PE 1: Persona Non Grata

John and Christie spent the rest of the lunch break talking about nicer things. Mostly one thing, really, which was Tolkien’s works. Unsurprisingly, their way into that had been different. She had somewhat obviously started with the books, specifically The Hobbit, and gone from there. Meanwhile, John’s first brush with Tolkien stuff had actually been a game.

Still, they shared an appreciation for the carefully crafted world, the compelling stories and the vast influence it had had on fiction going forward. They also shared a dislike of many of the overt breaks from canon that could be found in various derived media, things that had often been John’s least favorite parts of game plot and lore before he knew what the actual canon was. They didn’t dwell much on the latter though.

When the bell rang, John was greatly tempted to just stay up there and skip PE. Doubly so because Frank would be waiting. But the truth was he had to face those consequences anyway, and the longer he waited, the worse it would get, unless he could outgrow the issue while he waited. But on the topic of growth, he had a Quest to get back to as well. Besides, he probably shouldn’t try to make a delinquent of her.

So they went back down, and just as John was about to say goodbye for now, Christie broached something else. “Uhm… I- I don’t want to sound like I’m not grateful t- that you helped with Frank and my cane but… There is one thing that I… have to say…”

“Okay…?” John wasn’t really sure what to think of that. Then he glanced at her RS, which was flickering a 20 point loss on the 47 it had climbed to during lunch. Which made him decidedly worried.

When she continued, the hidden ‘marble’ of will was back. “What you said to him, to get his attention… it’s not a joking matter, or something to insult people with…”

It took John a moment to remember what he had said about the Frank Dickinsons, Sr. and Jr. Then he felt a stab of guilt. That was actually something worse than he would wish on anyone. Even Frank and Vanessa. “No, it isn’t. I… pretty much just threw the first insult I could think of at him, and his surname was it. You’re right, though, it’s a terrible thing. And if it were true, the one who should get shit for it is the dad.”

Her RS stopped flickering and settled on a small uptick to 48, and John and Christie let out relieved sighs in unison. They were quiet for a moment before John spoke again, “Well, we should probably head to class… Thanks again for lunch.”

“You’re welcome…” For a moment, she looked like she wanted to say more, but then she turned and started walking away. John pondered for a moment what it might have been that she wanted to say, if there had actually been anything, but ultimately came up blank. Or rather, he had a ton of ideas but nothing to substantiate them with. Then he headed towards the locker rooms.

Well, that wasn’t entirely true. Being late enough for the jocks to have left the locker room was probably wise, even if he got a tardy citation for it. So he kinda headed for the locker rooms, but he did so by the longest route he could think of that wasn’t outright absurd.

On his way, he kept on the lookout for more Abyssals. Which mostly consisted of tossing more Observes at random people passing by, though he did make sure to check their nameplate for skulls or other ominous characters.

He hadn’t really expected to find any, so he was pleasantly surprised when a nameplate that didn’t fit the person’s appearance at all turned out to be a ‘hit’.

Jane “Rave” Hollmey
Lvl 19 Brawler
Fun Loving Rave Girl
19 years old
RP: 2
Guild: Collide [C]
Guild Rank: Member

With straight, brown hair, a moderately conservative take on the school uniform and an overall appearance that was largely a bland form of mildly attractive, she very much didn’t look like a brawler or a rave girl, let alone both.

The only thing about her appearance that was even close to standing out was that even the modest cut of her uniform couldn’t quite hide that she had an uncommonly shapely rear. Knowing that she was Abyssal, her appearance seemed almost aggressively bland and generic.

Even so, he was pretty sure that John would have noticed nothing amiss if not for his powers, much like with Enkleman. With that in mind, John had to reconsider his earlier assumption that a clique of Abyssals trying to appear homogeneous would come off as artificially so.

Five minutes later, that consideration was thoroughly confirmed. The cause was the hallways thinning out to empty, giving John a chance to take a look at the Quest window to refresh his memory on what rewards he seemed to be landing at. At which point he found the Quest counter to be at 8 rather than 7.

Trying to think back, he was very far from sure who it could be. The people who stood out had done so in mundane seeming ways: a goth here, a colorful hairdo there, a few people skirting the edge of uniform rules and so on.

He considered briefly the short, blue-haired girl whose title had been Perfectly Ordinary Student. At the time, he had thought it was just Gaia poking fun at his long streak of unremarkable Observe results.

Even now, he couldn’t really rule out the possibility that he had been right about that, and that an Abyssal had flown under the radar somewhere else. In fact, given that John was biased towards remembering, and paying attention to, the girls more, it was probably a smarter bet to expect it to have been a guy.

When John reached the locker room, it was empty. A small success he celebrated by changing to his sports clothes by way of inventory, before heading outside.

“YOU’RE LATE, NEWMAN! 50 PUSHUPS!”

Coach Conroy shouted at John as soon as he stepped onto the track and field area. That the PE teacher acted like a drill sergeant was nothing new, but the **** glare that went with it seemed out of the ordinary.

50 pushups was also significantly harsher than being late usually resulted in, even keeping in mind that Conroy was a sadistic prick. Still, John knew from experience that trying to complain would get him nowhere, so he found a spot where he wouldn’t get in the way of the people doing laps and got to it.

Usually, he could do somewhere between 9 and 11 before collapsing, getting yelled at for five minutes and then let off the hook. Today, he was mostly still going strong at 10, started struggling at 15 and got all the way to 24 before he couldn’t keep at it anymore.

Having been here more than a few times before, John simply tuned out the coach’s actual words and let it meld into a derisive slurry. It was harder to tune out the occasional not-quite-hard-enough-to-be-a-kick prodding of Conroy’s foot, and as a result he responded to those with another attempt or two that they both knew wouldn’t succeed. Or at least, John knew they wouldn’t, and Conroy would have to be uncommonly dense not to know as well.

Meanwhile, he considered how a stat growth of about 50% had led to him beating his personal pushup record by more than 100%. It seemed likely to John that it was something along the lines of STR, or STR relative to weight, determining how much stamina a single pushup required while END determined how much stamina he had in total.

Of course, there wasn’t an actual stamina bar or stamina points or anything like that, but given that STR and END were actual stats for him, it seemed like it wouldn’t be an unreasonable approximation to use. In any case, it supported his speculation from yesterday that most physical tasks used more than one stat.

After John had been struggling through failed attempts to continue for a few minutes, a few jocks broke off from running laps to go jeer at him, soon joined by some of the girls. This was an unusual development, which is probably why he couldn’t well tune it out like he did Conroy’s drill sergeant routine.

Soon, the heat of embarrassed humiliation rose in his cheeks, along with the heat of anger rising in his chest. Unfortunately, being angry didn’t actually make him any more able to do more pushups. Evidently, his Gamer powers didn’t come with rage-based physical buffs.

He was greatly tempted to use Enhance Muscle to buff his arm END, but he could only have one Enhance Muscle buff up at a time, and odds were he would need it in his legs a lot more over the course of PE class as a whole.

“I guess that poor showing will have to do. On your feet, Newman.” After what felt like half of the two-class block of PE, but was probably closer to ten minutes, Conroy relented.

Or so it seemed for the few moments it took John to get back on his feet. Then the coach addressed the class as a whole, “Since Newman here decided that punctuality is beneath him, you’ll all have to keep doing laps until he finishes his five.”

That prompted a chorus of sighs and groans and directed numerous glares towards John. The glares mostly came from the group that had gotten to take a break from running to jeer at him, though, while he noticed with some satisfaction that the rest of the class glared just as much at Conroy.

Well, time to see if he could cast Enhance Muscle while moving, or if that working while running from the rat ogre was just Gaia throwing him a bone. She had been the one to bring him into that situation, after all. At least mostly.

He was interrupted almost immediately by one of the jocks shoulder checking him in passing, while jogging towards the perimeter of the sports field. That repeated another 6 times before all of the jeer squad had passed and gotten back to doing laps.

The spell getting interrupted immediately had set him back 5 MP. That was actually nice, John had expected to be gambling the full cost on his attempt to cast while walking. Non-instant spells only using part of their cost if interrupted definitely went a long way towards mitigating the downside. He probably shouldn’t assume that this was true for all spells with a casting time, though.

With the jocks having passed him, John tried casting it while moving again. This time, he felt a strain in his mind that he hadn’t had time to register previously, like his thoughts were being pulled in two different directions at once.

He knew instinctively which one was the spell and which wasn’t, but as soon as he deliberately shifted ‘towards’ that pull, his steps slowed to a crawl, and shifting in the other direction caused the spell to fail.

Worse yet, his next attempt showed that staying in the ‘center’ where he was walking at a decent pace while continuing to cast the spell was nearly impossible. It felt like the mental equivalent of cartoon characters trying to grip a wet bar of soap.

It occurred to him that he must have looked pretty weird, changing gait and speed with every step and sometimes even mid-stride. Embarrassment started to rise in his cheeks again, but with a flare of anger at himself for even caring, he shoved that thought aside. Getting the best possible handle on his powers was a matter of survival, for himself and possibly others as well. Looking weird for a little while was nothing in the face of that.

Going into his third real attempt, John had an idea. Even though there was no game mechanic attached to this part of his powers, that didn't mean he couldn’t try to approach it as one. His character sheet called him ‘The Gamer’ after all. Not ‘a’, ‘The’.

Specifically, he was thinking of the common balance minigame where you had to keep an indicator as close to the middle of a bar as possible for a while, but whenever you tried to move it in any direction, it’d way overshoot leading to a constant cycle of compensating for one’s last move.

That helped a bunch. He got a lot further before failing, and his gait got less erratic while he was at it. It still took a few more tries and he ended up throwing a whole 55 MP at a spell that cost 25. Still, this felt like something that was important to practice, and the buff to leg END wasn’t any less useful for the failed attempts.

By the time John was done and set into a jog, people had more or less stopped paying attention to him. Conspicuously, he was spared Conroy’s ‘encouragement’. ‘He probably doesn’t want to risk making me finish faster and thus annoy everyone else less.’

Well, the joke was going to be on the coach because John could already tell the difference in stamina half a lap in. For the first time in forever, he was going to finish the laps without slowing to a walk.

While doing so, he had the time to take a look around. While the main idea was to look for Abyssals since he still had that Quest going, the first thing he noticed was something else: Frank was absent.

John kind of had noticed that Frank’s voice hadn’t been part of the jeer squad’s taunts and insults, but at the time his mind had been too consumed by the embarrassment, anger and feeling of burning lead in his arms to really think about it. Now, though, the fact stuck out like a sore thumb.

The meathead skipping other classes was practically business as usual, but him ditching PE was almost as unlikely as him missing football practice. Given Frank’s implied threat to make John pay during this PE class, it seemed even less likely to be voluntary.

Giving it some thought, John could think of three possibilities. A family emergency could probably be bad enough to make the jock forget about both PE and beating up John. Alternately, whatever Wentworth came to get Frank for could be something that took enough time to still be ongoing. Lastly, Frank did hit his head pretty hard slamming the two of them into the wall. Once she was done with him, Wentworth might have sent him to the nurse, who could have **** him to go home because of a concussion or something like that.