*Knock knock*
Sighing and half-naked I kicked all the door-blocking shit aside and ripped it open.
“What?”
Vivi… looked different. Really really sexy. What the hell had happened? I saw the sun had just set but it hadn’t been that long, like at all.
“What’s up?” I felt my heart beat in an uncomfortable area.
She eyed me up and down. Suddenly feeling like a piece of meat, sexy meat actually, I realized that I wasn’t wearing a shirt.
“Are you settling in okay?”
I gulped and realized in a rush that I wanted to sleep with her. Badly. I was also incredibly horny. That warred and twisted inside me until my finger brushed against the engagement ring still wrapped around my pinky.
“No… No. Thank you though. For everything today, showing me around. Saving my ass out there. I- I gotta go.”
I slammed the door shut and locked it. I left the key inside the lock and when the finality of the lock clicking home didn’t do anything for my… attention, I decided to try headbutting myself against the wall to get myself together. Besides the near concussion, it kind of worked. It hadn’t even been two weeks and I was already thinking like that? I felt like a piece of shit. I was truly a piece of shit. I loved Duck. NO. I love my Duck. She was still alive. What is wrong with me?
Agh! I’m thinking of Duck again. The emotional gut-twist of desperately missing my Duck twisted the feelings of guilt into some new indescribable emotional pain. I ran to the bathroom as Vivi continued her remote assault on my libido.
I skipped the hot shower and sat in the tub as I filled it with slightly-too-cold water. I needed to cool my ass off.
There were lingering thoughts of Viviane… of her naked. Of her rubbing on me, more than she had when we were walking around. Of her rubbing herself on me nak- NO. NO, BAD THOMAS.
I really didn’t want to think about Vivi right now but ‘not thinking about something’ just made you think about it more. Pink elephant. See? Thinking about a pink elephant. That momentary distraction made me realize something. I just had to think about something else.
I sighed, I had been trying not to do it, but I knew exactly what would distract me. I’d been putting it off in my so-far failed attempt at a Mental Health Week. That said, after Vivi’s rat-murder-orgy, I was this close to calling it quits on the whole mental health thing altogether and embracing both the suck and the crazy.
“Display Status.”
Doubting Thomas
Class: Ghetto Hedge Knight
Rank: Above Average Human!
Level 6/20
*Knightley Duties
Earned Feats:
Bonus Feats:
Unspent
Feat
Points: 6! +13 22!
Body
7+ 9!
The Strength of your Body.
Fight and Rage: 1
Feline Bane: 1
Cat Shepard: 1
Keep walkin’ son: 1
Shield of Ontiveros: 1
My Body was a Temple: 1
Mind
7+ 10!
The Strength of your Mind.
Trap n Burn: 1
Distract the Doggos: 1
Looks shadily around, whispers, I gotta plan: 1
Man with a plan: 1
Contact: 1
Soul
7+ 9!
The Strength of your Soul.
Mercy on a Poor Soul: 1
Zomboi: 1
Heart of Ontiveros: 1
They Count on You: 1
Good Boy: 1
External Will
5+ 9!
The inner spark of Man manifest, the Will to Shape Reality
I’d rather Die than Lose: 1
Improvised Defense: 1
Clever boy: 1
Assassinate This: 1
Friends in low places: 1
Internal Fortitude
7+ 11!
11/11
How do you carry on when all is lost?
Tis but a scratch: 1
Found a Reason: 1
Thou Shalt Not Pass!: 1
Down but not out: 1
Excuse me… That’s Mine!: 1
Back from the Brink: 1
*Delayed Gratification*
Divine Spark
0
Do you believe in miracles now, heathen?
Your little stunt with the Ontiverians would have been enough. Before. Heathens gotta work much harder than that.
This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.
Luck
7+ 9!
To clarify, Humanity has an average luck of 20. Losing His Favor was your choice but regardless, you can't call that 'good' luck. Humanity’s luck reset to (0)
Make your own luck: 1
Right Lady, Wrong Time: 1
Fortunate Son: 1
MisFire: 1
Found You!
Potentiality
-9.94 →
-9.96!
Ranges between (-10 and 10). Losing Status as Most Favored is pretty bad on a potentiality curve, don't tell me that surprises you?
First of all, what a fucking mess my stat page was. An absolute balancing nightmare. It made my brain twist just to try and sort it out. Body, Soul, and Will needed to go up. ASAP.
Math was not nearly enough to distract me, I wasn’t good enough at it for that to be possible. I dug into my Feats.
Keep Walking Son: Keep… ya know, walking. Like when stuff is chasing you, but instead of a grandma and a tired police officer it was you and the restless dead. One-two, one-two, good for you.
‘One-two’ sparked a memory and I looked at my sword… Nah, that was stupid.
Shield of Ontiveros
Shield those poor people from harm. With your body. They still don’t like you that much.
“Joe does!”
Besides Joe.
Looks shadily around, whispers, I gotta plan:
It’s a minor miracle, you came up with a plan and convinced others to go along with it. Lena got a double-stack of Feat Points for this. Since, you know, you wouldn’t have been able to convince them on your own. Charisma dump stat in the apocalypse? Bold move Tommy-boi.
Motherfucker. I didn’t like being ‘boy’ed’ and I sure as fuck didn’t like being ‘boi’ed’.
Man with a Plan: I mean, in terms of the class between Angels and Humans it should read ‘Boy with a Plan’, but you’d get all pissy about that.
“Are you gonna tell me what it’s for or are you just focusing on the petty thing right now?”
I repeated myself, “What is the Feat, ‘Man with a Plan’?”
Man with a Plan: I mean… have a plan and carry through with it, mostly successfully. Good job… I guess. Keep your shit attitude in the apocalypse, see how far that gets you.
I didn’t have a shit attitude. Well, okay maybe sometimes, but only with this fucking angel! And the animals. And the people that killing would solve my problems with. And… Well… No no, fuck him. Fuck him to death. My attitude was fine.
Contact!: Make Contact between your force and an enemy force. Come out ahead in the initial clash. Lame.
I almost felt bad for Gabby’s reduced sass, but I repeated ‘fuck gabby’ in my head until that dumb feeling went away. At least I was getting some clearer info. Which just proceeded to piss me off again since if he’d stop being pissy for a damned second maybe I’d know more about it.
Heart of Ontiveros: Carry the spirit of your Human brethren to their victory. Yay.
They Count on You: Have people… like, believe in you and stuff. Don’t let them down, ass.
Good Boy: form a frienemy relationship with a goodboi.
What the hell was that? Chibi was the first thing that came to mind. He was kind of a goodboi. I say ‘kind of’, because presumably, he also had an owner at some point in the past. A former owner that he likely murdered at some point. Regardless, I wouldn't mind not having a deathmatch with that particular beast.
Improvised Defense: Using your Will to nullify that attack was pretty cash-money, I’m not gonna lie. I was totally expecting that shitty desk-shield to not work at all. Would have been kind of hilarious.
Clever Boy: Most of you absolutely INSIST on firing ‘magic’ out of your hands.
I was, admirably ignoring Gabe’s depressed shit, as well as paying extra attention to the important bits. It confirmed a few things. Primarily that Will didn’t have to come from the fingers or hands. From personal experience, I already knew that, but I’d still take any evidence that I could get.
Snapping was… Well, I wasn’t sure what snapping did exactly. From experience and some light-testing, it did make it a bit easier to use my singular light skill; but, especially for my unattuned stuff, I didn’t really notice any significant improvement in either strength or ease of use when snapping my fingers. Definitely no improvement in Fortitude cost. With my Light Affinity skill, it did make the… process? Yeah, the process was definitely easier. Much easier. Maybe snapping was some sort of shortcut… If I could eliminate that completely, I’d have a huge advantage. Not having to snap for my unattuned bursts had proven its worth already, multiple times.
There was another word I caught… ‘nullify’. Was that something specific to certain spell interactions or was that perhaps a feature of unattuned Will? That could be potentially useful. Scratch that, potentially YUGE.
So while ‘Clever Boy’ didn’t really tell me anything I didn’t know, it was just kind of nice to have some sort of informational reinforcement on it. Even if my mental health week was in tatters at this point, I should have been practicing that, because, you know, I hadn’t been and I was surrounded by absolute psychos.
I focused on building Will to fire it out of my back again, but it seemed hesitant to… come out? No. Express itself? That seemed more on the money. If I could get some fucking practice without being nuts-deep in a life-or-death situation, I’d be more than happy to pursue it.
Assassinate This: Beat off an assassination attempt. Probably not the first trap you’re going to get caught in. Try and have your pants on next time.
The Assassination attempt wasn’t going to be the first trap? Yeah, no shit, there are probably a hundred more coming my way at some point. Big shock there.
Friends in Low Places: You got some scrappy humans to save your life in your little battle against the tinsey minsey ‘big-bad’. All it cost you was a tramp-stamp.
“Bastard!!!” Whatever shreds of sympathy I had for the archshithead was GONE. I had been valiantly suppressing it, but that little comment reminded me that the angelic asshole had given me a tramp-stamp. A tramp-stamp! A terrible one too, ‘Friends in Low Places’ gave all sorts of the wrong ideas. God knows what other people would think. Crop-tops and Brittney Spears’ twist-tops were OUT. Permanently.
I had completely forgotten about it… the tramp-stamp. It was painful to even say in my head. I realized in a rush that I was standing in the sauna-tub now, fist shaking toward the sky and wearing my birthday suit. Ok Tom, keep on moving on. You can’t see it so it doesn’t exist. I sank back down and turned on the heat.
I debated stopping here but… The little asterisks were kind of annoying me. And by ‘kind of’, I mean triggering every ounce of ‘notification ocd’ I’d ever had in any type of video game, but a million times worse because this was real life. Because you know, it’s the apocalypse, so it’d make a horrible sort of sense for shitty game designers to not push their shitty ‘Journal’ aspects? At least there wasn’t a Lore journal. Though, Lore would actually be ridiculously helpful. Of course, any sort of that would be too good for us heathens.
Thou Shalt Not Pass: Zombies ain’t getting by. Hold the line with your boys.
I was very much completely okay with that. Joe and I were indeed boys. And the other guys too, whatever their names had been. Dave? Something.
Down but Not Out: I don’t know why you chose ‘Bulwark’ if you were still going to be knocked down like a bitch. Still, I guess you didn’t die/give up.
Did… Gabby just ‘/’ me? Lazy! Lazy writing.
Excuse me! That’s MINE!: Brutally murder a living, breathing, sentient, conscious being that tried to ‘borrow’ your petty material shit.
When was that? Wait. The fox?!
“It was my shotgun! It wasn’t ‘shit’.” Anyone wants to borrow some lead, they are more than welcome. 0% APR interest-free lifetime loan. I grinned, I’d only collect it after they were dead. Wait, that didn’t make total sense but the first half was cool enough. Mentally saved into my one-liner file.
Make your Own Luck: It’s easier to be lucky when you make it yourself.
Make your Own Luck: It’s easier to be lucky when you make it yourself.
Terribly, stupidly vague. Like most ‘luck’ shit in video games. Glad that feature got ported into RL.
MisFire: He would have shot you, maybe that interruption was a… lucky thing.
“Huh?” What was this referring to? Oh, that’s right, when Gramps tried to kill me. Ugh. PITA. And now that acronym made me hungry again. I really needed to check these regularly, mental health week be damned.
Asking about *Delayed Gratification* didn’t give me an answer and I didn’t know why it was asterisked on both ends of the Feat. Regardless, I didn’t really want to play a guessing game at the moment. I got out and laid in bed, still kind of wet, which seemed like a pretty bad thing to do on my mental health week, but I was beyond caring. Maybe that was the key to mental health, not giving a shit.
That sounded wrong but I didn’t care enough to get back up. As I was laying there I remembered my Will-Blade, name-pending, and decided to try it out. I couldn’t form it infinitely, but I kind of had the feeling that it restored the ‘charges’ each day. When I closed my hand into a grip it formed easily twice in a row. It was somewhat costly from a Fortitude aspect, somewhere around 2 points. I tried to form it again but just ended up bursting Will from my hand. The long day as well as the drop in Fortitude from the Will-Blades sent me quickly to sleep.