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In Love's name and for Love's sake, I assert that I will employ the Art which is its gift in Love's service alone, rejecting all other usages.
I will spread joy and ease pain. I will fight to preserve what loves and rejoices well in its own way, and I will change no object or creature unless its joy and love, or that of the system of which it is part, are threatened.
To these ends, in the practice of my Art, I will put aside despair for hope, and hatred for love, when it is right to do so-- Until Universe's end.
Y/N
wen ning is the erogamer
"It makes it sound like I'd be a bad wizard if I didn't, so--"
Accept, accept, accept.
What are the 'self' quests?
The manual has helpfully popped up a box with a meditation description and a box with a language learning program, which he can easily dismiss.
In the Self category:
Quest available: Massage
Give yourself a nice self-massage.
Success: +100xp, Massage skill
Failure: Tense muscles
Accept Y/N
Quest available: Love Yourself
Normally you jerk off in five minutes because having a sexuality is embarrassing. To fulfill this quest, you must make at least a little bit of a production out of your masturbation session. Candles? Music? Making sure to select interesting pornography? Touching parts of your body other than your dick? Edging? Combining it with the Massage quest? Fantasizing about Wei Wuxian? Up to you.
Success: +100 xp, Driving A Manual skill
Failure: Mild sexual frustration
Accept Y/N
Quest available: Clothes Make The Wizard
Buy yourself some clothes that make you smile when you look at yourself in the mirror. (HINT: Wei Wuxian may be willing to help! You may also wish to google information about 'color seasons.')
Success: +100 XP, +1 BOD
Failure: 'Fashion Disaster' status effect
Accept Y/N
Quest available: A Wizard's Home Is Their Castle
Make your home a cozy, relaxing, inviting place where you love to spend time. (HINT: Pinterest.)
Success: +200 XP
Failure: 'Decorating Disaster' status effect
Accept Y/N
Quest available: Take Yourself Out On A Date
Plan a date you would like and take yourself on it. Try your best not to feel self-conscious about eating dinner alone in public. No one is watching you.
Success: +100 XP
Failure: The One will arrange for someone to take you out on a date and they will not take no for an answer.
Accept Y/N
Quest available: Reading Is Fundamental
Read ten books, or an equivalent amount of text in shorter-form writing, that you genuinely like. Poetry counts three times as much as prose, due to its density.
Success: +150 XP
Failure: 'Television Doesn't Necessarily Rot Your Brain' quest
Accept Y/N
Quest available: A Journey of Self-Discovery Begins With A Single Step
Find one new thing you like that you didn't know you liked before.
Success: +250xp, +1 NOV
Failure: ???
Accept Y/N
Quest available: Fun Is A Basic Human Need
Identify no fewer than ten things you genuinely enjoy for their own sake and not to make other people happy. Make a plan to do one thing you enjoy each day. Carry out this plan for at least two weeks.
Success: +500 XP, +1 LUV
Failure: Your poor self-care harms you in your battle against the Lone Power
Accept Y/N
Self care now having high stakes is definitely not panic inducing at all!
"It wants me to learn to massage myself," SKIPPING THAT ONE, ER DOCTOR OR NOT "get nicer clothes, make my house nice, go out to eat," because phrasing that as 'take myself on a date' is too embarassing "read some books, find a new thing I like, and do something nice for myself." At risk of imperilling the world. No pressure.
don't-look-down
"Well, those all seem like good ideas. You can go to work tomorrow and bring in a cake, and then this weekend you can get a head start on those things and learning the Speech."
It is so many things, but at least for some of them he'll have... maybe not a lifetime, but at least a year? to try and do them all. "That's probably a good plan. --I could bake a second cake for you to take into work?" He does not say 'because you are more likely to run into sad people.'
...He should check what the Ordeal is.
don't-look-down
"Yes. Excellent idea. Going to get in good with the nice magic entity so it gives me superpowers."
Quest available: The Ordeal
The Ordeal is a wizard's first brush with the Lone Power. Each wizard is a force for joy and love and pleasure in the world, and the Lone Power seeks to destroy them before their full potential can be realized. At its best, the Ordeal is the site of our greatest victories against the Lone Power. At its worst, people die. Not uncommonly, both occur.
In lieu of conventional success and failure criteria, the Manual presents the following advice: don't be afraid to make corrections. Don't be afraid to lend a hand. And don't look down.
This quest will begin automatically at WIZ 20.
... He's going to start that when he's closer to WIZ 20 and a) hopefully less likely to die and b) hopefully more prepared to die? And if he is extra lucky he may even be the force for joy he is meant to be.
"Hopefully it will work out?"
He is now a wizard (of some variety?) who's tasks are objectively easy but he is still probably going to fail at. Oh, and even people of normal competence often die doing this.
...
He hugs her back.
... he has time. He can do these things one step at a time.
He can bake two cakes (and hope box mix counts for the quest) and study the Speech while they're baking.
And then he can take stock of what quests he can practically do, and the best order to do them in.
Time for some shaky definitely-not-panicked cake making!
A spell family has been created by a special action! Baking a cake has unlocked the spell family Cooking.
Info // Spells // Cooking
"Cooking" is a family of spells that makes your food, as it were, magically delicious.
Never Burns: Passive. Automatically reminds you when anything you're cooking is ready to be taken out of the oven, off the stove, etc.
Seasoning: Active. Gives the caster an intuitive sense for how to season their food in order to make it taste best. This skill only applies to spices, herbs, and similar, not to other factors that affect the taste of the food.
And there is a series of words, presumably in the Speech, that allows him to cast Seasoning, with a thing he can press to hear the pronunciation and footnotes he can tap on for descriptions of vocabulary and grammar and how the spell can be modified for various more specific purposes.
He's going to try casting Seasoning on one of them (just in case it's possible to fail at casting them spell) and see what happens.
He is suddenly aware that it would taste better with a bit of vanilla, and the spell will tell him exactly when he needs to stop for optimal taste.
He can do that.
... This is his first spell. And it worked. He is a wizard, and he has successfully casted a spell and it is close to useful.
The manual pops up some boxes, almost as if it were being run by someone with brainfog who had totally forgot what they were supposed to be doing:
Quest complete! My Sister Knows Everything About Me
+100 XP
Increased relations with Wen Qing
No Greater Love Than This quest unlocked
New Ally!
Manual // Ally // Wen Qing
Wen Qing. She/her.
4119 Kerry Way, Bell Gardens.
562-806-6658.
wen.qing@gmail.com
Wen Ning's sister.
No relations with other allies.
Linked quests: My Sister Knows Everything About Me (complete); No Greater Love Than This (accepted).
+ Food preferences
+ Clothing preferences
+ Media preferences
+ Music preferences
+ Hobby preferences
+ Relaxation preferences
+ Sexual preferences
You know what: good on the One for making sure he doesn't know about his sister's sex life.
And now he can (objectively?) check what she likes to eat. ... At the risk of finding out he's completely wrong.
He puts the cakes in the oven (it's a bit of a game of Tetris to get them in.)
He should probably get started on learning the Speech. He opens up the menu.
There is a little owl mascot! The little owl mascot would like to teach him how to make various phonemes. The Speech, it turns out, uses every phoneme human beings are capable of making.
The owl mascot wishes to intersperse this with teaching him:
-Greetings and etiquette for various people he might encounter and wish to talk to.
-Emotion words.
-Food-related words.
The Speech is extremely detailed and makes a lot of fine distinctions, and it's also quite precise. There's something... correct, about its ontology. This is the way that emotions are actually divided up among humans; these are the terms for the categories of feeling that Wen Ning has. There are words here for feelings he's never quite been able to name.
The food-related vocabulary is just as precise but perhaps in a less revelatory way. It does make him hallucinate smells and tastes so he can learn the differences.
This is too many phonemes. He's in a fight with his own mouth to make the ǂ sound.
But it makes sense if there's so many words, and so many fine distinctions.
He's going to miss the words for emotions. There is going to be a conversation where he's really going to want to use them, but no one would know what he meant.
Eventually the back of Wen Ning's brain informs him the cake is ready, ten seconds before the timer goes off.
Well, that's very convenient. He could get used to this being a wizard thing.
He pulls the cakes out, and puts them on a rack to cool.
He should probably start strategising which quests to do and in what order. He pulls up the to-do list (thank you, Wen Qing). Learning the Speech would probably work best doing a little bit each day, and the quests based on that are going to have to wait on him knowing it more.
Going on a date with himself or someone else, getting fashion advice, and getting kissed might have to wait for the weekend. (He has a plan for the kissing one. It's a stupid plan, but he doesn't have a better one.
He wants to kiss Wei Wuxian. Wei Wuxian is the person he knows who would probably be convinced by "I want to practice kissing with someone I trust but don't have feelings for." Wei Wuxian would laugh, but in a "haha what a funny plan" way and not a "haha Wen Ning is laughable" way.)
His secret admirer may also have to wait for the weekend.
There is one quest that would be very easy to finish today. (...no pun intended.) The Love Yourself quest. ... People manage this all the time. He can do this. Even if it is incredibly awkward to imagine. And it feels mean to plan to fantasise about someone who isn't into him.
... The cakes are probably cool now. Those are less awkward to think about. Does Seasoning think he should do anything with the packet icing?