Author's Note: After pulling my notes together better and all, I decided it's still too early to be worthwhile to post a glossary of sorts. The main characters at this point are still in the dark about a lot of things -- including some important ones such as even what some of the abbreviations on the stats sheet actually represent. I'll wait until the characters themselves are a bit more aware of what things are and what they represent, before I gather all that information up and share it as a glossary for the reader's convenience.

Until then, all I can offer is a chapter of the story for your reading pleasure. I hope everyone enjoys!

The next week flew by in a flurry of the two of us pushing ourselves to our physical limits. My day basically consisted of me being a human battery for Isabella to feed off of, and to pick things up or move them, and then put them back down. She was getting to the point where she could absorb my life much more quickly than previously, and that made the pain of her doing so increase. But, it really wasn’t as bad as it sounds. As she got more skilled and pulled my life out quicker, my Physical Endurance increased. It hurt more, but I could endure more, and in the end it always just felt like some sort of stinking sunburn happening – only it happened quicker and was over sooner now!

The problem started on the second day, as she began to use her magic out faster than I could recover health. As the day went on, my wounds got worse and worse, and she ended up having to wait for me to recover before she could take any more of my life essence from me. I really need more CON! However, as much as I would like to train in CON, I didn’t have a clue how to make myself healthier. I couldn’t get health foods, or carrot juice, or anything like that to eat. No vitamins that I could find. I didn’t have a clue how to possibly train CON, so I worked on STR instead. I lifted the chairs over my head and sat them down. I climbed under the coffee table and bench pressed it. Isabella didn’t think it was heavy enough by itself apparently, so I ended up having to bench press it while she sat on it and giggled.

By the third day, Isabella had gotten so talented with the lifeflame that she could make two of them at once and throw them. At this point, she decided to stop practicing the spell completely. My health recovery just couldn’t keep up with her energy needs with the spell. Instead, she started to practice the Enchant Earth spell.

It’s a shame that the book doesn’t really explain what the spell is before you learn it, as Izzy was pretty shocked when she learned it. She was thinking that she might be able to enchant the earth to come to life and fight to protect us, like some sort of golem or earth elemental. Instead, the spell allowed her to place enchantments on items made out of Earth.

Silver, copper, steel, iron. Any sort of mineral that was basically found in the earth, she could enchant. MAGIC STUFF! It sounds completely awesome! Except it’s not. At least, not right now. Apparently enchantments have a set time for how long they can last, and that time limit is determined by the enchanter’s level and the amount of energy that they put into the item.

Izzy had a large energy pool to pull from by following The Way of The Lifestealer, but she was only level zero. Even when she put all 100 points of her energy into enchanting my metal rod so it would be wrapped in a lifeflame, it wouldn’t hold the enchantment for even a full hour. And, of course, it took me almost 5 hours to get all my life back after she recharged that 100 points from me!

Fifty minutes of a flaming stick, for the cost of all her mana, which ended up costing me 100 health, which took me five hours to recover from. No thanks. I don’t need an oversized candle that much right now. Maybe in the future Enchant Earth will be useful, but for now it really isn’t.

Another odd thing about enchanting: you have to enchant an item with another magic of some sort. A metal rod enhanced with Enchant Earth creates an enchanted metal rod. Which doesn’t do a whole lot, until you then cast a second spell like LifeFlame on it, when then makes it a metal rod with flames coming out of it until the enchantment wears off.

So for now, not only do the enchantments disappear quickly, there also aren’t a large assortment to what they can do. They have potential, but are useless for now. Poor Izzy. Spending all that time just to learn something that’s more or less useless right now. I’d be peeved if it was me, but she sees potential in it, so that’s OK I guess.

Since she thinks of it as a ‘potential spell’, she decided to save practicing it for later. I told her I thought that was a good idea, since it seemed to me that it didn’t matter if the spell fizzled half a dozen times before it worked. It wasn’t a battle type magic anyway. She just giggled and then kissed me on the nose.

Once she’d shelved learning that, she sat down and studied the Phantasm spell. Once she had it working, I thought it would be the type of magic to make a person richer than rich! She could basically make a true 3D movie!! Like “Beam me up Scotty” holodeck type movies!

Phantasm basically gathered the moisture in the air and created a cloud shaped like the user wanted, and then it colored it to perfectly look like what the user wanted. The process was slow as Izzy started practicing it, and the colors sometimes got off, and the image sometimes fell apart or smeared itself or something, but even then I could see the awesomeness of being able to make hologram-like images.

Izzy agreed with my assessment and spent the rest of the time in that week of preparation practicing and improving the Phantasm spell. By the last day, she had mastered it to the point that she could hold the images together, and even move them slowly. Something like an image of herself standing across the room and waving at me, while she was right there beside me, made my eyes bug out in awe. If only it somehow could produce sound to go with the image, who knows what all could be accomplished with such a spell?!

As for how me and Izzy are doing ourselves, I guess I could say we’ve gotten quite a bit closer. It doesn’t bother me to see her running around in her birthday suit anymore. I’ve stared at every inch of her so much, I can close my eyes and imagine whichever curvy goody that I want to almost perfectly. Part of the reason was because of her method of practicing her abilities now.

Now, no matter what Izzy is doing, she’s in one of those positions that makes a man’s eye pop out and his nose try to bleed. Like the other day, I turned around from chair-lifting, and my jaw almost hit the floor. She was sitting on her butt, both legs up in the air around the height of her shoulders, but wide out to the side of her naked body, and her hands were out at the sides touching her ankles.

“Upavistha Konasana,” she told me, so I answered, “Bless you,” and then she giggled so hard she flipped over backwards. “That’s the name of the asana,” she reassured me as she was stretching like a cat and showing everything oh-so-plainly as she was getting up. “It’s yoga.”

“They should call it ‘Heavenly Catcher’s Mitt’, if you ask me,” I told her.

She giggled and asked, “Why?”

“Cause it just looks to me like someone wants a guy to throw a couple of balls into home plate there,” I answered honestly. She laughed so hard she fell out of her cat pose and simply ended up on the ground in what I’m going to call the ‘Rolling Laughter’ pose.

Later, she was standing on one foot, bent over with her head down almost all the way to the ground at her ankles, with her other leg straight up in the air, and my eyes popped and my jaw dropped open. It was like she had tried a cartwheel and then gotten herself stuck like that! And the damnedest thing? While she was bent and twisted like that, she was trying to read the book which sat on the floor near her ankles. I don’t know what sneeze-like name she would call a pose like that, but I just call it the “One Eyed Welcome”.

One thing’s for certain, we seem to have a different sense of what to call things. She called it all “maximizing performance”. I just called it an amazing performance. Apparently she came to the conclusion that improving her DEX would help her guide and control her magic, and help her hit targets easier with her lifeflame. Unlike me, who tends to focus on one thing at a time, she was attempting to use yoga to stretch her body to become more flexible, while she was reading or practicing her magic at the same time.

One side effect of her training method was that I could stare at her all I wanted without getting flustered or bothered by it anymore. Let a woman shine her best bits at you for a week, and either you’ll go nuts or you’ll learn to just accept that they’re odd and enjoy it. I’d already given up on going nuts – the world had did that already – so I just decided she was odd, and I enjoyed the show.

As for the problem with Little Bud waking up every morning and stretching before me, that too ceased to be an issue. I thought it was something to be embarrassed as heck over, but Izzy called it something like “nocturnal penile tumescence” – how’s that for a mouthful! She said it was perfectly natural and ‘wood’ be the result of improving my CON so much. Apparently, with a twenty in CON, I was the healthiest teenager in the world. And apparently, that was true with Little Bud as well: He was the healthiest little helper any teenage boy could have in the world!

I thought it was still embarrassing, but Isabella firmly took matters into her own hands and fixed the problem. Now, most mornings, I woke up to a gentle massage while she snuggled tightly up to me and lightly nibbled on my neck. I told her I wasn’t certain that we should do such a thing yet, but she just giggled at me. “It doesn’t do anything to your ‘first’, if you shake hands with him does it? It shouldn’t be wrong if I introduce myself and shake hands with him either.”

I tried to think through what she was saying, but Little Bud was yelling that it was OK, and Izzy was giggling and going on with her introduction, and in the end I just enjoyed the moment. Since then, just about every morning has been a case of her taking matters into her own hands and dealing with the issue. A few mornings, I’ve awoken to her snuggled in tight with her arms around my neck while she rubbed her legs or hips against me, much as I had her that embarrassing morning a lifetime ago, but the end result was always the same. My better part always went back to sleep nice and contented afterwards, my brain was broke from enjoying the process while still kind of thinking it was wrong, and Izzy usually got up with a warm stain across her chest, or leg, or something. I mentioned I was sorry about that once, and she stomped on my foot for some odd reason, which didn’t hurt, and then she refused to even wipe it off. There was a crusty, flaky spot across her belly and thigh that day and if I ever looked like I wanted to say anything about it, she just gave me a glare that seemed to say, “Tough. Get used to it, it’s no big deal.”

I swear, I’ll never understand women.

But, that’s more or less how we spent the second week of our time after The Crackening. Izzy thought my naming sense needed some work, but I thought the moment needed a title of some sort. Since The Crack caused it, The Crackening sounded perfect to me, so that’s what I’m going to call it from now on.

So far, no one has came for us, and we haven’t been disturbed in our safe-zone. Of course, Izzy isn’t even certain if this is a safe-zone now. She’s went to calling Jello-Muncher the “Guardian of the Halls”. She thinks that since it’s roaming up and down the hallways, everything is just staying away from the path it travels upon. And, since we’re near the end of that path, everything just avoids coming this way to a dead end where they might accidently bump into it.

Jello-Muncher ate my ass, and yet it might be the reason we’ve been safe. That just doesn’t sit well with me for some reason.

As to the results of all the training on my part over the last week? I finally, finally, finally managed to improve my strength by one whole point. It’s now a ten and up to where I should’ve been if I wouldn’t have been such a lazy slacker and doing nothing all the time before The Crackening. And my Physical Endurance which I just got a week ago? It’s now been trained up to a 42! Talk about amazing!

I feel like if one of those rats were to jump on my leg and bite me now, I could just stand there and watch it nibble for a bit, and then pick it up and hug it and squeeze it and cuddle it and call it George!

Author's Reference: For those who may not understand, I thought I'd share this: Spoiler :

Oh! And before I forget to mention it. Rat sucks!

Rat for breakfast. Rat for lunch. Rat for supper.

Rat for breakfast. Rat for lunch. Rat for supper.

Rat for breakfast. Rat for lunch. Rat for supper.

Rat for breakfast. Rat for lunch. Rat for supper.

Rat for breakfast. Rat for lunch. Rat for supper.

Rat for breakfast. Rat for lunch. Rat for supper.

Rat for breakfast. Rat for lunch. Rat for supper.

I’m so sick of rat! We finally used up all the meat that we’d wrapped and stored in the bottom of the fridge, and all that is left now is a few days of frozen rat up top in the ice box . Isabella suggested that it would probably be a good time for us to leave and scout around a bit to learn all we can about the pattern Jello-Muncher travels and what’s around us, and I agree.

Tomorrow is the big day. That’s when we’re going to head out of here and start looking around. We don’t plan on going far for now, we still have some frozen rat (BLAH!) left here, so there’s still a few days left to be cautious and plan what to do next.

But, if I didn’t say it properly before, let me say two things clearly now:

One: Rat sucks!

Two: I think I just might be becoming a demon worshipper, and somehow I’m OK with that.