Chapter 11: Experiments while the Girls Adventure
DM got a chuckle at the girls’ comedic and ultimately successful efforts to buy clothing. Of course, he didn’t monitor the girls when they were being measured and fitted in the back room. After they finished shopping, he realized it was a good thing the clerks didn’t try to rip them off. Had the merchants price gouged or otherwise tried to take advantage of the girls for being young, he wouldn’t have had any immediate way to help them out that wasn’t overkill. He could send an infected bat to grant him eyesight at a later time, but that was taking things too far.
The five were successful in securing accommodations for the evening after convincing an innkeeper that they really were allowed to be traveling on their own. The treatment they received was just generally more positive after they cleaned themselves up with nicer clothing to match their decent armor. DM sensed that discrimination against beast people wasn’t too prevalent, at least in the Twin Cities.
As the girls’ activities were coming to a close, DM received an alert. After a few tense moments, a pig wandered into the dungeon. Cautious of possible tricks and traps, DM had the pig led to his chamber, where he conducted a few experiments. He’d noticed that applying status effects to enemies can cure them of other negative statuses. Which abilities could he use without canceling out his previously successful applications of various effects? It was time to find out.
Once the pig was poisoned, DM couldn’t find a way to remove the poison other than through the ability antidote, using an antidote item (assumed, he didn’t test it), or healing and waiting. The poison effect, at least at T1, would eventually cease if the pig was healed once before reaching zero HP. Considering how rapid the onset of fatal damage was with poison, it made sense.
The slow ability lasted longer if DM left the pig alone, but was more easily removed by applying various other negative status effects. Berserk and paralysis were the same way. DM did not know what would happen if a member of a party succumbed to berserk. Would the enemy potentially harm their own allies? He’d have to be careful when engaging non-evil opponents until he knew the answer to that. Oh, wait, he could just ask the dungeon system, couldn’t he?
>Berserk Touch (T1): Chance to enrage target while in physical contact. If successful, effect will persist for several minutes.
>Berserk: Target attacks enemies indiscriminately, abandoning all attempts at defense, healing, or support. Strength increases slightly while accuracy decreases slightly.
Considering DM could use high-level charm abilities, the limitations of berserk weren’t worth worrying about. Speaking of charm, DM easily charmed the pig with his T6 ability and found it difficult to remove. He could intentionally release the effect, but other negative status effects didn’t terminate the charm effect. DM didn’t have any healing magic effective at removing the T6 charm effect either.
Health and mana touch were both fairly slow at T1. Outside of combat, DM could easily extract or inject full HP or full MP, but in battle it would be a last resort until he could get the tier higher. Extracting experience from the pig wasn’t very helpful since it was just about the weakest possible creature to begin with. On a whim, DM tried injecting experience into the pig, carefully.
“Holy crap, this actually works?” DM’s experience was decreasing by the same amount as the pig’s increased, so he stopped quickly, but it was effective. Of course, he took the experience right back. “When I suck out experience from enemies, I guess I have the option to feed it to allies now…” The rate of exchange was pretty slow at T1, so again, in combat it might not be that useful yet.
Infect wouldn’t wear off unless DM released it or healed the pig. The last thing to test was affection T1. DM applied the ability through touch. It was slow. Slower than the other T1 abilities, but that was no surprise. Only a captured enemy could possibly succumb to this, DM thought. This helpless pig slowly converted from hostile to friendly. Kind of like with the infect ability, DM could feel that the pig was under the influence of affection as well as how strong the effect was.
After seemingly maxing out the effect, DM applied every negative status effect he could think of on the pig, but none of them had any effect on affection. The pig loved him. However, unlike with charm, he couldn’t order the pig around from afar with telepathy. The other difference, as compared to charm, was that sensing magic, at least at T2, wasn’t detecting the affection effect at all.
“I’ll need to ask the girls to research affection next chance I get. I wonder if the Twin Cities even has mention of this ability in their libraries…”
DM wanted to try one more thing. He’d test granting an ability to a minion. If he was successful, he’d test it on one of the girls as well. There was some risk involved, but he felt it was a risk worth taking, a risk that could save their lives one day.
A goblin shaman walked over, as commanded. DM attempted to grant the goblin regenerate T1, and appeared to succeed. He then absorbed a small amount of HP with his appendage and waited. Slowly, the goblin’s HP returned to full. He then confiscated the ability from the goblin.
“Excellent, this ability seems to work as I expected. Now let’s try something funky.”
DM tried to grant the goblin tentacle slap T1. He could feel that the effort failed, just like failing to apply a negative status effect on a first attempt. He tried again. And again. He must have tried 100 times because he was super curious to see what would happen if he was successful. Unfortunately, he concluded that creatures without tentacles can’t learn the ability.
Stolen novel; please report.
“Well, I guess I won’t be giving the girls tentacles anytime soon! What about absorb equipment?”
In a way, this was the most meaningful part of the test. Could other creatures learn abilities by absorbing equipment, or only DM? He granted the goblin absorb equipment T2. Another goblin handed the goblin shaman a dagger with poison strike. He absorbed the dagger and waited for DM to assess him with sensing magic.
“Hah!” DM could clearly see that the goblin shaman had learned the poison touch T1 ability. Somewhat heartlessly, he commanded the shaman to poison the other goblin. As expected, the goblin succumbed after a few moments of physical contact. DM cast antidote while thinking about the ramifications of this finding.
“If I grant someone absorb equipment T1 or T2, they can learn the ability inherent in all low-level equipment, just like I can. I can’t pass on my ability touch skill to anyone else since it lacks a tier designation, but this is still a big freaking deal.”
DM wasn’t sure, but he guessed that it was unheard of for humanoids to go around absorbing stats and abilities from equipment. He’d have to be very careful about his decision for who to grant this ability to… if anyone.
He looked down at the harmless pig loitering near his lower body. “Here, take this keycard.” He gave the pig absorb equipment T2 because, why not?
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“Welcome back, girls.”
The same clerk from yesterday greeted the party of five adventurers, each sporting a unique tail and animal ears.
“Hi. What should we do today?” Kat asked.
“As I mentioned yesterday, things are a little different than usual. After getting set up in your classes and trained up to LVL 2, adventurers usually explore the Lower Gordu Forest. Right now, adventurers aren’t allowed there though so we’re sending adventurers to other locations. You’re all already LVL 3 and 4 so that shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Why can’t we go into the Lower, uh…”
“Lower Gordu Forest,” the clerk confirmed. “The city is currently investigating suspicious behavior in the forest right now.”
“But, but, isn’t that where we’re supposed to go next? Why is there an… investigation?” Judging from Kat’s facial expression, you’d think she’d been told she could never see her friends again.
“I don’t have all the details either. All I know is that several adventuring parties encountered trouble in the new dungeon near the Twin Cities and now the authorities are investigating the presence of enemies in that area.”
“Why would Ms., uh, Olivia be away for that?”
“Oh, right, I did mention Olivia to you yesterday. She was a witness for one of the recent events involving that dungeon. They must still be questioning her…”
Kat wondered who the clerk was trying to convince.
“A-Anyway girls, your choices right now are either to fight monsters and collect herbs in the plains and hills south and east of the city, or to journey to the southwest, although that will take a few days.”
The girls all realized that the latter mission was an excellent opportunity to sneak back to the dungeon, but it was probably too soon for that. Also, with all the investigating going on in the Lower Gordu Forest, they thought they should probably steer clear for now.
“Can we start by going south or east? Which is better?” Kat asked.
“Of course! Let me walk you through the common monsters in those directions, as well as what to collect from monster corpses and which herbs to bring back.”
While the clerk educated the girls on the adventuring they’d be completing over the next several days, a few other parties watched from across the guild hall with expressions ranging from bitter to joyous. Most of them thought the young beast girls were cute and wanted to join up with them but couldn’t think of any justification for doing so.
As the clerk concluded her explanation, Kat asked, “Are there any other dungeons near the Twin Cities?”
“Yes, there are. In addition to that new one I mentioned that you are not to go to right now, there’s one north of the city in the Upper Gordu Forest and another east of the city, but they’re both over the border in other countries. Others are further away.”
The girls thanked the clerk and departed for their first true day of adventuring. They’d return that evening.
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After the girls exited, a couple of other adventurers, likely too old to be novices, shifted their conversation, although DM couldn’t monitor this one.
“So, what do you think?”
“Hm, I’d say the cat or the fox.”
“Not that! What’s wrong with you? I’m just asking, what do you think’s going to happen with that party?”
“I’m sure they’ll get split up before long. Let them have their fun for now, though.”
“You think so too, huh?”
“A party like that is too conspicuous. If they get stronger, they’ll get poached by other cities or even the empire or the union.”
“Did you see the raccoon girl get called up to the Guild Master yesterday?”
“No. Isn’t it a little early for something like that? What’s going on?”
“This is just a guess, but maybe he singled her out for some type of special role.”
“Special role? You’ve lost me.”
“Really, you haven’t heard about that?”
“No. Are you making this up?”
The adventurer shook his head in disbelief before continuing. “I’ve heard the Guild occasionally assigns adventurers special roles in secret. It’s probably for espionage or getting revenge for betrayal or stuff like that.”
“If the Guild has super-secret agents like that, why would you know about it?”
“Well, it’s probably easier to hide stuff like that in plain sight.”
“The raccoon girl, you said? She was pretty cute too.”
“You need help.”
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While the girls adventured in the plains, learning the ropes as adventurers, DM continued scouting the Lower Gordu Forest from the air, via infected bat, and studying his dungeon console. It was still early in his investigation, but it seemed like he could use the console’s programming language to automate actions in the dungeon. Further, he found evidence of new functionality that could be activated by using computer-like code. As with all functions of the console, deciphering it was a slow and tedious process.
It helped when he knew what he was looking for. For example, he queried the console in various ways trying to learn about anything it could tell him regarding transmigration. He hadn’t collected any useful information yet other than the fact that the console did recognize transmigrating as a thing. There were hints of a communication network, possibly connecting the various dungeons in the region or world.
A few items he found were locked, presumably awaiting the dungeon reaching the minimum required level to access the feature. There seemed to be ways to create items using alchemy, customize items, create and customize equipment, enchant equipment, customize abilities, and even customize monsters. He hadn’t figured out a way to determine which dungeon LVL unlocked each of those features, yet.
Time permitting, DM’s next goal was to explore a separate dungeon. He’d need the girls to collect more information for him, first.
“Oh, that bastard!” DM noticed a jackalope had successfully stolen one of Lupy’s new hand-axes and was running away. He looked all around to make sure nobody else was watching and then spawned a tentacle just in front of the retreating jackalope to slap it.
>92 damage.
>Jackalope defeated.
Perhaps that was a bit overkill.