Chapter 16 – Double Trouble[i]

Coming home with slightly sore feet and several shopping bags, Arwyn slipped off her shoes and collapsed (melodramatically), bags and all, on her couch. She and Leah had spent a pleasant afternoon exploring various clothing and shoe stores. The majority of Arwyn's purchases consisted of practical, comfortable, and professional clothing (with the rule of thumb for clothing to be considered “practical” being that she could kick people in the head while wearing it), along with a few pieces of fancy, stylish clothing that she liked, but rarely had the occasion to wear. After dinner at a restaurant with her friend, Arwyn had come home relaxed and pleasantly tired.

Arwyn could hear the seductive voice of Fantasia calling out to her. “Come rest on this comfortable recliner,” it coaxed. (She tends to have a lot of conversations with inanimate objects. Just go with it.) Her gaze was dragged to the game helmet in the next room over as if by gravity. “Come,” it whispered.

No, she thought, sounding unconvincing even in her own head, I have to stay off until bedtime.

“But why?” asked the game helmet, a pout in its voice. “Don't you want to play with me?” (Is anybody getting creeped out? It was supposed to be funny, but it ended up getting creepy instead.)

Resolutely, Arwyn turned away from the games room (“Come back,” whispered the game). Just to have something to do, she sat at her desk and turned on her laptop. Fantasia still foremost on her mind, Arwyn ended up spending several hours watching educational videos about swordfighting on the Internet. Although she was sure that this was a bad way to learn proper technique, she memorized a few movements that she thought she could copy reasonably well.

Arwyn also came across several rants about the inaccuracies of swords as depicted in fantasy novels (which made her sad, because they were generally the coolest aspects of swords as depicted in fantasy novels); for instance, having a longsword in a back sheath is impractical because human arms are not long enough to draw it from that angle.

After the videos went rather off-topic (“related videos” my behind), Arwyn closed her laptop to send it into hibernation mode. She performed her nightly rituals of preparing for bed, even putting away her newly-purchased clothing. (Usually, it stayed in the bag until she felt like wearing it for the first time.) She peeked at the clock: 11:00 p.m. It was still early for her to go to sleep, but reasonable by humanity's standards. She gave in to her growing addiction and slid on the game helmet.

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A disembodied female voice. “Scanning. Player detected. Welcome back to Fantasia, Fey E'lan.”

Fey blinked as she materialized in the same place where she had logged out. Pets flashed into existence as well, and she petted them in greeting (haha, she petted her pets; this is like the notice board all over again).

Fey took a moment to recall what she had been doing before logging out. Let's see... Blade apologized, and I was unnecessarily cryptic with him for fun, and before that... Ah yes, I was training Osmosis. (The fact that it took her several seconds to remember this was sad, considering the flask of water she still held.) Plonking the slime back into the water, Fey led the way back to the village, looking for something to do while her pet trained her skill.

At the notice board, Fey looked for requests relating to monsters around her level. Emboldened by the fact that she had yet to come to serious injury (surprise attacks by level 99 angels notwithstanding), she dared go after monsters slightly higher than her own level 14. A posting caught her eye: Dubbles and Trubbles. The description read:

No image of either monster was provided, but the notice indicated that dubbles were level 16 and trubbles were level 18. The quest would be challenging, but the prospect of improving her Guardian's Blessing was too good to pass up. Fey headed east, wondering what kind of monsters would be named 'dubble' and 'trubble'.

Walking along the forest path, Fey received a system notice:

“Good job, Amethyst,” she cooed through the glass of the flask. The slime flicked her bubble to make her spin (cutely) in the water. Pulling out a thornweed thorn, Fey trained Immunity while she walked.

Partway through her journey to the eastern forest, Fey received a private message.

“Hey,” came Blade's disembodied voice.

Private messaging in Fantasia had three levels. The most basic was text-based messaging like Fey and Leandriel had shared (see Chapter 13 if you don't remember), which took very little attention and could be sent while the other player was offline. The second level was audio chatting, as Blade was using right now, similar to a phone call without needing a cell phone. The third level was video chat, which partially blocked the player's field of view with an image of the other player and was therefore inadvisable unless both players were unoccupied and in safe areas.

Fey thought it was a bit presumptuous of Blade to initiate audio chat on the first call (actually, she just didn't like being startled by sudden and unexpected noises), but answered anyway. “Hi.”

“Where are you?” Blade had just logged in, only to find Fey online and nowhere in the vicinity.

“Heading to the eastern forest on a quest.”

“Need some help?”

“Not really. You can come anyways.” With that rather unenthusiastic invitation, Fey shut down the chat link and continued walking.

As Fey approached the eastern edge of the forest, the trees became smaller until they only looked decades, rather than centuries old. By the time she reached the designated quest area, Immunity had reached level 4 – making her immune to thornweed poison – and Amethyst's Osmosis had reached level 5. Putting the water flask down, Fey pulled Amethyst out and held the slime in one hand while looking around.

“So where are the monsters?” she asked out loud.

As if in answer, something crashed into Fey's back at chest level, hard enough to knock her off her feet. Fey's breath escaped her lungs with a whoosh as she fell, managing to drop Amethyst before she broke her fall with her hands. Instinctively turning towards the attack, she glimpsed a flash of pastel green before it disappeared into the trees.

“What the-” she muttered, standing up and positioning her back against a tree so it could not be attacked again. Tensely, she drew her weapons and waited. When nothing happened, she became annoyed and yelled, “Come out, you stupid monster!”

A flash of bright green streaked towards her with the speed of a spiked volleyball. Reflexively, Fey held her hands up in defence, and the creature hit with a loud smack that was slightly painful even under the sturdy leather of her forearm guards. She managed to get a good look at the monster at the moment of impact. The creature appeared to be two spherical bodies, each the size of a bouncy ball, connected by a flexible line as long as her arm and as thick as one of her fingers.

“...A double bubble is called a dubble? Really? Who the hell invented this game?” (The author, who really likes dumb puns and is exhibiting the reason she steals monsters from books and games rather than inventing them herself.) Sighing, Fey prepared for battle. Badly-designed monsters or not, she had a quest to complete.

“Come back here, you stupid pun-made-monster!” she yelled. This time, she managed to hit the dubble with her sword as it streaked towards her, but the twin-creature bounced off the weapon, apparently unharmed, and flew back out of sight.

Fey decided that in order to have any hope of defeating the dubble, she needed to impair its movements. “Magic, cast Spore,” she ordered.

As a glittering cloud of particles spread through the trees, Fey was inundated with system notices:

...Oh crap, was all Fey had time to think before every dubble in the area attacked.

It was a nightmare of a dodgeball game, thirty against one, where headshots were allowed and you could not go 'out' after being hit. Fey quickly herded her pets into the shelter between her legs and the tree behind her, taking all the damage herself rather than risk her weaker, unarmoured companions. She (mostly) managed to protect her head, but impacts slammed into every other part of her body; the combined slapping sounds were deafening.

Fey was overwhelmed, but after a minute or two of the assault, realized that her health bar had stabilized at around 150/225. The creators of Fantasia had quickly discovered during the initial stages of testing that players disliked the feeling of dying in virtual reality, and were very likely to quit if they died in the early part of the game. The programmers had then altered the monsters below level 50 so that if players overreached and attacked something too strong, they would simply be overwhelmed and unable to do damage, forcing them to give up and look for weaker opponents instead of dying.

Fey, of course, was not one to give up against dumb-pun monsters like dubbles. As she became accustomed to the barrage of attacks, her brain started thinking and planning.

“Magic, cast Spore every five seconds,” she commanded, choosing a pace that the mushroom could maintain indefinitely without becoming exhausted. As the status effects piled on, sleeping and paralyzed dubbles dropped to the ground. Fey was unable to leave her post defending her pets in order to take advantage of their immobile states, and focused instead on the smaller number of dubbles still attacking.

The turning point in the fight came when one of Fey's sword strikes glanced off the head of a dubble at an angle, shearing across the appendage that united the twin-monster. Both halves of the dubble dropped to the ground, unable to move except for the ineffectual waving of the severed connecting arm. Yes! Invigorated, Fey aimed for the dubbles' weak spot. The dubble's heads tended to travel one after another rather than side by side, making it difficult to hit the linkage, but slowly, Fey was surrounded by a semicircle of grounded monsters.

In the middle of her battle, Fey's attention was caught by a system notice different from all the rest:

Spore was now at level 8, with a success rate of 45% and a range of 25m. “Magic, stop casting,” Fey ordered. In a louder voice, she called out, “Blade?”

“Dammit, stop poisoning me!” came an irritated male voice somewhere behind her on the right.

“You (literally) walked right into it,” Fey muttered, continuing to fend off dubble attacks. Using her dagger to block, she managed to slice apart another dubble pair with her sword.

Closer than before, Fey heard a loud smacking sound, followed by swearing. “What the hell was that?”

“It's called a dubble,” Fey explained cheerfully (*schadenfreude*[ii]). “Cut the line that connects the heads and they can't move.”

Eventually, Blade came into view, herding a group of half-dubbles along with his feet. The paralysis effects on the dubbles were wearing off, and the noise of their yelling had woken many of the sleeping dubbles. Fey went to invite Blade into a party so that Magic could resume casting Spore without harming the human, then realized that she was still in a party with Leandriel, his name grayed out on the party list to indicate he was out of range for sharing experience. She sent him a quick private message to explain her leaving of his party:

Fey had not expected the angel to even want to adventure with a newbie like her, let alone have time for it. Ignoring her feelings of pleased surprise, she replied in a lighthearted tone.

She could almost hear the quiet amusement in his words when he replied,

The words made a silly smile appear on Fey's face, and she compressed her lips in an effort to suppress it.

In the few seconds that the private conversation had occurred, Blade had sent Fey his own party invite, only to be informed:

Three seconds later, he received Fey's party invitation and accepted, assuming that the elf was already the leader of a party with other people in it.

“Where's the rest of the party?” Blade asked, confused.

“What rest of the party?” Fey asked, equally confused.

“When I tried to send you a party invite, the system said you were already in a party.”

“Oh. I just left a party that I joined yesterday.” For no reason that Blade could discern, Fey seemed rather embarrassed in her explanation (it's because she has a crush on Leandriel *sings annoying K-I-S-S-I-N-G song *). He was about to press for more details when he noticed that Fey had jumped from level 11 to level 14 since yesterday. He himself had only gained one level from training.

“Holy [censored word]! How did you gain three levels so quickly?”

“You know, hunting quests,” Fey muttered, looking rather shifty as she avoided eye contact during her (very incomplete) explanation. She was relieved when the dubbles attacked in enough numbers that they were forced to drop the conversation in order to focus on combat.

With Blade's freedom to move around and disable the downed dubbles, it was only a few minutes before all of the monsters were split apart and unable to attack. Cautiously, Fey stepped away from the tree, revealing her three pets. (“And you got another pet, too?” Blade asked in disbelief.) The pets helped the players collect the dubbles into a pile. Despite all their work, all of the monsters were still alive; their outsides had the toughness and consistency of car tire rubber and were very hard to cut through. By holding the spheres still with their feet and bearing down with a sword with all their weight, the players were able to puncture the bubble monsters, making them disappear in a cloud of dust (*poof*).

The party's experience allocation was set to 'individual,' and Fey and Blade divided the kills exactly in half, each getting 15 dubbles.

Fey's boar hunting from the night before had filled her experience bar close to full, so the experience from fifteen dubbles was sufficient to level up.

Fey sighed. “There's probably a couple hundred more where those came from.”

“So... What quest is this?”

“Clearing all the dubbles and trubbles from the eastern forest.”

“What's a trubble?”

“I have no idea.”

Trubbles turned out to be groups of three linked (yellow) bubbles, which enjoyed travelling with a spinning motion like a boomerang, making it difficult to cut their linkages. As the battle raged on, Magic was quite helpful, but Fey put Amethyst back in the flask to practice Osmosis and let Boris wander around in the areas they had already cleared. She was pleasantly surprised when the boar returned from his explorations carrying cooking and potion-making ingredients.

“Aww thank you,” she said with a pat on his head every time the miniature boar returned with a bunch of plants. She had no idea that Boris had gotten into fights with herb-monsters and was returning with their defeated corpses (*oblivious irresponsible pet ownership*).

Human and elf were getting along quite well, with the straightforward fighting showing Blade off to advantage. Fey had to admit (to herself) that the warrior was clearly better at swordfighting than she was. He moved with a grace born of natural athleticism that contrasted with her own lack of coordination. All of Fey's physical ability came from years of repetition in tae kwon do class, drilling until her muscles picked up the correct technique. She was relatively slow to learn new physical skills, though the lack of ability rarely showed unless she was attempting a new sport (or in this case, trying to kill things).

Every few hours, Fey would drop suddenly and unceremoniously to the ground in order to rest. (It took Blade several times to get used to it, as, in appearance, the rest stops looked disconcertingly similar to collapse from exhaustion.) Around game-time noon, Fey decided that it was lunchtime and pulled out her travel food to eat while resting. She handed Blade an apple. “Here.” Fey's lips twitched in amusement as he examined the fruit cautiously. “It's not poisoned. Look, Amethyst is still in the flask,” she said, pointing. (She neglected to mention the thornweed in her pouch, stored right next to the food packet.) Blade took a bite (and was not poisoned), and the party shared an amicable lunch before tackling the rest of the bubble-monsters.

Fey and Blade spent the entire game day fighting the animated bubbles. Without Magic's ability to immobilize a fraction of the monsters and Blade to disable them while they were down, the quest could have easily taken three days to complete. With the advantage, the party levelled up ferociously, Fey reaching level 19 and Blade level 20 after putting down hundreds and hundreds of the creatures; Fey's pets reached level 15 from the passive experience gain, and Spore reached level 10, evolving the ability so that Fey could choose what status effect to inflict, though each individual status effect had a cooldown of 1 minute (still way OP).

It was well into night when the last trubble burst into dust. “Well done,” came an unfamiliar female voice. Startled, Fey and Blade looked up to see a figure leaning against a tree only a few metres away. The NPC ranger was dressed in mottled browns that made it easy for her to blend into the forest, and carried an enormous longbow strapped to her back.

“Hello?” said Blade cautiously.

“Hello.” The ranger straightened and approached the party. “I am Eliana,” she introduced herself.

Fey's keen night vision picked out the shape of a mana blossom on the ranger's cheek. “Are you the one who put up the request?” she asked.

“I am. And you are the ones that fulfilled it.” On closer inspection, Eliana asked, “Might you be Fey?”

“Uh, yes?” Fey answered, confused as to how the ranger would know her name.

Eliana chuckled. “Jerem- Jerendal told me about you the other day.” Fey was so embarrassed remembering the slug incident (see Chapter 6 if you don't remember) that she failed to note Eliana's stumble over Jerendal's name.

“You already have the Guardian's Blessing, of course,” Eliana continued, “But you...” She turned to Blade. “We do not have any human guardians.”

Blade had no idea what Eliana was talking about, having not read the quest description or reward description. He glanced uncertainly between the two elves.

“Aww, come on, give him the blessing,” Fey urged. She thought it would be hilarious if Blade were to get a flower marking on his face as well. “It's really helpful,” she assured Blade with slightly too much enthusiasm, making him suspicious as to whether he actually wanted whatever they were talking about.

“Uh, it's okay,” he said, his hands rising a few inches, palms out, as his subconscious tried to defend him from Fey's sense of humour.

As if his reticence paradoxically made Eliana want to bestow the Guardian's Blessing (a contrary people, the elves), the ranger said, “Fine,” and began chanting.

Blade nervously backed up a step, then halted when nothing more threatening than the glow of light appeared. This time, golden light coalesced into a blue butterfly whose wings resembled mana blossom petals (as opposed to a mana blossom, which resembled a butterfly). It fluttered in its butterfly way indirectly towards Blade. Fascinated, the human warrior put up a hand in invitation, and the magical butterfly landed on the tip of his index finger (as opposed to on his face). In a flash of light, the butterfly disappeared, transformed into a solid blue tattoo of the silhouette of a butterfly in profile.

“Cool,” said Blade, infused with a sense of well-being.

“That's not fair,” complained Fey, “Why does he get to have it on his hand, and I have to have it on my face?”

Eliana raised an eloquent eyebrow (apparently a racial trait common to elves, based on Irrilana, Kallara, and now Eliana). “If you did not desire the marking on your face, why did you let it land there?”

“Nobody told me not to let it land on my face,” Fey grumbled.

“Nobody told him, either,” Eliana pointed out reasonably, indicating Blade.

“Bleh.” Fey hated it when she was on the unreasonable side of the argument.

“Well, if that is all, I will be leaving. Goodbye.” Eliana leaned against another tree and disappeared (*magical ranger powers*).

In the place Eliana had disappeared was a small pouch holding the gold reward for the quest in the form of ten 500g pieces, which Fey and Blade split evenly.

Fey and Blade travelled back towards Moonwood village. Fey was still feeling childish from the fact that her prank had not worked. Her mood was reflected in her gait, with her feet dragging along close to the ground and her upper body leaning slightly forward, making her resemble a really tall five-year-old shuffling along, hugging a flask instead of a stuffed animal. Blade was bemused at how easily his companion could switch between poise and intentional gracelessness.

Near their destination, Fey's alarm chimed, letting her know that she had been asleep for eight hours. “I'm logging out,” she announced.

“See you tomorrow?”

Fey made a non-committal sound (it sounded like “muh”) and exited the game.

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Footnotes:

[i] Chapter title credit goes to epithetic

[ii] Satisfaction or pleasure felt at someone else's misfortune

schadenfreude. (n.d.). Dictionary.com Unabridged. Retrieved October 23, 2014, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/schadenfreude