Ch.33
I’d spent the next couple of nights killing the giant undead and experimenting with my new Advanced Class, Pneuma Adept.
Pneuma Adept basically focused on making you better at glyphs and using Pneuma itself. Of course, it also advanced my Combat Art Initiator level, making all my maneuvers stronger and giving me access to more and higher-level maneuvers.
Pneuma Adept added its level to Disciple to determine what and how many Combat Arts I could manifest, how much Pneuma I could spend in a round, gave me new glyphs, and both added affects to a Disciple’s glyphs and made it easier to use them. It also made me gain Pneuma a lot faster in combat, which was probably the most important part of the class as far as I was concerned since it looked like I was going to be able to use them instead of Psi Points for casting my Psionic Powers!
The 1st level of Pneuma Adept gave me the Extra Pneuma Feat, raising my Pneuma at the start of combat from 8 to 10.
It also gave me Empowered Glyphs, which let me cast one of my elemental glyphs as a free action any time I used a maneuver and added +1d6 damage per six Initiator levels to anyone affected by the glyph.
The damage type was based off of the element of the glyph. For the three elemental glyphs I could manifest, Air gave lightning damage, Earth gave Acid, and Metal gave physical damage.
Pneuma Adept gives +d8 HP and +2 skill points per level. Both of the skill points went into raising my Computer Programming.
For my Feat, I took Accomplished Sneak Attacker, which gave me +1d6 Sneak Attack, to a maximum of Primary level/2, rounded up.
It also meant that I was now using Combat Arts as if I was a 7th level Initiator, 3 levels from Disciple of Pneuma, +1 from Pneuma Adept, and half my Primary Class level, 6/2 = +3 to make 7!
The new Stance I took was from Fist of the Four Elements and it was a straight upgrade to Elemental Embrace, the 3rd level Stance called Elemental Flux Stance.
It raised the damage to +2d6 damage of your elemental attunement, so lightning damage for Air and Acid for Earth and gave resistance 15 to the damage type of the element you were currently attuned to!
In addition, while in Air attunement I got +4 Initiative and +4 Dodge bonus to AC! While in Earth, it gave me DR 4/Adamantine.
I traded Spark Strike for Lance of Power, a 3rd level Fo4E maneuver, and my first genuine AoE attack! It did your elemental attunement’s damage type in a 30’ long, 5’ wide line that could begin up to 30’ away from you. Its base damage was 5d6, but you could expend up to 5 points of Pneuma to juice it by +2d6 per point of Pneuma expended! Reflex save for half damage.
My DC was 22 already, and every point of Pneuma spent also increased the save DC by 1.
Unfortunately, it can’t do more damage than your Initiator level, so I was stuck at 7d6 for now.
If I hit them with lightning, they’d be deafened, and if I used Acid from Earth attunement, they were affected like the Grease spell, which means that if they fail their saves, they drop whatever they’re holding and fall down!
My 2nd level of Pneuma Adept was less impressive. It gave an ability called Mystical Prowess which basically added my Pneuma Adept level to my Lore (Martial) checks and to my Spellcraft checks, so +2 for now. Still, it's not like it's bad! That’s +2 to my rolls to block attacks with Arcane Shield, after all!
It also gave me a new initiator level.
I was done with all of that, though, and I was looking forward to heading downtown tonight with Chris and a few of his buddies. We were heading to a bowling alley of all places, but they had a live band, drink specials, and it was apparently one of the cool spots to hang out right now.
It was called Rock-n'-Bowl and Chris had been going there every Friday night for weeks. He’d finally convinced me to come check it out.
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“Wow. There’s a line to get in at seven o’clock on a Friday night? To a bowling alley?” I said, genuinely surprised.
Chris grinned. “Yup. They’ve got great food on top of everything else, so a lot of people come by right after work for dinner and a few drinks. I told you this place was one of the most popular places in town!”
He was dressed to the nines. Black, pinstripe three-piece suit, silk tie, and black leather loafers. It might not have been a $1000 suit, but it was a nice one! A month and a half back training at NW Kajukenbo had been good for him. He was already starting to visibly lose weight and get into shape!
He hadn’t appreciated it when I told him the only way I’d come out here with him is if he promised to go to the nine AM class at the dojo with me tomorrow morning, but he had agreed.
Really, I would have gone no matter what. I needed a night out. A night where I could turn my brain off and just relax. I’d been training like a mad man recently. Tonight was going to be the perfect solution to my stress!
I was dressed more casually. Polo shirt, nice pair of jeans, a navy-blue sports coat, and a pair of Converse hi-tops. I’d recently had to spend a bunch of money shopping, because apparently having a 20 Strength and a 23 Constitution means you really start packing on the muscle and trimming off the fat!
To put it bluntly, I was a freaking jacked, now! Add in a 20 Charisma and all of those Social Skills, and I was looking forward to seeing if I could charm the pants off of a cute girl tonight... maybe literally? I was pretty sure I wouldn’t really even have to try! I looked GOOD tonight!
I grinned, surrendering. “Ok, ok, I get it. This place is awesome, you brought me here so that makes you an awesome friend. Geeze!” I told him, shaking my head.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
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While the main bar area and the upstairs area was packed with people having dinner and a few drinks, the bowling lanes weren’t anywhere close to being at capacity.
“Huh. I thought that a bowling alley would have more bowlers.” I told Chris.
He shook his head at me. “It's more like a full-service bar that has a bowling alley, really. Ready to get your ass kicked?”
Chris used to bowl in a bowling league when we were in college, he had his own bowling ball and everything. Even with my crazy stats, I wasn’t completely confident that I could beat him at bowling. Like any sport, a lot of being good at it has to do with practice and knowing proper technique... advantages he certainly had over me!
“Yeah, yeah, rub it in. The one thing you can beat me at!” I told him with a nudge to the ribs.
“Hey, I beat you in that game of league that one time!” he told me, trotting out his evidence.
I snorted. “Really? The one time you win, and it's because we had our Jungler DC at the start of the game! You’re gonna bring that up, again?”
He shrugged. “I still won!”
I rolled my eyes. “Sure, let’s get this over with, buddy.”
Chris demolished me the first game, but by the time the second was done, I’d closed the gap a good bit.
Then Chris got a text from three of his work buddies who were outside, wondering if he was there already?
We decided to wait until they got in to bowl another round, since they said it would only be five minutes.
The band had started playing a little while ago, and I was frankly a lot more interested in the large number of attractive women on the dance floor than I was in bowling any more. A few of the women dancing out there were quite pretty!
Even better, a few of them had seen me looking and been looking back!
Chris saw where I was looking and snorted, shaking his head. “What ya lookin’ at there, buuuuuddy?” he asked as skeezily as possible.
I groaned, there was no other good response. “Oh, please. I saw you checking out the women over there dancing, too!”
He snorted, but the subject got changed as the three guys he works with walked up. I’d met Louis, Stuart, and Mortimer before; they were normally referred to collectively at their work and by their friends as Lou, Stu, and the Jew. They all thought that was hilarious since they were all Jewish.
I shook hands with them while they were putting on their bowling shoes. The three of them were all pretty avid bowlers too.
Which made it easy for me to decide to sit out of the next round of bowling, as Lou, Stu, and Mort wanted to bowl a lot more than I did. Bowling was fun, but I wasn’t going to deny bring a lot more interested in the pretty girls dancing by the band stand than I was with bowling another round. I happily let one of them take my place.
Chris asked, “What are you gonna do?”
I grinned. “Please. I’m going to go ask a couple of pretty young ladies to dance!”
Chris just shook his head. He’d never been one to make the first move when it came to women, where I was of the opinion that you’d never know the answer if you didn’t ask the question.
I waved goodbye and walked over to the dance floor.
Once there, I walked up to a group of girls dancing in a group in front of the band stand. “Hey there! I’m Ray.” I said over the music. “Any of you pretty ladies want to dance?”
I won’t lie, currently being more jacked than an NFL middle linebacker had done some pretty wonderful things for my self-confidence, but even then, I was surprised at the response I got.
The prettiest girl in the group was a girl who could only be described as Goth Barbie Doll! She was tall and gorgeous, with long, curly black hair, and almost hypnotically pretty green eyes. She smiled at me with her ruby red lips and said, “I’d love to, Ray.”
Her voice was every bit as beautiful as she was!
If I could pick anything at all to complain about this gorgeous woman, it was that she’d look better with a bit of a tan. Seriously, she could win a, ‘Who’s paler?’ contest with Snow White!
That was being incredibly picky, though. She was both beautiful and had a stunningly sexy hourglass figure.
Her words when she agreed to dance sent shivers up and down my spine. Soon we were busy dancing and flirting. “So, what’s your name?”
She smiled in a way that made my heart nearly skip a beat. “Jenny Foreman, nice ta meet ya!” she said, holding out her hand to shake mine. I grinned and shook her hand. “Ray Ramirez. It's nice to meet you, too.”
When the band’s set was almost over, I asked her, “I’m empty. Can I buy you a drink?”
My heart went pitter-patter when she grinned and said, “Hell yes! I was about to ask what a girl needed to do to get a guy to buy her a drink around here!”
We strolled over to the bar and put in our orders.
“So, Mr. Ramirez, what do you do for a living?” Jenny asked me.
“I have my own Network Admin and IT business, which basically means I run the computer systems for a bunch of small and medium sized businesses in Hillsboro and the NW part of town. Mostly, though, I spend my time telling Boomer’s not to open email attachments from email addresses not on the approved list and removing viruses from computer systems of people who don’t listen!” I told her, grinning. “What do you do?”
She smiled up at me. “Oh, I work at the city morgue.”
I raised an eyebrow. “That’s... well, I don’t think I’ve ever met someone working in that field before.”
She grinned. “Expectations are weird, huh? I certainly didn’t expect that you’d be in the computer field. I halfway expected you to tell me that you played college football somewhere, or something!”
I shook my head. “Nope. The closest I get to a football field is watching one from my couch!”
Before I knew it, we were off in a corner making out. Even I was kind of shocked at how well things were going, when I was jerked out of my blissful state when she bit my lip, HARD! Hard enough that she actually drew blood!
It hurt! Not in a fun or sexy way, either! “Ow! What the hell?” I grunted, pulling away from her.
She looked surprised, but the look on her face was weird. It was that of someone who was seeing the impossible happen... she looked genuinely shocked that I'd put on the brakes!
She tried to apologize, but I was totally done with her after that, and I wasn’t quite sure why. A little lip nibble was perfectly fine, heck it was even enjoyable. Her biting me hard enough to draw blood? No thanks! That was an early warning sign that she was a bit too high on the Crazy side of the Hot/Crazy axis for my taste!
There was something else, too, but I just couldn’t quite figure out what it was. My instincts were telling me that something was wrong... and frankly, there was no way someone bit that hard on accident!
My pleasant buzz was immediately gone, and the fun time I’d been having with her suddenly felt really shallow. I grabbed a handful of napkins to stop the bleeding from my lip and turned and walked away. Even then she tried to follow me.
I’m not sure why I was so mad about her biting me, but I was. "No! Go away you crazy bitch, leave me the hell alone!” I told her, easily avoiding her grasp. She looked surprised at that, then her eyes narrowed.
“You’ll regret this later on, Ray.” she told me.
I flipped her off. “Get away from me, you psycho!” Then I went and found Chris.
“Hey, man!” Chris told me with a grin on his face. “Didn’t expect to see you until sometime tomorrow, buddy, if I’m gonna be honest! What happened to the gorgeous Goth girl?”
I pulled the napkin away from my lip, showing him the blood. “Bitch is a little too crazy for my tastes, man. She bit me so hard she drew blood!”
Chris snorted. “Typical. Why are all of the gorgeous ones crazy?”
I sighed. “They aren’t. Our luck is just shit when it comes to women, man.”
Chris laughed. “That might be true. Still, you were gone for almost two hours! I thought for sure you were gone already.”
That blew me away. “Wait. How long was I gone?”
Chris looked at me oddly. “Almost two hours, man. Did you really not realize that?”
It had felt like just a few minutes to me.
I was shocked to find out that I’d been gone for almost two hours, and that Chris was about to go looking for me.
Chris had already called us a cab to get us home, as both of us had several alcoholic drinks, and we'd planned to go home in a cab anyway. After letting me know, he went outside to vape and make sure we didn’t miss the taxi. I’d stayed back to use the bathroom. I just wanted to leave at that point. My buzz was completely gone and I was more annoyed at how the night had wound up than anything else.
That crazy bitch biting me had just killed the evening for me. Who the hell even does that? A little nibble is one thing, but she’d torn out a chunk of meat! If I didn’t have regen, I’d probably have to get stitches!
I pee’d in the bathroom, then washed my hands; I couldn’t have been in there for more than three or four minutes, all told.
When I walked outside, though, Chris was nowhere to be found.
I glanced around, then asked the bouncer if he’d seen Chris. It was almost 1 AM, and the place was pretty much cleared out, since the band’s last set was at midnight.
Bruno was his name, I think? Considering Chris slipped him a twenty-dollar bill, he’ll probably remember him...
"Hey, man! Your name was Bruno, right?” I asked him. He nodded and looked twenty-five percent less bored than he had a couple of seconds ago. “Have you seen my buddy, Chris? He slipped you a $20 when we walked in, I think.”
He thought for a second. “Oh, yeah! Chris, always comes in early on Friday, right?”
“That sounds about right, yeah. Have you seen him? He was supposed to have been out here waiting for our cab.”
Bruno nodded. “Yup. Hate ta tell ya, but yer buddy skipped out on ya. Some really foxy babe was waiting out here when he came out a few minutes ago. The cab pulled up and they got in together and left; they were all over each other!”
That’s not like Chris at all. There’s no way he’d ditch me like that, and we just talked about the fact that he hadn’t had any luck with the ladies all night! Some random hot girl shows up just in time for the cab and he takes off with her? That sounds really damned shady.
Suddenly, I just knew that this guy was lying to me. In fact, I was completely certain of it... the kind of certain that told me I’d just succeeded in a Sense Motive check by a LOT! The only question was, WHY was he lying to me? I just wasn’t sure what I should do.
Should I go old school 80s action movie hero/private detective and beat a confession out of him? That seemed unlikely to be very effective. I could probably Intimidate him, but that cuts off any other interactions with him and likely any possible help from the people in the bar, too.
Uggh. Something weird is going on here. Well, lucky for me I have ways to figure out weird shit!
I activated Sense Supernatural and immediately felt like a damned fool.
The bouncer wasn’t even remotely human.