The adrenaline from the battle still surged through Jerome’s borrowed body, but the slap still stung a surprising amount.
“What was that for?” Jerome complained.
“You know what that was for,” Krystyna said.
“I’m serious. I don’t know why, but look at my stats — I’m really good at being inside you right now.”
“Stop it!” she yelled. “You almost made me crack up while we were fighting those gnolls! What if it had gotten out of control? What if I had started rolling on the ground from laugher? Wouldn’t you feel terrible knowing I died because I was laughing at your stupid joke?”
She chased him and he backpedaled, tripping over the body of a dead gnoll and falling onto his back. She fell on top of him, probably on purpose.
“I’m glad you survived,” he said. “Deadly jokes and all.”
“Me too,” she said warmly.
Then she kissed him.
Jerome’s heart rate had barely started to slow down from the battle, but it shot right back up when she did that. He returned it passionately, grabbing her and pulling her tight against his body, and also sticking his elbow in something squishy.
“Hey this is great and all,” he said, “but I think we’re laying on a dead gnoll’s body.”
“Oh yeah, let’s uh… let’s move a bit.”
They scooted over, but ran into another one. “These things are frickin’ everywhere.”
“Who put all these dead bodies here?” she asked with fake harshness. “Bring me the lips of whoever’s responsible for this!”
“Seriously? Let’s at least get away from all the dead things first.”
Krystyna grumbled but agreed. “I knew there was a downside to you acting like an adult.”
By the time they found a nice not-splattered-in-blood tree to lean against the moment had passed. Instead of kissing they held hands and relaxed as much as they could — it was, after all, still the middle of the night.
After a while Krystyna spoke. “We might as well figure out what’s going on with your stats. I can’t do that because it hides all the transformation stuff from me, so you’ll have to narrate out the facts.”
Jerome looked at his stat screens.
Name: Krystyna Kowalska (Jerome Wallaby)
Race: Human
Level 11 (Level 7, 178% progress)
224/224 HP
168/168 MP
224/224 SP
Statuses: Transformed (24 hours remaining, Intimacy Bonus)
Strength: 43
Endurance: 34
Agility: 60
Focus: 32
Dexterity: 25
Connection: 34
Holy hell! 224 HP! An Agility stat of 60! This was madness! It was higher than either one of their stats. No wonder his movements had felt so smooth during the fight.
A normal transformation takes half (0.5) of your stats and combines them with half (0.5) of the target’s stats, creating an average. A transformation with an Intimacy Bonus is greater than the sum of its parts, raising the 0.5 multiplier applied to each set of stats.
He looked at his skills, hoping the bonus applied there as well.
Oh boy did it ever.
Skills
Special Abilities
Transform Level 3, 74% (unique)
Store, Transform, Preview (level), Pass-through (attribute bonuses), Intimacy Bonus
Recoil Burst Level 18 (Level 8, 88%) (unique)
Burst
Portal Hand Level 4 (Level 5, 66%) (unique)
Portal (1)
Blast Off Level 2 (Level 3, 42%) (unique)
Blast Off
Magic Pulse Level 1 (Level 1, 68%) (unique)
Pulse
Unarmed Strikes Level 9 (Level 6, 82%)
Dodge Level 11 (Level 5, 63%)
Hear The Wind
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Grappling Level 10 (Level 5, 45%)
Healing Level 6 (Level 5, 31%)
Refill HP, Refill SP
Sneak Level 2 (Level 3, 71%)
Alteration Level 2 (Level 3, 91%)
Blessing, Hold
Flows Level 2 (Level 3, 21%)
Crystal Overload
Herbalism Level 9 (Level 3, 9%)
Identify Herb, Make Potion (see recipes)
Light Armor Level 4 (Level 0, 0%)
Heavy Armor Level 1 (Level 1, 39%)
Those skill level were amazing. His unique skills like Portal Hand took less of a hit than normal, and the skills he shared with Krystyna were amped up like crazy.
Level 18 for Recoil Burst! No wonder that gnoll had flown so forcefully into its comrades!
“So my transformed stats, they’re a combination of our stats, like before… but instead of half and half it’s more like two thirds and two thirds.”
“Huh,” she said, “that makes sense with all the numbers I’m seeing. What was your HP before?”
“140”.
“And mine was 180… So if your transformed HP is 224 when we would expect 160, that means…” She was silent for a second while she stared off into space, doing some sort of mental math. “If it split things equally, then it took 70% of each of our HP instead of 50%. The other ones are harder to check, since the numbers are lower and there’s probably some rounding, but I suspect it’s similar.”
“My old MP was also 140. Test it with that.”
“And my MP is 100, and your new transformed MP is 168… so the split seems to be even. 70% from each. The biggest question is… why’s it doing that?”
“Through the, uh…” Jerome choked on the words he was about to say, embarrased at the name of the bonus. The ‘i’ word was weird. Even weirder than the ‘l’ word. You could ‘love’ ice cream, tv series, video games… really, anything could be loved. It had lost the old inflammatory, reactionary, revolutionary meaning it had once held. But to be intimate… intimacy was a weird anachronism that had no place in modern society.
He finally found his voice and repeated something he’d heard on an old show once. “It’s through the power of friendship.”
“Did it say that?” Krystyna asked darkly. “This better be more than just friendship.”
He turned red, doubly embarrased now. Hiding it was definitely worse than saying it up front. Might as well come clean. “It’s called… an Intimacy Bonus.”
Whew. There, he said it.
“An Intimacy Bonus? So you get awesome powers because we had sex?”
Jerome focused in on the message that popped up.
There is no bonus from casual sex or forced sex. More bonuses are applied for greater commitment, higher levels of affection, and better (and more frequent) sex.
“Not just because we had sex, although that seems to be a part of it… After all, it’s not called a Sex Bonus.”
“Okay… what’s the rest?”
“The status screen says we should…” This one would be even harder to say than ‘Intimacy’. Jerome breathed deeply and psyched himself up. “We should get married, love each other deeply, and have mind-blowing sex all day every day. If we want to maximize the bonus, that is. You know, for effective fighting and all that.”
Krystyna fought down a grin that threatened to engulf her face, winning that internal battle only after a good ten seconds of effort.
Then her face fell, no effort required. She rubbed her eyes and sighed. “I’m turning into my parents.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” How would she know what her parents were like?
“I’m old-fashioned, but not that old-fashioned. I’m not going to jump into a forever commitment with the first person I sleep with.”
“This was your first time too?” That didn’t make any sense. She was definitely hot enough to get laid. Any guy would be thinking about it within five seconds of meeting her. And yet she hadn’t had sex before?
“Have you seen the guys out there? I mean, did you see you when you came in here?”
Heh. ‘Came in here’. But Jerome had gained enough awareness to not make the joke and ruin the moment.
“Girls aren’t like guys,” said Krystyna. “Guys can stick it in a warm cherry pie and make things happen. Girls have all these conditions before it’s good for us. I think I told you some of mine when I had that… episode… the other day… but we don’t even know what all of them are until they’re met!”
“But the government films…” he knew it was stupid as soon as he said it.
“The government films are trash, written to make the men of the world complacent and easy to manipulate. The old films were better. They were still wrong in many ways, but they weren’t written explicitly to sedate and emasculate an entire generation; that was just a side effect.“
“What’s that mean for us? Are you saying that we shouldn’t…”
“No! We definitely still should. Just… not forever. Not yet.” Krystyna had hopeful pleading in her eyes. “We can’t just… we have these feelings, you know, and they’re chemicals in the brain, and what happens when the chemicals go away? Forever is a long time. We don’t know how this bonus works. If we commit to forever, and we break that, what happens? Does it just go away? Does it take back what it’s given you, with interest? They didn’t have a magical bond, but when my mom left... He’d thought their relationship was forever. Despite everything that he saw in the world, despite the statistics, he held to the old religion and he thought it would protect them.
“He wasn’t a perfect man, but he really thought it would be forever. He gave her a part of his soul.
“It left with her, and he never got it back.”
Jerome was stunned by this revelation. “You… you knew your parents? Isn’t that…”
“He tracked me down. It was illegal, but he did it. We couldn’t live together as a family, and we couldn’t do registered activities together, but the state is incompetent, and no one reported us because no one else knew. I called him by his last name. He was a dance instructor — well, really a martial arts instructor, but he hid it like he hid everything else — and he took me on as an unregistered student. I had dinners at their house. Before she left, that is. After…
“I’ve said too much already. I just don’t want to break your soul, okay? And I don’t want you to break mine.”
“Oh… okay,” Jerome stuttered.
It was weird thinking about something forever. He’d said ’marriage’ just because it was the longest commitment he could think of, an absurdity, an anachronism. No one actually got married these days.
“So maybe not forever…” Forever might increase the Intimacy Bonus, but the talk of soul-ripping had made him skittish. “Still, I don’t think I’ll be abandoning you any time soon.”
She smiled. “You better not. Or I’ll hunt you down and… I don’t know. Rip out the pieces of soul I’ve given you.”
“With a threat like that I don’t think I’ll ever find the courage to leave.”
“Good,” she said with satisfaction.
Then she got one of those embarrased looks, like she was ashamed of sharing too much and wanted desperately to change the subject. “Now, about the weird things those gnolls were saying when we got up...”