-6.

Maya laughed aloud with giddy relief.

The time had come, the die was cast, and the number was a mere -6. Plus the penalty, for a total of -11. She wasn’t going to risk re-rolling. That was good enough for her.

Never again would she cower in fear of such a minor misfortune. People would slightly increase their prices instead of snarling and slamming doors in her face. And with any luck - which wasn’t -100! - she might even gain some experience from tonight’s fighting and questing!

Which reminded her, new Trickster Quest! She could get that luck into the positive with no problem. The lower numbers were usually nice and easy. Lose an arena fight, lose a duel, what would she be losing today?

Trickster Day 9: Eat a doomshroom.

Probably poisonous, but shouldn’t be hard to find! Maya grinned and jumped out of bed, eager to get started. For the first time in what felt like ages, she could look forward to the day, sure that she could start making progress again.

Julios answered the knock at his door with an absent mumble, then took minutes and minutes to actually come out while Maya swayed impatiently from one foot to the other.

“Ready to go?” she asked, all but dragging him down the hall, before she remembered that she didn’t know her way around the building - player structures didn’t show interior layouts on her minimap, for some reason.

“Wow, Emma, you’re energetic all of a sudden.”

Maya grinned. “Yep! I’m feeling better than I have in days! Come on, let’s go kill stuff! Wait, first, do you have a sword or something?”

“Yeah, sure. Wait here a sec.” He backtracked to his room, where he tapped the storage chest by his bed, then returned to hand Maya a decent low-level blade. She equipped it, gave it a few practice swings, then nodded. “Good enough. Let’s go!”

It was fully dark now, evening having fallen during Maya's seclusion. They set out, and Julios gave her a detailed rundown of the sort of enemies that roamed the night, seemingly forgetting that he’d already told her earlier. Still, Maya didn’t mind. She wasn’t sure if she’d mind anything right then.

“Drile are much more common at night,” he was saying, “and goblins tend to congregate in larger packs or else lone scouts. Making it either much easier or much harder.”

“Respectively?” Maya asked.

“Er…” He seemed taken aback by her question, and she giggled.

They found their first goblin scout easily enough, hiding behind a tree half his width and staring out at the lantern-lit little village whose name Maya still couldn’t recall.

The fight was embarrassingly short. Even with Maya using an unfamiliar blade as a weapon, she was able to contribute to the kill. Which she did by throwing the sword into the goblin’s stomach from close range, but hey. She wasn’t a swordswoman.

After retrieving her blade and claiming the goblin’s loot - which actually existed! Minimal stats, but better than nothing - they set out again.

“We should check for quests again, it’s been long enough,” Maya said enthusiastically.

“Alright. Maybe they’ll be over their grumpiness earlier.”

Maya giggled again. “Probably so!”

Indeed, they searched the village and found two minor quests. Well, Julios found them. Maya found suspicious looks and uncertain expressions. But the upgrade from disdain and outright hostility was good enough for her. Nothing so minor could possibly burst her happiness.

They’d continued venturing further into the wildlands far north of Kalyx, in the untamed wooded hills just below the mountains. A river flowed somewhere nearby, hidden from sight by the trees but audible in the rushing of water.

“Why would they assign me to travel with you?” Julios asked, breaking the brief silence since he’d last stopped talking. “Shouldn’t you be off powerleveling with Jirell or Eon?”

“We’re collecting Kalyx City faith tokens, remember? It’s important.”

“But Rominian turns those in on a daily basis. We’re probably going to be competing with him for quests, which, I mean, no wonder we haven’t gotten any, right? So what’s the point?”

“I need to level,” Maya said. “Everyone else is busy elsewhere.” Then she grinned. “But if you have something else to get off to, I’d be glad to split up. I don’t think I need a babysitter.”

“I’m not going to fail my first major assignment so easily. For all I know this is a test.”

“Mmm. You never know. I could be reporting on you right now.”

“Are you?”

“No. But I could be.” Maya smiled. “What’s your deal, anyway? Why did you join Domitius?”

“Because he’s awesome! Do you even need to ask? This place is untapped potential to the max, man! I mean, it’s a whole planet with less than one continent unlocked so far. Can you even imagine how much there is left to explore? I mean! Before Domitius came along, no one thought tier six was even possible! They thought level 49 was the max. But now we’ve got three over that line, and more to come.”

“Three? I thought it was just Domitius and Shardlord.”

“You haven’t heard? Cydrin passed the Fifth Trial a couple days ago!”

Maya recalled his cocky attitude at Domitius’s council table, and Domitius’s warning not to get too full of himself. So that was why. Another player had reached tier 6. And a trickster at that.

Maya had to get back to the mage academy. Not that she’d be much use in her current state. But she just felt like she ought to be supporting the one group she might actually choose to ally with, rather than ending up involved in by chance or coercion.

“Hey, Julios, you’re well acquainted with the area. Do you know what a dooomshroom is or where I can find it?”

“They’re uncommon, an essential ingredient in almost all poisons. I believe there are some mid-level quests to collect them for an alchemist, though I haven’t seen any today. Did you get that quest?”

“No, a different quest. I need to eat one.”

“What? Why? Even unrefined, it’ll put a debuff on your health for like a week!”

Maya glanced at her energy, which remained flatly at 0 of 120. She didn’t want to add a health debuff onto her energy debuff, but for the +20 luck? She’d live with it. Or die with it, if it came to that.

“How big a debuff?”

Wonder of wonders, Julios didn’t have the answer. He rambled on at length about why he knew what little he did, how his feelings had gotten in the way of learning more, its general similarity to witherwood fir bark, and other tales of Julios - which Maya quickly stopped paying attention to once she realized the answer was basically ‘I don’t know.’

Since no one in their right mind would seek out a known poisonous plant to ingest, Maya could see how information on it might be uncommon - but not so insanely rare as it seemed.

“Isn’t there a World 9352 wiki out there somewhere?” Maya asked.

“Not much of one, last I checked. The fact that this world is off-grid makes it harder to update than most, and this isn’t a very popular world in the wider range. The fact that so many early worlds were limited to a few hundred people may add to their mystique, but who really wants to come to a disconnected backwater like this? I mean, most people have so many contacts, how would they live without being able to update their flow and everything? It’s mostly hardcore gamers here.”

Maya couldn’t help an incredulous look at that claim. “Hardcore? Really?”

“Well, present company excluded, I suppose. You’re. . . Why are you here?”

“Random chance? Being in the right place at the right time? Wanting a world that wasn’t solid desert?”

“There are a lot of desert worlds. I’m not sure why. They must have been popular back in the 2000s for some reason. They’re really annoying to play on though.”

“Hm.”

Julios continued to talk as they walked around through the forest in a wide half-circle, drawing nearer to the river for a while, then wandering away. Maya wondered if he even cared whether anyone was listening, or just liked hearing his own voice.

Maya kept an eye out for any mushrooms, but each time she thought she found something, Julios would shake his head and rattle off a list of reasons it couldn’t be a doomshroom.

“You’ll know it when you see it,” he insisted.

She didn’t know, and didn’t find one.

They did find many more goblins, either singly or in large camps. They found a nest of angry drile, which Maya found entirely confusing creatures. Furry grey four-winged rodents with no other limbs, their attack was to fly and bash at any attackers with their jagged, curved horns, or slap their long, ratlike tails with the force of a whiplash.

Altogether unpleasant little creatures, which Maya felt no guilt in slaughtering. They collected a good pile of items from them, wings and horns and a single tail from the lot, which Julios insisted would be useful for quests later. Maya was already carrying dozens of goblin weapons for the same purpose.

And, at long long last…

Your level has increased!

Finally, back up to level 9!

She didn't pause to revel in her success, nor was she sure enough of her build plans for Emma/Circe to assign her points yet. Time to see if she could bring this save route up to tier 1 max too.

They wandered around for hours, killing any potentially quest-item dropping creatures they came across. Only when Maya stumbled face-first into a tree did she realize it must be after midnight.

She brought up her mission list and scowled at the FAILED on her daily trickster quest. Doomshrooms were rare ingredients apparently, and she’d certainly kept an eye out for any. Since her longstanding debuff hadn't worn off until late the previous evening, she simply hadn't had enough time to finish.

Well. Maybe today would be better.

She rolled her Trickster’s Die immediately, and laughed aloud with relief when it came up at +57. A glance at her penalties, and, yes! The Trickster’s Curse was finally gone! No more guaranteed-negatives, no more crazy tricksters hunting her for retribution.

"Hah!" She screeched in triumph, punching the air with glee. She’d made it. Though everything seemed stacked against her, she’d withstood them all and emerged with her sanity and self-respect intact. And who cared about the rest.

Julios stopped talking and looked at her oddly, but at the moment Maya barely noticed his existence.

Even with the rollover of the late-day roll from earlier in the evening, the -10 only brought her luck down to a mere +47.

Then she glanced at her mission list, and her mood faded a bit. The quest to claim Standalone’s house had just flipped down to its final day. 23hr 57min. She was almost out of time, and she still hadn’t even reached level 10.

Trickster Day 10: Craft an [Exceptional] item.

And right on cue, she glimpsed something vibrantly green peeking out from beside a rotted stump.

“I don’t suppose this is a doomshroom?” Maya asked, leaning over to pick the wrinkled, poisonous-looking fungus. Its stem gleamed like amber and was sticky to the touch, while its broad wrinkled green-yellow top stood out against the surrounding foliage even in the dead of night.

“Yep! I told you you’d know it when you saw it. Congratulations!”

Maya looked at the evil-looking plant dubiously, then dropped it into her inventory. “I’m not eating that.”

“Your quest, your life. I wouldn’t either, if I were you. Sell it to an alchemist, they’re valuable.”

“I might do just that,” Maya said, thinking about how much more money she could make on a +47 luck day.

And boy, did that luck pay off.

They stopped back at the little town - Panaroth Village, it was called - at Maya’s insistence, and just happened to find three quests in their area for the new day. Two of them required trophy items they already had on hand, so they turned them in at once.

The rewards were something of a disappointment. After trickster quests, a way-too-high-level dungeon, and fighting in even higher level zones with Sevard, +5 reputation with Nonn the Alchemist and 3 silver just didn’t seem that satisfying. The other quest gave only 2 silver 50 copper, which when split between the two of them came out to an overall gain of less than 3 silver.

Had Maya once been excited by such small gains? Now she knew it wouldn’t cover even half of her arena entry fee, or buy any but the weakest and cheapest of items.

She felt like she’d outgrown her level, but as much as she felt she ought to be playing in the third or fourth tier, that wasn’t how things worked.

At least they both contributed to their local reputation level, which was the point. She didn't know how much would be required to trade in for tokens, but didn't want to ask. Right now, Julios rambled on. . . something about a mouse he'd once had in his house, and a neighbor's cat? Maya left him to it.

The longer the night wore on, the more dissatisfied she became. They finished five more quests (she’d long since received the tier-1 experience cap notification, and was now on the lookout for the Goblin Champion for her tier trial quest) but there was no real risk to any of these fights.

Even when attacking a full group of goblins, the creatures were level 2 or 3, their stats meager, and their threat minimal. Even not using magic, just flailing about with a borrowed sword, Maya had no difficulty in surviving.

There was no challenge here, and ever since hitting the top of tier 1, no sense of purpose. Sure, they killed all the random mobs, but what was the point of grinding once experience capped?

She kept searching for the Goblin Champion. Julios had said it could spawn in this area. But as dawn lit the sky, she still hadn’t found it.

And her time was running out.

“We should quit for the day,” Maya proposed, as they turned in their newest quest. “I have other things to take care of back at Kalyx City, and I’m really tired of killing drile and goblins.”

“We’re so close, though!” Julios whined. “Look, you’ve got 70 reputation with Panaroth, right? At 100 we can convert it to regional, which is what we need to gain the faith token. Would you really rather come back here another day?”

“Yes, very much so. I have time-sensitive things to take care of back at Kalyx City, and I’m really tired of killing drile and goblins. If you want to stay, be my guest. I don’t need your help finding my way around the city. I’ll meet you back at the castle tomorrow morning and we can keep hunting then. Okay?”

Julios hesitated. “I was told to stay with you.”

“And you don’t have any other goals of your own? No personal projects that would not be facilitated by hanging around with me?”

“Well…”

Maya turned to the Panaroth guardsman standing nearby. “Back me up here. There’s no need for us to travel together at this level unless we’re fighting or questing. Right?”

The guard nodded. “You’re both very capable warriors, I would be proud to fight alongside either one of you. But you clearly don’t require help. A simple trip back to Kalyx City? Why, even common merchants make the trip regularly without coming to harm.”

Maya nodded. “See?”

Julios glanced around, as though worried about being seen, then nodded. “Alright. I’ve seen you fight, I know you can handle yourself. And I do have something I’ve been working on at the castle. Just, don’t get yourself killed. I have a duty to protect you.”

“Yeah, great. See you there.” Maya hurried back to the Panaroth marketplace, purchased a Dust of Recall for 5 silver, and teleported back to the city. She had no interest in wasting hours in walking across the zone.

Arriving at the leypillar, blessedly free of Julios and his near-constant chatter, Maya paused just long enough to make a quick plan.

She had to find out if the Fire mages had figured out the dragon protection spell. If so, they could proceed even with her lack of advancement. Otherwise, she’d probably have to write the quest off as a failure - much as she loathed the idea - and switch her attention to figuring out the crafting system.

Since today’s quest was to craft something with [Exceptional] quality, it would surely require a lot of trial and error. At least luck was on her side today.

She headed first to the Domitian castle, returned to her room, saved the game, then loaded in her most recent Path of Life save.

Load successful: Path of Life 2

Maya took a moment to reacquaint herself with her stats, glad to be back over 200 health again. As much as she loved Seer’s utility - being able to calculate exact damage amounts necessary to bring down enemies was invaluable - going from 85 health to 233 was not a minor change.

She’d loaded into her apartment, so she'd need to make her way back to the mage academy by foot. But first, she had some cosmetics to adjust.

On this save she had everything Sevard had given her, including some extra universal and equipment dyes that she hadn’t needed to set up Twinkle’s persona. She activated her Trickster’s Mask interface and dragged several of the dyes into another new persona, naming this Mage Stader.

Her initial look had been mostly white, with black patterns and small purple accents. Now, she went with solid black. Her patterns had been custom, so simply recolouring them would do little to disguise her identity if anyone were paying attention. She’d like to add some purple and white back in later, once she could get to a makeover place again, but today was already a ticking countdown, she couldn’t afford to waste time on details.

She saved again, Path of Life 3, then loaded Seer 5 just to double check her equipment before reloading the new save she'd just made. She had to ensure that nothing from her Domitian persona remained in her Magi look, and vice-versa.

No problem. Between the gear she’d borrowed from Domitius, and the equipment from Sevard, she was able to swap out nearly everything. She had to go back to the basic newcomers leggings, as the only better ones she had beside her stupid dancer thing required level 19. Unequipping said stupid dancer thing dropped her health a couple points, but she had to create distance between her identities and she had to do so fast.

Now, time to see if she could still move forward with this insane conquest attempt, or if she was going to spend the day crafting.

Maya jogged to the mage academy, reveling in the returned speed offered by her Midnight Armor of Agility. She had gotten used to the slower speed, but it wasn’t the same.

A guard stepped forward to stop her before she could enter. She tried to push past him, then remembered that she’d changed her appearance. Of course he should be suspicious. Though. . . didn’t NPCs read players’ character details directly? You could hide from other players, but. . .

“I’m sorry, you’re not authorized to be here.”

“It’s just me, Maya. I changed my feathers, but I’m still the same person—”

But the guard shook his head. “I’m sorry, you’re no longer authorized to enter.”

Maya dodged around him, sprinting at the archway leading into the glittering academy, but he was faster. Before she knew what was happening, she was flat on her back, dizzy and disoriented. -8 health.

“What?”

“I’m sorry,” he repeated. “I really am, but you’re—”

“Not authorized, yes yes.” Maya got to her feet and brushed herself off. Unnecessarily, since dirt didn’t cling to her character here, but some habits were hard to break.

The guard watched her warily, but didn’t attack.

“Can you call Shardlord out here, then? I have information for him.” She couldn’t help noticing that no one was coming and going. Sure, it was still early morning, but usually there were at least one or two players moving around.

“Shardlord is currently busy. I can take a message.”

Maya shrugged. Nothing she had to say would really have much impact as a message. Besides, it wasn’t really Shardlord she needed to see, but the rest of her Fire team.

“What about Raidah, Tahpa, Fridget, Ranon, Nalana, or Desi? Are any of them around? They can vouch for me.”

“They are not.”

Maya snorted irritably. “Really? Everyone’s gone, so you’re going to just keep me out? What about my stuff, in my room?”

“I’m sorry, but you’re not authorized to enter.”

“Well, fine. I’ll be back.”

Maya hurried back to her apartment.

“Save game Path of Life 3. Load game 4 no specialization.”

The world froze, shifting to greyscale, and stayed that way.

Error loading save: 4 no specialization

Permissions mismatch, 'Mage Academy'

>Begin conquest

>Request access

>Load without location data

>Cancel