Chapter Ninety-Seven - Rest and Rejuvenation

I got home, shucked off my shoes, tossed my coat onto the floor, and flopped down onto my bed. A few moments later, Mister Couchtop hopped onto my back and started to purr, and I pretty much immediately fell asleep.

I woke at three AM, groggilly got up, and then went and took a shower... after which I went right back to bed.

The second time I woke up, naked in bed and feeling much better, it was closer to five in the morning.

So, I rolled over, which signalled Mister Couchtop to rejoin me where he nestled onto my blanket-covered stomach, and then I pulled out my phone and started to doomscroll, as one does.

The worst part was that I'd doomscrolled this same news already, though it had been a subjective while ago.

Urgh, these loops were messing with my perception of time so much. It felt like months had passed since I'd returned to the 7th of September, but it was only the 29th. Like, sure, that was 22 days, which wasn't nothing, but it had probably been closer to a hundred days for me.

I had this low-key worry that I'd spend a bunch of loops learning some skills only for them to degrade because I spent so long in one loop not practicing them.

Then again... how quickly did skills degrade?

Maybe things were like... riding a bicycle? You'd lose some of your sharpness after a long bout of inactivity, but pick it back up again real quick?

I wasn't sure, but I had the feeling I'd be finding out.

My doomscroll paused as I came across an article about Synthcorp. Their stock had crashed pretty hard. More so than I remembered. There were also more people talking about a cover-up of some sort in the comments.

Huh. Interesting.

Maybe a bad thing. I'd kinda pissed them off. It was probably worth it, for the near-C-rank portal alone. That had been a nice boost to my power.

Actually, now that I was thinking about it, today would be a good day to head out and find one of those little potentiometres. It wouldn't do anything, exactly, but it would let me have a good measure of my growth day-by-day.

I set a new post-nap Save, seeing as how it didn't seem like anyone was after my head yet, then I rolled out of bed, found some shorts and a t-shirt to wear, and did my morning calisthenics.

Then I set a new Save right after, because morning exercise was a chore already.

Okay! Goal for today... it was Sunday, so no work, which was nice. It was also very early in the morning.

Ideally, I wanted to spend the day getting better. I'd done a lot of combat stuff the day before, but there was a lot of room for improvement there, but I also wanted to sharpen my other skills a little.

So I started with the guitar.

I didn't know if there would ever be a time to show off my playing skills, but I could dream, right? Also, it was just a cool, fun hobby. I was finally getting to the point where I could kinda just... play the instrument?

I still had to follow along, and my chord changes needed some practice, but I felt... maybe a little faster? A little more dextrous? Was that a D-ranker thing, or was that just practice?

Jamming out to some punk classics was fun. And knowing that I could Reload at any moment, that the day would last as long as I wanted... yeah, in some ways, it made things less stressful.

Somehow, with only a few pauses to order junk food for delivery, I ended up late at night, laying on my bed with my feet over the sides, plucking away at a song of my own making, the soft tink-tink of my unplugged electric guitar competing with the apartment HVAC.

That was.... Nice.

Still, I Reloaded.

The second loop was French.

That embarrassing mess of a conversation with Louise had lit a fire under my ass. I bought a premium language teaching service and dove in.

That loop wasn't as long. I was super envious of people that could just pick up a language without any effort. I wasn't one of them, that was for damned sure.

I had a headache before noon rolled around, and gave up in the early evening.

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Not a full-on give up. I'd try it again later, but French grammar was just such a convoluted, unintuitive mess that I couldn't wrap my head around it. So many rules, so many more exceptions to those rules.

I think I once had a plan to find and hire a French teacher for a day, run through some practice with them, then loop to before it all? It might not hurt to try that, but I suspected that I wasn't at the level where I needed practice yet, I was still at the 'baby figuring out sentences' level.

My next loop for the day, I decided to spend on more magic practice. For that, I stepped outside, into the backyard of the apartment. It was... kind of a shitty backyard, with an emptied out pool and patio space that had gone overgrown.

The pool had a few feet of stagnant water in it, which was perfect for practicing Shadow Bolt, and the tufts of grass and weeds were decent targets for Grasping Growth.

Unfortunately, seven or eight casts of Shadow Bolt tired me out. I Reloaded and tried Grasping Growth, but my limit was three, maybe four if I really pushed it.

Still, it wasn't bad. I had to get used to casting both faster. Shadow Bolt had been really nice against the orcs. It wasn't as good as a direct offensive ability. The damage was... negligible. But it still smacked, and most mammals didn't like a smack in the face much. As a stealth skill it was better. The bolt was dark, but it still caught the eye and had some orcs turning to see where it went, and I could hit something and make noise further away from me.

Like... tossing a pebble in a shitty stealth game.

Grasping Growth I'd yet to find a great use for, but it did impress the shit out of my neighbours when they'd come out, so that was cool.

I did a few shorter loops practicing Nutrition, but that one... kinda was hard to grasp? I hadn't carved it out yet, and it was very finicky. I decided that I'd impress Dharti with my Grasping Growth first, then see if she couldn't help me learn Nutrition real fast this week.

I might have to look into a second offensive Void spell soon, something to compliment Shadow Bolt.

There generally seemed to be two schools of thought as far as spells went. The first was to generalize and learn as many as possible. That was popular on the corpo side, since they could afford all of the copyrighted spells and having rankers with a large repertoire meant more flexibility. The other side was to learn fewer spells, but to master them to a much greater extent.

The more a spell was used, the better and more efficient it became. Even if that gain in efficiency was in the fractions of a percent.

I figured looping was a good way to do a bit of both?

Unfortunately, when I looked into bespoke spell creation, I immediately felt lost. That shit was complicated. Like, PhD levels of complex. All I knew about topography was that everything was a doughnut, and any spell above level one required an in-depth knowledge of some very complex math.

I'd barely passed any of my math classes, so that was not gonna happen anytime soon.

Reloading, I ran through another half-day-long guitar sesh, this time trying to specifically learn a Punk Pop Lady Killer song from start to finish. I recorded myself, and cringed out of existence as I relistened to it. Yeah, I had most of the notes in the right order, but it was all... off? Not terribly, but I was falsetto karaoke levels of good. More practice would be required, but it was at least fun. This content belongs to N0v3l.Fiɾe.net

Then more French.

Why? Why French? Why did I torture myself so?

Finally, I Reloaded, slid on some sweatpants and a sports bra, and shucked on a nice coat before heading out.

The goal for the next few loops was to suck less at fighting, and that meant heading over to Ctrl-Alt-Delts. Natalie was gonna be there, at least according to her socials, and I wanted to see if couldn't do a repeat of some of my earliest loops, training up my martial arts a little across several loops, picking up some techniques and maybe seeing if that D-rank body was finally starting to kick in.

Time to become the next Bruce Lee, baby!

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