Chapter 42

“So where are we going?” Blade asked.

:Good question: Sirena answered cheerfully. :We should go train or something.:

“Okay,” Blade agreed. As the pair swam to the edge of town, he asked, “How long do you think they’re going to be?” referring to Fey and Requiem.

Sirena smiled wickedly. :As long as it takes that idiot to learn, so probably a couple of hours.: She petted Ebony, whom she had convinced to morph out of arachnid shape.

“Is it okay to leave them alone for that long?”

:Yup. There’s a ninety-nine percent chance that nothing interesting will happen.: Sirena sounded rather disappointed in her friend’s lack of scandalous behaviour.

“What about the one percent?”

:That’s to account for the possibility that Requiem will do something extraordinary, or extraordinarily stupid. I’m leaning towards stupid.: Changing the subject, she continued, :So do you want to look for a hunting party or just train by ourselves?:

“Whichever one’s easier, I guess.”

Blade had no problems with working with strangers, and neither did Sirena. They quickly found a party that welcomed the addition of a warrior and a mage, setting off towards the territory of level 23 bladefins.

Right before Sirena left Fey’s party to join the new one, she sent a message to the group:

“Blade and I are joining a hunting party. Have fun, you two!” As farewells went, it was perfectly innocent and appropriate (except for the insidiously suggestive tone of the “have fun”; to be fair, only Fey detected it).

Bladefins were fish whose name was perfectly suggestive: their dorsal, pectoral, and pelvic fins were hard, sharp, and metallic silver in colour. Small and agile, they travelled in schools of around fifty and were not safe to hunt unless one belonged to a large hunting party.

Aquatic battle formations were different from their land-based counterparts; due to the three-dimensional nature of the milieu, a well-balanced party required more front-line fighters to defend players with high attack but lower defence. However, the principle was the same: tanks (meatshields) protected the more fragile players, who focused on destructive output.

Blade and Sirena settled easily into their respective roles. Their party, which, other than Blade, consisted entirely of female merfolk, was reasonably skilled. It was not long before the fighting became predictable and Sirena started to get bored.

Thankfully for everyone involved, Fey sent her a PM before she found a way to alleviate her boredom. Barely an hour into hunting:

Sirena devoted half her concentration to the conversation. (The other half focused on mercilessly frying bladefins into lifeless husks.)

Sirena snorted as she released chain lightning upon a new school of fish. It sizzled past the head of one of her party members with less than a hand’s breadth to spare.

Sirena knew her friend well enough to apply the correct hopeful tone to the words. She released another spate of lightning before replying:

Sirena forgot to cast magic, too absorbed by the hint that her predicted one-percent-chance-of-Requiem-doing-something-extraordinarily-stupid event had occurred.

:Sirena!: one of the mermaids called out sharply.

:Oops. Sorry!: Sirena called out meekly. She was actually quite irritated at her gossip being interrupted, and her next chain of lightning was proportionately more lethal.

Sirena viciously let her Charge Jolt build for an extra-long period. When she released it, it annihilated an entire school of bladefin without any of her party members’ participation.

(Hey wait, are we really skipping over what happened with Fey and Requiem? That doesn’t seem like a good narrative choice. *Overruled by author-goddess*)

Fey and Requiem arrived at the hunting grounds (waters?) by taxi-dolphin and were welcomed into the fighting formation. Both were classified as warriors and took positions on the outer perimeter; there was subtle maneuvering as Fey attempted to put distance between herself and the merman, while Requiem attempted the opposite. Fey by herself might have lost the battle, but she was aided by the fact that several mermaids wanted to fight next to the handsome bard. She ended up as far away from both Blade and Requiem as the geometry of a sphere would allow. (She wasn’t trying to avoid Blade, but definitely wasn’t willing to fight hormone-crazed girls to be near him.)

At the first break in fighting, Fey sent her pets away to train separately. With their small bodies and lack of magic, they were unsuited to joining the hunting party’s battle formation.

:Go find a good place to train: she told them. :Take care of each other and don’t let anybody die.:

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With various (adorable) gestures of affection, the Feypets bade their owner a temporary goodbye and set off to find a suitable training ground.

Having surpassed the level 20 mark, Fey’s pets had gained a boost in intelligence and also developed more distinct personalities, drawing traits and patterns of behaviour from their owner.

Generally speaking, pets below level 40 would be quite unable to act effectively on such vague orders as Fey had given. The Feypets, being patterned after their eccentric owner, were unique in several ways:

First, their intelligence was distributed extremely unevenly. They were incredibly logical and pragmatic for their level (z > 3) (1); in converse, they had simplistic and reductionist views of the world. They had also failed to gain the basic language skills most pets developed at this stage, relying on the fact that Fey seemed to understand their incoherent squeaking.

Second, the Feypets were naturally independent. Their owner rarely issued them commands and they had had to rely on their own initiative to even keep up with her from day one. Even if their personalities were not taken from Fey herself, the experience they had gained under her loving-but-absent-minded care would have forced their development in this direction.

Third, they had very good memories for things they considered important. (They tended to forget trivial things, such as, ‘Try not to poison Blade.’) All of Fey’s actions and battle strategies had been carefully observed and analyzed, pondered and distilled into their purest form. The Feypets had found several common themes, such as ‘be unexpected’ and ‘hit them where it hurts’, but all had independently arrived at the conclusion that Fey’s battle strategy could be summed up into one sentence:

Pick a monster weaker than you, then spam your most effective attack until it dies.

With this master plan in mind, the pets set out to find the perfect (victim) monster to train on.

The glooms squeaked suggestions. (“It swims slower than us.”)

Boris chimed in. (“Preferably land-bound.”)

Amethyst squeaked. (“Poisonous!”)

All the pets turned to look at the slime (except Inkblot, who was carrying her. The gloom extended the length of its neck so it could stare.)

Boris snorted. (“Why? Your poison won’t work well on them, and we can’t get near them.”)

Amethyst squeaked earnestly while the other pets listened on. (“I’ve been thinking. You guys should all learn Immunity. Fey-Fey won’t make you because it’s uncomfortable, but it would make everything convenient.”)

Obsidian was the first to squeak agreement. (“You’re right. Fey-Fey’s doing it, so we should, too. We’re not wimpy like Blade-Blade.”)

Boris and the other glooms nodded, united by the notion that they were more tenacious than Blade.

Amethyst squeaked a warning (“I’m doing it, then.”) and released her weakest slug poison through Poison Sphere. No system notices appeared due to the lack of players in the vicinity, but the pets were each aware of their own statuses.

Boris absorbed the minor discomfort of the poison and put it out of his mind.

A beat later, Onyx squeaked confusedly. (“Did you cast it yet?”)

Amethyst squeaked, likewise confused. (“Yeah. Didn’t it work?”)

Boris grunted. (“I’m poisoned.”)

Each of the glooms reported their lack of status ailments.

Amethyst put forth a hypothesis. (“Are you guys immune to poison?”)

Inkblot squeaked. (“Looks like it.”)

Amethyst squeaked cheerfully. (“Well, that’s convenient.”)

(Probably too convenient, but hey, they don’t need oxygen and don’t have blood or nerves, so it’s plausible.)

Amethyst was full of plans. (“We can kill a lot of monsters quickly if we swim around poisoning stuff.”)

Onyx squeaked. (“Boris still has to learn Immunity.”)

Much squeaking followed as the Feypets attempted to create a viable plan.

In the end, the pets decided that planning was too much trouble. They swam through the ocean looking for monsters with the intention to deal with issues as they came up.

Shadow was the first to spot a group of black starfish on rocks below. Unknown to the pets was the fact that the monsters were level 30 ninja starfish. Inkblot carried Amethyst over to the sea stars while the other pets hung back cautiously. Amethyst reached out with a furyweed-infused Poison Sphere.

Enraged starfish immediately leapt upright onto two points and launched themselves through the water at much higher speeds than the glooms could swim. Inkblot dodged sideways, avoiding one spinning starfish, but squealed in pain as a second flew past, leaving a deep gash in her shadow-flesh.

The Feypets scattered, frantically dodging spinning death. Onyx, burdened with carrying Boris, was particularly slow; both the gloom and its passenger suffered extra damage.

Amethyst and Inkblot formed the rearguard of the retreat. Amethyst was able to use Whip to deflect many of the attacks, though she inflicted little physical damage.

The starfish were easily able to keep up with the group’s travel speed and were relentless in their attack. Enraged by furyweed, they continued attacking past the edge of their territory. Amethyst was beginning to worry about disobeying Fey’s ‘no dying’ rule when the black sea stars began to visibly weaken. The (ridiculously OP) poison had done its work, eating away at the monsters’ health. As they died, they stiffened and hardened, becoming perfectly balanced throwing weapons.

Amethyst squeaked. (“Not good for training.”)

The other pets nodded vigorously. They collected the loot and moved on.

Several mishaps and close calls later, the Feypets were ready to give up. Because they had started off in bladefin territory, the monsters in the area were between level 25 and 30, slightly too strong for the pets. They decided to make a wide loop into unexplored waters and then return to Fey if they found no promising targets.

Luck (or statistical probability) was with them as they came upon a group of strange-looking fish. Rather than having the sleek lines of more agile fish, these looked rather round and slow.

The pets were cautious, knowing that appearances were usually deceiving when it came to monsters. Rather than provoking a whole group of them with Poison Sphere, Midnight bravely volunteered to perform a high-speed flyby (swim-by?) attack of an individual fish. He clipped the fish with jarring momentum and continued by in fast retreat.

The retreat was unnecessary: rather than pursuing aggressively, the fish reacted by inflating itself to almost spherical shape, revealing the spines that had formerly lain flat against its skin. Its appearance now clearly matched that of a pufferfish. As the Feypets had no education in biology, this meant little to them.

A moment of waiting made it clear that the pufferfish reacted only defensively. The Feypets’ mood rose collectively as they saw the possibility of a good training spot. Other glooms dived at the fish, knocking it this way and that. They took no damage, but it was clear that they inflicted little as well.

They switched attacks, deciding to use Suffocate. After plastering themselves to fish, the pufferfish revealed another defensive mechanism, spinning rapidly around. The action would have torn flesh, except that the glooms simply spun with their victims. They felt slightly dizzy but were able to cling on.

The glooms with passengers hung back. Amethyst bade Inkblot to take them forward, as it looked safe to use Poison Sphere on multiple monsters. However, when she cast furyweed into the water, they failed to react.

Amethyst became excited. The resistance to poison meant that the fish were likely poisonous themselves (2). With an excited squeak, the slime opened her mouth an engulfed an entire pufferfish.

What happened next was not pretty. Amethyst was fairly transparent, so the entire digestive process was visible to observation. (Fortunately, nobody was paying attention, so the gruesome details can be skipped and this story can continue its family-friendly status.) The end result was that she learned the recipe for pufferfish poison.

It occurred to Amethyst that she need not restrict her eating solely to poison collection. The skill Engulf was born.

Boris and Onyx were the last ones yet to join the fray. Boris was pragmatic; the creatures were poisonous and his Immunity was only level 2 after training for a few hours.

He grunted. (“Put me down and go fight.”)

Onyx hesitated, but logic and pragmatism won. The gloom delivered Boris down to the sandy seafloor before attacking the nearest pufferfish.

Boris wandered along, feeling slightly lonely and out of place. He was of very little help in underwater fighting, and in fact was more of a hindrance to Onyx, who had to carry him. Feeling morose, he looked up at the fighting as he passed a medium-sized rock.

He was jolted into a more immediate state of mind when a powerful suction force tumbled him off his feet. The rock was in actuality a rockfish waiting for unsuspecting prey.

With a desperate twist, Boris managed to avoid having any of his limbs caught in the fish’s gaping mouth. His main body was too large to fit, and stopped up the mouth quite nicely. The rockfish released the suction for a second attempt, and Boris lashed out with his sharp tusks.

In the end, Boris was battered and bruised, but victorious. He enjoyed the rush of experience points, picked up a coin, and began nosing around more carefully in the sand.

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Footnotes:

(1) Z-scores state the number of standard deviations away from the mean a value is in a normally distributed data set; 99.73% of all values will be within three standard deviations from the mean.

(2) Pufferfish contain tetrodotoxin, which blocks sodium channels in neurons and prevents impulse conduction. This toxin is not produced by the fish itself, but rather symbiotic bacteria that live within the animal.