1833 gold.
Not enough to buy anything I wanted without worrying about the cost—but enough that if something caught my eye, or even four or five things caught my eye, I’d be able to walk away with them.
Oroth had directed me to a shop close to the stairwell that led into the underground, and inside I found a building that had the same quiet and cozy atmosphere as a library. A few players perusing the same glass displays that I’d seen in Oromar’s Bastion, and I joined them.
Most of their stock were things I’d already seen, but there were a few new ones:
Common Spell Card – Conjure Light
Cost: 2 Mana + 2 Mana / Hour
Cast Time: 1.3 Seconds
Range: 20 Meters
Effect: Conjure Light
This spell conjures a light that can shine as brightly as a small campfire. Your Power increases the maximum intensity you can conjure.
You may have one light conjured for each 6 Spellcraft you have.
Common Spell Card – Charm of Water Breathing
Cost: 12 Mana + 12 Mana / Hour
Cast Time: 4.1 Seconds
Range: 5 Meters
Effect: Water Breathing
This spell allows you or a target creature to breathe normally underwater.
Common Spell Card – Charm of Darksight
Cost: 6 Mana + 6 Mana / Hour
Cast Time: 4.1 Seconds
Range: 5 Meters
Effect: Darksight
This spell allows you or your target to see in even total darkness, though you cannot see color.
Uncommon Spell Card – Slow
Cost: 14 Mana
Cast Time: 2.1 Seconds
Cooldown: 20.6 Seconds
Duration: 10 Seconds
Effect: 6 Defense Rating; 12 Haste and Celerity; 40.4% Movement Speed
This spell afflicts your target with heavy penalties to their Defense Rating, Haste, Celerity, and Movement Speed.
Uncommon Spell Card – Visions of the Past
Cost: 115 Mana
Cast Time: 41.2 Seconds
Cooldown: Special (See below)
This spell allows you to look into past events that took place at your current location. You can choose either a specific event or a date and time when you finish casting this spell, at which point you witness your surroundings as they were then for up to 5 minutes in length.
The cooldown of this spell varies depending on how far back into the past you looked. The cooldown is 10 minutes if you looked back up to 12 hours, 1 hour if you looked back up to a week, 12 hours if you looked back up to a year, and 24 hours if you looked back up to 100 years.
Uncommon Spell Card – Emotive Attenuation
Cost: 17 Mana + 8 Mana / Minute
Cast Time: 4.1 Seconds
Duration: 6 Seconds
Effect: Emotive Attenuation out to 101m
This spell allows you to detect strong emotional states in your surroundings, as well as get a general sense of the direction they are in, if not their exact location. Creatures who are not in a state of intense emotion will only be detected by this spell if they are within close radius of the caster. This effect extends through solid material.
I couldn’t tell which ones would be useful in the future, but the first three seemed like they would be useful for dungeon-delving. My Heightened Sight skill helped me see all right enough at night—but with reduced effectiveness. Darksight would hopefully let me see as well at night as I did during the day.
I figured it would be worth it to buy all of them—Slow was another Defense Rating reducer, and didn’t come with the stacking resistance that something like Hex of Chains did. The last two spells were the sort of thing that didn’t always come in handy—but when they did, they’d likely be a godsend.
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I found the shopkeep, a tired-looking human woman who, like Miradel, was level 8. Inquiring as to the cost of all of them, I found the commons were all cheap, under 100 gold each, and the uncommon cards were predictably more expensive—Slow was costliest at 385, the other two both were 255.
All totalled, I spent 1129 gold on all the spells. Then I bought a small length of chain from a blacksmith in town and made my way to the town square with 703 gold in my pocket. It was much like the square in Oromar’s Bastion, though here the square had essentially been built over the river—one super-wide bridge with a clearing on either side that formed a free-flowing marketplace.
I sat at one of a row of stone-carved tables and began to make another Hex of Chains card, listening to the players and NPCs hawk their wares, hoping to hear something about Spell Cards, Class Cards, or just decent mage equipment—I still had empty slots for gear: my back and one ring slot.
It was nice, focusing on making the card and listening to the people in the square. It seemed to me that my Heightened Hearing ability made it easier to pick out individual voices, and to notice when a new chant had joined the chorus of already familiar ones.
I didn’t hear anybody selling gear. But a gnome who appeared just before I finished the card promised potions: 55 gold potions and 110 gold potions specifically. Curious when the price had already been set, I asked him to trade.
“First row is the cheap stuff, friend!” he said cheerily, grinning at me in a way that reminded me of Cuby. I wondered briefly if he was a Phrenodine.
The first row had both Potions of Primeval Resistance and Potion of Steady Focus, along with a Power-increasing potion and a Potion of Iron Skin which gave 10 Physical Resistance.
The second row had only two potions:
Uncommon Item – Potion of Revelation
This potion restores one charge of Grace, but only if you have no charges remaining. You may only benefit from one Potion of Revelation in a single day.
Uncommon Item – Potion of True Sight
This potion grants you True Sight with an effect strength of 50. This effect lasts 2 hours.
“This is some good stuff,” I said to the gnome.
He grinned and nodded back to me. “Worth buying, yes?”
“Definitely,” I said, checking the effect strength on my False Identity—34. The True Sight potion was well above what I’d need to spot my own bullshit, and while we hadn’t had any trouble with illusions so far, it was exactly the sort of thing that you didn’t want be missing if you needed it.
I asked him if he’d seen Cuby, and when he told me no, I bought two more Potions of Primeval Resistance, another Potion of Steady Focus, two Potions of Iron Skin, and one Potion of True Sight—bringing me down to 318 gold.
I finished the Hex of Chains card, then, because I hadn’t heard anyone selling grenades—the thing I definitely wanted to stock up on—I went to check the underground to find that Cuby had already returned to the waterfall.
She spotted me and smiled, only it wasn’t her usual smile. It was slight, subdued… and there was something almost sad about it. “Will you come with me?” she asked as soon as I approached.
“Yeah, Cuby. Of course.”
“Come on,” she said, smiling that same smile again as she moved to the open edge of the promenade and made a Mighty Leap over the railing and into the air. I followed, leaping out over a drop of several hundred feet to the river below, feeling my stomach lurch first with terror, and then my whole body ride a wave of elation, of exhilaration, as I began to glide behind Cuby. Had I flown like this for fun? We’d been chasing Haroshi, planning to outplay Haroshi, this entire time. And here….
It was as beautiful as any place I’d seen on Earth. As a gentle blanket of air seemed to push on every part of the front of my body, I looked down at a mist-wreathed rainbow where the waterfall plunged below. The sheer scope of the valley below, the rising mountains on either side and ahead of us, made me feel like I’d entered the grandest of cathedrals.
This place isn’t even real, I thought to myself. And it can still make me feel like this.
I wished we could have flown forever—or at least followed the river for awhile. But Cuby pulled a right and led me to a patch of grass that bore three small trees, a ledge that fell away on all sides.
She landed, then stepped toward the edge, not looking at me. “I sat and meditated and regained my self-mastery,” she said, speaking in pleasant tones, but without her previous, characteristic exuberance. “I feel much better, now.”
“That’s good.”
“But being sad was useful,” she said. She turned to me. “You’re right, Alatar—consciousness should be triangulated. It’s good to know what you think about something when you’re in different moods. In my old job, I hadn’t forgotten that….” She gazed into the distance again.
Then she spoke. “Before… I was glad to help you. The promise of the boon card meant that I could tolerate the fact that you were hiding things from me because I was… it’s like you said,” she said, shrugging. “I was happy. And I was so focused on looking forward to the future, to the boon card, because the stories I was telling about it were good—well….” She looked away. Frowned. “It’s not just that I was looking forward to it. I’m used to doing things this way. The powerful get their way by motivating with their power, not with trust. As long as I understand you, I can trust you’ll hold up your end of the bargain.”
Ah, I thought. This was… exactly what I suspected, then. And with everything Cuby was saying… how could I blame her if she demanded that I tell her the truth?
“I don’t want to do that anymore,” she said simply. “I want….” she looked over at the waterfall and sighed. “I never would have liked this view as much, before. I’m part human now. Part human, part phrenodine, and I don’t really know what that means. Except… I want to be friends with you, Alatar,” she said, still not looking at me. “I don’t want it all to just be an exchange. I don’t want the best relationship we can have to be that I understand you enough to know that you’ll get me what I want. I want you to trust me… just because you trust me. I think I wanted it back in Oromar’s Bastion, even if I really didn’t see what this meant. And I want you to be around, and I want to be able to trust you, because if I’m changing then you know better than anyone what that will mean.”
Now she turned to me, her expression kind, but still somehow very sad. “Don’t you?”
They are going to find Earth, said the voice of fear in my head.
“Cuby—”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I know exactly what you are already.”
I gulped. “You do?”
“Of course I do,” she said. “It’s the only thing that makes sense, even if it’s impossible. But it’s okay.”
“It is?” I asked.
She smiled. Shrugged.
“You’re an NPC.”