Over the next several hours in the dungeon, Kylie discovered several interesting things with her magic. With a subtle manipulation of her healing spell, she could increase the amount that it healed. She could decrease the amount that it healed. Occasionally, she could make it heal over time – which seemed to be a good counter to the poison. Seran would lose health to the poison, only to have it go back up as the healing spell slowly triggered and released some of its energy, restoring a small portion of his health.
Her most interesting discovery with her magic came in the middle of a fight with several of the spike-haired rats. Seran had been bit a few times – nothing drastic with is higher level of health – and Kylie had taken a back seat to fighting to simply practice variations on her healing magic. One moment Seran was happily bashing away, yelling, and stomping at the rats in front of him; the next he looked like one of them!
With a twist of the magic, Kylie altered the spell which normally regrows flesh and blood, and instead made it grow hair! Black hair grew from every follicle on Seran – from top of bottom – and covered him in nearly two feet of thick, course black hair. One moment he was a man, the next moment he looked like a Wookie on Rogaine!
Fighting was all but impossible for Seran at that point, as he kept tripping on his own hair, yanking his hair, and basically just cussing his hair. For someone like Sera, who had never even worried about managing her hair in the ‘dream world’, it was an instant hell. The only good point of the whole occurrence was the fact that the rats were actually having just as much trouble trying to chew past the fur to get to the warm flesh inside.
Heather ended up laughing so hard from the situation that she blasted the walls and ceiling as much as she blasted the rats, and it ended up with Kylie being the one to have to finish off the rats. Once all was finished and the rats were cleared once again, several methods were attempted at removing the hair. First was cutting it with a sharp claw; but that was determined to take too long. Second was a simple attempt at death, which ended up restoring Seran at the entrance – long hair and all. Heather finally ended up scorching and setting it one fire and burning the air off, one extremity at a time, while Kylie used magic to keep Seran’s health up.
All in all, it was a time consuming, but memorable experience. When they all logged for lunch, Sera couldn’t stop laughing about how oddly it felt, and how frustrating it was to have so much hair to deal with. To her way of thinking, it was a ‘secret move’ which Kylie should work on perfecting as much as possible – just not on her!
“Just think,” Sera laughed while sitting and nibbling on her salad in the kitchen, “what would happen to some enemy wizard if we ever have to fight PvP with someone else and you blast them with a hair-bomb like that. Or even a knight in all his armor! He’d suffocate before he could even get his helmet off!” The more she tried to imagine what could’ve happened if Seran had been wearing heavy clothing or armor, the more she laughed and giggled over it.
“Fireball? Who’s scared of a little fireball? Everybody builds up a tolerance and a resistance to fire magic,” Sera laughed. “But who the heck builds up a tolerance to healing magic? Or hair magic? Nobody! It’s a perfect sneak attack. And the person you beat with it will probably be too embarrassed to ever admit to anyone what happened.”
“Hi, I’m Warrior Badass. I lost my last duel due to hair problems!” Sera laughed and thumped the table so hard, she knocked her plate in the floor scattering salad everywhere. “I’d never admit to such a thing, and I can’t imagine any real warrior ever would either.”
“Well, to be honest,” Kyle admitted, half smirking himself, “I wouldn’t admit to it as a healer either. Death by ‘excessive hair growth’ just doesn’t seem like something you admit to. Especially since it carries over after you die!”
“Well, you have to admit, it does make an odd sort of sense. After all, if you spend time letting your character’s hair grow out, you’d be disappointed to have it just disappear when you died,” Sera reasoned.
“Maybe,” Kyle argued, “but it still seems like one of those convenient double-standards in a game. Let something melt your face off with acid, and you can back with hair. You don’t restart bald, you know.”
“All games do that, to one degree or another. It has a lot more to do with pleasing the customers and giving them what they want, than it does with trying to maintain logical rules for every little thing.” Sera offered. “The game probably has some rules to help it sort out what to do and not do in cases like that. Being struck with a flaming sword or whip would leave a brand, and no one would want that. Can you imagine how you’d look after a few thousand fights or deaths? And yet, how’s that so different from getting a tattoo in game?”
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“It might be a really simple game logic, and we’re overthinking things,” Kyle mused. “You were in my party, it was a healing spell, so the game may have viewed that as a ‘willing alteration’ to how you appeared. On the other hand, an attack from a monster, trap, or something else might be a ‘temporary unwilling effect’. “
“You know, you should write that up and send it in as a report for your grandfather’s company,” Sera suggested. “The makers of the game aren’t actually confirming any of the game mechanics, allowing players to learn and discover the rules of the world on their own. I imagine it’d be something a lot of people would be interested in reading and learning about, and might help you stay hired on longer, or even get a permanent position.”
“I’ll do that!” Kyle declared enthusiastically. “But, not until after the weekend is over. I’m enjoying the added experience rate and drop bonus too much for now to take time out to write up a report.”
“By the time Monday rolls around, you’re going to have an almost unmanageable pile of items for crafting. We’re stocking up on them a whole heck of a lot faster than you’re using them right now. It might get to the point where Heather and me will have to start using some things. I wonder if any of those items have an expiration date, before they spoil or rot or anything?” Sera mused.
“Nothing that I’ve identified yet,” Kyle answered, “but the two of you taking up some craft skills might be useful in the long run also. Heather really needs to meditate and work on her mana recovery as much as possible, so it might be better not to ask her to worry over crafting anything yet, but Seran could take up cooking for us.”
“Cooking doesn’t seem like a very manly skill,” Sera complained, wrinkling her nose slightly.
“Your dad’s a cook!” Kyle reminded her.
“See! That proves my point!” Sera giggled and then slowly shrugged. “Fine. I’ll see if I can cook some of the stuff we’ve had drop. Rat meat is probably cookable. Is there any specific reason why we need food though?” Sera asked, curiously.
“So you don’t get hungry for starters!” Kyle exclaimed, half laughing. “Do you mean to tell me you’ve never gotten hungry in game?”
“Nope.” Sera shrugged slightly. “I guess I’ve just died too often to get hungry. I just thought food was there simply to add to the immersion of the game. You know; a nice feature like the smell of a rose, that really didn’t do anything.”
“It does stuff,” Kyle informed her. “Good food, like the elven trail bread which I started with, gives a bonus to your health and recovery rates. I imagine going hungry would lower those rates, and might even eventually lead to you dying or not being able to use magic.”
“Then the next time we’re in game and Heather needs to try and meditate, I’ll see about trying to cook something while you do the armor and jewelry making for us,” Sera offered. “And once Heather improves her meditate skill, we’ll find something she can work on crafting for us. We’ll split the work, share the burden, and pool our work to improve ourselves together.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Kyle agreed, “when we can log back in. What say you clean that mess of your up out of the floor, and then we go for a jog or something.”
“Are you saying you think I’m getting fat?” Sera asked, tapping her fork on the table warningly.
“Not at all!” Kyle laughed, holding up his hands defensively. “I’d talked to mother earlier and she’d warned me about how gamers got sick and all from simply sitting around and being too inactive. If I’m going to try and work as a professional gamer, I’ve got to boost my activity levels while I’m out of game like this, to make up for the time my body just lies there while my brain is lost in the virtual world.
“It’s not you at all, it’s me!” Kyle clarified. “I just want to make the most of the two hours we have before we can log back in again. I don’t want to spend that time surfing the web, watching TV, or killing myself being a couch potato, like some of those other gamers end up doing.”
“Sounds good!” Sera said, hopping up from her chair and moving around the table. “Just one change in that plan – you clean up the dishes and the mess in the floor, while I go upstairs and change into something else. I can’t go out jogging like this!” Without bothering to even wait for his response, Sera was out the kitchen and heading up the steps.
“Figures,” Kyle griped. “Just like usual, I get stuck with all the work.”