Arc Four: New Beginnings

Lilith waited anxiously in the room as the occupants started to stir. Kali had taken the opportunity to reconnect Lilith and Carmen, as the latter would have fallen unconscious during the process anyway, so she felt it was best to get it out of the way when during a time she was already asleep.

Everyone woke up at close to the same time, and she clapped her hands in relief. “Good, everyone’s awake.” She took the opportunity to look over everyone, checking their statuses to make sure they weren’t damaged.

That didn’t seem to be the case, but Lilith decided to ask them anyway, only for Carmen to near instantly flip it on her. She was genuinely surprised to hear that Carmen had remembered – Kali had assured her that no one was the wiser multiple times. She’d have to have a talk with Kali about that later.

Carmen made a valid point in her argument, though. The differences between her now and the her of a month ago were noticeable if you knew what you were looking for. Still, back and forth argument wasn’t going to get them anywhere. They were going to have to share memories at some point, so Lilith figured it was best to just do it now. Thanks to Hivemind even a whole month’s worth of memories wouldn’t be enough to knock one of them out, but it would make them freeze up for a while.

While Carmen processed that, Lilith continued catching up with everyone else. She made sure that they were all fine with staying with her, and it seemed like they were all content with that for the time being. Thiala definitely wanted to go home to her parents, but without setting them up somewhere else completely there wasn't much Lilith could do in that regard. Well, not without letting Thiala get captured by Elenoa, and neither of them wanted that.

She’d have to keep a careful eye on Elenoa in the future. Once she let the Sin and Virtue series of Skills go out to the public in another month or two, Elenoa was the biggest candidate for Pride, so she’d have to see how she reacts once she gets it. Well, provided she does get it, but it was almost a guarantee at this point.

Right, getting distracted. She was finally able to undo the contract Carmen had forced Alex into, and scrub any lingering effects of it from her. She was surprised at how readily Alex chose to stay as she was, though. And…what was she going to say? Ah well, Alex would probably tell her when she was ready.

Raphael was the other sticking point in this situation. The girl could be every bit as stubborn as her grandmother if she wanted to be, and she seemed really set on the whole “bonding through shared experience” thing. Lilith would have to sit down and have a serious talk with her about that, make sure she knew that that concept was just something Carmen thought up to manipulate her.

“Are you kidding me?!” Carmen exclaimed, interrupting Lilith’s train of thought.

Lilith defended her decision with Raphael, but apparently that wasn’t what Carmen was talking about. No, Carmen wanted to talk about getting into a relationship with Kali. Lilith knew that something like this was probably going to be coming – Carmen was always…opinionated when it came to Lilith dragging her feet about…anything, really.

And now she was wanting Lilith to introduce Mae. Yes, that was important, but Lilith figured she’d check up on everyone first. Once that was out of the way, Lilith left Carmen to show everyone around, and went to go find Kali. On her back to her Core room, her way into Kali’s…house? She wasn’t quite sure what to call it, as the layout wasn’t stable enough for her to really stick it in a single classification of dwelling. It seemed like there was always another room that wasn’t there a day ago, or one of the old rooms had vanished once it stopped being used.

Anyway, on her way back to the Core room, she stopped by the room where Siph was currently training and let her know that everyone had woken up. Her mother had chosen to use the time she was waiting to level up, as opposed to just sitting around and doing nothing. Lilith didn’t actually have to go down in person, due to her mental link, but she just preferred talking in-person. It was like calling the phone of someone who was in the same house as you – it just felt better to go find them.

Siph happily left to reunite with her spouses, and Lilith was soon back inside her Core room. She knocked on the door to Kali’s residence, and it opened almost immediately.

“Sheesh, I told you to stop knocking!” Kali said, grabbing Lilith and pulling her inside. “Just come in! I told you the Core room is supposed to be your own set of house keys, and that means you can come in whenever you want, OK? Anyway, did you finish showing everyone around already?

She had Lilith sit down on the bed with her and paused the TV.

“I thought you were busy making sure there weren’t any problems?” Lilith asked.

“Yes, but that’s basically just sitting there staring into space. I might as well have some background noise.”

“Why a nature documentary, though? I don’t think there’s much they could teach you.”

Kali held up a finger. “A cryptozoology documentary, thank you very much. I think it’s entertaining to watch them freak out over “evidence” that half the time isn’t even real.”

“So, the other half is?”

“Oh yeah. The Protectorate just couldn't scrub all evidence of cryptids, so they left some of the least convincing stuff behind. The problem was getting worse and worse as Earth’s population grew, too. Man, I wish you could have been at some of those meetings. Elenoa and Baern were freaking out, and it was hilarious.”

“Right. So, uh, we need to talk.”

Kali grew serious. “Alright, what about? “

Lilith blushed. “Us. Um, I think…that it’d be alright if we, uh, officially start going out, you know?”

Kali froze briefly and then squealed in excitement, throwing her arms around Lilith. “Yes! Yes yes yes!”

She quickly released the hug, grasping Lilith’s hands and placing them between the two of them. “Alright, let’s decide on some boundaries, so I know what not to do. I’m fine with just about anything, so don’t worry about me. We’ll take it as slow as you need, alright?”

I’m ready for whatever mistress is ready for. Don’t worry about me. Mae said.

“Uh, right.” Lilith said, face growing even more red. “Um, you’ll have to check with Carmen for what she’s ready for, and I’m not prepared to…go all the way, but I think other than that I’m ready for most things. Like holding hands or…” She trailed off, working up her courage. “Kissing.”

Kali grinned impishly. “Like this?” She said, darting in and giving Lilith a quick peck on the lips before withdrawing. “Sorry, I couldn’t resist. You’re just so adorable when you’re like this.”

Lilith, who was at this point blushing about as hard as she could, nodded. “Y-yeah, like that. That…was my first, you know?”

“But I kissed Carmen before, surely you remember that.” Kali argued.

“Well, yeah, but…that wasn’t exactly me, you know? Anyway, that’s…all I really needed to talk about. I should get back –”

“No, you don’t!” Kali said, cutting her off and pulling her closer. “I’m sure Carmen’s got it covered. You can’t just enter into a relationship like that and waltz off, you’re going to spend a little quality time with your girlfriend, alright?”

After Lilith left, Carmen walked over to Lilith’s old seat and sat in it, allowing her to see everyone. “Before I show you everything, what questions do you have?”

“Where’s Siph?” Mike asked anxiously.

“She’s on her way.” Carmen replied. “She’s been with Lilith for moral support and training this past month, and she was leveling up while waiting for us. Lilith’s going to let her know everyone’s awake while she’s on her way to see Kali.”

“Speaking of,” Jessica said, “did you just say that Lilith’s going to go try and get into a relationship? Am I hearing this right?”

“Not going to try, she will. All she has to do is ask and it’s official. Believe me, mom, it’s a sure thing.”

The door opened and Siph walked in. “Did you just say that Lilith is finally going to go talk to Kali about dating?” She asked.

“Yeah, that’s right.” Carmen said, smirking. “I wasn’t about to let something that frustrating continue.”

“Thank goodness. I’ve been telling her she should just go for it, but she would never listen.” Siph said, walking over to her spouses and gave each a hug and a kiss. “I’ve missed you two.” She purred. “I’ve been thinking up some ideas this whole time and I can’t wait to put them into action.”

“Later, mom.” Carmen said sharply. As fun as it was to tease Lilith with this sort of stuff, she was busy at the moment and Carmen didn’t really want to see that either. “Any other questions that aren’t about my relationship status?”

“Are you sure she’s fine?” Vithi asked. “I think that’s pretty important.”

Carmen nodded. “Yeah, she’s perfectly OK. No mind alterations have been made to her, well, save for the one needed to make Mae, but other than that it’s all basically been etiquette lessons.”

“I was there the whole time.” Siph soothed. “We just had to teach her to be more assertive so she wouldn’t get taken advantage of.”

“And it worked? In just a month?” Vithi replied dubiously.

Carmen shrugged. “For strangers, yes. If any of you want something, she’ll probably still bend over backwards to get it, and then make it look like that was just a side goal of something else she was doing. She’s not very good at it, though.”

Siph shook her head. “Good grief, you wouldn’t believe some of the excuses she’s given me. I mentioned being chilly once and she kitted out the entire dungeon with an advanced temperature manipulation system under the guise of “training for extreme environments.” I don’t think she’s used it for that purpose once.” A small smile crept onto her face as she recounted the incident. “I’ll have to show you all how to use it. It’s pretty nice.”

Carmen nodded. “Anything else before we go?”

Thiala raised her hand but didn’t wait to for Carmen to call on her. “When’s Lilith coming back? I want to catch up with her!”

Carmen, not having yet been modified by Mae to be capable of constant sense sharing, relayed the question to Lilith.

Uh, not until you finish your tour, at the least. Lilith replied, sounding quite flustered. Kali’s keeping me here on the pretense of “spending quality time with my girlfriend”, says you should be more than enough to handle showing everyone around.

Roger that. Have fun for me, will ya? Carmen said, cutting the telepathy.

“She’s not going to be back for a while.” She told everyone, grinning. “Kali’s making her stay with her and hang out as a way to celebrate officially becoming a couple. I’m sure you’ll have plenty of time to talk later, and if you have any questions, I can answer them. I got the whole set of memories for the time she was gone, so I should be able to tell you anything she could.”

She hopped off of her chair, stretching. “Alright, what do you want to see first? The training stuff or the living quarters?”

“I say we see the training stuff first.” Alex said, standing up as well. “That way we can take some time to get settled in the living quarters without having to walk back.”

Carmen nodded. “Fair enough. While you all get up, this is the medical bay. It’s got an effect that enhances the regeneration of your HP, Mana, and Stamina while inside, as well as the ability to put the occupants into a deep sleep in case unpleasant operations need to be done on someone before we can apply healing magic.”

“And be careful with healing magic, too. It’s always best to get things treated properly before applying it, as otherwise it could lead to incorrect healing. The only real exception to that is if the magic is super high level stuff, like what Lilith and I can toss out. We’ve got literally the best healing ability out there, so we don’t have to worry about any of that.” She winked, walking over to the door and waiting for everyone. Once everyone was ready, she opened the door and ushered everyone into a large circular room, bare save for the doors lining the outer edge of the room.

“This is our hub of sorts. Aside from the door to the medical bay and the door to the teleporter to the living quarters, each door leads to a hallway with further rooms for training based on your needs. For the time being, I’ll show you one of our low-level halls, most of the others will look fairly similar, so there’s really no need to look through them all.”

Hey, mom. She said to Siph. Will you go kill something for me? I’ve sent you a party invite, I just want to have my stats as high as possible for a demonstration and I’ll need some levels for that.

Of course, sweetie! Siph replied. I’ll only be a moment! She hurriedly made her way down one of the medium level halls, into the room she was training in before.

“She’s just helping me get ready for some stuff.” Carmen said before anyone could ask. “She’s already pretty familiar with this place anyway, so she’s not missing anything.” She paused to open the door to the hall she had been leading the group towards. After everyone was inside, she continued her speech. “There are two rooms here for every major type of element, status, or other kind of attack, one for monsters that are weak to that, and one for those that are resistant. In addition, we have a few rooms filled with traps designed to help train your reflexes, and a few that are under construction. We’re hoping to make them a place where you can make a customizable fight, but we don’t quite have the resources to do that yet.”

Each room had a large window next to the door, often showing a monster or set of monsters, standing completely immobile. Carmen stopped by one, nodding as she saw that Siph had already defeated a few enemies, raising her level. She’d made sure to set her Class to High Arbiter earlier, so as to get the most out of the levels she was going to get. Between the Skills in Arbiter’s Arsenal and her Racial Class levels more stats was probably overkill, but more could never hurt, and she’d have to gain those levels sometime soon anyway, so she decided to go for it.

She created a rock using the dungeon and tossed it to her dad. “Go ahead and squeeze that, if you would.” He nodded and squeezed the rock. Nothing happened. Carmen went over and took the rock, before moving back to her position at the front of the group. “Just a rock, right? Didn’t feel soft or anything?” She asked.

“Yeah.” Mike replied, “Why?”

She held up the rock in a single hand and squeezed, turning it to powder. She smirked, watching everyone’s stunned faces. “Believe it or not, Lilith’s almost twice as strong as I am right now. But, that’s not the point.” She turned to the window and threw a punch at it, causing a very loud thud as she hit. She turned back around. “The point is,” she motioned at the undamaged window, “That these windows and the walls are near indestructible, so you can feel free to go as wild as you want, it won’t affect anything not in the room. The monsters inside are going to stay completely still until you take hostile action towards them, and if it looks like you’re going to retreat, they’re set to disengage from combat. That doesn’t mean that they won’t try their best to kill you while fighting, though. If you do happen to die, you’ll just come back in the medical bay, so there’s absolutely no risk to any of this, aside from any pain you’ll feel while fighting.”

Alright mom, that’s good enough. Meet us back in the main room after you finish off whatever’s left in there, I want to talk about the party before we move on.

After receiving an acknowledgement from Siph, she showed everyone a few more of the rooms, and then led them all back to the hub room.

Once everyone was together again, she began to talk again. “Alright, so, does anyone here not know what a party is?”

Thiala raised her hand. “Um, I read the thing, but I’m still confused. What does it mean when it talks about sharing EXP and stuff? How is it split? Why would we want to do that?”

Carmen nodded patiently. “Valid questions. Unless someone has a Skill that changes things, EXP is split evenly between all party members who currently want to share EXP. You can choose to stop sharing EXP, but if you do that then you won’t get any of the EXP earned by people who are sharing EXP. You would choose to share EXP so that when your party fights a monster, all of the EXP is divided among everyone instead of all going to the person who killed it.”

“More importantly, some Skills only work on your party, and being in a party lets you view the Health, Mana, and Stamina of all the other party members, allowing you to work together better. Keeping this in mind, right now we’re going to put everyone into one big party and have you all share EXP. Another one of the Skills Lilith picked up lets us forfeit our experience earned to boost the amount of experience you all gain by 500%, meaning instead of the experience being split eight ways and everyone getting 11% EXP, it’s now split eight ways and you all get 66% EXP.”

She held up a hand to forestall the complaint she could already see Alex and her parents getting ready to make. “Lilith, Mae, and I will be fine. We can make up that much experience in a snap, and it’ll only be for a couple of days. Once we’re comfortable with where everyone is at, we’ll be splitting everyone into two parties of four, with Lilith, Mae, and myself switching between the two as we see fit.” She paused. “Oh, and if you were wondering, we all count as one person for the purpose of parties, so it’s all of us or nothing. Anyway, we’ll let you all decide who groups with who, but we might change things around if we feel a party doesn’t have enough strength. In case of disputes, Lilith has the final say,” she paused again, thinking, “well, theoretically Lilith always has the final say in everything now, but that’s semantics. Anyway, we’ll set that up later tonight when Lilith is back. For now, just follow me and I’ll show you the living quarters.”

As she had expected, everyone was pretty shocked with just how much stuff Lilith had put in their new home. Since much of it was either just making new rooms or replacing materials, there was little in the way of DP costs, provided she could get the materials from somewhere.

And, as it turns out, Kali has a pretty large pile of wealth that she was more than happy to spend for things like this. She practically forced it on Lilith, finally winning her over by pointing out just how much it would improve the quality of life of everyone, Kali included.

Most of what was purchased ended up being raw materials, as once her Dungeon had absorbed something, it was able to reconstruct it from its components. And, as it turned out, buying the raw material in bulk was cheaper. So, Kali had got in touch with some companies she knew, and suddenly Lilith had anything she could ever want to get her residence made.

And so, no expense ended up being spared. There was a pool, a shooting gallery (made to accommodate bows, guns, spells, and any other ranged weapon Lilith could think of), several rooms with movie-theater size screens, a gym, an indoor garden/greenhouse, a room filled with all sorts of instruments, a library, a recreational room with tables for games like pool, ping-pong, and cards…the list just went on and on. Beyond that, she made sure everyone had their own room and bathroom (save for her parents, who would share an extra large room), put in a couple of extra-large kitchens (kept stocked with food via the dungeon), and made a large living room where everyone could gather if it was necessary. It even had a few rooms designed with Siph’s dragon form in mind, for if she ever felt like she wanted to return to her base form for a while.

It was the most luxurious places most of them had ever seen, and Carmen could tell that everyone was feeling considerably better about being basically forced into staying there now that they had seen it. She had everyone pick a room, and let everyone begin to settle in.

Fighterman481

Disclaimer: I haven't actually read Twilight, the title's just there for the meme.

With that out of the way, the only thing I really have to say about the chapter that's not bookkeeping stuff is about the contents of the 'house' - my thought process was basically "hey wouldn't this be cool?" And I figured Lilith's thought processes would be similar, and she has one of the most powerful construction tools around available, so it was basically "why not?"

And...look, I know I said I was going to close Q&A stuff this Friday. I was wrong. I've decided there's going to be one more chapter in this little mini-arc, so I'm closing things a week from Friday instead, just to make sure any potential Q&A happens right before a new arc.

Oh, and last thing, I've put a poll below: should I add a Girls Love tag? I've already got the relevant subplot tags added, but I'm not sure whether or not to put up the "big" one. So, I'm going to leave it to you all - it's something that's mostly going to be in the background and not a focus, but I'm also not going to hide it, it's going to be relatively obvious, so it's something of a toss-up.

Anyway, as always, thanks for reading!