Gatekeeper

Once Lyr and the others were done they all came out with the healed and restored familiars as well as the numerous babies they had given. "You could have come in and helped," Lyr remarks while giving me a displeased look, forcing the unnamed baby that Cweeper had birthed into my hands. "It's an imp priestess, just like its mother, and the other came out as… well, special."

That caught my attention in an instant as the others quickly crowded around and Go was given that special baby by Merch. After examining the imp infant in his hands, Go asks, "What's a gatekeeper?"

"A dark summoner," Lyr and Agnes reply at the same time, looking at each other with surprised smiles. Then Lyr nodded for Agnes to go on and Skooma's sister says, "Summoners are neutral by technicality, we can interact with both the divine dimensions and this world's hells and all the places in between. A gatekeeper is a summoner that specializes in literally opening the gates of hell to summon demons."

"We can't farm her demons, can we?" I ask unhappily, knowing that most demons in this game had the stats of boss monsters equal to their levels. Their parts were also supposed to be some of the rarer and more advanced crafting materials, like in most games.

"Farm… demons?" Lyr asks, looking around the gathered group in confusion.

"He means repeatedly summoning demons to kill them and collect their parts so we don't have to go out and actually find demons to hunt," Merch replies casually, as if this were all completely normal. "Things like that are how we usually make our quicker money."

"No, it takes a very powerful ritual to summon a demon's true body," Ferithar replies in Lyr's place. "The form they appear with when summoned by usual means is a physical presence of mana. When the summon dies, the mana disperses. If you want to farm demons, though, we might be able to work out a deal. I've dabbled in a few dark arts, myself."

"Merch is our merchant," I reply while grasping the shorter fellow's shoulders to drag him over in front of Ferithar despite the baby imps in his arms. "If you want to work out long term business deals with our group, he's the guy to talk to. If you want to make some quick cash, I'm the guy to talk to."

"I see…" Ferithar says slowly while examining the halfling elven kid I just placed in front of him. Merch was in his early twenties and all of his characters usually used his actual skull structure if not the rest of the superficial details. However, he really did look like a kid in reality and it was pretty funny but also one of the reasons why he played games as an assassin.

"Daily, weekly, monthly, yearly," Merch states simply after a few seconds of silence.

"What?" Ferithar asks in confusion.

"How often can you summon how many demons to provide how many of what parts that you do and do not desire for yourself as well as their usual market values," Merch says in more detail as well as complication.

"Merch, he's the guy who makes things that get sold, not the guy who works out the deals," I say while patting my friend's shoulders. "He's going to be good to us in the future, so try not to be too hard on him. Ferithar, try not to get too impatient with him because he's very professional. You guys work out the dealings and help the others with their mana," I add with a pointed look at Ferithar who nodded and called out all of the people with warrior classes to one side.

While I led Lyr and the familiars to the other side of the back yard from them I could already hear Papi expressing the pain of having his mana pool forcibly enlarged. Then I left Lyr to loudly lecture the others not undergoing mana pool surgery about caring for these infant monsters while I lined up their mothers and showed them a basic defensive stance not unlike the chopping and slashing stance I taught Lana.

Once everybody had their hands up in front of their heart and neck and readily open I showed them a slow and simple set of jabbing attacks with the different parts of their hands from the outer side to the heel of their palm and the pad of their thumbs as well as claw thrusts before finally showing them how to use a fist. Because of their finger lengths and their claws fighting with a fist would usually be problematic but I at least wanted them to have that option.

[Beast Mastery Leveled]

[+50XP]

Cweeper would usually have no claws or short ones, anyway. It took about ten minutes of going around to each familiar and correcting their stance or extensions as well as literally holding their hands through the motions. However, they were eventually copying the same set of hands that I was displaying at the same slow, cycling pace. It actually looked like we were practicing the Wing Chun jabs without using the wrist exercises.

Once they started naturally keeping pace with me I started slowly speeding up little by little until they started getting tired while moving at a more fluid pace. They got to rest for a minute or two while I traveled from one imp to the next using First-Aid to replenish their stamina but then they were right back up and once again starting the slow cycle. Then, feeling multiple sets of eyes on me, I turn around to find everybody watching with an oddly intense interest.

Even Lyr was watching me while rubbing her chin thoughtfully as if she were thinking of possibilities I probably would not be happy to hear about.

"Shouldn't half of you be getting shot at with magic and the other half shooting?" I ask loudly, causing the imps to stop in their forms training. "You've seen how it works and what it can do through Ferithar and I. What do we do when we learn something new? Replicate, incorporate, and innovate! Get to work!"

Everybody suddenly snapped to attention and picked sides in a bock battle with Ferithar leading the magic users and Lyr leading the others who were stuck in blindfolds. Lyr honestly just wanted to have fun blocking shots and I saw no reason to stop her since it would keep everyone busy for longer. This way I could go back to teaching the imps my stolen martial arts.

While my family had its own brand of mixed martial arts that my father taught in his own professional gym, I was not about to start handing out the family techniques. Ours had been a military family that traveled the world learning the different arts of war that had culminated into a recognized martial art two generations before my father. Thanks to technology and entertainment, though, the family business was usually booming.

Blood sports like professional kickboxing and MMA and the like had risen to even greater heights since full dive games started coming around and then incorporating real combat needs in realism games like this one. Not only did professional fighters play these games to train but many players usually sought real training to have an edge in games.

Once the imps got the hang of fluidly cycling through their different 'hands' after an hour or so of practice I showed them their first kick. It was a simple front kick but because of their backwards knees their kicks became a more solid stomping attack. Also, thanks to those knees they had an incredible natural balance.

As the day wore on into the later afternoon the imps made great progress, gaining a solid mastery of their hands as well as three different kicks from straight forward to straight up and then straight back. All with ease. Their next moves would be basic side kicks and then I would start teaching them the more rigorous moves like high kicks, flying kicks, and roundhouse kicks.

The others also made pretty good progress, developing their mana detection skills over the course of the first ten minutes while they spent the next few hours learning to use the different elements.

By the time Ferithar and Lyr decided that it was time for them to leave everybody had learned not just some form of quicksand ability but also how to use the ice element in similar fashion to me. As well they even started working on the more wild element of fire that was more dangerous to practice with our current methodology of live but low-caliber attacks.

After walking Lyr and Ferithar to the gate and returning, I just went right back to training the imps while the others practiced their magic tricks. I did not know if it was my teaching, their talent, or my collective buffs at work but these creatures just soaked up everything like sponges. All I had to do now was show them a move a few times and they were easily repeating it.

Cweeper and Lil's warrior imp were the fastest learners and were eventually moved together in the middle with Go's Missy to be my main focus. It was not that I was preferential to them over the other imps it was just that they seemed more suitable to physical combat. The others would need to learn finer points from their own masters.

Once I finished teaching them these basics, four different hands and six kicks, I made them pair up together and practice their techniques. At first they fought one another bare-handed but only while I made thick gloves of soft leather layers to lessen the damage they did to each other. Pretty much all of them had just given birth hours ago so I needed to take it easy on them at least that much.

Thankfully I acquired a few levels in Beast Mastery and was finally allowed a fourth pet at level five. Mastery skills usually have numerous levels while attack and support skills usually only go up to level ten, so I was sure to get many more pets in the future. For now, I was content to be able to tame Cweeper's baby, Cweepy.

Sadly I was only a few hundred experience away from level twenty-six, now, and was worried about taking it easy on leveling. I had gotten my base Agility passed fifty but after having had stat building actually brought to my attention by an outside entity like Sir Beryl I was becoming paranoid. Originally I wanted to catch up slowly to the other players around level forty and hopefully have the highest overall stat average but now I just felt like I needed more and more stats.

When I could finally leave the imps to train on their own I started in on my own training, deciding to train my Agility through aerobics and acrobatics. To do this, I would make short runs and leap or dive into flips and somersaults that I eventually began blending together. After the first ten minutes I was finally rewarded.

[Agility raised by 1]

After those first ten minutes, though, it took longer and longer to gain stats. After an hour I had only acquired two more Agility and one Endurance for my efforts. Now that it was early evening, though, Mr. Harlow was sent from inside to call everybody in for supper. Thanks to Lana's insistence of treating her future household as a family, we all ate at the same time and table.

Lady Mara was beyond the point of caring, simply accepting that the Delai family was going to be an eccentric noble house once we finally clawed our way up into the upper echelons of society. I was honestly happy with the idea of such a future setting, I could essentially build our clan off of the Delai family through its financial, political, and general ties.

Dinner was a simple affair in which everyone essentially reported how much they had grown for the day as well as their aims for tomorrow. When Lana proudly boasted that she had learned the Slash skill after several hours of arduous practice, Lady Mara halfheartedly congratulated her while teasing her about how manly it was to train. Lana just laughed and said at least she would be able to protect herself from monsters and not need to protect herself from men.

After dinner I reported that Merch and I had things we needed to see to and bid the others good night. It would be morning in less than an hour in reality and I did not want to be late anymore after yesterday evening. However, we really did have a lot of work to do.

For the most part we just wandered the main streets of the city's market districts hawking our wares to players and NPC alike. When it was finally too late to be peddling, though, we posted on the game's forums through our Social windows that the players in Sierra selling the best goods would have Away From Game stalls set up by the south gate. The we set up shop through a log-out option and went back to reality.

*