24 KiB
[RT][WIP] Worth the Candle, ch 30-33 (End Book II)
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Author: u/cthulhuraejepsen Fruit flies like a banana*
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URL: http://archiveofourown.org/works/11478249/chapters/27276351
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Score: 106
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Created: 2017-09-10T04:23:31
Post:
Comments:
u/cthulhuraejepsen [+56] Fruit flies like a banana (9 minutes later)
If you haven't read it yet, Worth the Candle is a self-insert litRPG portal fantasy, but probably not as bad as what you pictured when you read that. If you want to start from the beginning, chapter 1 is here or read the whole thing in one page (but it's past 150K words, which is getting on the long side for a single sitting). If you want to stay up to date, get an account on Archive of Our Own and then click the subscribe button. Also maybe stay out of the comments unless you love spoilers?
Apologies for the delay, I've been sick the last few days, but am (mostly) better now. In four days I will have been writing this story for two months without a break, with an average daily word count of 2,607 words. Go me! Thanks to everyone who has read this story, recommended it in other places, or clicked any of the buttons that make the metrics go up.
u/josephwdye [+21] I love you (29 minutes later)
I hope you're feeling better! Thanks for the big update <3. Worth the candle has quickly become one favorite things this year, between the world building and great writing it has blown me away.
u/Adeen_Dragon [+12] (an hour later)
Hey, thanks for the update! I've been repeatedly checking, which is a bit dumb since I've got email notification set up, but it paid off! I found the update on the sub Reddit first.
u/PM_ME_OS_DESIGN [+6] (10 hours later)
So, is there going to be a larger-than-normal delay between chapters now, since it's the end of Book II? If so, how much larger than normal do you expect it to be?
u/cthulhuraejepsen [+19] Fruit flies like a banana (11 hours later)
Nope, no delay, next chapter is half-written. I do like to separate books, so there will be a tiny bit of recap stuff mixed in, but it will otherwise be like normal. (I continue to insist that I don't actually have an update schedule and no one should make expectations of me.)
u/PanickedApricott [+4] (19 hours later)
half-written. I do like to separate books, so there will be a tiny bit of recap stuff mixed in, but it will otherwise be like normal. (I continue to insist that I don't actually have an update schedule and n
how many books are there?
u/cthulhuraejepsen [+11] Fruit flies like a banana (19 hours later)
Book I is chapters 1-14, Book II is chapters 15-33. If you're asking how many books there will be, then the answer is that I don't know, but probably not more than ten.
(I just counted out the planned arcs and it looks like there are about fifteen of them, but some will occupy a B-plot position, others will be only half a book, and some will inevitably get dropped when the story takes a turn, which will probably be balanced out by others coming into being.)
u/BoilingLeadBath [+9] (18 hours later)
A pure magenta gem... a spread of 90 degrees... one-quarter of projectile force will be directed back at the user.
Huh. Balanced by game design, rather than conservation of momentum (which would indicate something like 41% back-at-user).
Or, you know, commoner's guide.
u/Gilgilad7 [+8] House Atreides (12 hours later)
Wow, double level up! I hope he invests his points wisely! What do you think he should put the points towards everyone?
Would be interesting if there was a chart somewhere listing each skill we have seen so far and which stat was its primary/secondary assuming it has been revealed so far in the story.
By the way, great conclusion to book II. Thank you!
u/cthulhuraejepsen [+16] Fruit flies like a banana (13 hours later)
Known skills and their primary and secondary attributes, where discovered by Juniper at the end of Book II (please let me know if this is contradicted by the text at any point):
Skill Value Primary Secondary Unarmed 18 SPD One-handed 18 POW Two-handed 18 POW Improvised 15 POW Thrown 15 SPD Dual Wield 15 SPD Pistols 12 SPD Bows 12 WIS Rifles 12 CUN Parry 18 SPD INS Athletics 18 END Dodge 18 SPD INS Engineering 12 CUN Horticulture 0 Art 6 CHA Blood Magic 12 WIS Bone Magic 12 KNO Gem Magic 6 Skin Magic 12 KNO Flattery 6 CHA Comedy 6 CHA Romance 6 CHA Intimidation 10 INS Deception 8 POI/??? Edit: Note that you can also draw some conclusions about what secondary attributes aren't, e.g. if Unarmed is capped at 18 then the secondary attribute can't be CHA or POI, since skills cap at five times the value of the secondary stat and that would be 10 for both CHA and POI. That information is known, but not included in this table.
u/Izeinwinter [+6] (a day later)
Clearly he needs to drop more points into mental/soc. Not the subskills, because unbalancing his reasoning ability is not a good idea, and also it would probably distort who he is more. But.. mental/soc. Because most of the magic runs on them, and being smarter is victory. Seriously, people in gamer setups going for physical hurts. Min-maxing a physical combatant when you are sitting at a table and can use your real life mental faculties to reason out a plot your int-3 barb could never ever follow is fine. But if the stats affect you directly, every point you dont use to get smarter is going to result in you missing things.
u/PM_ME_OS_DESIGN [+3] (a day later)
But if the stats affect you directly, every point you dont use to get smarter is going to result in you missing things.
While ideally mental/social stuff is the best, adding physical attributes makes you directly harder to kill*, and all Joon really needs is to buy time to get exp - as long as you don't minmax physical entirely, I think it makes the most sense to focus on inherent (i.e. can't be undercut by betrayal, e.g. stealing magic items (cough Aumann cough)) defense. And as a bonus, revision magic looks super useful as a defensive tool, so you'd be dumping points in MEN anyway.
*Specifically, harder to kill in an ambush - i.e. when you don't predict everything. By the same logic, luck is also super-important.
u/chicken_fried_steak [+2] (a day later)
Agreed. Given how dangerous the world seems to be, defense and healing are key. That would mean prioritizing getting up Dodge, Parry, Bone Magic and getting his hands on some Revision Magic, pronto. So Spd, Kno and whatever stat governs Revision Magic should be the immediate priorities.
u/PM_ME_OS_DESIGN [+3] (a day later)
So Spd, Kno and whatever stat governs Revision Magic should be the immediate priorities.
Uh, what about the stat that gives Max HP directly? I mean, parrying et al are great but in some circumstances you just have to take a blow. Not to mention Max HP is an implicit cap on self-healing, for obvious reasons.
u/chicken_fried_steak [+5] (17 hours later)
Interesting to think about what the best investments would be to fix Juniper's bones and Amaryllis' Ratrot... It seems obvious to me that getting Bone magic up can only help for both problems, so dumping 3 points into Kno to get it to 20 might be wise. On the flip side, that's a big investment for something that might not work.
Dropping all four points into Luk and hoping it influences things to start breaking a bit easier for the party as a result might be the best bet for a quick resolution, or else investing 2 into Men and 2 into Soc to try and engineer a solution... Tricky.
u/Izeinwinter [+3] (a day later)
Men + soc are the most universally applicable. Of course, if he drops too many points into them, he gets really hard to write for the author.
u/Laborbuch [+3] (15 hours later)
Known skills and their primary and secondary attributes, where discovered by Juniper at the end of Book II (please let me know if this is contradicted by the text at any point):
Funny you mention that, since you probably meant at the end of Book I, not II.
u/cthulhuraejepsen [+3] Fruit flies like a banana (19 hours later)
No, I mean I keep an up-to-date character sheet as the story gets written which has all the information available on it, color-coded to show what Juniper knows and what the reader knows so I have less of a chance of screwing things up. The above table is a snapshot of part of what's on my canonical character sheet, as of ch 33.
u/nytelios [+1] (a day later)
It's confirmed! It was odd when Deception kept leveling up even after reaching the cap. I suppose any skill with a joint primary stat cap is easier to level. And what does that say about the game design, hmmm.
P.S. Intimidation should be at level 10 after the tattooist episode.
u/cthulhuraejepsen [+1] Fruit flies like a banana (a day later)
Fixed that, thanks.
u/Accord_ [+9] Chaos Legion (15 hours later)
This is probably my favorite work of fiction since HPMOR. Thank you for the updates
u/nytelios [+6] (a day later)
And on the seventh day, cthuluraejepsen giveth four chapters at once. cue chorus
Ugh, the Aumann
showdownletdown. It's official: gold mages suck. I thought there was no way Aumann would fall for their obvious scavenger-hunt bait, being the schemer that he is - having outmaneuvered two gold mages, presumably through knowing his profession's weaknesses. I mean, gold suddenly springing up at conveniently remote locations (then disappearing in their dry runs)? Here hold mybeeridiot ball.If it can't be ignored despite one's best rational efforts, the call of gold seems like a severe Achilles' heel. I imagine the few gold mages stronger than Aumann are all rabid prospectors twitching at every granny's gold tooth passing by.
Wards are heavy, absolute velocity, blood and bone to stop us, but all three breakable in five minutes.
Warding is a surprisingly unreliable field. It's overpowered when you can set the field for an imminent confrontation against a non-warder, but amounts to a glorified delay tactic against a warder of equal or greater skill. At least this applies to Bessemer's temp wards. Not sure how Sheriot would have subverted the permanent wards at Caer Laga.
I was wrapped in a golden glow, tinged with red this time, and it was like a goddess had taken my brain for my skull, trailing every yellow-white nerve from it, then stuck it into her mouth and ran her warm, sucking tongue along the tip of every nerve ending.
Lewdest level-up ever. Now I'm expecting a smut warning at level 20!
u/Kuratius [+14] (7 hours later)
Do note that if loyalty mind magic works in both directions ( assuming it exists and keeps actual loyalty close to the game stats) , Fenn and Juniper are never getting rid of each other. At max loyalty, that's probably a more severe commitment than getting married.
u/OrangeBasket [+7] (11 hours later)
Hell, the name Twinned Souls alone could mean that there might be another layer to this relationship - if one of them (aka Fenn, sadly) is hurt or dies could it have an adverse effect on the other (Joon) not just mentally or physically, but on a magical layer?
u/Kuratius [+6] (12 hours later)
Calling it now: Twinned souls heals his companions on level-up if they would fall too far behind in power otherwise. The implications are left as an exercise to the reader.
u/696e6372656469626c65 [+12] I think, therefore I am pretentious. (3 hours later)
Ahaha. I suspected that the "kiss at the end" of this particular quest might have come from someone other than Amaryllis (it seemed like the kind of dickish thing the game layer likes to do), but for some reason it never actually occurred to me that it would be Fenn. On a more serious note: this indicates an absolutely insane amount of precognitive ability on the part of the game layer, which combined with the whole "Juniper Smith" thing pretty much shoots the dream-skewer hypothesis to dust.
u/Noumero [+13] Self-Appointed Court Statistician (4 hours later)
I suspected that the "kiss at the end" of this particular quest might have come from someone other than Amaryllis
I'm still a little disappointed it wasn't Amaryllis kissing Fenn or something, as someone in a previous thread speculated. That would have been hilarious.
this indicates an absolutely insane amount of precognitive ability on the part of the game layer
I would bet on subtle reality-warping/probability-manipulation instead. We've seen, apparently, how it manipulated Fenn's mental state, so that it corresponded to her loyalty level. If it was working on precognition, what we should expect is Fenn and Juniper never ending up in a situation that would lead to her loyalty going down, not the game rewriting her mind — which is exactly what happened, since Juniper's game-assisted model of her personality (as well as Fenn's own model of her own personality) strongly disagreed with Fenn's actual behaviour.
That said, it could still be precognition — a situation just special enough that Fenn exhibits model-surprising behaviour — but the evidence are more indicative of reality-warping than precognition. Remember also Juniper's speculations about DM retconning these two girls he left to die in the Risen Lands into not being Amaryllis.
We're choosing between reality-warping + precognition, and reality-warping. Occam's Razor suggests the latter.
u/valeskas [+10] (8 hours later)
No need for subtle reality-warping/precog. If the game is capable of tailoring Amaryllis looks to MC brain, it is definitely capable to create Fenn in such a way, that she will like MC naturally.
Plus, I think there were hints that Fenn likes MC. For example, Ch 19:
I couldn’t tell whether she had any actual interest in me or whether she was just having fun at my expense, or maybe both.
So, the kiss was probable from the game POV, and it added "maybe kiss" to quest description.
u/Noumero [+7] Self-Appointed Court Statistician (9 hours later)
If the game is capable of tailoring Amaryllis looks to MC brain, it is definitely capable to create Fenn in such a way, that she will like MC naturally.
"Naturally liking Juniper" and "never starting to like Juniper less" are two different things. The latter is much harder to implement without reality-warping, and it would likely result in either a horribly twisted human mind, or not human mind at all. Can you imagine someone who always likes you at the exact same level, no matter what you do?
Good point point about the probabilistic nature of the kiss-related statement, though. It indeed said "there might even be a kiss", not "there will be".
u/serge_cell [+6] (9 hours later)
insane amount of precognitive ability on the part of the game layer
That could be "timeless physics" case. All non-negligible probability paths have specific invariant preserved, that would be "kiss at the end".
u/nytelios [+2] (a day later)
I was dreading that bit after hearing about the "cloacal kiss." We're safe.
u/GriffinJ [+4] (10 hours later)
That was a pretty spectacular climax. I'm really glad I picked this story up.
u/xamueljones [+10] My arch-enemy is entropy (an hour later)
Wow! Four chapters? It must be my birthday! I'll just ignore my calendar telling me otherwise.
u/PM_ME_OS_DESIGN [+5] (a day later)
Can I just say: "Aumann" is a TERRIBLE pun. You should be ashamed of yourself.
u/I_Hump_Rainbowz [+2] (20 hours later)
Anybody know the name of the style of game worlds? Like level up systems?
I recently read a few shitty korean translations and enjoyed them (even though the english is bad).
I enjoy these kinds of books. What are the preemo quality books in this genre? Maybe even readable?
u/HeartwarmingLies [+6] (21 hours later)
My taste is somewhat questionable but I'll link some I've liked recently:
In this one Earth gets absorbed into a game system and due to being underground at the time the MC spawns in a dungeon leading to some powergamey stuff.
http://royalroadl.com/fiction/11209/the-legend-of-randidly-ghosthound/chapter/127131/chapter-1
In this one the MC ends up in an abandoned inn and becomes an inn keeper in a magical world. Much less focused on power gaming than the other 2.
https://wanderinginn.wordpress.com
And finally in this one the MC and her class are killed by dimensional magic and then are reborn into a magical world, with MC spawning as a spider.
http://blastron01.tumblr.com/post/128092792800/im-a-spider-so-what?is_related_post=1
u/josephwdye [+1] I love you (a day later)
is there any good translation where blastron01 left off?
u/HeartwarmingLies [+2] (a day later)
Not that I know of (let me know if you find one) but blastron is back to updating again, though pretty infrequently.
u/GriffinJ [+2] (22 hours later)
Like heartwarminglies said, The Wandering Inn is a great piece of LitRPG fiction. It takes a while to set up the story, but it's worth having the patience to get into this one. The updates are definitely highlights of my week.
u/serge_cell [+2] (2 days later)
The most prominent LitRPG fanfic/x-cross is probably The Games We Play
u/None [+1] (4 days later)
Asian cultures love it.
u/I_Hump_Rainbowz [+1] (4 days later)
What are the better translations?
u/None [+1] (4 days later)
They come and go. If I had to recommend a few with game systems, I'd say Death March, Death Mage, No Fatigue, Slime Tensei, and Manowa are generally pretty well translated and also not terribly written.
But that's based purely on my personal standards and preferences, so your mileage may vary greatly.
u/Dufaer [+1] (a day later)
The way the elevator is handled is strange.
After the still mage is killed and the elevator boy presumably stabilized, the whole thing is effectively forgotten. This is very strange, as:
The elevator is full of arrows and blood. So the party would have to jam it on the 19th floor to avoid discovery. This is however still problematic, because somebody might come through the staircase to investigate the now non-functioning elevator. The staircase door to the floor is missing, a hallway full of blood is visible from there and the party does not have a line of sight to this location. This means that they can be discovered without them noticing that something is amiss. Neither the jamming of the elevator nor the staircase access is addressed in any way.
The elevator boy is apparently still there during the after-gold-mage-battle cleanup but neither his condition nor he himself is ever mentioned again.
u/nytelios [+3] (2 days later)
- Security overall was weak and/or poorly designed in the tower. No one used the stairs, there were only two guards on the way to the top floor, guards flirting/reading books, the warder who was the pillar of the defense was located at the closest point of contact to a breach, there was no designated backup for the warder as a countermeasure to the obvious threat of a hostile warder (we don't know what other magics counter warding).
So lax security protocols and understaffed security as /u/serge_cell mentioned.
Also when there's one elevator to the penthouse, the penthouse is expected to have priority and one of their head honchos did just go up.
- I expected the time they spent on healing the boy to come back to bite them. Besides the possibility that he may yet have background significance as the only survivor and witness to the assailants, not every minor character can be expected to be plot relevant.
u/serge_cell [+2] (2 days later)
First level explanation is that there were surprisingly few personnel and especially grads in tower. There were no one to find out, or if somebody found out they were not motivated to investigate/raise alarm but prefer to run away. Second level explanation is that the Game Engine was influencing situation heavily.
That also was looking suspiciously like Game Engine shenanigan. Plot needed innocent victim, but protagonist managed at least not kill boy completely. "Intended outcome" seems was death of the boy or boy left to die so that protagonist had pangs of conscience later. As it was it was natural for protagonist completely forget the boy. There will be much more collateral damage later anyway. That was Watsonian explanation. Doylist explanation is that author probably forgot about boy.
u/cthulhuraejepsen [+6] Fruit flies like a banana (2 days later)
Doyalist explanation is actually that he wasn't important to the narrative anymore and I couldn't find an aesthetically pleasing way to bring him up again without making him seem Important so just left him out as something most people would probably assume was taken care of "off camera". (The fact that this did not work means I probably do need to figure out a way to slip in a line somewhere.)
u/serge_cell [+2] (2 days later)
I couldn't find an aesthetically pleasing way to bring him up again without making him seem Important
That's what you got for playing with recursive meta. Because The Plot is possibly one of the characters in the plot anything plot related could be mistaken for Plot related.
u/LordOfCatnip [+1] (2 days later)
Oh yes, an update :)
I wonder why the party didn't consider healing the rat rot before they left for Caer Laga? Juniper could at least have tried to use bone magic on it or something.
u/valeskas [+1] (2 days later)
They did consider, Magus Bormann from Kindly Bones said they need more money to even try.
u/LordOfCatnip [+2] (2 days later)
That's when Juniper learnt about her condition in the first place. And Bormann said she wasn't familiar with it, so they opted not to try and heal it right away (because she couldn't promise any results).
The next step would have been to find out more about the "rat rot" and whether it was curable within the resources available to them. So I'm surprised it wasn't mentioned again during the week Joon spent training. Unless I'm missing something?
u/valeskas [+1] (2 days later)
Unless I'm missing something?
Nope.
I assume that Bormann is knowledgeable enough that casual efforts were futile, or they expected that and did not try anything else.
edit: From this line from Fenn to Bormann, the next step was to wait until they have to do something.
And we’ll deal with the rat rot later, if we have to.