Cuddles and a Lesson

This felt wholly surreal. Not only was a girl snuggled up to John while more or less sitting in his lap. The girl was also a highly attractive monster girl. With an absolutely phenomenal ass, that he was ogling just minutes ago. In his lap.

And with that, John’s dick started stirring. Time to try to find something to distract himself enough with to prevent that from becoming a problem. “By the way, you mentioned that what Gaia did had implications?”

“Mmhm.” Qhila nuzzled her face against his chest briefly before shifting enough to avoid muffling her speech. “I looked up how relationship scores usually work in video games. If I understood it right, a deity of video games could probably use their powers to make someone trust or like the ‘main character’ more, or less. Basically, do what we were afraid your powers might have done.

“Manipulating an item that wasn’t made by something to do with video games, or altering the consciousness of someone with no connection to video games in a different manner, is a much bigger stretch since that isn’t how video games seem to do it. Doing it with magic instead of divine gifts would require either actively stalking you or extensive preparations. Preparations that would require the ability to predict that you would act spontaneously…”

John raised a brow. “Couldn’t Gaia just kinda, uh, Supreme Deity at it though?” ’Saying that really shouldn’t be more Main Character Syndrome when she actually did apparently do something unusual.’

Qhila lightly shook her head, which in their current position meant she more or less rubbed her cheek against his chest. “It probably isn’t actually the Supreme Deity. Even if ‘The Lady’ is actually the Supreme Deity like the GROies believe and not just the most successful fraud, blessing the Wardens makes it two times in the last ten thousand years that the Supreme Deity did something. Meanwhile, there have been dozens of false prophets, and in some of those cases, the ‘prophet’ didn’t know about the falsehood.”

“Oh…” John hadn’t considered that. But he also didn’t really know what to do differently with that perspective. At least he had chosen not to tell anyone besides Qhila about it in the first place. Not really knowing what else to say following that, he commented on the bit about predicting his reaction to the first rat ogre, “I’m afraid it wouldn’t take much to guess what I’d do when the rat ogre appeared. I kinda have a history of getting beaten up by an asshole at school because of interfering when he’s giving someone else shit… But hey, at least I managed to beat him today for a change.”

Qhila shook her head by rubbing her cheek against his chest again and half-muttered, “Heroic fool.” This time, instead of a tinge of melancholy, it just sounded… affectionate maybe? John wasn’t entirely sure, but whatever it was, it took the potential for sting out of it as effectively as the previous melancholy.

Then she just sat there quietly, nuzzling into him slightly. John considered trying to fish out another topic of distracting conversation, but the previous one had actually failed. Well, mostly failed, anyway. He was definitely past the point where it seemed possible for Qhila not to have noticed.

But if she had reacted at all, he had missed it. Perhaps… perhaps she just understood that male biology did that and had decided not to make a big deal out of it if he didn’t. That was an arrangement John was perfectly happy with, so he decided to just relax and enjoy the moment.

And enjoy it he did. The light but still noticeable weight of her small body against him. The muted feeling of the heat of her skin passing through his shirt. The slight friction when she nuzzled into him. The delectable balance of firmness and squish of her butt and thighs when she shifted slightly in his lap. The sound of her breathing getting slower and deeper and the feeling of tension leaving her body as she relaxed more and more into him.

If anything in existence could rightly be called heaven, John was certain he had found a little piece of it. He had long since lost count of the amount of times he had imagined cuddling with a cute girl. Yet despite his imagination being vivid and well practiced, he now knew that it had been utterly unequal to the task of predicting how wonderful it would be.

John had completely lost his sense of time. It could have been minutes, it could have been hours. Well, a small part of his mind that remained cognizant of his remaining plans for the day pointed out that it could at most have been a bit more than an hour. Otherwise, the alarm on his phone would’ve gone off, warning him that it was time to head to Brighton Manor.

But the cuddles ended as suddenly as they had started. One moment, she was snuggled against his chest, then she swallowed, abruptly went stiff as a board, and shot away from him like she had burned herself by touching him. John got a glimpse of her flushed cheeks and the glassy look in her amethyst eyes before she turned away and started towards the door to her alchemy workshop.

“We should spend our time productively, you still have a lot of growing to do.” Her tone was one of **** evenness, similar to the one she had used yesterday when they set off to the forest. Yet something about her that he couldn’t put his finger on prevented the dread from then to rise anew. Even for the fraction of a second it took to note that her RP had shot up to 105.

It took John a moment to get up and mentally change tracks. “About that, what about a lesson in the basics of alchemy? I got the Skill from a book, but the only knowledge that came with it was about mundane chemistry. Besides, I have a Quest to Observe magical phenomena that I didn’t cause, and I’m guessing there’ll be at least some alchemy stuff that qualifies.”

“Sure, do you have any particular questions or should we just go at magical reactions in general?”

John rubbed his chin for a moment. “‘In general’ was what I was going for, but my alchemy skill is called Low Alchemy, and I was wondering if that means there’s a high alchemy or if it’s a system thing that means the skill can be upgraded.”

“There is,” Qhila confirmed as they entered her workshop. It seemed to be a copy of some sort of maintenance station originally, now outfitted with various glassware, ceramics, and clear tubing, a few bunsen burners attached to small gas cylinders and some devices John couldn’t identify. Unsurprisingly, there was a lot of magic item glittering going on, mostly of the dull gray color that matched ‘common’ rarity.

She checked on the swirly blue and white liquid in a beaker placed in a bowl of sand before elaborating. Whatever it was, she seemed to decide to let it be. “High alchemy is the creation and use of cohobated mana. Low alchemy is the study of how magical substances react to one another and how to put that to use. The fields are heavily entwined and more or less share origins. Many uses of cohobated mana require compounds that don’t form naturally, some of which have very short shelf lives. In the reverse, most low alchemy work is made a lot easier with some high alchemy and a few things outright require it.”

“Is it better to cover a mix of both at the same time then?”

Qhila scratched at the scales on the back of her hand. “I can’t give any demonstrations of high alchemy, and my theory on it isn’t the greatest either… It’s rare for a kobold to have a strong enough aura to do any.”

“Oh.” John awkwardly scratched the back of his head.

“That’s why it is ‘high’ and the other is ‘low’, high alchemy is the more exclusive club. The ‘feeble’ races like kobolds and goblins mostly can’t get there, and most other demihumans can only manage the basic ones supporting low alchemy. The advanced stuff is only for the exceptional. Meanwhile, anyone with the right recipe, ingredients, and maybe some charged quartz can do a lot of low alchemy, and aside from a few things, advancing is entirely about being smart and putting in the work. The actual power comes from the materials.”

“... That naming convention sounds like some pretentious bullshit. In any case, my skill says ‘low’, so I’m pretty sure that’s the important part to learn at the moment. Plus, if aura strength and my Levels are related, yours is probably still stronger than mine.” John ventured some encouragement.

“In any case, you should try Observing the congealing crystal lightning,” She gestured at the beaker she had inspected earlier, then pointed at a scuffed leather tome the size of a notebook, “and find the recipe for drywater while I get some ingredients.”

Actually hitting the process itself with Observe rather than the beaker or the liquid in it took a few tries, but it did increment his Quest. Meanwhile, touching the tome produced a window.

Learn Qhila’s Formula Book?
Note: learning recipes does not take up academic capacity
Yes|No

“... I assume you don’t have an extra copy of this lying around.”

Qhila looked over from the cabinet she was getting stuff from. “No. But most of the formulas are in common formula collections available in a lot of stores. Grave Concoctions probably has one, and the Abyss Market and the Auction definitely do.”

“I’ll have to get me one of those then,” John noted as he started leafing through the tome.

That proved to be a very fruitful lesson. John wasn’t certain how much was Qhila’s ability as a teacher and how much was the benefit of being the only student so things could progress at his pace. The end result was that he felt like he had learned more in an hour than he would’ve in a few weeks’ worth of classes at Ashcroft, even on a streak of classes that were interesting enough to bother paying attention.

Most of the actual alchemy stuff he had learned wasn’t really immediately useful in any real way, it was largely building blocks of understanding and demonstrations through examples that were either instructive or consisted of making ingredients into other ingredients. That last part was probably going to be useful when he got a formula collection to absorb though.

The only one with immediate practical uses was drywater. It turned water, or aqueous solutions that fit a set of parameters, into a powder with about 10% less volume and weight. Running a bit of mana through it or getting it wet then turned it back into the original amount of water. While John could see how that could be useful on a larger scale for stuff like logistics, for his personal use he already had his inventory.

On his system’s end of things, the results were a lot more interesting. For one, he had found out that he could learn a crafting recipe from making something, even if the Item Level was higher than his Craft and Low Alchemy Levels. He just couldn’t use the Skill to make it, not even by the ‘put his body on autopilot’ method. He had to sit and follow the instructions manually like everyone else. It also didn’t get the Quality Factor benefit of the skill.

Secondly, he was 2 phenomena away from bumping up Observe. The cherry on top, however, was that Low Alchemy actually had Leveled Up along the way. As it turned out, Observing a reaction for the first time granted him 4-5 Skill EXP. They had discovered that towards the end, so they hadn’t had the time to set up a reaction with more powerful ingredients, or more exacting requirements, to see if that changed the amount.

For now, John was leaving. It wouldn’t do to be late for his meeting with the leader of one of the most important guilds in Springfield. Who was taking time out of managing a war to meet with John. The magnitude of that was starting to sink in and stir up some nervousness.

He could worry about that in a moment though, for now it was time to say goodbye, since Qhila had followed him topside. Presumably for that very purpose. “Well, that’s that I guess. See you tomorrow and thanks again for the lesson.”

He had half-turned to wave at her, and found the small alchemist scratching the back of her hand while looking away. “You ne- we should hug goodbye.”

“Sure.” John closed the half step between them.

She was still looking away from his face as she decided, for whatever reason, to explain, “It’s kobold custom. I gave you a keystone so you’re a friend of the- well, there is no tribe. But friends see each other off w-”

Qhila dropped the explanation mid-word because he’d dropped to one knee and pulled her into a hug. It was adorably obvious that she wasn’t being entirely forthright about why she had asked for one, but to begin with he had needed no more reason to hug her than that she asked.

She almost melted into the hug, leaning on him and nuzzling her face into his shoulder. When John thought it had lasted as long as a goodbye hug normally would, at least one from his mom anyway, Qhila was showing no signs of stopping. So John just enjoyed the closeness for a bit longer. But eventually, the feeling that he did need to get going started nagging at his enjoyment, bringing him to let go and pull back. She did the same, though she seemed a little slow to do so, and once they had ‘untangled’ he left the barrier.