The exploding head was the gnoll’s, taken off by a speeding rock.
Green blood spilled all over Jerome, but he didn’t mind. He was alive!
“You’re just full of tricks, aren’t you?” Krystyna walked over and observed him with what might be called, for the first time, approval. “I can’t believe I’ve had this power for so long and didn’t think of using it as a slow-loading makeshift gun.”
He couldn’t have looked good laying on the ground, in the body of a gnoll, covered in blood… but she looked at him with approval! Maybe women really did like bad boys; he had, after all, just emerged victorious from a terrible battle. Nevermind that he had only killed one gnoll while she had killed six, but he’d done several things to turn the tide.
One of those things: saving her by healing her at a critical point. He added it to his mental tally, wondering what the score needed to be in order for sexytimes to occur. The number was different in every movie.
Did it count less if it was through the relatively unmanly method of healing? Did the fact that she saved him at the end count against him?
Women were complicated.
Anyways, time to transform back into something more presentable.
Would you like to transform?
Too bad, you’ve used up all the transforms in your queue. Go touch something else!
Ugh. His ability was based on physical contact with other sentient creatures. Possibly the most extroverted of superpowers.
At least he could engage those creatures in life-and-death struggles instead of making smalltalk.
Or, if they were standing over him, he could just reach out and touch their leg.
“What are you doing?” she asked, not sure what to make of Jerome’s sudden movement.
“Getting boobs,” he said lazily.
She sighed. “My boobs are up here. Not that you should grab them. You shouldn’t.”
Damn. Guess he had to save her a couple dozen more times or listen to her problems or something.
“Not yours. A pair of my own. That are yours.”
Would you like to transform?
Too bad, you’ve used up all the transforms in your queue. Go touch something else!
What? But he had just touched Krystyna!
When he thought that a helpful message floated into his field of view.
You’ve been transformed into Krystyna within the last 24 hours. Go touch someone else.
Wow, even the game messages were saying he was getting too grabby. It was just her leg!
“Nevermind. Apparently my ability has limits.”
“Get on up then. It’s time to loot the bodies.” She paused. “Well, except for that one. What the hell did you do?”
He sat up and saw where she was looking: the exploded pile of bones and green blood that had once been the gnoll mage. “Ockdine tentacles, combined with Recoil Burst.”
Krystyna actually grinned. She grinned! At something he’d done! Apparently the way to a woman’s heart (and boobs?) was through killing things in creative and brutal ways.
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He grinned back like a puppy that had just been petted… and for some reason that caused her grin to fade.
What? No! No takebacksies on approval!
“Tell me about these limits,” she said as she rifled through a gnoll’s pockets. “It’s better to know what you can and can’t do before we get into another combat situation.”
“The first limit is I have to touch something before I can transform into it.”
“We covered that already.”
“I want to be thorough. Make sure we’re on the same page.
“So I touch something and it goes on my list of available transformations. I can transform into anything on that list at will. The second limit is that when I transform into something it’s removed from the list. That means I can run out of transforms.
“Related to that are the third and fourth limitations. If I don’t use a transformation within 24 hours it disappears from the list. At least that’s what I think that ‘hours left’ message means. And then if I transform into something I can’t transform into it again for another 24 hours.
“That’s it for triggering the transformations.”
Krystyna grunted in acknowledgement.
She’d been digging around the gnoll’s bodies — much deeper than the pockets — and her hands were bloody. Beside her was a small pile of coins that were also covered in blood. Why was everything in this world covered in blood? Beside that… bones, organs, and various crystalizations she’d pulled from the corpses.
“What the hell are you doing?”
She pointed at the pile of body parts. “Herbalism is a dirty business.”
“Those… aren’t herbs.”
“Technicality. If it can be used to create potions it falls under the purview of herbalism.”
Jerome felt a pang of cognitive dissonance, although he didn’t know that was the word for it. He’d been able to forgive the whole part about her being a free-speech extremist, but now she was digging through the corpses of her enemies for drink ingredients while using words like ‘purview’. There were some things even Wit and Charm couldn’t overcome.
“You stopped talking,” she observed. “Is there a problem?”
“You’re collecting body parts from sentient creatures.”
“No, I’m collecting body parts from dead creatures. One of which you killed.”
“You’re going to drink them.”
“You didn’t seem to mind that hangover cure.”
He blanched.
“Waste not, want not. It’s what my mom used to say. And those crystals, I hear gnolls themselves will buy them. Now finish telling me the rules for your transformations.”
Couldn’t they just loot the clothes and weapons off of their enemies like normal adventurers? Well, whatever it took to stay alive.
He continued his explanation, his voice only wavering during the first few words.
“Okay, rules. Rules for when I’m transformed. My transformed attributes are halfway between my own attributes and the attributes of whoever I’m transforming into. So if they’re stronger than me I get a boost. If they’re weaker then I’m pulled down.
“My own stats haven’t gone up yet, even though my progress bar says three hundred and seventeen percent. So I’m guessing that once I transform back to my own body, about twenty-three and a half hours from now, then I’ll be able to level up three times.
“My transformed skills are also halfway between my skill levels and the skill levels of what I’m transformed into. So any skill I learn is only half as strong when I transform into a body that doesn’t share them.”
Krystyna was done with the first two bodies and was on to the third. She was fishing out a crystal from its torso. “Is that all the limits?”
“I think so.”
“Good. Now let’s talk about the positives. You can power-level skills. You can combine skills from diverse sources that normally wouldn’t mix, like you did with the ockdine tentacles and Recoil Burst. Magical skills are typically difficult or expensive to learn, but you can just touch someone and get them, so that will be big.
“And then there’s the huge one: the supposedly-unique skill that humans get when they come into this world. They’re powerful enough to make the other species scared of our power. When combined into one person…”
”All the species here will band together and concentrate their military efforts on killing me.”
“Well, there is that. But once that’s done, you could… well, I’m not going to say rule the world, because you’d be incredibly bad at it… but you could be the sovereign power that decides which empires rise and fall.
“Kingmaker.”