~ CHAPTER 8 ~
THE MAGIC OF PASSION AND CREATIVITY, PART 2
I hadn’t thought much about it earlier, although I guess I had noticed, but with my dress clinging tightly around my body, it was really hard to ignore the… different… feeling between my legs. Apparently they still modelled that stuff even if you couldn’t do anything with it. Anymore. Except in games someone my age couldn’t buy. Yet another relic from the Dreamscape era. It was kind of a pity actually: how many people got the chance to… you know… actually nevermind. The water was really cool.
I gradually became aware of the sound of high pitched laughter coming from somewhere off to my right. Strange thing to hallucinate. There was something small and glowing greeny-yellow darting above the reeds like a weird radioactive firefly that didn’t know what time of day it was. It was still mid afternoon right? The dark swirliness and purple tendrils combined with the chill of my now-waterlogged body didn’t seem to support that hypothesis, but I didn’t think I’d been at it that long.
“You okay there champ? Need a boost?” chirped the high pitched voice altogether way too close to my ear.
“Eh?” I shook my head. Somehow I didn’t think hallucinating actual voices was supposed to be part of the package.
“Hang on a sec, I gotcha… probably.”
I tried to follow the source of the voice, and finally my eyes rested on the firefly-like thing I’d spotted earlier. It, or rather she, was standing… flying… about an arm’s length away from me with a deep frown on her face, her cheeks puffed out, and her lips pursed to the side in a look of fierce concentration. Around her a series of opaque greenish-white spell matrices were glowing and slowly reforming into a spell that looked like it could wind up being considerably advanced.
It wasn’t the spell that caught my attention, though. For what felt like the hundredth time that day, I could only stare in stunned amazement: the girl I was looking at was a miniature gossamer-winged Faerie. She was also quite possibly the cutest thing I'd ever seen. She was wearing a tiny yellow sundress with a little brown satchel strapped to her waist, and I could see flower petals sticking out from it like it was the most normal thing in the world. Her little antennae twitched as she dedicated her single minded attention to the spell matrix that was now considerably larger than she was, looking a bit like a elementary schooler carrying one of those life-size teddies, only scaled down about a hundred times.
It wasn’t that Faeries were an impossible sight in the Wild Continent, I just hadn’t expected to meet one for… well, ever, really. The thing was, Faeries were rare. Really rare. Exponentially more so than my own Mistborn race, and there were some really good reasons for that. First, they were tiny. Like, size of my hand tiny. She could have sat on one of those mushrooms earlier and looked quite comfortable, and she probably wouldn’t even have disturbed it. Second, they had wings. Four of them, made of out of rainbow-coloured gossamer like an adorably sparkly dragonfly. Some players could pick up the knack of additional limbs quite easily like learning to whistle or wiggle their ears, but others would never be able to no matter how hard they tried, and there was only so much the Assist System could do.
“Yoohoo!” she waved at me energetically. “Earth to Mistborn chick! You back with us?”
I nodded and shook my head, blinking. “Sorry, yeah. Thanks. Umm.” I’d somehow managed to trip over my my own head without even having moved.
She grabbed her belly and stretched out another high pitched chortle before zigzagging madly in the air for a second. When I could see her clearly again, she had a massive cheshire grin on her face and I could practically see her eyes sparkling at me as her antennae wobbled back and forth. “You ate one of those shrooms didn’t ya? Ayayay. Ok, what’s the debuff say?”
“Ah…” I relayed to her what I’d read.
She held her hands together and turned her cute little eyes up at me with a look of abject tragedy. “Yeah, fuck, man, sorry. Looks like I can do crap all for tier three. I tried to gen some shit, but I guess I got twatblocked. Guess I ain’t a frackin’ healer, you know?” She snorted at her own joke. “Gotta go through tiers one and two first anyway, haha.”
I frowned, not quite sure what she was talking about. “Um, thanks anyway, though. I think I’ll be fine, I just need to be more careful next time.”
She held up her hands. “Nah, whatever. Gotta give a hand when I can right?” Suddenly her face split into another mischievous grin. “Plus, who-the-tats said that shit was all I had?”
I smiled weakly at her. “I’ll really appreciate anything you can do. Really.”
She zigzagged a bit, setting her jaw with a look of innocent determination, then started forming another spell matrix that looked quite a bit simpler than the first one. Since she was so tiny, even as she initially formed it her spell matrix was almost as large as she was. This time it was bright yellow, and had an interesting sort of spiky precision to it as individual points snapped into place almost like she was plucking them with her mind, and it made the air around it feel slightly electrified. By looking at it I still couldn’t tell what class she was, other than ‘not a whatever-ing healer’, but that was probably just my inexperience.
As she worked, I slurped my way back up the bank, and finally knelt by the edge letting the slimy water drip out of my hair and clothes. Everything about me felt bedraggled and waterlogged, and I realised I was surprisingly grateful to have the little Faerie there even if all she did was keep me company.
After a little while, she released her spell and an electric yellow glow engulfed my body for a second. “Here, lets see if this twazbit works.” In the corner of my eye I saw a new status effect appear.
[Enchanted: Minor Constitution]
Grade 1 Enchantment. Increases Constitution by +3. Caster unknown. Estimated duration remaining: 7 minutes.
I checked my poisoned status and it had gone down to sixteen minutes remaining. “Oh wow, awesome! You shaved off like two minutes!” I beamed at the miniature girl, who I now realised must be an [Enchantress], but she just frowned.
“Hrmph. Screw that, waaay not good enough.” She pursed her lips and her frown deepened for a second. “Hang on, I got another one coming.”
“Oooh, alright. Um. You really don’t have to though!” I’d already decided to just let her do her thing, so I only gave a half-hearted protest. If she could take off even another couple of minutes from my poison it would honestly save me a lot of grief. She immediately set to work on yet another spell matrix, this one easily the most elaborate yet, swirling with yellow and points of deep violet so it almost gave me a headache to look at it. Rather than worry about it, I just sat and allowed myself to drip.
Finally after what must have been at least thirty seconds of careful construction, the Faerie’s newest spell was ready. She released it, and this time instead of a warm glow, I was engulfed by a sort of un-light that was yellow only in the sense that it seemed like it had sucked all that was not yellow out of the air, and I felt a weird pinching sucking sensation as if a tiny part of my soul was being sucked out through a syringe and then forcibly reinserted somewhere else. I couldn’t quite decide if it was a horrible sensation or just an interesting one, but it didn’t hurt exactly. I checked my status, and sure enough, I had a new effect.
[Metatransference: Minor Willpower to Constitution]
Unstable grade 1 Enchantment. Converts up to 2 of your Willpower into Constitution. Caster unknown. Estimated duration remaining: 24 seconds.
I blinked at the effect, dumbfounded. What was up with this idiotic spell? On top of that, ‘Unstable’? and it only lasted less than thirty seconds?!
“Uh…” I started. “I think it might not have worked.”
“Damn, sorry, I’m not sure what went wrong. I’ve got a message here…” she folded her arms and frowned at the air. “Oh fuck this, it says I’m out of Skill Slots! What-the-nuts, that’s so dumb!”
“Wait…” realization suddenly hit me. I knew why her spells had taken so long to cast. “Did you just literally create that spell from nothing?”
She nodded. “Oh yeah, it’s not that hard if you know how they work.”
“Yeah, but…” I started protesting. How did she know spell theory well enough to be able to create her own spells, hours into the game’s launch, but not know the most basic element of the game’s Skill System? “Just go to your character sheet and unequip one of your Skills you aren’t using. It’ll cost you a tonne of Stamina though, so try not to faint, ok?”
She had her face in her palm, her antennae drooping comically. “No shit… crap I feel like a complete noob right now, running out of twizzling Skill Slots without even realising.” She reached into the air and pulled out a tiny wispy milky white potion and chugged it, then started fiddling with her fingers in the air with what I could only assume was her character sheet. After a little while she nodded forcefully and clapped her little hands together. “Alright, lets try this clotwaffle again.”
The same spell took her only about ten seconds to cast this time, and the sensation was distinctly less unpleasant, even if it still set my teeth on edge. I scanned the new status effect.
[Metatransference: Minor Willpower to Constitution]
Grade 1 Enchantment. Converts up to 6 of your Willpower into Constitution. Caster unknown. Estimated duration remaining: 41 minutes.
Now that was more like it! I glanced at the poison and saw that it had gone down to thirteen minutes remaining. “Wow, you’re awesome! You just saved me like a third of the whole time I was going to be poisoned. Seriously is there anything I can do to do for you to pay you back?”
She looked at me with her eyebrow raised skeptically. “‘Like a third’ means you still have like, more than ten minutes to go, right? Ayay, I guess I’d better not scat off and leave you on your lonesome like this, huh?” After a moment she frowned. “Actually, wait, holy crap, that must mean your innate Constitution is through the clippin’ roof. Haven’t I boosted you up by like nine already? And you only lost a third of the duration? That poison must be freakin’ insane.”
I thought about that. Her language had been a bit excessive, but there must be a reason why her spells had had so little effect. Then it dawned. “Ah, haha, yeah I have the Body Conditioning passive, it gives me an extra four Constitution on top of my base stats, so any more you added would have that much less effect.”
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
She cocked her head to the side, then after a second started chortling again. “Wait, does that mean you’re an MMA?”
A little wounded, I glared at her slightly. “Yeah, something wrong with that?”
She shook her head vigorously, blurring a little in the air. “Sorry man, haha, no, no hard feelings, you just totally don’t look like it. Like, not even a bit.”
“Yeah well, I kinda got embarrassed looking at the starting outfits, and then didn’t really think of trying to buy something new.” I admitted, hanging my head.
“It’s cool. You can play however-the-wink you want, you know?” Her big grin was back, but it at least looked like she was trying to make it into a friendly smile. It still felt like I was looking at a little kid, even if I was starting to get disturbingly disillusioned, so it was hard to hold it against her. Suddenly her face made a big ‘O’ shape and she exclaimed. “Actually, you know that just gave me an idea!”
“Oh?”
“Right, so, you know how you’re all mucky and shit?”
Somehow I didn’t like where this was going. “Err, yeah?”
“If you’re cool with it, you could totally make my day!”
I’d already promised to pay her back, so I couldn’t really back down now. “Ok, um. What do you need me to do?”
“Oh man you’re the friggin’ best!” She squealed and clapped her hands together. “Right right. So um… the quest I’m on right now, there’s these, like, fossil things… Ok, lets start that again. I’m an Enchantress, right? There are Enchanting mats underwater I need for my quest. I flipping hate getting my fricking wings wet, and haven’t unlocked a good enough Water Affinity Enchant to make it even remotely fracking cool. I was totally going to get my buddy to do that part for me, but then he went and got himself called in to his dumb-flicking job, or whatever. Never party with a freakin’ fireman, you know?”
I felt like my ears were beginning to bleed from listening to this tiny ball of filth. “You sound… upset.”
“Huh?” She blinked at me. “Oh, no, no, it’s cool. Just means I’ll be overleveled or whatever. Does it even work like that in this quibbling game? Anyway, he’d better make it up to me! Stupid-fucking people having dumb-fucking fires on goddamn-fucking launch day, couldn’t they wait until tomorrow at least? Haha!”
Now I was just confused. Even if I’d been able to follow what she was saying without feeling like my brain was going to atrophy, somehow I didn’t think she was nearly as upset as she sounded. Her tirade still didn’t sound like one you’d go off on for a ‘buddy’, but I didn’t want to read any extra meaning into her words that maybe wasn’t there. I decided to regretfully steer the topic back towards my impending re-submersion. “Um, so anyway, you want me to dive underwater and find fossils for you? Or something? How am I going to do that exactly?”
“Right. Um, actually it should be pretty easy. It’s not like I’ve got a whole twatload of inventory space anyway, you know? So, anyway, you know how stuff in bogs gets preserved underwater? Some-shit about acids being released or something? So it’s not really a fossil you’re looking for, or it is, but whatever.” She stopped to take a breath.
“It’s just a pocket of preserved ‘Amber Vitae Epicantunia’.” For this she held her hands up to do little air quotes. “It’s like a magical flower that died like a million years ago, or whatever, but it should just look like a pocket of hard off-yellow goop in the mud at the bottom. Probably about half the size of your fist. I’ll put my best Water Affinity Enchant that I fuckin’ do have on you, so you should be able to see just fine underwater and have no trouble finding it. Apparently they’re all over.”
I nodded in resignation. It wasn’t really that much she was asking me to do, and she was right that I couldn’t get much muckier than I already was. Plus I couldn’t even imagine what having this slimy stuff on my wings would feel like, and it would probably be tough even just diving down for someone her size. This was why Faeries were so rare, after all.
“Alright. I'll do it. I guess I shouldn’t waste too much time though, or my Stamina will hit Exhausted before I even start.”
The Faerie grinned. “Awesome! Ok, but wait, just hang on a sec, you’re gunna love this.”
She puckered her lips to to the side and held her hand under her chin for a second, then snapped her fingers to release another hilariously disproportionate spell matrix. It bloomed from her fingertips like a cloud of ink being poured into water before coalescing into a gorgeous swirl of pale teal and deep ultramarine. She'd clearly practiced this spell, because it only took her a few seconds to snap the formless Mana into a mind bending four-dimensional blossom-like-shape almost like she was folding origami.
When the spell hit, it hit me like a punch to my stomach and it felt like all the air in my body was being forcibly ejected. At the same time, the feeling on my legs shifted, and what had felt like uncomfortable clinging a moment ago suddenly became a blissful silky sensation. Somehow I didn’t feel short of breath, but the air that had been foul and stale before now painfully seared at my nose as if we were in a arid desert.
[Metatransference: Minor Affinity for Air to Water]
Grade 2 Enchantment. Converts up to 4 degrees of your Affinity for Air into Water. Caster unknown. Estimated duration remaining: 24 minutes.
That made sense. I could now understand why the feeling of the air had changed so much, and it seemed she had been seriously underselling how powerful her spell was, but… “Um, wow, but… there’s something I don’t understand. Why did you make me lose my Air Affinity?”
She beamed. “Pretty brilliant right? That spell is like a double whammy, it’s perfect. Not only do you get higher Water Affinity, but you also get lower Air Affinity. Which of course means you don’t have to breath as much so you can stay down longer, and on top of that you can even dive down more easily because you’ll have less air inside you pulling you back up.”
I blinked at her. “Wow, that, actually…. makes a lot of sense. Alright, I…” Suddenly I noticed something else and my heart sank. “Oh no, your newest Enchant just overwrote the last one!”
“Crap!” She slapped her forehead with her palm. “Of course it did! I’m an idiot! Wow, sorry man. Huh. I guess… Well it should be fine right? I’ll be hanging around up here anyway so if anything attacks we’ll just deal with it together, right? I’ll just have to recast the Const one when you get back up.”
I nodded. “Alright then, here goes nothing.”
I’d been sitting on the bank with my feet off to the side, but now I scrambled a little to slide them back into the water before the rest of me followed. I wasn’t surprised when I glided down as if I was wearing a perfectly functional swimsuit instead of a heavy full length dress, and the water actually felt really good. I might not be able to stand up straight or see anything clearly without it spinning and making my stomach feel queasy, but with my now-supercharged Water Affinity I felt like swimming would be as easy as breathing. Maybe easier. I gritted my teeth to take a deep breath of the parching air before kicking myself into a dive.
I was no stranger to swimming. In fact, at school I was even top of my class, as long as you discounted all my classmates who were at all physically active. I was at the top of the bottom twenty five percent anyway, maybe. Anyway, I knew I could swim. I didn’t know I could swim like this, but it was all good. In game I was an athletic martial artist enchanted with supernaturally high Water Affinity, so it made sense I could pull off moves that would put a professional to shame. That didn’t mean I could just open my eyes, though. I mean, I was underwater! Plus it was horrible mucky water, that nevertheless felt like the cleanest pool I’d ever swam in, which I was sure would definitely give my virtual avatar some deadly incurable disease.
Still. I wasn’t going to find a random pebble of amber-coloured whatever unless I could actually see what I was doing. Mistborn have good eyesight in poor visibility. It took me four tries, but I finally managed to get one of my eyes open a crack, only to feel a deep sense of shame. The Faerie lady/woman/person, whose name I still didn’t know I realised, had told me I’d be able to see just fine, I just hadn’t believed her. Not only did I have no trouble seeing, but the water on my eyes actually felt good. In fact, my vision down here was only a little murkier than it had been up on the surface after I’d taken that poison, and I even felt slightly less nauseous with the water supporting me. The purple clouds were still there down here, though, so I knew the poison was still in full effect. So were the pulsating fungi.
Yup, that’s right. Of course it is. There were vibrantly pulsating purple mushrooms growing underwater. A lot of them, in fact. The glowing hallucinations highlighted them through the darkness like ethereal little lighthouses. I could also make out several flower-shaped chunks of amber scattered about, lodged in the mud at the bottom just waiting to be picked up and delivered to a wacky little Faerie.
Why were the Faerie’s flowers preserved, but the evil mushrooms weren’t? Or were they… wait… a thought suddenly occurred to me. There was something else that had been bothering me this whole time, and I was only now able to put it into words. The Keeper had said we were going to use ‘Flame-Seared Ink’, but the quest had said ‘Ancient Flame-Seared Ink’. This actually was a test in the end - of intention.
The Faerie up above momentarily forgotten, I surged towards the nearest of these new, different mushrooms. As I got closer, I could see that they weren’t just preserved, but changed. They were smaller, more compact, but somehow thicker as well, and the sliminess that had been so vile on the surface was now a beautiful lustrous glow. Where the logs up above had been rigid, these were dense and seemed to somehow radiate a sense of timeless invincibility.
The jar of collected resin was in my hand almost before I realised it, and I only needed to scrape it for a moment before the contents vanished into the water. The whole point of being here, of gathering this resin, was so that respect would be paid to the Creator Flame. I wasn’t quite sure what exactly that meant, but I did know one thing: that it was important that its symbol be made properly. This was my story, I thought, my choice, and if I was going to choose it, I was going to choose to do it right. Good enough wasn’t going to cut it for my Rune, if there was better resin to be found, I wasn’t going to let anything less stain my work. If respect was what was wanted, then I was going to make absolutely sure that respect was properly given.
I got to work.
~ ~ 26/1/1/13:53 ~ ~
Status: [River]
Class: [Novice Mistborn Magical Martial Artist]
Location: [Lower Spelltouched Wilds - Evelyn’s Bog (Underwater)]
Health 38/38 ~ Mana 23/40 ~ Stamina 20/41
[Poisoned: Yvinauch’s Kiss (14 min)], [Exhausted (2.4%)], [Inspired], [Enchanted: Minor Constitution (2 min)], [Metatransference: Minor Affinity for Air to Water (24 min)] Equipped Skills (5/8):
[Force Infused Palm]
[Myriad Fists]
[Imbued Defence]
[Unarmed Discipline (Passive)]
[Body Conditioning (Passive)] Statistics:
Defence +8
Resistance +4
Constitution +4 (+9)
Willpower +4 (-6)
Endurance +4
Spirit (+1)
Strength (-2.5%)
Intensity (-2.5%)
Affinity: Air (-4)
Affinity: Water (+4) Equipped Items (2/8):
[New Arrival’s Simple Dress]
[New Arrival’s Simple Shoes]
Other Skills:
[Inscribe: Rune of the Creator Flame (0/1)] Other Items:
[Special Edition Founder’s Token]
[Novice Healing Potion]
[Novice Mana Potion]
[Small Glass Jar]
[Small Pouch]
[Vial of Silver Gemdust (10)]
[Small Iron Key]
[Sugary Biscuit]x2 Active Quests:
[Acquire Ancient Flame-Seared Ink]
[The Ancient Keeper of Runic Magic (Part 2)]
[Acquire and Deliver Preserved Amber Vitae Epicantunia]