Chapter 10: Post, Plots & Points

There is something uniquely strange about waking up under the open sky, I’m not sure if it’s the sensation of bathing in sunlight that's all around you instead of streaming in through a window, the embrace of a gentle breeze and fresh air, or the smell of healthy earth and wet grass.

I might have just lay still and enjoyed the refreshing strangeness of it, if it was not for a different strangeness, the strange feeling of waking up constricted and unable to move or roll over, arms pinned at my sides by a pair of strong pale ones wrapping around me.

Not a bad strange.

Unlike sleeping rough, I don’t really have a lot of similar experiences to compare it to. The closest experience would be when I was in my Moms’ bed between them and the warmth and safety I felt. It wasn’t a perfect comparison though, this was different. My heart was thundering and I felt kinda vulnerable, but I guess I also felt safe.  

Roxi apparently talked in her sleep, my ears flickered brushing against smooth skin in response to her soft murmurs. 

Maybe she had already been waking or maybe I had woken her with my squirming or the flutter of my furred ears, but grumbling sleepily as she did, one of the arms around me released its hold as she drew it up and over my head. I felt motion, our bodies brushing gently together as she rubbed at the sleep in her eyes.

I couldn’t tell if I was more afraid or embarrassed of what the coming conversation would hold. What do you even say in this situation? Hey, I’ve just met you and this is crazy, but here we are, cuddling maybe?

“Roxi?” I asked in a whisper.

Suddenly as if I was a burning iron, Roxi released me and slid out of reach as she pushed herself to her knees. Ouch that hurt a little more than I thought it would, despite how awkward and embarrassed I felt before.

“Sorry,” mumbled a bashful Roxi as I rolled over to face her. She must have been just as embarrassed as I was, if not more going by the fire engine red creeping across the previously moon pale skin of her cheeks and ears. “Ummm so… Normally, outside the game I mean, I have this really big, soft, fluffy wolf plushie. I kinda use it like a body pillow when I sleep. I must have… umm, yeah.”

That was kind of a cute image… Who’d have thought the Amazonian death priestess would have this side to her.

Wait? Is that how she sees me? “So I was your— “ I hesitantly began.

“Ah! No! It was an accident, an accident!” she said almost leaping into the air as she interrupted me, before shyly staring into her lap. “I must have grabbed you while I was dreaming.”

“Ah.”

Well time waits for no embarrassed awkward-afflicted girl and we both needed to get back on the road if we wanted to make Fort Brightspring before nightfall. So we couldn’t just sit on our asses in awkward silence doing nothing.

Instead we did our morning ablutions in awkward silence, had our breakfast of rations in awkward silence and pulled our packs on in awkward silence. 

I think you get the picture. 

Awkward.

At least my pack was a blanket and several meals lighter and I was getting used to this hiking gig. Always look on the bright side of life. 

You might be an orphan in both the real world and a game, you might be trapped living in a decaying theocratic dictatorship, lived on the streets, you might have spent your last night running from monster lizards in a game, but there is always a silver lining. All I needed was something to do while I walk to keep the awkward silence at bay and things would be rosey. 

The power of positive thinking.

There was something I could do… I’d first noticed it back at the Bear and Beekeeper and reminded again every time since, when pulling up my UI. The little flashing icon telling me I had levelled up and had unassigned skill points.

Roxi would probably sigh in frustration again if she knew how long I’d been ignoring it. Trying to be subtle about it I brought up my UI with a slight flick of my wrist and casually brushed the blinking icon with my hand. 

Level Seven? I’d leveled five times since I last checked before the fight with the bandits. That’s a lot of points to spend… I need to stop leaving this until I have this many points built up.  

My stats were mostly how I remembered them. I’d been focusing on my magical stats and they were mostly higher than the rest but not by much, I’d been making sure not to completely neglect my physical stats since I didn’t want to end up a physically weak glass cannon who couldn’t take a punch. 

That said, I seemed to have a few more stat bonuses similar to my racials, probably from the hair clasp, oh and my endurance was a little higher than I remembered. Maybe Roxi was right about the whole pack thing. 

Twenty five points, twenty, twenty twenty five. Fiver. Points. Hmmm... 

Sticking with my previous plan, I placed five in my physical stats. Maybe they will make carrying this pack easier. The other eighteen I spread across my magic stats, dumping a large chunk in power and intricacy.

I was pretty happy with how I’d spent my points, but a part of me knew there were min-maxers out there writing guides on the mathematically best way to construct your character, who would be horrified by my nearly carefree approach. That kinda made me gigg— I mean chuckle. I always played for escapism and that meant the story, adventuring and losing myself in role-play, not so much competing to be the best player at pve or pvp.

Stat points weren’t the only thing that had built up while I leveled, I had a lot of ability points to spend on construction components in my ability trees.

A mesmer, I was trying to build a mesmer. Stats were one thing, but it’s abilities that make an archetype. I had four so far, four abilities that I’d been building on with increasing complexity as I tried to recreate my own mesmer. 

I didn’t have many attacks yet, but after my run-in with a crossbow bolt I wanted to focus on survivability. A couple ideas were already forming in my head as I pored over my ability trees and began purchasing new components to build with. 

I’d heard some compare the game’s ability constructor to writing code, but for me it felt like the back alley engineering and tinkering I knew best. In fact it was even easier, it didn’t have to worry about compatibility, as long as the end result was valid I could take a single component from a spell or several that together controlled a more complex function and combine them with other parts to create a new ability. I didn’t have to deal with issues such as parts that were incompatible physically, because of different companies’ proprietary firmware or inbuilt DRM.

The parts might all be compatible, but that didn’t mean any combination would work. At least if I accidently made a non-functional ability the game would just tell me, instead of, say, catching fire and frying all the parts. 

I’d lost hard gained ‘salvage’ through such accidents and a few orders I’d had to refund.

Since trial and error was risk free, I was able to experiment with my ideas until I had come up with two new abilities. An active I’d named [Daze Wave] and a passive [Now You Don’t] I was hoping would save my ass next time we got into a fight.

So I guess you can say I was feeling pretty successful at this point.

Well I was...

Until I tripped and wound up gliding face-first towards the road. This was probably going to hurt. Throwing my arms out in front of me, I closed my eyes and braced for impact.

An impact that never came.

Chancing a peek, I found myself a foot away from a close encounter with the packed earth. “You just keep tripping around me don’t you, Aisling. You aren’t falling for me just so I can catch you?” Roxi asked teasingly as she slowly guided me back to my feet with an arm under my breasts.

“ I… uh, uh, I. Falling for you? Uh I’m... I was—“ I stammered until my brain’s speech pathways seemed to overheat just like my face was and then shutdown.

Smirking like she was the cat who’d got the cream, Roxi put on a stern voice, “You’d be a little less clumsy if you watched where you were treading, but you were so caught up with what you should have been done yesterday.”

What?! “How’d you know what I was doing?!” 

“I might not be able to see your UI, but it kinda obvious when you are tapping invisible buttons in front of you or picking up and moving things. To be fair you were being pretty sneaky at the start and subtle with your gestures, but it didn’t take long for your eyes to light up and your little brow furrowed with concentration as you forgot about trying to hide what you were doing,” my companion giggled in amusement, “If I hadn’t been having so much fun watching you, I might not have been ready to catch you like that.” 

“Oh…”

I’m not sure what had me more embarrassed, that I’d got so caught up in character and ability creation that I’d forgotten to be subtle, or the fact she had been watching me the whole time.