So, you have to wonder what we could do in a week. We didn’t. At least we didn’t do it this time. After that lovely shock, I spent that week and another one kicking back with my little family and catching up on stuff. I even brought Cliff over. Kat and Dom both suggested, for very different reasons, that we get Cliff killed so he could remember it all, but I wasn’t sure that was such a good idea. Dom took the choice out of my hands, and I had to see my best friend’s female version of a face as she died at the hands of my husband. Destiny was a hit with the Underground, but it didn’t last because we had to reboot it to bring Kat back. When Destiny went home to the old world, Cliff went with the knowledge of the location of Fizzbarren’s workshop. I didn’t know what he might be able to do with the knowledge, but Fizzbarren wasn’t going to be there much longer, so it couldn’t hurt.
We gave tearful goodbyes, and resolved to a restart that could become the future. The minute Kat got there, we put her to work in the castle doing every profession we could find. Sammi gave us a hard time but granted Kat the class of Flaming Angel and no more than ten days. I’d pushed extra hard for the extra days and that was all I could wring out of Sammi. Kat’s class was an eclectic mix of con artist, sword dancer, and priestess that granted her Minor Bless, Basic Heal, and Summon Dart. Sammi had tried to reason that it was a weird bard combo, but Kat had charmed them into not classifying her into a box. He’d muttered something about, like mother, like daughter, and we’d sighed our relief and gotten to work.
In my first ten days in the game, I’d gone from a mouthful of dirt to taking over the underground of Siff. With our help, Kat had to stand up to our newest foe-to-be and we couldn’t even act like we knew what was coming. It was a good thing that the king was eager to task Dom and me with bringing the church down a few pegs, because we had to whittle them down quickly. The king, as an NPC, did not remember our reboots. His justification was that without the Mage Guild to hold the church in check, it would soon out-power the throne. He didn’t know how right he was.
“I’m getting a headache, and my Heal spell isn’t touching it,” Kat complained, one hand stirring a pot of health potions while her other shook off the dust of the last spell scroll that I’d fed to her. It was the fourth in a row that she’d failed to learn.
“Maybe we should dial it back on the Cup of Joe,” I worried, my own heal spell not helping either from the look on her face.
“It’s not that,” she used Telekinesis to cap a dozen bottles at once and Spark to seal the wax on them, already dual wielding her spells. “My Intelligence isn’t high enough for this many spells. I can feel it.”
“Too much too fast,” I nodded, as Kat’s tiny kitten of a pet chose that moment to burrow out of Kat’s hair with a mighty mew that made us chuckle.
“The best way to get my stats up is dungeons and you know it,” Kat rubbed her cheek on Shadow’s head, even as she pushed mana into the pot. “Enough with the professions. We’ve been at it for two days. Let Dad take me to the gnoblin dungeon. I’ll take a few lower-level underground in with me to stay safe if you need me to, but I’m pretty sure I can solo it at this point.”
“You’re right, I’m stalling, and we really can’t afford it,” I admitted, less reluctant than she’d expected me to be. “But I need Dom here. I’ll have the king send Cumbers with you. He has teleport up high enough that the down time should be almost as small as if Dom or I took you. Maybe you should see if Lily or Chester want to go in with you.”
Persuasion +1
Exp +10 (3,149,164/5,985,462)
“They don’t remember me,” Kat smiled but shook her head. “It’s hard to be around them having to rebuild all that relationship. I’ll take some NPCs. It’s easier with them.”
“You just want to take Dugger,” I teased her, a little surprised that I wasn’t more worried.
Comedy +1
Exp +10 (3,149,174/5,985,462)
“Maybe,” she cast me a sideways smirk. “He’s cute.”
“He’s not real,” I countered, but I was smiling too. We’d gotten back a lot of our closeness over the past two days of grinding.
“Even better,” she shot back in a sing-song voice, and I couldn’t help it, I laughed.
“Fine,” I agreed. She was a big girl. She could make her own choices. “Go max out that dungeon and check back in, okay?”
It wasn’t like I didn’t have enough to do on my own and I had a lot more to trust her with this time. I’d learned from the college that sometimes it was easier to take out big obstacles with a bunch of little annoyances. Still, a bunch of annoyances could take quite the workforce to set in motion. Dom and I had the underground, the Merchant’s Guild, and the king’s spies. We also had the king, who was moving things in his own way.
“I’m going to stay and take out that Eroomtsim dungeon too,” Kat winked at me. “I want a closet or two like you have. Don’t wait up for me.”
“Take a bundle of spell scrolls in case you get a chance to learn some more spells,” I called to her as she dumped the whole cauldron of health potions into her inventory, as if I was telling her to grab a jacket before she headed off to school.
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“I will, but I don’t need Cumbers,” she plucked a few loaves of bread and other stuff from our manor’s pantry. “I can Teleport myself. That spell, I learned.”
“You’ll Teleport yourself into a stupor,” I warned, knowing that teleporting would have her passed out for an hour at least if she cast it herself.
“I’ll Teleport into my old room at the cottage,” she waved off my concern. “I’ll be fine.”
She would, I realized. I gave her a hug and a shrug and a ruffle of her hair that had Shadow batting at my hand. Shadow had a habit of somehow clinging to Kat’s hair and collars in a way that made her invisible to anyone who didn’t know she was there. I marveled at how different each of our familiars were.
“She’ll be fine,” Terra echoed to me. “But this priest is not allergic, nor does he want a cat for a pet.”
“You could pretend to be a dog,” I suggested, leaving Kat to her preparations before I broke down and begged her not to go. I consoled myself with the idea that at least if she was out of the city, she couldn’t be dragged into the tangled web of machinations we were weaving to bring down the church.
Will +1
“Never again,” Terra spat at me in our mental link. “I’d rather be a hamster.”
“Caw,” Malice gave a squawk to get my attention. I was popular nowadays and I was cautiously pleased with the fact. I summoned Malice to gain Telepathy with Dom, who was obviously too far away to use Telepathy. As much as we tried, we hadn’t been able to level it up enough to be able to use it beyond eyesight of each other so we were still summoning our pets to talk over a distance. Terra was busy trying to weasel her way into a few of the higher priest’s houses to be summoned, so Dom sent Malice.
“Weasel, I would try,” Terra commented into the overall shared link, making Malice caw with almost human laugh that I was glad Terra couldn’t hear.
“Are we having weasel for dinner?” Dom asked, misunderstanding the conversation Terra had dumped on him.
“Not if I can help it,” Terra muttered.
“What’s up, Dom?” I asked to try to keep our pets from derailing yet another conversation.
“If you’re free tonight, I have a priest I think we can take if we do it together,” Dom purred into the link like he was making date plans. The life I currently led was odd but ever so satisfying.
“Sounds good, darling,” I drawled back, having learned to go with the flow rather than fight these kinds of conversation. The problem wasn’t taking out a single priest. Dom and I could take on at least two of them at almost twice our level. The key was doing it without causing a ruckus that would get us arrested. The king was ready to pardon us, but it wouldn’t look good, so we were trying to keep this as messless as possible.
“It’s a date,” he quipped. “And you said we wouldn’t have time for us.”
“I’ll wear something sexy,” I breathed out in a way that made Terra huff out of the link.
Flirting +1
Exp +10 (3,149,184/5,985,462)
“You are something sexy,” he retorted with a mental kiss to my forehead that made me blush.
“Kat’s heading to the dungeons,” I warned Dom, chilling the mental touch between us.
“Does she need a ride?” he asked, and I was thinking we were the weirdest family since the Addams’.
“I gave her the keys to the station wagon,” I joked, but Dom was not amused.
“She’ll be exposed…”
“She’s teleporting to the cottage until she wakes up,” I explained and felt him relax. He had more faith in her “driving” than I did right now, but that was okay.
“What level is the priest for tonight?” I changed the subject back to more pressing concerns.
“She’s not taking Dugger is she?” Dom asked, his tone not ready to switch back yet.
“I don’t know for sure,” I hedged but I could tell he knew.
“Dugger is about to become a grave digger,” Dom muttered. “His own.”
“Would you rather she went alone?” I asked, trying to play referee.
“I’d rather she went with Felix or Cumbers,” he countered, and I laughed. Both Cumbers and Felix were twice her age and had seen the harder side of most of their lives, or at least their character’s faces looked that way.
“If your dad sees Cumbers or Dugger before you do, you’ll have a very different chaperone for the dungeons and Dugger might go missing,” I warned Kat, stepping up behind her raid of the pantry. “I have an extra batch of cupcakes if you want them.”
“Ugh, no time,” she muttered around a mouthful of chocolate croissant, our newest pastry at the bakery. “I’ve got to catch Dugger before Dad does.”
“Summon Malice when you get to the dungeons so we know you’re okay,” I called out to her retreating form as she slid in and out of shadows, her own Shadow giving a parting mew that made Kat look like she had golden eyes in the back of her head.
“I will,” she called back over her shoulder. “This way I get to miss church!”
Two days. She was already level seven in her class and three in almost everything else. They grew up so fast. If she went through those dungeons like Dom and I had, she’d be level twenty in time for most of the showdowns. Ironically, she was just the distraction, but she might turn out to be our ace in the hole. Kat had been our excuse for asking for more time. We’d known we couldn’t dismantle a whole church in the hour or two it took Fizzbarren to take it over. This was something to work from the inside.
The church had been pushing back now that the Mage Guild had folded. Emboldened, they’d begun already to broadcast decrees. Tomorrow was a holy day, and they happened once a week in a chilling reminder of churches I’d experienced in my old world. The latest decree was that once a week, people were expected to attend church. This included the king and his nobles, which is where Dom and I were now trapped. I wasn’t looking forward to getting dressed up in respectable clothing and sitting in a church while some priest told me how to live my life so that society could consider me a good person.
Will +1
Tonight I would kill one of their own, so that tomorrow there was one less priest to glare down their nose at my depravity. Did I mention that we’d petitioned the church to sanction our marriage and they’d turned us down? The king would have done it, but he was busy and didn’t feel like he could upset the church by marrying someone at this time. He’d pardon us for murder, but he wouldn’t marry us. Ah hell. We didn’t have time to plan a wedding that big anyway. Do you know what a noble has to do to get married in this realm? It’s absurd. Dom and I agreed we’d do it after we took out the church when we had more time.
I couldn’t help but wonder how messed up our lives had gotten that this was a normal day for us. We got up, grabbed a quick breakfast, planned out our days and who was taking the car. And we planned for a future like we were staying in this world forever. I grabbed myself an apple out of a bowl on the table and started to take a bite of it only to remember that it would taste like an orange. I didn’t want an orange, but I didn’t have the patience to peel a bunch of grape-looking things so I could have an apple-worth of a bite of apple. I consoled myself with a devil’s food cupcake with champagne flavored frosting. I didn’t have to worry about the fact that the champagne flavoring came from sour apples. I just ate a second cupcake and went on with this weirdo life.