Today is Day 21 of NaNoWriMo! My total for day 20 of NaNoWriMo was 1,741 words and I'm in the home stretch to make it to 50k words. Let's see what I can accomplish today.
All passages were in order from yesterday's post, so here's what I wrote:
Rinneth leaned back in her chair and grinned, clearly pleased with herself. “Thank you. So, Allyson, what do you have to share with me?”
Allyson leaned in close, and kept her voice low. “They next two maps are tucked away in two different raids.”
“We talking old or new raids?” Rinneth asked.
Allyson smirked. “In between.”
Rinneth nodded. “Good. Means I can drag these two along with me.”
“We could help in a more recent raid,” I defended.
The two females looked at me with disbelief and then went back to discussing map locations. I crossed my arms and grumbled to myself as Vamir snickered. I know the team didn’t have a lot of PvE experience, but how hard could a raid be?
******
I fell to my knees as my health depleted dangerously low. Rinneth sighed with aggravation and summoned two more of her pets before taking aggro, aggression, so the armored snake-like boss would target her instead of me.
“Vamir, get him healed up...again.”
Vamir shielded her. “Here’s a shield for you first.”
She nodded her thanks and kited, dragged along, the boss while Vamir healed me. This PvE raiding stuff was far harder than I thought. The mechanics were predictable, meaning it should be easy for me to use my tanking skills properly, but I was so used to the unpredictable nature of PvP, I was struggling and I knew it was trying Rinneth’s patience thin at this point since she was doing better at tanking than I was. At least I’m giving Vamir something to do…
“How are things going on your run?” Ramos asked through guild chat.
“Oh, just lovely,” Rinneth said sarcastically.
“Uh, oh, what’s going on?” Erin asked.
“I suck at this PvE stuff,” I admitted.
“It’s not really much different than when I’m running with Ramos,” Rinneth said. “Except, Vamir makes it so we don’t wipe as much.”
“Hey!” Ramos said.
Rinneth snickered and focused on the boss, though I didn’t let her for long. Once Vamir topped of my health, I rushed at the boss and activated an aggro skill to bring the boss’ attention back on me, allowing Rinneth to focus on dpsing again. When the boss started casting a high damage spell, I readied myself to activate a defensive spell myself. I wasn’t going to fail this, not in front of Rinneth. She was trying hard to be supportive, and chose to misdirect the negative conversation to Ramos, but I knew it was only a cover. No way he was as bad as me.
I managed to activate my defensive cool down, timed reset spell, at the proper time, but didn’t feel like celebrating, even though Rinneth and Vamir were. Instead, I continued to focus on my job as a tank, and eventually we defeated the boss.
“Well that was fun,” Rinneth said as she looked over the loot, items, that had dropped from the boss.
“Anyone in need of any of this stuff?”
Neither Vamir or I needed it so she used the auto-vendor option to turn the drops into gold and split the funds between us.
“Sorry I suck at this,” I said.
She came over to me and hit my forehead with her palm. “You just need practice. Don’t sweat it.”
“But with this gear, I should be able to do better,” I defended.
“In PvE, success isn’t solely gear driven. You have to know the mechanics of the fight. PvP and PvE are vastly different worlds. It takes time to get used to them both, no matter how good you are at the one out of the two.” She smirked. “Besides, I purposely chose the harder of the two raids because we had Vamir here to back us up.”
The others hadn’t had any luck with their informants so Rinneth instructed them to head to Twilight Decent while we took on the Emerald Grove raid. So far, neither group had found any sign of the map, and I was starting to seriously doubt it was even here at all.
“Okay, let’s scour this room,” Rinneth instructed.
We split up and began searching every nook and cranny of the room, only to come up empty. Rinneth scratched her head.
“What gives?” she mumbled. “We only have one boss left and we’ve searched every inch of the areas we’ve been in.”
“Maybe we should retrace steps?” Vamir suggested. “I mean, it’s possible the map in the last boss room, but we could have missed something.”
I nodded. “I think that’d be a wise thing to do.”
Rinneth poked my cheek. “You just say that because you don’t want to fight the last boss yet.”
I pushed her hand away. “Yeah, and?”
She laughed, that honeyed laugh I’d never get sick of hearing, and walked back the way we had come. “Let’s retrace steps.”
We wandered through the maze of tunnels and halfway through we still had yet to find a clue for the map, and we had lost Vamir.
“I can’t believe you managed to take a bad turn,” I said with exasperation.
“Hey, I was focused on trying to leave no stone unturned,” Vamir defended.
“Alright, butt buddies, you can squabble later,” Rinneth said. “We’ll continue to search until there’s nowhere left to search and then I’ll have Karla come find you.”
“Wait, back up,” I said. “Did you just call us butt buddies?”
She began walking off. “Uh, yeah.”
“We are not,” I said.
She held up her hands. “Hey, not my fault you two got a bromance going on.” She smirked as she glanced back at me. “And I can see one budding between you and Ramos. It’s so cute.”
I ran after her and tried to cuff her. “No and no.”
“Aww, don’t be shy. It’s okay,” Rinneth teased.
“Hey, easy on the flirting you two,” Vamir jested. “Didn’t think you two liked each other that much.”
Shit... I really didn’t need Vamir bringing that up.
Rinneth grabbed onto my arm and started to act a bit cat-like. “Aww, didn’t you know, Vamir? Vesser and I are secret lovers. Getting you separated from us so the two of us could have some alone time was all part of my master plan.”
Vamir chuckled. “I’m sure it was.”
Rinneth began laughing and let me go. “You should see Vesser’s face. He looks absolutely mortified!”
Vamir laughed. “I’m sure he does.”
My face and ears began to burn and Rinneth laughed more. “He’s so embarrassed now.”
“Knock it off you two,” I muttered. Rinneth was doing this out of fun, as far as I could tell at least. But I knew Vamir was purposely doing this to me because of what he knew.
Rinneth smiled coyly and walked away, the action pulling me along on base instinct. Oh, this is bad. I really needed to get myself under control. Luckily, I wanted reacting in any other way at the moment, but I knew it was only a matter of time before things started to get out of hand and hard to ignore. The end of the season can’t come fast enough…
I knew it was bad to think that, but I was honestly starting to look forward to retirement, if it meant I could seen Rinneth more, in a less restricted way. It seemed silly, that I could fall for someone so quickly, especially when I still didn’t know her well, but from what I had learned about her, the only thing I didn’t like, was how overprotective her clan seemed to be of her, and her bossiness, though that was easy to overlook.
“Rinneth, look out!” I shouted when she wandered past a hall and a snake humanoid NPC enemy attacked her out of nowhere.
Rinneth reacted slowly and felt to the ground when the NPC slammed her with it’s tail. Her Calacours, Karla and Zaro, came to her defense, tearing the enemy apart. I helped her up and the two of us looked down the hall.
“Is this new or am I going crazy?” I asked.
“I don’t remember this hall,” Rinneth said. “And I’m sure we went through this main hall before.”
“Did you guys find something? Vamir asked.
“I think a secret passage was unlocked after defeating a boss,” Rinneth said. “We’re going to go down it and investigate. I’ll send Karla to come get you.”
“I’d appreciate it.”
Karla ran off on Rinneth’s order to fetch Vamir and the two of us, along with Rinneth’s other two Calacour, headed down the new path. I rounded up a group of enemies at a time and Rinneth took them out quickly. I wished bosses were this easy. I’d be happy to take on a boss if they were.
When the hall was clear, I took the time to replenish my holy power while Rinneth cautiously moved around. The hall had lead nowhere, but the two of us were sure there had to be something hidden here. Unfortunately, I was having trouble focusing on my prayer, because she was moving around. The armor she wore for PvE covered her far less of her body than her PvP armor. It added to her distracting value to me, and that was something new and unsettling for me to deal with. When asked, I could tell someone if a female was attractive, but this was the first time I would say a female was attractive and I was undeniably attracted to her.
I sighed quietly and stood up. “Hey, Rinneth.”
“Yeah?” she replied without looking at me.
“Why is your PvE armor so different than you PvP armor?”
She giggled. “Because they’re for different aspects of the game?”
I shook my head. “That’s not what I meant. I meant--”
“I know what you meant,” she said. “I’m just teasing. You’re wondering why the PvE armor covers less of my body. I don’t know exactly, but as far as I know, it’s because NPCs can’t target specific body parts, like players can. Of course, beast tamers still aren’t as protected like other classes in PvP, but I would suspect that’s because we rely on our pets so much to work for us and keep us safe. Why do you ask?”
I shrugged. “Just curious.”
She eyed me skeptically. “Sure.”
I crossed my arms. “Why else would I ask.”
She continued to eye me and then went back to looking around the room. “Just pushing your buttons.”