:10/09/2251:

5:51 PM

My marketplace was more of a bazaar than a building, I felt like. The canopy of the mushroom head stood above us, surely enough, but the walls weren't walls so much as a series of columns and arches. The stalls were spread out across a layered floor, the different sections raised or lowered slightly to section off the different areas but, otherwise, were not walled or separated from the greater whole. 

Vendors had their stalls spread out under the giant umbrella hood that was zoned for their business, each one having constructed wooden booths and draped tents to their own liking. I felt less like I had just walked into a shopping mall and more that I had walked into a massive flea market simulation. The chaos of a barber perched next to a weaponsmith next to a gardener just did the building absolutely no favors whatsoever. 

Still, I could sort of see the logic of it as I walked. If you didn't know where to find the booth that you were looking for, you would have to walk past all the rest and the like temptation for impulse buys on the way. The maze of vendors did wonders for advertising and distracting, for all the annoyance of never being able to find the shop that you were actually looking for. 

I did notice, to my surprise, that the special perks of my town were already having an effect on the wares that were being sold here. In addition to the flintlock pistols that I was familiar with, there were clockwork revolvers of living metal, somehow crafted more of wood than steel. I saw a flying, helicopter monkey being sold with the promise that it would explode when the windup beast's momentum stopped. It was the clothiers, though, that really drew my attention - for instead of the standard silk and leather fair that was so common on the market, there were entire leather outfits with clockwork parts and woven parts of living fungus. 

I didn't speak the same language as the little catgirl who ran the booth, but even still she was very excited to show me her wares and help me to try things on. I ended up falling in love with a fine corset of finely woven fungi and brass - the fungi skin seeming to have the same consistency and texture as leather, though the colors where the white and deep orange of my city, and the brass was sewn into the fungal leather in the intricate designs of clockwork gears. It matched the crown well enough, and the white and orange looked stunning when wrapped over the gray of my robe. Plus, this corset wrapped around my waist only, and didn't compete with the robe at the bust or bunch up any of the fabric.

Using my interface, I converted a thousand credits into gold and handed them over gladly to the seamstress.

Clockwork Corset (Living; Masterwork) 

Belt

+1 Charisma; +1 Intelligence 

Liking the way it looked, I wandered a bit further on, finally finding what I had come down here for - the weapon's shop. A little old Dark Elf woman was running it, dressed in fine silks cut in undercity fashion. And yet, the weapons on the table, they were anything but the standard Undercity fair. Like the revolver I had seen earlier, they were strange, clockwork things with fungal leather wrappings. Even the swords seemed to have gears and motors, with dull Soulstone pommels. 

"Greetings, good woman," I smiled at her as our eyes met over the strange weapons. "Can you explain to me, what do these mechanisms do? I've never seen weapons like these before and I admit that I am more than curious."

Her eyes narrowed as she looked at me with a dark intelligence. It was clear that she was a roleplayer, considering by now the town may have immigrated one, maybe two residents into the population at most, and she was clearly not one of the little Mushroom People we had grown. Stil, she seemed to fit right in here, in this place, hovering over the weapons in front of her like a miserly old hen. 

Her eyes widened slowly as I could see her reading my Status with her eyes, loosing the aura of distrust even as the dark shade of her face became just a shade paler, "Oh... Warlord Frost! Please, don't be fooled by this common fair I have out on display! Please, please, come take a look at the finer stock down here!"

She hurriedly moved aside and opened a trunk that had been laying behind her, pulling out some clearly more intricate weapons that she had been keeping locked away. Even as she moved, though, she never stopped talking, her eye darting over to me nervously as she moved, "The ability to create hybrid items of science in your city has allowed great and wonderous things, I'm sure you know! But, you see, where before oil for motors and power for guns made technological wonders scarce and valuable, the ability to use Soulstones to power our creations has enabled our smiths to make giant leaps forward in our technological designs."

She pulled out a sword, it was bulky like a broadsword, but it had sharp, razor teeth on a chain around the blade. She popped her palm lightly on the slightly glowing stone in the pommel of the hilt and the razors started spinning up and down the blade faster than my eye could see. "You see, where once we could have run a Sawblade like this for a matter of minutes, eating hundreds of gold per second worth of raw oil, now it can run in good half an hour bursts just off the heart's blood of a lowly rabbit!" 

She eyed me then, taking a good look at my spindly arms and wiry frame, before quickly slapping the pommel again and switching out the weapons in her hands, "But you don't look like the type for such an unwieldy piece of tin, no, instead you need a weapon of beauty and grace!" She held up a long, Ranger's rifle of thin wood and fungal leather wrappings, with only the long barrel and small gears over the firing mechanism reflecting the gleam of living metal. Instead of a hammer, the gun held a small, glowing Soulstone in a brass setting. And where there might have been housed a scope, there was a small, mechanical eye with wet fungi throbbing in the iris.

"No, why lumber around with brutal looking junk, when you can gun down your enemies from hundreds of feet away! Take this rifle, for example! Where, before, finding the black powder to fuel a single shot was an expensive endeavor, this weapon projects bullets with the same speed and force using simply an Enchanted Soulstone focused through Living Steel."

I picked up the long, five-foot rifle in my hands, amazed it how light the entire thing was. Checking the cartridge, I found that a good portion of the actual weight was actually coming from the rows of long, steel bullets waiting within. I also noticed, somewhat ironically, that the bullets weren't worked into the standard black powder shells that had been common in history, apparently now being flung instead from some enchantment simulating an electromagnetic railgun. 

Emboldened, seemingly by my interest, she continued on, "at medium range, it will still be weak to the AI-Assisted perry of a swordsman, as is common with these type of weapons. And we haven't been able to work explosive enchantments into the bullets the same way you can with an arrowhead to counter the issue. However! This is one of the rare units that received a quality upgrade in the final stages of forging. The eye will extend the range on the weapon making it much, much harder for your standard parry-AI to plot the trajectory of your bullets from maximum range."

I nodded, simply, sitting down the barrel into the air, liking the feel of the leather and steel in my hands, "Indeed. And where can I find more bullets for the device? Are they difficult to make or..."

Shaking her head, the woman grinned ear to ear, "Oh no, no, Warlord. They are just standard steel. Any workshop in the kingdom could reproduce one provided they had an example to work from. And they can be made very cheaply."

Shrugging, I nodded and we got down into some serious haggling. In the end, even at the 65% discount, she offered me (probably due as much to my Charisma as to my status as Town Warlord), it took the rest of my remaining 15,000 credits, converted to gold, to purchase the weapon.

Clockwork Railgun (Living; Epic)

2 Handed: 65 Base Piercing Damage; Range: 500 Meters

Soulstone: Tiny

+2  Agility

Living Eye: +50% Range; Increased Accuracy

I wasn't a Warrior or a Ranger, and I knew I wouldn't be getting abilities that could empower the shots from this weapon. Moreover, even with the semi-automatic cartridge in place, I knew it was going to have a moderately slow reload that would limit its effectiveness in close combat. So I knew it would be somewhat difficult to use it within the range of my Auras. Still, I had something that Rangers did not, being the ability to quickly reposition using my bestial forms, and it was that very speed and flexibility as a shapeshifter that was my greatest assist. A ranged weapon then, especially one the likes of which the world had never seen before, would play to my strengths. And, unlike a weapon such as a pistol or rapier, spellcasting Auras had been specifically designed to be used with a staff in hand. So, given the lightness and dimensions this weapon, there should be no reason for me to have to sling the rifle when I switched over into a casting. 

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Luckily, the old woman agreed to throw in a few extra clips of ammunition with the weapon. So I realized I was good to go. Thanking her, I shifted into Raven form and started to fly away. I started to, that is, until I heard the metal ting of metal hitting the ground beneath me.

Tilting my Avian head, I glanced down below me and I realized - as I had shifted my form only my primary weapon had shifted shape with me. The thin steel of my Rapier had fallen then onto the floor below, same as it would if I would have died without it equipped as my primary weapon. 

Thus I was faced with the question all DDO players had to confront at some point in their career - do I carry a side arm and risk loosing it, but increasing my effectiveness in both close and ranged combat until that day? Or do I choose, one or the other, and allow my character to have a fairly significant weakness?

Though, admittedly, it wasn't as much as a choice for me as it was for many other players. Not only would keeping the rapier significantly reduce my effectiveness as a shapeshifter, but I also had the claws and natural weapons with my own inherent poison enhancements to make up the difference. Moreover, as I had learned with the Ogre and, later, with McBeal, my natural weapons were as good as, if not superior to, the little sword I had been carrying around for so long now. 

It was sad to loose the blade, especially after the hours and hours of training that I had sunk into learning the blade, but even still it wasn't even that much of a choice. And while the rifle still was an untested weapon, I had sunk my current remaining funds into it and sort of already made my choice. So, moving the sword into my inventory, it was with only a little hesitance that I dragged it into the discard pile to deconstruct the weapon.

'Do you want to deconstruct this item? Y/N' The system had asked. And, whispering softly to no one, "In for a penny, in for a pound," I slowly selected the 'Yes' option. The epic item, thankfully, was a battery for luck points, and I watched happily as my abysmal score of 'One' rose up to 'Two', then 'Three' and 'Four'. Luck was going to be a pain to raise at higher levels, but for now, just a little bit actually went quite a long way.

Happy at the advancement, and realizing that I was not pretty geared, I went ahead and deconstructed my old corset, blouse, and skirt that had been my old adventuring outfit. All three items were of basic quality and didn't visibly increase my stat, but they should have made some amount of progress, even so, and the conversion opened up a few more spots in my user inventory. 

 I went ahead and window shopped what other wonders my town had held. Few of the wonders of the place compared to the rifle in my hands or the spinning clockwork of my crown, and yet everything seemed to possess a strange, innate beauty.

There was some innate quality that the gear and the buildings around me now seemed to possess, with the pillowed seats, it's strange archways and the curtains of living fungus. I had not placed it before, but here in the marketplace, it became clear. The theme for this city, above all others, was that of a clearly Arabian aesthetic. I could see how the heads of the mushrooms seemed now to billow up into towering Byzantine Domes, and the long white walls below shone not unlike marble walls, pillars, and columns. Even the strange, veined surfaces of the domes, when viewed from below, seemed to give the impression of large, geometric mosaics above us. 

As the day grew late and the merchant shops around me began to close for the night, apparently not interested in remaining for longer than the setting of the sun, I found myself being gently herded out of the building by the thinning current of the crowds. Still, I was dirt poor, at least for another day until my Streaming royalties came in, and I let myself be carried away.

Opening the interface, I selected a single trainer from those assigned to my town, Sanrich the Weaponsmaster, and I plotted a course toward him. I needed to both harvest some Soulcrystal to upgrade the one in my rifle, as well as to solicit him for training in marksmanship. It wasn't hard for me to remember just how awkward, how stupid I had been with the Rapier when I had first picked it up, and I knew that if I wanted to become anything but a rich newb with a useless weapon, he would be the goblin that I needed to talk to.

:10/10/2251:

11:42 AM

Even as the monkey died in front of me, cage becoming painted with its fur and blood as the bullet tore through and shredded it from the inside, I smiled hesitantly at the goblin below me. Sanrich simply nodded and handed me a new cartridge of bullets, pointing further away at a tree on the edges of the forest.

It took me a good twenty shots to properly sight and hit the tree, and another twenty before I was able to do it with any consistency, but even so with every shot, the rifle seemed to feel more and more alive in my hands. I started to feel like it was beating in tune with my breaths, fungal organs pumping away in tune with my own body. 

While I was practicing against the tree, Sanrich had torn out the Ape' heart and used its blood to power a spare Soulcrystal that he had on hand, tossing me the remaining organ after he had finished. It tasted raw, but somehow less tough than the hearts of the predators before it. And I found that, in spite of myself, I was enjoying the snack between rounds of fevered training.

He quickly tooled the new, empowered Soulstone into the hammer of the weapon, upgrading the quality from 'Tiny' to 'Common'. It required his specific skills as a smith to complete, but even still, thankfully, it wasn't a process that required a forge or an iron - simply a pair of pliers and a bit of replacement copper wiring that his Metallurgist abilities quickly set around the gem. 

Each shot now felt less like a gun going off in my hands, than the smooth clockwork of the weapon spitting out the lead and rebalancing itself, recoiling much less as the electromagnetic pulse did more of the work. And while there was a bolt action that took a couple of seconds to work, the more I practiced the more I realized that I was approaching a rate of fire that rivaled some primitive revolvers. 

I couldn't have been more grateful that the goblin had instantly agreed to train me when I had asked, setting aside all other tasks and setting his assistants to work on forging us more rounds. He didn't even charge a fee, simply waving it aside like nothing and muttering something about his duty as a craftsman. It seemed odd behavior to me, coming from a Goblin, but I wasn't one to complain overmuch when it came to getting things for free. In the end, I decided it must have been a result of my hiring him directly, and as an actual NPC of the town, he had been placed fully at my disposal.

It took a hundred more shots before the Soulstone finally took on the glow and hue of one that had truly bonded with the weapon, but even still as the hum of the enchanted rock started pulsing in tune with the beating of the fungal skin, I was rewarded with the tring of new status updates.

You have successfully upgraded Clockwork Railgun!

Reputation raised with Clockwork Railgun from: NEUTRAL to: FRIENDLY

Would you like to give Clockwork Railgun a name?  Y/N

I quickly selected yes and a menu opened in front of me, displaying a glowing keypad and an empty line of text. For the name of my weapon, I barely hesitated, already somehow feeling in my heart what I knew it to be. On the glowing panel in front of me I typed out in flowing letters, 'Alleycat' and clicked 'Confirm'. 

:10/10/2251:

8:42 PM

My training day finished with a new notification, awarding me an achievement for my long hours of practice.

Achievement Unlocked!

Senpai, Tier 1

Completed 100 hours of training.

Special:

+1 Stamina

Smiling as I picked up Alleycat and waving as Sanrich packed up to go home, I stretched out my sore muscles and, not for the first time that day, danced through the Lifegiving Aura to magic away my exhaustion. I almost missed it when it was gone, I reflected, the sore muscles and aching joints reminding me of the hard work and sweat that I had poured into my marksmanship. Still, I knew there was no reason to remain uncomfortable when I had magic at my fingertips, and there would be plenty of time left later for sweat and pain when I started collecting new quests.

It was with a bounce in my step that I set off, meaning to log out and maybe scrounge up a bit of free food from the banquet table of my Adult program, when an update screen, much more unexpected and unwelcome than the last, flashed into my vision.

New Quest!

Magical Catastrophe

Skotty discovered a new schematic while working in his lab! Unfortunately, when he was building the prototype something went horribly wrong. Rather than bending the will of legendary creatures, this device attracts hostile monsters directly into your town! Before he could shut it down, he had caught the attention of one such creature who is even now on its way toward Dementia

Intercept the Wyvern before it reaches Dementia and ransacks your town! Wyvern location and route is now marked on your map!

Sighing and tired, I opened the local map and found the creature's location and auto pathing listed in the interface. Thankfully, it would take twenty-four hours for the beast to close in on the city. However, the drawback was that the creature's name was clearly labeled in the golden letters of a Legendary magical beast. And even with the full strength of the city and my crew available, I knew that there was a good chance the thing would be reducing our town into cinders by the end of the day tomorrow.

I wasn't sure why such an advanced encounter had appeared, though I did remember the warnings from when I had first leveled up the town and started selecting the perks. I guessed that when the 'Megalith' guardians were complete that were even now being built in my Megalithic workshops then there would be something of a safety net for encounters such as this one. It was probably just bad luck that the Wyvern had appeared some weeks before the first Megalith construction had been completed, and it was likewise probably just dumb probability that had left me in these straits. But it was still incredibly frustrating and disheartening, after all we had accomplished, to think that by sunset tomorrow we would be starting over from square one.

Shaking my head and half-heartedly cursing my town's resident Mad Scientist, I hardened my heart and opened my panels to start organizing a grand hunt. Blinky, Olga, Steve, and Gray were invited, of course, and I also posted a town-wide announcement declaring it an open Event set for first thing tomorrow morning. I needed time to get my people together, no army marches in a day, and yet there wasn't much time to be had for planning or for strategizing. 

It was with the upcoming tragedy weighing heavily on my mind that I finally did log out. Forcing myself out of DDO and into the ravishing Adult pleasures of my relaxation program.

I was so involved in my own thoughts then that I didn't even realize, as I filled my plate in the evening breeze and slipped into a hot tub, that on the massage table next to me lay a perfect reproduction of my own body. A sighing, contented version of myself sprawled out naked, even then receiving all of the attentions of our adoring harem while I quietly sipped my wine.