Chapter 271
Project: Gamer Ver. 2 Alpha Build 2.7.1
Disclaimer Me Do: I own nothing you recognize. And most of what you don't recognize, I still don't own.
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26/11/2010
Thanksgiving hadn't really been that bad. It'd been him, his mom and dad, his uncle and aunt. The food was good, the atmosphere had been reasonably happy and the part of him that wanted to be miserable and sappy just couldn't quite manage to overwhelm the rest.
Wally still wasn't over Alice ghosting on him. He was getting there, but it wasn't going easy on him.
The boy was used to being rejected out of hand, he'd gotten used to that real quick, but someone just up and running off after they actually got invested? It... hurt.
His parents weren't really home all that much and some things he just wasn't sure how to talk to them about. They cared. And they tried. But there was just a disconnect in experience.
"Hurry up!" Barry shouted, dogging Wally's heels. "Move it, slowpoke!"
But his uncle was always willing to make some time for him. Which, today, meant testing out just how fast the two of them could run out on the salt flats of Utah.
"Tough talk from second place!" Wally shouted back, a wide grin on his face.
They'd used the Zeta Tube network to get to Salt Lake City, then they'd just run from there to Bonneville. It was exhilarating, getting a chance to push themselves harder, trying to reach new heights of speed.
Wally's grin grew a bit toothier as the crimson of his uncle's costume started to creep into his peripheral vision.
It used to be, he struggled just to reach the sound barrier. It meant he was the slowest of the three who'd worn the mantle of 'The Flash' and the bitter taste that fact left in his mouth was something he thought would never go away.
"Gotta do better than that!" the boy shouted, laughter in his voice as his legs burned and his heart pounded.
"Come on!" Flash whined. "I'm getting old! I'm not as good as I used to be."
"Yeah," Wally crowed, nearly tripping as a laugh bubbled its way out of his chest. "That's what she said!"
"...Okay, you asked for it." Barry's voice was practically in Wally's ear as the man quit pretending that he was 'just' keeping up and began to steadily inch his way ahead of the teen.
Wally pushed a bit harder himself, taking back the lead.
And Barry pulled a little more speed out, the duo constantly playing a game of keep-up as they pushed through the sound barrier and just kept running.
At nearly mach two, Wally found a limit. A wall. It didn't matter how much he pushed, how hard he tried, he couldn't eke anymore acceleration out of his legs.
"Aww, what's the matter, champ?" Barry asked, running backwards in front of Wally. "That all you got? Guess I shouldn't expect much from a slowpoke like-"
It started as a brief flicker as Wally leaned forward and cycled a trickle of energy into the belt around his waist. At the speeds the two were running as they circled around the salt flats, a trick of the light was hardly surprising.
But the dull, blue glow that swiftly ignited into a full aura around Wally West was no mere trick.
The boy rapidly accelerated, surpassing his very surprised mentor as he shot up from mach two to mach six in a blue blur.
"What was that?!" Wally's voice echoed over the flat plains. "I can't hear you over how fast I am!"
-----
"-So, the key thing to remember when you're dealing with androids, robots or people with pacemakers is that the Steal skill can let you grab things that you can't really reach," Alchemist, using Ghost Sound, explained to Player One as he held down one of the robot guards inside of the Wind I.D. "Like batteries. Go ahead and give it a try."
There were all sorts of things inside of the Wind I.D.. Slithering red hydras, knights clad in black armor with glowing red eyes, massive snakes with human-ish faces, giant undead cyclopes skulls, rock golems, knights clad in black armor with glowing red eyes that cast magic, nearly-invisible wind elementals and, in a major tonal shift compared to everything that had already been listed, robots.
The weirdest part, Alchemist observed as Player One carefully targeted the robot Guardian he was holding immobile, was that the robots actually made sense for the environment. A high-tech palace with electric lights and indecipherable whirligigs and gewgaws embedded in the walls.
"Alright..." Tiffany mumbled as she reached forward and then jerked her hand back in a clawing motion. "I got a... healing potion."
"Always handy, but not what you're after," Alchemist unnecessarily told the girl. "Go ahead and give it another try."
The robot Alchemist held down buzzed angrily and he could feel the mechanisms inside of it struggling against him but it just couldn't muster up enough force to push him off.
"Healing potion," Tiffany repeated after stealing again. "'Nother one," she tried steal again. "And yet another healing potion. Are you sure this works?"
Alchemist tilted his head slightly to the side in consideration before turning his head down to look at the strangely-designed quadrupedal robot. His claw lashed out, gripping at something that was... not quite there as his own Steal skill latched on to something-
And he brought his hand back with a strange, canister-shaped object while the robot went still and inert.
"Yep," Alchemist said as he tossed the battery over his back, ignoring the explosion that it caused upon landing that decimated a small group of vampires that had been trying to sneak up on them. "Pretty sure."
-----
Bruce kept silent as Guy read through the documents he'd provided.
Honestly, he wasn't sure what all he could say on the matter. Between the Question and himself, they'd tracked down quite a bit more than Bruce had been expecting.
Ace... Bruce had been hoping that the girl didn't exist at all. He'd been hoping that the clues he'd been given, that they wouldn't be relevant to -his- world. That the horrific rabbit hole he'd found himself falling into wouldn't end with small children, strapped to tables and-
"I don't see a location listed, here," Guy said, far more calmly than Bruce would have expected. "I can probably figure it out in about five minutes, but I'm guessing you held it back for a reason."
"We don't actually have it, yet," Bruce admitted before he finally gave up on keeping up a front and just sank back into the overstuffed chair he'd claimed. "We- The Question and I- have been sifting through the documents we've been able to extract without detection and it's been... difficult."
Bruce watched silently as Guy didn't just take a sip of his beer. The man threw his head back and chugged the whole can. Then he got up and walked to the kitchen just to come back with a fresh one.
"Project Zero-One, huh?" Guy asked as he dropped onto his couch. He wasn't looking at Bruce, but the billionaire nodded anyway. "Well, how high up does that go? Zero-Two? One-Oh? Freakin' Ninety-Nine? Or'd they start throwin' the damn alphabet in there?"
"...We don't know," Bruce told the simmering Green Lantern. "We've been working on extracting the data without getting caught. It's limited us to what you have so far. Now that we have her name, we can hunt down the facility she's in. The question that we have to answer is 'What next?' Because ripping her out of the facility is the right thing to do but we don't know how many other people are there with her or what kind of condition they're in. Nor do we know how heavily defended it will be."
Adjacent to him, Guy gripped his unopened can so tightly his knuckles had gone white. The muscular redhead inhaled deeply and then... relaxed. He sank back into his couch and sent Batman a toxic green glare.
"So, you didn't come here just to throw me at 'em and watch the whole mess get dragged into the light. What do you want, Bats?"
"Help," was Batman's simple answer. "The Justice League is fracturing. Some of us are beginning to focus on the big picture, or at least the one presented to us, and that would let 'little' things like Ace happen. We need people that won't just let the needs of the many justify the suffering of the few. We need to be able, willing to take a stand. Even, especially, when things like this are discovered."
Bruce sighed and leaned forward, his half-empty can of Gingold Charm clinking loudly on Guy's table.
"Everyone in the Justice League would act on this. At least, everyone that's part of it right now," Bruce clarified. He had faith that, even if their desires might misalign in the future, the people that he'd stood beside and fought beside would refuse to let a child suffer for someone's political interests. "But things are changing, especially after Bialya. Politicians are lashing out in fear, pushing metahumans underground where they'll be targeted with nobody able or willing to stand for them. The Justice League, the United Nations is demanding that we do more while also accepting more oversight. Nearly a dozen countries are demanding that a member of their metahuman teams be placed among the League. Which would normally be fine, we've needed to expand for years but they're demanding we take on the likes of August General in Iron."
"...Yeah, that sounds like an absolute shit-show," Guy very succinctly summarized. "Alright. You've convinced me that you're not just shovelin' shit but I'm gonna need details. What are you actually planning? How, exac'ly, do you see this workin' out?"
"My goal-" Batman started to say before clicking his teeth shut when Guy held up a hand to stop him.
"Yeah, this ain't gonna be quick an' easy. I'm gonna order a pizza before you really get goin' 'cuz I got a feeling this might take a while. Whaddya want on it?"
"...Cheese." Batman didn't care for being interrupted. He really, really didn't...
But Guy was right. This would not be an easy or simple conversation, especially given the fact that he was still hammering out the details with Charles Szasz.
The formal nature of the Justice League meant it was slow and difficult to change but that offered a significant amount of security. Until it was coopted by external forces.
The vague idea that he was forming among his current confidantes, something more along the lines of cooperative splinter cells, was far less secure and far more prone to changes and shifts. And there was no guarantee that it could even get off the ground.
"You seem... far more put together than I'd been told," Bruce said once Guy got done placing an order for delivery. "I'd been expecting..."
"Me bein' a stubborn ass that'd fly off the handle?" Guy asked, before laughing darkly. "Yeah. Considerin' that was a pretty serious issue of mine, I can see why you'd think that."
"What changed?" Bruce asked. He knew that Guy had suffered a traumatic brain injury, it was in his file. And he knew that it was inoperable.
Knowledge he'd intended to use to... manipulate Guy, should it have proven necessary. He could have offered Alchemist's services in healing the man as a carrot, of sorts, if Guy had been excessively belligerent.
"Oh, 'bout two months ago I got called in for an emergency. Bunch'a folks were hurt and this fella was handing out Pretty Pegasister wands they claimed could heal someone with a touch. Told us to go off and start smackin' folks in hospitals to try and get things under control."
...The Injustice League attack?
"You used one of the wands on yourself?" It was so blindingly simple, Batman had no idea how he hadn't considered it a possibility.
"Of course I did," Guy snorted, a grin on his lips. "I wasn't about to go and try to use some kinda 'healing artifact' on anyone, much less a group of kids in a hospital, if I didn't actually know what it was gonna do."
-----
Getting through the first few levels of the Wind I.D. was tedious. Not hard. Tiffany's attributes at level 1 were even higher than her attributes were the first time she hit level 100, now.
They'd left a wake of destruction behind them and Alchemist had actually been keen on teaching her how to use the skill she'd bought off of the Game Shop.
Steal. A critical tool in being an effective Rogue, he'd claimed. And she could definitely see that. It took a few levels before she started grabbing something other than healing items but she'd eventually gotten Steal up to a point where she could sort of direct it.
The first time she'd stolen a Deathbringer sword off of one of the Dark Knights... had been kind of amazing.
Then she'd buried the knight's own weapon through the visor in its helm.
Though, for as helpful as Alchemist was, especially when he'd shown her how helpful his Stop spell was for stealing from something, the guy was kind of irritating.
"Why did you just leave this sitting here?" Case in point was the fact that Alchemist had insisted on digging through every treasure chest and stripping every monster. Sure, he was fast at it but it was still kind of wasting time. "Do you have any idea how valuable this thing would be?"
In this particular case, he was asking after a... Was it a meteor or meteorite?
Regardless, there was a great big rock that had ripped through multiple floors overhead before it had come to rest on the second floor of the I.D.
"It's a rock," Tiffany told the man, dragon, whatever. "Do you really think it'd be worth my time to go hunt down a collector?"
"...Hit it with Observe," the dragon demanded.
Tiffany glared at him for a moment, increasingly frustrated by how much time this was taking before huffing and doing as he demanded.
-- Meteor --
-- A traveler that has finally finished its grand journey. --
-- Composition by volume: Silica - 44%, Iron - 22%, Adamantite - 19%, Nickel - 10%, Misc. Minerals - 5% --
Tiffany quickly rattled the numbers off and waited for Alchemist to explain whatever it was that had his panties in a bunch.
Instead he just inhaled slowly and then snapped his claws, casting a spell of some kind that changed the rock nestled deeply in a cradle of twisted metal into a number of stacks of ingots and a pile of black sand.
"Adamantite is a... unique mineral," Alchemist began to explain as he picked up the various different bars of metal. "It's not magical, not by itself, but it is anomalous. It has physical properties that simply exceed what should naturally be possible. Specifically, it is significantly harder than diamond."
"How much harder?" Tiffany asked, now genuinely interested in what he had to say. She'd been expecting it to be a lecture on making money off of things but this seemed a bit different.
"That's... kind of hard to say. The Mohs hardness scale is subjective, not linear. And a bit irrelevant. Pure adamantite might be incredibly hard but it also has no shear resistance, a lot like pure aluminum. Instead, it can be alloyed with a mixture of mithril and iron to make adamantine and that can be used to make weapons and armor of quality that is..." Alchemist trailed off, the dragon struggling to find words to describe what he was trying to say.
Instead, even as he kept mumbling to himself, he set a bar of adamantite on the ground in front of him, then a bar of iron and then he extracted a bar of a sort of silvery-blue metal from his inventory along with a small block of wood and some leather.
"...That should be it," he mumbled, just barely audible to Tiffany as he snapped his claws once again and the various materials all disappeared.
Replaced, instead, with a pair of shortswords with leather-wrapped handles.
"...Huh," Tiffany mumbled as she raised one hand up to her chin and hit the weapons with Observe.
--Adamantine Shortsword--
--Quality: Legendary--
--
ATK: 98
EVA: 25
Accuracy: 100
Adamantine: This weapon ignores up to (physical resistance: 20) and automatically inflicts critical damage on materials with (hardness<20)
Sneak Attack Multiplier: 2.5
--
That... well, the raw values were better than her sword, the Ame-No-Murakumo-No-Tsurugi that Alchemist had given her a while back.
"These are really good," Tiffany admitted as she picked up the fairly small weapons. "But I think I should stick with the sword you gave me? I tried the katanas, too, but... the greatsword has those really big buffs to my stats."
"Let me see it," the dragon demanded, holding his claw out expectantly.
Tiffany hesitated for a moment and turned to check that the door into the small room they were in was still barred before she handed her weapon over. She nearly cried out in shock when he just started poking the purple orbs out of the sword, letting them all drop to the ground, though she barely managed to hold her tongue.
"Hmm..." the dragon mumbled, the sound escaping from the helmet instead of projected with magic as he plucked each of the six orbs off the ground. Then he put them all away in his inventory, alongside both of the shortswords he'd made. "Let's see... yes... this should work."
"What are you-" Tiffany started to ask before the dragon snapped his claws twice, each one releasing a massive wave of magical power. The force of it nearly dropped the girl to her knees and she felt... something, somehow, behind her nose start to act up. Almost like she had to sneeze, but worse.
"Hmm... Yes. This should do nicely, I think."
Tiffany stumbled back up and rubbed at her eyes to get some focus back. When they did, she saw the dragon was holding out both of the shortswords to her again. Though, now they seemed to have a subtle green sheen to the once-black metal.
Tiffany hit one of them with Observe-
--Adamantine Shortsword--
--Quality: Legendary--
-
ATK: 101
EVA: 25
Accuracy: 100
- HP + 50%
- Stamina + 50%
- Strength + 50%
- Vitality + 50%
- Wisdom + 50%
- Expend Stamina to empower your defense and offense +100%
Adamantine: This weapon ignores up to (physical resistance: 20) and automatically inflicts critical damage on materials with (hardness<20)
Ghost Touch: This weapon can strike ghosts as though they were fully corporeal
Sneak Attack Multiplier: 3.5 (Reaver)
-
Taking both of the proferred weapons, Tiffany felt a severe jolt of weakness as her max HP didn't just jump by 50%, but by 100%! More than that, even, as her improved vitality added even more on top.
"...That's just ridiculous," Tiffany said as she looked at the weapons that Alchemist could just apparently make on demand.
Then she looked down at her armor, still the same suit that she'd made out of materials from the Water I.D.
The blueprints she'd gotten for the Wind I.D. were heavy. And clunky. And slowed her down a lot.
"Do you have any ideas on some better armor?" Tiffany asked.
"Well... I might know of a few good suits," the dragon admitted as it opened its own Gamer menu. "Provided you're not afraid of spending some GP."
"...Alchemist? I have literally billions of GP."
-----
Hippolyta did not much care for Themyscira rejoining the larger world of Man. There were benefits, no shortage of boons that they'd been able to enjoy. The modern bra, for example, was a true breath of fresh air for her people. Some, those that had been young when they'd come under Hera's promise, they still suffered from their menses and so found sanitary pads to be especially helpful over the more traditional methods they'd once employed.
And she might have had a fairly sizeable collection of rather tawdry romance novels kept in her private chambers alongside several boxes of truly decadent Swedish chocolates...
Alright, Hippolyta found commerce with Man's World absolutely wonderful.
She did not, however, care much for its politics.
"How many times have we told them that we will not be allowing an embassy unto our lands?" the queen asked her assistant. It was an absolutely constant deluge from nearly every single country that they interacted with.
Themyscira may have been governed by Hippolyta and her people. They did not, however, claim it as their own. They were but supplicants, gracefully given freedom to develop the land by Hera and her kin.
"As that was Germany's request?" Hippolyta's main assistant, Chloé, asked as she picked up and checked over the paperwork. "I believe this is the seventeenth time they have requested such. And this would be the fourth time that they have declared your stipulation of only accepting female staff as a requirement to granting their request to be needlessly discriminatory."
"Wonderful." Hippolyta did not care for all of the paperwork that came with opening themselves up to the world at large. At all. The short-sighted and short-lived people that they were forced to interact with had proven perpetually unable to learn the lessons of those that came before them.
Such as how to accept the word 'No'.
Hippolyta set the request from Germany aside, to be sent to one of her other aides who would write a formal letter of rejection, when her daughter, Diana, strode into the room.
The queen sighed and set down another piece of paperwork on her desk. Judging by the weight Diana was putting into her steps, there was something the princess wanted and waiting would not be on the list.
"Diana," Hippolyta greeted, looking up from her work. "It's wonderful to- What happened to your face?"
"Hello, mother- I found a sparring partner that was able to keep up with me, at first." Diana's face, as well as her exposed arms and parts of her chest were a motley mix of yellowed bruises. The sallow tint looked downright ghastly on the girl.
On the other hand? If Diana had an adequate sparring partner, perhaps she would stop sending Hippolyta's amazons to the healers.
"That is... wonderful, daughter," Hippolyta decided. She had noticed, during the few moments that she could steal away for herself, that Diana's growth had slowed significantly. There were few challenges for Diana's might, here or in Man's world. Those that truly existed, few had the will to properly fight. "While I delight in seeing you, I am rather occupied at the moment. What brings you here?"
For a long moment, Diana said nothing. Her blue eyes, piercing and far too deep for Diana's age, bored into Hippolyta.
"I... have been pursuing a strange clue. An accusation as much as it was a suspicion from a man that seems unpleasantly akin to Cassandra." Hippolyta raised an eyebrow, both confused and curious, but motioned for Diana to continue. "Do you recall a woman by the name of Rose Canton?"
"The name is... familiar," Hippolyta admitted, though she pursed her lips in thought as she tried to place the name.
"She was a friend of mine, sixty years ago," Diana clarified before closing her eyes and inhaling deeply. "She was a metahuman with limited control over plants. She came to us for help in mending her fractured mind, in subduing the dark half of her soul known as 'Thorn'."
The details were slowly dredging themselves from the depths of time and memory. Hippolyta remembered a redheaded woman with hidden depths, coming to them for help. Seeking asylum so as to heal and be able to lead a normal life back in... Man's... world.
"The one I spoke to, they had some deep suspicions as to the timing of Rose reverting to Thorn," Diana continued, speaking into the silence as Chloé left the room. "They noted how very odd it was that Thorn reappeared upon Rose being wed and pregnant. How our healing failed exactly upon the woman's honeymoon."
Hippolyta remembered, now.
"The mind is a very complex machine, Diana," Hippolyta said, choosing her words very carefully. "Even the very best of our healers cannot-"
"DO NOT LIE TO ME!" Diana roared, crossing the distance of the room in an instant to slam her hands upon Hippolyta's desk. "I have already extracted the truth from Ida. Why... Why would you demand that the tethers of her mind be riddled with failures, mother? Why?"
Hippolyta swallowed thickly as tears dripped from Diana's bowed head, staining several papers that she'd yet to get to.
"...The world of Man had just experienced a war the likes of which had never been seen before," Hippolyta explained, unconcerned with the Geas that had been in Diana's words.
She'd never made a habit of lying to her daughter. Nor did she plan to.
"And I knew not how safe the little Rose might be, once she returned to her home. Thorn, as wicked as she was, held the strength between the two. Ida was instructed to ensure that, should Rose fall to the wiles of Man, should the secrets of Themyscira be placed at risk, the shackles within Rose's mind would falter and Thorn would be freed." It had been meant as a last-ditch defense. How the magics of Ida failed, what the trigger had been, Hippolyta could not say. "The spells that worked alongside her therapy would have been subjected to Rose's own mind and thoughts, Diana. I do not know what caused them to fail."
A pair of guards stepped into the room, directed by Chloé, but Hippolyta waved her hand down and shook her head.
There was no danger, here.
Instead, the warrior queen stood from her seat and walked around her desk, her work forgotten.
"...She was my friend," Diana repeated, her voice quiet and trembling. The force from before spent and leaving behind a woman that was clearly exhausted and overworked. "I..."
Hippolyta pulled her daughter into a tight embrace, wrapping her arms around the woman.
"I failed her," Diana whispered as hot tears burned against Hippolyta's toga.
"...We both did," Hippolyta admitted, shame in her voice.
As long lived as she was, she'd failed many people. Time had a habit of burying the memories, helping to push her forward, push her people forward, but the memories were no less bitter.
"...I miss her," Diana admitted, quietly, into Hippolyta's shoulder.
The old queen had little more she could say to soothe her daughter's hurt. Telling her that she ought get used to missing people as she chose to linger in the mortal world of Man would just be needlessly cruel.
Instead, she just held her daughter and offered her what little comfort that she could.
-----
"It's pink," was Player One's first comment on seeing the suit that Alchemist suggested for her, called the Aurore Doublet. "Why is it pink?"
"I've been asking that question for about fifteen years," he admitted as he looked over his own purchases.
A full hauberk set, moderately heavy armor that had pearl inlay all over its pieces. The Perle Hauberk was another set from the world of Final Fantasy Eleven. An introductory set of armor for a high-level area that had been introduced after the level seventy-five cap had been lifted.
It wasn't amazing compared to the other sets available around it, but it had the benefit of being useable by multiple vocations in the game, like the Aurore Doublet set, and it could be used right after being purchased instead of needing to be upgraded.
The whole set, five pieces, had run him about one point eight million GP. Then the Aurore Doublet had run him the same. Grabbing the mage set, the Teal Saio outfit had also cost the same amount. But they had some incredibly convenient factors. Combined, they almost reached the maximum potential possible for in-combat Haste from the game.
Grabbing something that would cover the final two percent had actually cost about the same as buying all three sets combined at an even five million GP, the Zeal Cap +1. Still, he'd put them all together when he got home and then extract the effects into ebony tokens. It was past time to upgrade his gear a bit and he could afford the epic perks to expand his ability to equip magic items to include another pair of rings.
"Huh," Tiffany said, audibly surprised. It drew Alchemist's gaze away from an entry that nearly had him salivating, the Defending Ring and its universal ten percent damage reduction. He'd just have to fight a beast called the 'Sovereign Behemoth' for it. "This isn't too bad, actually."
Tiffany had actually put on the pink outfit while Alchemist had been distracted. It only left a portion of her forearms and her face exposed. The floppy cap sitting crooked on her head was almost cute.
"Do you mind if I ask you a question?" Alchemist shook away the errant thought and ran a search for a different item, instead. Mana Wall offered a phenomenal amount of defense but there was a spell that would turn that defense into an offense. A spell called 'Dread Spikes'.
"What's up?" the girl asked as she twisted around, looking at herself.
"Why haven't you upgraded your gear on your own? I know you mentioned the Wind set impeding your movement but there had to be something else of value for you."
"Eh... sorta?" Tiffany admitted as Alchemist extracted and unrolled the scroll he'd just purchased. "Like, the weapons from the Water I.D.? They were all made out of fish bones, had a really high chance of inflicting poison and paralysis, which would've been cool. Except that they weren't instant, like that Stop spell. And the spiny parts kept getting caught."
"...Something swam off with your gear," Alchemist summarized.
"A dolphin swam off with my gear. Yes," Tiffany didn't seem too broken up about it, however.
"So, why didn't you try anything from the Game Shop?" he asked, double checking something on the scroll.
The spell was dark magic, an unusual application of the Drain spell, really. Though, there was a sort of safeguard in place that would keep it from quite functioning if something undead activated it. A fairly clever 'sifting' function that kept the spell from absorbing anything other than positive energy.
"I did." Tiffany strapped her shortswords to her hips and then hopped up and down a few times, seemingly pleased at the lack of anything moving. "Everything I could find was kind of like the weapons on it. All big and gaudy and pretty much useless. Especially since the 'armor' was usually a pair of boots, maybe some gloves and then a sheer bikini made of metal."
"...Ah." That... would explain things rather well, actually.
"So, do you mind if I ask you something? Before we get moving, I mean?"
"Of course, go ahead," Alchemist told the girl as he began to shape his magic, following the directions in the scroll.
"What's with the skeletons?" Tiffany asked, her voice oddly bereft of judgement. "And what was with the one that attacked you?"
"Ah, that. I've been considering the merits of using reanimated defenders to keep a few things safe," Alchemist admitted as he slowly worked the magic through its form. Once he had a feel for it, he could cast it significantly faster but that would still demand familiarity. "Unfortunately, between the spell I was using and the perk improving it, I have a limit of ten levels worth of undead per one of my own levels."
"So... you lost control of some when you prestiged?"
Alchemist nodded silently as he snapped his claws and he was wrapped in a series of dark circles which swiftly faded away.
"Yes," the wizard told the girl as he double-checked things and confirmed that the spell was active. "It renders those plans rather unworkable, I'm afraid."
"Yeah... Might be for the best?" Tiffany offered, not at all sympathetic to Alchemist's plight. "I really don't think people would react too well if they knew you had a whole, uh, 'Army of Darkness' at your beck and call."
"...Oh," Alchemist whispered, dropping his head into his claws. It was a shame he couldn't grin as a dragon. And, even if he could, it certainly wouldn't be visible through his helmet. "Oh my god. How... Why did nobody tell me this?!"
AN/ I miss having the time to play Final Fantasy Eleven...
Disclaimer Me Do: I own nothing you recognize. And most of what you don't recognize, I still don't own.
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26/11/2010
Thanksgiving hadn't really been that bad. It'd been him, his mom and dad, his uncle and aunt. The food was good, the atmosphere had been reasonably happy and the part of him that wanted to be miserable and sappy just couldn't quite manage to overwhelm the rest.
Wally still wasn't over Alice ghosting on him. He was getting there, but it wasn't going easy on him.
The boy was used to being rejected out of hand, he'd gotten used to that real quick, but someone just up and running off after they actually got invested? It... hurt.
His parents weren't really home all that much and some things he just wasn't sure how to talk to them about. They cared. And they tried. But there was just a disconnect in experience.
"Hurry up!" Barry shouted, dogging Wally's heels. "Move it, slowpoke!"
But his uncle was always willing to make some time for him. Which, today, meant testing out just how fast the two of them could run out on the salt flats of Utah.
"Tough talk from second place!" Wally shouted back, a wide grin on his face.
They'd used the Zeta Tube network to get to Salt Lake City, then they'd just run from there to Bonneville. It was exhilarating, getting a chance to push themselves harder, trying to reach new heights of speed.
Wally's grin grew a bit toothier as the crimson of his uncle's costume started to creep into his peripheral vision.
It used to be, he struggled just to reach the sound barrier. It meant he was the slowest of the three who'd worn the mantle of 'The Flash' and the bitter taste that fact left in his mouth was something he thought would never go away.
"Gotta do better than that!" the boy shouted, laughter in his voice as his legs burned and his heart pounded.
"Come on!" Flash whined. "I'm getting old! I'm not as good as I used to be."
"Yeah," Wally crowed, nearly tripping as a laugh bubbled its way out of his chest. "That's what she said!"
"...Okay, you asked for it." Barry's voice was practically in Wally's ear as the man quit pretending that he was 'just' keeping up and began to steadily inch his way ahead of the teen.
Wally pushed a bit harder himself, taking back the lead.
And Barry pulled a little more speed out, the duo constantly playing a game of keep-up as they pushed through the sound barrier and just kept running.
At nearly mach two, Wally found a limit. A wall. It didn't matter how much he pushed, how hard he tried, he couldn't eke anymore acceleration out of his legs.
"Aww, what's the matter, champ?" Barry asked, running backwards in front of Wally. "That all you got? Guess I shouldn't expect much from a slowpoke like-"
It started as a brief flicker as Wally leaned forward and cycled a trickle of energy into the belt around his waist. At the speeds the two were running as they circled around the salt flats, a trick of the light was hardly surprising.
But the dull, blue glow that swiftly ignited into a full aura around Wally West was no mere trick.
The boy rapidly accelerated, surpassing his very surprised mentor as he shot up from mach two to mach six in a blue blur.
"What was that?!" Wally's voice echoed over the flat plains. "I can't hear you over how fast I am!"
-----
"-So, the key thing to remember when you're dealing with androids, robots or people with pacemakers is that the Steal skill can let you grab things that you can't really reach," Alchemist, using Ghost Sound, explained to Player One as he held down one of the robot guards inside of the Wind I.D. "Like batteries. Go ahead and give it a try."
There were all sorts of things inside of the Wind I.D.. Slithering red hydras, knights clad in black armor with glowing red eyes, massive snakes with human-ish faces, giant undead cyclopes skulls, rock golems, knights clad in black armor with glowing red eyes that cast magic, nearly-invisible wind elementals and, in a major tonal shift compared to everything that had already been listed, robots.
The weirdest part, Alchemist observed as Player One carefully targeted the robot Guardian he was holding immobile, was that the robots actually made sense for the environment. A high-tech palace with electric lights and indecipherable whirligigs and gewgaws embedded in the walls.
"Alright..." Tiffany mumbled as she reached forward and then jerked her hand back in a clawing motion. "I got a... healing potion."
"Always handy, but not what you're after," Alchemist unnecessarily told the girl. "Go ahead and give it another try."
The robot Alchemist held down buzzed angrily and he could feel the mechanisms inside of it struggling against him but it just couldn't muster up enough force to push him off.
"Healing potion," Tiffany repeated after stealing again. "'Nother one," she tried steal again. "And yet another healing potion. Are you sure this works?"
Alchemist tilted his head slightly to the side in consideration before turning his head down to look at the strangely-designed quadrupedal robot. His claw lashed out, gripping at something that was... not quite there as his own Steal skill latched on to something-
And he brought his hand back with a strange, canister-shaped object while the robot went still and inert.
"Yep," Alchemist said as he tossed the battery over his back, ignoring the explosion that it caused upon landing that decimated a small group of vampires that had been trying to sneak up on them. "Pretty sure."
-----
Bruce kept silent as Guy read through the documents he'd provided.
Honestly, he wasn't sure what all he could say on the matter. Between the Question and himself, they'd tracked down quite a bit more than Bruce had been expecting.
Ace... Bruce had been hoping that the girl didn't exist at all. He'd been hoping that the clues he'd been given, that they wouldn't be relevant to -his- world. That the horrific rabbit hole he'd found himself falling into wouldn't end with small children, strapped to tables and-
"I don't see a location listed, here," Guy said, far more calmly than Bruce would have expected. "I can probably figure it out in about five minutes, but I'm guessing you held it back for a reason."
"We don't actually have it, yet," Bruce admitted before he finally gave up on keeping up a front and just sank back into the overstuffed chair he'd claimed. "We- The Question and I- have been sifting through the documents we've been able to extract without detection and it's been... difficult."
Bruce watched silently as Guy didn't just take a sip of his beer. The man threw his head back and chugged the whole can. Then he got up and walked to the kitchen just to come back with a fresh one.
"Project Zero-One, huh?" Guy asked as he dropped onto his couch. He wasn't looking at Bruce, but the billionaire nodded anyway. "Well, how high up does that go? Zero-Two? One-Oh? Freakin' Ninety-Nine? Or'd they start throwin' the damn alphabet in there?"
"...We don't know," Bruce told the simmering Green Lantern. "We've been working on extracting the data without getting caught. It's limited us to what you have so far. Now that we have her name, we can hunt down the facility she's in. The question that we have to answer is 'What next?' Because ripping her out of the facility is the right thing to do but we don't know how many other people are there with her or what kind of condition they're in. Nor do we know how heavily defended it will be."
Adjacent to him, Guy gripped his unopened can so tightly his knuckles had gone white. The muscular redhead inhaled deeply and then... relaxed. He sank back into his couch and sent Batman a toxic green glare.
"So, you didn't come here just to throw me at 'em and watch the whole mess get dragged into the light. What do you want, Bats?"
"Help," was Batman's simple answer. "The Justice League is fracturing. Some of us are beginning to focus on the big picture, or at least the one presented to us, and that would let 'little' things like Ace happen. We need people that won't just let the needs of the many justify the suffering of the few. We need to be able, willing to take a stand. Even, especially, when things like this are discovered."
Bruce sighed and leaned forward, his half-empty can of Gingold Charm clinking loudly on Guy's table.
"Everyone in the Justice League would act on this. At least, everyone that's part of it right now," Bruce clarified. He had faith that, even if their desires might misalign in the future, the people that he'd stood beside and fought beside would refuse to let a child suffer for someone's political interests. "But things are changing, especially after Bialya. Politicians are lashing out in fear, pushing metahumans underground where they'll be targeted with nobody able or willing to stand for them. The Justice League, the United Nations is demanding that we do more while also accepting more oversight. Nearly a dozen countries are demanding that a member of their metahuman teams be placed among the League. Which would normally be fine, we've needed to expand for years but they're demanding we take on the likes of August General in Iron."
"...Yeah, that sounds like an absolute shit-show," Guy very succinctly summarized. "Alright. You've convinced me that you're not just shovelin' shit but I'm gonna need details. What are you actually planning? How, exac'ly, do you see this workin' out?"
"My goal-" Batman started to say before clicking his teeth shut when Guy held up a hand to stop him.
"Yeah, this ain't gonna be quick an' easy. I'm gonna order a pizza before you really get goin' 'cuz I got a feeling this might take a while. Whaddya want on it?"
"...Cheese." Batman didn't care for being interrupted. He really, really didn't...
But Guy was right. This would not be an easy or simple conversation, especially given the fact that he was still hammering out the details with Charles Szasz.
The formal nature of the Justice League meant it was slow and difficult to change but that offered a significant amount of security. Until it was coopted by external forces.
The vague idea that he was forming among his current confidantes, something more along the lines of cooperative splinter cells, was far less secure and far more prone to changes and shifts. And there was no guarantee that it could even get off the ground.
"You seem... far more put together than I'd been told," Bruce said once Guy got done placing an order for delivery. "I'd been expecting..."
"Me bein' a stubborn ass that'd fly off the handle?" Guy asked, before laughing darkly. "Yeah. Considerin' that was a pretty serious issue of mine, I can see why you'd think that."
"What changed?" Bruce asked. He knew that Guy had suffered a traumatic brain injury, it was in his file. And he knew that it was inoperable.
Knowledge he'd intended to use to... manipulate Guy, should it have proven necessary. He could have offered Alchemist's services in healing the man as a carrot, of sorts, if Guy had been excessively belligerent.
"Oh, 'bout two months ago I got called in for an emergency. Bunch'a folks were hurt and this fella was handing out Pretty Pegasister wands they claimed could heal someone with a touch. Told us to go off and start smackin' folks in hospitals to try and get things under control."
...The Injustice League attack?
"You used one of the wands on yourself?" It was so blindingly simple, Batman had no idea how he hadn't considered it a possibility.
"Of course I did," Guy snorted, a grin on his lips. "I wasn't about to go and try to use some kinda 'healing artifact' on anyone, much less a group of kids in a hospital, if I didn't actually know what it was gonna do."
-----
Getting through the first few levels of the Wind I.D. was tedious. Not hard. Tiffany's attributes at level 1 were even higher than her attributes were the first time she hit level 100, now.
They'd left a wake of destruction behind them and Alchemist had actually been keen on teaching her how to use the skill she'd bought off of the Game Shop.
Steal. A critical tool in being an effective Rogue, he'd claimed. And she could definitely see that. It took a few levels before she started grabbing something other than healing items but she'd eventually gotten Steal up to a point where she could sort of direct it.
The first time she'd stolen a Deathbringer sword off of one of the Dark Knights... had been kind of amazing.
Then she'd buried the knight's own weapon through the visor in its helm.
Though, for as helpful as Alchemist was, especially when he'd shown her how helpful his Stop spell was for stealing from something, the guy was kind of irritating.
"Why did you just leave this sitting here?" Case in point was the fact that Alchemist had insisted on digging through every treasure chest and stripping every monster. Sure, he was fast at it but it was still kind of wasting time. "Do you have any idea how valuable this thing would be?"
In this particular case, he was asking after a... Was it a meteor or meteorite?
Regardless, there was a great big rock that had ripped through multiple floors overhead before it had come to rest on the second floor of the I.D.
"It's a rock," Tiffany told the man, dragon, whatever. "Do you really think it'd be worth my time to go hunt down a collector?"
"...Hit it with Observe," the dragon demanded.
Tiffany glared at him for a moment, increasingly frustrated by how much time this was taking before huffing and doing as he demanded.
-- Meteor --
-- A traveler that has finally finished its grand journey. --
-- Composition by volume: Silica - 44%, Iron - 22%, Adamantite - 19%, Nickel - 10%, Misc. Minerals - 5% --
Tiffany quickly rattled the numbers off and waited for Alchemist to explain whatever it was that had his panties in a bunch.
Instead he just inhaled slowly and then snapped his claws, casting a spell of some kind that changed the rock nestled deeply in a cradle of twisted metal into a number of stacks of ingots and a pile of black sand.
"Adamantite is a... unique mineral," Alchemist began to explain as he picked up the various different bars of metal. "It's not magical, not by itself, but it is anomalous. It has physical properties that simply exceed what should naturally be possible. Specifically, it is significantly harder than diamond."
"How much harder?" Tiffany asked, now genuinely interested in what he had to say. She'd been expecting it to be a lecture on making money off of things but this seemed a bit different.
"That's... kind of hard to say. The Mohs hardness scale is subjective, not linear. And a bit irrelevant. Pure adamantite might be incredibly hard but it also has no shear resistance, a lot like pure aluminum. Instead, it can be alloyed with a mixture of mithril and iron to make adamantine and that can be used to make weapons and armor of quality that is..." Alchemist trailed off, the dragon struggling to find words to describe what he was trying to say.
Instead, even as he kept mumbling to himself, he set a bar of adamantite on the ground in front of him, then a bar of iron and then he extracted a bar of a sort of silvery-blue metal from his inventory along with a small block of wood and some leather.
"...That should be it," he mumbled, just barely audible to Tiffany as he snapped his claws once again and the various materials all disappeared.
Replaced, instead, with a pair of shortswords with leather-wrapped handles.
"...Huh," Tiffany mumbled as she raised one hand up to her chin and hit the weapons with Observe.
--Adamantine Shortsword--
--Quality: Legendary--
--
ATK: 98
EVA: 25
Accuracy: 100
Adamantine: This weapon ignores up to (physical resistance: 20) and automatically inflicts critical damage on materials with (hardness<20)
Sneak Attack Multiplier: 2.5
--
That... well, the raw values were better than her sword, the Ame-No-Murakumo-No-Tsurugi that Alchemist had given her a while back.
"These are really good," Tiffany admitted as she picked up the fairly small weapons. "But I think I should stick with the sword you gave me? I tried the katanas, too, but... the greatsword has those really big buffs to my stats."
"Let me see it," the dragon demanded, holding his claw out expectantly.
Tiffany hesitated for a moment and turned to check that the door into the small room they were in was still barred before she handed her weapon over. She nearly cried out in shock when he just started poking the purple orbs out of the sword, letting them all drop to the ground, though she barely managed to hold her tongue.
"Hmm..." the dragon mumbled, the sound escaping from the helmet instead of projected with magic as he plucked each of the six orbs off the ground. Then he put them all away in his inventory, alongside both of the shortswords he'd made. "Let's see... yes... this should work."
"What are you-" Tiffany started to ask before the dragon snapped his claws twice, each one releasing a massive wave of magical power. The force of it nearly dropped the girl to her knees and she felt... something, somehow, behind her nose start to act up. Almost like she had to sneeze, but worse.
"Hmm... Yes. This should do nicely, I think."
Tiffany stumbled back up and rubbed at her eyes to get some focus back. When they did, she saw the dragon was holding out both of the shortswords to her again. Though, now they seemed to have a subtle green sheen to the once-black metal.
Tiffany hit one of them with Observe-
--Adamantine Shortsword--
--Quality: Legendary--
-
ATK: 101
EVA: 25
Accuracy: 100
- HP + 50%
- Stamina + 50%
- Strength + 50%
- Vitality + 50%
- Wisdom + 50%
- Expend Stamina to empower your defense and offense +100%
Adamantine: This weapon ignores up to (physical resistance: 20) and automatically inflicts critical damage on materials with (hardness<20)
Ghost Touch: This weapon can strike ghosts as though they were fully corporeal
Sneak Attack Multiplier: 3.5 (Reaver)
-
Taking both of the proferred weapons, Tiffany felt a severe jolt of weakness as her max HP didn't just jump by 50%, but by 100%! More than that, even, as her improved vitality added even more on top.
"...That's just ridiculous," Tiffany said as she looked at the weapons that Alchemist could just apparently make on demand.
Then she looked down at her armor, still the same suit that she'd made out of materials from the Water I.D.
The blueprints she'd gotten for the Wind I.D. were heavy. And clunky. And slowed her down a lot.
"Do you have any ideas on some better armor?" Tiffany asked.
"Well... I might know of a few good suits," the dragon admitted as it opened its own Gamer menu. "Provided you're not afraid of spending some GP."
"...Alchemist? I have literally billions of GP."
-----
Hippolyta did not much care for Themyscira rejoining the larger world of Man. There were benefits, no shortage of boons that they'd been able to enjoy. The modern bra, for example, was a true breath of fresh air for her people. Some, those that had been young when they'd come under Hera's promise, they still suffered from their menses and so found sanitary pads to be especially helpful over the more traditional methods they'd once employed.
And she might have had a fairly sizeable collection of rather tawdry romance novels kept in her private chambers alongside several boxes of truly decadent Swedish chocolates...
Alright, Hippolyta found commerce with Man's World absolutely wonderful.
She did not, however, care much for its politics.
"How many times have we told them that we will not be allowing an embassy unto our lands?" the queen asked her assistant. It was an absolutely constant deluge from nearly every single country that they interacted with.
Themyscira may have been governed by Hippolyta and her people. They did not, however, claim it as their own. They were but supplicants, gracefully given freedom to develop the land by Hera and her kin.
"As that was Germany's request?" Hippolyta's main assistant, Chloé, asked as she picked up and checked over the paperwork. "I believe this is the seventeenth time they have requested such. And this would be the fourth time that they have declared your stipulation of only accepting female staff as a requirement to granting their request to be needlessly discriminatory."
"Wonderful." Hippolyta did not care for all of the paperwork that came with opening themselves up to the world at large. At all. The short-sighted and short-lived people that they were forced to interact with had proven perpetually unable to learn the lessons of those that came before them.
Such as how to accept the word 'No'.
Hippolyta set the request from Germany aside, to be sent to one of her other aides who would write a formal letter of rejection, when her daughter, Diana, strode into the room.
The queen sighed and set down another piece of paperwork on her desk. Judging by the weight Diana was putting into her steps, there was something the princess wanted and waiting would not be on the list.
"Diana," Hippolyta greeted, looking up from her work. "It's wonderful to- What happened to your face?"
"Hello, mother- I found a sparring partner that was able to keep up with me, at first." Diana's face, as well as her exposed arms and parts of her chest were a motley mix of yellowed bruises. The sallow tint looked downright ghastly on the girl.
On the other hand? If Diana had an adequate sparring partner, perhaps she would stop sending Hippolyta's amazons to the healers.
"That is... wonderful, daughter," Hippolyta decided. She had noticed, during the few moments that she could steal away for herself, that Diana's growth had slowed significantly. There were few challenges for Diana's might, here or in Man's world. Those that truly existed, few had the will to properly fight. "While I delight in seeing you, I am rather occupied at the moment. What brings you here?"
For a long moment, Diana said nothing. Her blue eyes, piercing and far too deep for Diana's age, bored into Hippolyta.
"I... have been pursuing a strange clue. An accusation as much as it was a suspicion from a man that seems unpleasantly akin to Cassandra." Hippolyta raised an eyebrow, both confused and curious, but motioned for Diana to continue. "Do you recall a woman by the name of Rose Canton?"
"The name is... familiar," Hippolyta admitted, though she pursed her lips in thought as she tried to place the name.
"She was a friend of mine, sixty years ago," Diana clarified before closing her eyes and inhaling deeply. "She was a metahuman with limited control over plants. She came to us for help in mending her fractured mind, in subduing the dark half of her soul known as 'Thorn'."
The details were slowly dredging themselves from the depths of time and memory. Hippolyta remembered a redheaded woman with hidden depths, coming to them for help. Seeking asylum so as to heal and be able to lead a normal life back in... Man's... world.
"The one I spoke to, they had some deep suspicions as to the timing of Rose reverting to Thorn," Diana continued, speaking into the silence as Chloé left the room. "They noted how very odd it was that Thorn reappeared upon Rose being wed and pregnant. How our healing failed exactly upon the woman's honeymoon."
Hippolyta remembered, now.
"The mind is a very complex machine, Diana," Hippolyta said, choosing her words very carefully. "Even the very best of our healers cannot-"
"DO NOT LIE TO ME!" Diana roared, crossing the distance of the room in an instant to slam her hands upon Hippolyta's desk. "I have already extracted the truth from Ida. Why... Why would you demand that the tethers of her mind be riddled with failures, mother? Why?"
Hippolyta swallowed thickly as tears dripped from Diana's bowed head, staining several papers that she'd yet to get to.
"...The world of Man had just experienced a war the likes of which had never been seen before," Hippolyta explained, unconcerned with the Geas that had been in Diana's words.
She'd never made a habit of lying to her daughter. Nor did she plan to.
"And I knew not how safe the little Rose might be, once she returned to her home. Thorn, as wicked as she was, held the strength between the two. Ida was instructed to ensure that, should Rose fall to the wiles of Man, should the secrets of Themyscira be placed at risk, the shackles within Rose's mind would falter and Thorn would be freed." It had been meant as a last-ditch defense. How the magics of Ida failed, what the trigger had been, Hippolyta could not say. "The spells that worked alongside her therapy would have been subjected to Rose's own mind and thoughts, Diana. I do not know what caused them to fail."
A pair of guards stepped into the room, directed by Chloé, but Hippolyta waved her hand down and shook her head.
There was no danger, here.
Instead, the warrior queen stood from her seat and walked around her desk, her work forgotten.
"...She was my friend," Diana repeated, her voice quiet and trembling. The force from before spent and leaving behind a woman that was clearly exhausted and overworked. "I..."
Hippolyta pulled her daughter into a tight embrace, wrapping her arms around the woman.
"I failed her," Diana whispered as hot tears burned against Hippolyta's toga.
"...We both did," Hippolyta admitted, shame in her voice.
As long lived as she was, she'd failed many people. Time had a habit of burying the memories, helping to push her forward, push her people forward, but the memories were no less bitter.
"...I miss her," Diana admitted, quietly, into Hippolyta's shoulder.
The old queen had little more she could say to soothe her daughter's hurt. Telling her that she ought get used to missing people as she chose to linger in the mortal world of Man would just be needlessly cruel.
Instead, she just held her daughter and offered her what little comfort that she could.
-----
"It's pink," was Player One's first comment on seeing the suit that Alchemist suggested for her, called the Aurore Doublet. "Why is it pink?"
"I've been asking that question for about fifteen years," he admitted as he looked over his own purchases.
A full hauberk set, moderately heavy armor that had pearl inlay all over its pieces. The Perle Hauberk was another set from the world of Final Fantasy Eleven. An introductory set of armor for a high-level area that had been introduced after the level seventy-five cap had been lifted.
It wasn't amazing compared to the other sets available around it, but it had the benefit of being useable by multiple vocations in the game, like the Aurore Doublet set, and it could be used right after being purchased instead of needing to be upgraded.
The whole set, five pieces, had run him about one point eight million GP. Then the Aurore Doublet had run him the same. Grabbing the mage set, the Teal Saio outfit had also cost the same amount. But they had some incredibly convenient factors. Combined, they almost reached the maximum potential possible for in-combat Haste from the game.
Grabbing something that would cover the final two percent had actually cost about the same as buying all three sets combined at an even five million GP, the Zeal Cap +1. Still, he'd put them all together when he got home and then extract the effects into ebony tokens. It was past time to upgrade his gear a bit and he could afford the epic perks to expand his ability to equip magic items to include another pair of rings.
"Huh," Tiffany said, audibly surprised. It drew Alchemist's gaze away from an entry that nearly had him salivating, the Defending Ring and its universal ten percent damage reduction. He'd just have to fight a beast called the 'Sovereign Behemoth' for it. "This isn't too bad, actually."
Tiffany had actually put on the pink outfit while Alchemist had been distracted. It only left a portion of her forearms and her face exposed. The floppy cap sitting crooked on her head was almost cute.
"Do you mind if I ask you a question?" Alchemist shook away the errant thought and ran a search for a different item, instead. Mana Wall offered a phenomenal amount of defense but there was a spell that would turn that defense into an offense. A spell called 'Dread Spikes'.
"What's up?" the girl asked as she twisted around, looking at herself.
"Why haven't you upgraded your gear on your own? I know you mentioned the Wind set impeding your movement but there had to be something else of value for you."
"Eh... sorta?" Tiffany admitted as Alchemist extracted and unrolled the scroll he'd just purchased. "Like, the weapons from the Water I.D.? They were all made out of fish bones, had a really high chance of inflicting poison and paralysis, which would've been cool. Except that they weren't instant, like that Stop spell. And the spiny parts kept getting caught."
"...Something swam off with your gear," Alchemist summarized.
"A dolphin swam off with my gear. Yes," Tiffany didn't seem too broken up about it, however.
"So, why didn't you try anything from the Game Shop?" he asked, double checking something on the scroll.
The spell was dark magic, an unusual application of the Drain spell, really. Though, there was a sort of safeguard in place that would keep it from quite functioning if something undead activated it. A fairly clever 'sifting' function that kept the spell from absorbing anything other than positive energy.
"I did." Tiffany strapped her shortswords to her hips and then hopped up and down a few times, seemingly pleased at the lack of anything moving. "Everything I could find was kind of like the weapons on it. All big and gaudy and pretty much useless. Especially since the 'armor' was usually a pair of boots, maybe some gloves and then a sheer bikini made of metal."
"...Ah." That... would explain things rather well, actually.
"So, do you mind if I ask you something? Before we get moving, I mean?"
"Of course, go ahead," Alchemist told the girl as he began to shape his magic, following the directions in the scroll.
"What's with the skeletons?" Tiffany asked, her voice oddly bereft of judgement. "And what was with the one that attacked you?"
"Ah, that. I've been considering the merits of using reanimated defenders to keep a few things safe," Alchemist admitted as he slowly worked the magic through its form. Once he had a feel for it, he could cast it significantly faster but that would still demand familiarity. "Unfortunately, between the spell I was using and the perk improving it, I have a limit of ten levels worth of undead per one of my own levels."
"So... you lost control of some when you prestiged?"
Alchemist nodded silently as he snapped his claws and he was wrapped in a series of dark circles which swiftly faded away.
"Yes," the wizard told the girl as he double-checked things and confirmed that the spell was active. "It renders those plans rather unworkable, I'm afraid."
"Yeah... Might be for the best?" Tiffany offered, not at all sympathetic to Alchemist's plight. "I really don't think people would react too well if they knew you had a whole, uh, 'Army of Darkness' at your beck and call."
"...Oh," Alchemist whispered, dropping his head into his claws. It was a shame he couldn't grin as a dragon. And, even if he could, it certainly wouldn't be visible through his helmet. "Oh my god. How... Why did nobody tell me this?!"
AN/ I miss having the time to play Final Fantasy Eleven...
"What did you do to Ace?!?!"
