The maid stood on
top of some smooth rock floor. There was the sound of a fountain
spouting effluence behind her, and ahead she saw the back of a wooden
building atop a craggy stone base. She didn't make much of it; she
had a sense that she wasn't out of place, that, like the tavern, she
was supposed to be here. Unlike the tavern, she hadn't been prepared
the knowledge of where exactly this was meant to be.
She looked to the
side and saw the keeper, her horns and all; at this point, she
noticed that those horns seemed to sprout without any interruption to
the hair, which flowed straight downwards as if there were no horns
at all, like they had been some afterthought in her creation. Well,
she figured that was giving the gods of this world too much credit;
it implied some sort of intelligent design, and the fact that
seahorses were allowed to exist has proven to her the stupid nature
of evolution.
“So...” began
the maid, unsure as to where to begin. “What now?”The
keeper stared at her for a moment. Her expression didn't betray much,
but the act itself hinted at some sort of dumbfoundedness, as if the
question enacted a ritual which violated her very person – as if it
were so inconceivably anserine, so extraordinarily unintelligent and
moronic in nature, that it became an affront to her soul. It was a
violent stare.
But she reminded
herself that the maid was new, that this was her first time. Most new
arrivals were just a bit more intuitive about the whole thing...
well, they had a voice in their head telling them what to do all the
time. Maybe it'd be a moment before the maid got hers.
“Buy items,”
suggested the keeper, breaking her violently blank expression.
To the maid's right
was a stand that could hardly be called a store; it had some items
behind the shopkeeper, who was idly standing there. The maid turned
to begin walking towards the shabby establishment, but the keep
placed a hand on her shoulder to stop her.
“You don't need
to talk to her, y'know,” she said.“Are we supposed to
communicate by sign language, then? I only know the ones for beaver,
skin, and...”The keeper thought about dropping the
politeness entirely, but she thought better of it and conjured her
affirmations: Positive mental attitude. Positive mental attitude.
Positive mental attitude. Positive...
“There's a
fucking menu,” she concluded. Her patience stretched as far as one
might expect a veteran support main's patience to go: three
centimeters, right about.
“You can pull it
up by thinking about it,” she continued.
Not the most
helpful hint she'd ever heard but the maid made do with it and
wondered what exactly entailed in this
situation. Was she supposed to imagine going shopping? The keeper had
clearly implied that she was supposed to think about menus to pull
one up, so naturally she tried to recall the last menu she saw.
A piece of paper
large enough to obscure most of her torso, attached to a hard board
beneath. The word was clearly printed at the top in
large font, and...
“AH! This is too
complicated. There ought to be some other way, like, shouting ''
or something.”
Well, to ask her to
think was always asking too much.
In any case, her
vision was suddenly filled by a somewhat translucent black box,
filled with grids that held hundreds of different images, each
minute, together forming a sea of information that the maid wasn't
all too keen on parsing.
“What's this?”
she asked, staring at it though not making much an attempt at all to
understand it.
“The shopping
menu, dipshit,” replied the keeper. “Right click – er, think –
mmm. Shout the name of an item to purchase it, maybe. Just... buy
whatever the guide tells you, okay?”
The left edge of
the shop connected to a separate grey box with its own icons. The top
read , and it divided itself into a few categories,
topmost amongst them uncreatively reading . She
looked to the keeper in hopes of divining some guidance on how
exactly she was to acquire the names of these items in order to shout
them.
The keeper opened a
shopping menu as well. The faint sound of a generic nondescript cash
register ringing signified that the keeper had made a purchase, and
suddenly items appeared in her hands: five talismans, two cans of
iced tea, two tree branches cut in full bloom, a branch with eyeballs
in place of flowers, a crow, and an apple. A rift in space appeared,
and she tossed the items in before she held out her arms and a large
gift box appeared and fell into them. She tossed it on the ground and
from the resulting cloud of smoke appeared a donkey.
This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.
The keeper noticed
the maid staring.
“Your passive
income is determined by your donkey ownership status,” she noted.
“What?”
“It might be
important later if someone finds a way to kill the fountain. Again.
In any case, don't worry about it... too much..? Yeah. Usually ain't
important.”
She stepped out of
the fountain and left while the maid continued to peruse the icons on
the shop menu without much more progress in acquiring in their names.
Two of the three others that had been with them left long ago, and
all who remained there was a siren from whose fish part grew
betta-esque fins that shrouded her tail like the skirt of a cerulean
wedding dress, pallucid sheets folding into pleats of silken
fishflesh begging to gyre about a pirouette and yet now flowed still,
for they poured from a dancer that knew no waltzes.
The siren stared
forward and idly made the motions of a living thing as she breathed,
but otherwise offered no signs of conscious thought. The maid swung
an arm in front of her and gathered no reaction.
“Hello?” said
the maid, as if calling into a deep well.
She took some time
look at her. In most regards the human half was likenable to a
platonic form: preternaturally pure-skinned, hair ebon like each
strand was once baptized in a lake of jet, the exact sort of look
that could call ships to wreck and sailors to their deathshores, a
model of the siren beauty that pierced seafarer hearts like a jagged
spear and reeled them in to... what did sirens lure sailors in for,
anyway? To eat them? Probably. The maid decided that if she were
possessed of that kind of beauty, she'd use it to eat people too.
Wait, aren't sirens
supposed to be birds? Whatever.
The maid would
probably appreciate the siren more if she were a bit more responsive
to stimuli than the vegetables in her... vegetable garden. She had
one of those, she thinks, and her vegetables were prettier and had
more personality than this glorified mechanism of fatal amercement
who existed to, like, punish man for mistaking the beautiful for the
good or something.
She could
go for a cabbage right now.
Whilst she
enumerated a variety of cabbage preparations in her head, and there
were a surprising amount of them that managed to cut through her
amnesia, the siren moved, turning her head to the maid lost in
thought. The crystaline corals that consisted the siren's cragged
chaplet dazzled the maid's eyes and called her absent mind to
attention.
“...Who the hell
are you?” asked the siren.
“Cabbage.”
The siren blinked.
She supposed it wasn't the weirdest name around here and turned her
attention to making her item purchases, which occurred in much the
same manner as it had for the keeper, and after stashing the items
away she noticed the maid staring.
“What'dya want?”
“I'm trying to
figure out how this shopping business works.”
“Uh... think
about it?”
“Think about
what?”
“Think that you'd
like a thing.”The maid thought to object and make some
assertion about how it can't be that simple, but, well, it really
seemed like that was about it. She looked back at the menu and
concentrated – a rare action on her part – on the first of the
icons beneath the banner. Another menu popped
up, something she was tiring of.
Tree-Devouring
Talisman
150n
Active: Devour
Consumes a charge to eat a tree and gain 7 health regeneration for 16
seconds. If cast on an ally, a talisman is transferred into their
inventory.
Comes in packs of 5!
They used to
come in packs of 4, but the supports kept complaining. Something
about “the regen pooling economy which encourages mid regen
extortion” that “crippled our ability to lane by necessitating a
second talisman set be purchased, lest we lane with insufficient
regen, thus financially overburdening our starting funds.”
The maid read the text twice and gleaned nothing from it. Eating a
tree? Health regeneration? Seven? Sixteen? She didn't like sixteen.
Wasn't a good number in her opinion.
In any case, the siren's instructions were simple enough, and she set
her mind to wanting these talismans. She didn't even get around to
formulating a nonsense reason for desiring them before the cash
register sound effect rang and she had them in her hands.
Well, no point in questioning things now. She looked at the other
items beside it.
Gorilla's Paw
200n
Passive: Cull
Melee heroes gain +24 attack damage against creeps. Ranged heroes
gain +8.
Active: Deforest
Cast on a tree to chop it down.
Unlike its
cooler cousin, this paw doesn't grant wishes, just the burden of an
overwhelming hatred for creeps and trees.
Branch of Death
50n
+1 All Attributes
Some stupid kid
snapped all these branches off the Tree of Death. The gods were so
preoccupied with enacting his eternal torment that they forgot to
collect them from the ground where they'd fallen, so here we are.
Stoat Shield
200n
Passive: Damage
Block
Grants 50% chance to block damage from any incoming attack: 20 for
melee heroes and 9 for ranged ones.
A stoat died to
make this furry buckler. Are you happy now?
The maid was halfway down the Gorilla's Paw's text before she
stopped reading and purchased the three items without further
question. The items appeared, suspended in front of her. She reached
out her arms and they fell into them, and a rift appeared as it had
for the other two. The siren stared at her intently for a few more
seconds and turned away and left the fountain as well, making the
motions of slithering yet going at a speed that made it look like she
was just sliding across the ground, almost as if her animators hadn't
coorindated very well with the rest of the designers, or maybe it was
fitting once upon a time and she had her speed changed, or maybe it
was intentional and it was like, rajiform propulsion or something.
“Skill ya spells,” she suggested, her parting words.
The maid tossed the items into the rift. If the pattern followed,
she'd have to think about spells – the question then became just
what she should think about it. As it turns out, thinking about the
word at all called to appearance yet another menu, one horizontally
elongate and holding five icons: one depicting some random
undiscernable spherical object or symbol and drawn with mostly blue
and purple colors. The other four similarly depicted abstractions of
teeth, a clock, and some other undiscernables, each greyed out and
colorless. When her mind went to asking what this was about, tooltips
conveniently appeared with them.
Ex Machina
Ability: Passive, Innate
Affects: Self
Gains 0.25% cooldown reduction per point of intelligence, up to a
maximum of 80%
Augment
Ability: Point-Target
Affects: Enemies/AlliesPierces Spell Immunity: No
Dispellable: Basic
When cast on an enemy, they take damage and have their movement
speed, attack speed, and turn rate slowed. When cast –
Too much reading. The maid swat the spells away and set about
following after the siren.
ent, it's a nod to Warcraft III units having abilities with names that included the letter that the ability was hotkeyed to, and highlighting it to alert you of what you needed to press to use that ability.
