Save Scumming Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-Seven - Lux

Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-Seven - Lux

When I got ho, I decided to be productive. I was still feeling a little crampy and gross, but it wasn't as bad as the day before, and I had more energy. Maybe being a D-ranker had more upsides than I'd initially realized?

Anyway! The evening was a good ti to train.

I first went through a full rotation of spellwork practice, using up all of the magical energy I had blasting Shadow Bolts in the backyard, then spending the rest of the evening playing guitar... also in the backyard. It was a little embarrassing to have random neighbours, so of whom I only vaguely recognize, see plucking away on my old electric, but I figured that I'd have to play before people at so point.

Maybe I could start learning how to sing at the sa ti?

That would require learning how to sing, though.

Other than a few one-woman concerts held in my shower, or singing along to so classics on the radio, I'd never really dived deep into singing. Wait... I think I'd done a show as a kid in elentary school? I was pretty sure that didn't count.

In any case, I was putting in more hours per week practicing on the guitar than so professionals, I bet. That didn't suddenly make one, however. How many hours had I accumulated in the last month? Fifty? Sixty hours of practice? That was good 'get the basics down' ti, but it wasn't nearly enough for any degree of mastery.

The next loop I tried Grasping Growth, using up the spell until the backyard looked like a poorly tad jungle. Then I did French practice.

I actually asked around, and discovered that not one of my neighbours spoke a lick of French. Soone spoke Italian, I had a few Spanish, one German, a smattering of Asian languages, and a couple of Hindi and so who spoke other, less common languages, but no French.

Too bad. It would have made practice easier to have soone to bounce off of.

So the next loop, after burning all of my magical energy on Grasping Growth--this ti going slower and really feeling out the spell, I wanted to have it be pretty efficient, and just casting it as hard as possible wouldn't help with that--I then spent the evening looking for a teacher online.

I actually found one. So sites had AI training software to learn languages with, but I was worried that I'd learn so bullshit. So I dug deeper and found an insanely expensive course for like, C-suit corpo types who wanted to learn a language fast.

That course included one-on-one training with a native speaker. It cost several thousand dollars a month, but money ant nothing, so I got it and ended up in a video call with a sixty-sothing year old man sitting in his ho off in France.

We had a conversation.

It wasn't good. I was a stuttering, uncertain ss, fumbling over words, forgetting half of the vocabulary I'd learned, and generally probably sucked more than most of the people he trained.

Still, he was patient with and I liked the lesson for the hour and a half it lasted.

I did the sa thing the next loop, though that ti I started training Nutrition. The next was Restore Stamina, and the next Exhaust Senses. Not spells I was using very often, but I figured that if the spell was in my toolbox, I might as well have a decent idea of how it worked.

At the mont, I was still not sure what other spells to pick up. I figured I was ready for a few more Level Two spells, however. Stuff like Grasping Growth, only more... potent.

Maybe so variation on Shadow Bolt? The one I had delivered a weak punch's worth of energy at a decent speed. Having sothing with more oomph to it could give a flexible combat spell.

Seeing Becky and Mizu fight with overwhelmingly powerful magic, either given to them from an innate ability or from learned spells, was making a little envious.

Just a little.

I spent the before-last loop playing guitar in my room while idly listening to the news. I had a sockless foot next to my mouse and would sotis turn the scrollwheel down to go to the next auto-play video.

There wasn't much that interested , but there was a lot. Fortress ENE alone generated plenty of news, and then there was the rest of the country and the world. I sat up and listened more attentively to a story about a Peruvian fortress city being hit particularly hard by a breach until a pair of A-rankers showed up and blasted a large part of the city apart to quench the breach.

An estimated three thousand dead over a forty-eight hour period. It wasn't even the top news story at the mont.

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

Had Fortress ENE's breach made international news at all? Had we hit three thousand dead?

Probably. I could rember a large chunk of the city being on fire. That was maybe not even the breach's fault. When people were running away in a panic, it was only natural that they'd sotis cause other, unrelated accidents.

I found so guy online, on one of the bigger video-sharing sites, who had an hour and a half long breakdown of the entire situation.

It was hard to focus on playing while I watched, but I tried.

My last loop of the evening was spent suffering through so basic exercise in my room. Burpees and situps and pushups until I was a sweaty ss. I cast so basic spells, mostly See Darkness and Nutrition, over and over again to almost-drain my magical energy. There were so things that said that draining and regaining one's energy was a sowhat efficient way to work on one's magical reserves, like a sort of muscle.

It was la, but the shower after was nice, even if I ended up using even my expanded hot-water reserves and ended up getting splashed by cold water by the end.

I slept like a babe.

The next morning, I got up early, wasted the hour I'd gained in the morning cuddling up to Mister Couchtop and doomscrolling on my phone, then I rushed through getting dressed and darted off for work.

Work was la.

We had more training, but it was mostly non-physical stuff. The most exercise I got was taking the stairs instead of the elevators. So of it was vaguely useful. Codes and alerts to call out, how to use so of the radios and more specialized equipnt, a whole hour about putting on PPE and environntal protection in case we ever had to handle a portal world filled with toxic gases or enemies that used aerosolized attacks.

Boring, but not useless to know.

How would Fran and I handle sothing like that? We had masks as part of our costus, but... yeah, it wasn't everything. We had a lot of exposed skin. But that was necessary. How would people think that we were hot as hell if we didn't show a bit of skin?

That reminded . I sent a quick text to Jane, asking her if she could arrange for a few more costus in a similar style and promising her pay. Then I sent her a censored image of Becky and told her to find sothing that might fit soone with those proportions.

Jane seed halfway between amused and annoyed, which was a good sign, I figured.

The most interesting thing in the day happened almost as soon as five o' clock rolled around and I set a new Save. The goal was to just keep an eye out on that gala, in case Fran needed help.

I was just stepping out of the office when I heard a ring.

Pausing by the threshold, I picked up my phone and stared. Orchid Lux. Huh?

"Hello," I said as I answered.

A young man was on the other side of the call. "Hello. I'm a representative of Orchid Lux's Private VIP services. We were made aware that you had so interest in so of our products as well as our private cyberware installation services."

"Oh! Yes, uh, you caught with my... you caught at a good ti, actually. Give one mont? I'm moving into a parking garage."

"Of course. In the anti, please be advised that this call isn't being recorded, and we suggest that you keep personal information to a minimum. Orchid Lux's Private VIP services are second to none because of how guarded we keep our client's privileged information."

Nice corpo speak, there.

I climbed to the top of the parking garage, then told the rep to go on. "So, what do you offer?"

"We can install any of our mainline products, and even so of our competitors' cyberware, all while keeping extrely discreet. Did you have your eyes set on any particular model?"

"Uh," I replied. "Not just yet. How much does this service cost?"

"Our Private VIP services aren't inexpensive, understandably. We have certified surgery teams under oath, using specialized censoring cyberware that ensures that no identifying information about you or what cyberware you've equipped will leave the surgical suit. We have transportation, privately, to and from the suit, as well as back to a desired location for private convalescence. I see here that your operational budget is... one hundred and fifty thousand dollars at the mont. Prepaid."

I felt my mouth go dry. How much? "Who prepaid that?" I asked.

"I'm not at liberty to know."

Well... shit. "So, uh... do you have a catalogue?"

***