Beta by Faria Lyton.

Party Invite 2.3

"So that's my house over there." I waved toward my home with a vague feeling of embarrassment at how run-down it was. The paint was peeling in places; the weed-filled yard hadn't been mowed in a while; and the bushes were overgrown. At least the front step wasn't visibly broken. "My father is already inside. I appreciate you walking me home, but I'd rather not introduce you to my father right now. Strange boy, teenaged daughter…" Hopefully James could connect the dots.

James did. "Hey! It's not like that. I mean, I'm certainly strange, but… Not that you're not-"

"Stop now. Before you put your foot in your mouth. I know you're not, but I haven't had friends in so long. New boy, he'll jump to conclusions. Let me bring you up in conversation first, make my father aware you exist first."

"Right. That's a good idea."

This felt awkward. While James had walked me home, that was only because my house was on the way to his. We'd talked and discussed ideas, nothing more. Not that I would have minded a bit of chivalry between friends even though it was totally unnecessary. It was just hard saying good-bye to a friend after not having one since Emma. "So… tomorrow, same time, same place?"

James smirked. "It's a quest." His eyes didn't track an unseen message nor did he poke the air, so he probably thought he was being funny.

"Right. See-ya." I headed toward my home while tasking my bugs to track James until he was out of my range. Today had been a great day. Better even than meeting Parian. James's power was weird, but awesome. I'd gained so much today: valuable skills that would make me a better cape, a new title, and ten points to spend on stats from leveling twice. Fighting zombies was great practice for the real thing. It also had been surprisingly fun. Once we'd found our rhythm it had been cathartic to beat the crap out of legions of zombies. While my muscles were pleasantly tired, I felt almost giddy.

I hopped over the broken step and stepped inside. "Hi Dad, I'm home."

From my bugs I already knew that I would find my father on the couch watching TV. My friendly flies also let me know that he was working on his second beer and the first lay crushed in the trash bin in the kitchen. A glance at the TV told me that he was watching a Western. It looked vaguely familiar, so he was probably rewatching one of his favorites. There was a pile of paperwork beside him. This was a habit of his. Some of the paperwork was so routine he'd fill it out while watching TV.

He smiled at me. "Evening kiddo. You're looking chipper. Did you have a good day?"

I joined him in the living room and plopped on the arm of the couch. "Yeah, I did. Paris introduced me to some friends of hers and we hung out." Paris was a pretend friend that I'd made up when going to meet Parian. Now to try out the story that James had thought up. "You ever heard of Dungeons and Dragons? It's this game and they invited me to play tomorrow. They made it sound fun. They were talking about a dungeon full of zombies and stuff."

My father chuckled. "Really, D&D? I haven't heard about that since college. Not my thing, but if you want to give it a try, go for it."

"Really? Thanks." Not that Dad paid much attention to my comings and goings, or cared if I was going out other than to make sure I had my pepper spray, but permission was good. Even better, he'd accepted the cover story of a gaming group. That would make it easier to meet up with James to train, and provide a good cover in case I ever made a verbal slip-up.

"So have you eaten any dinner?" I knew he hadn't. My flies smelled no recent food smells in the kitchen.

"No, I was just going to nuke something."

I was tempted to agree and just nuke something for myself as well. I was still in a party with James, and time spent cooking could be better used leveling my skills. However, I wanted something more than a frozen TV dinner. Fighting zombies was hungry work. "Don't. I'll cook something."

Throughout my conversation with my father a part of me was busy calling in my spiders scattered around the neighborhood and setting them to work in our basement. I paid Parian for her consulting work on my costume in golden orb spider silk. She'd used some for her own costume, but she also was looking to market it and thought it would sell well. She was offering me 50/50 on any future sales. Nothing had materialized yet, but money wouldn't hurt. More importantly James needed a costume, so I had my black widows weaving silk as well. I'd need to get his measurements eventually, but it wasn't critical at this step.

A quick check of the fridge and the pantry, and I found we had the ingredients for spaghetti and a salad. I wasn't not a great cook, but I could manage that. Besides, the hamburger needed to be eaten soon or it would go bad and become bug food. As I was setting the food on the table I was suddenly flooded with a swarm of pop-ups.

[A skill has been created by repeated action.]
[A skill to create meals from raw ingredients, [Cooking] has been created.]
[Cooking (Passive) Lvl 1 Exp 4.1%]
[By the combination of raw ingredients tasty meals can be created. Eating food can restore The Gamer's HP and MP. Higher quality meals restore more of both. Meals created out of special ingredients can provide short term stat bonuses and/or buffs.]
[Healthy foods are good for you.]

[You have unlocked the Blueprints tab.]

[A recipe has been learned by experimentation.]
[Recipe: Spaghetti]
[Rank: Low]
[A pasta dish with a mild tomato sauce.]

[A recipe has been learned by experimentation.]
[Recipe: Garden Salad]
[Rank: Low]
[A salad composed mostly of leafy vegetables such as lettuce.]

[An item has been created via [Cooking].]
[Spaghetti]
[Rank: Low; Type: Consumable Item]

[An item has been created via [Cooking].]
[Garden Salad]
[Rank: Low; Type: Consumable Item]

So… that just happened. Having proof that James's skill worked at a distance and still gave me skills was nice, but at times it took things beyond weird to just plain silly. Although the part about bonuses for special foods was interesting. Did that mean if I leveled up my cooking high enough I could be some kind of weird food tinker? While James was just a voice chat away, that would out us both as capes and was only for emergencies. I'd have to wait until tomorrow to discuss it with him. So I pushed it aside for now. "Dad, dinner's ready."

My father's arrival started a wonderful family dinner of spaghetti, salad, lies and guilt. He wanted to know about the gaming group. I made James into the game master and specifically mentioned that he was someone that I'd known for years. When pressed for other names, to my undying shame I mentioned Greg Veder and Anne Shirley from Anne of Green Gables as a members of the group. Both of whom I was able to describe in sufficient detail to settle my father's curiosity. Fortunately my father never read Anne of Green Gables and didn't know that I wouldn't even ask my bugs to crawl over Greg Veder if I could help it.

Having satisfied my father's curiosity I was able to finish my low rank spaghetti and salad without further questions. That gave me some time to think about what I wanted to train tonight. There were skills I wanted to acquire that I didn't have yet. First aid and some kind of ranged weapon were on the top of that list. There were also skills I needed to improve. I had bugs working on four of my skills constantly: [Mental Control Area], [Lingering Command], [Sense Processing], and [Combat Mapping]. I also needed to improve my other skills, but we'd learned from fighting zombies that most skills leveled much faster through combat. There were other things I could work on tonight, but the one that stood out the most was luck.

So as we cleared away the dishes I asked my father a seemingly innocent question. "You know with all that talk about games today, I was thinking… do we still have those old boardgames in the hall closet?"

Dad smiled. "I'm sure we do. Are you going to scavenge them for dice?"

"No, well maybe, but that's not why I was asking. I was thinking maybe we could play a game. That is if your paperwork can keep."

"Kiddo that sounds like a great idea." My father's smile was more than fond indulgence or faked interest this time. It was that smile I remembered from when I was younger, the daddy smile. "Of course, the paperwork can wait."

[Relationship with Danny Hebert increased!]

There were several old games in the closet that depended heavily luck: Monopoly, Life, Risk and Parcheesi to name a few, I dug out the box labelled Yahtzee. The game was fairly simple and almost entirely based in luck, which made it perfect for my purposes. Since my luck was zero it should be easy to train.

Except it wasn't. I had the worst game of Yahtzee ever. On my first five rolls I ended up with 2 in my ones box, 4 in my twos box, 10 in my three-of-a-kind box, and 16 in my chance box after failing to complete a small straight off a 3-4-5 in two rolls. Meanwhile my father had booked his threes, fours and a full house. I wasn't a math whiz, but my luck wasn't just bad, it was terrible and it continued roll after roll. Only after I'd used up my ones box, chance, and three of kind, did I roll triple 1s on my first roll, which did not grow to a Yahtzee or a four-of-a-kind. I took a zero in my Yahtzee box. Next roll – triple 2s, also already blocked. My luck wasn't just bad, I was rolling the worst possible rolls that I could get. It was a statistically anomaly that my rolls were so bad. The implications were scary. While I've had some bad luck in the past, I could only believe that James's power had decided to apply my 0 LUK to random events as some kind of anti-luck. That could be real bad.

Initially Dad teased me light-heartedly at my bad rolls, but as the game progressed he started to wince every time I rolled the dice. "You know Taylor, you could just concede."

I forced a lame laugh out. "It's just a game," I said, but one bad roll followed another. It wasn't just a game any longer. I really did have no luck.

Rattle. Roll. 2-3-4-5-6. "Large Straight!"

[Fortune has smiled upon you, LUK has increased by 1]

"Large Straight! Yes! Yes! Yes!"

My father laughed. "I take it you didn't zero that one out yet?"

"No it's still open." I marked a forty down in my large straight box.

I still lost, of course. I was much too far behind to possibly catch up, but I'd done it. I'd improved my luck! I wheedled my father into playing a few more games and managed two more checks giving me 3 LUK in total. More importantly the anti-luck effect had eased up. I still lost every game to my father, but not as badly. The dice no longer seemed to actively hate me; they just didn't like me very much. Given that four games of Yahtzee still took less than an hour, I thought that was great progress.

"Taylor, I think I've had enough Yahtzee. How about we play something else?"

I mentally reviewed the games I had to choose from. Which one involved more luck? They all had varying degrees of strategy. "How about Risk?" That had a strategic element, but attacking and defending was all luck.

"Okay, we can play Risk."

Two hours of Risk only netted me one additional skill check, a double-six on defense vs. my father's 6-6-4 attack. My luck was still clearly bad, but not painfully bad. I found myself growing more and more annoyed at the game. I could level so many skills up faster fighting zombies. Yahtzee, as boring as it was, had at least leveled my luck faster. Risk was a waste of valuable time.

As my father's armies marched across the board taking over the world, I found my thoughts drifting. James's power was weird, but there seemed to be certain underlying rules. I clearly still had bad luck and James's power had somehow made my luck worse by affecting what should be completely random dice rolls. It really shouldn't come as a surprise that having James's breaker effect apply to me came with some disadvantages. From what I'd read that was pretty common with breaker states. All in all the advantages made up for the disadvantages. Being on Murphy's bad side wasn't really anything new to me.

After losing at Risk I retreated to my bedroom, but was too keyed up to go to sleep. I figured out how to swap my titles around. [Unaffiliated Parahuman] wasn't much use. It granted a +20% to reaction rolls from 'fellow rogues', even though I wasn't a rogue. [Novice Hero] was more interesting. It helped me gain skills and stats 10% faster. That would have been handy when I was trying to raise my luck. For that matter it was probably more useful than [Apprentice Undead Hunter]. That title helped me kill zombies faster, but faster wasn't necessarily better. It was the skills I wanted. Those would help me survive more in the real world. So I immediately switched my title over.

Still not sleepy I decided to play around with my multitasking talent. I was already exploiting it to train [Mental Control Area], [Lingering Command], [Combat Mapping] and [Sense Processing] almost constantly. Experience gain was slower out of combat, but maybe I could make up for it by doing multiple things at once. I settled for singing along with music on some of my favorite CD, while playing Yahtzee solo with my left hand, while reading the D&D Players Handbook for ideas with my eyes, while taking notes in code to practice my cryptography.

Two hours of effort netted me some skills: [Singing], [+1 INT], [+1 Mental Control Area], and [+2 Cryptography], but overall it was a failure. No LUK, and not much progress. There was only so much that I could physically do at once. Maybe if I got some kind of tinker heads-up display that would let me read six things at once, learned braille, or suddenly figured out how to see through my bugs, I could do more, but right now I was limited.

Oh well, it wasn't like I was planning my hero debut tomorrow anyway. I needed to get James up to speed now. He wasn't ready for prime time yet. He needed to improve his skills, develop new ones, and he certainly needed a real costume. If it took the better part of a day to collect the parts for one set of pauldrons, it would take a while for James to assemble his own outfit. I'd pretty much used up all my silk to make my own costume, so I was a couple of weeks from making one for James. Plus, I wanted to introduce him to Parian. Plenty of time to build up my own skills yet before we made our debut. Hmm, probably the Merchants. I'd rather not piss off Empire Eighty-Eight or the ABB on our first night out.

A/N: Yahtzee is a common dice game in the US, but goes by different names in other countries. I've been advised by readers outside the US that this chapter is difficult to follow without knowledge of the game. I tried to write this section so that an understanding of the rules was not needed, but full rules are available on the internet if it helps.