CWD: OE ~ Twenty-Three

Welcome, Cookie, to the Skillz Box! Not to be confused with the Skillz Cube, which you had to move to get here. Fun fact: this room is also cube-shaped, and it contains a variety of Skillz, so it’s kind of like a Skillz Cube as well. Anyway, would you like to go over what you can already do?

Yes / No

From the other room, he heard Brie yell, “I’m not reviewing my Skills. I know what I can already do. I’m just going to cut to the chase.”

“Same!” Nacho yelled back. He chose the ‘no’ option, only for the system to directly ignore him. He heard a frustrated grunt from another room, and knew that he was not the only one dealing with this issue.

No, Cookie, really, let’s review your Stat Sheet together. The statue wants to do it! It’ll be fun. Don’t do it for us; do it for the statue. Stat Sheet coming in hot!

Eli ‘Nacho’ Naches

Class: Junior League Chef

Level: 15

Experience Points: 159,700 to Level 16!

Current Credits: 3,027,700 (12,136,225 total Dinner Party pool. 9,000,000 unavailable for use!)

Build Type: Balanced, Delayed

Body:

• Fitness: 25
• Metabolic Efficiency: 25

Mind:

• Mental Energy: 25
• Circuit: 25

Satiation:

• Hunger: 100
• Thirst: 100

Health Points: 60

Bonus Physical Damage: 12.5%

Health Regen: 25% Health Regen/minute

Total Mana Pool: 47.5

Bonus Spell Damage: 12.5%

Mana Pool Regen: 25% Mana Regen/minute

Skill Slots (4/4)

• Small Blades (Passive) Level 19: 38% bonus damage on all knife attacks.
  • Tier 1 Enhancement: Your blades can slice from up to 6 inches away from their edge!
• Ingredient Processing (Active) Level 19: Remove Putrid Mana from monsters up to Level 21.
  • Tier 1 Enhancement: Process ingredients from 15 feet away!
• Cooking Magic (Active) Level 19: Create food that enhances a single stat by 95% of maximum.
  • Tier 1 Enhancement: Throw magic into a food item you cooked from 15 feet away!
• Feasting Feats (Active) Level 19: Cook 19 times the food you’re currently preparing!
  • Tier 1 Enhancement: you can choose up to five locations where people can use you like a vending machine! At the low, low cost of 15% of the sale price, people no longer need to come bother you directly for their food. It’ll just appear in front of them in the location you specify, within 500 feet of the food source.
    • Caution! As this is meant as a feast for many, and not for one, only a single portion of each meal created through the use of this Skill can be eaten by each person!

It was all a review for Nacho, but he was a little surprised at how many credits the four of them had. Then he remembered they’d each earned the twenty-five thousand credits from the Sweet Skillz, and then there was the obvious three million each for the Skillz Slammer. The real surprise was the extra thirty-three thousand that Brie and the gang must’ve collected while killing the various fried undead. There had to be some bonuses included, since a lot of those Prisoners had been low Tier. Even for a Tier two monster, like those they’d fought in the final chamber, the maximum number of credits for a kill had only been sixty. That was practically worthless at this stage.

The other stuff was familiar. He was level fifteen, and getting to level twenty—becoming a Tier two player—felt like a long way off.

He double checked the handy table that listed the cost of getting to Tier two:

Lvl : EXP required : Credits required

16 : 159,700 : 319,400

17 : 258,400  : 516,800

18 : 418,100  : 836,200

19 : 676,500  : 1,353,000

20 : 1,094,600  :  2,189,200

Combined Totals: 2,607,300 EXP :  5,214,600 Credits

“Maybe not as far off as I thought it was.” Nacho muttered softly to the empty room.

“Yes! Let’s skip all the work and go right for the juicy upgrade!” Reuben called out from his room. “We have enough credits to get ourselves close to Tier two! It’s not as impossible as we initially thought!”

“Skills first!” Nacho called back warningly. “Let’s spend the money in the smartest possible way, please.”

Purchasing an additional Skill Slot would cost him five thousand credits, which seemed incredibly cheap, only due to the fact that leveling took millions of credits, and he suddenly had a comparable balance on hand. In reality, that was equivalent to earning the maximum payout for killing eighty-three Tier two monsters. “Mm. I feel like my perspective is getting skewed. I shouldn’t be thinking of that as ‘easy’.”

A mirror appeared in the room, giving him a view of himself dressed up in his Sunday Brunch Armor, skillet shield on his back, HungerCry Knives sheathed on his belt. It was rather shocking to observe the change between his baby-faced statue in a tuxedo, and the scarred guy with hollow eyes wearing a pot on his head and frying pans on his shoulders. “I’ve come a long way in eleven short months.”

Nacho barely managed to shake off the cognitive dissonance.

Let’s review some of your Skill options, some of which appeared in the Evaluation Mall. You have three of the finest options available already: Ingredient Processing, Cooking Magic, and Feasting Feats. Here are some of the great options you have previously unlocked for purchase:

GOURMET LURES: Allows you to lure monsters to your location. If you like being the target of lots of unwanted attention, or you like drawing monsters to yourself, choose this one!

BLADE SHARPENING: You probably don’t need this one since your HungerCry knives have permanent sharpness. But Tier 2 will be coming any time now. This skill allows you to keep your blades sharp enough to cut through a tin can!

CYCLONE WHISK: Mix things really well and fast. It’s not exciting. But the name is cool. NOTE: You cannot use this ability in Active Combat.

MOTHER’S LOVE: This is like Reuben’s Healing Hug, only you can put it in your mouth. Yes, you can bake cookies that heal. Or, as we like to call them, Mouth Hugs.

SUMMON STAFF: Trash Golems. They’ll smell and they certainly won’t be sanitary, but they can help you chop onions.

MANY HANDS: Cross a hit-show chef with a spider, and that’ll be you! This will allow you to grow multiple appendages for cooking-related activities! Number of appendages based on skill level. Caution: this skill permanently mutates your body.

COMBAT CONVENIENCE STORE: Buy convenience store items from the Store during Active Combat or Active Cooking.

There were a handful of other options, but Nacho had gone over all of these before. The Many Hands skill was pulling his consideration the hardest—even with the knowledge that it would actually alter his physiology—but the Mother’s Love ability would make his food even more valuable. If he cooked his disaster donuts again, they would reduce damage, heal damage, and give the consumer a boost to a Stat of their choice.

But… the Patrons seemed to want to tempt him to buy from that preexisting list. There had to be more.

Nacho, those are some cool abilities, right? Would you like to purchase an additional Skill Slot and a Skill for the low, low price of 10,000 credits?

Yes / No

Nacho chose 'no' just as Reuben shouted from his stall. “I’m not buying from the existing list. I want to see what’s special. Is that what we’re doing? Do we think there’s something special that we don’t see?”

“Almost certainly!” Jennifer yelled back from her room, voice brimming with excitement. “I’m way ahead of you there!”

Luckily, the walls were thin, and there were no wandering monsters coming to check out why there was so much shouting. They’d be easy pickings, all four of them alone in their respective rooms, vision obscured by System messages. Nacho likewise chose not to take the offered deal, and the next message confirmed the wisdom of the decision.

I see you are playing hard to get. Would you like to see the special Skillz Box abilities we’ve opened up for you, since you successfully completed your Welcome Dungeon?

Ow! You don’t need to hit that ‘yes’ button so hard every time.

Here are three extra Skills that we’re offering just to yo~ou… until you buy them and make them publicly available! We hope you like them!

GMO MINIONS: Have you dreamed of commanding a deep-fried army? Did the Lightly Breaded and Extra Crispy Prisoners make you oddly hungry? Do you want to convert enemies into your unwilling allies? Well, this skill will give you the ability to fry up humans, CrossHumans, and monsters to use against your enemies! We’ll provide the recipe, the vat, and the canola oil. You provide the questionable moral decisions. Note: Any minion that makes a kill will automatically transfer the credits for the kill to your account!

GASTRONOMIC TELEPATHY: Many people order their steak well done, then are upset when they receive a charcoal briquette. Others want theirs rare but complain about the blood. This ability will grant you magical insight regarding exactly what people want when it comes to their meat, as well as other items on the menu. Is the pasta too al dente for the snob who said he likes chewy noodles? Are people complaining about the consistency of their oatmeal? Are you tired of people requesting blended soups when they really want chunky? You’ll know, every time, how to please your most picky customers. Note: automatically teaches you how to flavor the meal to your target’s liking.

BABY BIRD(ING): As you know, during Active Combat, things can get dicey very quickly. Most of the time, you’re too busy to dice onions. You’ve done well in providing your troops with Strawberry Life-Hack Yogurt, Pocket Pancakes, and Peanut Butter Balls. Still, we can’t tell you how many times your party members have nearly choked to death while trying to eat in the middle of combat. Actually, there’s a tally: 412 times. Now, with BABY BIRD(ING), you can satiate your people from across the room! You eat the food, and they get the Hunger Points! At Higher Tiers, you will be able to BABY BIRD Hunger Points at multiple people, then stand back and chow down while your friends kill the monsters! Yum, yum!

Nacho read through the skills, and he was impressed by two out of the three new abilities. Yet, a second later, the System sent a new message with a timer at the bottom, ticking down from thirty seconds.

Here comes the hard sell, Cookie!

Please make your choice now:

10,000 credits for the extra Skill Slot and normal Skill

20,000 credits for the extra Skill Slot and special Skill

Please make your decision in thirty seconds!

“We might have a problem!” Nacho shouted. “I found two skills I really like, and I only have thirty seconds to choose-”

“Same!” Reuben and Brie shouted nearly simultaneously. Jennifer was silent, but she was probably already in the middle of her own impossible debate.

“The special version costs fifteen thousand credits, twenty total for the slot-” the cook tried to explain, only for Brie to bark at him.

“We trust you to make smart choices, so do it!”

Nacho thought having his own army of crispy combatants would be incredibly powerful. He could march his army of sizzling Prisoners across the land and down into dungeons, taking in all the credits they gained from fighting while he stayed home and cooked away. It would open up a whole new revenue stream for him! The downside? There was bound to be a limit, and he’d have to use living beings. He felt a weariness take hold of him. The idea of having to drag trussed-up enemies through egg and breadcrumbs and then throw them in a big vat of boiling oil felt exhausting. “This one’s out. Too… serial-killer for me.”

Also, he was absolutely not going with the Gastronomic Telepathy option. With the fate of the world in the balance, he didn’t really care if people liked his food or not. Most of the time, they were eating during combat, so taste wasn’t that big of a deal. That made the final decision easy.

Nacho chose the extra Skill Slot, and for his fifth Skill—Baby Birding.

This particular Skill was a game changer. As long as he had food, his most powerful Body Players like Brie, Abby, and Taye could use their abilities all they wanted without needing to pause to eat.

A *buzzing* started in Nacho’s stomach, growing until he had to close his eyes as he rose from the ground. Leveling up a Skill felt good and left him feeling powerful, but adding a skill was even better.

He smelled baking brownies.

He tasted almond Christmas cookies.

A glow rose from within his skin, sparkling like fireworks on the Fourth of July.

Then he mentally grounded himself, opening his eyes as Reuben yelled from the other room. “Hey! Everyone! Hey! Come quick!”

“What’s wrong?” Nacho didn’t wait for the answer. He burst out of his room, sprinting to Reuben, where he found the big guy glowing like a lantern as he earned his fourth Skill. Reuben settled back to the ground and pointed at his statue, which wore the piecemeal armor and the Leather Helm of Helming. He pointed at the terrible helmet. “Why didn’t you tell me I looked so good? I mean, I was never one for hats, but this helmet? Awesome.”

Brie had joined Nacho in the doorway, and scowled her most ferocious expression at her husband. “Don’t do that, Reuben. If you’re going to joke, tell us. I’m already on edge from being down here. I thought you were under attack.”

Nacho turned and peeked into Jennifer’s room, noting that the Brewer’s glow was just fading away. Her statue showed her in her stylish black leather armor, with her spoons and paddle ready for battle. He wondered what her statue had looked like when she first entered.

A System message popped up.

Fair warning! The gates to the Skillz Slammer Welcome Dungeon, on both sides, have opened. CruxTerrans are coming, though they’ll have to fight their way through a fresh batch of monsters. We like to keep our Welcome Dungeons fully stocked. Have fun finding the entrance to the Starvation Dungeon!

“That’s just great.” Brie marched back to the staircase. “We definitely need to talk about our Skills, but I don’t want to do it up here. Let’s just go.”

Jennifer frowned, clearly a little troubled. Reuben looked conflicted, but he took a few steps after his wife, his stride becoming stronger as he moved. “I want to be happy about my new ability because it’s awesome. But she’s just… so right, all the time. C’mon, guys.”

Following Brie down a floor, into the bureaucratic frightmare of CruxTerra, Nacho smirked as he thought about how differently combat was going to be for the Berserker… all thanks to his new Skill.