They piled our purchases on the table, and I traded it for some coins in my purse. There were two boxes of vials for the potions, a huge roll of leather, another of thick fabric, two backpacks, nails, a hatchet, four pads of paper, some rough pencils, and a few bundles of dried herbs. Chester took my coins and gave us a wave as he headed back to his shop, checking things off his list. I handed the backpacks to Dom to expand his inventory.
Since Dom was so far behind on stats, he started with the hatchet to get his strength up and get us a supply of wood for one of my projects. I paid him to get the wood for me and he paid me for the buff I gave him to help out. The wood thing got him a Woodsman profession, but the buff didn’t result in anything. Either buffing was part of my class and therefore disqualified as a profession, or there wasn’t a profession that focused on buffing people. I knew I wouldn’t get the Healer profession because the Heal spell was part of my initial spell set, but I could get a thieving profession because it wasn’t part of my class’s specific skill set. It was one of the few balancing mechanisms that worked.
I was glad that Dom had something to do because I wanted to try something that I’d learned to do much later in the game. I knew that Lily wouldn’t be able to retain anything I taught her without a spell book. This was the biggest scam in the game, and I wanted to see if I could bypass it. It was a failed attempt to balance because it didn’t work. I could cast a spell without a spell book, but that was because I was already creating spells and I knew how to mold mana to my will. The spell book just made casting a spell faster. A PC could be stripped of their spells by destroying their spell book, but that took a very high level NPC.
An NPC like Lily could learn spells but if the main storyline changed, those spells would be lost to her. If she had a spell book, it would travel with her even if the main quest changed her character traits. The story rationale for it was that a person in the game had to get their spell book from the guild. I had been exempted from this rule until Fizzbarren changed the rules. A PC would start off with a spell book if they chose a magic-using class and it was just assumed that association with the guild was in the backstory somewhere. It could have bigger implications for my next fight but that was a tiny gamble that I didn’t think would work. Still, I sat with one of my blank pads of paper and tried.
I sharpened a sturdy stick because I needed more umph than a pencil could provide for this one. I pulled a single sheet of paper and laid it on the table. I’d start with the smaller accomplishment that I was pretty sure I could get. I placed the stick in a small cup and slashed my palm for a small pool of blood.
Health -12 (2163/2175)
I quickly scratched the words “Basic Clean” in blood at the top of the page. I didn’t have the spells I wanted to be able to do this, so I’d have to use my mana manipulation skill instead. I had to do it quickly because I didn’t want my palm to heal before I’d completed it. I smeared blood over my palm and laid it in the middle of the page. And pushed. I bled mana into the page. I filled my mind with the Clean spell and rather than cast it, I pushed it into the page. It took four tries, but I got the spell to manifest for a massive chunk of a hundred mana, more than any other spell I had.
Spell Learned: Create Scroll
Exp +30 (13,624/30,755)
There it was. It took a chunk of mana, but Terra did her job, twining around my ankles so I was quick to regain it. Even so, I’d drained my mana to empty by the time I made two scrolls of each spell in my spell book including the Create Scroll spell, and that was with Terra’s constant attention. I could only make the basic spells, but it was something. The scrolls could be cast by anyone who had the mana, or they could be written into a magic-user’s spell book.
“I think we have enough wood,” Dom broke into my meditation when I was only half refilled.
When I looked up, my eyes widened. I’d never seen my husband buff. Those were honest to goodness muscles on that man. That was leather armor stretched near to bursting and I cast Repair on it just to try not to drool. Dang. I mean, I didn’t care what he looked like. I loved him. But, dang! I was suddenly reminded that I had sixteen-year-old hormones all over again. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
“Are you alright?” Dom asked, setting down the hatchet just inside the door.
I looked down to see the blood-spattered table. “Oh, this?” I shrugged. “I’m just trying some new spells.”
“Is that your blood,” his tone held concern.
“Um, yeah, but it’s good. I did good,” I didn’t have words. You would think with my level of intelligence that I could have more or better words, but he had just come in fresh from chopping wood looking like his body had walked in off of a Fireman’s calendar.
“You don’t sound okay,” he obviously hadn’t noticed the physical differences in himself because he still walked in that awkward way that let my heart slow down its annoying racing. Ugh.
“I’m fine,” I ground out, casting Clean at my table as if it was what upset me. I took a deep breath and shoved a scroll at him. “Here, this is a Clean spell. See if you can write it into your spell book.”
“How?” he asked, and I cast Clean on him as he got close to me. He had been chopping wood in a black leather outfit and while it wasn’t hot, temperature-wise, it would be after chopping wood for probably over an hour. At least that had cleared my mind of its stupid love-sick haze. I had the derogatory thought that I was like a love-sick teenager when I realized that was exactly what I was. Ugh again.
“I have no idea,” I admitted. “I’ve always made up my own spells. Maybe just cast it and see if it ends up in your spell book. That’s how I got most of my recipes.”
“Uh, huh,” Dom didn’t trust my explanation and I didn’t blame him. Things didn’t work for him the way they worked for me so it probably wouldn’t work that way. I knew he wanted to go off somewhere and try it out. He hated to try something new in front of someone. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust me, it was that he didn’t want to look like a fool. It was a deep-set flaw that we’d never overcome.
“Go on.” I shoved a pile of scrolls into his hands and waved him away with annoyance, another thing that helped shut up my unwelcome hormones. “I have other work to do. If you screw any of them up, I can make more.”
“With your blood?” he mumbled, and I tried to temper my attitude.
“Have you seen my health?” I pointed out, laying out another set of pages to infuse. He wouldn’t understand my mood and I really didn’t want him to. I didn’t know what it meant to be married to a man who could stop traffic in a gunny sack. That was going to take some getting used to for me. I didn’t even wonder if he felt anything like that about me. That’s how short-circuited my brain went.
His head cocked to the side like when I’d said something he didn’t understand. I knew he was just thinking about it. We’d had a hundred fights about that look. His face said he thought I was crazy for whatever I’d just said. His mind was just trying to figure out what I was saying.
Just so you know, I refuse to put the romance tag on this book. My husband and I have a normal loving relationship. We are not falling in love. We are just stuck in bodies with stupid hormones that make me think very inappropriate things for my daughter to be reading. And those bodies are very hot versions of what we knew and already loved in each other. Can we just leave it at that? Good. Thanks. For a minute, I thought this was going to get weird. Don’t get weird on me and I won’t get weird on you.
The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
“If you finish that, will you go to Chester’s shop and see if he has any more blank paper with or without binding?” I asked, ignoring the look as ten years of marriage and two years of marriage counseling had taught me to do. “I need another thirteen points in this spell before I can get what I really want and I’m at,” I did some quick math in my head, “an average of three pages per point. I’m short about forty pages.”
Intelligence +1
“And that’s how you get your intelligence score up,” I quipped to myself.
“Sure,” Dom shook his head at me and climbed up into one of the lofts. It was another disconnect between Dom’s physical expression and what he meant. His head might have been saying no, but he would get me my paper once he’d figured out the spell thing on his own.
I put aside my scroll stuff and took a break to start a few batches of potions. It helped me get my thoughts back under control. It had been a few incarnations since I’d had the luxury of churning out batches of anything in a kitchen. I let the routine wash over me. I was setting out glass vials on the counter when Terra disappeared with a mental squeak.
“Terra?” I called out, concern making me say it out loud.
“She’s up here,” Dom called back with a laugh.
“I’m fine,” Terra groused from the loft. “Tell the oaf to warn me next time.”
“I heard that,” Dom entered our mental conversation.
“Oops!” Terra leapt from the balcony and onto the table making my scroll-making supplies rattle.
“You heard that?” I asked Terra in our mental link, testing to see if Dom could hear me also.
“I did,” Terra and Dom both answered.
“Isn’t that interesting,” Dom commented, but his voice was fading from the link.
“If he can hear my thoughts all the time, we’re in big trouble,” I whispered out loud to Terra.
“And it’s gone again,” he announced, poking his head over the edge of the loft.
“Hey!” Terra meowed both in my head and out loud, her outside voice coming from the loft again. “I said to warn me!”
“Nice,” Dom grinned like a maniac. “I hear you again!”
I waited for the spell to fade again and could almost feel when he left our link. Unlike my oafish husband, I warned Terra and then summoned her to the tabletop.
“Does it work the other way?” I asked Terra in our link.
“I don’t think so,” Terra admitted, giving her paw a nervous lick.
“Hey!” Dom called out again, casting the spell again. “Give her back. I need the mana recharge more than you do.”
“I’m not a mana battery, you oaf!” Terra hissed at him and darted away like the cat she was.
“But,” Dom started.
“She’s a cat and sentient, Dom,” I shook my head at him with a stern look. “Don’t take away her choice just because you don’t want to sit still and rub your hands together.”
“Rub my hands together?”
“You should give him a rabbit pelt,” Terra gave a little hiss toward the loft, then lifted her leg and began to clean in a way she knew disturbed me. I cast a Clean on her and shooed her off the table. Realizing that I hadn’t told Dom about the friction trick of getting mana back, I took the time to teach him what I knew of mana, spells, and mana manipulation. It didn’t give him the mana manipulation skill, but he did duck his head back into the loft to do the rest of his spell work alone.
I was halfway through potions when he came down. He shuffled through the spells on the table and took a few of them and tucked them into his inventory.
“Can I help?” he offered.
“Yep,” I answered, more because it would increase his Alchemist profession and therefore his health and mana than that it would help me out. I had him help me pour out potions. He’d gotten the healing and cleaning spells, so I let him charge the potions and clean up the workbench.
“So much better than a dishwasher,” Dom commented about the cleaning spell.
“I know, right?” I was happy to pass on the cleaning.
“The spells had about a twenty percent failure rate for going into my spell book once I got the hang of it,” he told me as we worked.
“That’s not bad,” I capped the first potion, showing him how as I did it.
“You’re going to have to show me how you created the scrolls,” he capped and sealed the mana potions while I did the healing ones. “I can’t seem to get it right without whatever it is you were doing with the blood, and I don’t have the health pool yet to fumble around with that one.”
“No worries,” I blew out a breath, happy to be finishing up the potions. “You’ll get there.”
“I see what you mean about the professions,” he made conversation as we worked together. “I got up to level four on Woodsman and my health got healthier. It also upped a few of my brawn stats.”
“You don’t still have Brains, Brawn, and the rest of the dumbed down version of the character sheet, do you?” I asked, worrying that I’d forgotten to warn him of more things that I forgot from the beginning.
“I turned that off almost immediately,” he said, leaning back to scratch Terra in a less needy way. She’d warmed back up to him when we hadn’t continued the tug-of-war. “There’s a button at the bottom of the character sheet that allows you to toggle between them.”
“What’s your level?” I asked, half-distracted.
“I’m about to hit level three,” he answered, “maybe four more skill ups will do it.”
“I’ll let you clean up the rest then.” I shook out my hands to bleed off a little mana. I cast a low version of my poison on both of us just to watch the health drain. “Cast enough heal spells on that to level up before you cast Cure Poison.”
“I don’t quite have enough mana,” he complained, quickly trying to cast Heal. Terra twined around his feet, and he nearly stumbled.
“Welcome to Dexterity and Constitution training,” I laughed.
He gave a great heavy sigh and a little glare, but he juggled my challenge like a champ. I was glad. I’d been worried that him coming here was as much of a mistake as bringing Kat, but he wasn’t rash like she’d been. He wasn’t rushing to third level just to take a Nemesis Quest. He… my eyes glittered with tears. I missed her so much it was like a punch in my gut. I blinked them back. This wasn’t about her right now. I had to ruthlessly push it from my mind.
How did I do that? She was everything good in my life. Kat was a beautiful culmination of everything I’d hoped she could be. Insecurity hit me when I thought of her. Hadn’t I been good enough of a mother? Sure, she was rash, but she was less so than most teenagers I’d known. Did I just have blinders when it came to her? Of course I did, but shouldn’t I be allowed that?
“What?” Dom asked me, and I noted that his mana bottomed out as he cured the last of the poison.
I told him about Kat’s incarnation here in the game as we packed up a dozen each of mana, health, and preservation potions into one of the little wooden boxes the vials had come in. I told him how she’d taken the Nemesis Quest and all the reasons she’d had in her mind.
“Kat is going to be a force,” he told me gently.
“But she’s brilliant and,” I choked off, so that he stopped what he was doing to hold me.
“And she’s young,” he whispered into my hair.
“And she died in front of my eyes,” I forced myself to say. “I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t protect her. One moment she was alive and amazing and everything and the next…”
“I’m sorry babe,” he let me cry it out, petting my hair.
“I killed them all,” I whispered.
“Good,” he ground out, and only then did I notice that his voice had gotten rough.
“I killed that boy so fast that his crazed eyes didn’t even close,” I told my sins to the one person I knew wouldn’t condemn me for it. “I don’t even remember how. One moment he held her dead body, and the next moment I was shoving his body away from her. I cast Heal so many times. When it didn’t help, I haunted the sewers.” I told him about every death, every whimper, every plea for mercy that I ignored.
When I was done, he held me long enough for my sobs to quit, then he whispered so low that it felt like it was in my own mind. Maybe it was. “Let’s go do it again. You and me.”
“One more time,” I breathed out and breathed him back in.
“Fun times,” he assured me in a way only he could. “Thanks for inviting me to the party. Can’t wait.”
He meant it. Fizzbarren had not understood what he’d unleashed in bringing me to this messed up world. I realize now I had taken to calling the world a game. I’d had to. I could win a game if it meant killing a hundred NPCs and then I’d release the real people who still wanted out. Only then could I fix it all. It wasn’t enough to destroy it all. I’d fix it. And then I’d burn every book every written by the asshole who had killed our daughter.
“Can you take these to Chester?” I asked Dom, normalcy back in control. It was as close to normal any of my family was ever going to get and it was only a façade over the minds that existed underneath. “I’ve got to get to level forty on that Create Scroll spell before we teach Lily anything.”
Lily and Chester were how I could still think of myself as the good person in the story. As long as I could take care of them and get them out of it, somehow it was all worth it. Well, it was as long as Kat was still alive. Kat being alive made it worthwhile to endure. Lily and Chester were what made me the good guy instead of the bad guy. And there was no way I was letting some hack of a bad writer win. Even I could write better than that.
“I’ll stay and watch, then take it over to Chester,” Dom suggested, and I nodded. That made sense. At least I could trust Dom to make sense. “Maybe I’ll stop in and meet Lily.”
“You could stop in the tavern and meet Mabel too, if she’s up this early,” I suggested, slitting my palm to dump some blood into the bowl. It felt late, but I could tell by the light that filtered through the skylight windows that it wasn’t even midday yet.
“That is disturbing,” Dom admitted, his attention on the table where my blood was still dripping across blank pages.
“Sorry?” I didn’t even pause in my work. Dom watched as my concentration got intense, but I didn’t notice when he left. We were in sync. I didn’t have to know where he was to know that he was as motivated as I was to rewrite Fizzbarren’s destiny.