Testing the Jarnak

Hera was sitting in front of the Jarnak as the snake just stared at her with an angry expression. She had been doing this for a couple of hours already, and Pandora was starting to get restless. She understood the idea. In order to tame a wild beast, you had to first gain its trust, but so far, nothing that they tried seemed to have worked.

Giving it food only made the monster finish its meal. Showing that they were respecting the creature also didn't seem to amount to anything. Even singing didn't give any results. And now, Hera was just trying to make it so the Jarnak could see in her eyes that they were similar. Even using her tail to mirror what the creature was doing. Hera was trying to be hopeful about the situation, but she was starting to doubt if it was even possible to do anything with the Jarnak. Maybe this wasn't about making it trust them, but something else entirely.

She tried having Daskka around her shoulder as a way to show that she did like snakes and they were friendly, but that also ended up not doing anything. As a matter of fact, the presence of her Court only seemed to make the Jarnak even more wary of the Empress. And Pandora was in a very similar situation. Nothing that she could do seemed to make the Jarnak more likely to accept them. It was starting to get annoying and Hera felt she was getting angrier by the second. Which was probably not helping the situation.

"Um, Hera do you mind if I ask something?" Pandora approached, making sure not to keep her weapons in hand as that seemed to anger the Jarnak.

"Yes?" Hera didn't look away from the creature, still moving her head from side to side while following the snake.

"Have you ever actually tamed a snake or something?" 

The Empress didn't look away but still replied. "Not exactly. There was this giant snake that was very lonely and was already friendly to me when I met her due to some circumstances. And there was a dungeon where I participated where I had to take care of a snake. But we could play around while hunting other monsters. It was fun, but the snake had already been told that I was going to be taking care of her. So it was already a tamed snake. Just not my pet snake."

"And is Daskka like a real snake?" Pandora asked. 

" Hey!" Daskka protested, but turned to the Empress. "I mean, she does have a point."

"Not exactly. She was always nice to me because the item belongs to me. So I guess the system doesn't want people to just get an item with a personality that hates them. Not for no reason at all, at least."

"Then are you sure you're doing the right thing?"

"What do you mean?" Hera turned to Pandora, breaking eye contact from the Jarnak and causing the creature to hiss angrily.

"I mean, what if this is not the way people generally tame snakes? Maybe we should study a bit about that first before coming back here." Pandora said.

The Empress glanced down at her tablet, checking the time, and realized that there wasn't that long before they had an appointment with the crafter. After letting out a sigh, Hera said, "Okay. you were probably right. It's pretty obvious we have no idea of what we're doing. Well. I have no idea what I'm doing."

Hera got up and fired a poison fang at the Jarnak, killing it on the spot, and watched as it dropped only its skin. Which was a material so weak and easy to come by that it wasn't even going to be worth to go out of her way to pick it up.

"Let's just leave and hope that someone else got some better luck than we did." Hera nodded and the two of them quickly climbed down to Nimbus as the Sentinel took them back to the entrance of the dungeon.

As soon as they left, a barrage of messages came through their tablets. Apparently, Bonnie's team was able to figure out what they could do to change the Jarnak. But they understand how through the messages they received. It was a bit of a mess, so Hera said they just ask where they were and headed to a restaurant where the other teams had gathered.

"You know, I just realized, but we spend a lot of time in restaurants, don't we?" Pandora asked as they walked inside and saw their table filled with food already.

"I mean, yes, but we also need a lot of energy to do what we do. So it kind of makes sense. And if we are not in a more relaxed place, things could get too serious," Hera replied before they arrived at the table.

"Hey, you two!" Alex cheered, clearly a bit buzzed already. "I'm glad you could make it."

Hera stared at her friend for a moment. "Since when can you get drunk? I thought your legacy stopped you from being able to do that."

"I recently got a skill that lets me turn off some effects. Only when I want them to," the Assassin said with a smile.

Bonnie shook her head and turned to the Empress. "You don't have to worry. Even though she can get like that, the Legacy still stops anything that could be an actual danger to her. She basically has a cheat code that never lets her blackout, but she can be as sloshed as she wants."

"I can also turn it on anytime and solve any problems I might have while drinking," Alex added, but her words were very slurred to the point of it being hard to understand her.

"Okay then, but what happened? What is going on? The message said you figured out a way to do something with the Jarnak?"

"Yes, we did." Shane put a small earring on the table. And by the looks of it, this was exactly the item they were searching for. But to confirm it, the Empress took a look at the object stats.

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Earring of the Jeweled Jarnak.

Epic - set item.

Created using the remains of the Jarnak. An Apex version of the Feywyrm's last successful experiment. 

Passive skills

Poison Resilience:

Increases wearer's natural poison resistance by 20%. If wearer does not have any poison resistance skills, this bonus is increased to 30%.

Active skill:

Poison Detection.

If the wearer has any poison in their system, the earring will lightly warm up. The warmer it is, the more poison is present on the wearer's body.

Set effects:

???????

???????

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

"Okay, is this really as good as I think it is? Because I'm not seeing anything about this being bound to someone," Hera asked.

"That is right. The earrings at least are not bound items. We're not entirely sure if the entire set will be like that or if there's one piece that would be bound, but at least we can mix and match the rest. Not to mention that by itself this is already almost as strong as the set that we were looking for."

"Yeah, but I was curious about one thing. What happens if Hera tries to wear that earring and use the ability? Would it warm up since she has poison in her body or would the skill understand that it's not a harmful poison?" Callena asked.

No one really had an answer to that, so they all turned to the Empress. Hera quickly put on the earrings. They were very pretty jade colored jewels adorned by a silver frame with the shape of a snake coiled around the gem. Simple, but elegant, and very in-brand with the kind of things that people would expect from a snake person. Sending a little bit of mana to the earring, even though it didn't require any to cast the skill, she felt it quickly warming up. It wasn't uncomfortable, but it was clearly noticeable. As if she just put on a pair of earrings that were left out in the sun for a few minutes.

"Either one of you tried to poison me or it does consider my own poison as part of the detection," Hera explained.

"But this is really good!" Pandora gasped. "How did you get it?"

"So, it was kind of an accident," Bonnie started explaining. "We got a variation of the dungeon that asked us to kill a monster near where the Jarnak first was. When we got there we started fighting it and with one of the constellations that I could use, Ruby ended up just throwing the Apex monster into the ground a bit farther away from us. We went after it, but before we got to it, the Jarnak found it in and killed it. When it did that, it swallowed something and started shaking. 

"Since this was the first time we ever saw something like that, we figured we should let it ride," Shane added.

"The Jarnak made a cocoon and not long after kaboom!" Alex said with a smile, almost falling off from her chair and starting to giggle. "The whole thing exploded." Alex chuckled again.

"And what came from inside was the new Jarnak. It had grown a little bit and its scales were more shiny," the Astral Witch. "We thought that was it and killed that one. But it didn't work. We got some drops that seem to be just regular drops, so we left the dungeon and went back inside again."

Shane picked up the story once more. "In the next attempt, we captured the Jarnak and made it kill every other Apex creature. We would beat them to the brink of death and let the snake deliver the final hit. Every time it did that, it would go back into a cocoon and a few moments later would come out as a bigger and meaner version of itself. The only one that we were not able to let it kill was the Nactra-Vall. If we tried to push it to their layer, it would just flip out and refuse to go forward, and when we tried to let it kill them in the final part of the dungeon, the Jarnak just died out of the blue. Like it didn't even get close to the Nactra-Vall, it just collapsed and then disappeared."

Hera asked a bit more about the details, but she still had to leave the group to meet with the crafter that might be able to fix her gloves. Yet, even after talking to them, it became clear that wasn't much of an option. Not because the gloves couldn't be fixed but because, according to the crafter, due to the nature of the items she wanted to use, if he tried to fix them, there was a good chance that the item would be bound to him. Not so much because the materials would force it, but because he wouldn't be making something from scratch. He was fixing something with a powerful material and that combination could result in an item bound to the person who fixed it.

It was one of the main reasons why people didn't really upgrade items to others. What was the point of making an item better if the customer would lose their ability to use that item? There were a few blueprints that could be used to change the materials of a forge or something and there were skills made to offset that, but they always came with the risk of becoming bound to the crafter instead of the person who owns the item. And in those cases, the only way to solve it would be to find an item capable of unbinding a piece of equipment, but those were very rare, especially since they were not items that came from one specific place.

After thanking the crafter for the consultation, the Empress returned to her team to discuss their options. She had a lot of things to do. From fixing her weapon to learning how to befriend the snake and to running the dungeons in order to get the drops. Pandora was confused why she wanted to befriend the Jarnak, but Hera said she wanted to see if it was possible to have it attacking the Nactra-Vall. She figured that might be a reason for the monster's reaction to them. And maybe going in that direction and completely bypassing that apparent block the Jarnak had against fighting them could be the key for one of the pieces of the equipment.

The group agreed with her that it was possible that there was something else happening there, so instead of just doing the same thing over and over again they should try a different approach. And since Hera also had to work on repairing the gloves herself, it might be a good idea for them to split off a bit more so they wouldn't have to waste so much more time in this dungeon.

And that became the plan for the next few days. Hera would be trying to figure out a way to fix her gloves, learning how to tame snakes and running the dungeon every so often in order to see if she could get more of the drops. While everybody else would be just focusing on running the dungeon, evolving the Jarnak and getting more and more drops. If anyone ever managed to figure out a way to have that creature face the Nactra-Vall, they would warn everybody, but if that didn't happen, they would just have to continue running to get the other items.

That was all going off the assumption that in order to get the final piece they would need to do something different. Which might not be the case. But in the end, they all agreed it was a nice plan. And Hera realized that this was a chance she had to go to her private room and not to just use her forging tools, but also talk to Nana Mittens again and see if she had any more advice to give.