We spent another day puttering around the cottage and tavern getting a few of our professions up. I had enough tavern meals prepped for us to be gone for weeks and still get residual experience from the sale of food. We’d brewed up a bunch of batches of potions for Chester’s shop too. It was getting harder to get levels in our professions, so we figured we were ready to move. I wanted a few runs at Eroomtsim, more for the loot than for the experience before we hit the road for Siff.
“Nice,” Dom drawled out, looking around.
I’d been surging forward so fast that I’d forgotten how to look around and enjoy some of it. This zone was actually my favorite, so far. We zoned onto a path that led out of a very creepy forest and into an even more creepy landscape. Wrought iron gates stood open with one side half buried in the dirt path and a tall wooden slat fencing that surrounded the front yard. The graveyard beyond the fence was dotted with grave markers that ranged from crumbling wooden ones that were illegible to the four gothic mausoleums that anchored the corners of the battlefield. Beyond the graveyard was a beautiful gothic mansion that could have fit in with the zombie version of Pride and Prejudice.
“Duh-duh-duh duh,” Dom snapped his fingers twice and I giggled.
“This is a little game they like to call Wake the Dead,” I quipped back at him.
I summoned Terra, who had decided to nap at home instead of taking the walk out to the dungeon. Her summoning spell had leveled up and it allowed us to see what she might grow into. Dom and I were using it a lot more than I had alone, so we’d leveled it up twice. Once Terra had seen the potential for growth, she’d been much more content to let us summon her around all day.
At 20, the spell had allowed her to choose her color, and at 40 we could choose a small wildcat. It was a rare breed with the body of a Serval, but black instead of the leopard pattern of normal Servals. Unless you looked very closely and knew big cat breeds, you wouldn’t know she was more than a large black cat except that her ears were exceptionally large. I let Terra choose her main shape, and she’d simply gone through everything she thought might intimidate Damon from home. While this was now her default shape and coloring, she could temporarily take the shape and color of any cat this size or smaller.
“Ugh, bugs,” Terra gave a mighty stretch, her tail in the air and her ample claws extended in front of her.
“You’re almost as big as they are,” Dom said, and she preened under the compliment.
“Care to bring a few together so we can clear the trash with a Fireball?” I asked her, running a hand over her head and down her back and she rubbed the side of her face against my upper thigh.
“Sure thing,” Terra purred out, her tone deeper and lazier than I’d ever known her to be. “I’ve been craving something larger than the mice.”
Her form became liquid and slid into the shadows with the expertise of a cat that had been practicing on rabbits. I knew this because she’d brought several dead bunnies the day before. Dom had been happy to have more rabbit pelts to practice with for backpack material, but I was getting sick of trying to find rabbit meat recipes. That sewing project had gotten up Sewing, Seamstress, Tanning, and Leatherworking, so Dom and I had encouraged her.
I watched her purposely give away her location to chase and herd the scattered beetles into a swarm near the gate. I was impressed, thinking that she could give a border collie a run for its money. I kept my eyes on her so that our Fireball spells wouldn’t singe her. While she was gathering the swarm, Dom and I quietly made a barricade like when ranchers loaded cattle onto the truck. Between our upgraded Silence spell, our Woodworking skill, and the upgraded Fix It, it was child’s play to turn the nearby wooden fencing into slaughter pens.
Grave Robber Beetle – Level 10 (Health 300/300) (Mana 170/170)
Dom cast his Sparkler spell, mumbling about having to get his spells up, while I waited for the swarm to get close. His Sparkler spell only did eight to nine damage, but he could cast with both hands and Sparkler was more precise. He did a slight amount of damage to everything. There were around 20 of the shiny black cockroach-like things. I took his example and cast the lower version until they were all together in our slaughter pen.
Grave Robber Beetle – Level 10 (Health 272/300) (Mana 170/170)
Once they were in the pen, we stopped messing around. My double blast of Fireballs did 80 to 90 damage per cast. It was eerie how they clittered until they hit our Silence spells in the pen. Once they were all quiet, I knew my Fireballs would fry them all up.
Grave Robber Beetle – Level 10 (Health 198/300) (Mana 170/170) – Burning (-10/5 seconds)
Dom and I sat on the tallest portion of the fence, which was also burning now. We were too high for the beetles to reach us, but Dom took a round to cast a Repair spell at the burning fence. I just cast two more rounds of Fireballs.
Grave Robber Beetle – Level 10 (Health 22/300) (Mana 170/170) – Burning (-10/5 seconds)
I fixed the fence and let Dom cast Sparkler on the beetles until they all fell, letting his Sparkler spell level up.
“That’s better,” Dom gave a heavy sigh. “Sparkler just leveled up to Flare.”
You have killed a Grave Robber Beetle – Exp +150
Exp +3150 (29,453/155,696)
I was wrong. That line repeated a total of 21 times for a whopping 6,300 experience split between the two of us, which seemed like a lot until you realized that it would take another 50 swarms for us to level up, more for Dom. We might level up one time in this dungeon per run. I knew we needed to move into a higher-level area for faster level ups, but I didn’t want to leave.
“Talk to me,” Dom broke into thoughts, touching the still smoldering beetle corpses to gather the loot.
“I’m just in a down,” I answered, kicking the one body I could reach from the fence. The loot consisted of beetle legs, which my cooking skill told me might fry up into something interesting. Yeah, I was really sick of rabbit.
Terra slunk up next to me and sprawled with half of her torso in my lap and her back legs hanging one on either side of the wooden fence next to where I sat. Her purr was enough to vibrate the fence precariously, but I appreciated the affection anyway. Dom looted corpses and waited for me to continue.
“I think I’m afraid of leaving our little oasis here,” I finally admitted, stroking Terra’s big ears.
“Makes sense,” Dom nodded, kicking another two. “Last time you left town, Kat died.”
His bluntness was like a kick in the chest, and I gave out a huff of air, putting a hand on my chest to soothe the almost physical pain his statement caused.
“Sorry,” he muttered, giving a more vicious kick to the next corpse.
“No,” I shook my head and tried to shake it off. “You’re right.” Though technically he wasn’t. I’d gone back on a reboot to see if she was there. I hadn’t left since I’d brought him back. Some irrational thing in my head was telling me that if he went to Siff with me, he’d die. I didn’t like being a slave to my subconscious, so I tried to tell it to shut up. Denial worked for me about as well as it did for everyone else. I knew better.
“I’d say we could stay here forever, but I don’t think we can,” he pushed on, casting a Clean on his boots to get the charred beetle off them.
“I never grieved,” I wondered aloud.
“She’s alive,” he argued.
“Yeah, but that’s got me stuck in the process,” I reasoned, giving Terra a hug before I jumped down from the fence. “I got stuck in bargaining. I told myself that I’d do anything to bring her back and then she was back. I don’t get to see her, but my mind is still stuck. She’s back so I don’t get to grieve. She’s back but the cost was that I don’t get to see her.”
I had a moment’s thought that this conversation might not make sense to a person who was reading the first iteration of my journey. To them, my daughter never died. I was also stuck in denial because I shouldn’t talk about it. Terra leaped down next to me and pressed her head against my hip. I knew she could feel what I was feeling. Even feeling these things was dangerous.
“Kat may be alive, but I can’t see and touch her,” I went on, trying to couch my phrasing so that it wouldn’t trigger Fizzbarren’s anger. “Part of me thinks it’s in denial. Part of me is stuck on bargaining. Hell, part of me is wedged into depression and anger too. How do I get to acceptance when I can’t even get through a single part of the process?”
Dom gave me one of those looks where his eyebrows pucker over his nose and his head cocks to the side a little. His bafflement made me mad again. It shouldn’t have, because I knew he was just trying to understand what I was saying and figure out what to say back to me.
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“And there’s the anger,” I threw my hands up, heedless of the graves that were too close for me to be playing around with an emotional crisis.
“Keep that,” Dom suggested with more blunt blandness and then deftly changed the subject. “You said the graveyard was full of skeletons. How do you get them?”
I was mad for a good minute, crossing my arms over my chest. I didn’t want to change the subject. I needed to deal with these emotions before they…
“I’m not sick,” I realized, backing up until I hit our fence perch. I was shocked at the realization that should have hit me long before. It had, but not like this.
“I noticed,” Dom watched me carefully.
“I used to have to fix my emotional problems as ruthlessly as I face the dungeons,” I let the wooden fence bite into my back and took breaths like they were a cherished privilege. “I didn’t have the energy to be emotional. It took away too much of my strength. I didn’t have the luxury of emotional outbursts.”
“You did do that,” Dom shook his head at me, and I knew that this fact had been why I’d been good at psychology. It’s why I was going to be a psychiatrist. I wanted to help others do what I’d had to do.
When I said I was sick, I tended to undersell the idea. The only thing worse than being sick was admitting that I had limitations. To put it in perspective that won’t mean much to most people, I would manage my emotions in order to do the most average of things. For example, I might have gotten furious in order to trigger a fight or flight response just so I’d have enough energy to take a shower. Or I would get terrified, so I’d have the energy to walk across campus to a class that was too far from handicapped parking. My life was full of triggering emotional reactions in order to flush my system with the chemicals that I needed to accomplish what normal people did without blinking. Need to charm someone? I would trigger the “falling in love” hormones that made them feel special and desirable.
“But I don’t have to do that anymore,” I let my arms slide down my chest so that I was hugging myself. “I have energy.”
Dom finished looting the last beetle and strode over to stand near me. He leaned against the fence next to me. “You have energy.”
“I have the energy to be a little screwed up,” I admitted with a little laugh.
“Now you lost me,” he put his hands into pockets he’d added to his leather pants.
“You said it,” I pointed at him. “Keep the anger.”
“Yeah,” he backed away.
“I can keep the anger because I have the energy to keep it,” I wondered at something that was incomprehensible to someone who’d had the ability to hold deep-seated emotional baggage for decades. Dom and I had worked on his baggage for years, but I’d always been rooting it out like he was like me, like he couldn’t afford it. But he could. And now I could too. “Maybe it’s not a great thing to carry around emotional baggage, but it’s not the end of the world to have it now. It used to be that I didn’t have the physical strength to carry my own purse half the time. Now I have the strength to pick up a car!”
“You want to carry a car’s worth of emotional baggage?” Dom dipped his head and creased his eyebrows.
“Well, no,” I chuckled at him. “But I can carry this little purse of Kat’s absence.” In that moment, my body accepted the fact that it wasn’t sick. I let my shoulders wiggle to loosen them up from the tension that comes with emotional outbursts. I might forget again in a day or two, but for today, I could let go of the heavy fatigue that had plagued my life.
“Can you carry that and kill skeletons?” he pressed, his eyes hooded.
“Kick the headstones,” I told him, letting the emotion sit on the back burner.
“Now you’re talking,” Dom gave me a blooming grin and pushed off the fence, trusting me to follow him to the graveyard.
“Kick one hard enough and you’ll wake the row, so…” I tried to tell him, but he was already swinging back his foot at the nearest tombstone.
Two skeletons rose slowly from the earth. They couldn’t even be targeted until they were all the way out of the grave, so we waited and watched them pull heads, shoulders and then hips and legs out of the mound of earth. Dom stepped behind their tombstone and slid into the shadows.
Dirty Skeleton – Level 13 (Health 468/468) (Mana 299/299)
Dirty Skeleton – Level 11 (Health 352/352) (Mana 209/209)
We’d had a strategy for the beetles because I always had a strategy to find the fastest and easiest way to dispatch the mobs, but maybe we didn’t need that either. At least, maybe we didn’t need it as much. I couldn’t cast my Fireball with Dom sneaking up behind them, so I cast Lighten Emotions, the upgrade to my Lift Spirits spell. Dom slipped his garrote over the higher leveled skeleton and deftly decapitated it. Dom had chosen the garrote as his signature weapon, so he got double damage with it. Using it as a death blow had worked in the Gnoblins dungeon.
Health -41 (16,059/16,100)
Dirty Skeleton Body – Level 13 (Health 330/330) (Mana 49/49)
Dirty Skeleton Head – Level 13 (Health 158/158) (Mana 250/250)
Dirty Skeleton – Level 11 (Health 352/352) (Mana 209/209)
Then again, maybe we would need a different strategy with skeletons than we’d had with the gnoblins. The severed head of the skeleton hopped about and bit Dom on the ankle. Much to my surprise, my spell didn’t do anything at all.
“That didn’t quite work the way I expected,” I bit out, dodging a skeletal hand that was swiping at me. I had cast it before at a lower level and it had worked as a DOT. I cast the older version to see if it would still work.
“Me neither,” Dom groused, swinging back to punt the head. He used his hands to cast Flare at the body of his skeleton, dropping his garrote into his inventory.
Health -32 (16,027/16,100)
Dirty Skeleton Body – Level 13 (Health 311/330) (Mana 49/49)
Dirty Skeleton Head – Level 13 (Health 94/158) (Mana 250/250)
Dirty Skeleton – Level 11 (Health 340/352) (Mana 209/209) – Cheerful (-12/5 seconds)
“Lift Spirits works, but Lighten Emotions didn’t,” I told him, casting it at the body and what I could see of the head as it went flying away from us.
“That’s terrible,” Dom groaned, but I didn’t get it at the time. Dom punched out with a spell I didn’t recognize at first. Terra bounded after the head with a playful leap.
Health -29 (15,998/16,100)
Dirty Skeleton Body – Level 13 (Health 248/330) (Mana 20/20) – Cheerful (-12/5 seconds)
Dirty Skeleton – Level 11 (Health 328/352) (Mana 209/209) – Cheerful (-12/5 seconds)
“What?” I asked, but Dom only shook his head.
“Clean does damage,” he told me, dodging a wild swing from the skeleton body.
“What!?” I had to see it, so I cast Bleach at the one in front of me. Bleach only effected one square foot and I hadn’t used it a lot, choosing the lower level Cleanest instead. The only problem with that was that the spell itself would not increase in level if you used the lower version, which was stuck at whatever it did at max of that level of the spell.
Health -53 (15,945/16,100)
Dirty Skeleton Body – Level 13 (Health 176/330) (Mana 20/20) – Cheerful (-12/5 seconds)
Dirty Skeleton – Level 11 (Health 216/352) (Mana 209/209) – Cheerful (-12/5 seconds)
“Glowing eyes mean a magical attack,” I called out as my skeleton’s eyes lit up. “And that Clean thing just wrong. My Bleach spell did a hundred damage.” I cast my Bleach spell on a different part of the skeleton, because the part I’d already cast it on was a very bright white.
“Nice,” Dom drawled out. “Terra’s got my head.”
“I noticed,” Terra hissed in my mind, talking about the head having magic.
Health -72 (15,873/16,100)
Dirty Skeleton Body – Level 13 (Health 104/330) (Mana 20/20) – Cheerful (-12/5 seconds)
Dirty Skeleton – Level 11 (Health 104/352) (Mana 179/209) – Cheerful (-12/5 seconds)
“Do you need me to summon you?” I called to Terra, concerned.
“As if,” she growled in a very un-Terra way. “This thing is my plaything.”
“I think Terra’s size is changing her in other ways,” I told Dom, finding another spot to Bleach.
“Bad ways?” Dom asked, somehow combining a kick with a cast of two spells.
Health -12 (15,861/16,100)
You have killed a Dirty Skeleton Body – Exp +165 (29,613/155,696)
You have killed a Dirty Skeleton – Exp +176 (29,789/155,696)
You have killed a Dirty Skeleton Head – Exp +79 (29,863/155,696)
“Not as long as she still loves me,” I said aloud, kicking a skeleton to loot it.
“Always,” she purred, bounding back toward us. She playfully bounced off one of the tombstones and triggered it, giving me an idea.
“Hey Terra,” I called to her, watching the skeleton pull itself out of the ground, its eyes zeroing in on Terra. “If you can trigger all the tombstones, we can round them up like the beetles.”
“These guys can reach us on that fence,” Dom protested, but only lightly. It was a moot point since Terra was already redirecting to hit another tombstone.
“Yeah, but your Cleanest spell is area of effect, and you can cast it on several at a time,” I shrugged. “It’s not Fireball, but how many can really reach us that high.”
“Huh,” Dom eyed the one coming out of the ground still. “I can make them all shorter.”
I wasn’t sure it was a great idea, but we did have the zone at our back if anything went too wrong. I backed over to our cattle pen and cast some Fix Its on the enclosure.
“Let’s pull four to begin with, okay?” I called to Terra, who lunged over the next tombstone instead of onto it.
“Sure,” she changed direction on a dime and batted at one of the heads that Dom had disconnected from its body.
Dom punted the nearest one away from our area. “No extra damage if they don’t have eyes.”
“True.” I climbed up onto the fence I’d just heightened. Four bodies lumbered slowly after Dom as another head went flying.
“I thought you hated sports,” I teased him.
“Just because I don’t want to play basketball, doesn’t mean they didn’t teach me how to kick a football,” Dom jogged in a circle to tighten the group and cast a Clean spell at the pack. I started casting the Lift Spirits spell, when I finally got the stupid joke. Seriously?
Dirty Skeleton Body – Level 13 (Health 228/330) (Mana 49/49) – Cheerful (-12/5 seconds)
Dirty Skeleton Body – Level 11 (Health 202/250) (Mana 34/34)
Dirty Skeleton Body – Level 12 (Health 240/288) (Mana 41/41)
Dirty Skeleton Body – Level 12 (Health 200/288) (Mana 41/41) – Cheerful (-12/5 seconds)
I was impressed with the distance at which I could cast Lift Spirits. I managed to cast it again long before they got to the pen. Dom had time to hoist himself up onto the top before the skeletons dragged themselves into the pen. He got to the top and cast another Clean at them before they were close enough to even try to hit us back. I cast a Fireball, curious as to what Bleach might do to charred bones. We probably could have dotted them to death, but we could kill them faster in the pen.
Dirty Skeleton Body – Level 13 (Health 112/330) (Mana 49/49) – Cheerful (-12/5 seconds)
Dirty Skeleton Body – Level 11 (Health 116/250) (Mana 34/34) – Cheerful (-12/5 seconds)
Dirty Skeleton Body – Level 12 (Health 124/288) (Mana 41/41) – Cheerful (-12/5 seconds)
Dirty Skeleton Body – Level 12 (Health 173/288) (Mana 41/41) – Cheerful (-12/5 seconds)
The bad news was that the bodies could climb our fence as well as we could. The good news was that they were so slow, we killed them all before they could reach us and repaired the fence long before Terra came back with the heads. The heads hopped and cast a lot, but unless they could sink their teeth into us, they didn’t do any damage at all.
We kited them. I would kick the stone and leisurely walk to the next one. Dom would wait until they were targetable and then garrot their heads off. Terra would bat at the heads enough to gain aggro and lead the heads in another direction. Dom would lead the bodies in a circle to get them close together and I would cast Fireball into the tangled mess. Most of them died before we got them back to the pen. Terra herded in the heads and that too was a slaughter as they couldn’t climb at all. We practiced our spells on the heads since they were like a bubbling cauldron of impotent aggression. My poison spell finally upgraded over eighty and gave me a Poison Cloud.
There were two wights in each of the corner mausoleums. They were called wights, but they were closer to Casper than Supernatural versions. They were also overly susceptible to fire, so we lit them up and moved on to the house.