Chương 16: Pawn Shop

"I figure we're not going to see many compound bows in whatever world we end up in after this," she says to me.

"And shooting with it is a whole different experience. Once you get the string all the way back, it takes practically nothing to hold it there. I prefer the feel of the recurve."

"Me too," I say.

"And yeah, I think we're going to find more bows like that than compound ones. Those seem a bit too high tech for what we're going into."

"So you think we're going quasi medieval too?"

"There are no guns in the tutorial," I point out, "so I assume that there will be no guns in the new world. That means a society that doesn't have gunpowder, which means quasi medieval, yeah. Maybe something closer to Renaissance timing, with flintlock pistols or whatever. But I'm expecting, based on the classes and the lack of guns, that we're going to a fantasy world."

"I hope so," she says.

"I don't like guns. They cheapen battle. I want to live or die based on my skill with the blade, not the random chance of being shot."

"You might still be shot with an arrow," I point out.

"Yeah, but if I am, it means that the person who shot me has the skill to get past my armor and defense. You can't just pick up a bow and shoot straight on the first try. Guns cheapen the skill needed."

"You do need skill to use a gun." She shrugs.

"Maybe. But not nearly as much. It's a much more simple point and click interface." I laugh at that.

"What did you do in the old world?" I ask, taking my ten shots as rapidly as I can, barely taking the time to aim with any of them. I want to be able to shoot a solid grouping fast, so that I can shoot monsters as they come close to me, killing them the way I killed the shadow wolves running up the stairs at me in the park.

"I was a computer programmer," she says.

"We used to do SCA larp on the weekends. That's how I had the armor. I wish I'd put more money into it and had something better though."

"What you've got seems to be working for you just fine."

"I need better armor," she says.

"We all do."

"Maybe we should go looking for that," I say.

"There's got to be a store that has armor in it somewhere around town."

"Maybe a pawn shop?" she offers, firing the last of her ten shots. We go to collect the arrows. My shots are far better grouped than hers. Not all of hers even hit the target. But my bow skill is at 8 now, and hers is only 4, so that makes sense.

"I could go scrounge through a pawn shop," I agree.

"There could be all kinds of stuff there. Do you know a good one?"

"There's one down lake," she says.

"Just a couple of blocks past lyndale."

"Maybe we should go there?"

"I want to get up to level five first," she says, gesturing to the bow.

"I feel like I'll be able to do some actual damage at level five. I'll be able to hit with a bit of distance between us and the enemy." I understand that. I want to get to level ten, which will probably take me a lot longer than it takes her to get to level five. I wonder what her sword skill is at. Is it at ten already? Looking over at Ashley, I see she's sparring with El, her mace and shield against El's axe. Is the mace skill interchangeable with the sword skill?

Like, will Ashley qualify for the new class if she gets level ten in mace instead of sword? I imagine it will; otherwise, she'd be back to practicing with her sword, just to get the skill up there and qualify. I bet if I picked up another weapon, I'd get the option of replacing my sword requirements with it. Same with El and her axes. The two of them must be trying to boost their respective weapon skills the same way we're trying to boost our archery skills.

I go back to shooting, wanting my bow to feel like a part of me. I lead Gigi back another ten paces from the target, and we shoot from there. She wants to get range with her shooting, and so do I. Also, longer range means harder shots. And harder shots, I assume, means more progress for the skill. I can really see the difference that our classes make.

My pathfinder class makes it easier for me to increase my bow skill, which is evident in that I get to level nine in the same amount of time it takes for Gigi to get to level five, and I get to level ten in the same time it takes her to get to six. Shooting from father away seems to help a lot; by the time she's hitting the target with every shot, her skill is already at six.

"Do you want to keep shooting?" I ask her as we retrieve our arrows.

"Or did you want to go looking for the pawn shop?"

"Let's go to the pawn shop," she says.

"But let's see if the others want to come with us." El and Ashley stay behind to keep working on their weapon skills, but Vinny is happy to join us on our trip to the pawn shop. He needs levels more than any of us, and while his spells are a lot stronger than they were, he knows that the only way to keep up is to fight some monsters. There just aren't that many quests to go around. I wonder how we get more quests. In most games, you need someone to give you a quest. Usually an NPC.

When they give you a task to do, you get prompted with a quest. I don't know if that's how it's going to happen, but I haven't gotten many quests any other way, save for the skill related quests. But those are quests that everyone is going to get. Much like the friends quest, the lynxith quest, and the mantis quest. I wonder if we can get more of those. We leave most of our stuff behind and head out from the park, moving in stealth as best we can.

Gigi is better with stealth than I would've expected a front line fighter to be, but then, she doesn't have heavy armor on to give her penalties. Vinny moves with stealth pretty easily, his armor being mostly leather that doesn't creak or make much noise on its own. We do come across a pack of lynxith, but even though there are five of them and three of us, it isn't a challenge. Between Vinny's spells and Gigi and I with the bows, the cat creatures don't last long enough to even make it up to melee range.

It's a nice hundred points of experience; can't complain about that. But it certainly isn't a challenge. I wonder if there will be other monsters we can run into, or if we're stuck dealing with lynxith, mantis, and giants during the day for the entire tutorial. If we are, it almost makes sense to just stay in the park and practice our skills all day, then go out at night and hunt the skeleton warriors, the larger giants, the spiders, and the shadow wolves for experience.

Then again, it'll be harder to scrounge around the pawn shop when I'm the only one who can see in the dark. I doubt Gigi is going to pick dark vision as her talent when she hits level ten, which she should be doing any minute now. She'll probably go with regeneration, or with the toughness thing that will increase her base hit points. I like that HP increases with every level, and I know that it's based on vigor, but I wouldn't say no to having double my current HP or something like that.

I could definitely get used to being a tank, which I'm guessing is the way Gigi is going to plan things for her own build when she reaches the right level. We get to the crossroads of Lyndale and Lake and get our first sight of a new enemy. They look like three lynxith from a distance, but as we get close we see that there are little green skinned creatures riding on their backs. Lynxith Rider. Common Elite monster, level 10. HP 500/500. This story originates from a different website.

Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. Now we're talking. I use Sniper Shot on the first of them, dealing 161 damage. They turn towards us and start charging. Vinny hits them with electric bolts while Gigi and I continue to fire our arrows at them. The bleed from the first Sniper Shot ends up doing a total of 319 damage, the next two arrows taking that one out before it can get within melee range.

Gigi fires three times before switching to her sword and board, and I get off another six shots before I put my bow down and draw my ranger's blade. Only one of the lynxith riders actually makes it to us, swinging a spear that deflects off Gigi's shield as I stab the lynxith itself in the eye. My blade doesn't dig all the way into the brain though, sliding out and across the poor creature's face.

I don't know how the hit points are shared between the two of them, but I'm hoping that the lynxith's hit points aren't any different than they've ever been, in which case my sword strike plus Gigi's will kill it, leaving us to just face the goblin or whatever that was riding it. The lynxith dies, and we make short work of the goblin between the three of us. It manages to hit me with the spear one time, but it doesn't get through my Shell, so I don't take any actual damage from the strike.

It's nice having that shielding spell there to help when someone does get through my fifty defense. Killing the three lynxith riders gets Gigi up to level ten and Vinny up to level nine, leaving me just two hundred and forty eight points away from level twelve. If there's an iron chest in the pawn shop, that'll be enough for me to level up again. Gigi ends up taking the tough talent, and it does in fact double her HP.

"I'm a proper tank now," she says.

"All I need is to get a spell like that shell thing you have, and I'll be able to take massive damage without even slowing down. I might be able to take one of those giants on all by myself. I have more than five hundred hit points!" That's a lot more than my two thirty one.

"We definitely need to get you the Shell spell," I agree.

"I wonder if the pawn shop will have spells." It does. It has a heal spell, which we give to Gigi since both Vinny and I already have it. But there are three other spells available as well. I take a spell called camouflage, Vinny takes one called Ice Storm, and we find Shell for Gigi. It's a shame we can't teach each other spells, or that more than one person can't learn the same spell from the same book. I'd really like Vinny to get the Shell spell. Seems like it would be useful for him to have it.

Most of what he has are offensive spells. In fact, I think he exclusively has offensive spells, other than heal. We take the time to learn the spells before we go through the rest of the pawn shop, so I get to see what camouflage does. Camouflage. Common spell 1/5. MP cost: 1/second. Casting time: instant. Cooldown: instant. Hide your presence, doubling the effect of your sneak skill, provided you move no faster than 50% of your maximum movement speed.

That'll help me stalk around and make me damned near invisible so long as I'm careful. Plus it helps me qualify for the spellslinger class, provided that I get one more level of meditation. Which I probably will, now that I've learned that I can refill my mana through meditation. The pawn shop is a scrounger's dream. They have everything, though most of it is junk for our purposes. We don't need guitars, golf clubs, or radios.

But we can use the rings and gems that we find behind the counter, we can use the forty extra hunting arrows and the two hunting bows, and we can use the four javelins we find. Or at least Ell can use them when we bring them back to her. The act of scrounging around the rows and rows of seemingly random assortments of goods has helped my scrounge go up to seven, and when I find a safe in the back, I know that I'll be able to get my twelfth level opening it. I'm starting to run out of lock picks.

Maybe I'll be able to find more in this store, or maybe I'll go back to the surplus store and see if there are more that I missed the first time. I'm much better at scrounging now than I used to be, so it's a distinct possibility. First, though, I need to get this safe unlocked. It doesn't take much to get it unlocked, but the process does improve my Pick Lock to level 8. You have opened and iron chest! You gain 250 XP! You find 25 silver pieces, lockpick (recipe), javelin (recipe), ring of might, 5 magic crystals.

The ring of might I give to Gigi. She's the strongest among us, and while the ring just gives a bonus to strength, I think she'll get the most out of it. Vinny and I prefer ranged attacks anyway. Vinny wants the magic crystals, and seems to have figured out what they're for.

"You use them to upgrade your spells," he says.

"Not level by level, but by category. Like when your Shell reaches level 5, you'll need to spend magic crystals to get it from common to uncommon. My ice spike is already at level 5, so these crystals will be enough for me to advance it and see what the new ice spike is like." That seemed fair, so we let him have the ice spikes. In exchange, he took five silver pieces, leaving Gigi and I to each get ten. And I got a recipe for a javelin. Which to me seems kind of simple; it's basically just a pointy stick.

But there's some engineering that goes into it, so I guess it needs a recipe. Of course, what we get from the chest is kind of secondary. What really matters is that getting it put me above the experience threshold. You have gained a level! You are now a level 12 pathfinder. You have 6 points to spend. You have learned the ability: find path. Find Path. Common tracking ability 1/5. Stamina cost: 2/minute. Casting time: 60 seconds. Cooldown: instant.

Locate the path of a creature and have that path highlighted to your vision. I decide to raise my charisma back to 10, then put the other points two in Vigor and two in Agility. I don't know if I'm going to boost my vigor very often, but it means a lot of hit points with every point, so it's pretty worth it. It puts my hit points at 276, which means my Shell is at 110 points. I'm pretty well established to be a tank, too, when I think about it.

Maybe I should look into more fighting up close and personal and rely on my Shell to keep me safe throughout it. Even if it doesn't, I'll be able to take a lot of damage before I'm in any real danger. Provided, of course, I don't die again. The death penalty is nothing to sneeze at. I've got all my attributes at or above the level they were before I died now, I think. I at least don't have anything below ten anymore. I can put more points into those as soon as I figure out what they do.

For right now, I think I want to go back to the park and go back to working on skills, and maybe on attributes. If I can improve attributes without putting myself into danger, that would be a good thing. And while there are more lynxith riders for us to find, I'm sure, the real experience comes at night. So I'd rather rest up and spend the day improving my attributes and skills so that I can go out fighting tonight. Hopefully, the others will come with me.

But if not, I might be able to get a fair amount of experience by myself. It comes faster by myself, though it is nowhere near as easy to get. I also find one other thing of note in the pawn shop. It's a set of tools. Not power tools, though there are plenty of those. What I find is a set of pliers and wrenches, of hammers, mallets, screwdrivers, and that sort of thing. Also a really nice pocket tool.

All of this could be useful for my armorer and weapon crafting, so I decide to take it with us rather than trying to hunt down a hardware store to find the same sort of thing. Although, a hardware store might not be a bad idea. If we go to one of the big chain ones, they probably have all the materials we need to improve our weapons.

"Good idea," Gigi says when I suggest it.

"I'd like to get some wood to reinforce my shield, too. We can probably find that there. I know of one about three miles away. We can get there pretty quickly if we jog. Plus, we might run into more lynxith riders along the way." The haul from the pawn shop is a bit on the heavy side, but we adjust it between us and are able to move without nearly as much difficulty as I was expecting. I really thought that we'd be slowed down by everything, but we're not.

We're able to move pretty quickly, and quietly enough that I'm not afraid we're going to call down every monster within earshot. We do spot another group of lynxith riders, four of them this time. I once again get a sniper shot off on one of them, taking it out completely before the other three close the distance. Vinny shoots an icy spear at another of the riders, seeming to do a lot of damage to it.

Not enough to kill it, but it seems like the ice spear also slows it down, enough so that only two of them reach melee range, after we both hit the slow lynxith rider two more times, him with the ice spear and me with arrows. I swing with the ranger's blade and deal 52 damage, taking a stab from the spear of the goblin rider that does 8 damage. At this rate, I should be able to go toe to toe with the goblin without having to worry. But the lynxith itself also claws at me, only 2 points getting through my defense.

Even still, I think I can take them. I have to hit them ten times to kill them, but if I only take ten damage every time I do it, I'm going to kill them before my Shell goes down. It's strange to allow myself to get hit in order to get hits off myself. It's a style of combat I'm not really used to. I usually prefer to only strike when I'm sure that I can hit, and when I'm at least relatively sure that they can't hit me back.

But now that Shell is offering such a large force field for me, I'm finding my fighting style is changing. I'm willing to exchange blows, because I know I'll outlast the enemy. I don't have to worry about any other enemies, either; Gigi will definitely take care of the other lynxith rider. I just have to focus on this one. I still do my best to duck and weave, but it seems like every time I get a slash in, I also get stabbed or bitten or both.

I should probably move back and go back to the bow; then they wouldn't be able to hit me at all. But if I do that, they'll just flank Gigi and try to take her out. I'm not sure how well she'll stand against two of them at once, even with Vinny and me shooting them. So I keep striking, doing 46 damage here, 50 there, and taking a few hits and scratches for my trouble. The lynxith and its rider still don't last very long. Maybe a minute, all told.

A little bit less time than it took for Gigi to kill hers, because she comes and flanks mine to help me get the last little bit of health away from the goblin and the lynxith itself.