Magical Renegades - Roll for It!

"There it is!" Felicity excitedly gestured towards the item that her party was looking for! Her party entered an old toy shop hoping to find the item that they needed. Some of her other teammates followed and looked inside.

Felicity was the cleric of her party and like many clerics, she wielded a hammer.

Some of the shelves were conveniently empty, which highlighted the item that Felicity's party was looking for. A mechanical elf doll that has light green hair and was wearing a mauve, silver and black dress. The doll had mechanical wings and had three small vertical pipes coming from the top of its head. With how the pipes were arranged horizontally, from a distance they looked like a crown.

This doll was regal, but also gave off an eerie vibe because of its isolation, and because it was behind a glass case standing on an ornate drawer. Above and behind the case was a large sign.

"Are you sure about this?" Alfbern asked. He was the pirate in the party. As a pirate, one of his class bonuses was the chance to successfully steal an item, but this one felt too risky. The sign read "DO NOT TOUCH. Ask for assistance. If you break it, you buy it... with your soul"!

"Did you read the f**king sign?!" The shopkeeper blurted out, which startled Felicity and her party. The shopkeeper was dressed in a simple black outfit with a gray apron and had blue hair. She also eyed Alfbern with a lot of suspicion.

"Did someone teach you to run a business with such foul language?" Fiorina snarked. She was the scholar in the party, and one of the bonuses of the scholar class is to be able to give snarky answers to NPCs without invoking their wrath.

"Sure, go ahead and break it with that hammer and pay with your souls, but I'd rather have the money!" The shopkeeper blurted back. Fiorina's scholar bonus roll failed that time, but she had the *chance* of avoiding this.

"It's not what it looks like and we want to buy with money!" Felicity nervously said.

"That includes me." Alfbern added.

Felicity put the head of the hammer on the floor. "Whoops... I don't want to be swinging my hammer around in a shop, but I have to carry this around everywhere." She nervously said, and did the same gesture again, but without holding her hammer. Her hands were open and gesturing towards the case like she were presenting it.

"Be careful! It contains 1000 moving parts, and is fragile enough you need to be careful how you gesture towards it!" The shopkeeper shouted.

Felicity drew back her hand and pointed at the case.

"Seriously?" Fiorina asked. "Is it fragile enough to break if someone yells too loudly?"

The shopkeeper grumbled. Felicity tried a few more gestures with both of her hands. "We'd like to buy this doll for our quest." She said, but the shopkeeper was still annoyed by these larger gestures so Felicity tried gesturing again by just pointing straight at the doll with one hand.

"Would you let us buy it now?"

"You made your point... Pun not intended." The shopkeeper said, grumbling. Fiorina's party gathered the money for the doll and carefully took it with them.

"I'm glad that's over with, mateys, but do ye think we should've waited until that hammerspace patch is released to buy it and continue that side quest?" Alfbern asked, feeling a bit of buyer's remorse, though it was more the timing of the purchase.

"Yeah..." Felicity and Fiorina agreed. "The developers said they'd add that patch next." Felicity said.

"For now we're playing on hard mode, mateys!" Alfbern said. "If we didn't buy it now, someone else could've bought or stole it and we'd have to do a different quest to find it which might've been harder!"

"I can't believe I'm the one having to do this!" Chelsea loudly grumbled. She was walking through an eerie graveyard with a digging tool in hand on a moonlit night...

How did this happen? It happened this evening...

"What side quest are you looking at next?" Fiorina asked Felicity. They were seated at a table near a campground in the evening.

Felicity was looking at a holographic menu that displayed a list of side quests that NPCs mentioned to her party. These were the same screens that the players could see for themselves and they messaged each other over chat.

"The closest one is to retrieve a special tool kit that'd help keep this cursed doll we bought from breaking!" Felicity said. "Ooh! Where we'd need to go isn't too far away from here and it's almost time that we can start this one!" She expanded the screen and touched a holographic map button. It loaded a 2D map that showed where her party currently was with several locations marked. She pointed to one of them on the map.

"That's the graveyard." Chelsea nervously said, hoping that Felicity accidentally pointed to the wrong location. Not far from the graveyard was a hardware store. Chelsea was the aristocrat of the party and her character was dressed for the part.

"Oh no, it's in a graveyard. One of us is going to have to rob a grave for this side quest tonight." Felicity said, sounding a bit nervous but her tone still sounded as energetic as before.

"Eek! What do you mean one of us?" Chelsea started to argue.

"Some of us will have to stay behind to protect this doll." Fiorina said. "We should roll dice to decide who has to do this." She suggested, and brought out two 20-sided dice from her satchel, and held them in her hands. "Whoever gets the lowest total has to do this."

Everyone in the party was gathered around the table and looking at the dice. Fiorina rolled the dice first and got a high total. She looked confident and recorded the first roll.

"Wow! It'll be hard to beat that!" Felicity said. She rolled next and got a roll that was slightly lower.

When the dice were passed to Alfbern, he was thinking over something and seemed hesitant to roll the dice, but not because of fear. "I'm wondering if I should just volunteer for this. Pirates have bonuses related to thieving."

"And additional penalties when a thieving attempt fails." Fiorina said. "Would you want to guarantee taking that risk now?" She asked.

"But that's true of aristocrats too." He said, but starting to think over his answer again. He looked at his holographic screen to double check the side quest which confirmed it can only be done as a solo quest, and only at night. Someone was having to do this alone and risked worse penalties for it if anything went wrong.

He picked up the dice and rolled. His total was lower than Felicity's but could've still been lower. "Oh well. Unless someone is very unlucky, I'll be doing this and I hope I can also bring back some more gold and treasure." He said before he passed the dice to Chelsea.

She looked confident. One of the bonuses of the aristocrats is that their dice rolls are skewed to be a bit more favorable than normal, with lessened penalties for failed dice rolls, but the worse penalties for failed thieving attempt. When she rolled the dice though, her confidence turned to terror. The total was only 5 out of 40.

"Someone's going to have to be really unlucky to beat that!" Katt said with a nervous laugh. She was playing as a farmer. "But I'll gladly fight the undead. This rake is stronger than it looks!"

"Oh dear, that's unlucky for an aristocrat." Claudia said. She was playing as an artist.

Chelsea passed the dice, hoping that someone would get a lower roll than her and although some came close, hers was still the lowest after all of the rolls! She was frustrated and wanted to complain that Alfbern should've just volunteered; her own team and resource-managing abilities as an aristocrat are useless on solo quests, but a dice roll is a dice roll, and she agreed to it too.

Reluctantly she set out for this quest when it could begin. The rest of her party was stationed nearby but couldn't go with her.

"I can't believe I'm the one having to do this!" Chelsea loudly grumbled. She was walking through an eerie graveyard with a digging tool in hand on a moonlit night. In the night she could see silhouettes of the trees, which were twisted and without leaves, and were near the silhouettes of shrubs. Glowing pairs of eyes peeked through them!

"Maybe I should've complained. It helped me get a lot of things before and out of many things I didn't want to do especially around commoners feared arguing with me..." She thought to herself, but then her frustration turned to sadness when she remembered that not even her parents' complaints against Pretentia Academy not allowing her in because of her grades wasn't enough to get the school board to change their mind!

They knew who she was and who she's related to since she wasn't just playing as an aristocrat in this MMO! She was from one of the richest families in the country and a direct descendant of the former royal family on her mother's side. She had many connections and this incident with Pretentia cracked her understanding of the world and her view that she can get through life with just those connections!

Yet if her parents got her way then, she wouldn't have known in-person some of the people that were in her party...

She passed rows of headstones while she looked for a grave with a specific marking on it which indicated it was one with the item that her party needed to complete the quest. Shrubs were littered with sticks and bones. After some looking around, she found a gravestone with the marking she was looking for, and started digging.

"I still can't believe I'm doing this." She was determined to complete this quest, even if reluctantly and still grumbled out loud. The long train at the back of her dress was touching the dirt as was the skirt layer around her knees. She didn't have her digging gloves either; those were lost in another quest!

"Avoid the coffin..." She thought to herself, while she was digging around it, hoping that the tools she was looking for were next to it and not in it!

Luckily for her, she saw a small box next to the coffin. She picked up the box and opened it; it was the tool kit! A small pop-up screen also confirmed it was. She smiled and put the tool kit away in her satchel, used her digging tool to move the dirt back and start walking out of the graveyard.

"I got it! 🎉 😄" She messaged her teammates, and she saw them congratulate her in the chat. However, she should've been running!

At some of the graves, hands were rising out and picking up their weapons!

She panicked and behind the screen, Chelsea started to message her teammates.

"Help! Help!" She messaged them. Undead soldiers were emerging from some of the graves with their weapons, and the tool maker in the grave she stole from was also rising up!

"Do you have any magic weapons with you?" Fiorina asked her.

"No! I lost mine!" Chelsea replied. The undead were closing in and there appeared to be ghosts emerging from the fog...

Twisted roots started growing from the ground trying to grab Chelsea; they were hard to see with the moonlight providing just enough light for her to see them and strike them with her digging tool.

This kept them away but she needed to run and started to as she saw the undead start shambling towards her. She smirked when she saw that they were shambling about when she was walking at a brisk pace while she could keep her eye on the ground for more of those roots, but she could see more glowing pairs of eyes among the darkness.

She heard fast footsteps behind her and saw that some of the undead soldiers could run after all!

"The movies that show the undead walking slowly are a lie! 😭" While Chelsea's character was still running, she quickly messaged her teammates in the chat.

"Keep running to the gate! We're still near it!" Felicity replied. This was the most practical option; there might've been weapons lying around to replace what Chelsea lost, but there wasn't much light and enemies were everywhere. The fog was growing thicker too when suddenly a ghost jumped in front of her!

"Give me your money!" The ghost said. She swung her satchel as a makeshift weapon, which cleared some of the fog and showed that she bore a strong resemblance to Chelsea's character, but as a ghost and wearing a suit with a tattered overcoat and cape.

Chelsea clutched her own satchel in both of her hands and jumped back. "You're not stealing what I had to steal!" She yelled back to the ghost, but the ghost didn't relent.

"I'm not so interested in that unless I can sell it for a lot of money." The ghost player said.

"It might be since it's for a cursed doll--" Chelsea said, immediately realizing she shouldn't have given away that the tools she stole were related to something valuable and might've been valuable themselves!

The ghost player kept swinging her satchel as a weapon against Chelsea, who was trying to dodge the attacks when one of them knocked her to the ground.

"I got ambushed! 😭" Chelsea messaged her party.

"Where are you?" Fiorina messaged her.

The rest waited outside and got worried when there wasn't a response. This was an emergency, and since the mission was completed, they could enter the graveyard. They were low on potions but had to take the risks.

Felicity took the lead in the investigation because the cleric class has an advantage against the undead; her attacks do more damage, but the large numbers of the undead ran towards her first. She quickly brought out her hammer, but was nervous; where she had a player class advantage, the undead enemies had an advantage in sheer numbers!

6 +3 = 9 -- Felicity's attack hit the enemies that she swung at, but they weren't direct hits. The +3 bonus for her class advantage turned a weak roll into a moderately effective one. "They're faster than I thought!" She shouted before she was quickly knocked to the ground!

20 -3 = 17 -- They didn't miss, and they even knocked her down with a strong attack! The disadvantage that subtracted from the roll didn't dampen the attack much.

"Oh no!" Katt said in the chat as approached.

"I have only a few HP left. It's only because of my advantage against the undead that they can't one-hit KO me." She said to Katt and the other teammates within earshot.

"It's an emergency; She's low on HP and I'm helping her leave the graveyard so we can go to the apothecary. The rest will try to get over where you are to help you." Fiorina replied in chat.

Katt brought out her rake and was ready to strike against the undead enemies that were trying to ambush Felicity and Fiorina. "I'm not letting you get them! I'm not letting her hard work get wasted!" Katt said with a fierce determination. Despite the disadvantage her player class has against the undead, she charged an attack and swung her rake at them.

"Thanks but at least I'm not going to get killed in real life if the undead ambush me in the game 😅" Felicity messaged in the team chat.

19 - 3 = 16 -- Katt's player class disadvantage weakened the full power of her attack, but it was still more than powerful and accurate enough. With the swing of her rake, the physical impact knocked the undead enemies back, and a large gust of wind knocked the surviving enemies back even further!

"You'd still lose a lot of work 😭" Katt said in chat.

"Hahahahaha! I warded them off and didn't take much damage even at a disadvantage!" She boasted just a couple seconds later.

"Great job! May good dice rolls stay with you!" Felicity congratulated her in chat.

"I hope you get good ones too" Katt replied.

"Awww... I would've wanted to see if I could loot them, but great job matey 🏴‍☠️" Alfbern said in chat.

Katt chuckled. "Sorry... It's just funny seeing you play as a pirate and acting the part 😂"

"And it's funny to me to see you play as a farmer." Alfbern chuckled back.

"So are you going go over here 🤨?" Chelsea asked in the chat.

"We didn't forget!" Alfbern replied.

The remaining group ran ahead and through some winding paths, careful to dodge the twisting roots that were moving when one of them lashed out!

Alfbern took the lead and used his cutlass to block the attack.

17 -- He successfully blocked the attack from the roots, and struck back, dealing enough damage that the roots died back and dropped some coins.

"We need to keep going!" Katt warned as she ran ahead, pushing her petty feelings towards Chelsea aside. "If she lost her player character I wouldn't hear the end of it." She sighed. Alfbern picked up the coins and wasn't far behind.

They saw where Chelsea and the enemy she was facing were on the map and quickly headed towards it, avoiding as many random encounters as they could.

16 - They avoided most of the random encounters that could've happened.

"We tried to get here as quickly as we could but got stopped by a few random encounters!" Katt said. She and Alfbern clearly saw Chelsea, but not any enemies.

"I'm glad you're here!" Chelsea said in the chat. She seemed a bit weary and her HP bar was lower than it was before. "I'm sorry though. I lost some of my money because I paid the ghost off so she wouldn't steal the tools and I still don't have a new magic weapon!" She apologized."

"It was better to pay, as long as we can get our money back." Katt added.

"Definitely! I'm not doing any solo graveyard quests again! 😡" Chelsea pouted. When she was calmer, she explained her ordeal in the group chat. She explained that the ghost she tried to evade before paying her was from another team that was struggling for money after a very tough dungeon grind and thieving attempts that failed; multiple players on her party lost their characters and had to start over. This ghost was one of the few who didn't.

"We really don't have much left after buying that cursed doll 😅 That ghost wouldn't get much from any of us after that" Felicity said.

"If any enemies are here, I try my pirate bonus on them?" Alfbern asked and chuckled.

"You should meet us at the apothecary then we could continue. I made some potions for us to save on money. Next we can go to the mess hall to get more food." Fiorina said in chat.

Chelsea still looked worried about something which her teammates noticed. "That fight against that ghost was scary, but the scariest part might've been that she looked like me. She looked like she could be one of my ancestors!" She said.

Clearing that dungeon in the forest enough times until her character got the rare spell book she was hoping to get was just the beginning for Katt as she tried to return to her team!

"I got it after 50 clears!" She messaged in the group chat.

Her teammates that were online congratulated her, but Fiorina said "50 clears isn't that bad, but congrats."

"Half of the enemies are undead and they make this harder for me and I don't have much food leftover for recovery!" Katt replied. She was stationed at a small shelter near the dungeon that no enemies could reach.

"You should head back now. The rest of us will be heading to the mess hall near the edge of the forest." Fiorina replied.

The area was a rather desolate plateau. Taller peaked mountains pierced the sky behind the dungeon. The dungeon that Katt cleared was atop a rocky hill on the plateau and it sloped downwards to a flat area. She stepped out of the shelter and looked down the hill, and around her.

There wasn't much cover for any random encounters or players from rival factions to ambush anyone, but she knew that they could be another obstacle. Leaving the shelter was to enter a danger zone again!

(How many random encounters did she find? -- 4)

(How difficult were they? -- 8)

Luckily for her she saw only 4 random encounters. Each of them were a bit of a challenge, but she took them on and didn't need to expand any food or potions to recover from them, but ahead she saw she was on the edge of a cliff!

It looked to be a long way down. "What happens if a player can't jump or fly across or can't find a bridge?" She nervously thought. A sign at the edge provided hints about how to build a bridge with materials that are around the area. Katt read it but groaned in frustration. "This is useless!" She shouted.

"What's going on?" Kayla curiously asked. She was in the hallway of their house when she heard Katt shouting from her room.

"I might be stuck in that game unless I wait for however long!" Katt answered through the door.

"It's too bad that my player can't pilot an airship yet, unlike me!" Kayla snarked and laughed before she walked through the hall. Katt was annoyed but tried to focus on the game again.

None of the materials her player character needed that the sign listed could be seen, and she didn't want to keep waiting around for however long for them to randomly generate.

She explained her situation in her team chat, but most of them weren't online this time, including the teammate that can pilot an airship!

The sign listed two other options as a last resort: Using a levitation spell, but she couldn't do that because she didn't have a magic weapon yet. That's what she's wanted to get next. She's only been fighting in melee styles.

The other option was running towards the cliff and jumping across at the right time, but there were minimum stat requirements to have a chance at successfully trying this! Her speed, endurance and melee stats met the requirements, but her trajectory and timing still needed to be within a range...

"Maybe I should log out and wait when we're all online again." Katt thought when she stared at the computer screen, thinking over what to do. She was momentarily considering the commonsense option. There wasn't much homework she needed to do, but then she realized that Kayla wasn't playing because she was waiting to meet Melody and Alicia for their troupe practice. "I'm not prepared but I just want to finish this one task before I get ready!" She thought.

She waited for a couple of minutes to see if the materials she needed to build a bridge would be generated, but no luck. So she tried the last resort option. Her player character ran back, running from a few random encounters along the way, ran forward to build momentum and made the jump!

Was this risk instead of waiting really worth it? She had moments to think about this while she also had to set the trajectory.

Luck had it there weren't any random encounters to interrupt her character's run forward, and the trajectory was just right! Katt sighed with relief over this success, and led her character to a camp site near the forest and near the mess hall to save her progress.