Tinniel was presently an NPC, but that was already changing. She had taken quests, after all.

When she finally had her wits about her and could sit up, he addressed the situation and found she was indeed now a PC with a basic action deck. She was Beginner level 1 as a Caster, meaning she had the basic heal and attack spells Ashley had when the whole apocalypse began.

That wouldn’t do. He quickly rummaged through the low level consumables she had, and got her Staves, Wands, and Spades leveled up to Beginner 3, then got her a few uncommon spells into her action deck, including the Telekinesis he’d ended up with after having sex with Rachel on the ship’s deck. She was able to throw in some decent spells, though he wasn’t thrilled with having two casters and a Rogue in the party.

Until Lucifer and Jezebel proved to be anything but an anchor around his neck, they were the quest givers and no more.

Tinniel suggested she would also be just fine firing a bow, if that would help. This sent the three of them off on a hunt through their respective inventories to search after something more martial. Ash would still have to tank with his Dragonscales, but they swiftly found Tinniel a set of decent cards to make her a Ranger. She had a rapid reload skill, the ability to befriend animals, quick shot, an enhanced speed buff, and the ability to generate arrows just by spending mana. The generation process wasn’t a quick one, but she didn’t need quick. Several dozen arrows would suffice for a battle.

After that, she had a pair of fey cards, one called Mesmer and the other Blend In. The former gave her the power to trick somebody of x Clever or lower, and alter their memory of the interaction, while the latter made her semi invisible in a fight. This second one was perfect for a Ranger, especially one who needed to keep the focus off herself and on Ash.

Soon enough they had a couple of decent low level uncommon cards for martial classes and a few specific to Rangers: Power Shot, Speak with Animals, Herbal Remedy, Quick Shot, and Multi-Shot. She had over ten cards pretty soon, specializing in ranged combat. She stared down at the action deck in a sort of horrified fascination he found cute, mouthing the words.

They then took a few minutes to get her used to the sensation of drawing and playing ability cards.

“You’re going to need to draw and play as fast as possible. A round is only about six seconds, but it sometimes seems like you can do more in a round than just one thing.”

Tinniel regarded him with wide, terrified eyes, like she was already seeing her own death. He opted for cheerful and light-hearted. She needed a morale boost as much or more than his shitty lessons. A teacher he was not.

“Just stay behind me and off to one side, and shoot a lot of arrows.”

Aside from being struck dumb watching him get busy with Rachel, this was the first time he’d seen her with little to say. Instead she just muttered over and over again, “Behind me, shot a lot of arrows.”

“We’ll need to get moving. We’re due another Random Encounter soon and I doubt we’ll be able to skirt past all of them.”

Tinniel wore a dazed expression, but it wasn’t the right time to get into her business about what she’d just experienced. The rain was intensifying, and they needed to be back on their way if—

The notification struck a moment before Tinniel disappeared in a blur and a flash of feathers. Ash had enough time to identify the creature: a hippo-griff. Another one of them clamped claws onto his shoulders and ripped him off his feet a second later.

Rachel was on the ground, or else she’d have been snatched up as well, but that didn’t stop the big bastards from trying.

 

You’ve been caught in a Random Encounter!

 

Ash laughed at the unnecessary UI pop up notification, and surveyed the first four cards available to him. He wasn’t about to try taking out the one who currently had him in its talons, because he had no intention of falling to his death, but he could help the two who were still on the ground.

There… he grabbed Improved Telekinesis and flung the one stone hippo-griff away from Rachel. He slammed it into the other. A good look at the things told him he was looking at a dinosaur version of a griffin: the hippo face with the big round maw and the surprisingly terrifying tusks, the beady eyes, two enormous wings of flashing feathers, and finally four stumpy hippo legs ending in very avian claws. The stone part of stone hippo-griff meant that every bit of them, from feathers to flappy little ears, to claws was made of some kind of stone. These two were different types: one lighter gray and the other a layered sandy color.

 

Stone Hippo-Griff (Expert threat, beast, earth elemental)

Stone animated by pooling local mana has taken the form of creatures borne of people’s minds. These two are the unlikely mesh of a flying creature and one never meant to do so, wrapped in a form seemingly unsuited to flight. Hippo-griffs are fond of horse flesh like griffins, and fiercely territorial like the hippopotamus.

HP: 180+/180+

MP: 10/10

SP: 1260/1300

Weakness: elemental wind attacks

Resistances: elemental stone and fire attacks

Special abilities known: Dive Bomb, Seize, Swoop, Air Cutter, Head Smash, Bulldoze. To expand any of these special abilities, click on them.

 

The one he’d thrown crashed together with the other in an explosive crack, something like a hammer smashing into a tile floor. Though they were far from dead, the action gave Rachel the time she needed to grab up her daggers, and hopefully for Lucy and Jezebel to be of any use for the first time ever. It was probably too much to ask for, but… there, Lucifer turned into a huge owlbear and started swiping at one of the hippo-griffs. Before he was turned away from the action below, he saw Rachel rise, nude, and leaping this way and that, striking with two daggers glowing different colors.

 

***

 

Tinniel was screaming, and the wind was mostly ripping them away, but not completely. He caught the very ends of a lot of her ragged, terrified shrieks. She wasn’t wrong to be terrified; she was low level and on her first ever adventure. These weren’t owlbears lumbering this way and that. Well, this was what she got for stealing a card from her boss and going on an adventure with a Bard who was less into the sort of performances she thought Bards were into, and more into the sort of performances Bards were famous for.

This gave him time to chuckle while putting on Boiling Blood, Dragon’s Blood, Sorcerer’s Blood, and Replenishing Aura before the hippo-griffs deposited them near one another on a high cliff, atop a floating island that was little more than a jagged boulder.

Several more of the creatures crept around from behind the knife-like shards of rock, these ones obviously babies by the look of their patchy stone feathers.

 

Stone Hippo-Grifflets (Journeyman threat, beast, earth elemental)

Stone animated by pooling local mana has taken the form of creatures borne of people’s minds. In baby form.

HP: 80+/80+

MP: 10/10

SP: 500/500

Weakness: elemental wind attacks

Resistances: elemental stone and fire attacks

Special abilities known: Head Smash, Bulldoze. To expand any of these special abilities, click on them.

 

“I’ve got you,” he told her. Although he had built up his aura skill with Harem Laird, Tinniel wasn’t under the umbrella of the buffs, since she hadn’t slept with him. Still, Boiling Blood was a potent defense that would knock these birdies for a loop if they got any closer, and did cover allies like her. Just not as much as they would Rachel.

In the meantime he had Arcane Lance.

The violet energy condensed into a cone of power at the end of his outstretched hand, and he felt the now-familiar sensation of the mana draining out of his body as the projectile left him and speared the nearest baby hippo-griff in its ugly face. It went flying from the Force damage, already near death, but flapped its way back onto the tiny floating island and bellowed at them in pain and fury.

“It’s arrow time,” he told his fey ally, and unleashed Tsunami to bash into the other two creatures. Thankfully Sorcerer’s Blood gave him a huge damage bonus, because not only were they knocked back, they took as much water damage as possible.

He knew stone creatures would take less damage from fire attacks, but there was nothing for it. He’d just have to chip away at them, spell after spell. Luckily he had on his Replenishing Aura to regain lost mana. So for now, it was Fireball time and again. In the meantime the hippo-griffs used a skill called Bulldoze time and again to harden themselves up, increase resistances, get temporary hit points, and shrug off any conditions put on by his spells. Or they’d use Dive Bomb to close the distance in a blink.

Tinniel wasn’t ready for this kind of action, not yet. She gaped at the creatures as they took spell after spell, then closed in on and jabbed their beaks into Ash. The one who’d been lanced with the purple cone of energy actually killed itself attacking him.

“Arrows!” he shouted, and she flinched. Finally, she got the idea and drew out an arrow, then nocked it and frowned.

“Which one do I—“

“Pick one and fire!” he snapped, harder than he’d meant to.

She did, and it wasn’t the best choice. She had an explosive arrow that would work a lot better. This one flared into bluish flame, but the ice left coating the stone skin of the creature shattered and fell away.

Ash had a bubble shield of mana up a second later, when one of the parents swooped around and dive bombed them as a punishment for not being an easy meal. Its beak pierced the bubble shield with a resonating crack of low thrumming energy coupled with an ear piercing crash of broken glass. It drove into his shoulder for 4 damage, which was perfect. Its beak exploded and it was sent rocketing backwards from the force of Boiling Blood’s retaliatory damage. It was far from dead, but it was neither happy nor an actual threat to them. Just as importantly, a copy of Dragonscale and Fireball each appeared somewhere in his action deck.

The two remaining babies reached the bubble shield a second later and began pecking it to death.

“Keep firing!” he called.

“I—”

He clasped her by the shoulder and used Elemental Blast to smash one of the babies in the face with a gust of wind. Without looking. He was staring Tinniel in the face. “You can do this. You have to.”

This ended up being a Hearts (Tough) check and the success worked wonders. He watched as her terror fell away, or was stuffed down beneath a hard veneer of hopeful resolve. She nodded once, sharply, and nocked another arrow.

“Exploding shot,” he told her.

Several exploding shots, a fair number of spells, and two Bard abilities later, they had disposed of the hippo-grifflets, along with another of the adults who had returned to check on whether the hatchlings had successfully consumed their meal. From there it was collection time, with Ash scooping up only a single caster card and a 15 coin card, while Tinniel grabbed the rest. She hadn’t done that much of the work, but he outpaced her by so much that it hardly mattered. Only two of the twelve reward cards were uncommon, and neither of those were useful in any capacity to him. To be fair, none were useful to her either, save a common copy of Rapid Fire.

Tinniel didn’t need to cling to him in order to make their descent, but she did stay awfully close while he used Improved Telekinesis to facilitate his own descent. He was getting low on mana and didn’t want to walk into another combat situation at half mast (or half depleted on mana anyway), but he now had the extra added bonus of his hilarious cape, which could give him a full boost of mana if he needed it. He actually hummed a little tune while using the new slate of cape abilities off to one side of his UI, to resurrect the wind blast version of Elemental Blast using stamina instead of mana, and caused one of the beasts to swerve out of the way before diving maw-first into Tinniel.

He was prepared to handle the entire fight, if needed, but healing up his friends would be a costly enterprise.

His fears were unfounded though, since Rachel, still nude, was finishing off the second rock monster with the help of a clothed Jezebel. Jezebel, hands on knees, was panting and shaking her head.

“They’re rock, and they fly,” she managed between big gulps of air. “That’s hardly fair.”

“Rock monsters should stay on the ground,” Rachel agreed, eyeing her blades dubiously. Then she seemed to remember she was fully nude and cringed at him.

“It went well?” he asked.

“Not even close,” Rachel said, but smiled. “This psycho detonated an explosive Druid spell like five feet from both of us.”

“It does the most damage,” Jezebel protested.

Jezebel had finally done something to help. Gods be praised. Ash wasn’t sure if he was more shocked they had helped out, or that Jezebel had been on the ball instead of his best friend.

“Shit… You’re very fucking lucky I dodged away from the worst of the blast.” She spun, and showed off a slightly scorched ass, with the tip of her tail blackened. And what an ass it was. Instinct told him to whistle, but he reconsidered. Surprising all of them, Jezebel did the perving for him.

“Nothing some salve won’t handle,” she replied, “especially if it’s expertly applied by the right person.” Half-closed eyes rose up Ash’s mostly nude form. “I might need some as well… applied internally.”

Then her eyes flicked to her husband and she blanched.

“You’re all so… so horny!” Tinniel blurted.

“That’s not inaccurate,” Jezebel replied, and reached up to run a several fingers over one long ear.

Wait… were the ears erogenous zones for elves?

“You should see Evie and Ashley,” Rachel remarked idly. “Those two can’t keep their hands off him.”

“Or each other,” he added. “When we were on the spaceship, Ashley was on all fours, and Evie was fist deep—”

“Oh my God!” Tinniel blurted, making a face.

“It’s almost like he is a god,” Rachel added softly.

“Not even close.” Ash snorted. “Let’s put some clothes on and get to the nearest town so we can recuperate and spend the night.”

“In bed?” Rachel asked.

It was Tinniel's turn to snort. “Unbelievable!”

Jezebel seemed to come back to herself when her husband and child lumbered into view, along with Waffles snuggled protectively against them. They were tucked up against the back of the area where a boulder jutted out and gave a hint of cover from dive bombing stone hippo-griffs.

“They’re dead?” he asked.

“Yes, dear husband,” she said, and grinned. “Ash and his girls did most of the work.” And then probably Ash imagined it, but her eyes slid over to him and her smile brightened by just a smidgen.

No. He definitely imagined it, he told himself.

“Let’s go find Ash’s parents,” Jezebel said. With any luck, he could save his mother and father, and resettle his best friend’s family in the same place. And with a tad more luck, they’d be easy to find.