My eyes opened a few times as I floated in and out of consciousness. I saw sunlight once, then trees floating past me, a door then just a dreamless sleep. I woke up a while later, the first thing I saw was Josh leaning over me.
“What’s up?” I asked dumbly. He smiled reassuringly and pulled a wet cloth away from my face.
“I was just cleaning you up. Apparently, we heal a bit faster than we used to, but your clothes were not as lucky unfortunately. I found some of my old things for you.” I sat up and felt where my face had been pierced by the grass. I felt the acne that covered my face but at least it didn’t feel like I’d taken a running leap at sandpaper carpet. Looking down I saw I was wearing a yellow smiley face T-shirt and a pair of red skinny jeans. “Don’t worry the girls didn’t see your giblets.” I scoffed and rolled my eyes. I almost responded when Tony barged into the room and saw me sitting up.
“Guys he’s awake come here!” The others came running through the door and saw me sitting up. The two girls came up and joined us in the bed laughing with relief. Josh stood up and chuckled at the sight.
“How long have I been out?” I asked with one arm around each of the twins.
“At least two hours we were really freaked out, but we’re really glad that you’re ok!” Susan let out in a single breath. I looked over at the tiny blonde ball of energy and gave her a puzzled look.
“Something… is different about you?” I said it as both a statement and question. Susan covered her arms and turned around quickly.
“No there isn’t!” She protested. Tina laughed and sprang up to hug her girlfriend around the waist. That’s when I noticed her arms.
“You’re buff!?” I asked and Susan’s eyes filled with tears.
“Oh, come on babe! I love your new muscles!” Tina told Susan but that just made her cry harder.
“I’m SNIFF suppose SNIFF to be cute!” Tina hugged her again and whispered something to her that I couldn’t hear but they started kissing instead and I turned away.
“What happened?” I asked Josh. He just shrugged.
“She leveled up.” He said flatly. My questioning look must have told him that I needed more information, so he continued. “After the fight she immediately leveled up. Her Strength and Agility automatically went up by two. We’re guessing that that’s why she’s changed so much.” That made a certain amount of sense to me except for one thing.
“Why didn’t the rest of us level up?” Josh looked thoughtful for a second and then responded.
“The series explanation said something about most of the essence for warriors coming from combat remember. Ours was something about performance. So maybe we just don’t get as much essence even when we kill something.” He then looked over to Susan.
“Hey Sue, how much essence did you get for that kill?” She got a blank look on her face as she looked at a screen with her notification on it.
“It says I got 150 essence for the kill and a bonus of 50 essence for damage taken.” I balked at the essence difference and did some quick math.
“So, we get 50% less essence than the combat classes?” I asked.
“It looks that way, which means I think we need to either find more people to perform for or we can perform for Susan?” He said hopefully turning to Sue. She gave a smile and a half shrug.
“I don’t mind if you think it’ll help!” Josh turned to me.
“You wanna try?” I nodded and reached for Ballads Bow on the side table. I thought for a few seconds about what to play bore it came to me. I strummed the first few chords of “Kiss Me.” By Sixpence None the Richer and started singing. Tony came in with a beat on the tambourine and Tina with the base. Josh started with the lyrics, and I harmonized with him. Before I knew it the song was ending. Susan clapped for us, and golden motes came off of her.
“You have performed for a fan 100 essence awarded! LEVEL UP! +2 Charisma +2 Dexterity! 1 Free Stat Point!” I was dumbstruck I’d gotten more essence from playing a song for one person than I did for killing that monster. We decided to play another song for her in order to level up as much as possible.
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“You have performed for a fan 25 essence awarded! LEVEL UP! +2 Charisma +2 Dexterity! 1 Free Stat Point!” We looked at our essence gain with disappointment. “Why do you think we got less this time?” I asked the others. Tony was the first to answer.
“Maybe it’s something like diminishing returns?” We all looked at him puzzled. “So, like in video games, right? When you get to a certain level killing something of a lower level doesn’t give as much XP so the higher our level the less essence we’ll get from people of the same or lower level than us.”
“But doesn’t that mean that our leveling will slow down a lot once people start leveling up?” Josh asked.
“I don’t know for sure it’s just a hypo glycolate. Technically we’re still a combat class so maybe there’s more essence for performing during combat.” Tina slapped her brother on the shoulder.
“You mean hypothesis dumbass.” Tony laughed and tugged at one of his braids. He did that when he felt uncomfortable, but we never called him out on it.
“I guess we have some testing to do then.” I said then I noticed that Josh was staring at me. “You ok man?” I asked giving him a questioning look back. Josh just turned and left the room. When he came back, he was carrying a handheld mirror and handed it to me. “Why?” I asked.
“Just look.” He said. Following his direction, I looked in the mirror I didn’t understand what he was talking about though.
“Is there something on my face? I asked touching both sides of my cheeks.
“Your acne… I think… you have less.” he said awkwardly stumbling over his words. I’d had bad acne ever since I hit puberty and he knew I was subconscious about it. It had gotten slightly better in the last couple of years but I was left with lots of acne scars from my mom deciding to pop them every chance she got, which led me to doing it. I looked back at the mirror to check my face and he was right I still had a little acne, but looking at it now they were much less inflamed, and I could even see some of my scars had repaired themselves.
“What the fuck?” I said looking around at the others it was then that I noticed some differences in the others’ faces. Josh had always been hot part of why he made such a good front man for the band but now he almost had a kind of effervescence going on that made me not want to look away. I did though I looked at Tony whose teeth looked whiter and straighter as he smiled. Tina’s dark skin reminded me of that one model she had on her vision board hanging up in the practice garage. I’d never really found myself attracted to any of my friends but at this moment they were all looking damn good.
“What were all of your starting charisma at?” I asked curiously. All of them answered that their charisma had started between 12 and 15 Tony being the lowest at 12 and Josh being the highest at 15. “That means that now Josh’s charisma is at 19. No wonder it’s so hard to look away from him.” I said under my breath, but he must have heard me because he blushed and looked away causing the twins to laugh. I paled at what I said too and tried to correct myself. “I mean you’re all fucking hot now!” That just made them laugh even harder.
“Excuse me but my lovely princess has always been hot!” Susan protested.
“Yeah! And since she’s my twin that goes double for me!” Tony exclaimed. I just facepalmed and threw my head into the bed to hide my shame. Josh asked me what my starting charisma was, and I begrudgingly told him.
“Damn maybe you should have been a fighter!” Tony teased me. I blushed hard and Tina punched him in the shoulder.
“How is it that you had a 12 in charisma, you’re the weirdest looking one in the bunch walking around with one foot in your mouth and my boot up your ass?” I knew that Tony didn’t mean anything by it, he just didn’t have much of a filter. I pretended his comment didn’t bother me though and changed the subject.
“So, what should we put our spare points into?” I asked.
“Well, I don’t know about you guys, but I am not putting more into Strength! I’ll be a giant before you know it!” Susan said that last part with a whine and Tina grabbed her by the waist.
“That’s ok I like big girls too.” She winked and Sue rolled her eyes. “But in all seriousness, I think you should invest in your base stats. You’re tough and all but that monster just ignored your choke hold I don’t even know if it breathes. I don’t want anything to happen to you.” Susan sighed but had to agree. She was the most combat oriented of all of us and if she couldn’t do anything to a level three monster then our little band of bards was fucked.
“Fine I’ll put it in strength so I can do some more damage. But I’m getting some of that charisma eventually, I don’t want all of you to start walking around like super models and leaving me looking like an ogre!” That got a laugh out of all of us seeing as Susan was an actual competing beauty queen.
“I just leveled up again!” Tina exclaimed.
“What for?” Josh asked her.
“It says that I manipulated someone into seeing things my way and got bonus experience for it!” She then looked guiltily at Susan. “Baby I promise I wasn’t trying to manipulate you!” Susan rolled her eyes.
“I know sweetie you were just looking after me. But you did get me to change my mind and see things your way, so I guess the system considers that manipulation. It’s fine let me go ahead and assign my points.” She got a slack jawed look on her face like she was looking at something that only she could see. In the next moment we watched as her arms grew a little bigger. She then proceeded to make us laugh even more as she executed a perfect lat spread and gave a few more flexing poses.
After the laughter had died down, I asked about Josh’s parents. Their cars weren’t in the driveway, so he was still holding out hope that they were alive.
“So, what’s our next move?” Tina asked.
“What do you mean? Mom always said when we get lost to stay where we were till someone found us.” Tony responded. She gave him a look that said, “What the fuck are you talking about?” One that I think the rest of us mimicked. Susan, who let’s face it was the nicest of us reached out and patted him on the hand.
“Tony dear we’re not exactly lost, are we?” It was condescending but I understood it.
“What do you mean? There’s basically a brand-new forest out there, I couldn’t see the road we came in from, and apparently there are disgusting walking nut sacks walking around that want to snack on us. If that’s not lost, I don’t know what is.” We all stared at him after his response because for once he made sense.
“Well, I’m going to go look for my parents.” Said Josh resolutely.
“Hell no. You are not heading out there we almost died just coming from the garage up to the house!” I argued.
“Well, I’m not asking you guys to come with me!” He argued. I made a buzzer sound in response.
“Wrong answer! You’re especially not going out there alone!” Josh had that belligerent look on his face like he did whenever he was trying to convince us that a song, he wanted to perform was good. But we both knew how this was going to end. He may have been stubborn but when it came to Josh, I always got my way especially when he was being stupid, and he knew it. I gave him a hard stare and after a few seconds he backed down.
“Fine what do you think we should do?” He asked. I paused for almost 30 seconds before answering.
“We need to train.” I responded.
“Train? I thought you didn’t want to leave.” Josh responded.
“I don’t really, but you’re right we need to find out about your families. We do need to leave here. But we need to get stronger first. We were idiots and all of us chose the Bard series, so we need to take things slower and figure out our abilities. Give it a few levels then we can make our way into town.” I looked at everyone else. “Does that sound ok to you guys?”