Levi considered his options. Aside from the basic abilities, which would each cost a single ability point to unlock, there were Levi's own species-wide abilities, costing double for Shadevine, but still available if you knew where to look:

Shadevine: Enhanced Drain (0/5)

Shadevine minions will drain enemies 20% faster

(Upgrade: 2 ability points)

Shadevine: Advanced Elongation (0/5)

Shadevine minions can stretch or thin themselves up to 20% more

(Upgrade: 2 ability points)

Levi ran as he thought, the motion so automatic by now that he barely registered it.

Shadevine had a very different sort of available set of options than most of his other minions. Gremlins were highly biased towards being ambush attackers; Stone Centipedes as off-tank debuffers.

Shadevines, it looked like, were almost entirely reactive defence. Even the mobility options, Advanced Elongation and Branching, were minimally effective sounding at best. 20% sounded way too minimal for the two points it would cost, and unless he ended up with a large army of shadevines it would be a wasted investment.

But Levi didn’t need a stationary defence. He looked over the options again, then put a point into Branching, giving Shadevine the ability to split his vine shape up to four times. Then, since he was hanging out with Frosty so much and it seemed appropriate, he dropped another point in. Now Shadevine could have eight legs too, if the desire struck him. Levi smiled at the thought of Shadevine scuttling after Frosty, the two of them pouncing on enemies from the ceiling together. It would help give him some semblance of a personality, too, having the ability to gesture with more than a wiggly body.

Of course, aside from the cool factor of turning Shadevine into a drain-spider, there was also the sheer utility. The ability to slink around grabbing and draining multiple enemies at once could be decisive in massed combat. Perhaps not so much in dungeons, but Levi could easily imagine throwing Shadevine into a charging army of hellhounds and tripping them up, draining them, and scampering on to the next ones before they could retaliate. It would shift Shadevine’s place in the party from ‘technically there’ to ‘actually dangerous’.

He considered going for a third point in branching, but figured eight was enough for now and he wanted to try out some of the other options too. The problem was, they all seemed very helpful. Unseen would help Shadevine sneak around and remain undetected longer. Expansive would give him immediate utility in size, and opened the door to some interesting options with growing and shrinking strategically. And Savage Blood would add an ongoing damage effect to anything that managed to hit him, which was never going to be useless.

There would always be next threshold to try out the others…

Hm. That reminded him; his second threshold, he’d been offered options generally connected to those he’d already chosen. So if he couldn’t decide between options now, perhaps he could choose between paths.

Unseen was obviously a stealth path, Expansive the melee, while Savage Blood seemed a more defender route. Though all three would be useful for any of the roles, he suspected the next ability would be at least vaguely along those lines.

He already had the centipedes as defenders, and his team’s melee was already doing fine. Shadevine’s role was to be the unnoticed drain weakening enemies. Now that he’d have better mobility, it might be harder to go unnoticed, so Unseen it was.

Shadevine: Level 5 Shadevine +

Strength: 3

Health: 65/65

(+16/min)

Psyche: 2

Mana: 135/135

(+14/min)

Spirit: 0

Stamina: 40/40

(+10/min) Evolution Progress: 1/5 Unseen 1 - 2 mana/sec Decrease the visibility of substance by 20% Branching 2 - Full control over up to eight splits in form.

An hour later, Levi arrived at Gayle’s house to find Laurence had beat him there. Cen, Becca, and Shadevine were already waiting for his return.

Shadevine seemed notably more alive now as he slithered up to Levi, having elected for four very short splits on each side giving himself more of a mini-centipede look than the spider Levi had imagined, using his ‘legs’ to propel himself forward at a much increased rate, fully mobile now instead of riding on one of the others. As soon as he saw Levi, he ran over to bop Levi's shoe, then two of his ‘leg’ splits disappeared as he split his ‘head’ in three to give an awkward sort of hug to Levi’s ankle.

“Glad to have you back too,” Levi said, smiling down at his little shadevine. “Don’t worry, we’ll get you bigger in no time.”

Shadevine waved his head(s?) in agreement before shifting his form again and reversing direction, turning his ‘tail’ into his new ‘head’ as he slithered back to Frosty's arm. Once there, he wrapped himself around her shoulder opposite Plus and relaxed into his standard unsplit vine form.

"Glad you had a good trip," Levi said, smiling as Cen and Centoo good-naturedly stabbed one another with their clawed legs.

Levi left them to it and headed inside.

"Peter?" Levi asked, when he found Irene, Cassandra, Gordon, and Laurence already sitting around in the family room.

"Upstairs," Irene said. "Mom's reading to him."

"I've been thinking a lot about what you said," Gordon said without preamble. "I want to go get Robert."

Levi met his eyes and saw the firm determination there, and nodded. "Just say the word, and we'll go."

"This week."

"Alright. I'll take care of it. Do you have the address?"

Gordon pushed a paper with the address, and driving directions from their current location to the town where Nancy lived. "Try not to hurt her," he said, weakly. "I know she can be... a bit much, but if you can avoid harming her, please do."

"I'll be as gentle as possible," Levi said. "Should I bring her along?"

Gordon shook his head. "Only if she wants to come. I doubt she will, but you can give her the chance if you think it's worth it. But don't force her. She'd be no good to us under duress, and more of a hindrance than much of anything else I can think of."

"Understood."

Cassandra cleared her throat. "I've been thinking a lot about what you said, about the future."

"That's what I wanted to talk to you all about," Levi said, smiling with a grateful nod for the opening. “I think our first goal should be to Awaken as many people as possible. It’s a lot safer to curate leveling than Awakening, especially at higher levels.”

“Wouldn’t the danger be exactly the same?” Gordon asked. “If you have someone chuck a rock at a monster, what does it matter if they’re doing it to increase experience or to become Awakened?”

“Awakened people have innate defences and advantages,” Levi said. “What would outright kill an ordinary person can be mitigated with elixirs and support spells, but those can only be used on Awakened.”

“I haven’t heard about this.” Cassandra had a folder of papers with her, which she put a hand over unconsciously as she leaned forward. “What happens if someone outside the system uses a potion?”

“Bad things. The side effects for Awakened are because it uses the body’s own resources in a brief, intense cycle to draw more than would ordinarily be possible. A health restorative draws from the physical body to start the conversion to health, which then rapidly repairs the damage the elixir did and then goes on to fix everything else, and you end up with a net gain because the restorative added power to the process. But if you have no health to be increased, all that internal damage will be left for your natural healing process to deal with, which is much slower and less effective than system health. Raw mana can act like a toxin if not absorbed properly, and mana restoratives are highly concentrated mana. Stamina is probably the safest, but even if it does nothing particularly detrimental, it doesn’t provide any benefit either."

"And you didn't think to mention this sooner? We could have tried to help people and ended up hurting them."

"I haven't had to think about it for a long time. But you understand my point. Not just for combatants, but anyone who may be hurt, we should try to Awaken as many people as possible."

"There are how many dungeons?"

"Thousands."

"And they reset every 24 hours."

"Yes."

"And how many people can be Awakened in a dungeon in a day?"

Levi shrugged. "Maybe four or five per monster, if you stretch it out as far as it could go. So... a hundred or so?"

"It might work..." Cassandra frowned, tapping her fingers as she pondered, then shook her head. "We have three months, close to a hundred days. If we were able to get everyone in the area into a dungeon as quickly as possible and not waste anything, we could get a max of ten thousand people per dungeon before invasion day. If we round up to ten thousand dungeons, that's a hundred million people."

"Less than a third of the population," Laurence pointed out. "And that assumes we do nothing but Awaken. We need people to level as well, or all the newly Awakened will just be killed anyway. Given what you've said so far, it would be far more efficient to have a small force stationed in each region that are as leveled as possible, rather than spreading the available experience too widely."

"It's easier to Awaken in a low level dungeon than survive long enough to reach level 1 in a higher level dungeon,” Levi reminded them. “Some of the dungeons become hazardous just to enter, and without high level defences to protect you, it would be dangerous or deadly to even try."

“I’m inclined to agree with Laurence, I think it’s more important to have a few thousand dedicated groups that can each take responsibility for their own region.” Cassandra flipped open her folder. “And I have a plan for how to get them.”