Chapter 3 – Kick Start[i]

Walking away from the healer's, Fey noticed a notice board (haha, it fulfilled its function) at the edge of village's central clearing. On it were several flyers from players and NPCs alike requesting items to be collected, tasks to be performed, and expeditions to be joined. Most of the tasks were far above Fey's level in difficulty, so she skimmed through them without much interest.

A flyer with an illustration caught her eye. It was titled Twiggy[ii] Collection. The drawing was of (a twiggy) a woody monster that looked like a large branch with legs and carved eyes and a mouth. The task was to collect thirty twiggy branches and to bring them to the tavern. The reward was 30 gold (Fey only had 58g at the moment) and the monster was only level two, so Fey decided to accept the task. Following the directions on the flyer, she left the village by a different trail towards the twiggys.

The twiggys looked just as odd as the slimes. It was as if the game designers had started the monsters as cartoons and then made them three-dimensional to match the game graphics. Each twiggy came up to her knee at the top of what she thought of as the 'head;' three branches split off from there and reached up to her hip from there. Two shorter branches made arms and two stumps made feet (they didn't have much in the way of legs). The main trunk was about twice the width of her forearm (Fey was a skinny child). Eyes and mouth looked carved but opened and shut realistically. At least they're not very cute. Drawing her dagger, she walked up to one (they were even slower than the slimes), then hesitated. Can a dagger really do much against a tree branch? Oh well. She slashed down with the dagger.

A small line appeared on the twiggy, but it did not appear to be hurt at all. Fey had time to think, Great. How am I supposed to kill these (damn) things? before it reacted (slow in all respects, huh) by whipping its head branches at her. It hurt as much as, well, a small child poking one’s leg with a stick while one is wearing jeans (which is to say, not very much), but Fey took a long step backwards so it would not repeat the ‘attack’. (Well, at least until it covered the 50 centimetres that now separated them, which didn't look like it would happen any time soon.) She saw the other twiggys were moving in her direction as well. Ah, they all attack once you hit one.

Amethyst made a (cute) squeak on her shoulder. Oh yeah; how am I going to use her in combat? Eyeing the twiggys, Fey thought their branches looked rather too pointy for the slime's membrane to handle. Taking another step backwards to avoid the growing mob, she took Amethyst down and examined her (*pokepoke*). Her body was still pretty soft, but the bubble seemed to be made of tougher stuff. The glimmering beginnings of an idea formed. Fey held Amethyst in one hand and used her other hand to flick the bubble at a twiggy.

Grinning, Fey walked back to town to get what she needed for her plan (leaving the twiggys far behind, creaking angrily).

Back in town, Fey located the general store and entered the archway. It was odd (by human standards), with the counters and shelves growing directly out of the floor and walls. A young (handsome) elf was stacking potions in an (obviously) elegant pyramid on one of the shelves; she automatically knew that this was Jeral, the shopkeeper's nephew. Looking up, he said, “Greetings. How may I be of assistance?”

“I need a rope.”

“Rope, is it?” He went over to another shelf and took down a length of thin rope. Very thin rope. Really, it looked like string. Dubious, Fey accepted the woven fibres and tested their strength. Despite its (lack of) thickness, it was quite strong. A fine example of elven craftsmanship, she thought, impressed. “How much is it?” she asked.

“For such a beautiful maiden? Naught but five gold,” he replied with a charming smile (and no bursting into laughter).

Fey's thoughts scattered. Reeling them back in, she quickly (and wordlessly) paid without haggling and left. Oi. If only they made them like that in real life. She had never met a boy who could make her the slightest bit nervous, let alone scatter her thoughts. The NPCs in this game... She did not notice Jeral watching her leave with an amused smile on his face.

By the time Fey returned to the twiggys, they had forgotten all about her and had gone back to their business (not that they appeared to be doing much). Fey quickly seized a twiggy by both ends and took three steps back from the others. Ignoring its feeble attempts to escape, Fey briskly tied it up at both ends and then to a tree. It could wiggle, but not much else. Satisfied that the twiggy would not puncture her pet, she put Amethyst on the ground before it, and called, “Whip!” Obediently, the slime sent her bubble flying out. It bounced off the twiggy harmlessly with a sound like a rubber ball bouncing off the wall. “This is ridiculous,” Fey muttered, pulling up the pet skill:

Are you kidding me? You can't even throw a pebble with that little force. Fey happened to know off the top of her head (yeah, the author hasn’t just looked it up on the Internet out of curiosity *coughcough*) that it required about 120 pounds of force to break a wooden board in martial arts, and that was thin, dry wood under tension at the ends. Well, she'll just have to do this over and over (and over) again until it levels up enough to do damage, thought Fey resignedly. Wait. Force equals mass times acceleration[iii]. Fey couldn't do much about acceleration other than levelling Whip, but mass... Picking Amethyst up, she went to the stream, which (conveniently) happened to be nearby, and plopped her in, calling, “Osmosis.”

Amethyst tripled in size, and hopefully mass. Fey brought her back to the bound twiggy (the others had managed to turn all the way towards the stream and were now in the process of turning back) and called, “Whip!” again. The attack made a slightly louder noise, but still had no visible effect. Noticing that the other twiggys were almost upon them, she said, “Keep whipping, Amethyst,” and led the mob two steps to the right.

Thinking about board breaking had given her the idea of trying out her real-life tae kwon do skills out on the woody monsters. Raising her knee (below waist level, which was usually considered lazy, but twiggys are short), Fey snapped out a front kick at one of the creatures, leaving a small dent and knocking it to the ground.

Giggling a little at how funny the twiggy looked trying to get up, she knocked the entire mob over, ten in total, conscientiously alternating legs rather than favouring her stronger right side. Hmm... Fey frowned thoughtfully. There was no way the mob was going to be of any danger to her, but she did not appear to be doing much damage in return, either. Ah well, I'll just think of it as a chance to level up my skills (cynical optimist, that’s our heroine). Wasting no time complaining, Fey applied her analytical mind to the situation. Adding Axe Kick – an overhead kick that brought her heel slamming sharply into the ground (and through anything between her and the ground) – to her skills, she came up with an efficient training system as she usually did. Using Slam or Snap Kick to knock a twiggy over, Fey then attacked with Stomp or Axe Kick to deliver heavier damage. Delivering the combo once to each of the ten twiggys allowed time for them to struggle to their feet before she knocked them over again. Moving with assembly line efficiency, her attacks became as regular at the beat of Amethyst's bubble against her victim. Passers-by would have found the sight interesting to behold (probably then edging away quietly with the madwoman none the wiser).

Just as Fey settled into a comfortable rhythm, the mob died in quick succession. Rousing herself from the trance-like state she had fallen into, Fey dragged the bodies into a pile and collected the gold secreted about their persons (it probably wouldn't actually stick like that in real life). Task done, she went to check Amethyst's progress. There was now a definite (bubble-shaped) indent, but the twiggy was still struggling vigorously against its bonds. “Keep going,” she told the slime, who had paused to cast a (cute) questioning look at her approach.

A new wave of monsters had now appeared, so she kicked one, then checked her stats while the twiggys converged on her. Each of her four skills had reached level two, and she had reached level five. She spent her attribute points, waited for a while, then got bored and walked up to meet the twiggys, forcibly putting them into place on her (dis)assembly line.

The second group died even more quickly, as her skills were now considerably less (crappy) weak than when they were at level one. Again Fey piled up the bodies and collected the coins, then went to check on Amethyst's progress. The middle of the twiggy's body looked definitely battered, and its struggles were getting weaker. I hope she actually kills it by the time I'm done with the next mob... “Faster,” she said, and the slime obligingly picked up its pace. Fey went to deal with the last wave of twiggys she would need.

This time, when she hit a twiggy, only nine converged on her. She saw the tenth one hanging back with uncharacteristic (for a twiggy) intelligence in its eyes. Fey instinctively left it alone to deal with the others. Instead of the conservative efficiency of before, she deliberately went about to be impressive. With a sweeping kick, she knocked the whole mob over, then simultaneously stomped on one while seizing a second to slam into a third. Her strikes were at full strength, no energy conserved, and the twiggys died quickly. With a final Axe Kick on a standing twiggy that left it half-buried in the ground and split down the middle, only Fey and the tenth twiggy were left (in spirit; the bodies were still there, of course). With a look of respect in its cartoonish eyes, it bowed. Feeling rather silly, and not quite sure what (the hell) she was doing, Fey bowed back.

Oh, so THAT'S what the hell I was doing. I'm totally going to have a menagerie of creatures following me around by the time I reach level twenty (*foreshadowing*). The twiggy had started walking towards her, but it did not look like it was going to arrive any time soon. “Feh, your legs are so short, you're more of a stumpy than a twiggy,” Fey muttered.

“Hey!” she yelled, indignant. “I didn't actually want to name it Stumpy!” (The system notice made no reply.) “Aargh, stupid game.”

Dismissing her irritation as useless, Fey piled up the twiggy bodies (we could probably call them 'logs' now) and let Stumpy make its way over in its own time (which seemed to be similar to that of a turtle. Or a tree). The regular sound of slime bubble impacting wood ended in a crack, then stopped. Looking over, Fey saw that the twiggy's body had actually split, held together only by splinters. “Good job, Amethyst! Shrink!” Amethyst jumped up and down (cutely) in happiness, shedding water until she returned to her normal size. Untying the rope, she used it to tie up the logs into five linked bundles and slung the contraption over her shoulder. Ugh, this is heavy. Drawing on her high school experience with ridiculously heavy backpacks (Arwyn still maintains that she would’ve been an inch taller if the evil textbooks hadn’t stunted her growth), Fey headed back towards town with Amethyst and Stumpy trailing behind, hoping the twiggy would not become completely lost.

The walk back to the village seemed a lot longer than the trip to the twiggys. Ow, ow, ow. If she were not herself, she would have driven herself mad with complaining (as she was herself, she sympathized). Her mood was vastly improved about three-quarters of the way there, when she received a system notice:

Cool! You can actually improve your attributes through practice. Hefting her bundles a little higher, she headed the rest of the way back with less internal complaint.

Footnotes:

[i] Chapter title credit goes to thirst

[ii] In an attempt not to steal too many creatures from Maplestory, Twiggys have been altered from Maplestory’s Stumps by adding branches to the creatures’ heads and bodies.

[iii] F =ma, Newton’s second law of motion