Chương 30: [That Time I Learned My Mentor's First Pet Was Named 'Cornelius' With No Additional Context]

Morning. A new day's light blessed us, warming our skins after a full night of absence, while the moon-refrigerated air, still crisp and fresh, invigorated our lungs and flavored the sleepless wind with the hope of new opportunities and the energy to grab them with our two bare hands. BARE hands. Not BEAR hands. Ya'll thought I'd go for a joke that cheap this early, huh? Ya'll think I'm out of ideas already, right?! Well screw you, reader!

We're talking about the beautiful yet ephemeral nature of the morning not setting up for a silly little gag! Not everything here is a-"Stop sleeping it's 1 pm." The Dicster kicked me in the ribs.

"Get your butt up we got stuff to do."

"Hey watch it! You could have hit my lungs if my ribs weren't in the way," I bristle back as I get to my foot, ready to begin.

"I see your leg hasn't fully grown back." The Dicster peered at the shattered kneecap and the shredded flesh we forgot to bandage.

"It's a shame, but it's no excuse. You'll simply have to go without."

"Heh. Don't worry about it, old person." I jabbed the hole in my chest with my thumb.

"I've still got enough leg to have a leg up over you in any situation. Where's the Kobold? I want to bleed on him a little bit."

"I sent him to fetch us lunch. Besides — you don't want these secret techniques in the hands of just anyone, boy. If you're to stand alone at the peak of this world — nay, the whole LitRPG genre — you cannot afford competition, even… incidentally." I nodded grimly, understanding intuitively what it was they wanted me to do.

"I see you think you understand. That's good. For now, we'll start on stat training." My mentor took a seat opposite me and flicked their wrist. But unlike when I did it, a small screen made of pure light appeared before them, prompting them to enter their Blumo account details. They put in the username, but paused at the password. Then they clicked on 'I forgot my password'. Then they put their email address in the offered field. Then they went to a new tab to check their email, but they needed to log in first.

They put in the address then put in the password, but it didn't work. They tried with a slightly different password and it didn't work. The third password worked, but the email from the Blumo people wasn't in the inbox so they had to look around and found it in the Promotions folder for some reason. Also, there was no copy or paste feature so they had to remember the eighteen-string passcode from memory. Also, the code would be invalid in exactly 39 seconds.

So they weren't able to do it the first time, but when they asked for a new code they didn't have to mess with the email password anymore so they had a full, luxurious one minute and sixteen seconds to try and input the new eighteen-string passcode. But it didn't work. So they had to switch all the O's with 0's and the I's with 1's to see if maybe the issue was with the font, but by the time they tried that they needed a new code.

They tried three more times before Blumo shut them out because their account might be compromised. So they pulled up the customer support team and called the customer support team and had to navigate an AI assistant for roughly fifteen minutes because the AI assistant would get confused whenever The Dicster would break out into their apparently uncontrollable fits of maniacal laughter.

But no matter how many times the Dicster asked to talk to a real person the AI agent kept looping back to the start of the conversation. Eventually the AI agent gave up and directed them to a real customer support person, but they only spoke Greek and Chinese and this is an American fantasy world so we were all speaking American the way God intended so we got put on hold because all of their English-speaking customer support staff were busy.

Roughly twenty-nine minutes and fourteen seconds and thirty-three milliseconds later an American-speaking customer support member could take the call and The Dicster explained the situation and they said they could help, but first they needed a verification code which the Dicster could find in their account settings. The Dicster explained they couldn't see the account settings because they couldn't log into their account.

The customer support person said they should have gotten a physical letter with a verification code a few weeks after setting up the digital account but the Dicster explained they didn't have anything like that anymore. So the customer support person said they could maybe send them a new verification code in the mail if the Dicster could answer all seventy-four security questions they had to fill out when first making the account.

So the Dicster started telling them their mothers maiden name and where they went to high school and what their first pet's name was and got to question thirty-three before saying their favorite color was red. The customer support guy said that actually his favorite color wasn't red. The Dicster explained that red was their favorite color now and didn't remember what it might have been in the past.

So the customer support guy explained that he's obligated to mark the account as compromised and permanently locked it down so if they wanted to see their stats they'd have to make a new account from scratch. The Dicster asked to talk to their manager and the manager did come after a forty minute wait and explained that the customer support guy was just following protocol and there was nothing anyone there could do about it.

So The Dicster asked if they could make a new account and the manager said they could, they just needed them to physically mail forty gold pieces and a dental imprint and proof of insurance to the Blumbo headquarters. The Dicster asked if they could use the matching dental imprint to prove they were the same person to unlock the account. The manager said no because the dental imprint isn't actually used for verification purposes. They only collect them because the CEO is a pervert freak.

The manager urged them not to think about it too much. So the Dicster- Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.