Pudding fighting the mental connection she was making when she had an idea. “Action-man, are you there? Come with me and bring Pudding with you.” Indirectly, through Pudding’s stat screen, Jen was feeling a “lesser” mental connection with action-man. “Success!” Jen thought as she made her first-ever real psych connection with action-man.

“Damn! Without all of Sam's mana filtering and gathering enchantments, my mana is running low pushing this connection so much.” Jen thought. She was pulling and filtering as much mana as she could through her channels, but it just wasn’t enough. Jen sensed Tamako’s mana signature as she came into the room. “Not now!” she thought. However, Tamako placed her hands against Jen's mana channels like she'd seen Sam do in the past, and started flooding her mana into Jen's system. Jen internally groaned as she took in Tamako's lower quality mana, but even with its lower quality, the extra surge of mana allowed her psych skill to solidify the connection with action-man and Pudding, bringing them into her onboard. Jen then then brought their presence directly into her meditation state in one of her multi-focuses.

She was basically forcing Pudding into a state of meditation. As he started meditating, his resistance flowed away, and she could access his skills’ screen. Jen transferred a copy of the meditation code from her onboard directly into Pudding’s skills list. She noticed several puppeteering skills, but she could not spend any extra energy or mana while focusing on copying the meditation skill over to him. Last, Jen lead action-man and Pudding back into Pudding’s onboard, and pushed him into a meditation state of his own. When she confirmed he was meditating and stable, she broke the connection.

After draining their mana pools to near zero, both Jen and Tamako were on the edge of collapsing. A moment later, Jen did collapse.

As Tamako carried Jen to her bed, she stroked the passed-out love of her life's hair, “My sweet love, you should put more points in your strength and stamina, if you did, you wouldn’t have passed out like Sam always does.” While leaving Jen on the bed, Tamako wanted to lie down and pass out herself, but she wasn't sure where Slim was and stayed near the door keeping watch.

*****

When Jen woke up she received a notice.

===

System Message

===

You have leveled up. You have 5 ability points to distribute.

===

“Three to mana and two in mana regen,” Jen thought. Unfortunately, her psych skill was still too complex for Sam to turn into a body enchantment tattoo, so Jen had to grow her mana pool and mana regen. She was even more determined to grow her mana pool and mana regen after learning how hampered they were without access to enchantments. She didn't like that they had become too dependent on enchantments.

****

As he examined the object in the room, Sam finally said to Bell in disbelief, "The System casino... no, WE now have control of our own teleportation and Deck Jump pad!?"