Current Quests
The Safety Of Walls: Reach a walled town with Samorn Khantong.
Abandoned Forest Town: Investigate the abandoned forest town Courbefy with local…
The aftermath was a realisation of how much tension they’d been holding in since encountering the hunting party. Silently, they drifted over the town just hanging in the net beneath the fire. They drifted west slowly until they passed the border of the town and kept going. Dave allowed the balloon to land a couple of kilometres into the forest. It mostly just crashed into tree branches which helped slow the landing.
Sam and Dave retrieved the saucepan from the burner and climbed out of the hanging basket to the ground. They left the paper balloon in the canopy of the forest. Sam spread a blanket on the ground and Dave made a fire. Sam made tea, Dave used Grand Mage’s Gravitas to clean them both.
They spread their hands towards the fire for warmth and just breathed. The complete relief of finally not being hunted by a pack of human predators was overwhelming. They each took a spirit coin, sipped at their hot tea and just ordered their thoughts.
“We’d better get back in there and loot the bodies before his extra guards and baggage boys do,” murmured Dave, letting Tome and Tzu out of his body.
“No,” said Sam. “They’ll be too scared to go in. At least for a day. And, nobles often camp out away from their baggage train on a hunt.”
“Alright.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes.
“We can make the baggage train leave if I spook them with illusions?” asked Dave.
Sam just nodded.
“Tomorrow. I’ll put up a tent now?”
She nodded again.
Dave, Tzu and Professor Tome put up a simple tent. He’d be able to summon a cabin in the evening.
They rested for the entire afternoon. Dave idly drew a magic item amplifying ritual on the ground in case a monster encountered their camp but nothing did. He just lay on the blanket next to Sam and they quietly read An Introduction To Adventuring by Arabelle Remore to each other before going to sleep.
They awoke in the cabin the next day although they still allowed themselves to lie in past dawn. Sam had been waking every six hours to refresh her skeletons so Dave let her sleep longer while he idled himself awake first and got a fire going. He thought he’d be doing his part if he made sure that the person who was interrupting their sleep every six hours for his safety got a warm, toasty introduction to the day. He took a mana potion, memorised his spells and started writing notes for a new variation of the origami golem in Tome. Eventually, Sam stirred.
“Morning sleepy-head,” murmured Dave.
Her skeletons all saluted smartly.
“So, today I think we loot the bodies before anybody else does but it needs to look like an accident, right?” said Dave.
“Yes. He’s with the adventure society. They’ll send someone to investigate,” agreed Sam. “So, if you want to take all of it you’ll need a reason why the body was looted.”
“That’ll be a bother.”
“Also, they might see us going into town.”
“I’ve been thinking about that. I’ll scry them, find out where they are and then, perhaps you can think of a way into town where they won’t see us?”
Sam tilted her head to the side.
“Yes!” she smiled.
Sam set about her morning routine and Dave cast his scrying spell.
“Through farseeing eye to distant space, I will scry my desired place,” Dave intoned, focusing on a hand mirror. He focused on the rat-faced tracker who was sitting around a table, yawning and playing cards with other members of the baggage train. He ignored their talk and noted the angles of the mountain peaks to his map’s north and left the scrying.
“Eighty-five, one hundred and twenty and one hundred and forty,” muttered Dave to himself, quickly writing the numbers down on the map that Tome was displaying. “Oh, this is that eastern ledge with the good view. What do you think? Stealth is an option?”
“Yes! We are on the opposite side so we can get there easily but we will have to move slow once we’re in town.”
“No golems?”
“No golems. Too big, might be seen.”
“Fair enough. Let’s go, eh?”
They moved at a walking pace with many stops along the way to make sure that there was a canopy of trees between them and the cliffs that the baggage train was camping on. They didn’t encounter any monsters along the way, which was lucky. Especially in the couple of hundred metres they had to crawl through some long grasses. After that they were among the buildings of the town and it was just a matter of winding their way around the structures, making sure something was always blocking line of sight to their east.
The changes to the town were pleasant. No longer was there an oppressive gloom overshadowing the entire area and now it had the feeling of quaint ruins from a wholesome past. It was almost an enchanting fey feeling.
They searched out the building that Lord Ross’s hunting party had made their last stand in and made their way inside.
“Huh!” said Dave, looking at the building that the corpses were in. “I should have known.”
There were scavengers everywhere. Since the sense of evil that had pervaded the air until yesterday had lifted, the wildlife had moved back in. Raoul’s body was being savaged by a fox, he’d already heard the scurrying of rats and the air was thick with flies.
“They’re more rotten than they should be,” said Sam with concern as they came closer and got a good look at the body.
“Oh, you know how the shadows would go through you but the bruising would already appear a week old?”
“Oh yeah. They got his whole body. Looks yuck!”
“Well, time to loot.”
Dave used loot all on each corpse. The bodies were real so there wouldn’t be any stinky, rainbow smoke. All of their items went into Dave's inventory and he went with Sam to find the body of their scout, Remy, in the last direction Dave had seen him moving in. The corpse was quickly found, broken at the bottom of a tree. He must’ve tried to climb it for safety and died up there. Dave looted the blackened body of everything it had and went with Sam to the ruins of a shop closeby to look through the impressive haul.
Dave took most of the items out of his inventory and put them about the room they’d commandeered for the purpose. He left all of their personal items in his inventory. He’d dispose of them later. Sam didn’t need to see that. Remembering that the people who’d tried to kill them were still people wasn’t something she needed to feel right now. He pulled out a couple of unfamiliar bottles and read the labels.
“Oh, crystal wash? I know I’ve heard of that but I’ve forgotten what it is,” said Dave
“What do you use to clean things on your world?”
“Soap and water?”
“But when you need it to be really, really clean?”
“Very high quality soap and hot water!”
“Really? Is that all?”
“I’m going to guess that my people have put more effort into soap technology than people with access to crystal wash.”
Sam thought about this for a second and nodded. It made sense. Sam was collecting all the potions. She already had a small collection of health, mana and stamina potions.
“Oh, look at this! Potion of resist elements, potion of resist afflictions, potion of virtue, potion of jumping, two oils of light and a potion of direction.”
Dave had to use epistemology on a couple of them to figure out what they did.
“Virtue is just having a couple of extra hit points?” asked Dave, while in his UI looking up the potion.
“I guess?” said Sam.
Since Dave’s inventory stored the money as a counter that took up no inventory space, they both agreed he would carry it. 4910 lesser spirit coins, 1014 iron spirit coins, 74 silver spirit coins and 27 gold spirit coins. They were now wealthy in the measure of regular people but only the upper end of normal amounts of money for starting adventurers. They also got a couple of hundred quintessence of many types. Dave checked the looting logs in his text box history. Some of it they were just carrying around and a good bit of it was quintessence looted from the broken essences of their bodies. Except for one shield essence looted from Dori, which Dave was quite pleased with. It seemed a versatile and useful essence.
“What good magic items did they drop?” asked Dave now that they were getting a sense of organisation about the items he’d randomly got.
“A curved sword that is cold?” said Sam, pointing at it.
“Scimitar of frost,” said Dave, who could identify items with his HUD. He concentrated for a second to scroll through his history. “Ahh, yes. Got it off Lord Ross himself. I guess he used it if something had lightning resistance?”
Sam shrugged.
“The best is this big crossbow and this armour,” said Sam gesturing. “All their other items are good but not best. Not many, though! The rest is just normal armour and little things like this bracelet that keeps you warm.”
Sam smugly took the bracelet. Dave grinned at her knowingly. His magic fire always went out when he got sleepy meaning Sam was often cold at night when he was not.
“That’s a crossbow of snakes. Attune it to a venom you’re carrying and the quarrel turns into an adder on impact delivering the venom and generally upsetting the target for a second or two because of the snake which can add more venom because it’s a snake. The armour is lamellar armour of conduction that increases lightning damage. Oh! By a lot! Looks like the crossbow is from their bear to give him a ranged option if he needs it. The armour is from Lord Ross, obviously.”
“I thought they’d have more!”
“It makes sense that they wouldn’t,” said Dave, thinking it over. “The bearman doesn’t need many items because he’s a bear, the fortress-man summoned his armour, mace and shield and, the swift essence commonly gets unarmoured defensive bonuses. So, this party doesn’t need a lot of good equipment. It does explain why they have so many mana potions, though.
They both stared at the large part of the floor covered with mana and stamina potions. It really was excessive.
“Soooooooo,” said Dave awkwardly, getting Sam’s attention. “Now that we’ve looted them I don’t suppose you could summon your skeletons to help me put the bodies in one of the dimensional bags?”
“Ugh! Why?”
“Because they look like looted corpses and it’d be better if they just looked like ashes.”
Sam winced at the particularly grim idea but did as Dave asked. Sam spent her time making three well organised dimensional bags while Dave and the skeletons stuffed the bodies into the fourth dimensional bag that he was really hoping wouldn’t need cleaning later.
Dave used Grand Mage’s Gravitas to clean up the areas where the bodies had been, leaving no trace he, Sam or their hunters had ever been there. In this time Sam searched for traces of animals they could use to stick the adventure society badges onto to scatter them. Then he froze. He’d had an idea. He scrambled through his inventory.
“What is it?” asked Sam, looking at him.
“This!” said Dave, triumphantly holding up one of the seven remaining Builder cultists outfits he’d looted from Chateau Chamois. “We build a pyre and burn the bodies with these on top. Parts of these clothes will float off with the smoke. The Builder cult did it.”
After Sam informed Dave of the amount of wood they’d need, about five times the weight of a person per person, it was obvious they’d need to frighten off the baggage handlers. This turned out to be easier than Dave could have hoped. Since none of the baggage handlers were iron rank, they still needed to use the loo. In sensible camping fashion they’d set it up away from camp. Dave simply waited until one of them needed to go pee, set up a forest troll image several tens of metres away and, when the baggage handler finished their business and stepped away from the screened-off hole in the ground, Dave, from behind the image, loudly snapped a tree branch.
“Bloody Death and Truth!” croaked the woman.
She backed away slowly and the image impassively started her down. Her nerve broke and she bolted for the camp. Dave dismissed the image.
Within the next hour, Sam spied them all holding weapons and digging a new hole within the camp. Dave used another spell and made another image of two very large forest trolls. One of them holding a large, glass spear. Sam made a loud guttural noise in a quiet moment of the woods to get the attention of a man who was on watch who pointed out the forest trolls. The entire camp started shouting in alarm and Dave directed the illusions to walk behind a hill and then dismissed them.
Dave summoned an origami mount and spent the next hour making a lot of stomping noises, at Sam’s direction, on different sides of the camp. At the end of the hour, the camp was packing up and, weapons out, travelling out of the valley.
“Well, that’s the first problem down,” said Dave once they were sure that the baggage train was leaving.
=We could have killed them all too.= opined Tzu.
Sam shot it a scandalised look.
“Yeah, we could have buddy but those weren’t enemies. They were just folk doing a job. Don’t make enemies you don’t need to, hey? Besides, what if it goes wrong and one escapes? Everything we’ve done would be for nothing.”
=There is tactical sense in that. I will remember.= hummed Tzu and dipped respectfully.
Dave summoned another origami mount for Sam and they set off to collect the awakening stones they’d hidden and to pick up the remaining awakening stones in the town. They encountered two fergax along the way, which was surprising. They were normally a solitary spawning monster, but they easily avoided and out-paced the fergax with the origami mounts.
The origami mount he’d summoned today was another variation on the golem. Dave wondered if he should write it up as a separate spell. Instead of organising and drawing up an optimised shape of the summoned form, he’d figured out how to simply program the magic for the concepts of transport, animal and swiftness, like how essences formed concepts, and then allowed it to find its own form.
The resultant mount looked a lot like a giant, roughly-hewn vulpine which Sam identified as a pini. Apparently they were a fast animal from boreal regions that were sometimes trained as mounts. The origami pini were shorter than a horse, only about one and a half metres at the shoulder, but their legs, head and tail much larger and thicker. Overall, they were more sturdily built with more flexibility around the spine. Dave suspected that a horse would be superior for dragging a cart but a pini would be more agile.
Sam picked the path while on the way but Dave often warned her of monsters ahead on his minimap.
“So many!” said Sam.
“It must be the backed up magic leaking out, but this time into monsters instead of building up into stones.”
“We have our own little monster surge!”
Dave quickly used his abilities to look up what a monster surge was.
Monster surge: A regular event approximately every ten years where there is a massive, simultaneous increase in the spawn rate of monsters all across the world.
“Ugh, I guess so? Doesn’t sound too good to be in the middle of. We’d better work fast.”
Sam just grinned at him.
They’d avoided most of the monsters while picking up their hidden magical goods. Moving through the woods was much faster now that they didn’t need to hide their presence at all which turned out to be a bad way to discover a nest of trap blinders.
Trap blinders were a lot like their cousins, the trap weavers. They were a kind of giant spider with a humanoid torso but with spider bodies. Although they produced webs, the webs weren’t as long and the blinders used the webbing to make blinds in the forest foliage that were very hard to recognise in bad lighting conditions and easy for an unwary explorer to push their way through while travelling a trail. Also like the trap weavers they were very stealthy.
Sam rode through a seemingly harmless bunch of leafy branches across the trail and was suddenly knocked off her pini. Dave, who was following close behind, was forced to jump his pini over Sam and careened pini-face-first into a trap blinder, almost losing his seat in his own saddle. Fortunately, this high-speed crash disrupted the trap blinder’s ambush as much as it disrupted Sam and Dave’s travel. A second trap blinder was behind the first and so the fight began.
After a quick use of Stop And Think and Epistemology, Dave mentally directed the two pinis to deal with one of the trap weavers while Sam and Dave ganged up on the other. Sam took a guardian role while Dave and Tzu, who Dave manifested out of his eyes, shot at the trap blinder constantly. Dave took opportunistic stabs at it with the scimitar of frost but mostly just distracted it from concentrating fully on Sam. For her part, Sam threw her beetle swarm over its face and made good use of her shield to continually push forward at the trap blinder, content to let the ranged damage from behind her as well as her death aura slowly kill the creature.
Sensing that it was slowly losing, as was its fellow that the pini were also hounding down, the trap blinder attempted to escape. Sensing the end herself, Sam cast Dragged To The Grave. The skeletal hands lept from the ground, took the trap blinder by the spidery ankles and dragged it down. The pini bodily shoved their own heavily damaged trap blinder into the spell as well. Sam simply stood at the edge of the roiling earth letting her aura hurt them both. Dave and Tzu kept up their own stream of damage as the trap blinders slowly and carefully died. Dave looted them both.
“Well, that was a mess,” said Dave conversationally.
“I thought they were jungle monsters?”
Dave quickly checked with his abilities.
“Nah, says ‘jungle and forest’ in the books.”
“Oh? Alright, I will be more careful then. Thank you for tackling them!”
Dave laughed.
“I actually didn’t mean to! Yeah, I was just going fast and so close behind you I crashed.”
Sam laughed too.
“You came out of the crash so ready!”
“My abilities,” Dave shrugged. “I had time to think.”
“Oh, yes!” Sam laughed. “You also have time to make a plan!”
“Yeah. Unfortunately, some things you can only learn from experience, like knowing that there’s trap blinders out today, and experience is something you have only after it would have been the most useful.”
Sam’s smile remained but her eyebrows furrowed as she tried to keep up with Dave’s cryptic wisdom.
“Let’s keep going,” said Dave. “No point hanging about and we know to watch out for the buggers now.”
Sam reset her smile and nodded.
After picking up their stashed away magical stones and heading into town for the rest of the awakening stones, the monster encounters started getting so numerous in the town that Sam dismounted and summoned her five skeletons.
They set off again at walking pace, taking down a fergax and two fresh water shabs before they picked up the first awakening stone. As they went from stone to stone encounters happened on average between each awakening stone, usually of a single iron rank monster or two but there was an incident at a creek with a school of flying eels which Sam’s death aura dealt with nicely.
By the end of the day, they’d completed Sam's awakening stone quest and he pulled up the window to check before turning it in with her.
Quest: Abandoned Forest Town
Description
Investigate the abandoned forest town Courbefy with local guide Samorn Khanthong and collect magical items throughout the town; 32/32. Remove the evil from the town; 1/1. Bonus objective: Remove all essences from the town, 3/3.
Detailed Information
The quest disappeared from his list at Sam’s assent and Dave skimmed his text box, reading the reward. Reward: 10 bronze spirit coins, 100 iron spirit coins, 120 lesser spirit coins, 2 rings of gecko pads.
Dave curiously clicked on the rings of gecko pads and found that they were basically a wall-climbing ability. Whatever surface they were touching, the user was guaranteed to stick to. High mana per second, though.
“Any stones you want to absorb?” asked Dave as they cantered away from the town, avoiding monsters again.
“Yes, but what stones do you think?” grinned Sam.
“Well, that blight stone is a sure thing. A powerful curse is almost a sure thing from that but the others? Perhaps a magus? But no. That’s what I’d want and you don’t want dangerous magic projectiles.”
Sam just grinned in confirmation as Dave tried to guess her mind.
“I don’t know!” admitted Dave. “Flesh is also good. Perhaps that eye stone to take another go at another sight based ability?”
“Ugh, no! Tome said I might get a dead eye!”
“He said only if it interacts with your death essence! Take the feast essence first. It’s almost certainly going to give you something that eats death!”
“I don’t want to eat corpses Dave!”
“You won’t really be eating them.”
“Sounds yucky! I want plant awakening stone!”
“Really? Oh, yeah. You like gardening.”
“Yes! I checked with Tome. Most likely is summon ability but all other most likely abilities are also useful to me so I will take plant awakening stone.”
“Fair enough. Any thoughts on the third and forth?”
“Flesh and air!”
“Okay, flesh is great but air? I looked that up myself. Weather and stealth?”
Sam grinned.
“And maybe another summon?” she said.
“You’re really doubling down on using my equipment aura, aren’t you?”
“Dave is useful!” sang Sam in an innocent, sing-song voice.
Dave shook his head and smiled.
“Well, let’s find a place to camp and do it,” he said.
“One hour of riding,” said Sam. “Too many monsters for staying close, now.”
They rode for the extra hour and, just as planned, Dave summoned a cabin. Sam summoned her skeletons for a watch and they went inside to take her last three awakening stones.
“First, wine!” declared Sam.
They were running out of food to snack on but they still had several bottles of wine left.
“You want it as liquid courage or a celebration?” asked Dave, taking out a bottle.
“Both!” grinned Sam, taking the bottle and pouring it into fine glasses looted from the dead aristocrat adventurers. Dave was already using Grand Mage’s Gravitas on both of the cups but after Sam finished pouring the wine, he switched to Magician’s Meagre Magics to chill the wine.
“What’re you thinking about the stone order?” asked Dave as he channelled to remove heat and make the cups cold in his hands.
“Like Arabelle wrote in her book, if we have options we take the awakening stone with the least options first so that the awakening stone with the most options will not take its place by accident!” said Sam happily as she gestured at Tome who flipped open to the page of An Introduction To Adventuring that Sam was referring to.
=Would it be so bad to double down on good abilities?=
“Not always! Arabelle writes about it. She says they do that in Rimaros where they train specialists instead of generalists but she says that although this makes stronger teams, there are two downsides. The first is that the adventurer risks becoming too team-dependant and this limits their growth, sometimes even because of scheduling conflicts, and the second is that if you have two similar abilities, there’s often little difference to just using the same ability twice,” Sam informed them, proudly showing them the line with her finger.
Dave nodded along, still chilling the wine.
=I understand. Thank you for explaining, Sam.=
“So we’re hoping for a curse, a summon and some stealth but we’re expecting a curse, anything from a zombie to a creeping rot and a weather-based ability?”
Sam gave her strained smile.
“You’re sure?” confirmed Dave gently, knowing she’d understand that he was referring to his offer that they do some trading in the city and get some more specific, uncommon awakening stones.
“I’m sure. I have a feeling that this will work! I think your awakening stone ability will help.”
Dave sighed as he handed the chilled wine to Sam and used his prestidigitation to clean them both off. He was worried she was leaning too hard on Bringer Of Change. He opened up his UI and navigated to the ability.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
Ability: Bringer Of Change
Type: Racial, Special Ability
Tags: Special
Cost: None
Cooldown: None
Description
Awakening stones that you apply to yourself or you apply for others are more likely to have rare, powerful and synergistic effects.
Detailed Information
He clicked the Detailed Information button and read. It didn’t give any numbers just described in more detail that awakening stones that Dave applied would have ‘rare, powerful and synergistic effects’ by way of a connection to the astral which supplied more power than usual for an essence binding ritual. There were a lot of technical terms he didn’t understand and would need to look up later. It was also noted that the abilities would be, so long as the combination of essence and awakening stone was appropriate, more likely to be useful in battle. For a ‘more information’ button, there was surprisingly little more information.
“Well, if you’re sure,” said Dave sceptically. “Blight, plant, flesh and air? They’re all pretty general so take them in the order you feel, I guess.”
“Yes, I want awakening stones now.”
Dave had just finished cleaning Sam and himself with his prestidigitation. Clean, comfortable and with a good drink in hand, Dave held out his hand for Tome who flew into his grasp. He placed it open on the ritual circle page and activated the circle when Sam’s hand touched Tome.
The tree stone looked a bit like a willow tree or a cauliflower that’d been shrunken and fossilised, depending on what angle you looked at it from. It blew into Sam’s hand upon activation as though on an Autumn breeze. Dave and Sam read the text reproduced by Tome after the ritual was over.
Samorn Khanthong has used, awakening stone of trees. She has gained a new life essence ability. Grove Guardian. Summon a towering, treant grove guardian to protect you in battle. Requires a magic circle of topsoil. High mana. Six hour cooldown.
Sam was wearing a bigger grin than even Dave had expected.
“Oh? It’s that good?”
Sam nodded vigorously.
“Yes! They are guardian tree. Protect parts of forests or jungle and also people who care for area. Very good luck to meet one!”
“Ah! Well, you can meet one every day now, so that sounds great.”
Dave clicked on the ‘grove guardian’ link in his UI to get a better look at the summon.
“Big stats. Known for being a bit slow. Really durable and strong. Vulnerable to fire. Ooh! Has an aura. ‘Guardian’s protection’ Small strength and recovery buff and adds a flat-rate supplement to all healing? Nice.”
“What does flat rate mean?”
“It means that every bit of healing will get the same amount extra,” said Dave before furrowing his brow and suddenly digging deeper into the details. “Hang on, is that to every healing instance or for every spell? Let me see, let me see… flat rate based on tick rate of guardian’s protection not the spell it’s based on. Oh! Oh, that’s actually really good!”
Sam smiled happily in confusion.
“Oh, hard to explain without maths. Basically, It means that lots of little heals are better than one big heal and most of your healing is little heals. It’s very good.”
“Sounds good! Next stone. More nice abilities!”
“Onwards and upwards.”
Sam’s face was a picture of happiness as Dave readied Tome for the next awakening stone ritual.
The blight stone looked like a palm-sized stone with marks on it that suggested rot. Sam activated the stone and it melted into her palm in a sickly way by dribs and drabs. Tome displayed the new essence ability on his page as it became available.
Samorn Khanthong has used, awakening stone of blight. She has gained a new animate essence ability, Blightwood Walker. Summon a towering, animated treant to protect you in battle. Requires a magic circle of deadwood. High mana. Six hour cooldown.
“Oh! I got the angry brother,” said Sam with her worried smile.
“Hmm? Let me take a look,” said Dave, already clicking through his UI to look up what being blighted really changed between the treants.
Their stats were similar to the grove guardian but not as strong or as tough and had no aura buff. Instead their attack rate was increased and they imparted a condition called ‘wood blight’ with their attacks.
Wood Blight
Rank: Iron
Type: Special ability
Tags: Affliction, disease.
Description
While a target is affected by wood blight, all stamina costs are increased and it can't regenerate stamina.
Detailed Information
Dave raised his eyebrows appreciatively and whistled.
“Now, that one will put your enemies on a clock.”
“What you mean?”
“Tome, show her the Wood Blight condition.”
Sam quickly read the ability from the floating book.
“See?” prompted Dave. “Over the course of a long fight you’ll eventually just make your enemies collapse, unable to move.”
“Umm, Good! Don’t want enemies to move,” she announced.
“Sam, you have some serious long-fight, I-will-eventually-win, abilities. I got to say, I was sceptical of Bringer Of Change but you’re making me a believer. I mean, look at these abilities you’re getting. Are these typical from these stones?”
Sam just smiled guiltily.
“Sure, you have some weaknesses,” muttered Dave, mostly to himself, “but you can clearly overwhelm a battlefield with constant pressure until your enemies can’t fight back. It’s a legit strategy, it suits you and girl, you are a badass!”
Sam smiled cheekily into her wine and said nothing as she reached for the awakening stone of flesh.
“Circle please!” sang Sam innocently.
Dave, still grinning, put his hand on Tome with Sam and activated the magic circle. In her hand, Sam was holding a stone that looked like a small, self-contained, skin-covered muscle in a fully contracted state free from bones. It was both interesting and a little unsettling to look at. Sam activated the stone and it extended and flexed like a worm from her wrist to the nook of the elbow and slowly settled into her body. They watched as Tome flicked through its pages to display the text of the new ability attached to her animate essence.
Samorn Khanthong has used, awakening stone of flesh. She has gained a new animate essence ability, Create Flesh Golem. Create Flesh Golem; Turn three or more fresh corpses into a flesh golem. The more fresh corpses, the more powerful the golem up to a maximum of nine. High mana. Six hour cooldown.
“Bloody wish we’d had that when all those goats turned up,” said Dave.
“Definitely will be called evil for this!” giggled Sam. The wine was clearly in play.
“Yeah but you’re laughing because you can see how powerful it is,” retorted Dave as he clicked through his own menu to find the details of the spell in her character sheet. Sam was simultaneously looking up anything she could about the ability in Tome, which was precious little. It seemed that people who got these kinds of abilities tended not to report the details to the Magic Society for publication.
“Similar stats to my golems, I guess? A huge mass of hit points with a huge power stat. Good bodyguard or front liner, hey?” mused Dave.
“It says here that flesh golems can put more bodies in their body as battle goes on, getting stronger,” said Sam, pointing at a paragraph of a memoir from a retired adventurer which described a flesh golem they were fighting who got stronger when they killed the ghouls surrounding it.
“Hmm? That’s not mentioned on your ability at all. What rank does your book mention?”
“Oh, I don’t know. It doesn’t say.”
“I’m guessing that’s something you can expect at higher ranks. You don’t have it right now.”
“Aww! Fine. I will wait for my battle-snowball.”
Dave chuckled.
“Snowball. That’s a good name!”
Sam grinned back.
“Alright, last ability!” said Sam, clapping her hands excitedly.
Once again, Dave took Tome with Sam and activated the magic circle on the page.
“Good luck!” said Dave as Sam took the wispy-looking awakening stone of air in her hand and activated it. The stone turned into mist and streamed into her nostrils.
Samorn Khanthong has used, awakening stone of air. She has gained a new balance essence ability, Mist Walker. Mist Walker; Familiar. Summon a mist walker to support you. Your own senses are not obscured by natural mist, fog or the mist walker’s abilities. While subsumed into your lungs your breath may have a mana steal effect and for low mana per second any noise that originates from you will be muffled. High mana, high stamina. No cooldown.
So, they looked up what a mist walker was.
Monster: Mist Walker
Rank: Iron, bronze
Description
A thin semi-substantial creature native to climates that, despite their name, generates a thick fog from their body that many observers have described as ‘spooky’. The mist walker’s fog can stretch over a great distance and magically obscures sight and sound within. They are a parasitic, although benign, life form and feed by sneaking up on resting creatures inside their fog and draining their mana. They are typically non-aggressive and flee when confronted.
Detailed Information
They read Samorn’s last ability.
“It specifically says ‘spooky’?” asked Sam.
“Yeah, I noticed that too. Not just any mist. Spooky mist.”
“Think I should use it?”
“Definitely. Let’s see this spooky mist.”
They had the required reagents from the psychotic goat bezoar loot and so Sam went outside and summoned her new familiar. It took a few minutes to set up but she soon had a tall, wispy figure appear in a summoning circle that immediately began exuding a curling fog into the forest.
It started at the bottom of the creature, washing over Sam’s feet.
“Does it feel like anything?” asked Dave.
“No! Is weird. It’s there but I can see through it,” called Sam as the twisting fog subtly raised to her knees and kept spreading.
“Yeah, that’d be your new sight ability where you can see through the mist walker’s fog.” The edges of the fog cloud were spreading out to encompass Dave’s feet. “I can’t see through it properly at all. It, sort of, obscures things even though I can still see them.”
Sam started talking to her mist walker familiar in Siamese. It sounded like an introduction and, Dave guessed, a conversation establishing that it could understand her but it couldn’t speak. The mists soon went over the cabin and surprisingly quickly over the entire area. According to Sam. Dave couldn’t see clearly much further than the immediate area of the forest. The mist walker remained still and silent while this continued, only visible because Dave knew where it was. Even so, despite the mist walker remaining still, he kept losing track of it in the constantly twisting and winding fog.
“Oh! I see it. Spooky,” said Dave pointing. With his Eldritch Eyes he could see wind magic causing eddies and small gusts in the fog. They were small, though. Dave wasn’t sure he’d see them if he wasn’t specially looking.
“Yes! I see. It moves by itself. Makes shapes,” said Sam as she ran her hands playfully through the mist in front of her.
“Yeah, when I ignore my Eldritch Eyes it looks like there’s creatures moving just out of sight all the time.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” said Dave. “It doesn’t hamper your senses so to you I guess it just looks a little misty?”
Sam looked at her surroundings closer.
“Oh, yes! I can see through it but when I really look it’s like a cloud but see-through!”
“Yeah, I definitely can’t see through it at all.”
“What can you see?”
“Umm, that tree? I can’t see anything behind it clearly.”
“You can only see fifty paces?”
“Yep. Well, clearly. Can see shapes behind it but I’m not sure they’re real.”
Sam looked in amazement at Dave who grinned back.
“You thought this ability was a dud for a second, didn’t you?”
Sam grinned guilty.
“Maybe.”
“Ask Misty to channel a bit more. I reckon it might get worse. For me, I mean.”
Sam asked the mist walker for a bit more and fed it some of her own mana. This time they both noted a delay between the channelling of the ability and the mist rising in thickness, something tactical to remember. Dave lost track of the tree he’d used earlier as a marker for Sam. It was just another dark shape in the fog, now.
“You can still see?” asked Dave.
Sam nodded with eyes full of questions. Dave pointed at a clod of earth only a few metres away.
“Everything is hazy past that. Again, shapes that might or might not be real.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Hang on, let’s check something.
Dave took some string out of inventory and handed one end to Sam.
“Hold this and start counting with me. I think the fog will cut off the noise for me.”
Sam started counting and Dave started counting with her as he walked off into the mist. Dave was up to thirty when he realised he couldn’t hear Sam anymore. He looked back in the direction the string went and realised for a panicked moment that there was no true reassurance that it led to Sam. He shook himself and followed the string back.
“You stopped?”
“Couldn’t hear you. That part about negating sight and sound is legit. Without the string I’m not sure I’d find you again.”
“This is a good power!” exclaimed Sam.
“And very versatile. Obscuring power isn’t just for hiding.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if we’re facing enemies with strong ranged powers, you can use this and they won’t know where to aim, yeah? That means we can get closer before they start shooting.”
Sam stood with her head tilted for a second as she thought about it and then grinned when she understood the advantage of cracking a smug mage about the head while they were trying to cast spells.
“I like it!” said Sam with a happy, mischievous grin.
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They were attacked at about four in the morning by two griffons. They dropped out of the sky and immediately tore apart a skeleton. Sam immediately rushed into combat without her armour, only taking her shield and sickle. Dave was behind her with sword and wand.
“Won’t you lose spells if you don’t sleep?” asked Sam, concerned for the future.
“They recharge slower if I’m dead. Let's do this quick,” said Dave, letting Tzu out of his eyes. He quickly used Stop And Think and Epistemology on the griffons. “Get the skeletons inside, we can do ranged attacks to just drive them off. They’re ambush hunters and will go away if they can’t catch anything. If the info’s right.”
Dave and Tzu went to the windows and started a barrage of ranged damage. The griffon that Tzu was force-beaming flapped into the air and landed on the cabin. The other one charged the door and kicked a skeleton in the door across the cabin but two other skeletons at the door started attacking the griffon. Sam cast Dragged To The Grave, cast a stamina-to-mana shield with Dance Of Life And Death then stepped into the doorway with her sickle and shield.
The griffon pecked at her which she took on her shield and hacked at the griffon’s neck with her sickle. A taloned foreleg snapped up and scraped a wound across Sam’s leg but she just grit her teeth, cast a charge of Life Bloom on herself and kept hacking away with her sickle. The griffon made more pecks and swipes at her, causing minor injuries.
When Dave and Tzu began piling damage onto the one at the door, the one on the roof, perhaps sensing safety, jumped down and frantically began smashing its head into the frame of one of the narrow windows but quickly stopped and retreated when a skeleton hit it in the beak with a war axe.
The griffon that Sam was fighting was in a war of attrition with her, her skeletons, Dave joining in now, and Tzu keeping a constant stream of beaming force damage, it too, retreated. Sam glared at the griffon as it left.
“No! I bet they have good money inside!”
“Me too.”
“It’s not fair! They interrupt my sleep and there’s not even money!”
“Life is unfair,” said Dave with an amused smile.
“Sheesh-iyeh! You go back to sleep now!” huffed Sam, but couldn’t help smiling and giving a small wai after she said it. She was right, though. They’d noticed that Dave’s spell slots recharged quicker while he slept or meditated.
“I will and I’m so grateful to have you looking out for me and making sure I’m safe. You are the best person ever, Sam,” said Dave, clearly laying the compliments on thick.
“Yes!” said Sam, doing her best to look smug.
Dave laughed, put his weapons away and lay back down in bed to try and sleep another hour or two until he felt his spells recharge.
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Dave woke up an hour or two after dawn and felt his spells come in soon after. As soon as he resolved to get up and go about his day, he felt a familiar sensation of emptiness indicating a few unmemorised spell slots. He drank a mana potion to get a fifth spell slot.
Today was different. Today, he memorised, for the first time, three different spells. One Comfortable Country Cabin, two of Origami Golem and two of Origami Mount. Last night he’d decided to write it from the ground up as a new spell, writing the self-directed shaping aspects directly into the spell as fundamental elements and only expressing the function of the summon as constants.
“Come forth, worthy steed. Come forth, worthy steed,” intoned Dave twice and watched as reality printed out, like a reverse black hole, two woolly, giant rams with full tack. Except they were booky, not woolly. Except for the hard horns, which looked dangerous, the cloven hoofs and the tack, the whole of the body looked like it was made of open books with fluffy pages lying on top of each other which were simulating fluffy wool. Dave thought it was actually quite the artistic decision on the part of the magic.
“Oh, nice!” exclaimed Sam. “I like that you made it fluffy!”
“Wasn’t me! I took the form out of the spell. The pseudo-intelligence of the spell picked it.”
“Well, maybe pseudo-intelligence can pick more often?” grinned Sam.
Dave could only chew on his lip and raise his eyebrows. She had a point.
“Maybe,” he admitted.
“We will find dead trees today,” said Sam, as a statement of intent.
And, so they did. Sam and Dave had an interesting encounter with a hypno-python along the way which was informative. It turns out, the origami mounts are susceptible to hypnosis, a condition he was certain that the origami golem was immune to. He was so distracted and staring at the magical interactions that he didn’t pay attention to the fight.
“DAVE!” Sam shrieked.
“Fuck! Answer my call!” gabbled Dave as he joined battle by summoning his latest iteration of Origami Golem into reality. Frankly, it looked like two headless octopi glued together except that the legs didn’t taper. The legs were made of armoured segments that could bend in every dimension and tipped with a cloven, hoof-like lump of hard paper that could also open and close to a limited amount, allowing for some rough ability to grab.
The hypno-python had already struck Sam’s unresisting mount and was wrapping itself around the papery wool of the ram. Sam had dismounted, screamed at Dave and got into battle with shield and sickle. By the time Dave was summoning his golem, Sam had already covered the python with her beetle familiar, annoying it greatly and covering its eyes.
Dave sent in a single shot of Mage Bolt and Sam was putting a healing spell into her mount when the origami golem finished printing and it struck. Grabbing the out-sized python’s head with two of its legs it hauled backwards in what, to a human, would have been a suplex except that the golem had more appendages and as the python’s head was forced up, the golem pivoted around the mount, unwinding the snake from it, grabbed the snake’s upper body and took that into the suplex motion as well. The two omnidirectional legs that were holding the python’s head were crossed over each other, holding the head in a loop and pressing the hissing head into the ground as the mount got free. With Sam and Dave taking opportunistic shots at it the whole time, the hypno-python was slowly controlled by the golem. It managed to get a glowing-eyed look at Dave who was standing still, trying to get a good shot. Dave went limp for a few seconds but that didn’t matter. Sam was hacking away at it with her sickle and she figured that if the snake wanted to waste its last moments avoiding escape, that was fine by her.
The snake died. It had done a good amount of damage to Sam’s mount, which was being healed and a little crushing damage to the golem, which had already healed.
“Sorry, Sam. I didn’t think paper constructs could be affected by mind effects and I… I fucked up.”
“You get distracted at a time like that!?” shouted Sam incredulously.
“Yeah! I know! It’s just… magic is so new and interesting. And being able to see it! It’s like always having access to the best reality measuring tools around.”
“Can’t you replay memories?” she snapped.
“Uhm, yes,” said Dave, ashamed.
Sam just looked at him crossly and Dave shrank.
“I have to get better at this.”
Sam grunted and got on her mount. Dave looted the snake and followed in shame.
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As they roamed around, scooping up dead branches as they went, the origami golem brought peace between Dave and Sam with the sheer oddity of its movement. Dave had designed the legs equidistant apart on the top and bottom with each set of eight at a ninety-degree angle between top and bottom. He had no plan for its gait, essentially figuring that the pseudo-intelligence of previous golems had improvised movements that’d surprised him so this creature would figure it. And, so it had.
The golem had taken the wheel-like rolling of the previous golem shape to the next level and hurled itself around the forest like a sea urchin stuck in a rough current. Its strong legs would flex much more than the previous incarnation allowing it to almost jump forward with each step and the limbs that weren’t using the ground for propulsion were free to grasp trees within its coils, using them to take sharp turns or just hurl itself along faster than ever.
“I didn’t know it’d do that,” said Dave when Sam turned to him with a questioning look after a particularly eye-catching stunt.
“You made it!” she laughed.
“Yeah, it’s a new shape. I just told it to guard us from threats and pick up firewood as we go and now we have a… a whatever that mad cyclone is.”
Sam continued softly laughing as the golem came tumbling back like sixteen wacky-inflatable-arm-men with a forestry mission. Two of the arm men solidly wrapped around a bundle of sticks which it held out to Dave.
“Good golem!” said Dave appreciatively, putting the large sticks into his inventory and using Pauper’s Paper Production to feed it a stick of paper. “High five and help us find more!”
The golem slapped Dave’s hand, flowed a few metres away and gestured with two of its limbs that Sam and Dave should follow which Sam did immediately, giggling the whole time. It led them to a small, fallen tree with a trunk about the diameter of Dave’s leg.
“Hey, good find!” said Dave and Sam took a woodsman’s axe out of one of her carefully organised inventory bags. “Sam, hand that to Scrambler here. I think it should be able to grip the handle.”
Scrambler, as Dave had dubbed this form, in fact could hold an axe, wrapping two limbs around the handle in opposite directions, it absolutely hammered into the trunk of the small, dead tree sending woodchips flying. Dave and Sam used hand axes to strip the smaller branches, shoving them into their inventories along the way.
Dave was glad that a lot of the smaller branches would stack in his inventory slots so he was taking most of them. He discovered with Sam and the help of Tome that his inventory was unusual. While stacking money was normal in most dimensional spaces and stacking quintessence was not standard but common enough, most inventory spaces stopped there and just used a one-slot-one-item policy for everything else, regardless of how big the item was.
Dave’s did not work like this. Items like armour sets would take up six slots, medium sized weapons would take up three and small weapons would take up two. His bottles of wine would stack into stacks of five, so would most sticks of about that size which included the typical bits of firewood that Scrambler was currently making. Maybe swords would also stack in lots of five but Dave hadn’t found two of the same sword yet. Of the lawn darts he’d occasionally make for Sam, he hadn’t found the stack limit of them yet. He was up to 34.
Put simply, Dave’s inventory seemed to be specialised for holding mass amounts of ordinary bit-and-bobs that you could comfortably hold in one hand but anything bulky would take up extra room and room he was running out of. By the time they’d stripped the tree down to firewood, which wasn’t much time thanks to Scrambler, Dave’s inventory was three-quarters full even with his enhanced stacking effects.
Dave and Sam, with the help of Scrambler, found three more slightly larger dead trees before their inventories were full. After consulting with Sam, Dave quickly made some adjustments to the giant ant model of golem, making the legs bigger with a grasping bend at the bottom, removing the head and abdomen and expanding the bucket-like thorax wider and up especially high for a greatly enhanced carrying capacity. It was basically a belegged, hexagonal storage container. Dave summoned it. Sam dumped all of the small pieces of wood she’d kept into its bucket and they continued on.
They’d encountered a few monsters as they searched and Sam soon had the bright idea of putting her skeletons in the hauler-golem’s bucket. It’d free up more space in her inventory since there’d be five less sets of armour and weapons out, equipped on the skeletons and the skeletons could swiftly disembark into battle.
There were quite a few encounters as they went about their day but the combination of Scrambler’s flail-ambling ahead, Dave’s minimap and the origami mounts’ speed kept them from ambushes. Another griffon made a dive attack on Sam but Dave had enough time to notice it coming and, crying a warning and shot it with eye beams as it dived from the sky which disrupted it enough that its attack missed. The resultant fight was very one-sided with Scrambler closeby who pounced on the griffon, coiling all sixteen limbs around the griffon’s wings and forelimbs, restricting its movement greatly while the group killed it.
By noon they’d decided that they would just find a nice, open space to drop all their wood off at for their funeral pyre and go collecting more.
“Not right in the town square? It’s paved,” pondered Dave.
Sam shook her head.
“Too many monsters now. We can just clear an area in a field.”
She was better at spotting signs of monsters than Dave so he believed her prediction. It was mid-autumn and the danger of accidentally starting a forest fire was real so a clearing away from the trees seemed like a good next-best idea.
“Oh yeah, alright. Pick me a field, I guess!”
“That one close to that fight where you made the big wall or the cliff where you made the first-night cabin. Less walking.”
“Good point. Those summons are also evidence, aren’t they?”
Sam nodded.
Sam selected a field near the cliffs figuring that the more solid parts of the cabin construction would be the worst to carry. They spent the rest of the day hauling firewood and cardboard making a pyre. Dave used his Epistemology ability to make sure they had enough, at least half a tonne for each body, before they committed to making the fire after dark. They’d broken the small cabin down, the same for the wall made while being chased, everything associated with the balloon and cut it all up.
Luckily, Sam had the idea to try storing the largest pieces of cardboard in one of the looted dimensional bags and it worked. Those pieces might not burn fully through so she’d thought to dispose of them at a later date. The smaller pieces they decided would fully burn were placed centrally along with the bodies of the hunting party and their personal possessions in the unlit pyre.
Once the sun had gone down they decided to light it.
“Oh, yeah. Bring up your mist walker, it’ll hide the fire from anything watching.” said Dave.
“Yes! Good idea. Don’t want to attract monsters,” said Sam, letting Misty, as they’d taken to calling it, out.
“Or the attention of slow walking servants who are looking back for signs of their masters,” grumbled Dave.
Sam gave a guilty smile.
“You should have scared them twice as much!” she said conspiratorially and held up four fingers while mouthing ‘four trolls’.
=Would that have worked?= inquired Tzu.
“I don’t know,” said Dave with a grin, the mist was rising up around him and he was already concentrating on his Warming Fire prestidigitation to get the pyre started. “I think you get diminishing returns on fear with respect to troll numbers pretty fast.”
“You need to be more scary, Dave!” accused Sam.
“I have some ideas about getting into battle faster and more reliably,” admitted Dave, getting a sour look and rolled eyes from Sam in response. A clear message she had not forgotten about the hypnotic python.
“Oh, I’m Dave, look at the pretty magic, let me think about it while my healer dies. I’m Dave and I think about things very deeply and forget everything else,” said Sam, doing a mocking impression of Dave. “That’s not scary!”
“Yeah, that’s fair,” said Dave, wincing.
Sam gave him a sceptical look. The fire had taken swifty to the pyre and Dave was using a burning stick to light a different part. They’d ripped up lots of cultist costumes as starter material and the fire was taking quickly to the kindling.
“No, seriously. Not being glib, I’m new to this world and magic is still unreal to me. I’m definitely going to hesitate or be slow sometimes because of it. It makes me wonder if we should expand the team so you’re not relying on me,” said Dave soberly.
“You were very fast on the day we met. No hesitation.”
“It hadn’t sunk in then. Even though Hugh proved to me that the world was real, I… I think part of me didn’t really believe it and I was just reacting like I was in a video game, just solving the next adventure puzzle.”
“Why not keep doing that?”
Dave opened his mouth but no sound came out as his mind turned over. He didn’t have a good answer. Because it wasn’t polite to treat reality like a game? That was all he could really think of but it wasn’t a good answer. Wasn’t polite according to who? Sam looked at him and smiled helpfully.
“You know what, Sam?” said Dave slowly. “I think you might be onto something.”
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The pyre roared into the night. Dave had thrown a couple of empty wine bottles into it as well. He’d already seen a few pieces of charred cultist cloth floating off so everything was done except the waiting. He’d cast Comfortable Country Cabin a few tens of metres away from the pyre where they could still see the shape of it in the deceptive fog produced by Misty. Dave had spent most of the night outside using Warming Fire under recognisable parts of each body until they completely broke down into ash, slowly working his way through them all. Sam’s skeletons were using long sticks to poke the fire, making sure that the bodies and the cardboard were always above the hottest parts. Tzu was hovering in the door keeping watch and the two golems were patrolling around the cabin.
“I’ll second that, Professor,” said Dave.
“I’ll third!” said Sam.
=I cannot be your forth. I enjoyed the battle. These days have been the most illuminating of my existence and I exalt in the victory!=
“Tzu, you can’t be happy about killing people!” said Sam in a concerned voice.
“I am,” said Dave, taking a sip of wine from his cup. “A bit. I’m not glad it’s us who had to kill them, but I can’t say I’m sorry they’re gone. Murderous buggers the lot of them.”
Sam looked at Dave, uneasy.
“What? They were chasing us screaming murder at me with additional sexual threats at you. I’m not going to waste time pretending I’m not glad they’re dead.”
“But, I think killing people is evil?”
“You and I are people too. So, by your logic, we prevented evil. Killing in defence of yourself is fine. If unnerving.”
“Yes but maybe we could run away?”
“Maybe we could have,” mused Dave, nodding. “But probably not. Even if we get away clean, which we couldn’t because their trackers and their scout were just too damn fast, we get back to town, he gets back to town, he uses his power and authority to find us. You get killed for your essence. I get arrested, discovered as an outworlder, the cult finds me, and I get killed. Like I said earlier, Lord Ross accidentally made killing him our best option to live.”
Sam nodded ruefully.
“Also, why do we have to be the ones who run away? Why shouldn’t he run away? Report us to the law? He’s an aristocrat, they’d listen to him before they listen to us, wouldn’t they? Him hunting us for sport? That was a choice.”
Sam sighed.
“You’re right,” she said.
“You just wish the world were another way, hey?” asked Dave gently.
“Yes!”
“Me too, mate.”
“Dave?”
“Yeah?”
“What’s a video game?”
----------------------------------------
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“Okay, wait what’d you do?” asked Florian over the Xbox Live chat. Masterchief’s gunfire took over his headset for a moment. “You did a meta-analysis of what? What’re you comparing?”
“Every team to every other team and to an estimated industry standard,” said Dave, his tone intense, the way it was when something bothered him. “Remember last year? When I started and got that entire team’s funding revoked because I didn’t know the company politics?”
“Ugh, yeah,” said Florian goofily. It’d really gotten under Dave’s skin.
“Ai convinced me to do something about it.”
“Hang on, bro, hard bit.”
The screen flashed with enemy fire as an elite charged their position. Florian threw a grenade, jumped, shot a rocket into another part of the pack at the same time as the grenade exploded and then meleed a grunt to death while Dave reloaded his half-empty plasma rifle.
“So, you did a meta-analysis?” Florian asked once they cleared the wave.
“I wrote a Python script to pull data using keyword matches. Honestly, the keywords were the hardest part—Ohshit! Left! Left! Sniper!”
Dave ran back and forth in a hard-to-track fashion while Florian shot the sniper nest with another rocket.
“Boom! I’ll take that,” said Florian triumphantly, swapping out his empty rocket launcher for the covenant sniper rifle.
“Thanks,” muttered Dave. “Anyway, I used a language model to suggest keywords but had to manually approve each one for accuracy. Time-consuming but necessary to make the associations robust.”
“Man, I don’t know what that means,” grinned Florian.
“Keywords were the hard part, lots of math,” said Dave. “Then I pulled company data to estimate meaningful results per time, and normalized it to the same-field average using data I pulled off PubMed,” Dave continued. “Some fields naturally produce more discoveries, right?”
“Ugh… right,” said Florian.
They rounded a corner in-game, entering a hallway filled with Grunts. Florian tossed a sticky grenade into their midst while Dave blasted on full auto at the closest with his plasma rifle.
“Then I compared each lab at the company to each other lab at the company to compare their meaningful result rate per time.”
“You quantified how fast the chemists are working? Calm down, Satan!”
“Yes.”
“Fucking evil,” said Florian, impressed. “You realise the suits you hate so much are just going to turn this into another KPI?”
“They already have KPIs,” Dave said flatly. “But they can only apply them to labs with quantifiable results. Meanwhile, the qualitative researchers just mess around with no accountability. All I did was remove the plausible deniability for the bullshit labs.”
“Gonna get a promotion?” Florian teased as he jumped in the warthog and waited for Dave to catch up.
“Not a chance. Everyone’s going to hate it.” Dave paused the game as he heard Ai unlocking the door. “Twice as much as they hated last year.”
“I’m here!” she called out, holding a plastic bag of takeout aloft.
“Your favourite place?” Dave asked.
“Definitely,” Ai replied, feigning offense. “You think I’d have sweet and sour pork that is not delicious?”
“The chicken feet place?” Florian chipped in through the headset.
“Yep. Good chicken feet,” said Dave, smiling. “According to her.”
“You should try it!” said Ai, affectionately tousling Dave’s hair.
“I just don’t get why you’d do it, man,” said Florian, saving the game. “You’re just setting yourself up for hate, you know?”
“I know,” said Dave seriously. “But last year, they gave a certain rationale for pulling that lab’s funding. This year, I’m testing if they’ll follow their own rules. My job is literally doing stats to determine funding cost-effectiveness. If they ignore this, I know my job doesn’t matter and I can dick around with code and bludge for the next three years. This is the moment, Flo. I’m doing quality control on my bosses.”
“Dave,” Florian laughed. “Only you would QC your own boss.”
Behind him, Ai giggled, her gaze playful. Dave shrank down sheepishly, grinning.
“Yeah, I hadn’t realized how much of a ‘me’ thing that was until right now.”
Dave could somehow hear Flo’s stupid grin as loudly as Ai’s giggles.
“Anyway, Victory dumplings, Flo. Gotta go!”
“Alright, alright. Enjoy your glorious career sabotage feast.”
Dave hung up the headset, turning to help Ai unpack the food.