The Abyss Web

The rest of the evening went largely like they usually did when John’s grandparents came by for dinner. That is to say, they talked about various recent goings on for a while before inevitably transitioning into getting stories out of Sam. One would think that over the course of 18 years, John had managed to hear every story his grandpa had to tell, but about half the time the old man got to it, it was a story John couldn’t remember hearing before.

Eventually, the old folks went home, and John and Brenda went upstairs to turn in. Or his mom was going to turn in, he assumed. Personally, he wasn’t quite ready to go to bed yet, though he was starting to feel the ‘increased need for sleep’ side effect of the Babel Incense. Or maybe it was because it had been an exhausting day. On second thought, probably a bit of both.

In any case, he was standing in the door to his room when his mom stopped on her way to the bathroom down the hall. “Sleep tight, John. Don’t spend half the night playing games on your phone.”

John returned fire with a chuckle, “I know you think Candy Crush is the best invention since sliced bread, but mobile gaming doesn’t really meet my standards.”

Brenda just shook her head with a smile and moved to continue past him. On a whim, John decided to throw a new Observe at her since it had leveled up a few times since this morning.

Brenda Newman
Lvl 9, housewife.
MILF
37 years old
Relationship: 200
Mother of: The Gamer

That brought a tear to John’s eye. The good kind of tear. It wasn’t that he had had any doubt that his mother loved him, or that he loved her for that matter. Still, seeing the literal Word of God(dess) state that she loved him as much as it was humanly possible was deeply touching.

With an urgency he didn’t quite understand himself, John took a half-step towards his mother and hugged her tightly from the side. Brenda moved to reciprocate as well as she could, but since the arm that was turned towards him was pinned between them, it mostly amounted to patting his arm gently with her free one.

After a few moments, she spoke a bit breathlessly, “Not that I mind a hug, but that was rather sudden and you’re making it a little hard to breathe. Is everything okay, sweetie?”

“Yeah, it’s just…” What could he even say? Not what had brought this on, clearly. Some of the roil of emotions that seeing her RS had caused? That might work. While he thought, he loosened the hug a bit. Whatever he ended up saying, it wouldn’t do to squeeze the life out of her while he was at it.

“I love you, Mom, and… I’m sorry for what I put you through today…” That was… well it wasn’t why he had felt the need to hug her, or at least not the full reason. But it was true, and it was things he was feeling right now. The love and gratitude and some awe-adjacent positive feeling he couldn’t put to words had been first, but the guilt hadn’t been far behind. Guilt for his own failings seldom were.

Brenda turned in the embrace and gave her son a proper return squeeze. “It’s okay, sweetie. You scared me, but I know you didn’t do it on purpose, and you apologized and took responsibility. And you did the most important thing: you came home in one piece.”

Considering how close he had come to ****, that didn’t dispel his guilt. Then again, he was certain she would be proud of why he had put himself in harm’s way if she knew. Not knowing what to say, he just gave her a quick second squeeze before letting go.

Brenda smiled reassuringly at him for another moment, before proceeding towards the bathroom and continuation of her evening routine.

John withdrew to his room, and spent the next few minutes in thought. He struggled against the feelings of guilt, and did so by way of reiterating to himself that he had done the best he could. Even in retrospect, he couldn’t think of anything he could have done differently that would have produced a meaningfully better result.

Eventually, John realized that no resolution to that internal conflict was forthcoming, and with some effort managed to push it away by turning his attention elsewhere. Specifically to the Abyss Auction intro package he pulled out of his inventory.

It looked like a black DVD box without a label. Inside it were a folded piece of paper and two flat, metal plates about half the size of a smartphone and the color of tinfoil. Each of the plates also had a stylized black thumbprint on one side.

The plates were probably the upgrade kits, but how to use them was a mystery, as was the blank paper. Mysteries Observe could hopefully solve.

That made sense. Probably what usually happened was the recipient touched the paper and it explained stuff. John gave the other kit an Observe as well, hoping to tick up his Skill Quest. Unfortunately that didn’t happen, so he proceeded to mentally grouse a bit about imprecise quest wording, while starting the kits on his phone and computer.

Once activated, the metal instantly turned liquid without heating up, flowed to the nearest opening, be it a cable port or a fan, and seeped inside. John quickly threw another Observe at it in action, hoping it might count as a magical phenomenon, which it did. Then he turned his attention to the letter, while the kits did their thing.

The moment he touched it, a faint, icy-blue light rippled from the point of contact and over the paper, leaving text behind. As he had expected, it came with an explanation of how to use the upgrade kits. It also came with instructions for accessing the website, either via its mundane internet mirror or directly via Abyss Web protocol, and some of the typical platitudes stuffed into welcome messages for customer membership programs.

Much more interestingly, it informed him of a one-time discount of 10% on his first order. The discount was capped at $1,000 or an equivalent value in other accepted currencies, but John had a hard time imagining that he would get anywhere near the $10,000 order he would need to hit that cap.

After ten minutes of browsing the Abyss Auction website, capping the discount made perfect sense. Anything even remotely magical was super expensive. Even something as trivial as a self-cleaning handkerchief cost more than $100. The magical consumables that went for less than triple digits were cosmetic and personal hygiene products with magically improved function, like shaving cream that inhibited hair growth.

The cheapest healing potions John could find cost $150, and going by the description, they were a heal-over-time kind of deal. The cheapest that promised instantaneous healing were a batch on auction with a current bid that came out to about $225 a piece. Meanwhile, the cheapest permanent magic item that could be considered actually power-boosting gear and not just vanity or quality of life improvements were in the four digits.

Even the mundane items on sale looked pretty expensive, and a quick trip to pricerunner confirmed that there was a markup even over the more expensive end of offers in the mundane world. It wasn’t bigger than to be arguably justified if the promise of delivery in ‘Less than 1 hour*’ held up, and the stuff behind the asterisk wasn’t too onerous.

The good news was that his Achievement rewards for earlier today were worth a small fortune, at least by mundane standards. On top of that, the category for ‘alchemical ingredients’ had things for sale for as little as $45. That meant that with some startup money, some more ranks in Low Alchemy, and the right recipes, he could probably earn pretty good money crafting.

The Auction also accepted 3 other currencies besides USD, though the closest thing to one John had heard of was ‘Gold Sovereign’, which he was pretty sure a few fantasy games called their gold coin. ‘Maybel’ meant nothing to him and ‘Soul Shards’ sounded… unpleasant.

Still, he should probably look into this stuff. Qhila had considered his ability to poke around the Abyss Web for information important, and this seemed as good a place as any to start. Especially if harvesting weak Late Bloomers for Soul Shards was a thing.

The currencies had an embedded link that explained some basics, though the part about Soul Shards was about quality standards and essentially useless to him. It did have a link for further information that he’d take a look at after reading the other currencies.

The USD paragraph briefly explained what USD is, making it mostly useless to John since he already knew. The only kinda new information there was that most Abyssal transactions on Earth, between Earth and a Kingdom or between different Kingdoms used USD. The former of those, he had assumed to be the case anyway, and the rest was probably not going to matter to him in the foreseeable future. It had a Wikipedia link for further reading, as well as one to the same domain as the Soul Shard link.

The ‘Gold Sovereigns’ bit explained that it was originally a specific, widely circulated coin from Abyssal and mundane reality both, which is probably why it had become a fantasy staple of sorts, but that at present the Auction accepted any gold coin of at least 22 Karat, weighing at least slightly less than 8 grams. It then mentioned a few coins that fit, and provided further reading links like the part about USD.

The ‘Maybel’ section turned out to be the most interesting one. Maybel was apparently a unit for measuring mana. The section explained that only mana in an ‘external storage’ was valid, and that the value of the storage unit itself was forfeit when used to pay in this manner.

That theoretically gave John the possibility of a passive incoming of several $ per minute, depending on how efficient a storage option he could get a hold of, and assuming that 1 Maybel and one MP was the same. That mana was probably better spent improving his skills, though, given the dangers of the Abyss. Much more interesting was the possibility of storing excess mana for his own later use, if the way to do so wasn’t too cumbersome.

On the topic of storing excess mana, or at least the closest he could get to doing so at the moment, he grabbed an empty soda bottle, screwed on the lid as tightly as he could and channeled Conjure Inferior Alchemist’s Fire towards filling it until he was almost dry. Then he went back to reading. With his Food Buff from dinner, it’d take a bit less than 15 minutes before he was topped out and wasting regen again.

Then it was time for the further reading links, which took him to the website of the ‘Librarians of Alexandria’. That turned out to be more or less an Abyssal Wikipedia, except it gave suggestions for further reading in a sidebar on every article, which linked back to the Abyss Auction, directly to the suggested book being posted for sale by the Librarians.

The article on Soul Shards was, unfortunately, more or less what he had expected. They were made by crystallization of the ‘spiritual energy’ released by a dying creature. Specifically a sophont with a soul even, although the article did call out that despite their name, Soul Shards weren’t made from the soul, but from the spirit.

John wasn’t sure what that distinction meant, and he wasn’t sure he cared. Especially given that the article said that a slow, drawn-out **** provided for the greatest harvest. Even in the best case scenario, this currency looked morally sketchy as fuck and like the kind of thing where making the stuff incentivized being as vile as possible. If he could at all help it, he would stay the hell away from this.

At this point, John’s MP was full again, and he sunk another 40 into making Alchemist’s Fire. He didn’t run his proverbial tank completely empty, because the ‘occasion’ for his second Augment Body was likely to start before too long.

The ‘further reading’ link on Maybel led to an article on mana storage, which was exactly what John had been after. It turned out that there were 2 useful types of mana storage. Liquid storage, which the article cautioned against confusing for something called ‘Mana Condensation’, and mana batteries.

Liquid storage sounded like it was basically mana potions. The stored mana could be retrieved very easily via drinking it, and the effect happened very fast. The downsides were that creating the liquid mana in the first place was a complex process and a very inefficient one. Most of the mana was essentially lost to the process. It also evaporated slowly if not kept in an airtight container, but that was less of an issue. All in all, it seemed like the kind of thing that was useful for emergency reserves but probably not for regular use.

Mana batteries, it said, were a far more efficient storage in terms of mana lost. The downsides were that equipment was needed for retrieval as well as storage, and that the rate of retrieval was orders of magnitude slower. Additionally, better batteries were both more expensive to make and required more expensive tools to use.

Fortunately, quartz was apparently a natural mana battery, if one could live with slow charge and discharge rates and low efficiency. Low for a mana battery, anyway, as it was still more than twice as efficient as liquid storage.

John finished the article, and was about to check if the Librarians’ website had one on Springfield when the light in the window facing the window in his room was turned on. With a smile, he put away his phone, eyed his MP and got comfortable in his chair.