The Intermission Pt4

Even though the others still needed to monitor the forums to continue eking out spare change from the rest of the player base, I called up Go and Ivana to have their family come and meet up with mine for the celebration. Despite the fact that I could face a clan basically on my own, my own clan would not be much without the actual people in it.

If I could have done so I would have invited all of my friends out to a celebrations, but many f us were states apart and there were a few in other countries who were forced to play on other servers. This newest update was opening the borders between servers and allowing players to travel the sea, so it should not be long until we all get to meet up in the game.

The place we met up at was a large bar&grill establishment that my parents enjoyed going to whenever they had time. While our parents and my siblings chose a table where a chef would come and put on a show cooking food right at the table, I chose an empty area at the end of a sushi bar off to one side of the table where several cooks were hard at work making large amounts of sushi rolls at high speed.

"Finally, real food," Ivana groans as she takes her seat on the opposite side of Go from me. "Thanks to traveling through Winter Wood, I haven't had time to eat more than sandwiches in days."

"Didn't you used to complain about maintaining a slim figure?" I ask heartlessly while glancing at the slightly older girl's already tiny waist. "All those grains and carbs are no good for you, even this rice we're about to engorge ourselves on will probably make you fat."

"Have you ever wondered why you're still single?" Ivana asks just as heartlessly, cutting me pretty deeply with her words. "I used to. When Gerard first brought you home like a lost puppy I actually thought you were kind of cute. Now I realize the only thing nice about you is on the outside and the inside is warped as hell."

"Have I ever claimed otherwise?" I ask nonchalantly, pretending I was not dying from internal bleeding after having my heart crushed so easily. "No? Then what's there to wonder about?"

"I'll take a dragon roll platter if you have the time and a round of house tea," Go orders first when somebody finally comes to our end of the bar to take our orders. "The kids are still deciding, so take your time."

"Three thousand calories worth of unagi, please," I say quickly before the nice lady behind the bar leaves, shooting Go a challenging look after his remark about Ivana and I.

"I'll have the same as my brother," Ivana says quickly as well before the lady could actually be dismissed, glaring at her brother.

Looking at Ivana in shock, the lady behind the bar asks, "Can you really eat that much? Your father's dragon roll platter just a little more than a third of the calories."

"My father?" Ivana asks in confusion, subconsciously turning her head to look over at the table where our parents were gathered.

I, on the other hand, sent a smirk to Gerard who sat between us looking much less relaxed than a moment ago. The poor guy was sixteen with a voice deeper than the ocean and a large body standing at six feet and five inches while weighing around two hundred and fifty pounds. Even though I was a lean ninety kilos or two hundred pounds at six feet and two inches, Go was naturally a big boy and an early bloomer so he had full facial hair even at his age.

"I'm her brother," Go says softly, staring down at the bar with a distant kind of look on his face that said he was experiencing an existential crisis.

"I see," the very pretty Asian lady behind the bar says with some disappointment in her voice, meaning her personal preferences had led her to think Go was older out of hopefulness. Now it was my turn to have an existential crisis. "My apologies, I'll get to work right away," she adds quickly before hurrying down the bar to ring up our order.

Once she was gone, I ask, "Did you hear how let down she was just now? Bro, older women love you."

"Shut up," he says stiffly, having been mistaken for his own middle-aged father who was also a small giant of a person with a much heftier build. Gerard, lean, would weigh the same as me but he had about fifty more pounds on him than I did. Even though he was several inches taller than me so it did not look bad at all, he was secretly upset with life over not having visible abs despite having arms and pecs like a wrestling superstar.

"At least video game girls like YOU," Ivana points out to redirect conversation away from her brother. "There's Lana, Donna, now that Mistress lady. As soon as she was alone with any Oleander she asked about who had claim on you."

Remembering the time she had talked to herself in third person about me being mean as a waiter comes by with a round of tall cups full of unsweetened herbal tea brewed specially by the establishment, I quickly shake my head and say, "Nope. All the women I know in video games have already left scars and we never even dated. I don't know if you noticed yet, but Mistress has some interesting quirks. Luckily, my only attachment to that clan is contractual and it's over with this raid."

"What did Donna ever do to you?" Ivana asks curiously, knowing there was briefly an attempt at chemistry there from multiple different parties.

"She put Merch in my supply raid party as a favor to Little Thirteen," I reply while staring at the far kitchen wall beyond the tall sushi bar. "He tried and failed to kill me which cost us the enemy supply train. It was done as a publicity stunt to mislead the enemy into thinking there was dissent and conflict among our ranks early on and I ended up meeting Merch because of it, but… my flawless record up til then was ruined."

"She also used an older character which would sometimes flirt with him and make things awkward for all of us," Go adds in softly after quietly enjoying his tea. "Nobody but the uppers and some information brokers knew she is actually around your age so she was young enough for him back then, but… well, it's Leo we're talking about."

"Yeah, it's m- what the hell is that supposed to mean?" I ask after realizing what I almost agreed to.

"You're either too focused on something else or just too dumb for women," he informs me calmly, smiling when he sees our chef preparing several different wooden trays with our orders. "Hold on, I got something," he adds quickly, taking out his phone after receiving an alert of some kind.

"Guy wants to know how to compensate for not being ambidextrous because he sucks at dual wielding," he explains promptly.

Sipping my tea noisily while wishing there was some sugar nearby, I nod slowly and say, "Tell him something simple like he naturally has a certain type of potential and to start by casting his melee skills with his weaker arm. The automated motions will teach his muscle memory how to monopolize that arm and the use of skills will make people think he is dominant in the weaker hand. Then he can switch leads in the middle of fighting tough opponents and say something old fashioned like, 'I'm actually right handed'."

Just a few moments later, he says, "Done. He's replying… he donated ten silver and said thanks. Cool. This one guy was a dick and asked me how to swing at an isosceles angle when using a right angled ax because I told another guy about the weapons you designed for me to use against beasts and lesser armored humanoids."

"That's… I can't even be mad," I sigh after thinking about what I had just been told. "It wasn't that good, but it's not the worst. Should have told him to make it equilateral or some shit. All I know are the actual questions, you guys are keeping all the gems to yourselves."

Leaning forward on the bar to look directly at me with a challenging gaze, Ivana says, "If we told you about the trolls you'd get involved and get everyone muted. Or banned. Just stick to being consultation."

Unbothered completely by her expression and words, I keep looking across the kitchen and murmur, "Hmm… consultation."

"What did you just do?" Go asks his sister dryly, knowing me well enough to know that my taking out my phone after mumbling was not a good thing.

"Nothing bad," I assure them both quickly, finally deciding on my own post. I simply made an empty thread titled Tragedy's Traveler's Creative Classless Consultation and decided to see what would happen. Organically, of course, because the only thing there was a name.

Just as the food was arriving, which was when Go asked for refills, I got my first post in the threat. It was simply the word 'hello' from a familiar name. Melpomene.

Well, that happened. Deciding to play it safe, I simply posted the same greeting and receive an instant like reaction but no further responses were made. It was simply the god-slash-moderator AI letting me know they were still around even outside of the game.

"How can you even eat that much eel?" Ivana asks in a disturbed way after seeing the ten chopped but standing lengths of sushi rolls on my platter. At the ends of each roll was a small spinach leaf garnish bearing pickled ginger or wasabi.

"Good eel is basically one gram of protein per ten calories and is high in necessary muscle minerals, the rolls have tens of eel calories apiece and next to nothing in rice and celery," I reply shamelessly after eating an entire roll in one bite with wasabi and then following with a second and ginger. "You live with my competition. This enormous muscle on the stool between us is what I have to keep up with in a gym. If I don't eat like this at every available opportunity, I will shrink down to your size. I haven't been that small since before puberty."

"That's a compliment," Go points out to his sister who was looking down at her food in confusion.

"I need to rethink my math," she says suddenly. "Some of these rolls have eel."

"No sugars so no carbs," I add with a smirk after I my fifth roll.

"You two are intolerable," Go says with a short but quiet laugh, having already quietly finished one of the three different fish rolls on his platter.

As the others finished their food in the following awkward silence, I finally received my second notification for the thread. However, instead of a message of some sort it was a notification telling me 'Moderation' had made my post a sticky or permanent thread in the player discussions area. That was definitely Melpomene's doing, but was she actually encouraging this or making an example of me somehow?

All I did was make a thread and say hi, though.

I was only half of the way through my own sushi while Ivana was ordering fried pastries when I got my first actual post. Someone with the familiar player name of Convoluted Cryptid posted, 'I use a classless player and have been forced to focus on my crafting skills to compensate for character weaknesses in combat. My main issue is that I have lacked skills until recently, do you have any advice for this?'

I almost wanted to say that he should eat cordyceps but quickly decided against it. There was a mod present and I did not want to die just yet.

Instead, I made a general response about how I, too, suffered from this problem and only slightly lied about how I compensated for it with familiars. Then I made a short spiel about how crafting has free stat raises but also its limits in the long run but there was also general training stats still available. Here I told him about practicing naked or basic sword swings for fitness points while saying that repeated attacks or techniques can become game skills with varying amounts of repetition depending on use in combat.

Cryptid responded with the fact that he already had some basic sword swing skills but he had yet to develop any dedicated or unique skills such as advancing his Swordplay into a swordsmanship. My only thoughts on this subject was to question his craftiness perk and ask if he was willing to share his actual skills while informing him that I only had to perform a common slashing motion 'about a thousand' times before acquiring my own Slash skill.

This back and forth continued one every minute before I finally finished my sushi around the time the others finished their dessert. Our conversation about developing, combo-ing, and even just fusing certain skills even continued while my friends and I joined our families' table. Then I finally got my next question from a completely random person.

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