Frostbitten Wayfarer

Zoe and Emma said their goodbyes for the day, and then Zoe made her way over to Kaira park to practice her enchanting some more. Now that she understood her skills a little better, she wanted to see how they worked as enchantments as well.

First off was checking her skill levels, and she brought up her stat window.

Class 2: Seasoned Frost

- Cold Affinity (11)

- Time Affinity (4)

- Restoration (3)

- Frozen Arsenal (5)

- Haste (5)

They were all good skills, Zoe thought. But Frozen Arsenal and Haste were both of questionable value. The first was powerful, but Adaptive Frost and better control over her Frost skill was likely just as competent offensively, if not as good defensively.

And Haste was objectively inferior to Alacrity if she wasn’t going to be around a bunch of people constantly to keep the buff up on them. And the mana cost of Haste might end up meaning she wouldn’t be able to use it at times if she was running low on mana, whereas Alacrity would always be there and give her that slight edge she might need.

Plus, it might even help her read faster, or travel around town quicker. She never used Haste while she was just around town because keeping the buff up was a little tedious when she didn’t specifically need it. But Alacrity would just always be there.

She swapped out Haste for Alacrity and felt the familiar speed settle in to her body. Everything around her seemed a little slower, which was another reason she never ended up casting Haste on herself too often. The feeling was just a little disorienting.

Having Alacrity always on might even help her get over the strangeness with the increased quickness, which would be a nice benefit. And the run to Moaning Point would be much easier without having to manage a manual buff constantly.

Zoe was satisfied with her Alacrity decision, and turned her attention back to Frozen Arsenal. It was hard to justify getting rid of it given how powerful the skill was for her. Unlimited weapons and armour at her fingertips was quite nice.

Frost of course had a similar effect, but Frozen Arsenal’s summoned weapons were just so much better than anything she could make with her other skill. Maybe one day she could switch it out for Eternal Elegance or Adaptive Frost, but getting rid of it now while she still had such a small selection of skills didn’t seem like a great idea to her.

Next was testing out her enchantments with the skills. First was her Cold Affinity, which on its own didn’t do anything. Zoe tried adding it in with her Frost skill and found that it made the enchantment a little more potent and dragged the temperature of the coin down lower than she could have managed with just Frost.

Time Affinity she skipped over. She had no doubt that it would do the same thing as Cold Affinity for her time aligned skills.

Restoration had no noticeable effect at first. But Zoe scratched at the coin she’d enchanted with one of her claws then dumped some mana into it and the scratch filled back in to leave the coin in the same condition it was in when she enchanted it.

She wasn’t sure if it made a ‘save point’ for the object or if it would only work on recent damage like her skill said. And it made her wonder if her Restoration skill would work on objects without being enchanted first.

Zoe grabbed a nearby twig, scratched off some of the bark and then focused on her restoration skill to restore it. The bark twisted as it was stitched back together. She hadn’t even thought of using it on objects before, for some reason a healing skill just made her think of recovering health, not just arbitrary damage.

Or did the objects have health of their own? Would any healer be able to heal damage to objects with their healing skill? Or was it just because Zoe’s healing skill was a time skill? Was she even healing things or was she turning back time on them until they were no longer damaged?

So many questions that she couldn’t answer. For now she just accepted that it was a very helpful skill. She could research exactly what it was later, in particular she was interested in whether or not other healing skills would have done the same thing or if that’s a less common effect.

Next was Frozen Arsenal. For a moment she thought about casting it on the dagger she still had in her storage bracelet, but decided against it. She could try again after if the coin did nothing, but seeing what an arsenal did on something other than a weapon would be useful too.

She enchanted her copper coin with the skill, and nothing happened. Zoe tried pushing mana into the coin, and it did accept it. But nothing interesting happened.

On something of a lark, she dumped as much mana into the enchantment as it would accept and then hurled the coin at the ground nearby. The coin exploded into frost and sent shards of ice flying around the impact site.

Zoe grimaced and thought about how glad she was she threw it at the ground instead of a tree. She walked over to see if the coin survived the explosion and found the copper coin embedded into the ground, surrounded by a layer of dense frost. She dug it out, pulled it back into her bracelet and took out her knife.

She was curious what the skill would do on an actual weapon, and started the process on her dagger. When it was done, she saw nothing happen again. She dumped mana into the dagger, but not quite as much as with the coin and then threw it at the ground next to her.

Rather than a large explosion of mana, the dagger left a trail of frost as it flew through the air and embedded itself into the ground a little deeper than she expected. She picked up the dagger, filled it with as much mana as it would take and tried again.

And it did the same thing, but with a little more intensity. The dagger left a larger trail of frost as it flew through the air and embedded itself even deeper into the ground.

Did the enchantment change because it was fit into a different weapon? Did daggers get extra stabbing power, but coins got explosive power? Or had she subconsciously created a dagger that stabbed better while she enchanted it?

Zoe pulled out a coin and tried to enchant it again, but this time she tried to mix in her vision of the dagger piercing deep into the frozen earth as she did. When she was done, she charged up the coin and then hurled it at the ground, and it behaved the same as her enchanted dagger.

Interesting, she thought. There were probably as many different effects for her Frozen Arsenal skill as an enchantment as there were weapons for her to summon with it. She didn’t have much interest in exploring all of them right now, an explosion and better piercing both seemed great.

What did interest her though, was whether or not she could enchant weapons she summoned with Frozen Arsenal. She could enchant what she created with the Frost skill she knew, but she never tried Frozen Arsenal. Zoe summoned a dagger of ice and then tried to enchant it.

Like with her Frost, the dagger was already saturated with her mana so she didn’t have to fill it herself. But also like with her Frost skill, enchanting the dagger didn’t seem possible without giving up her Frozen Arsenal’s control over it. Which made the process a little moot.

If she just wanted a normal dagger of ice without Frozen Arsenal’s enhancements, she could create one with Frost instead. Enchanting her arsenal didn’t seem possible and she moved on to her final skill, Alacrity.

The skill again had no immediately visible effect on her copper coin. She prodded around inside the coin with her mana to see if maybe the enchantment was wearing off quicker because of some kind of increased quickness effect on it, but it seemed normal to her.

Zoe tried throwing the coin to see if maybe it flew a little faster, but she wasn’t able to tell if the enchantment made a difference. She tried dropping it, flooding it with mana, but nothing that she did seemed to have any impact on it.

At a point she decided to just give up on it and come back when the skill was higher level. Maybe it did make it fly faster when she threw it but her skills just weren’t high enough level to actually have any impact.

Or, she thought, maybe Alacrity impacted other enchantments. Zoe didn’t have many skills that had any kind of movement component to them though, so she tried to combine it with Meditation. Maybe it would speed up its absorption of mana, not that it would have any impact since the mana would have nowhere to go.

She focused on the two skills, built up her image of the two overlapping and then pushed it into the copper coin she was holding. The mana swirled around it a little faster than she remembered it doing when she only had her Meditation skill, but she enchanted another coin with only Meditation just to double check.

And sure enough, the coin enchanted with both Alacrity and Meditation had mana swirling around it a little quicker than the one with only meditation. So Alacrity sped up other enchantments then, she thought. That was a useful combination, but just made her even more motivated to work in three enchantments at once.

If she could have Alacrity, Enchantment and maybe Frozen Arsenal then she could get a dagger that would charge faster, last longer and explode more violently, maybe?

Her ultimate goal would be Alacrity, Enchantment, Meditation and then a useful skill. But getting two in was already hard enough for her at her current stage, let alone three or even four skills. Maybe some day, though.

Zoe kept playing with her enchantments, trying to figure out good combinations as she waited for the following day when she had plans to go shopping with Emma. Zoe found a few good combinations that she thought might end up being nice.

Alacrity seemed to boost everything. Her Restoration and Vampyric Regeneration restored damage a little quicker, though not as quick as having both of her healing skills enchanted into the same object at once. Archery and Alacrity made an arrow that flew with what seemed like no air resistance at all.

Enchanting along with almost any other skill made a great combination that let her maintain the enchantment for quite a while. In particular on materials that lasted more than a few minutes it seemed quite nice. She could enchant a bunch of silver coins with explosive Frozen Arsenal effects and store them in her bracelet, then just pull them out and charge them every day or two.

She was half tempted to take an enchanting class for her next class and see what kinds of things she’d get out of that. There wasn’t really any reason not to, either when she thought about it. She could take the class, experiment with it and see if she liked it, and then just replace it with something else if she ended up not liking it very much.

Maybe, she thought. It was a better option the more she thought about it, but she’d wait and see what kinds of classes she had available to her soon. She planned on grabbing her next class before she left Flester, no point in leaving power on the table if she was going to be heading out into the wilderness.

The day passed, and Zoe made her way down to Emma’s tower.

Emma opened the door with a big smile on her face. “Haste me! Lets go shopping!”

Zoe laughed. “Sorry, I replaced it with Alacrity.”

“Aww, really? That makes sense I guess. Was fun while it lasted though.” Emma pouted.

“Yeah, I dunno. Maybe I take haste back if I end up around people a lot more but I’m going to be alone on the journey to Moaning Point probably, and I don’t know if I’ll have other people around when I climb it so Alacrity just seems better.” Zoe explained.

“Yeah yeah, it makes sense. I just liked being fast. Get another time class with cool buffs next time too.” Emma shrugged. “So what’re we shopping for today?"

“Well, I want to get some more supplies for climbing Moaning Point. It should be basically a normal mountain just covered in undead creatures so I’m thinking some rope and pitons at least would be good.” Zoe said.

“Sounds exciting. Where to then?” Emma asked.

“I know this place on Norlon that should have what I need. I’ve shopped there a few times before.” Zoe answered, and lead Emma down to Paul’s Goods.

The store was still there and looked the same as it always had. Henry was behind the counter and smiled at the two girls as they walked in.

“Hello, how can I help you today?" He asked them.

“I want some climbing supplies, do you have that here?” Zoe asked.

“Sure do!” Henry walked out from behind the counter and over to one of the shelves.

It was covered in ropes, pitons, carabiners and everything else Zoe might need to climb up a rocky cliff.

“All our rock climbing stuff should be right here. Anything in particular you want?" Henry asked.

“I’m heading down to Moaning Point, any suggestions for that?" Zoe asked.

Henry thought for a moment. “Well I’d make sure to have plenty of carabiners, a helmet, a harness, more pitons than you think you’ll need and a solid hammer to get them in the cracks. And of course rope. As much as you can fit in whatever storage item you’ve got, really.”

Zoe picked out the supplies Henry recommend with Emma’s help — which largely ended up being her grabbing the most colourful ones she could see and telling Zoe they looked cooler, and then brought them up to Henry who had returned to the front counter.

“I’ll get all this then. This should be good, you think?” Zoe asked him.

Henry looked it over and then nodded his head. “Yeah this should be fine. I’d recommend stocking up on food before you go too, it can be pretty expensive down there.”

“Yeah, I plan to do that too, thanks. How much for it all?" Zoe asked.

“Seventy four silver, thirty five copper for all this.” Henry answered.

Zoe pulled out some coins from her bracelet and paid him, and then stored all of her new supplies in her item.

“So what next?” Emma asked as they left the store.

“Food. I need lots of food before I go.” Zoe answered.