We sat at a small table in the back of the Impish Inn, each with our own glass of something called kefir, a thin, alcoholic yogurt that I occasionally took sips of to try acquiring the taste, a process that wasn’t moving along terribly well. That was okay though, because the Impish Inn was my […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 27: Fears
My left hand felt slightly numb, but otherwise no worse the wear for having its bones sucked dry of their latent magic. I flexed it every now and then, still suspecting that I was waiting for the other shoe to drop on that score. Bormann would probably know, but I didn’t quite know how to […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 26: Superman
I ate from the fairy jar, squeezing their tiny bodies to crush their marzipan internal organs, until I was fully healed, back at 36/36 hit points. My health meter had increased in size when I’d put points into PHY, but I didn’t fully understand the pattern I was seeing, nor did I fully grasp what […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 25: Rocket Man
It would be another three days before we were ready to go, which meant that Plan Glove-Rocket didn’t actually save us any time as compared to walking through the desert, but at least part of the delay was from all the time that Fenn wanted me to spend training. I didn’t like it one bit; […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 24: Like a Glove
It was the first time I really felt like Aerb had failed me. It hadn’t exactly been fun before, though parts of it certainly were, and it hadn’t been easy. And for all that, I wouldn’t even say that it was particularly gamelike, just maybe able to be mapped onto a game. This garbage? This […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 23: Siege
Warding magic was, apparently, a really complex thing, at least to hear Amaryllis tell it. I didn’t care so much about the low level aspects of warding, like how shapes were defined, just the high level stuff, like (hypothetically) how a fortress would be warded against intrusion and how intruders would get around those protections. […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 22: Rolling Need
She led us down several hallways as we slowly regained our breath, moving with purpose. I caught glimpses of other rooms, mostly bare but some with covered furniture in them. These were ideal conditions for keeping things in stasis, since there was rarely weather in the Datura and it was almost constantly warm and dry. […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 21: Cliff Racer
It wasn’t first light, but twilight had come over the Datura Desert, enough to banish the multi-colored stars from the sky. It wouldn’t be long before the sun (somehow) rose over the infinite plane of tessellating Aerbs (no seriously how) and splayed light on us once more. I was a bit more concerned with the […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 20: Desert Course
We traveled across the desert together, trudging through the sand in our white robes, moving single file to hide our numbers so that one person could play trailblazer, a duty we rotated. It had been explained to me that magic in the general sense could be divided up into three categories: latent, passive, and active. […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 19: Montage!
Skill increased: Bone Magic lvl 10! Spell discovered: Power Tapping! Spell discovered: Speed Tapping! Spell discovered: Endurance Tapping! Skill increased: Bone Magic lvl 12! (Skill capped at triple the value of primary stat KNO.) Affliction: Broken Bone Removed! It took me the better part of eight hours to cap out bone magic and fully heal […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 18: Communal
The closest thing to public bathing I had ever experienced was in the high school locker room, which had rows of showers lined up and nothing in the way of privacy. I’d say it was obvious that the showers were segregated by gender, but that was manifestly not obvious to the people of Barren Jewel. […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 17: Voting Blocs
“So,” said Fenn as soon as we were through the door to our room. “I finally figured out what this companion thingy reminded me of: a kharass, an elf cultural thing. Basically, there are groups of people who are cosmologically linked to one another by a wampeter, which I guess is their … purpose is […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 16: Kindly Bones
I’d had other things on my mind when I got the achievement “Tutorial Complete”, but what little attention I’d devoted to it had been to wonder how in the hell you could have a tutorial section that took three days to clear and featured something like a dozen perilously close brushes with death. Unless the […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 15: Whys and Wherefores
“The city of Barren Jewel lies at the heart of the Datura Desert, surrounded on all sides by hundreds of miles of sand dunes and rocky cliffs. It’s a city of cutthroats where the guards either turn a blind eye or are in on the take, a place of powerful magics lurking in the shadows, […]
Worth the Candle, Ch 14: ELEVATOR facts
Thank you for signing up for ELEVATOR facts! The thing to know about modern elevators is that they have a lot of safety features. There’s not a single cable that holds up the car, there are about eight, each of which is capable of holding up a fully loaded car all by itself. The elevator […]