Taking just a few minutes to calm down, Kyle yanked off his V-RIG helm and went downstairs and fixed himself a quick sandwich of cold bologna and wolfed it down. Snatching up a can of soda, he popped the top and guzzled it as he went back upstairs and then tossed the empty can in his trashcan. Finally, after taking a deep breath to calm himself down, he wiggled the V-RIG helm slowly over his ears and then logged back into Winter’s Tale.
Kylie’s first reaction was to cross her arms and protect her chest, even as she glanced around furiously and saw Heather had moved off a ways and was having fun chain blasting Tangleroot Creepers and harvesting leaves. Still not certain what to say to her, or how to deal with the bombshell she’d dropped about her past, Kylie simply sat up and dangled her feet over the bank of the creek and into the cool water slowly trickling by below.
While watching blast one vine to oblivion, Kylie waited for her to finish before she offered, “Party Invite, Heather.” She wasn’t certain if Heather would accept it since she was obviously soloing at the moment, but she did.
“You back, my lovely Lady?” Heather teased through the party chat. Like most private chat channels, distance didn’t have any effect on being able to communicate with each other; that was generally a limitation only set to public chat and sometimes special places.
“I’m back,” Kylie carefully responded. “I just needed to log to grab a quick bite to eat, and to use the bathroom.”
“And to get away before I could ravish you!” Heather teased. “Honestly, what true-blooded guy logs off and runs away when a lovely naked elf maiden tries to have her way with him?”
“Almost all of them that aren’t perverts!” Kylie exclaimed in her own defense. “And besides, I’m not a guy in game right now!”
“I know!” Heather laughed merrily through the chat. “And that’s what makes you safe. No dangly parts for me to have to worry over!” For several moments Heather was silent, as if she was lost in thought, and Kylie didn’t say anything either.
Finally, Heather slowly turned and gracefully walked over towards the creek where Kylie was sitting. “I gathered the leaves from where you’d killed them all willy-nilly earlier. There’s also few extra that I had drop while you were gone, in there too.” Leaning over Kylie from behind, Heather’s breasts gently rested on Kylie’s head as she dropped a whole pile of green and red leaves in front of her.
“We’re getting quite a collection of those,” Heather observed while Kylie tried not to think about the soft, springy weight resting on her. “Maybe you should simply focus on crafting those all into something useful for us, while I kill these vines and earn us some experience.”
“I can’t do that!” Kylie exclaimed, as she leaned forward to gather all the leaves into a bundle, and to steathfully move away from Heather’s chest a bit. “Let me disband first, so I don’t leech any experience from you. You’d be killing things all on your own; you shouldn’t have to share your experience with me.”
“Not a chance.” Heather immediately vetoed the idea. “It’s only the two of us out here and if I out level you too much, we’ll end up having problems grouping together. We’ve got to work together, if we’re ever going to get stronger and quest together. You’re going to share whatever you craft with me, after you make it. Right?”
“Well yeah, I was planning on letting you have whatever I made first.” Kylie admitted.
“Then see, you ARE doing something for me. You’re going to help me grow and become stronger by making me some sort of gear. Why’s it so odd that I help you grow and get some experience by using my skills in return?”
“Well,” Kylie hesitated and then shrugged her shoulders in defeat. “When you put it like that, I don’t guess there is a lot I can say about it.” Laughing slightly, she slowly sat back up and started working on stitching two leaves together again. “Go out there and kill some stuff for us, and I might have something for you a little later this evening.
“Well,” Kylie warned cautiously, “I might! Maybe! I can’t promise anything. IT all depends on if I succeed on the final combines or not.”
“If not this time, then next time. You’re getting the skill up, you’ll make us some armor before long,” Heather said encouragingly, as she slowly turned and walked off to start blasting things again.
Sighing to herself in frustration, Kylie couldn’t help but think that Heather had the easier task. Killing wasn’t hard in game; all it took was to hit something repeatedly until it died. Crafting though was a slow and tedious chore, which ended up destroying all the materials that you tried to use in the task.
Try to drill a hole in a leaf and fail, and that leaf was used up and gone forever. Try and stick a string through the hole, fail, and both the string and leaf were gone forever. Try to patch the tenth leaf onto a string with nine other leaves, fail, and all ten were destroyed in the process. The bigger and more complex an item was that a person was trying to make, the more chances for failure there were.
Kylie shook her head back and forth in disgust. It was almost as if the makers of the game wanted to emphasize destruction of things, over creation of things. To break someone’s gear was as simple as targeting it with several well aimed blows, but to craft that gear back took repeated successful steps in the crafting process – and the skill went up annoyingly slow!
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If it wasn’t for the fact that they were in a situation where there weren’t any other choices available to them, Kylie wouldn’t bother to try it either; but, when there’s no stores to buy from or sell from, one has to try and make due on their own. It didn’t help any either that leaf armor was considered to be an advanced crafting item either; though Kylie and Heather had no way of knowing that.
And so, Kylie spent that evening simply sitting and trying to stitch together the leaves into something – anything – that might be somewhat useful. She had improved her talent to the point where she could reliably stitch one onto a small string which she made out of strands of her own hair braided together, and even stitching two leaves together was now something that she succeeded at more than she failed at, but once it got to the point of trying to stitch three or more together, her success rate dropped significantly and everything was lost.
Heather was a godsend for Kylie though. Without her killing and collecting more leaves to replace the ones Kylie lost in practice, Kylie would’ve had to take time to try and hunt between attempts at crafting. As it was, Heather could almost replenish the stock of leaves as quickly as Kylie was destroying them, so the overall store was depleting very slowly.
And, slowly, bit by bit, Kylie’s skill increased. Also, thanks to Heather, Kylie slowly earned experience while working her crafting skill up. After a few hours of simply sitting there and stringing things together, Kylie managed to leech herself a level off Heather’s effort in killing everything in sight. The moment she dinged, Kylie sighed deeply and spent all her accumulated character points in the Tailoring skill.
With her hard work, and the few points she’d managed to raise it naturally, she finally had a skill of eleven in it – and it was still too low to reliably try and create anything with the green leaves. Looking down at the ever slowly dwindling pile of green leaves, Kylie finally shook her head and made a decision. “Heather!” Standing up and waving, she patiently waited for Heather to finish blasting the vine to oblivion she was currently fighting.
“Whatcha need, sweetie?” Heather teased as she slowly sashayed her way across the clearing, back towards the creek where Kylie was.
“This isn’t working,” Kylie reluctantly admitted. “Anytime I try and stitch enough of these together to start making them into something useful, I fail. My skill keeps ever so slowly increasing, but I’m afraid we’re going to be stuck out here until Christmas before I make anything useful. Since you’re with me now, I know of something else we should be able to kill. There’s some squirrel-like critters not too far from here, that we can hunt. I couldn’t kill them as they’re opponents that toss nuts at you from a range, and then run away if you try and get close. For you though, with your magic to blast them back from a distance, they shouldn’t be any problem.
“They’ll probably be a little worse for you than the vines are, as they’ll be attacking back and not just rooted there were they can’t reach you,” Kylie warned.
“That’s OK,” Heather said smiling, as she slowly flicked her hair out of her face. “It might be a good thing; I could probably use the practice trying to improve my ability to dodge. You know, The Tangler might not have been half as difficult of an opponent, if we’d been fighting and dodging those nuts for the last several days. After getting roasted by it once, I’ll be able for the chance to practice somewhere with easier opponents so I can get my skill up higher.
“When you’re dressed like we are; dodge is your friend!” Heather exclaimed with a laugh. “Besides,” she leaned forward slowly, as if to whisper a secret, “I’ll have you there to heal me when I need it. Right?” As Heather fluttered her long elvish eyelashes seductively at her, Kylie reflexively slid backwards away from her. “Kerplash!” Water splashed everywhere as she tumbled off the bank and fell backwards into the creek.
“And that’s a good idea too!” Heather slowly purred as she slowly eased over and down into the stream as well. “A nice bath together for the two of us, before we go traipsing off elsewhere and away from the creek sounds lovely! I don’t mind if I do.”
“Umm.. Errr. Ahh.. You do remember that I’m actually a guy, right?” Kylie asked in a state of half panic as Heather slowly stalked closer.
“Not here you aren’t, my dear.” Heather was grinning like a cat ready to pounce on an unsuspecting mouse. “Here you’re just about the prettiest little woman that I’ve ever seen. Don’t be shy now; we’ve enjoyed a few nice baths before together. Right?”
“But.. Errm… Well..” Kylie couldn’t think of any excuse that would work in a case like this, and simply logging out and running away wasn’t something she wanted to get in the habit of doing. Finally closing her eyes, she turned her back and took a deep breath. “Just my back then. I can do the rest.”
“Well, you could,” Heather agreed as she leaned in close and softly purred into her ear, “but you’re not. You’ve been working so hard trying to make something useful for us, while all I’ve been doing is playing around and burning some vines in the forest. I think you deserve a little reward, don’t you?”
Knowing there wasn’t anything she could say, Kylie took a deep sigh and prepared for the worst. Reward, or punishment, it was plain that there was no getting out of it…