The monotony of our journey was interrupted when we came across the next major city. Or rather, another major city, if we had tried we’d have been able to visit other cities with only a day or three of detour, but neither my children nor I had been terribly interested. But now, with the dark re...
2023-10-28 16:00:08 +0000 UTC View PostTravelling northwards from the forest of wonky dimensions, as I had taken to calling the damned place that messed with my mind in ways I didn’t appreciate, was strangely boring. On one hand, there wasn’t anything really new, just open fields, a few small- and medium-sized towns and a few fore...
2023-10-27 16:00:09 +0000 UTC View Post“What is all this?” Tank asked, after squeezing himself after their wayward witch. The entire place looked like something right out of a fantasy novel, or maybe a movie about rings, kings and small people living underground in very nice holes. This might just be one of those comfortable holes...
2023-10-25 16:00:10 +0000 UTC View PostIf an environment was to be judged by the number and vociferousness of the curses uttered while traversing said environment, the jungle that had sprung up near a certain city would rank near the top of the list. Or the bottom, depending on whether more and louder curses were deemed good or bad. 2023-10-23 16:00:09 +0000 UTC View Post
“So, does anyone think they can accomplish something more in this forest?” I asked once everyone had sat down for our evening meal. It was something akin to breakfast for Lia, though she primarily ate for the taste, taking her nourishment from my blood, dinner for Luna and something in betwee...
2023-10-22 16:00:07 +0000 UTC View PostMaybe letting Luna play in the forest of murderous plants hadn’t been the best idea I’ve ever had. On the one hand, her life magic went through the roof from what she told me, gaining quite a few skill points and even adding an interesting special ability to her repertoire after communing wit...
2023-10-21 16:00:07 +0000 UTC View PostSadly, even a full day of rest didn’t make matters more obvious. When I returned to the clearing the night after we defeated the dungeon, the hotel remained gone. I had no idea if that was a function of us defeating it, something akin to the lock-out we had experienced after repeatedly clearing...
2023-10-20 16:00:11 +0000 UTC View PostLooking at the notifications, I got some answers though they weren’t terribly informative. The obvious ones were a pair of level-up notifications, bringing me to sixty-five, one that told me that my Darkness Magic had risen to fifty. Additionally, there was one telling me that the Dungeon Explo...
2023-10-18 16:00:08 +0000 UTC View PostAs I hesitated over my own actions for a moment, Lia and Silva tore into the moving plushies, likely happy to have something to tear apart after hours of cautious trudging and avoiding traps. Both of them were beings of action and being subject to repeated attacks that they couldn’t fight back ...
2023-10-16 16:01:10 +0000 UTC View PostAs we continued through the Waldhof Dungeon, it kept its theme constant. From the laundry room with its shifting tiles, we moved back to the kitchen at Alex’ urging, where they used some of the chemicals and kitchen appliances to remove the stupidly sticky grime from the key we had found. Clean...
2023-10-15 16:00:08 +0000 UTC View PostLooking into the laundry room, we still couldn’t see any danger. That might be because there was none, or because the danger came from traps or similar hazards we had yet to detect. It was just like this entire place, eerily quiet and filled with an, now moist, air of foreboding. Even without t...
2023-10-14 16:00:06 +0000 UTC View PostRepeated attempts on the door yielded no result. After almost ten minutes of fruitless work, and trying to keep the strange slapping vine from causing us bodily harm, we gave up and decided to check out the rest of the place. Maybe we’d find the bloody key somewhere and could open the door that...
2023-10-13 16:00:11 +0000 UTC View PostAfter circling the building once, just to make sure there was no backdoor or anything else we had missed, we stood back at the front entrance. The brush growing out of the interior was still there and now, from up close, I could see that it was a thorny mess that one didn’t want to tangle with....
2023-10-11 16:00:09 +0000 UTC View PostIf anybody had been watching while we performed our next set of tests, they’d have thought us monsters. Given that we had no idea what the grass around the hotel might be, the first thing we needed to do was make sure the area was safe to approach and we wouldn’t die outright, simply for step...
2023-10-09 16:00:08 +0000 UTC View PostAfter circling the clearing the impossible hotel was on once we returned to the spot we had started from. The clearing was just that, a wide area of grass with the hotel sitting smack-dab in the middle. The building itself was overgrown with various vines and some strange plants were peeking out ...
2023-10-08 16:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post“It should be somewhere nearby,” Lia grumbled, looking around once more. As so often these last few nights, it was only Lia and myself out here. Alex had decided to remain behind and perform some experiments on the somnus grass, as we had dubbed the grass that constantly spread magical sleepi...
2023-10-07 16:00:07 +0000 UTC View PostThe last few days had been quite interesting. Exploring the forest and its… fascinating flora was something else, making me wonder about the speed of adaption in regards to the system. It seemed to me that some of the simpler organisms had rapidly adapted and became something wholly new, as the...
2023-10-06 16:00:10 +0000 UTC View PostWith a wide grin on my face, I pushed off the branch I had taken a short break on, flying through the air to reach the next. There was a lot of forest to explore, far more than I had thought possible. It would take us days, maybe even weeks, to explore it all, and that was with the fairly insane ...
2023-10-04 16:00:08 +0000 UTC View PostHaving the munchkin by my side made things far easier than it should have by any measure known to me. There was something about her presence, something beyond the skills and affinities she had been blessed with that made working magic flow smoother, as if an unknown obstacle was removed. The chan...
2023-10-02 16:00:07 +0000 UTC View PostSoftly whistling to myself, I opened up the space beneath the giant tree. There was an almost impossible warmth to the earth here, it was teeming with vitality and power, making me wonder if I could use some of that power for my own purposes. Images painted by the words of a brilliant writer, lat...
2023-10-01 16:00:12 +0000 UTC View PostAfter hearing the howls of Gravehounds while in the shadows, we moved as quickly as possible without completely abandoning our vigilance. If the hounds were after us, we didn’t want them to happen upon us while we were in battle, that might be the one case where they could cause us serious harm...
2023-09-30 16:00:08 +0000 UTC View PostSometimes, important events don’t start with a bang. There was no announcement, no explosive incident, nothing to indicate that something fundamental was changing, just a single whisper, passed from one person to another.
In this case, the single whisper went something along the lines of,...
2023-09-29 16:00:08 +0000 UTC View PostMaybe it was for the best that things worked out as they did. There was no real need for us to stick around, especially not if the people at the farm didn’t want us nearby. No need to make things difficult for them, at least as long as they honoured their debts towards me and gave us some addit...
2023-09-27 16:00:08 +0000 UTC View PostMy conversation with Luna continued for a little longer, the focus of it shifting from her worries to a more practical thing, namely the question I had been pondering before. What did she want to do and how sad would she be if we left the area behind?
Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised...
2023-09-25 16:00:09 +0000 UTC View PostAfter returning to our lair, I started to, once again, consider the current state of affairs. What were we really doing here, near the farm? How useful and practical was it to stay, compared to going out and exploring? My biggest concern in that regard was Luna. If we started to travel, she’d l...
2023-09-24 16:00:07 +0000 UTC View PostLooking around the area we had been in for the last few days, I decided there currently wasn’t anything else to do. The lake, while interesting, was currently beyond my capabilities to explore. I had bottled some of the water in a glass bottle, hoping that I could perform some experiments on th...
2023-09-23 16:00:07 +0000 UTC View PostKnowing that there might be beasts behind us, or at least that there were beasts out there, baying for somebody’s blood after we killed a few of their number, was enough to motivate us to leave with haste. It wasn’t that the Gravehounds were dangerous in open combat, but their ability to avoi...
2023-09-22 16:00:08 +0000 UTC View PostThere was something weird about the graveyard. It wasn’t just that a good portion of it had gone into the river thanks to a landslide, though that was part of it, no, there was something else at work. Some of me was convinced that it was magical, to the point that I had to constantly taste the ...
2023-09-20 16:00:09 +0000 UTC View PostAs we made our way upriver, I realised just how fascinating the area we were in truly was. Not only did the lake provide ample water, but the water also had a fairly interesting effect on the local wildlife, something I hadn’t noticed before due to their relative weakness. A beast around level ...
2023-09-18 16:00:09 +0000 UTC View PostSitting in our nicely enlarged cave, I was trying to figure out how to proceed. The marsh and its inhabitants weren’t at a level that would grant me a lot of EXP, only Luna stood to gain any if we hunted in the area, but that was only for the creatures we had actually seen. The larger plant-cre...
2023-09-17 16:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post