Party Synergy

With the Achievements looked through, they shifted position before proceeding. Specifically, into a seated one with Qhila in his lap. The reason for this change was the simple practicality that she couldn’t drink her TASTE-rade while lying down.

“Impressive,” she remarked after her first gulp

“What?”

“Considering that this is neither magical nor toxic, the taste is remarkably foul.” Despite having just drunk some of the stuff that she said tasted remarkably foul, her tone was mostly one of academic curiosity.

“Worse than a regular energy or sports drink?”

“I’ve never had one.” She shrugged and offered him a taste instead. He took it and, despite thinking he had been prepared, almost spat it out again. Somehow, this vile brew had taken the worst parts of the tastes of energy drinks and sports drinks, and combined them into something more awful than the sum of its parts.

“Yep, it’s worse,” he managed to **** out while trying to will himself to not even form that memory.

Qhila took another sip and somehow continued to seem mostly unaffected. John looked down at that in slack jawed… something. There was awe in there, certainly. Also some concern, less about her safety than about how she had come to build this tolerance for bad tastes.

In any case, after a few moments, she gestured at the air in front of them, which he took to mean that he should get to it. Deciding to save the decision points for last, he started by looking at the new entries in his inventory. Technically, that started with the Dummy’s Guide to Facepalming, but he was still rankled enough by that particular Achievement that he just glared at it. He was strongly tempted to just Recycle the damn thing, but it could potentially be a potent boon in silly clothes like the Gold Star Sticker. So he would at least hang on to it until he could bring himself to take a proper look, but for now he skipped it.

Aside from the title, that told him nothing about what information it actually contained, so he took it out for a look. The book itself was a leather-bound hardback with an embossed picture similar to Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, but female and with monster girl additions that were presumably from different species. Especially given that one leg was scaled to shortstack.

Somehow, despite having been just created via Achievement, the author’s name was blocked by a smudge, leaving just the title “Dr.” in front of it. The index was divided into “extant” and “(presumed) extinct” and otherwise consisted of a long list of species and subspecies. Skimming a few entries revealed anatomical information as well as a few other biological tidbits such as noting the length and frequency of rat girl heat. It was all presented in an academic textbook sort of way, but it only presented data on females and about 80% of the information was relevant to sexual purposes. Hell, John could probably think of lewd uses for the rest too if he really tried.

“Doesn’t look like this’ll be any help unless we end up fighting people-Echoes,” John commented drily and put it away. It took a significant exercise of will to do that, rather than flip to the Skytail kobold section and abandon the Leveling goal in favor of a different kind of grinding. But he managed, instead resolving to read that section later. Just because she had enjoyed their vertical workout today was no reason not to try to do better next time.

“Nice!” John got elbowed lightly by the kobold in his lap for coming with a disruptive exclamation while she was still reading the window.

Shortly after, Qhila nodded to herself. “The [Developer] is definitely a pervert voyeur.”

John chuckled at that for a moment, then noted more seriously, “So, awesome as this is, I’m not gonna use it until after I head home. If this is going to cram my head full of information the way the other Skill Books did, then if I use it now, we’re not getting any EXP grinding done today…” In truth, just the thought of what possibilities this could entail combined with the current state of his LIB stat were making Qhila’s seating arrangement the best kind of dangerous. So he should probably hurry up and check the Skills next…

“... That sounds like low key chemical mind control…” John remarked unhappily, thinking of how the concentrated version of Skytail pheromones had affected him.

“Not necessarily…” Qhila sounded a little uncertain of herself, but forged on anyway, “I don’t really know how it goes for other species, but the only kobold tribe with mind bending pheromones are Skytails, which have them because of Orronth. For other kobolds, it’s just olfactory communication. When… well, you know what concentrated Skytail mating pheromones can do. But for regular kobolds, it’s like flirting or dirty talk, but for the nose instead of the ears.

“We, uh, can actually check the arousing version… I have some indicator strips in a sealed package in the lab. For trying to improve the heat suppressant recipe. You just need to go outside, open a fresh barrier and take it out while the Skill is running…”

He wondered for a fraction of a second why he had to do it in a fresh barrier, before realizing that doing it in here would just have the indicator triggered by Qhila’s pheromones. “Okay. Definitely doing that then. After we finish with-” Instead of completing the sentence, he wrestled down the desire to just turn on the ‘olfactory dirty talk’ and see how she would react, gestured at the open system window, then replaced it with a new one.

A tooltip on her name in the Skill description revealed the benefits.

Synergy (Qhila)
Low Alchemical reactions caused through the efforts of at least 2 party members have all applicable parameters of reaction speed, yield and area of effect multiplied by x1.14 (1+RS/1000).

Relationship Score based scaling was new, but given what the Skill was, it made sense. That notation for the multiplier, rather than a percentage increase, was also new. And probably significant. A tooltip helpfully explained that a bonus noted as +N% stacked additively with other such bonuses to the same thing, while things with the multiplier notation stacked multiplicatively with everything. That made for an incredibly valuable bonus, even with a multiplier that capped out at 1.20…

Qhila whistled, prompting him to smugly comment, “Yeah, multiplier stacking can get pretty bonkers.”

“No, that’s not…” she shook her head for a moment, then stopped looking thoughtful, “well, yes, that can also get bloody absurd, but that’s not what I meant. Improving alchemical yield or reaction speed is usually done through supporting high alchemy or expensive lab tools, and each method or tool is limited to a small subset of closely related reactions. Doing it to both at the same time and to everything low alchemy is… Significant. Not as immense as your EXP and getting objects of True Substance from Mystic Echoes shenanigans, but still the kind of thing a lot of guilds would be willing to sacrifice members to get a hold of.”

More stuff that he needed to be careful about who he told it to. Marvelous. But if this was a big deal but a smaller one than the grinding options, then it might be just the right bargaining chip to get Qhila into a guild as a package deal with himself.

“Uuh, John?” Qhila’s tone was a mix of throaty and uncertain, leading John to realize that he had gotten so absorbed with the potential and implications of the Synergy that the focus put towards self control had fallen somewhat to the wayside. Consequently, his hand had wandered from Qhila’s midsection up to cradle her petite chest.

“Sorry!” he responded perhaps a bit too loudly and got his hand back under control. She put her own hands on his, swallowed and mumbled something along the lines of him not needing to apologize. Rather than awkwardly linger on that, he opened the Quest that he got along with the Party Synergy Skill, since that had a good chance of being how he could improve it at the moment.

Qhila finished reading the Quest shortly after he did, as evidenced by her half-turning in his lap and burying her face in his chest. Judging by the heat of it, she was blushing up a storm.

On his part, John was of somewhat divided opinion. On one hand, listening to whatever she might want or need to get off her chest and cuddling it better was something he had every intention to do regardless. In that sense, the Quest was basically just attaching rewards to what he meant to do anyway, and very good rewards at that, if what Party Synergy provided at the moment was any indication.

His concern was that Qhila knowing about the Quest, and the magnitude of the rewards that came with it, might make her feel a pressure to talk about things before she was ready. With war on Springfield’s figurative doorstep, she might feel that their lives depended on talking sooner rather than later. Worse, he could follow, and hardly fault, that line of logic. But he still wanted her to open up to those pains in her own time, even if that meant he would have to fight both harder and smarter when the cruelty of the Abyss came knocking next.

The only thing he could really do about that for now, though, was move on.

Skill Quest Completed:
Observe magical phenomena that you didn’t cause 25/25

New Skill Level: Observe 9
Buff and debuff icons on Observed targets fully unlocked
Person Sheet Stat ratings unlocked

’Wait a second. I got this notification from opening the pheromone Buff Icon into a window so Qhila could see it, not from using Observe. Unless…’ And that’s when bits that had been wiggling in the back of his mind clicked into place. Several times over the course of the week, bits of text in his system had changed minorly, getting more detailed or more precisely worded without any sort of notification telling him it would happen. Most notably, and the first time he had noticed this, was when Observe, Gamer’s Body, and Gamer’s Mind were marked as Special Skills. Yet the Developer had denied that he was getting stealth patches. ’My tooltips, Skill descriptions, maybe even the whole fucking character sheet and inventory display is me using Observe on myself!!’

Achievement Unlocked: Introspection I
Figure out something about the inner workings of your powers.
Surprisingly few people bother with assensing themselves.
Reward: +1 INT

That immediately made resisting the urge to fondle Qhila easier, evidently putting him back on the safer side of that tipping point. Which meant he could afford to just put a single point in WIS now so he could haul END up to 25 with the other 4 and take a look at that Perk selection, instead of sinking all of them into WIS for self control’s sake immediately. Though he was still taking the lower of his mentals to the Perk threshold next, barring a good reason to do otherwise.

Another inventory boosting Perk had some interesting implications, mainly by way of making it plausible that it would show up on other stats as well. STR seemed like an obvious candidate. As with yesterday, he wasn’t super strapped for space at the moment. Sure, most of the slots he had were full, but a bit of plastic sack finagling would go a long way there. It had, however, occurred to him that the container trick probably wouldn’t help indefinitely.

With Low Alchemy, he was going for a crafter build, and most fiction that went into that kind of thing had magical materials come with increasingly exacting storage requirements as they grew more powerful. With what Grimm Permeation said about how fiction and the Abyss affected one another, it was a good bet that he would eventually start needing stuff that couldn’t just be chucked in the same container to save inventory space, or even things that could only be safely stored in his inventory.

Still, that was tomorrow’s problem and he had fish to fry today, so to speak. This was likely not going to be his last time seeing inventory Perks offered, in either INT or END. And all of that was assuming he didn’t get a selection for another stat that consisted of an inventory Perk and two that were irrelevant to his build.

That left the decision here between general tankiness or specific defense against poison and disease. Both were relevant to his build, after a fashion. Alchemy was unquestionably going to involve a bunch of toxic substances, and while Craft all but eliminated the risk of lab accidents big and small, he still had to gather those substances and deploy whatever he turned them into. The former would probably be at least partially done via barriers, be it his own or the Springfield Forest, which likely meant either toxic environments or venomous foes. As for the latter, the fight with the rat ogre in said forest had clearly demonstrated that sometimes in combat, things went wrong. Being screwed less than his enemies if both ended up poisoned would be invaluable in such a situation, especially if he picked up a few of the follow up Perks that the numeral promised existed.

Meanwhile, Second Wind I provided healing, which was improved by Biomancy. For the in between fights case, it somewhat overlapped with Accelerate Recovery, but there was something to be said for conserving mana. He could also heal from both at the same time, making recovery quicker if he only had a short time. And the trigger conditions were different, so one could come in clutch when the other was hard to manage.

“How common are poisons and diseases in the Abyss?” he asked Qhila for the last piece of that assessment puzzle, thinking she would have had the time to finish reading while he pondered.

“That depends on where you are, or who you’re fighting…” She paused briefly. “Natural Barriers in Australia and the jungles of South and Central America are infamously full of poisonous… everything. More generally, there’s usually lots of poisonous stuff in Natural Barriers in swamps or the ocean, or Kingdoms dominated by that sort of terrain. Groups from those places tend to use poisons more as a result too. Also, kobolds, goblins, lizard- and serpentfolk, dark elves, and any group with a strong penchant for alchemy should be expected to use poison against their enemies in some way or other.

“For Abyssal diseases, Natural Barriers in Africa, in swamps, and overlapping sewers or places with a lot of diseased mundanes can be nasty, but generally it can spread through people, beasts or even objects, like I would assume diseases do among mundanes. It doesn’t get weaponized as much as poison, probably because it’s harder to control, but necromancers and biomancers sometimes do, and beware any weapon that’s both rusty and enchanted…”

John couldn’t help but chuckle. “Okay, not that that isn’t good to know, but I should’ve been a bit more specific I guess… How likely am I to run foul of Abyssal poisons or diseases in and around Springfield?” There weren’t any jungles, swamps or oceans nearby, to say nothing of Africa or Australia, but he had no idea about Natural Barriers in the sewers, or groups using alchemy. And his knowledge was vague about the presence of any of the races, since his looking at guild stuff hadn’t really explored any racial matters other than the feeble race issue with bringing Qhila along.

“... That depends on how the war between the Emerald Order and the GROies goes. The Emeralds are known to have a significant number of alchemists in their ranks. Some time before the Accord they tried to slip a tree blight into the Springfield Forest Barrier, and the word is the thing they got booted from the Accord over was a necromancy project.”

That tipped the scales pretty hard in favor of Iron Constitution I. He still meant to avoid that war if he could, but even if that succeeded, Emerald Order bioweapons could end up spreading to the city via the people who did fight. Like Marisa.

So that left checking the General Perks to see if that offering had something better, or more immediately useful, than the disease and poison resistance.

The only one immediately useful here was the Minimap, which remained awesome for all the same reasons he had pinned it. If he had had the ability to consistently form a party of 3 or 4 instead of 2, it was even good enough to take before Iron Constitution I, given that the next Perk Point was almost certainly coming in in a matter of days at most.

Accessorize was useless to him right now, as his only accessory item was a mundane backpack. But based on the stuff he had right now, item slots were a big deal as soon as he had items to put in them and him getting a second accessory was pretty much just a question of time. If he had a second one right now, or a reliable way to farm for that quickly, there would basically not have been a question at all about which Perk to get. As it stood, it was the prime candidate for pinning, if he grabbed one of the others.

Vanity Pet looked useless at first glance. But there had been a lesson in him underestimating Accelerate Recovery, and so he thought not just about what that was in relation to typical game mechanics and game assumptions, but also in relation to the real world. That was enough to see the potential. At its very least, an immortal pet could be a distraction. Doubly so if whatever it distracted didn’t know of its immortality.

But the Perk had no stipulations about body shape or about it being of animal intelligence. If he could get a hold of something he could communicate with, a lot of possibilities opened up. Like scouting dangerous areas, which the Instant Dungeons he still hadn’t looked at would probably have, baiting traps, and working as a lookout. With both that and opposable thumbs, or some sort of substitute, there was bound to be a lot of alchemical creations it could help him deploy at the right time and place. Even with a strict interpretation of ‘harmless’, there had to be plenty of things it could feasibly use.

It wasn’t something he could use right now, though, and it would probably take longer before he could use it than Accessorize. And since he was still in the low end of the Level curve, he could probably expect to get several Perk Points before he could get what he would need to use this. Currently, he should focus on things that would be helpful in the shorter term. So ultimately the decision was between Minimap and Iron Constitution I, and he had already made that assessment in favor of the latter.

With all of that settled, it was time to talk about grinding strategy. To that end, he brought out the Quest for the day’s grinding, in case Qhila would want to see the thing herself once the worst embarrassment abated.

Before actually getting to talking strategy, he noted the name of the Quest. ’... God dammit, the Developer knew exactly how me coming here would turn out…’

Putting that aside, he presented the basics out loud, “So, I have a Quest to try to Level you up before the end of the day, with rewards getting better the more Levels you get. There’s also a bonus for taking down an Arena Boss.”

“What’s an arena boss?” Qhila’s voice was slightly muffled from her face being hidden in his chest still, though she wasn’t actually pressing it against him anymore.

Not something she had happened to pick up while looking into NPC relationship mechanics in games then. “Arena is a type of grinding barrier where we get an area with a fixed number of enemies that we need to kill before getting loot and EXP. Afterwards, we can spawn another set and keep at it or leave and do whatever, but if we leave before mopping up all the enemies, we get nothing.

“I’ve only tried the mode against pseudodrakes, and they were dispersed across it lying in ambush, but they were borderline suicidally aggressive once ‘provoked’. I don’t know if that goes for all enemy types though or just ambush predators,” he had suspected them to be so during the barrier run, and taken a moment to look it up during the school day, “and I’m not sure if opening the thing with a party changes the organization or behavior either.

“As for an Arena Boss, I haven’t seen one yet so all I know for sure is that it’s a more powerful foe associated with Arena barriers. The way it usually goes, we either have a chance to get one every time we clear an Arena out or it’ll be triggered after clearing the same one enough times in a row without leaving. There is a good, but far from guaranteed, chance that the Boss will be related to the kind of enemy we cleared to trigger it.

“Usually, and my afternoon with pseudodrakes fits this, the regular Arena foes don’t really pose a challenge in individual fights, except for maybe the first time. The challenge is optimizing it so you clear them quickly and without expending too many resources. The Boss on the other hand is usually a tough nut to crack, but the rewards are typically big enough that if you can beat it, that’s how you advance the fastest.”

Over the course of the explanation, she had come back out of hiding. She took a moment after he finished to respond, presumably reading the Quest itself. “Sounds like the way to go is just repeating one type until a Boss comes out, then see where we go from there.”

“Pretty much, yeah, though we should probably try to aim for a type we’re likely to clear quickly and efficiently. There’s also two other wrinkles, but with the Quest I don’t think they matter enough to change the basic plan. One, I get a small bonus reward for killing a new type of enemy from a grinding barrier the first time. Two, I need to observe different kinds of Abyssal beasts to get the last Observe Level. Both of those push towards trying each type of enemy once first, before trying to push for a Boss, but I don’t think they’re important enough to pursue in the time we’ve got.”

She nodded, and he brought up the enemy selection screen while telling her about the color coding.

“Rats or slimes,” Qhila stated confidently as soon as she was done reading. “For the rats I have some Piper’s Philter left over from getting rid of some awakened rats a few months ago. It attracts them enough to override their self-preservation instinct. As long as the supply lasts, we can pull them into a trap quickly and easily.

“Slimes, meanwhile… Well, anything that makes sense to compare to rats and pseudodrakes is dumb as a brick, lacks any bells and whistles other than to crawl at their target and try to dissolve it, and they’re not magical enough to resist having the acid or base they’re made of neutralized with entirely mundane counterparts.”

“Rats sounds like the quicker of the two, unless you don’t have much of the Piper stuff. Also, there’s a decent chance the Boss will be either a giant rat or a rat ogre, so if you have anything well suited for those matchups…”