Chapter 140 – Charged Keys (Wednesday 6/7)

For the fifth time in a day, the Anti-Depressant of Wave 9 hit the floor. The keys lit up and John took a victory stance that doubled up as him using Escape I.D. “We did it!” John said ready to use the keys back in the emptiness that lay beyond the gate, “We actually did it!”

 “Yay, us!” Sylph said and edged John on, “use it, use iiiiiiiit.”

“Yes, yes, I am planning to!” John answered, similarly excited.

“Uhm,” Gnome interjected, “Shouldn’t we check the loot first?”

“What? Noooooo,” Sylph cried out in response, acting like she would faint whilst slowly sinking in the air, “My heart cannot take this! I just wanna be big, why is this so complicated.” Sylph broke out into a little song, “I want to be big, not the size of a twig, although a twig would be bigger than me, cause I am the size of a thumb.”

“Shut the fuck up, Sylph!” Salamander ordered, causing the air elemental to mumble quietly instead.

“As I was saying, John,” Gnome finally got to speak again, “on the off-chance that the boss dropped the bonus level item today, we should check first.”

“Yes, you are right,” John agreed, he was so excited he had almost forgotten an important rule of videogames: Order is key. As a reward he patted Gnome on the head. The stone elemental stared at her feet while John caressed her soft hair. No one would have ever guessed she was made out of stone. She let out a happy squeal as John kept patting her, with some certainty he could say that Gnome did not even notice the noise she was making. When he retracted his hand, Gnome made an unhappy expression, quickly followed by her trying to get an air of seriousness back around her. “Okay, girls, let’s go ba-ack.” That had sounded almost correct. “Uuuh, I bith my tongue,” Gnome sniffed. The pain was fixed after some more patting.

They went back to the basin and, true enough, they found the Time Cigarette there. “Absurd,” John said as he pulled the cigarette, whose aura he had detected, from the mountain of watches. It was nothing but a white cigarette, hand rolled and with a black, crumbly mass sticking out. John wondered what would happen if he just smoked the thing, but he didn’t have the luxury to actually try.

‘Okay?’ John thought after reading the flavour text. He was very interested in the Randomizer thing though. A theory formed in his head and he smirked. “Okay, let us see what this does,” he announced and, after working their way through the watches, they went back into the gate. John was presented with the usual window asking him if he wanted to use the item. He affirmed and the void around them quickly changed into the standardized plain green field that he was used to seeing as the placeholder model by now.

Two details had been added. One was a giant lever, attached to an even bigger slot machine. There was only one spinning segment, rather than the usual three, and the symbols printed onto it were tiny. The lights decorating it danced in a circle, illuminating this late hour, and the second detail had John confused.

It was a woman with green, curly hair and eyes of the same colouration. She wore a black dress that ended in four different strands, the gaps in between clearly showing off her legs and much of her thick ass. Overall, the girl was quite small and her face did have a cute roundness to it that clashed pleasingly with the confident shimmer in her emerald eyes.

“There you are,” the hovering girl said, her annoyed voice competing with the crunching of the chips she was snacking on. The familiar tone confused John. Not as much as the fact that Observe did not work though. That had happened before, but he typically got a sense of it misfiring. This time around, it just straight-up did not activate.

“I'm afraid that Skill is not yours yet, John,” she said and let out a heavy sigh, “still have to spoon-feed you everything. All the while I have so much other stuff to do… Feri was supposed to do this but she has ‘no time’ . How the goddess of time can have no time is beyond even me. Actually, it's not, I just let her be lazy.”

“Who… are you?” John asked hesitantly. He had an inkling suspicion but it was too ludicrious to be true.

“I am Gaia, or whatever other title you want to call me, stupid.” The supreme deity of the Abyss tilted back in the air nonchalantly, giving a casual view up her skirt. It took John a disbelieving set of seconds to realize he was staring at the, admittedly quite perfect, ass of the ruler of creation.

“Why are you helping me?” The question that had been itching behind his forehead burst out immediately.

Gaia tilted her head, “Pardon?”

“Nathalia told me that you are supporting my powers, why? You could just not do that and leave me to slowly grind on my own,” he furthered his question.

“Because I want you to live,” Gaia said, like it was the most basic thing in the world.

“But… why me?”

“Are you seriously asking me to not help you live? Are you that stupid?”

“No, not at all, I just want to know the reason,” John was at a loss here and Gaia was not helping him gather a clear picture. “Why me? Specifically?”

“Hmph,” the supreme deity munched on a few more chips. “You’re really insistent on making the gift horse bite you. The answer is that I am not helping you specifically. You’re not the first Latebloomer that needs some gas to start the engine and you won’t be the last. Happy?”

“That is the opposite of reassuring,” John mumbled.

“Hey, hey, hey, Gaia, hey, listen!” Sylph flew up to the goddess and started blabbering, “Can you, like, maybe, make me big?”

Gaia, with a deadpan expression, just said, “No.”

Sylph turned around and complained, “Joooooohn, Gaia is mean to meeeee,”

“Yeah, well, nothing I can do about that really,” John apologized. Sylph, with a soft ‘dumph’ sound, landed on his chest and made overplayed crying noises.

“You done now?” Gaia wanted to know, looking at her fingernails with a bored expression, “I need to punish a cabbage trader in the middle east, guy had the gall to use magical soil renewal.” Another potato chip flew into her mouth.

“Can’t you do that from here?” John asked, “I was under the impression that you are almighty.”

“I am,” Gaia firmly said, “but it is much more fun to look.” He made a shocked expression, he had not expected the goddess to be this bloodthirsty. “No, I am not,” Gaia read his thoughts, “I am just going to have his cart crash and hope that he screams ‘MY CABBAGEEEES!’ like that gag from Avatar.”

“Wha-?”

“Oh, right, you don’t watch anime, you should probably hang out with your girlfriend more. Whom you have to save, so stop wasting both of our time,” Gaia made a tiny motion and the giant lever pulled down, “So here are the rules: The slot machine will stop at a random bonus level which you will then enter. The bonus level will be scaled to the level of the randomizer used, so 60 in this case, and the rest will be per usual, giving you the rules window and then you do whatever that says, understood?”

John just nodded.

“Great, wouldn’t have repeated it anyway, so, what does the wheel say?” Everyone’s eyes focused on the slot machine as it came to a slow halt. Stopping at the image of a dog. “Wow, that is…boring,” Gaia yawned, “so the dumb dog catching game again, have fun doing that.” With a circling of her wrist, John found himself whisked away, standing in front of the sleeping fat black police officer with his bulldog.

“So we are doing this again, huh?” John sighed. “Everybody remember their roles?”

“Search for dogs, give Gnome the position, you give Gnome mana,” Aclysia promptly answered.

“Was it that way?” Sylph wondered in response, “Oh, well, if Acly says so…no, that doesn’t sound good. Al? Sia? Lysia? Lys…Liz!” the air elemental pointed at the Artificial Guardian, “you are now Liz.”

“No, Aclysia is the name Master gave me, you will not change it,” came an answer so strict that Sylph shrunk a bit.

“Okay…ehem, find dogs and report to Gnome, officer Sylph at the ready!” she tried to quickly get herself back on topic.

“What the airhead said,” Salamander said and then giggled a moment, “Didn’t even realize, man I am good.”

‘I will look underneath,’ Undine announced.

“I am ready,” Aclysia supported.

“Okay, everyone depends on you, you can do it, you did it before,” Gnome mumbled to herself, shaking her fists “Ey, ey, oooh!”

“Gnomy, you are doing that thing again,” Sylph laughed.

“No, wait, why are you all looking at me like that?!” Gnome only now realized that she had ended up as the centre of everyone’s attention again as she had fired herself up. John wondered whether Gnome always had been like this and her transformation had merely made her more outspoken or if she had become THIS shy only after evolving. Either way it was fun to tease her.

However, he did actually want to get this moving. The day was almost over already and he was tired from farming the Anti-Depressant all day. In a way getting such a short-lived bonus level worked out really well. “Okay, let’s start!”

He clicked the button and they scattered into opposite directions. Sylph and Salamander were once again the MVP’s in this. With their aerial surveillance they were much quicker to spot dogs in the streets or on rooftops. However, Undine did no small part either, finding two of the canines that hid in the sewers. John and Aclysia were mostly useless. He found one dog inside an office building while Aclysia found none. The much faster and airborne Sylph had found all that would have been in her way before she even got there.

In the end, they found and retrieved a total of 21 dogs, which was 6 more than last time but still nowhere close to the maximum of 50. ‘Who the fuck balanced this?’ John complained in his mind and realized a moment later that he had met the apparently anime-loving goddess earlier. ‘Sword Art Online alone should be justification enough to never let anyone associated with anime design a videogame,’ he thought and waited for the window to pop-up.

John closed the window with a sour expression and raised Sylph to 99 (he tried raising her to 100 but the option disappeared). He put the remaining points into Undine, leaving her at 84. This was extremely useful. “Now we need to get that SEP,” John sighed. “Worries for tomorrow, let’s go sleep everyone.”

So that is what they did.