I left the shop deep in thought, trying to figure out how I was going to move and store that many bricks. I could always throw them out, but that seemed like a waste of resources that might come in handy in the future.
Maybe I just needed to bite the bullet and do a dungeon, get some gold, and then rent a dimensional warehouse. At least then the bricks would all be in my own storage and I could slowly move them somewhere when I needed them. I wonder if we could also upgrade our apartment with a storage room?
I’d have to go back and look at the ledger in the apartment building. It would probably be pretty expensive, though. Maybe it’d even cost real money, in which case I’d be boned.
A warehouse was probably the best bet, so it was time to go and find a dungeon to solo. There was no way I was going to queue for a group. Why weigh myself down with excess idiots when I could do the content fine on my own?
In Rellithesh, there were multiple types of dungeon. The one I’d gotten my sword in was a secret dungeon; not on any ingame guides, and without a town access portal. Heroic dungeons were the same, except you could find NPCs and lore to point you to them, and they were usually harder than the most common type. That type, of course, was a regular old dungeon, which usually had a portal into it from a town, alongside its normal entrance out in the world.
I was going to be doing the last one, and I had just the dungeon in mind. It was a goblin bandit lair built within the ruins of an ancient fort up in the highlands. From what I could tell, the ruins were from the same empire as the mushroom boss’s city.
The dungeon hub was on the other side of town, back through the market and up the hill a ways, so I had time to think about how I’d tackle the challenges of my intended target.
I was in the middle of walking, spaced out as I thought about that, when I heard a sniffle from the courtyard I was walking past. It was one of those little cul de sacs that were common in the city, where houses all branched off from a tiny little park. Curious, I slowed to a stop and peeked through the open archway.
A small fountain bubbled away in the center of the courtyard, surrounded by a broken circle of raised flowerbeds. Against the flowers were a series of benches for people to relax on, and sitting on one of them was a kid with their back to me.
I almost left, but something about them caused me to pass through the archway and approach. “Are you okay?”
The kid jumped in their seat and turned around, startled. “What? Yeah, I’m fine.”
As soon as he’d turned around, two thoughts cascaded through my brain. Number one, he wasn’t a child, he was a dude about my age, and second, he was an Ascendant Fairy, like me. His platinum blonde hair and tiny, androgenous figure had made me think he was a child from behind, but looking at him from the front it was clear he wasn’t. He was, however, very pretty. Like, just as pretty as me, but in a more masculine way than I was.
“O-oh,” I gasped, staring at his big lavender eyes, then his long and delicately pointed ears. “You’re like me!”
“No. You’re like me,” he shot back. His bottom lip quivered a moment later, and he slumped a little in his seat. “Okay, no, I’m not okay. Please don’t make it any worse.”
“Why would I make it worse?” I asked, walking around the planter to sit next to him. “I’m Keiko, by the way.”
“Because when I tell you I’m a tank, you’ll probably laugh at me,” he said, gesturing to his tiny frame.
I had to admit, the threadbare clothing wasn’t helping his case much, but the lance that sat next to him was nothing short of gorgeous. It was all silvered metal with black acid etchings that flared out at the wide end of the spike into a floral hand guard of blued metal. The hilt of the lance was black leather, intricately tooled and well fitted. It took me a hot second to realise that it was his version of my katana.
“Can you hold agro and take the resulting hits?” I asked, looking back up from his lance.
He shrugged. “Yeah? I just do it with magical barriers instead of my body, because I’m not an idiot.”
“A mage tank?” That was a seriously hard spec to play. You had to internalize and ingrain the spell activations as something that would protect you from harm, overriding your mind’s natural instinct to shield yourself with hands or weapons.
“I think?” he asked tentatively, playing with his earrings, which were these little pink ribbons attached by metal studs to the tip and base of the ears. They were super pretty. Distractingly so, actually. “I only played my first character for five days before the lance dropped for me. I’m still a total noob, but my class is called Fae Enclave Acolyte. It’s apparently some sort of protector class for the Ascendant Fae Male Enclave, but I don’t know what that is.”
“Neither do I, and I’ve been playing this game since launch,” I shrugged, wiggling my feet back and forth. The bench was just slightly too tall for my feet to touch the ground. “The fae are all super secretive and their lands are currently out of bounds.”
He grunted, although like me, his grunt was very small and very cute. “That’s lame, I kinda want to see how our race lives.”
“Same… which reminds me, what path did you take for your race? Did you go for the wings?” I asked, an idea forming.
“Hell yes I went for the wings!” he laughed, fluttering them into existence. He had four, just like me, and each was a translucent lavender. Unlike me, the two upper ones were much longer than mine and the lower ones were smaller. That wasn’t all, though. Out of his head sprouted two small horns made of a blue crystal that shimmered as he moved.
Flexing my shoulders slightly, my own wings popped into being too, and we sat there grinning at each other. “Have you learned to shrink yet? Also, you got horns too?”
By way of answer, he exploded into a tornado of lavender ribbons and just like that, he was one foot tall. I followed suit, and the world grew in all directions.
“The horns were sort of a compromise,” he explained, running a finger along one of them. “My wings aren’t as fast or as strong as a full winged fairy like you, but I just couldn’t not choose wings, you know? Male fae apparently have the option to add the magic horns to whatever path we choose, but it costs us some power in our wings or animal forms.”
“Damn, that’s cool,” I said, a little jealous. How cool would it have been to get my own spell casting horns, or maybe a set of fluffy animal ears for advanced hearing capabilities. “I wish I’d had that option.”
“It’s nice, but like… apparently you girls can hit supersonic speeds at max level with those things,” he said, pointing to my wings. “Imagine that with a lance like mine? You’d obliterate whatever you hit.”
“I’d obliterate myself too,” I giggled, imagining the scene. What kind of crazy person would even try hitting something that fast?
He laughed with me and shrugged. “What? It’d be so cool!”
“You’re so cool! I’m sending you a friend request,” I told him, my tone brooking no argument as I excitedly fumbled through my menus. I was acting very out of character for my time as Keiko, but this guy was just… something about him made me want to be his friend. Maybe it was the way Paisley and I were talking again, and now I felt a little more confident again in my ability to make friends. Whatever it was, I was going to help this guy gain confidence in his tanking, and maybe snag a friend in the process.
“I’m Keiko by the way,” I told him, opening my friends list, I went to send the request and saw that he’d beaten me to the punch.
“Not if I send you one first,” he winked, his excessively long eyelashes fluttering like our wings. “Oh man, thanks so much. You’ve cheered me up a ton. My name is Noah.”
“No problem.” Then, I gave him a sidelong look. “Want to prove to those fuckwits that you can tank?”
He stared at me with a healthy dose of suspicion for several long moments. “How so?”
“I was going to go and solo one of the mid tier dungeons, but I figure if you want to team up then we can do that too,” I explained. “I figure, with you keeping the attention on you, I can go wild with damage. It’ll be a piece of cake.”
“You were just going to… to solo a dungeon?” he blinked. “I’m not sure how it works in this game, but in the others I’ve played, that tends to be rather difficult.”
"It is." Truth be told, he might have a tough time of it, but his class seemed uniquely suited to functioning without a healer. It might actually work, especially if he could drop agro onto me when he needed a breather.
I became uncharacteristically shy as he stood there waiting for me to continue to speak. I swallowed the sudden lump in my throat and mumbled, “Plus, you seem nice and friends are really hard for me to make.”
“Okay, okay,” he said, patting me awkwardly on the shoulder. “It can’t go as badly as the last run I did, so why not?”
We were still both in tiny mode, standing on the bench with our wings floating gently behind us, so I fluttered up slightly into the air. “We should fly over there. Oh, and what level are you, by the way?”
He puffed out his little chest proudly. “I’m level twenty two.”
“And I’m level twenty one, so we should go for a level twenty dungeon, then,” I said, moving to leave with one last questioning look into his lavender smile. He might have been a boy, but damn was he pretty. Those little ribbons in his ears were adorable.
Nodding, he gestured to the door. “Lead the way.”
Tanking with shields instead of your face is generally the superior method.
Depends I see Paladin sword and board and raise you Raging Barbarian with Pain immunity/Pain mitigation take a hit to the face and just truck on through while laughing like a demented madman leaves a bigger impact I’d definitely focus fire him over sword and board any day Ranger type myself why get hit when I can just plink and run lol set a few trip traps set myself up and just plink watch them get tangled as they chance and plink some more
Meanwhile in Warhammer 40k:
"My face is my shield!"
I think it's meant as magic shields, aka barriers.
@QuakeMidaro If we're talking TTRPG I prefer two-handed Paladin with at least Medium armor dishing out solid damage while also healing yourself with Lay on Hands.
Though then you have things in 3rd party material like the Warder for Pathfinder, that's an amazing shield user because they actually have some abilities that help keep aggro and can block attacks going towards allies(not just become the target of them with something like Bodyguard feat). Mixed feelings on Path of War in general, but the Warder class is nice.
@Zilfallion yeah 2 handed paladins are nice when I do play melee that’s my go to I personally could never stick with a melee class always stuck with Ranger with either Druid or Artificer (gotta love fire and smoke bombs) multi class depending on the team comp just feels wrong not playing a Neutral Drow or Lawful Evil Elf with a Bow and Shotel or Shortsword for when melee is needed
@QuakeMidaro I have played a LOT of characters with a lot of different classes. A fair bit of 3.5, mostly Pathfinder, a few other ttrpg systems. I am not sure I really have too much of a class preference when it comes to the D&D-likes. I do tend to prefer classes with some amount of magic though.
Of my favorite characters over the past several years... a Stalker(Path of War class) who wanted to become an idol despite being raised from a very young age as an assassin and loving to fight. A Warpriest(of the custom setting's deity of art), who was more obsessed with trying to get dragons to let her draw and paint them than anything else, but actually was a surprisingly deadly archer. A Witch(Portents patron), who was a combination mechanical/aerospace engineer, enchanter, and tailor, who spent a lot of time trying to put together a comprehensive dataset from the Vision Hex and how viewing the future changes it in an effort to devise a set of formulas to compensate for the knowledge of the future and how it changes. Used mostly a mix of curses, debuffs, and cold/electric blasting spells.
And then currently I'm playing a Rogue/Wizard/Arcane Trickster whose mother keeps forcing her to go out and get experience, but really doesn't like leaving the city(Bad things have happened pretty much every time, from undead and a dragon making them, to the same dragon raised as undead because a necromancer got to the corpse before we did[I killed with a critical card that caused a lung puncture and it failed it's fort saves to stop from drowning in it's own blood while it was trying to fly away]). Part time job as an actor with a local performing troupe. Mix of spells and melee. Do need to get a bow at some point.
And for the other campaign I'm in. A Stormbound(Akashic Mysteries 3rd party stuff), since the GM at character creation was like: Try strange stuff, look at this stuff, I'm open to anything. It's a weird class, but I'm looking forward to when we get to level 11(and later 17). Fun little class that works around forming Veils instead of Spells. Veils being basically semi-physical magical equipment. So I've got nice fog/cloud armor, a scythe made of ice, and basically a AoE micro-storm within a small radius of me that I can change into different types of storm. The aforementioned level 11 and 17 are when it goes from a small storm affecting like 40-50 feet of me to 200 feet of me to almost 800 feet of me. Really interesting and fun class, though... getting knocked out means all your party loses protection against your storm that keeps raging.
@QuakeMidaro Jesus. Hey mate, someone stole your punctuation.
@FireflyFanatic Honestly I’m sh*t with punctuation. Feel confused about where to put what and when. Seriously though the way my brain works sentences just never end, it’s hard to find a proper place for commas in my head.
@QuakeMidaro It's rough sometimes. I'm bad about run-ons or excessive commas. I have to put forth conscious effort to not be quite bad about them.
@Zilfallion I know the feel. Considering going through a relearning ordeal to help in writing a novel myself. I’ve got a few ideas I’ve been playing with over the last year or so and it is getting to the point I’m considering putting them up to read
@QuakeMidaro You could always just blame it on a punctuation thief too. (Should’ve made it clear but I was just making a joke and meant no offense with that other comment. Just in case.)
@FireflyFanatic No offense takin so no worries. And yeah Punctuation Ninja’s are everywhere, so keep a lookout they are almost as bad as those damned Onion Ninja’s
@Songe I'm a tank! I'm a tank! I'm a tank! *Orkish chanting*
@Rainathetransgirl Well, if we want to be Warhammer Tanks, the only appropriate response is: https://youtu.be/qvXnECMtXbc
@Zilfallion I see your Steam Tank, and raise you one Ork tank! https://youtu.be/kNjUiDpLvlQ
@Rainathetransgirl Well, I suppose I can only give one response to this. WAAAGH!!!
@Zilfallion
@Rainathetransgirl MY FACE IS MY SHIELD!!!! WAAAGH!!!
It's 2024 now, the latest trend is to tank the floor with our faces!