Apocalypse: Regression

As Nick woke up, despite the ominous, horrific message of the dream, he actually felt great. To be more specific, he felt like he’d slept 8 hours and woken up at just the perfect time. This type of ‘well rested’ feeling was the elusive, magical sensation that he had spent his entire adult life in the last timeline chasing, never reaching. It made him think of the joke Allen used to make often, about how the most wish fulfillment part of their occasional dnd game discussions was the ability for players to ‘sleep 8 hours and feel well rested.’

“This… this is great,” Nick thought as he quickly pulled out his phone, worried that he must have actually slept like ten or twenty hours, but when he looked at his watch: only an hour and 38 minutes had actually passed since he entered the tent.

“Oh, you’re up,” Topaz remarked from three cots over as Nick sat up and saw that she was the only one moving. “I guess it’s from the potion master skill you took off me.”

“Huh?” Nick didn’t understand what that skill had to do with him being awake.

“The potion I gave you, it lets you achieve a full REM cycle of sleep in two hours. It was actually a pain to make, and pretty expensive, but… I just felt like you needed it,” Topaz told him.

“I think I’d pay any amount of money for that,” Nick laughed.

“Yeah, don’t worry about the cost. I was just worried about you. However, that two hours needed for the full sleep cycle gets reduced by Potion Master.”

Nick nodded. One of the effects of Potion Master was specifically that it increased the efficacy of all consumed potions by 18.6%, which Nick guessed in this situation meant that he achieved his REM cycle 18.6% faster than the others. Though, he noted that Potion Master also said that the effect of all potions would be increased by 18.6% as well, so he very well might have ended up sleeping for an additional 22 minutes if the language had been interpreted one way instead of the other.

“Then I guess we got a few minutes to kill,” Nick said as he stood up, stretching his legs and performing his usual morning ‘limber’ movements.

“What are you doing?” Topaz asked as she watched him touching his toes like he was the weird one.

“Stretches?” Nick asked, looking at her funny. “Do you not do these every morning? You know that if we don’t keep up flexibility, it might literally cost us our lives.”

“Oh…” Topaz looked down and sighed. “This is just another touch your elbows behind your back trick, isn’t it?”

“I mean, no one’s pressuring you if you can’t do it,” Nick laughed, remembering the times he and Allen had tricked Maria into doing that in his last life.

“Fine Mr. Gallows, I suppose you’re do a show,” she said, before attempting, failing beautifully, and then walking over next to him to join him as she started to mimic his daily stretches.

“You know, now that I have a few minutes to kill, I kind of wonder which skill I should take next,” Nick told her, thinking aloud as he went through his options.

“I don’t know if I like that or hate that about you,” Topaz chortled at his random thought.

“What?” Nick asked, not understanding at all what she was talking about.

“You have the funeral for your grandfather, the reorganization of the guild to accommodate the new wealth, dungeons, sign ups, expeditionary unit and other crap, the pharmaceutical company that should have been the first thing you thought about when I showed you my new invention you jerk,” she stuck out her tongue like a grumpy child as she said that, clearly upset he hadn’t tried to buy a patent off her right away, “the city maintenance, and organizing using the new base’s facilities and all that other minutia… and the only thing on your brain is: what skill should I get next.”

“Ah… right…” Nick stopped mid stretch, standing up straight and looking at her for a minute. “You know, I have to admit, if I was still just this age in my first life, I’d have probably tackled those problems in that order.”

“But not now?” She asked. “Is there some great wisdom you got with age that stops you from just doing things right away.”

“Yeah. Because there is going to be a point in your life when you have a dozen things on your plate, and you can’t do more than one or two of them. You’ll reach that point where you have to say to yourself: this is the most important thing, I need to do this first,” he said as he pulled out his phone and began to try and sort through the list of skills his team members had. “And you think, ‘if I don’t get everything done, the world will end,’ but it doesn’t. At first you notice everything is fine when you drop the ball on small stuff, then you drop the ball on bigger and bigger things, until you realize the world will function even if you’re not there.

“That does not sound like a good thing to think about,” Topaz’s frown told him that he’d been misunderstood.

“No, you’re not getting it. The world will function without you, so you have the time to focus on the things that keep you functioning first. No matter how overwhelmed you feel by all the stuff you think you have to do, you should always focus on staying physically healthy, staying mentally healthy, and staying emotionally healthy… in that order. In this case, what skill I pick is going to be a 100 times more important to those three goals than figuring out what to do with the guild or how to plan a funeral.”

“Why do I find it a little hard to believe the world will keep functioning without us, coming from the guy who literally survived an apocalypse. The world definitely did not keep functioning,” Topaz’s frown twisted into something else, like confusion, as she was clearly thinking about what Nick had said. “It makes the whole, do what you need to be happy message fall a little flat.”

“Topaz, I didn’t say happy. I said healthy. There’s a difference. Sugar ice cream with bread pudding glazed in caramel and served with a rootbeer float might make me really freaking happy, but it sure won’t make me healthy. Emotion and mental health are the same. The things that give us instant joy or make us feel at peace without solving anything probably won’t leave us in a good spot later. Healthy should always be the goal, not happy.”

“That’s good, because then I don’t feel as bad telling you that you won’t be emotionally healthy if you don’t figure out how to deal with those issues with your grandfather’s death,” Topaz said.

“Well, let’s focus on the physical healthy part first. The skill that will keep me alive. Okay? I can deal with my emotions later, when I’m still alive,” Nick pushed the topic off again.

“Fine, what skills are you thinking about?” She asked,

“Well, if I had the aura to make it work, like Maria does, I’d probably copy Hero’s Gale,” Nick began, thinking about how powerful the ability was. In his last life, he’s seen her send a tornado of spinning wind blades right through an army of monsters, shredding them until they were little more than monster paste. The downside was that even for Maria, whose class gave huge boosts to the appropriate stats, the skill cost massive amounts of both mana and aura.

“But you don’t trust that you’ll ever be strong enough to make it count?” Topaz probed.

“Yup, that’s the issue.

“But, you’re magic based, right?”

“Yeah, sort of? I use Charisma magic, why?”

“Then why don’t you just take my skill: Cannister Launcher’s Loving Embrace,” Topaz said, opening her menu and pointing at the skill. “Then you can join me on the back line, firing loving shots of gooey goodness on the enemies.”

Sure enough, a question that had been plaguing Nick for a while, how did Topaz use her alchemy skills with a gun, was answered. It was a skill. The higher the level of the skill, the more alchemic canisters she could create and the more cannisters she could store on her at any given time. It was also magic based, but not Charisma magic, regular magic, which would put him back in the same position he was in with other skills: trying to use a skill he didn’t specialize in the stat of.

“That’s… not a bad choice. It’d be the perfect one if magic and Charisma were the same stat,” Nick grumbled as he dismissed the idea. His dreams of trying to create a double combo of launching flammable poisons at the enemy and then exploding them were dashed by the stat limitations.

“Alright then, what’s the next idea?” Topaz asked.

“Well, I could also grab Adele’s heal. Even if I’m not specialized in magic, having the ability to patch myself or someone else up on the battle field, especially when they’re near death, might be worth far more than any other skill,” Nick walked her through his logic.

“That’s a very good point, but my potions do emergency heals already, and Adele’s main heal will take you out of the fight for too long, won’t it?” Topaz asked.

“Right… but then there’s also Reggie’s Armoring ability. Being able to stop a group of 10 people from taking damage once at the start of the fight, that’d also be good,”

“You’re still thinking about keeping people alive only, aren’t you?” Topaz seemed disappointed.

“Yeah? Isn’t that my job? If I lead people into battle, I need to keep them alive.”

“What’s the point of that though if they can’t win the fight. You’re just delaying the inevitable. Damage Nick! Damage! You already picked constitution for the training stat to keep them alive, and we have my heals, Betty’s beautiful buns, and Adele’s heals too. What skill is going to help us get over the finish line and actually win the fight though?”

“Seo-ah’s… no, that’s the aura stat still,” Nick felt more than a little frustrated. Every skill he could think of was either based around a stat that he wasn’t specialized in, or was a heal. What he needed was a skill that would augment his performance, or the performance of his group, by a percentage. Potion master had surprisingly been perfect. It did exactly what he wanted without being limited by a stat. He needed another skill as good as Potion Master.

“What ya need to do, is teach one of the priests at the camp. His name is Father Kirill.

“Why’s that?”

“He’s not part of our guild, but he has a skill that might fit what you’re after: Faith of the Fervent,” Topaz told him. “I remember feeling it once when I was in church with him, went there for the free meals after service as a kid.”

“I see… and you know what it does?” Nick asked, his interest piqued.

“It’s a belief related skill. As long as the person believes in the words of the person speaking, they get a bonus. It’s like your pep talk, isn’t it? There’s a chance those can both work at the same time, no? It might be one of the only charisma skills I know, and you seem focused on that stat,”

“That’s do-able. I wonder what the actual benefit is, and if it’d merge with my pep talk skill, or stack with the effect of my standard

“I think it’s bull that you got such a legendary item, and they still haven’t given me a new grenade launcher,” Topaz grumbled. “I want a pretty one, with gold plate or something

“Aren’t you worried if it had a gold plate you’d sell it?”

“Hey! A girl can sell a lot of things, but not her precious,” she assured Nick as she pulled out her current launcher and stroked the side of it like she was soothing a pet animal or something.

“Alright, alright, well, I guess I’ll go find that Father Kirill,” Nick said, “probably should get it done before we head out.”

“Do you know how much you need to teach him to get the skill to work? Like it just says someone you’ve trained, could it be as simple as helping him with his form lifting a weight once, or does it need to be a steady thing?” Topaz asked.

“Who knows, but time to go find out,” Nick said with a shrug. “You mind doing the introduction?”

“Not at all. Like I said, he’s in the camp so it should be easy to find him. I saw him earlier, helping heal and tend to those wounded on patrol with Father Redd,” Topaz said cheerfully as she stood up and stretched. “But we only have about 10 minutes until they wake up, so we need to get this done quick.”

“Works for me,” Nick told her as the two of them left the tent to find the preacher.