Pursuit Of Pleasure 1

A shower later, Mia and I are downstairs. I’m sitting at the dining room table, while Ivy has her arm around me for comfort. Mia walks out of the kitchen with two plates of bacon and eggs. She sets one plate down in front of me, along with a knife and fork, before taking her own seat. “Thank you love.” She smiles at me. “Always.”

I eat the hearty meal happily, enjoying Ivy’s gentle massaging of my back. As Mia said before, Ivy still doesn’t understand sexual or romantic intimacy. She does know that I take comfort out of the gesture though, which is why she keeps doing it.

“Okay Ivy, today it is our goal for the both of us to get to level 24. Once we get there, we’ll be able to raise your libido, and hopefully you’ll be able to understand more about the human experience.” I tell her, leaving out the part about her potentially wanting to try sex with us. That part is up to her, when the time comes.

Ivy nods in response. “I like this idea. I am curious as to what will happen with the raising of my libido stat.” I look at Mia and she nods supportively. I reach my hand across the table, and she takes it in hers. “I love you. Thank you for being so supportive and kind to me.” I tell her. “You deserve it.” Comes the warm and loving reply from my beautiful girlfriend.

“Which monster are we choosing then?” Mia asks. “Well as I said, I’m not sure. The goblins were quite fast when I tested them out, I’m a little worried that we won’t be able to fight them at this tier with our current stats. The slimes should be an easy fight, as long as we’re careful about not letting them touch us. They also would be a little boring. All things considered, those two dungeons are the most effective in terms of experience. Thoughts based on that?” I ask.

“I say we go for one run of them each. You were able to beat them on your own before, we should be fine together. As you said before, your ice magic is the perfect counter to both of these enemies. We need something different I think, the rats are starting to get boring again.” Mia says.

“If I may, I think it would be good for me to experience fighting different types of enemies too.” Ivy adds. I nod in response to both of them. “One run of them each then. After we’ve done one of both, we can decide what to do for the rest of the day.”

The next hour and a half sees the three of us going through the slime and goblin dungeons with relative ease. My fears about the goblins being too fast for us turn out to be only sort of true. Mia can keep up with them easily, with her effective agility at 22. I’m not too far behind, with 19 effective agility.

Ivy struggles a little more, only having 10 agility. My ice magic helps to negate that, and it also helps that she doesn’t play a primarily offensive role in combat. You don’t have to be as fast as the enemy in order to heal your allies effectively. With Mia having higher endurance than me, Ivy stays primarily by my side.

When the boss comes around, we have a fairly easy time beating it. The giant and slower moving goblin makes for an easier target for Mia to use the cutting air technique that she learnt only a couple of days before. That - combined with a barrage of mana bolts from me, and thorns from Ivy - sees us defeat the boss pretty quickly.

1000xp

As with the first time I went through this dungeon, it didn’t take long. The boss XP is also lower to compensate for the quicker time it takes to beat the dungeon. Still, I’m halfway to the next level now. With the boss defeated, and the loot picked up, we move on to the slime dungeon.

We take our time through this dungeon. From my briefing on the enemies, Ivy and Mia are both aware that they don’t move very quickly, and a good sense of spatial awareness is all that’s really needed to do well. Ivy can’t damage the enemies much, thanks to her thorn attacks being physical in nature. She focuses entirely on looking out for slimes coming close to us.

Mia can damage the slimes, thanks to her attacks being a little magical. But they still currently do mostly physical damage, and we unanimously agree that using my ice magic to freeze each of the slimes before damaging them is a good idea. This strategy lets Mia conserve energy.

When the boss comes around, we’re already prepared. I point out the tells for it’s column-like attacks so they know what to look for. From experimentation with the regular enemies, we know that attacks with my axe can hurt slimes, but that magic is still a better and more reliable tool to do so. Magic also has the bonus of range, letting us steer clear of the enemy’s deadly acidic touch.

Ivy does have a bit of trouble dodging the boss’ attacks, so I make a mental note to increase her agility after libido. Luckily, her health regeneration is easily able to take care of any hits that she takes and she manages to avoid getting hit too much. We whittle down the health of the boss, and eventually, Mia makes the final strike.

1500xp

Perfect.

We collect the loot and exit the barrier, walking back inside Mia’s house. A look at the loot we got from the slime and goblin dungeons reveals that absolutely nothing interesting dropped. That seems to be a trend these days. I give some loot to Ivy for her to munch on, while I open up my character sheet to spend my new statpoints.

I did resolve that I wanted to increase my other two physical stats after strength, so the question is whether to increase agility or endurance first. After a few moments of thought, I put the points into endurance. My agility isn’t much lacking at the moment, and more numbers between **** and I is always a good thing.

Plus, the bonus at 25 points should hopefully increase my HP pool substantially. With the newly added points, my health bar is now at 125. Not a huge increase, but an increase nonetheless. Ivy finishes one of the pieces of loot and her level up window pops up.

It’s not super hard to level her up for the moment; we have more than enough loot for her to eat. I’m sure that’ll change eventually and I’m not too sure what we’ll do at that point. I figure that we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it though, and for now, this system is working fine.

“Do you want your libido stat raised to 5 now and 10 later, or do you want to do it all at once?” I ask Ivy. “All at once please. I feel that if you raise it to 5, I will be on the edge of understanding love and sex, but still not quite there. That sounds very frustrating.” I nod in understanding. “That would be very frustrating.”

“You were researching hobbies before, right? Have you found any that you’re interested in?” Mia asks Ivy. “I do like the idea of cooking! Preparing food for other people sounds lovely, and it allows me to take care of you both. Playing video games also sounds appealing, as does learning a musical instrument.” The genuine happiness and love in her voice absolutely melts my heart.

“How about I teach you cooking then? We can start off with basic things, and you can learn more advanced stuff with time.” Mia offers. “Can we start now?” “Of course! Gemma, you sit your pretty ass back on the couch!” She orders and I chuckle, having half stood up. Ivy shoots Mia a questioning look. “Gemma isn’t allowed in the kitchen. We’re pampering her today, because the idea that you have autism can be really difficult to process. Also, she once set her shirt on fire at her old job as a cook.”

“Okay that was one time out of three years! And I was sick!” I protest and Mia raises an eyebrow. Ivy giggles in the background at the idea. “You were literally a ‘professional cook’ for three years, and you still can’t cook proper food for yourself to save your life. If you had it your way, you’d be eating butter on bread for breakfast, the same for lunch, and fast food for dinner! Every day!”

“Rude.” I grumble, internally smiling. “What’s autism?” Ivy asks, and Mia is quick to answer. “It’s a disability spectrum that describes the different ways that people think and act. One side is neurotypical, meaning that they think and act more in line with societal expectations. The other is neurodivergent, which is an umbrella term that includes autism, ADHD and other similar disabilities, and it’s where Gemma and I fall.”

“It just means that we think and act differently to how society expects us to, which can look very different in different people.” That doesn’t sound so bad, with how she describes it. “It doesn’t sound like a huge deal, so why is the idea that somebody has it difficult to process?” Ivy asks.

“There’s a lot of stigma around it, so it can be a huge shock. With that stigma comes a lot of processing needed to understand and accept the way your brain works and what your needs are.” Ivy nods in response, then walks back to me. She gives me a hug, and I’m surprised.

“I understand how it feels to have difficulty figuring out things about yourself. I hope it gets easier.” Ivy says, giving me a warm smile. My heart melts for her once more, and I smile back. “Thank you Ivy.” With that, she walks back to Mia. “Are you okay honey?” Mia asks me. “With the both of you around, how could I not be?”

While the two of them go to the kitchen to start making some food, I spend some time idly reading on my phone. I’ve always enjoyed reading, but in high school, it got to the point where I couldn’t read a physical book for more than 5 minutes before I started to get sleepy. I took to reading on my phone and PC, and I never went back.