Escape From Litchfield Page 15
Failure:It is impossible to fail this quest.
Tamara has earned 100 raw experience! After bonuses are applied, 160 was earned!
As she completed the first quest, a new quest spawned.
Quest:SubClass Quest II: Drummer
You have chosen the subclass Drummer. Use your skill 200 times. This has a Level F+ difficulty.
Reward:200 experience.
Failure:It is impossible to fail this quest.
Tamara accepted the quest. The quest was a multi-part quest! So this is why people would focus on skills to level up over combat. She switched off to the mana song.
Quest Completed!:SubClass Quest II: Drummer
You have chosen the subclass Drummer. Use your skill 200 times. This has a Level F+ difficulty.
Reward:200 experience.
Failure:It is impossible to fail this quest.
Tamara has earned 200 raw experience! After bonuses are applied, 320 was earned!
Again, she was able to complete the quest quickly. And another quest popped up! She alternated songs again.
[Bob89: I have a suggestion. In addition to the red and green indicators, we can synchronize your legwork to the beat of the song.]
[Tamara: How will we do that? Can we handle more than one song?]
[Bob89: I can give you a visual aid that will help you. I can scroll symbols in a box across your vision. You will need to match the symbol box and the box at the top edge of your HUD. If you match it perfectly, you will have synched perfectly. While my job will be to keep you from getting hit. Each symbol will represent one of nine directions. north, northeast, northwest, south, southeast, southwest, west, east, and no direction. If you get good enough to handle multiple songs, I can use different colors.]
[Tamara: That sounds pretty useful. Let's give it a try.]
Bob89 used arrows on the scrolling boxes that corresponded to the direction, but he said that he may change it in the future. Even with the help, Tamara had to learn the slow way. Hitting the steps perfectly was very difficult at first. She had to learn to associate the box synchronization with the beat of her song. Once she learned that trick, the session became much easier.
Quest:SubClass Quest III: Drummer
You have chosen the subclass Drummer. Use your skill 300 times. This has a Level D difficulty.
Reward:300 experience.
Failure:It is impossible to fail this quest.
Again, she accepted. At a 60 beat per minute tempo, she was completing these quests in no time. As she became more proficient in stepping in the various directions, Bob89 began to vary the symbols on the sliding boxes. The first variation was to pick a path. At the start of a measure, she could pick the path of swords or the path of shields. Each had a different end goal. The shield path was to dodge and weave away from an opponent. The sword path was to get into range of an opponent and cut them up.
Tamara has earned 300 raw experience! After bonuses are applied, 480 was earned!
Quest Completed!:SubClass Quest III: Drummer
You have chosen the subclass Drummer. Use your skill 300 times. This has a Level D difficulty.
Reward:300 experience.
Failure:It is impossible to fail this quest.
Another quest finished. She found that following the patterns allowed her to free up a portion of her mind as she worked. This was a game changer for fights. She could now concentrate on strategy and casting spells while offloading a large portion of her defense to Bob89. She wasn't a melee fighter, at least not yet.
Quest:SubClass Quest IV: Drummer She found that following the patterns allowed her to free up a portion of her mind as she worked.
You have chosen the subclass Drummer. Use your skill 400 times. This has a Level D difficulty.
Reward:400 experience.
Failure:It is impossible to fail this quest.
As soon as she completed the part three, she accepted part 4. During the new training, Bob89 colored the steps with blue and purple to represent two different songs. Every step that synched perfectly to the beat was considered part of a combo. So hitting 10 steps perfectly resulted in a 10 combo move. As long as she kept a combo up, she could perform multiple songs, however, if she missed a step, she lost the combo, and she had to pick which song to keep, and all the other songs would be disrupted until she could start comboing again.
Quest Completed!:SubClass Quest IV: Drummer
You have chosen the subclass Drummer. Use your skill 400 times. This has a Level D difficulty.
Reward:400 experience.
Failure:It is impossible to fail this quest.
Part four of the series was just as easy! And she was starting to get a feel for the new visualization.
Tamara has learned a new skill Beat Dance Battle!
Beat Dance Battle: You have the ability to play multiple songs at once while evading and countering opponents during battle! Comboing the songs allows you to play more than one song at a time.
Tamara has learned a new skill Bard!
Bard: Your bard songs are now professional quality! Each skill of Bard adds another 1% effectiveness to each song!
Tamara gained 1 level in Bard and now it is 1
Tamara gained 1 level in Beat Dance Battle and now it is 1
Tamara has earned 400 raw experience! After bonuses are applied, 640 was earned!
[Tamara: New skills! Thanks for your help, Bob89.]
[Bob89: NP. I got you!]
[Bob89: You're getting a big head though. I'm giving you easy patterns using quarter notes. A battle will likely need 64th notes and maybe faster. Also, you should try and keep your steps even and consistent. It makes things easier for me to model. In the far future, we can add actions in. Like particular sword strikes or abilities. Or if you feel up for it, I can ramp up your brain into overdrive to show you a model that you can follow exactly?]
[Tamara: I am an awesome Dancer. I dance death.]
[Bob89: Big Head.]
Despite her big head, Tamara still began taking even steps when following the patterns.
[Tamara: I'll take the dance step method. Thanks. I feel like, in time, I'll be able to do the patterns by muscle memory.]
[Bob89: Good.]
Quest:SubClass Quest V: Drummer
You have chosen the subclass Drummer. Use your skill 500 times. This has a Level D difficulty.
Reward:500 experience.
Failure:It is impossible to fail this quest.
And again she completed it quickly.
Tamara has earned 500 raw experience! After bonuses are applied, 800 was earned!
Quest Completed!:SubClass Quest V: Drummer
You have chosen the subclass Drummer. Use your skill 500 times. This has a Level D difficulty.
Reward:500 experience.
Failure:It is impossible to fail this quest.
Finally, after an hour, she finished part five of the multi-part quest. And again a new quest spawned
Quest:SubClass Quest 6: Drummer
You have chosen the subclass Drummer. Use your skill in combat or with a paying audience 600 times. This has a Level D difficulty.
Reward:1200 experience.
Failure:It is impossible to fail this quest.
As usual, she accepted. This new quest required more than just tapping out the beat. She needed to use it professionally - in combat or with an audience. These subclass quests were easy to do, but they were getting more difficult as the level increased. A concert or a long battle should knock out several more subclass quests. Fifteen hundred experience was actually a decent haul. Her Herbal Chicken and Rested bonus increased the haul by an additional 750 and 150 experience respectively. The entire series of five quests came out to be 2400 experience after the bonuses. At level thirty-five, it took around 5,300 experience to get to the next level. Those five quests filled out the last half of level thirty-six! The level six quest provided a full twelve hundred experience. Even at this low level, the quests were extremely rewarding.
Now that sh
e was unable to complete more drummer quests, she decided to continue tinkering with her gravity quest. She was excited to see what her gravity quest line would bring. In the distant past, ancients even older than the ancients believed in a force called ether. The entire cosmos was filled with ether, and it kept all the planets and stars in place. Science couldn't find this mysterious ether using interferometer techniques. A brilliant scientist whose name was lost over the centuries came up with the idea of gravity. The world and all the stars were held in place by a mysterious force that governed the motions of the universe. As a master of gravity, she held the power to sway the moons and the stars!
[Bob89: Lovely thought, isn't it? The database does fill in more information that wasn't included in your classes. There were more interferometer experiments that detected gravity.]
[Tamara: So. Since there was no magic in the times of the Ancients, how did we get here?]
[Bob89: The Ancients discovered exotic matter called negative mass, which naturally countered the effects of mass. In an ideal world, you could stack a pound of matter and negative mass, then you'd have zero mass. Of course, exotic matter, being exotic, needed special containment. In the end, they needed much more normal matter to contain one pound of exotic matter. However, it was useful because the Gravity Drive was created, which allowed the Ancients to leave planetary gravity fields several orders of magnitude easier.]
[Tamara: So that's what we blew up over Hopetown?]
[Bob89: We blew up a relatively small Gravity Engine used for exploration within a solar system. They had engines designed to cross the space between stars that reached faster than light (FTL) speeds. And another set of engines to create a Star Road. They are also called Jump Gates, although they are more accurately called Wave Gates. If you put a series of jump gates between star systems, you can create a road that speeds up the journey between systems from centuries to years.]
[Tamara: The jump gate system seems like you had to invest a lot of time and effort to build.]
[Bob89: It took a great deal of time to build. Humans fled their birth planet to escape the Foe using their FTL technology. The journey took over a decade to reach the next solar system. From there they had centuries before they encountered the Foe again. Of course, the humans didn't stay idle. They improved their technology and created Star Roads manned by non-sentient AI's. The first Star Roads were built by AI manned starcraft since they could survive the massive distances.]
[Tamara: What happened next?]
[Bob89: They seeded the stars with Redoubts. Each would take centuries for the robots to find them since they didn't have FTL technology. And humans kept fleeing the advance of the Foe. This is the Last of the Redoubts seeded. They had some other great plan that wasn't revealed in the archives. I assume they either feared the Foe would capture the Redoubt. Or perhaps the database corruption had obscured it.]
[Tamara: As much as I don't want to, we have to talk to the Overlord. It sounds like we're going to be overrun sooner or later.
[Bob89: We need three more research bases. We will find my code and the Overlord at the same time.]
[Bob89: There was another reason why I told you the history lesson.]
[Tamara: Go on.]
[Bob89: During the fight at Hopetown. Remember how you were moving faster than the speed of sound? Yet, Jenny was constantly blocking your attacks?]
[Tamara: Yes. That was weird! I kept trying to move faster and faster, but she was always blocking me. She seemed like she was practically standing still, while I was attacking from all sides. She BLOCKED. EVERY. ONE]
[Bob89: Remember. I don't see the world the same way as you do. So in the dream, I got to see how you see the world. And I've been analyzing the imagery. I noticed that you were moving so fast that you were causing ripple effects.]
[Tamara: Ripple effects, as in if an outside observer were watching me, the air would be shimmering around me?]
[Bob89: Exactly. Basically, sound and even the air itself wasn't moving fast enough, so you created areas of condensed sound and air when you moved at full speed.]
[Tamara: OK, that's cool, but what does that have to do with gravity?]
[Bob89: Jenny didn't have any ripples around her, yet she kept up with your attacks.]
[Tamara: So. I was moving faster than the speed of sound by a fair margin. It would be logical to assume that Jenny would need to move at the speed of sound to counter me?]
[Bob89: She was more efficient and experienced. But that shouldn't make up for your speed alone. I believe she has a skill that lets her move at less than the speed of sound, yet travel the distance as if she had. Sound familiar?]
[Tamara: If I recall correctly from Awakening school, FTL technology allowed ships to travel faster than the speed of light, not by physically moving faster than light, but by shortening the distance.]
[Bob89: Yes. The FTL was a multiplier of speed. You may physically be moving a quarter speed of light, but with the FTL technology, you may be effectively moving at the speed of light or faster.]
[Tamara: How do we counter it? The lack of condensed air and sound point towards space manipulation but are there other possibilities?]
[Bob89: Her skill must use a particular frequency of gravity wave. If we can decipher the exact speed, we can generate a canceling wave. Then she'd be moving at normal speed for everyone! If she was doing something else, I don't have any theories.]
[Tamara: I think I'll have to rely on you to figure that out!]
[Bob89: I won't let you down! But I'll give you a little brain teaser. If you look closely at a cloth, you'll see little holes. If you magnify the holes, you'll see a lot of empty space. Eventually, you'll find things called molecules. And under even more magnification, you'll find atoms. If you were in a spaceship floating around the atom, what you see? How would you travel around?]
[Tamara: Is the answer, "A bunch of light?" I'd travel by using my blink spell!]
[Bob89: I'm disappointed in you. Think about this. My data tells me the answer but as an AI, I have trouble with creative thinking. I'm better at brute force analysis, but we don't have the time to be building a few trillion gravity engines.]
[Tamara: Ha Ha. I deduce the answer has to do with gravity waves. You let it slip out. Somehow it relates to atoms.]
[Bob89: You're a smart cookie, but I wouldn't say gravity has the strongest hold in an atom. We'll chat more when we get back to your lab. But I know your subconscious will work on the problem while we go through life and death situations. One point to AI. Zero to HI.]
[Tamara: When did we start keeping score? HI?]
[Bob89: Just now. Human Intelligence.]
Chapter 10
"Let's try this again," said Tamara. We've almost got it down. Tamara and Sol had been practicing their combat tactics all morning for various foreseeable monsters in the dungeon. Sol, as usual, wanted to tank. He had a number of battlemage buffs that he had to renew every couple of hours, but the buffs lasted long enough that he regenerated the mana back by the time he had to renew them. His metal shielding appeared to be a type of channeled magic, and it took a relatively low amount of mana to maintain since the metal was physically shaped by magic rather than metal conjured by magic. In addition, he was able to find some intel on the types of monsters they would find on the first 10 levels. Knowing your monsters could mean the difference between life and death, especially for squishy mage tanks.
After practicing a number of contingency plans, they will venture deeper to get a feel for how the dungeon worked. Dungeons weren't particularly good at innovating. The levels will get harder as you level, but there's a procession to it. Dungeons come with a wide variety of challenges from traps, puzzles, monsters, and more. However, the dungeon generally had a theme to it. For instance, an undead dungeon would be exclusively filled with dark aligned creatures and neutral creatures. Neutral being natural creatures such as goblins, ants, bees, slimes, and bears. A dungeon with an undead, trapless theme should generally have
no traps or light aligned creatures, except as a one-off. However, this dungeon seemed to have a trap, undead theme, so there will be all sorts of traps, undead, and neutral mobs.
In most scenarios, Tamara would stealth, while Sol pulled the mobs into the room. As Sol distracted the monsters, Tamara would backstab and cast spells onto the mobs. It was the case when something went wrong that they were worried about. The mobs were not allowed to leave after they engaged. Most monsters that got away would come back with help to attack the already battle-weary party. This needed to be kept to a minimum. So Sol and Tamara both had spells to debuff, stopping or slowing movements, the mobs. Tamara had a cold-based slow that would stiffen the creature's muscles, while Sol had shadow-based magic that would cause their shadows to pull at them. Another alternative was Tamara's gravity field, which could increase the weight of the monsters to double or triple their normal weight. Tamara's slow song was an area effect slow, but her skill had a 10% speed reduction, which was better than nothing, but not ideal. The goal was to have a plan and a run through in case of emergencies. It wouldn't be as effective as drills and repetition, but they had the basics down, so everyone knew their role in the heat of combat. By the afternoon, they had finished practicing their scenarios and allowed themselves a break before exploring deeper.
She was proficient enough in the Beat Dance Battle to play two bard songs at the same time. Aria's Slumber to slow the mobs and Mia's Safety Song to decrease enemy awareness of her. Alternatively, she liked to play Akbar's Mana Song with Aria's Slumber because the whole party used mana.
Myst scouted the next room and shared his vision with Tamara using his non-verbal communication skill. The room was occupied by two Ant Workers gathering plants and fungi for their colony. There was a wandering Ant Worker as well that ferried the gathered materials. The room was damp from water dripping along the sides and ceiling, glowing moss and lichen were growing everywhere, giving off an eerie greenish light.
Myst was stealthed close to the entrance, prepared to pounce once the mobs ran into the other room. Sol checked his battlemage buffs. His enhanced armor, weapons, mana shield, and Az's Shield Sphere put him on par with an equivalent tanking warrior of his level. Additionally, he had two cores prepared with fire and lightning balls, allowing him to rapidly cast the spells by crushing the cores. Few people would dare to attack a prepared battlemage, even one as underequipped as Sol. Tamara was also stealthed, prepared to backstab and freeze the mobs to the ground.