by Ryan Rimmel
The fall was the worst part. The path of the water ran us past several large outcroppings of rock that Julia narrowly avoided. We both impacted into the pool below at the same time where we were bashed around and crushed. After what seemed like hours, though couldn’t have been more than a few moments, we exploded to the surface of the water, undamaged.
“Hallelujah,” I muttered, spitting up water as we floated downriver. Ordinal didn’t care that I had gone over the falls. To the
Julia and I were in one piece. Unfortunately, our loyal surfboard had broken in twain. Still, it was surprisingly buoyant. I was willing to use a piece of bear as a board, but Julia found the idea revolting. We settled for floating down the river on our backs, past the rapids and into a calm spot well below the mountain.
“You are totally crazy,” groaned Julia.
“How long do you think it will take them to catch up?” I asked, looking around lazily for a place to land. Julia said nothing for a long time.
“Okay, maybe you are just moderately crazy,” she said, beginning to kick toward the shore. I followed. It only took a couple of minutes to reach our destination, a small landing with a beach. As we slumped onto the shore, our trusty Drop Bear’s top half floated down the river.
“Adios, Drop Bear,” I waved, flipping it off.
“Wow, I never figured you for the cultured type,” said Julia, who had collapsed into a wet puddle of soggy furs. The water from the mountain was one degree above freezing, but I could tell the lowlands were much warmer in comparison. It might have been in the low 60’s, but, compared to the arctic horror of the mountains, I would take it.
Julia shivered and cast Resist Cold on herself. I thought for a moment and cast Endure Elements. No sense in being uncomfortable. The fall had sapped most of our Stamina, so we both took a few minutes to just sit and recover. Constantly draining your Stamina eventually led to the Exhausted condition, which made everything harder to accomplish. You could partially recover from Exhausted by simply resting, and this well-sunned beach seemed to be a good spot. Glancing around for threats, I didn’t see anything unnerving. The only thing slightly weird were some statues at the edge of the sand. I relaxed.
“You idiot,” cried Shart, “Why do you keep getting yourself into these stupid situations?”
“I enjoy annoying you,” I groaned, feeling water begin to seep out of my left ear.
“That makes sense,” stated Badgelor. “Where are you?”
“Bottom of a waterfall,” I replied tiredly.
“Ha,” chuckled the badger. “Well, at least you have a path. I’m trying to figure out how to get through the Eastern Gate Fortress. It's chock-full of trolls. I’ve been hung up here for an hour trying to figure out how to bypass their patrols.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t try to fight your way through,” said Shart.
“Even I’m not that stupid,” growled Badgelor. “There are a whole bunch of them, and they look angry.”
“Why don’t you use that climbing amulet to just go over the wall?” I asked.
Badgelor was silent for a long minute. “I have an amulet of Spider Climbing. Feck.”
“You forgot,” laughed Shart. “Dumbass.”
“I haven’t eaten in fifteen minutes! You can’t expect a War Badger to be at the top of his game when he’s starving, you git,” snarled the badger.
I left them to it.
● You have achieved Level 4, Cleric
● You have achieved Level 5, Cleric
● Note: further Experience will be restricted until you select your god!
● You have earned one stat bump
● You have earned one perk.
● Your Hit Points are increased by 20, Your current Hit Points are 152/198 (32-point injury)
● Your Mana has increased by 20, Your current Mana is 90/90
● You have learned the spell, Bless!
● Your god will grant further spells.
I placed the buff into Charisma, as that seemed to be the largest buff to most of my Clerical spells. I had an epiphany about perk choices, but I didn’t find any perks that would assist me in my weapons selection. Weapons were becoming a major pain. I didn’t see any perks that would let me use arcane spells, either. There was no immediate benefit to assigning my perk. I had twenty-four hours to choose, so I decided to shelve the issue for the time being. Instead, I focused on my person.
“I’m pretty sure my foot isn’t supposed to bend like that,” I said, attempting to wiggle my toes and failing. My foot was at an odd angle to the rest of my leg. Bringing up my status page, I found it.
● Broken Ankle: You have badly broken your ankle! You suffer a 32 point injury. Injury will require first aid. Hit Points reduced by 32.
Bitterness flowed through me, as I realized what I’d typically do. I’d have Jarra fix it. Jarra was dead now, and I was here resting instead of killing Charles. I had the stolen healing potion, but wounds like this just screamed out for Healing magic. I cast my Heal Damage spell and was not disappointed.
● You have cast Heal Damage: Base Healing: 10 Hit Points for 20 Mana. Bonus healing: +4 Willpower, +2 Spirit, +20 Charisma. Total Healing: 36 points. Cooldown: 1 Minute
● Empowered Healing: You regain 4 Hit Points for spending 20 Mana on a healing spell
Recovering 40 Hit Points when I cast Heal Damage was a nice change from the 21 points I recovered only a few levels ago. I just had to mentally command the spell to cast, rather than blather on in some inane prayer. I sat up. I was going to need to pick a god, and I was unsure about that. My lifelong commitment to my core values was challenging my boiling hatred of Charles.
I tried to stand but noticed my foot was still just as badly out of place as before I started casting spells. Grumbling, I used my limited Healing skill to set the injured bone, but I needed some wood to create a splint. As I began crawling toward the woods, Julia loomed over me.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Trying to fix my foot,” I replied.
“Don’t you have Heal Injury?” she replied, looking at my leg. I shook my head, and Julia rolled her eyes, saying, “I’m stuck on Heal Injury, ‘cause Heal Injury’s stuck on me!” My foot abruptly snapped back into place. For a moment, there was nothing but sweet relief. Then came nausea, but I could manage that. I checked my status sheet. The 32 point injury and its Hit Point reduction were gone.
“Wait, so Heal Damage doesn’t heal injuries?” I asked.
Julia just looked at me, not even bothering to answer. The spell description was Heal Damage. The spell was doing just what it was supposed to do, the same way that Heal Injury only worked on injuries, apparently.
“Don’t healing potions also recover injuries?” I asked. “How is their healing different?”
“Oh, that’s an intelligent question,” said Julia, sitting down next to me. “A healing potion simply causes your internal healing to work faster. Magical healing has magic doing the work. You can target specific problems with magical healing that you couldn’t with potions. If you were down 50 Hit Points and had a 30 point injury, you could use magical Healing to go after the 50 lost Hit Points. A potion has to fix the injury first.”
“What about Overhealing?” I asked, remembering my Overhealing pool, which was currently not working. I quickly eyeballed it and found that Badgelor needed to be closer to me for it to activate. Given how I’d acquired the pool, I was probably expanding his and then sharing it.
“What about it? Just keep casting Healing spells until the Overhealing pool fills up. If you have an Overhealing pool, you can typically recover most injuries without a Heal Injury spell. Still, it tends to be more efficient to heal them with a Heal Injury spell. It helps to conserve Mana.”
I thought about that. My Overhealing pool did let me recover from injuries, but it took many points of Overheal to recover
a point of injury. That wasn’t terrible, because it allowed my standard healing factor to apply to any injury. However, Heal Injury recovered those points of Damage straight up, rather than having a ratio.
“Thanks,” I said.
“I would have expected a Remort to know most of this already,” said Julia, as we stood up. She was several inches taller than I was. Her height gave her the ability to look down her nose at me, before turning away.
She dismissed me.
“She seems smarter than I thought,” said Shart. So, I had my choice of in-game help, a sarcastic demon or a snarky woman. I wasn’t entirely sure that I hadn’t gone to hell when that semi hit me.
Julia stepped over to the statues, examining them. I collapsed back into the sand and continued casting Heal Damage on myself.
Next, I checked Adventurer, trying to figure out why it hadn’t leveled up. The reason was immediately clear.
“How is a club not a class weapon?” I groaned to Shart. I had never run into a situation where I couldn’t use a bladed weapon. I had used a bludgeoning one before, just not for extended periods. I’d initially picked adventurer for its wide weapon selection, but most of those weapons were either sharp or exciting. A club was neither.
“Is that a rhetorical question?” replied Shart. “It feels like a question you should already know the answer to, Dum Dum.”
I had earned some Adventurer experience. In fact, I was pretty close to leveling. Checking my logs showed me that I’d earned it for non-combat things. I’d found several exciting spots in the mountains and a bit of treasure with my talents. I’d snuck around. I’d killed at least one Drop Bear by ambushing the thing and kicking it off the side of the mountain. I was close, but no cigar. Yet.
Sitting up, I saw that Julia had removed her furs, judiciously using the Mend spell to recombine them into something that wasn’t so sweltering. However, the result was a mish-mashed attempt at clothing. Mend normally allowed pieces of fur to combine naturally, assuming they were all from the same creature. In this case, the furs had been from separate animals, so the result looked like a Frankensteinian abomination that should be burned rather than worn. I gave her a thumbs up.
“Your nipple is showing,” I said.
She patted her chest for a moment; I gestured to her waistband. She was going to need to get that fixed.
“As soon as you find me a cosmetic healer, I’ll be glad to,” she growled, cinching her weird furs back up.
“Shart, what the hell is a cosmetic healer?” I asked.
“Divine magic usually heals the skin perfectly. However, if it gets damaged while you are working on it, there can be some obvious stretching. Some clever people use that effect to torture people. It's good for a laugh,” stated Shart. “Anyhow, if you want to fix the damage, you talk to a cosmetic healer. They normally practice Clerical magic and Alchemy, so they can give you a potion that starts to shrink stuff. Then, they cast Healing magic to smooth it over.”
“So, it's not a class or anything? I just need to know some potion recipes?” I asked.
“Sure. Hell, there are some good ingredients for common recipes around here somewhere,” said Shart. Suddenly, my Herbalism kicked on. I usually left it in poison-scanning mode. Seeing all the herbs used for every little thing tended to be distracting. However, I discovered that out here, it was not.
“There are almost no herbs out here,” I said, scanning around. I mean, I saw a few, but it was nothing like Windfall. In Windfall, you could kick a rock and find some healroot. Here, in Falcon, I think I saw one tiny scrap of the healing herb growing at the edge of my range. I did see some other herbs, but most of them were far less effective than good old healroot. Sadly, I probably had more than a thousand of the damn things in my dimensional storage. They were just so common in the other places I had been.
Here, there was next to nothing.
I walked over and started plucking out both plants that were highlighted in my vision. I looked at the scrawny little things, before chewing them. As I waited for my Herbalism to tell me what the herbs did, I turned to Julia.
“Are there many healing herbs around?” I asked, finally spotting a third plant that Shart had highlighted.
“No more than usual,” replied Julia, walking oddly after cinching up her chest. She looked around, obviously also having the Herbalism skill. “This is about normal.” She walked over to the edge of the river and pulled out a plant, passing it to me. I started chewing without comment.
● Waterleaf: Minor healing, restores 1 Hit Point per second, restores 1 Stamina per second for 7 seconds. Side Effect: Nausea, 5 minutes.
“That’s not very good compared to healroot,” I grumbled.
“Well, look at Mister Fancy Pants,” chuckled Julia, “Going to pull out his big old wad of healroot. I mean, I guess we could spend all day looking for one. We might even find one, if we get lucky. Oh, wait, I know! We can just cast healing spells!”
“What about that healing bark?” I asked, remembering the Drop Bears. Julia gave me a deadpan look, and I further remembered the Drop Bears. My Herbalism skill chimed in to remind me that heal bark tended to grow near Drop Bear nests. My Herbalism did not specify if the Drop Bears chose their nests because of the heal bark or if the heal bark grew because of the Drop bears. In either case, the beasts would make harvesting it problematic.
“Heal bark causes temporary blindness in humans,” stated Julia. Sheesh, that was another herb with negative secondary characteristics.
Still, there had to be more herbs around. I just needed to look harder. I began meandering around until I found what I was looking for. I pulled up a large, shiny green root.
● AeloCumber: A tasty herb with pain-relieving properties. Known uses: Will tighten the skin if applied correctly. If misused, it will cause constipation.
“What are you up to?” asked Julia curiously, as I found the second ingredient.
● BotoxTater: A mild poison that is a natural booster for the effects of certain healing herbs, such as AeloCumber or healing bark.
Finally, I needed some sort of healing herb, like the Waterleaf I’d just eaten. We wandered back to the stream.
“Making a quick potion,” I said, going past the statues to find some Waterleaf. “Hey, I need to pick a god. Any suggestions?”
“I’d say Grebthar. He’s the default choice, but you seem to be some sort of traditionalist,” she replied, thinking for a minute. “I don’t know, maybe Rogers?”
“You have a god named Rogers?” I chuckled, sloshing into the river. I took a moment to confirm with Shart that there was nothing dangerous in the river. He informed me that there was nothing hazardous to me, as long as I was quick and paid attention. He also felt the need to add a quick, somewhat hurtful comment regarding my attention span, but I ignored him and hurried.
“Fine, probably not the best idea to make fun of a god, though. Maybe try Tony,” she continued. “He’s the god of wisecracks. I think you two would get along.”
“Har har,” I said, pulling out an immature Waterleaf. I ate it; it wasn’t suitable for the potion. “After I pick a god, how do I pledge to them?”
“Just go to their statue,” she said.
“Where are the nearest ones?” I asked.
“You are kidding, right?” she asked with a laugh, gesturing to the statues nearby.
“That close?” I asked. How fortuitous. As I turned, I heard a splash downstream. The paying attention portion of Shart’s warning just got a lot more necessary.
“This is Falcon,” said the princess haughtily. “We take two things seriously here, our religion and our dynastic struggles. By the way, I think a Hydra is coming to get you.”
“Damn it.” I stepped out of the water to look at the statues.
“Looks like the gods have assembled,” I said, reviewing all the statues. “If a god fights with a weapon, his clerics can use it, too, right?”
“Of course,” stated Julia, stepping well away from the wa
ter. A long-necked creature resembling a three-headed python swam toward the shore, stopping to stare at us about a foot from the bank. It wasn’t at such a high level that I was worried, but I also didn’t have any reason to piss it off at the moment.
Searching, I found the god I wanted. His statue wore a sword sheath, and I could just make out the handle of his weapon. “Who is this?”
“You mean Logan?” asked Julia, shaking her head. “He does fight with a sword, but no one worships the Badgerine anymore.”
Sounds good to me. Real gods would have been an issue. Fake gods I could manage. “Alright, Bub, lay it on me!”
● Specialization gained: Cleric of Logan, the Bagerine.
● You gain +1 Willpower and +1 Charisma
● Your Hit Point total is increased by 10. Your Mana is increased by 20.
● You have gained the Domains of Regeneration and Divination
● You have gained the ability to fight with a sword. You are already beyond Initiate rank.
● Your skill in: Religion is increased to Novice
● Your skill in: Survival increases to Initiate
● You have learned the spell: Renew!
● You have learned the spell: Heightened Senses!
● You have multiple skills over your Class Starting Rank. Class Skill Points have been coveted into Talent Points for Domain spells. You have unlocked 2 Talent Points.
That was awesome! Domains were the talents for the Clerical class. Each Domain had an expanding tree of options that started with Renew and Heightened Senses. I could see that I would be able to increase the current spells' rank and purchase new spells with Talent Points. Additionally, now I could fight with a real weapon. That was lucky; I’d lost Mr. Bat over the falls. I didn’t have a sword at the moment, but that shouldn’t be much of an issue.