Chapter 29: Chapter 29. If I could save Brains in a bottle…

Rik was swinging his new sword around, chuckling, “This thing is light as a feather, but if I push it at the right time, it hits like a ton of bricks. And it’s worth 200 gold! That’s like 200 cryptos in the bank right there.”

It seems as if everyone misjudges the value. What’s up?

The processes of the original economic predictor that the game was based on are open to everyone, but AO requires an appraise skill to accurately judge value. That’s a skill only their merchant classes get, so their identify skill varies widely based on their most related expenditures, knowledge of weapons and metallurgy, and crafting levels.

In addition, crafters often attempt to manipulate prices and take advantage of the ignorance of others. Rik is extremely ignorant. Cassie’s judgments are more accurate when it comes to weapons and armor, but you are unlikely to get more than 50 gold from selling the weapon to a merchant, which they can probably turn around and sell for around 100 gold to warrior classes.

Rik clearly has some sort of plan to use you to increase his own money, but I assumed you were already aware of that.

Yeah, I am not going to completely nip that in the bud, since he can go and sell things that would probably get me killed to attempt, but I do need to lower his expectations a little. I am not his slave.

“Rik,” I said, walking towards where he was… well...playing with his sword.

“Yep,” he said, swishing it through the air and focusing at the last moment to increase its tip-heaviness and damage.

“I have some things we need to clear up. Right now.”

He shrugged a little, “What does my pet kobold want?” he asked.

“First off, you don’t call me your pet kobold, or your pet, or your slave, or your property, unless we are trying to get in someplace that won’t allow a kobold. I don’t beg, and I won’t roll over, although I am more than happy to play dead if you try. I can do a lot for you, more than just crafting and cooking, but I am a small kobold, and I am not stupid enough to throw my life away attacking something that will instantly kill me, or that I have zero effect on.”

He nodded, “Right, fair enough.”

I nodded, “Secondly, you are an immortal. Don’t expect me to throw my life away protecting yours. I will act like a part of the team, but you can consider me that coward that won’t scream and leap at a giant lizard just to stop you from getting bit. You can come back, I can’t. I will help as best as I am able, but I am not stupid or suicidal.”

He nodded, “Okay, I can deal with that, but you are supposed to be immortal too. If you die, you should be able to respawn back to my location just like Shiana can.”

Is he right?

No. Definitely not.

I shook my head, “No, I am also supposed to be an animal that you feed and pat on its head. If I die, I am dead just like Cassie. I think, maybe, I might be a…. special case.”

He chuckled, “Right. You might be an exploit. I have no interest in letting the nerf patrol know. My buddy was a bet...early traveler, and he ate a fire core. He had a pet healer and sat there dying for like two hours before he got the paste eater achievement and a huge boost in fire resistance. The nerf patrol found out about it, and when I tried to eat an earth core, I just died and got the 'play stupid games, win stupid prizes' achievement. I don’t get it, He ate a fire core not paste, but still. The nerf patrol sucks.”

I nodded, “Still, I am not a dog, I am not in your Harem, and I am not going to spend the rest of my life making stuff that you can sell. I have no objection to sharing some profits if we can make them, but I am a real person even if I am a monster. My name is Bran, or Brantley if you want to be formal, not your pet kobold or that kobold.”

He nodded, “I know exactly what you are.”

“Oh?” I asked curious as to what his take on it would be.

“Yeah. At first, I thought that maybe you were a rehab or an admin playing a role, but you don’t act like you need to disco or anything. Then I realized, you are either a corpsicle or a sept.”

“What is that?”

He shrugged, “Well, AO needed a lot of power to get to work, a lot more than a machine could ever make, you know, to make all the little stuff. They gathered up all the septs… you know, the crates that were too old to work or anything, as well as the stiffs on life support, and all those idiots who wanted to travel through time by freezing themselves or their heads or something, and then they mashed ‘em all up” he made a gesture of pushing his hand down, and twisting it like the blades of a food processor.

“And then they added their brains to the world. So I figure you are either a sept or a sleeper. You don’t remember anything, but you are a lot smarter than a kobold, and you think and act like a real person, not like Shiana. I figure that all the folks that are walking around are probably like that, the realistic ones, anyway. But you understand stuff you probably shouldn’t get as a local, especially as a monster.”

The statement made me sick. My home, Earth, was gathering up the elderly, the handicapped, and the unconscious, and just cutting them up and adding their brains to a computer. What kind of twisted fuckers would do something like that? What had Earth become?

Is it possible? Am I just a brain in a jar somewhere wired into a computer? Did I go into a coma or something and wind up here?

I could tell you no, but in the end, you have to decide with your conscious mind what you want to believe. All I can add is that every grain of sand, every impulse, every leaf, and bit of scent and taste, is unique. Your own subconscious believes that there is too much evidence all around of this place being real to be an illusion.

Yep, Pavlov’s wager all over again. A billion pieces of evidence that this place was real, and basically no evidence that it was not other than my own preconceptions and a lifetime of reading, and that really stupid movie that came out recently.

I didn’t think this was the matrix, but I had no way of knowing for sure, and without any break in the pattern or inconsistencies in the overall story, which included magic, there was never a way to be able to tell if it was real. You might as well act as if it were real or you could wind up dead, or worse.

That’s why I had a problem with that movie. If they had added in a little bit of the fantastical or supernatural to their computer world or made it a miserable medieval existence instead of a modern place with computers, no one would have ever broken out, or even been able to conceive the idea of it being fake… any inconsistencies would be attributed to witchery or sorcery, not a glitch in the matrix.

The computer intelligences were just absolute idiots that made mistakes in ways that even a computer couldn’t screw up. Why even make it America? The Chinese had millennia of experience oppressing billions of people and keeping them alive, billions of batteries. But, the rule of cool. The limit to the willing suspension of disbelief is directly linked to its awesomeness. And cyberpunk badassery, black leather, superpowered kungfu, machine guns, and streaming lines of fake computer code were pretty awesome.

Then again, complaining about plot holes in big-budget Hollywood movies was a bit like complaining about corrupt politicians… Nothing, in the end, would ever change, because no one ever became a politician in the first place without flexible ethics and the willingness to bend over for the right price.

I shrugged at Rik, “I guess that is possible, but I am just a simple kobold. That sort of thing… I mean, brains are for tanning hides or eating. Using them for magic is way past anything I could ever understand. Magic is powerful, it doesn’t need a bunch of sleepers or anything to make it smart, all it needs is a few monster cores or a really smart wizard to make it work.”

“You eat brains?” Rik shivered a little.

I shrugged, “Occasionally. You probably do too. Ever had sausage? But I happily eat bugs too. You just have to be careful of what you eat, and some organs contain diseases like rabies. Shamans can cure it, sometimes, but it’s a good idea to avoid eating sick or diseased animals, especially their organs and brains.”

He slowly nodded, “Thanks for the sword, I am kinda glad we waited, but can we take off now?”

I nodded, “Yes, but first…” and I whipped out the remaining, steaming chimis. It had been nearly 24 hours, and I was pretty hungry. We should renew the buff.”

“Dude, good idea! I am totally starving.”

---

This time, the face-off with the shellcrawler went very differently. When Cassie planted her shield and blocked the first claw attack, Rik dived in so quickly that he was almost a blur. One of the claws closed on his new sword, now that it was narrow enough for the claw to close around it, and he lifted one hand to the rounded bottom of the blade and twisted it, snipping off both parts of the claw.

He dropped to the ground and swept his sword around, in kind of an extended move using his other hand to plant on the ground, and the sword neatly trimmed off the bottoms of most of the thing’s legs, allowing Cassie to easily smash the claw that was bashing her shield between her hammer and the ground.

In a few seconds, he seemed to leave a set of echoes behind him as his sword thrust into the head of the thing and then buried itself all the way down to the spikes in its body, killing it.

The previous monster I had checked for a core and avoided looting because I didn’t want to try and collect loot from something that was filled with a powerful poison. No core. This one, though, I took a few minutes to collect a small core, and several large chunks of chitin from its belly, back, and legs, before Rik looted it, grinning.

“Now that is how an Overlord is supposed to fight,” he announced. “My pets are supposed to give me power boosts while I take the lead, and now we really are a serious two-person party.”

I couldn’t really argue with him since I hadn’t actually done anything during the fight, but considering how effectively it had gone, I considered my contribution more than adequate. The creatures according to Cassie, were 4, which meant between rank 15 and 20 each, and a challenge for the group, but I was still a class 2, so I guess I was getting a huge amount of advancement for each one of them.

Over a dozen fights later, with only a single time out for Cassie to heal Rik’s arm after he caught a brutal tail spike while he was bouncing around, I felt like we were getting close to the nest’s core because the creatures were getting larger and starting to pop as class 5’s, and I was ready to evolve again.

“Can I have a moment?” I asked Rik. “I have absorbed enough advancement to increase my evolution again.”

I had managed to collect 4 lesser monster cores by this point, and I was building quite a collection. I also had a bunch of chitin that could probably be useful, but I was worried about my soul space getting overfull. Rik’s looting had turned up quite a bit of meat, but I had to hold off on accepting more since I didn’t want to fill up completely.

He was a little grossed out by it until I made the lobster comment again, but I had plans to show him that the stuff was good, and probably much tastier than the rat steaks.

“How are you advancing again so quickly?” he asked.

I shrugged, “Adolescent kobolds aren’t that much. I got a bunch of advancement making your sword and even more from being part of your group killing monsters that I shouldn’t be able to kill… The shellcrawlers are stuff that even warriors sometimes have trouble with, and we have killed a bunch of them. I can see an open space up ahead, and we have mostly cleared out the tunnels, so I figure that there’s a chance you could gain a new ability if I went ahead and got an evolution.”

Rik nodded, “Yeah, we are already at rank 18. Right now I am actually rank 2 on the leaderboards, right behind Murky, who made 18 before us. How long will this take?”

I shrugged, “I don’t really know, but we still have a day and a half before your break. If there is a boss, killing it and getting the first bonus could help you hit first place, right?”

He nodded, “I am not going to say these monsters are easy, but we kind of have a program now. The problem is, if it’s a boss, the program might have to change since bosses never act exactly like the stuff that leads up to them. It might not be anything recognizable as a shellcrawler, or one that’s very different.”

I nodded. “It’s been most of a day already. Would this be a good time to camp? Or should we wait until after the boss?”

Rik sighed. “I want to say after the boss, but if it can help us fight, it should be worth the wait. I already have seniority on the list, and unless someone manages to hit 19 tonight, I should still be number 2 tomorrow. Whoever Murky is, he seems to be hard lining it pretty severely unless he has the same DLC I do."

Mae spoke. “I have the option to advance as well, but… my advancement is very complicated. We have managed to gain two ranks in a single day, but I have held off working on them. I would much rather take the evening to rest and advance before we face a class 5 boss, especially since we are technically below the rank we should be to face it.”

Cassie nodded tiredly. “Plus my feet hurt.”

Okay, what are my options?

You are reading story The Chronicles of Alandia, A Kobold’s Tale. at novel35.com

Whatever you choose, I would suggest removing those scraps of armor you are wearing. You are going to be growing larger this time regardless of whether you choose to advance to adult or not. I also have some suggestions that might need some serious thought.

We started setting up a camp in the tunnel. This time there was not enough wind to safely make a fire, which meant cooking would not go well. I made up a quick salad made of Shiana’s forages, which were improved by carefully preparing them with my cooking knife and dressing them with a bit of oil, rice vinegar or Mae’s, and some soy sauce and pine nuts she had gathered.

I even used one of Rik’s rations, carefully cutting off the parts that looked to be in bad shape, and mincing the rest fine, they added a bit of bulk and carbs to the vegetable feast, and were much more acceptable soaking up a bit of vinegar and salt and mixed with the greens.

We had eaten the chimis at midday, so if we fought in the morning, we should still have the buff available. The eventual salad was not a masterpiece or anything, but it did feed us. Unfortunately, I was not able to actually add much in the way of magic to the dish, except for the mushrooms I minced into it, so we only had a 12-hour healing buff which, considering the scratches, minor wounds, and dings we had all received, should see us all ready to go in the morning.

Rik chuckled, “This is actually pretty good. I had a salad once at a restaurant, but it was just some leaves of lettuce with a weird red berry thing chopped up over it and some kind of white stuff that they called blue cheese. It was kind of nasty, but this is pretty good. Except for these red things.” he held up a chunk of wild radish.

I shrugged, “It’s a game. Eat it anyway.” and chuckled a little, starting to remove my armor.

He nodded, “Hell yeah, it’s still way better than nutra.” he bit down, crunching through the crispy vegetable. After a moment of chewing, he spoke again. “You know what’s really weird? Usually, when I take a break, I am kind of wasted. But this time, I wasn’t even hungry. I mean obviously, it was my real… I mean, I was in a different form, but it still felt like I had the food buff, and I swear to god that it felt like my muscles got bigger, and my suit was loose. During my long break, I have to check it out.”

Is that possible? I thought.

Yes. There is obviously some feedback along the bands. It’s possible that some of the growth he achieved while under a food buff from the game, instead of AO, might have traveled along the bond between his form here and his real body. Psychological effects as well. AO drains his mental and bodily energy while he’s playing to support his avatar, but it might have set up an actual positive feedback loop.

The fact is, just setting up a bond involves some magical feedback between the worlds. Even if Earth does not have energy, powerful magics like your imbue might create local effects… Obviously, if you were kidnapped from Earth via magic, there would have to be some way of transferring energy. Or else, the administrators of AO would have no interest in that world.

“Hey, Shiana, Do you think you could take the first watch? I have no idea how long my evolution will take, but if I can, I will take a watch when I wake up.”

Shiana nodded, “Of course. Ensuring you are safe while camping is one of the best reasons to have an Elf in your party. We only require four hours of meditation in lieu of a full night’s sleep. A safe zone cannot be created here, but a watch should be effective at alerting the team if something attacks us while we are camping.”

“Thank you Shiana, that was amazingly informative.”

Cassie grinned, “Yeah, that’s usually my reaction. My class is pretty well-plotted already, so I am going to advance while Shiana takes the first watch, but I can take over the second watch.”

Rik nodded, “I got third. And Mae can you do fourth?”

Mae Bei-Ling nodded, “Absolutely. It will only take me an hour or so to advance, I just didn’t want to do it while we were rolling so effectively. I can try to wake up Bran if I detect his higher consciousness ready to go. I also have some jerky in case he cannot make the first meal.”

I nodded, unrolled my blanket, and sat down. I wasn’t sure what this would take and was still wearing the loose garment I had gotten from the camp, but that’s because the sleeveless tunic was kind of oversize on me anyway… not many juveniles or even adolescents chose to wear clothing other than harnesses while working.

Okay, Hit me.

Well, you can choose several options. You have many of your original evolutions available, as well as adulthood options.

Lesser golem, blend minerals, energy aspects, innate alchemy, quirky, tempus fugit, weapon sense, element separation, and frosty still, technically, meet your earlier qualifications.

A new evolution, Absorption, has been made available by channel. It allows you to absorb more free ambient energy from monster deaths, increasing your rate of evolution.

Wait, what? You mean… there’s an ability that actually increases the experience I receive? That seems a little cheatery, I guess.

Of course it is. Fairness is not in question, and neither is balance, although if you feel like it’s unjust, just remember that you get few benefits from channel, and your imbue has helped others more than yourself so far. Considering the handicaps you labor under compared to a local common race, is it actually unjust?

No, not really. Man. I just wasn’t really thinking of things as a game until now. Then again, I am not a player, I am a monster, and accelerating quickly seems like a good idea, although I am looking at blend minerals or lesser golem right now, since accelerated advancement won’t help much if I don’t survive the experience. I have gotten a ton of information from these people, and I don’t know how long I will be on their team. I keep taking risks that I don’t think, in retrospect, are terribly smart.

Well, let me continue. Before you make any decisions. You also have the following adulthood options available.

Alpha- Grow to adulthood. This will expand your lifespan to twenty years, as an adult crafter kobold. You gain size, strength, and improved control of your crafting abilities.

Stealthy- You grow to adulthood. This will greatly improve your native disguise ability, and add more facility with living creatures to your analyze, allowing you to identify weak spots and vulnerabilities from the tiniest of clues even on creatures you have never seen before.

Lizard- This will allow you to become a Lizardman subspecies. You will gain a more efficient oxygen system allowing you to hold your breath for much longer, an improved swimming facility, and you will grow to almost human size. You had mentioning becoming more human, and while this will close off many more mammalian evolutionary paths, increased size and strength are much faster than other paths.

You managed to merge your salvaging, enhanced senses, and analyze into treasure sense. You maintain the functionality of its components, but you can also sniff out valuables that are more deeply hidden.

You merged your stone claws into magical crafting. Now you may use your abilities with tools while performing many crafting chores that involve cutting, slicing, or removing material. The minor skills ‘metalworking’ and ‘rune formation’ have been added to your magical crafting.

Because of this, you have the option of choosing the evolution ‘keystone’ which allows you to manipulate, merge, and reshape objects with your magical crafting, rather than just cutting or imbuing them.

The reason I mention keystone and lesser golem is that they both open a possible future evolution that I think you might be interested in choosing.

They both lead to classes in the game. If you have that option in the game, you may choose to evolve into a Troglodyte, which is a race that has classes and is considered common, or civilized. They are not well-liked by many races, but they advance with character classes, rather than simply evolutions. Keystone would open up the option of becoming a metalworker, and Lesser Golem would open up the option of choosing the Golemancer class.

Of course, Keystone is sort of outside your earlier specifications, because it will allow you to freely violate AO’s race restrictions as far as item creation and could potentially expose you to discovery, but I thought you might be interested. One of the reasons Troglodytes are not trusted is because, as a species, they have refused the bands. Only orcs and troglodytes have refused these, and orcs are capable of breeding with humans… Their offspring, due to their disconnect from true orcish culture, almost always choose to accept bands.

If you choose to become a Troglodyte, you will gain levels as a common race, but for every 5 levels, you may choose an evolution instead or a new class you qualify for. This capability is most likely the reason that Troglodytes have chosen not to accept bands, and may be the reason orcs have chosen not to as well. Orcs are, of course, less profound in their evolutions, but normal common races are far more restricted, due to the balance restrictions imposed by AO.

According to the database I have partially decoded, classes in the game are similar to AO classes but far less restrictive. They generally alter at 5-rank intervals to reflect the skill and ability choices you have made, rather than being required to open new options. Advanced classes are the same way, but more profoundly so.

Holy moly… do AO players know about advanced classes?

Yes. Bastion is an upgraded version of divine warrior, and Sensual Overlord is an upgraded version of Harem Lord.

How about Mae?

I do not know. Her class is concealed. It may be a racial trait.

I thought she was a shadowcaster?

Yes, you did. That is what she wanted you to think.

Man, this was tough. I needed a little bit of advice. “Cassie, what do you know about Troglodytes?”

Cassie chuckled, “I know that if you call them that they will try to slit your throat. For some reason, they like to refer to themselves as swamp elves, and get mad at anyone that calls them trogs.”

“Are they elves?”

Cassie shrugged. “I don’t know… I don’t really think so, but I know that the traders that come to Silverheart have claimed that they came here ten thousand years before the emigration, and like the wood elves, decided to bind themselves here… but they did it by transforming and breeding with the locals, instead of just abandoning the cities and binding themselves to nature.”

Shiana, watching from nearby, piped up, “Wood elves chose to defect from the flying cities of their ancestors and make Alandia their new home, rather than by invasion and empire like the sky elves. They did this by making a pact with Aen, and becoming the protectors and watchful guardians of the island of Fey Gallinian, and have interbred with the woodland fey. Unlike the sky elves, Wood elves have natural fey blood of this world running through their veins, and in my company, your party can enter and explore the island of Fey Gallinian without being attacked, as long as you are careful to follow Aen’s law on the island.”

I whispered to Cassie, “Does she always do the tour guide thing?”

Cassie nodded, “Yeah, it’s like she has some kind of list of words that if you use them, she goes into a rant about it. Usually, they have to do with her, Fey Gallinian, or wood elves, but sometimes she just pipes up with some weird elf fact out of the blue… and some of them are really strange, like talking about sky elf magic starts her off on the rebellion and dropping of five cities.”

“Do dwarves have a problem with Swamp elves?” I asked curiously.

Cassie shrugged, “Not really much of one. We don’t interact much with them except for traders, and dwarves welcome trade, usually. Even the word swamp elf is kind of weird because even though a big settlement lives in the Winnowrill, they aren’t really swamp creatures. I mean, no slime, no gills or anything, and they are just as comfortable running across the bowl ahead of a sandstorm, or even up north in the snows of the broken lands, as they are in a swamp… although, like kobolds and humans, they tend to come in different colors depending on their resistances.”

“I do know that orcs often war with them in goblin valley, but orcs go to war with everything. I heard they even went to war once with a lake that burst its banks and drowned an orc village. After a few of them drowned they declared that the lake had learned its lesson. Orcs are just like that.” Cassie said.

Then she added, “I know that right now there’s some kind of uneasy truce between them and Sindaenaway, but that doesn’t stop the adventurer’s guild from having tons of bounties for killing them. I guess they can’t send the guard or the army, but independents like travelers killing them are just fine. The whole thing is kind of confusing, but Winnowrills are really big on holding to pacts and their word. Does that help?”

I nodded, “Yes, thank you.”

Mnemosyne, if I chose one of the possible class evolutions, would I remain an adolescent?

Until you actually choose to evolve into a Troglodyte, yes. Changing species automatically makes you a young adult of that species. But then, you have been an adult for 15 years, so that should not be much of a problem.

Very well then, You have talked me into it. I choose Keystone.

I knew you would say that.

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