Return to the Regularly Scheduled Programming

When John woke up the next morning, he turned off the alarm without opening his eyes. He wanted to cling to this wonderful dream of having magical powers. Sure, fighting for his life had been scary, and having to hide all of it from his family had sucked, but even during those parts, he had had a feeling that his actions and choices mattered.

That was something that had been completely absent from the gray slog that had dominated most of his day for years. That was why, when his mom knocking on his door brought him to finally open his eyes, seeing a Quest prompt blocking most of his vision brought him an intense feeling of surprised relief.

“John, you need to get up or you will be late for school.” Brenda’s words were followed up by a second round of knocking. Which made John realize that the quest prompt had completely side-tracked him from answering the first time around.

“I’m up. I’m up.” While responding, he accepted the quest. Quest lines were usually worth a ton of rewards.

John more or less rolled out of bed in lieu of sitting up properly first. It felt like the kind of morning where tricking a little adrenaline into his system to get going was useful. He noticed that catching himself was a lot more effortless than last time, which was less than a week ago, and spent a second wondering why before he recalled having improved his STR and END.

That was not his last ‘doh’ moment of the morning. He was halfway through putting pants on by the time he recalled the option of equipping them through his inventory, and when he passed by the bathroom mirror on his way to the toilet, he remembered having ruled out the game powers being a dream yesterday morning.

During breakfast, something else came to mind. “Hey Mom, do you think there’s a chance I could convince you to start packing school lunches for me again?”

“Oh. What happened to wanting to buy lunch at the cafeteria like your classmates?”

“I realized that it’s kinda dumb to choose the food that’s more expensive, when yours is way better.” That was entirely true, but also not a new realization by any means. The real reason was that he didn’t want to not have lunch money when Frank came to collect.

Between money rewards from quests making that unlikely, the larger Food Buff provided by his mother’s cooking being important to John developing his powers, and said powers probably making Frank only a concern in the short term, that reason lost out by a country mile. Unfortunately, John couldn’t really tell his mom any of that.

“Flattery will get you everywhere,” Brenda responded with a giggle, then nodded towards the fridge. “It’s a bit too late to make you one today, but you can take the leftovers from last night if you want.”

“Thanks Mom, you’re the best.”

John ate the rest of his breakfast in silence, thinking. The whole food thing had been brought on by considerations of Mana Regeneration, which he was actually wasting at the moment since his bar was full.

He couldn’t well start making more alchemist’s fire in the middle of the kitchen either, so that way to ‘store’ his mana wasn’t really an option. That left the biomancy spells: Alter Body and Enhance Muscle.

The buff from the latter would be useless to him, but the Skill EXP would still be valuable. It would be nice if he could do some actual good with the casting too though. The former, he couldn’t cast more on himself for now, but maybe he could put one on his mom that she would appreciate but that would be subtle enough not to arouse suspicion.

Giving that a bit of thought, he recalled overhearing her talking on the phone with a friend, grousing about the price of some skin cream or other. By tone, it had been a fairly light hearted complaint but still. Besides, commercials for women’s stuff went on about smooth skin like it was the Holy Grail of women’s cosmetics. So smoother skin it was.

Error: Must be in contact with the target.

‘Oh well, I’ll just ‘happen’ to hug her goodbye today, I guess. But I should probably check if this limitation applies to Enhance Muscle as well, when I get the chance.’

The rest of the morning went as expected, and once John was on the bus and seated, he turned his attention to a small notification stack that had been sitting there since he got up. His guess was that Gaia had commentary on his choice of ‘entertainment’ last night.

Achievement Unlocked: Watcher in the Dark
Peep on someone while they are masturbating or having sex in private.
Really, the only surprising thing is that it didn't happen sooner.
Reward: +2 LIB, Scout’s Scope

And there it was. The continuous LIB increases were starting to worry him a bit. He hadn’t really noticed an impact on his behavior or thoughts from it yet, but given that he had had a powerful sex drive since it had first awakened in his early teens, it made sense for the effects to be hard to pin down.

The issue was if and when it would start growing out of control. The very same peeping that had gotten him the achievement was already a bit to the dodgy side of what his conscience and morals allowed, and he hadn’t been able to resist doing that even without these increases. He most certainly didn’t want to turn into a **** or something, just because his LIB got too high.

He couldn’t think of anything he could do about it, aside from finding a girlfriend that would be willing to be a better outlet for his lust. Since he was already kinda trying to work on that, he pushed the concern out of his mind and focused on the item he got from the achievement.

From the inventory view, it looked like the kind of scope that was designed to be mounted on a rifle, except it was currently mounted on a handle instead. Since that didn’t stop it from looking like military hardware, he decided to just leave it in his inventory for now.

It was nice that he got something that had uses outside of a lewd context, though. Sure, he didn’t have any immediate need for it, but based on what he had heard about the Abyss so far, it would probably come in handy sooner or later.

Achievement Unlocked: Caught in the Act
Get caught peeping (by someone other than me).
Ooops.
Reward: 2x Schrödinger’s Present

‘... Fuck.’

That was really not good, though how not good it was depended on who had caught him. It couldn’t be Marisa, surely she would have stopped and closed the blinds if she had noticed him. Unless someone was spying on him for some reason, that essentially just left his mom.

On reflection, he had gotten pretty sloppy about keeping his mom from walking in on him while he was masturbating. In part because of it being a meme classic, he had been borderline paranoid about it in the beginning.

But Brenda had always been very respectful of his privacy, knocking before entering if the door was closed and all that. So caution had quickly gone the way of the dodo. That it had gone so out the window that he apparently forgot to close the door completely was… well, he clearly had to pay at least a little more attention to these things.

Nothing he could do about it now, though.

‘Gee, thanks, Gaia. That was totally a mental image that I wanted to have…’ Mentally sassing the Supreme Deity might not be the wisest thing to do, but that comment about his mom deserved at least a little snark.

The reward itself was pretty cool. A steady supply of these would definitely make the holiday season easier. The wrapping had a picture of a chibi dragon sitting on top of a pile of presents, repeated in a symmetric fashion.

Idly wondering if the appearance of the thing was mutable as well, he concentrated on the thought of giving one of these as a christmas present. After about a second of that, a Santa hat faded into view on the dragon’s head.

Putting aside considerations about whom to give these, he proceeded to the next notification.

Achievement Unlocked: Mind Over Splatter
Delay your orgasm by **** of will.
I guess that’s also a kind of willpower.
Reward: Masturbation skill evolved into Climax Control.

Skill Evolution was new. Perhaps this was a teaser of things to be found in the Perk system.

‘Well, that’s a load of settings.’ The thought had barely finished before John internally groaned at the unintentional pun.

That aside, those were some neat quality of life improvements. Cranking the stimulation thresholds as high as possible should sharply reduce both the risk of awkward boners and the risk of finishing disappointingly quickly should he manage to get frisky with a girl.

Combined with the lowered replenishment timer, the instant replenishes and the high number of safe ejaculations, he was probably looking at some impressive sexual stamina from this. Even without taking into account him being a virgin.

The **** and volume bits seemed less significant, though having a way to minimize cleanup was nice, he supposed. And also, if Gaia kept throwing volume increases at him, then that and the setting might combine to let him do a one-man bukkake, which wasn’t a thought without some allure.

Messing around with it for a bit revealed that he could change the settings with a thought, without opening the Skill menu at all. Additionally, the instant refills came with a toggle to be used automatically when possible. That was pretty nice since he would probably forget the option existed, at least the first few times, if he had to trigger it in the moment.

With nothing more in his notifications, he turned his attention to the rest of the bus. It was the same people as yesterday, and even with knowing more about the Abyss now, there still wasn’t any that seemed likely candidates for being more than they seemed. Unless Frank was secretly a troll in disguise, anyway, but that would have been way too obvious a solution.

With no way to do anything about his Quest until he arrived at school, he decided to muck about on his phone a bit. About two minutes of memes later, he got a DM from one of his gaming buddies.

[SirCumference]: oi m8, where were you last night? Could’ve sworn that you wouldn’t’ve missed a new dungeon dropping for the world.

[Mr. N]: > wouldn’t’ve

[Mr. N]: > Whomst'd've'ly'yaint'nt'ed'ies's'y'es

[Mr. N]: anyway, I fucked up and got cybergrounded. 2 weeks with only my phone for a lifeline. Maybe I’ll get **** enough to try Raid: Shadow Legends.

[SirCumference]: I’ll let the squad know to say a prayer for our fallen brother before we pop the next boss chest o7

[SirCumference]: I take it you spent the night drowning your sorrows in lewds and tissue papers instead ¬‿¬

[Mr. N]: Something like that…

In truth, John had forgotten everything about the dungeon opening. Hell, with how the day had turned out, it could've been the release day of Half-Life 3 and he might’ve forgotten. In other words, he was probably going to miss a lot of gaming related stuff he normally wouldn’t have. In that respect, getting his computer privileges revoked was actually somewhat convenient.

[Mr. N]: Yesterday wasn’t all bad though. Managed to talk to a whole 2 girls for over an hour each. ᕦ(ò_óˇ)ᕤ

[SirCumference]: yo mama don’t count. And if she did she’s big enough to count as 4 girls.

[Mr. N]: Wasn’t talking about my mom, but if your idea of ‘girl’ weighs a quarter of what she does, Chris Hansen wants a word with you.

SirCumference responded with a “it’s an older meme” picture, which was itself an older meme at this point. Before John had time to formulate a good comeback to that effect, the bus reached its destination, so he went with a simple goodbye instead and disembarked.