When she left the VIP lounge, leaving both Brandon and Franklin behind, Ros decided to check out something she’d rather planned to look into eventually. She had tentatively scheduled it for after she unlocked her luck stat, but she had time now and she wanted to get some mental distance from the hunt she’d just led.
She was going to enjoy this.
In the lift on the way down Ros made sure she was cycling Qui and kept it going the whole time she played.
When Ros had first arrived, the Ibsen Group harem, of which she immediately became a member, was restricted to the green zone and the top ten floors of the recreation rooms.
The one time Ros, Sharon and Miko took the lift all the way down, opening all the doors, a guard member had been stationed just outside the lift. They were glared at, but they had not tried to leave the lift, so nobody said anything. It had only been a few days after that when Ros put her name on the list for hunter training.
Miko had turned up her nose at the thought and did extremely well for herself cajoling whatever boyfriends she had. Sharon took the pure mercenary standpoint and was the first girl in the harem to set a price and make a formal sign advertising herself. That had earned her a luxury 29th floor room, just off the casino.
Exploring had just been something to do while they were bored. The Ibsen Group territory wasn’t set up for a bunch of jobs. Even the available jobs were busywork.
Ros smiled as she exited the main lift into the 22nd floor lobby. Miko had been so very excited to see this floor. She called it a Game Center, while Ros would have said arcade, and she had a brief argument with Sharon over whether it was the same as the casino upstairs. To Ros and Sharon, it seemed very similar. Both had game cabinets, the casino was mostly slot machines and card games, all video based. This set of Game Center rooms had claw machines, gem pushers, elaborate chance games and to Miko’s intense delight, lotteries with a prize guaranteed to every ticket.
Ros turned to the room on the left as she exited the lift. A lot of the floors were like this, small elevator lobby, a few recreation rooms and then the halls to the residential rooms. She looked around as she entered, but it was exactly as she’d expected. The only thing she’d not counted on was that there were other people in the Lotteria room, playing for the ever popular health potion prizes in the machine just inside the door.
Every section had the same Game Center on the 22nd floor. The games were the same, but the prizes reset in a larger cycle that even seemed to have some randomness in it. That said, there was always a health potion lotto, a mana potion lotto and a stamina potion lotto, it was the top of prizes that changed. Also the tickets were cheaper than buying a normal health potion from the shop.
There were even ticket prize lottos with cosmetics for the prizes and when the lipstick, blusher and eye makeup were gone it would reset for hair color and hair adornments, some of which were quite pretty.
One theme among the prizes was that none of the prizes could be found in the replicators, even the health potions were different, although they mostly just tasted better or had shorter cooldowns.
Ros looked around the lotto room. She had never seen this sort of lotto before that day, so long ago, but still a week or two in the future. She was more used to scratch tickets that promised millions and produced just enough to keep you playing, never quite enough to break even.
This lotto was different, and Miko said it was like kuji games she’d seen at home in Tokyo.
Every ticket won a prize, but some of the prizes were rarer than others. Miko said at home the games she liked best were the toy lottos. She said the prize tickets would be numbered or lettered, and the Game Center would post how many prizes had been won of each kind. Unlike similar raffles, sweepstakes and drawings in the states, there would be a whole set of prizes for each box of tickets, so out of each drawing box someone would win the big prize.
In the states there would be one set of prizes for everywhere and you had to write in or go online if you won something.
Even though these lottos or kuji were entirely automated, they also had a whole set of prizes and a prize per ticket.
Ros slowed in front of the machine she knew she was looking for. It was a machine she’d never played in this setting, and never seen partly played either.
The main reason why nobody played it, was that the prizes were named, but not explained. They were potion ingredients, some of them very rare.
Basic alchemist equipment was cheap in the shop, but the ingredients were not available, you had to find them. The public gardens on floors 6, 16 and 26 had alchemy plants growing. This prize machine was all alchemy ingredients.
On the fifth realm Ros had spent some time with Olain, a Dwarven Alchemist. The Dwarves called themselves the Svartalfen, but in every relevant way they resembled the stout, honorable dwarves of modern fantasy books and games. She had recognized some of his ingredients from this lotto game, even though she hadn’t known what they were when she stared at them the last time she was here. She had even read some of his books while she waited for his attention.
If nothing else, she could collect ingredients and sell them on Svartal, the very odd megastructure that made up the fifth realm.
Shrugging slightly, Ros bought out the whole game. There were 50 tickets for this game, 100 coin per ticket. She didn’t hesitate. She had plenty of coin to burn, and a ready source for more.
The tickets vended one by one and she had to peel off the backing on each one to reveal the letter and the scanning code.
She scanned each ticket, inserted it into the machine, put the prize in her ring and did the next ticket from the pile.
She was surprised that Identifying each ingredient actually produced a list of common alchemy recipes it could be used for.
After the last prize was entered and won, there was a thump. Ros raised her eyebrows as a panel on the side of the machine opened, revealing a leather bound book. She picked it up.
Miko did say that in Japan sometimes there was a special prize for buying the last ticket in a lottery. Ros had never had an inclination to buy one out before. She was usually saving for something.
She picked up the book. As soon as she did, a shutter descended over the cabinet. Ros smiled ruefully. She’d never seen that happen either, but she knew it should happen.
She opened the book: ‘Practical Alchemy for Beginners.’
She flipped through the pages, most of the recipes took only a few arcane ingredients, then the rest of the ingredients were things like water, refined sand, gelatin and salt.
Ros was still reading- and checking her inventory for ingredients, most of which she now had- when the shutter raised on the cabinet.
As she would have expected if she’d thought about it, the posters in the machine had changed. The price on the tickets had risen to 250 per each and the new set had 100 tickets.
She saw the top prizes and didn’t hesitate for a moment to buy out the whole set again. The A prizes were three bottles of distilled lamia saliva, an ingredient for a sophisticated and deadly assassination poison, and coincidentally an ingredient in the antidote as well.
With a shudder she realized she didn’t actually want to leave that laying around in a prize machine.
She went through the motions of claiming all 100 prize tickets and took the book when the panel opened as well.
‘Elixirs, Cordials, Poisons and Antidotes for the Experienced Alchemist.’
The shutter closed again and she walked away. She could check back before she left. She wandered around the room. There were three aisles of lottery games, there were even games with plush toys as top prizes, which seemed slightly incongruous to the industrial mining station setting.
Then again there were five very different amusement parks on the outskirts of the city, with rides and carnival games everything, and she recognized these toys as mascots for the parks.
She stopped in front of the makeup machine. She had makeup, but there were only four tickets left and she was vain enough to put pretty trinkets in her hair occasionally. She bought the last four tickets, won the special prize for last ticket, a set of makeup brushes, and waited for the reset. She pulled her basic alchemy book back out.
It only took about twelve minutes to reset the machine. The shutter went up and she was startled to see jewelry instead of the barrettes and hair color she’d expected. The most plentiful tier of prize was a blind box holding a pendant, bracelet or ring setting without a stone.
Ros hesitated and then walked away. She went back to check the alchemy ingredients, but it was reset to the original assortment.
She considered it for a moment, but decided to wait until she had tried some of the potions in the books she just got.
She nodded to the other players as she passed them where they were waiting for health potions to reset. She went to the lift and went down to the level 12 Game Center, which was in an orange section. Level 2 also had a Game Center.
The orange section had an entirely different set of prize sets, but the exact same layout. Lottery machines in one room, claw and keyhole games in another, chance games in another, coin and gem pushers in yet another. On the 2nd floor the gem pusher games held actual faceted gemstone beads for the scooping gems. The signage listed the contents and assured the player they were the genuine stones.
Ros blinked away the memories of how much time and money she’d wasted at the gem pusher with the beads in it. She sighed.
She suddenly turned towards the sound of laughter. She saw a group of ten or more, clearly all fourth wave, hunters in jumpsuits and a piece or two of armor each. One of them was playing the game where you have to keep using a forked robot arm to pull down a string until the prize falls. If she remembered properly that was 10 coins a play and all the prizes were small armor pieces or small weapons or other small, useful artifacts. Everything in those sorts of games cost 50 to 100 times the price of the single play and it often took three or four perfect plays to get something out.
The prizes on level two were better, rarer and more expensive. There wasn’t anything specific she was looking for on level 12, but she had a feeling she’d see something she wanted if she looked around long enough.
Funny, just the rec rooms should have given the current inhabitants the feeling they were being trained, groomed, proven as in at a proving grounds. The games were patterned after human games and quite a few of the skill games tested the senses in ways that could be useful in combat. She turned away from the spatial relations skill games and into the kuji lotteries.
There was a skinny guy using the Trait lottery. Unlike the potions, which you could use or not, the trait and ability kuji applied automatically when redeemed, and the traits could not be removed, only upgraded. The abilities were different, and since she had the HUD she almost certainly would use the ability lottos, but not randomly.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
There were obviously better and worse prizes, there was at least one A ranked trait in the set, and it was unbelievably cheap to play, but it was permanent and Ros was still wondering how to approach him when he squeaked a squealing triumph and fed a ticket into the prize redemption. He let the rest of his tickets flutter to the ground, some unopened. Apparently he had a plan. Maybe he was buying the set until he got what he wanted. Ros could see that working if he had enough money and wanted one of the top three or four prizes. Each ticket did say what its prize was when you peeled the back off.
She turned away, it was his decision and there was no stopping him now that he’d redeemed.
After an hour or so of random wandering she got bored and headed down to the red gym. It was the lowest gym in the building, fifth floor. Like all other locations, the walls were actually some kind of partly metallic stone alloy, brown with a sheen to it.
The red gym was a solo instance, like the quest giver cut scenes. Even if she’d come with her team they would have been unable to help her.
When she left the lift, Ros was instantly surrounded by three Fenrirs, the single horn on each canine making them seem like dog shaped unicorns. The hell hounds looked more like horned, plated armadillo dogs than the Norse Wolf of legend, but that was the name the quest giver called them. They were also the color of a cooked lobster and their eyes glowed menacingly yellow.
Ros already had a lightweight pulse rifle in her arms as she left the lift. She was also blessed with the knowledge that there wouldn’t be any dogs in striking range as she exited the lift. This was the central lift and a safe enough zone.
The dogs would, and did, attack, but the pulse rifle killed them without problem. Zzzpt, zzzpt, zzzpt. Three shots, three dead hell dogs. Ros put them in her ring. She could butcher them all at once.
The gym was the same layout as the one where she went for karate. She stopped just inside the door and targeted the Fenrirs closest to her. The first one died before any of them knew she was there. She picked them off, one by one, and frowned, because she remembered why she didn’t like guns. She missed several times, even with her new uncanny accuracy ability.
She was a lot better with a sword, a spear. Her favorite weapon used to be a halberd she’d used for ten years, until she switched to more a magical attack sort of fighter. She frowned as she picked up the Cerberus to put it in her ring.
Blink, Butterflies, Echo, she didn’t even have a magical attack yet. Telekinesis would count, if she ever equipped it. She still wasn’t sure why she hadn’t, except that it could drain her mental stamina very quickly and she currently could not use that stat.
She shook off her thoughts and pulled out her butcher table. She quickly cut off the parts she needed for the first quest. Completing the quest the first time would trigger the second quest string, the recovery stat boosters. She would have to fight the Gelatinous Prisms of the life support zones.
She also had a belt full of Wurm poop for processing.
Ros found the closest corridor and smiled as the cut scene initiated immediately.
“You haven’t used the mysterious potion yet. It will degrade ten percent per day. You should take it.”
Ros eyed the robot. “Yeah. I guess I will. I’ve been trying to gain as much strength, endurance and recovery as I can without extra potions, so I’m close to my physique potential when I take the Cerberus potions.”
The machine whirred and beeped. “I categorically disagree with your logic, and you risk the potions losing potency. At the very least take the mysterious potion straight away or I cannot sell you a new one.”
She nodded and pulled it out. These things had to be ingested physically, and they often tasted bad. This one was in a soft sided bubble with a straw for sucking the liquid out. She bit the end off the plastic straw and sucked up the liquid. The membranous sides of the bubble wrinkled like a grape and then neatly got sucked into the straw.
She put the empty in her ring to recycle later.
The potion wasn’t horrible. It tasted like cotton candy and burnt butter. She opened her status screen to the buffs and debuffs tab. Nothing.
She switched to the notification list where she could read all the obtained coin notes and the stat updates and…
Mysterious potion ingested: Legendary effect activated- +1 Body Trait, +1 Mind Trait, +1 Soul trait. All six stats multiplied by 2.
Ros suddenly felt faint. She opened her traits and abilities matrix, sure enough, there were five slots under each trait type. She switched to the main stats.
She smiled. She could actually see Luck and Mental Resilience. She suddenly sat on the floor and leaned her head against the wall.
Luck was already 230, just before the potion it was already 115. There was an asterisk next to it. She scrolled to the bottom. She smiled.
God Touched. Well. She’d definitely been touched by an ArchDeity. She sighed happily.
She cleared her throat and stood up. “Excuse me. That was a bit of a shock. I wasn’t expecting the legendary effect to trigger. It was only a 1% chance.”
“Indeed. You should not count on your luck. Now. To business. You have ingredients for me? I have your previous potions.”
They traded.
“I also have Wurm droppings. You said 11%?”
“I did. I did say that.”
“I’m going to list your refining skill in my guidebook. I’m going to say you charge 25%. Excluding indivisible and unique items.”
“That would actually be nice. I can do a lot with an influx of materials.”
Ros started loading poop from her belt into the screen. The droid became more and more agitated.
“Some of these droppings are very fresh.”
“Yeah, I’ve been cutting them out of my kills.”
“And… do you happen to… I mean there would be value in the casings.” It said reluctantly.
“Do you want the casings of the side stomachs? I call them the appendix, but it’s more like a sieve.”
“Yes, whatever you don’t want of it. The remaining bile salts are useful.”
“Anything in particular? Do you have an anatomy chart you can highlight? Should I try to bring the whole bodies?”
“Do you have a large enough dimensional storage space?”
“This necklace is quite large. I can shift what’s in it to my ring or… something. I’ll try to bring whole bodies and if I can manage it we can talk.”
“Indeed. Indeed we can.”
“There’s four more, but I need them treated differently. I need the value of these split in four for four hunting partners. I’ll keep anything unique or indivisible. Just equal quantities of everything possible.”
“No problem. Just a moment.” The trade screen closed and about thirty seconds of whirring and chattering later the droid opened the trade screen again.
Ros was surprised. All the metals, minerals and gems were neatly lined up in the screen and four groupings were in brown bags. Everything was already on the side that said she owned it.
“That was quick. I mean…”
“I have more control over the recycle and replication technology than the average dumb machine. Do you… I mean do you want to sell anything?” The mechanical voice sounded wistful, as if it expected her to say no, but really hoped she could agree.
Ros scanned the list and pursed her lips. Did she care to stockpile against the day she knew smiths and armorers? Maybe after she sorted the first lot of treasure in her treasure room. She went down the list clicking lines, keeping a few things, mostly uncut gems.
2,732,267,036 coin
“Oh my. Luckily I have quite a lot of coin, weekly wages build up over the epochs. Well. I did tell you that I would restock:”
Superior Mysterious potion: 10,000,000 coin
Soul Trait- Prophetic(SS): 2,000,000,000
Ability upgrade- B to SSS: 700,000,000
“Is the price on that ability upgrade right? It looks low.” If she took all three she would come out 22 mil ahead. That looked good.
“There is some variability to pricing in some cases.” The droid said snootily.
That was the very first time she’d ever heard any such thing. She took them all anyway.
Superior Mysterious potion- unknown effects. No negative effects for potion failure. 15% chance nothing happens. 10% chance small effect, 55% chance medium effect, 19% chance large effect, 1% chance legendary effect. Luck stat plays major factor in success.
Ros winced and used the two slips first. Prophetic and increasing her butterfly ability to SSS. She sat again while she learned what she could do with a prophetic soul. Then she learned the ability upgrade features. She would now have a brief vision with each use of the butterfly ability. She would get a diary entry she could review later. She would have a list of potential choices to make in a situation. And the SSS level perk was she would see a flutter of otherwise invisible butterflies over the head of anyone with an impact on the future. It would be up to her to examine the potentials.
She took a deep breath and also applied the telekinetic mind trait. She smiled. She could currently lift a one ounce object. That would increase with practice and Resilience.
She glanced at the robot, but it seemed more than willing to wait. She pulled out the new mysterious potion.
She looked at the notification log immediately.
Mysterious potion ingested: Legendary effect activated- Prophetic Chronicler’s Physique(E)- imparts: Heads up display, Author’s Dictation, Editing Suite, Wireless Connection, Transcription(audio and visual), Book of Prophecy Access.
“You have a very powerful patron.” The quest giver said. “That should have been an ability of some kind, probably something to compliment another ability you already had. Well. Summon me when you have some more Wurm stool or some whole bodies. A whole body would be very fortuitous. Don’t even necessarily remove anything. I swear you will receive back everything indivisible, unique or individually valuable to you.”
“Thank you. I’ll see what I can do.”
“Oh. Oh my. I nearly forgot to mention. Since you are a formidable huntress and have assisted me to such an extent, my compatriot in the Air Quality Room is having some awful problems with gelatinous prisms. Do you think you can help out there? I can place it on your map.”
“Map? I have the Heads up Display, of course I have a map.” She looked at her character sheet and saw all the physique abilities were extra to her main slots. She had a very unusual named physique, E grade, and it was probably upgradable. She found the map, located the quest dot right where it should be and set the map to mini map.
Before she did anything else Ros bought the Automatic Targeting(F) ability. She immediately and successfully fused it to her heads up Display, freeing the F grade slot back up.
She went all the way down to the first floor in the central lift. Using her new targeting, which literally moved her arms to aim more precisely, she fought her way past eight more Fenrirs, since her repeatable quest was active, and she made a beeline to the unmarked express lift.
All along the way, she used her new dictation ability to compose her entry on the Hell Hound Quest Series. She used her Editing Suite to make it more coherent and the Wireless Connection to post it under the Moira pseudonym.
She was finished just in time to face something she’d always ignored on all her many forays into various stations.
There were five residential domes, basically really nice villa homes, at the top of the lift.
The lift looked undisturbed. She entered the code: 1-1-2-3-5-8-1-3; the first eight digits in the Fibonacci sequence. Maybe that was why they were as yet undiscovered. That had been posted on the message boards in the Second Realm in a ‘Secrets of the First Realm’ thread.
According to the message, if you took a rover from the mine entry, around to a switchback road you could eventually find and enter the domes, at which point the key code was posted at the top of the lift.
The number stuck in Ros’ mind because she’d been obsessed with number sequences for a brief time in the sixth grade. Some mystery book she’d read about solving secret codes used number sequences as major plot points.
The lift opened without complaint, she took it up to the lobby on the top floor. As advertised, there was a hexagonal table in the lobby, with five sets of keys laid on the table. She picked up the set with the number 387B-5 on the fob. She opened the door to Dome 5 and walked in. The entryway was a hundred yard people moving conveyor belt, which started automatically when she stepped on it. Dome 5 was the closest to the observation deck and the casino room would be in range of her Blink from the closest point. Or at least the observation deck would be eventually if she didn’t have the range yet.
The walkway was enclosed in a faceted crystal barrel vault and lit from beside the walkway. It was beautiful. The domes themselves shone too as if someone intended for the curious and the determined to find them and use them.
She had never been in one before, and she had every hope of finding treasures like the message threads had described.
The front door of the dome was also locked, although it wasn’t clear why two front door locks would be needed. The third key was for the rover in the airlock. Although she would also need an activation fuse.
The door opened into a majestic garden patio with a working fountain that somehow still had goldfish swimming in the basin. The trees were topiaries that never needed trimming. Despite the 42 hour day/night of the moon, the garden had a 24 hour day/night, and it was dusk inside the garden.
It was unnaturally still. No birds, squirrels, insects, no noises of any kind except for the tinkle of the fountain. According to reports, the appropriate animals could be purchased, the same way squirrels and butterflies and honeybees could be purchased for gardens in the city.
The house inside the dome was huge. It didn’t really fit the dome, which was round, because it was a two story mansion with a French Chateau aesthetic. Really it didn’t match anything else in the Realm. Even the houses in the city had more in common with Roman Villas than this pseudo castle. Of course it didn’t have any towers, the dome was too low.
Even though the place was uninhabited and had been for centuries or millennia, the house was lit, inside and out. The front doorway was an open arch, no door. Apparently the walkway door was sufficient. Ros looked up at the grand staircase, she peeked into the sitting rooms, the informal dining room, the library, which had no physical books, the billiards room, the formal dining room, the dumbwaiter into the underground kitchen.
The servant quarters would be down there as well. She spotted several doors she knew would be servant doors both in the main hall and in the side rooms. She went upstairs and looked at all the bedrooms. She picked the one with the view of the observation dome and the planet. She took a long bath in flower scented water that didn’t get cold. She slept in the bed big enough for a whole team of hunters. She set the defense grid on the airlock entrance. She was claiming this house, at least for now.
She went to bed in her new dome house and talked herself to sleep, recording all her observations about Qui Cultivation and why everyone should buy the 100 coin Novice Trait.