26: Effete Acolyte

I left the shop deep in thought, trying to figure out how I was going to move and store that many bricks. I could always throw them out, but that seemed like a waste of resources that might come in handy in the future.

Maybe I just needed to bite the bullet and do a dungeon, get some gold, and then rent a dimensional warehouse. At least then the bricks would all be in my own storage and I could slowly move them somewhere when I needed them. I wonder if we could also upgrade our apartment with a storage room?

I’d have to go back and look at the ledger in the apartment building. It would probably be pretty expensive, though. Maybe it’d even cost real money, in which case I’d be boned.

A warehouse was probably the best bet, so it was time to go and find a dungeon to solo. There was no way I was going to queue for a group. Why weigh myself down with excess idiots when I could do the content just fine on my own?

In Rellithesh, there were multiple types of dungeon. The one I’d gotten my sword in was a secret dungeon; not on any ingame guides, and without a town access portal. Heroic dungeons were the same, except you could find NPCs and lore to point you to them, and they were usually harder than the most common type. That type, of course, was a regular old dungeon, which usually had a portal into it from a town, alongside its normal entrance out in the world.

I was going to be doing the last one, and I had just the dungeon in mind. It was a goblin bandit lair built within the ruins of an ancient fort up in the highlands. From what I could tell, the ruins were from the same empire as the mushroom boss’s city.

The dungeon hub was on the other side of town, back through the market and up the hill a ways, so I had time to think about how I’d tackle the challenges of my intended target.

I was in the middle of walking, spaced out as I thought about that, when I heard a sniffle from the courtyard I was walking past. It was one of those little cul de sacs that were common in the city, where houses all branched off from a tiny little park. Curious, I slowed to a stop and peeked through the open archway.

A small fountain bubbled away in the center of the courtyard, surrounded by a broken circle of raised flowerbeds. Against the flowers were a series of benches for people to relax on, and sitting on one of them was a kid with their back to me.

I almost left, but something about them caused me to pass through the archway and approach. “Are you okay?”

The kid jumped in their seat and turned around, startled. “What? Yeah, I’m fine.”

As soon as he’d turned around, two thoughts cascaded through my brain. Number one, he wasn’t a child, he was a dude about my age, and second, he was an Ascendant Fairy, like me. His platinum blonde hair and tiny, androgenous figure had made me think he was a child from behind, but looking at him from the front it was clear he wasn’t. He was, however, very, objectively pretty. Like, just as pretty as me, but in a more masculine way than I was.

“O-oh,” I gasped, staring at his big lavender eyes, then his long and delicately pointed ears. “You’re like me!”

“No. You’re like me,” he shot back. His bottom lip quivered a moment later, and he slumped a little in his seat. “Okay, no, I’m not okay. Please don’t make it any worse.”

“Why would I make it worse?” I asked, walking around the planter to sit next to him. “I’m Keiko, by the way.”

“Because when I tell you I’m a tank, you’ll probably laugh at me,” he said, gesturing to his tiny frame.

I had to admit, the threadbare clothing wasn’t helping his case much, but the lance that sat next to him was nothing short of gorgeous. It was all silvered metal with black acid etchings that flared out at the wide end of the spike into a floral hand guard of blued metal. The hilt of the lance was black leather, intricately tooled and well fitted. It took me a hot second to realise that it was his version of my katana.

“Can you hold monster aggro and take the resulting hits?” I asked, looking back up from his lance.

He shrugged. “Yeah? I just do it with magical barriers instead of my body, because I’m not an idiot.”

“A mage tank?” That was a seriously hard spec to play. You had to internalize and ingrain the spell activations as something that would protect you from harm, overriding your mind’s natural instinct to shield yourself with hands or weapons.

“I think?” he asked tentatively, playing with his earrings, which were these little pink ribbons attached by metal studs to the tip and base of the ears. They were super pretty. Distractingly so, actually. I kinda wanted some for myself. “I only played my first character for five days before the lance dropped for me. I’m still a total noob, but my class is called Fae Enclave Acolyte. It’s apparently some sort of protector class for the Ascendant Fae Male Enclave, but I don’t know what that is.”

“Neither do I, and I’ve been playing this game since launch,” I shrugged, wiggling my feet back and forth. The bench was just slightly too tall for my feet to touch the ground. “The fae are all super secretive and their lands are currently out of bounds.”

He grunted, although like me, his grunt was very small and very cute. “That’s lame, I kinda want to see how our race lives. Hopefully it's not crammed into giant towers of apartments.”

The last part was a wry, disparaging dig at the world outside of VR, where large chunks of humanity were crammed into massive apartment towers. I used to live in one of them, before the accident. By the way he was talking, he was probably living in one right now.

“Hopefully not… which reminds me, what path did you take for your race? Did you go for the wings?” I asked, an idea forming.

“Hell yes, I went for the wings!” he laughed, fluttering them into existence. He had four, just like me, and each was a translucent lavender. Unlike me, the two upper ones were much longer than mine and the lower ones were smaller. That wasn’t all, though. Out of his head sprouted two small horns made of a blue crystal that shimmered as he moved.

Flexing my shoulders slightly, my own wings popped into being too, and we sat there grinning at each other. “Have you learned to shrink yet? Also, you got horns too?”

By way of answer, he exploded into a tornado of lavender ribbons and just like that, he was one foot tall. I followed suit, and the world grew in all directions.

Standing there on the now very large bench, we grinned at each other. I really liked this guy. He was pretty damn cool, and because I'd just found him crying and being vulnerable, I already felt sort of at ease. Any dude who wasn't ashamed by the act of crying was an instant win in my book. Although, that wasn't to say that it was easy to stop feeling ashamed by it. Society had some pretty intense rules that it expected men to follow. I know I sure as hell felt isolated, touch starved, and emotionally repressed when I'd been a guy.

“The horns were sort of a compromise,” he explained, running a finger along one of them. “My wings aren’t as fast or as strong as a full winged fairy like you, but I just couldn’t not choose wings, you know? Male fae apparently have the option to add the magic horns to whatever path we choose, but it costs us some power in our wings or animal forms.”

“Damn, that’s cool,” I said, a little jealous. How cool would it have been to get my own spell casting horns, or maybe a set of fluffy animal ears for advanced hearing capabilities. “I wish I’d had that option.”

“It’s nice, but like… apparently you girls can hit supersonic speeds at max level with those things,” he said, pointing to my wings. “Imagine that with a lance like mine? You’d obliterate whatever you hit.”

“I’d obliterate myself too,” I giggled, imagining the scene. What kind of crazy person would even try hitting something that fast?

He laughed with me and shrugged. “What? It’d be so cool!”

God damn but the vibes were good with this guy. He was so chill, and the way he rocked the many stereotypically feminine aspects of his aesthetic was so good. I mean, shit, despite currently being a very pretty fairy, he managed to make all of that stuff seem effortlessly masculine.

“You’re so cool! I’m sending you a friend request,” I told him, my tone brooking no argument as I excitedly fumbled through my menus. I was acting very out of character for my time as Keiko, but yeah. The guy was fun, and I wanted his friendship. Maybe it was the way Paisley and I were talking again, and now I felt a little more confident again in my ability to connect with people. Whatever it was, I was going to help this guy gain confidence in his tanking, and maybe snag a friend in the process.

“I’m Keiko by the way,” I told him, opening my friends list, I went to send the request and saw that he’d beaten me to the punch.

“Not if I send you one first,” he winked, his excessively long eyelashes fluttering like our wings. “Oh man, thanks so much. You’ve cheered me up a ton. My name is Noah.”

“No problem.” Then, I gave him a sidelong look. “Want to prove to those fuckwits that you can tank?”

He stared at me with a healthy dose of suspicion for several long moments. “How so?”

“I was going to go and solo one of the mid tier dungeons, but I figure if you want to team up then we can do that too,” I explained. “With you keeping the attention of the mobs, I can go wild with damage. It’ll be a piece of cake.”

“You were just going to… to solo a dungeon?” he blinked. “I’m not sure how it works in this game, but in the others I’ve played, that tends to be rather difficult.”

"It is." Truth be told, he might have a tough time of it, but his class seemed uniquely suited to functioning without a healer. It might actually work, especially if he could drop agro onto me when he needed a breather.

I became uncharacteristically shy as he stood there waiting for me to continue to speak. I swallowed the sudden lump in my throat and mumbled, “Plus, you seem nice and friends are really hard for me to make.”

“Okay, okay,” he said, patting me awkwardly on the shoulder. “It can’t go as badly as the last run I did, so why not?”

We were still both in tiny mode, standing on the bench with our wings floating gently behind us, so I fluttered up slightly into the air. “We should fly over there. Oh, and what level are you, by the way?”

He puffed out his little chest proudly. “I’m level nineteen.”

“And I’m level twenty one, so we should go for a level twenty dungeon, then,” I said, moving to leave with one last questioning look into his lavender smile. He might have been a boy, but damn was he pretty. Those little ribbons in his ears were adorable. I was going to get some of my own.

Nodding, he gestured to the sky. “Lead the way.”