*Knock knock*

  Sighing and half-naked I kicked all the door-blocking shit aside and ripped it open.

  “What?”

  Vivi… looked different. Really really sexy. What the hell had happened? I saw the sun had just set but it hadn’t been that long, like at all.

  “What’s up?” I felt my heart beat in an uncomfortable area.

  She eyed me up and down. Suddenly feeling like a piece of meat, sexy meat actually, I realized that I wasn’t wearing a shirt.

  “Are you settling in okay?”

  I gulped and realized in a rush that I wanted to sleep with her. Badly. I was also incredibly horny. That warred and twisted inside me until my finger brushed against the engagement ring still wrapped around my pinky.

  “No… No. Thank you though. For everything today, showing me around. Saving my ass out there. I- I gotta go.”

  I slammed the door shut and locked it. I left the key inside the lock and when the finality of the lock clicking home didn’t do anything for my… attention, I decided to try headbutting myself against the wall to get myself together. Besides the near concussion, it kind of worked. It hadn’t even been two weeks and I was already thinking like that? I felt like a piece of shit. I was truly a piece of shit. I loved Duck. NO. I love my Duck. She was still alive. What is wrong with me?

  Agh! I’m thinking of Duck again. The emotional gut-twist of desperately missing my Duck twisted the feelings of guilt into some new indescribable emotional pain. I ran to the bathroom as Vivi continued her remote assault on my libido.

  I skipped the hot shower and sat in the tub as I filled it with slightly-too-cold water. I needed to cool my ass off.

  There were lingering thoughts of Viviane… of her naked. Of her rubbing on me, more than she had when we were walking around. Of her rubbing herself on me nak- NO. NO, BAD THOMAS.

  I really didn’t want to think about Vivi right now but ‘not thinking about something’ just made you think about it more. Pink elephant. See? Thinking about a pink elephant. That momentary distraction made me realize something. I just had to think about something else.

  I sighed, I had been trying not to do it, but I knew exactly what would distract me. I’d been putting it off in my so-far failed attempt at a Mental Health Week. That said, after Vivi’s rat-murder-orgy, I was this close to calling it quits on the whole mental health thing altogether and embracing both the suck and the crazy.

  “Display Status.”

  First of all, what a fucking mess my stat page was. An absolute balancing nightmare. It made my brain twist just to try and sort it out. Body, Soul, and Will needed to go up. ASAP.

  Math was not nearly enough to distract me, I wasn’t good enough at it for that to be possible. I dug into my Feats.

  ‘One-two’ sparked a memory and I looked at my sword… Nah, that was stupid.

  “Joe does!”

  Motherfucker. I didn’t like being ‘boy’ed’ and I sure as fuck didn’t like being ‘boi’ed’.

  “Are you gonna tell me what it’s for or are you just focusing on the petty thing right now?”

  I repeated myself, “What is the Feat, ‘Man with a Plan’?”

  I didn’t have a shit attitude. Well, okay maybe sometimes, but only with this fucking angel! And the animals. And the people that killing would solve my problems with. And… Well… No no, fuck him. Fuck him to death. My attitude was fine.

  I almost felt bad for Gabby’s reduced sass, but I repeated ‘fuck gabby’ in my head until that dumb feeling went away. At least I was getting some clearer info. Which just proceeded to piss me off again since if he’d stop being pissy for a damned second maybe I’d know more about it.

  What the hell was that? Chibi was the first thing that came to mind. He was kind of a goodboi. I say ‘kind of’, because presumably, he also had an owner at some point in the past. A former owner that he likely murdered at some point. Regardless, I wouldn't mind not having a deathmatch with that particular beast.

  I was, admirably ignoring Gabe’s depressed shit, as well as paying extra attention to the important bits. It confirmed a few things. Primarily that Will didn’t have to come from the fingers or hands. From personal experience, I already knew that, but I’d still take any evidence that I could get.

  Snapping was… Well, I wasn’t sure what snapping did exactly. From experience and some light-testing, it did make it a bit easier to use my singular light skill; but, especially for my unattuned stuff, I didn’t really notice any significant improvement in either strength or ease of use when snapping my fingers. Definitely no improvement in Fortitude cost. With my Light Affinity skill, it did make the… process? Yeah, the process was definitely easier. Much easier. Maybe snapping was some sort of shortcut… If I could eliminate that completely, I’d have a huge advantage. Not having to snap for my unattuned bursts had proven its worth already, multiple times.

  There was another word I caught… ‘nullify’. Was that something specific to certain spell interactions or was that perhaps a feature of unattuned Will? That could be potentially useful. Scratch that, potentially YUGE.

  So while ‘Clever Boy’ didn’t really tell me anything I didn’t know, it was just kind of nice to have some sort of informational reinforcement on it. Even if my mental health week was in tatters at this point, I should have been practicing that, because, you know, I hadn’t been and I was surrounded by absolute psychos.

  I focused on building Will to fire it out of my back again, but it seemed hesitant to… come out? No. Express itself? That seemed more on the money. If I could get some fucking practice without being nuts-deep in a life-or-death situation, I’d be more than happy to pursue it.

  The Assassination attempt wasn’t going to be the first trap? Yeah, no shit, there are probably a hundred more coming my way at some point. Big shock there.

  “Bastard!!!” Whatever shreds of sympathy I had for the archshithead was GONE. I had been valiantly suppressing it, but that little comment reminded me that the angelic asshole had given me a tramp-stamp. A tramp-stamp! A terrible one too, ‘Friends in Low Places’ gave all sorts of the wrong ideas. God knows what other people would think. Crop-tops and Brittney Spears’ twist-tops were OUT. Permanently.

  I had completely forgotten about it… the tramp-stamp. It was painful to even say in my head. I realized in a rush that I was standing in the sauna-tub now, fist shaking toward the sky and wearing my birthday suit. Ok Tom, keep on moving on. You can’t see it so it doesn’t exist. I sank back down and turned on the heat.

  I debated stopping here but… The little asterisks were kind of annoying me. And by ‘kind of’, I mean triggering every ounce of ‘notification ocd’ I’d ever had in any type of video game, but a million times worse because this was real life. Because you know, it’s the apocalypse, so it’d make a horrible sort of sense for shitty game designers to not push their shitty ‘Journal’ aspects? At least there wasn’t a Lore journal. Though, Lore would actually be ridiculously helpful. Of course, any sort of that would be too good for us heathens.

  I was very much completely okay with that. Joe and I were indeed boys. And the other guys too, whatever their names had been. Dave? Something.

  Did… Gabby just ‘/’ me? Lazy! Lazy writing.

  When was that? Wait. The fox?!

  “It was my shotgun! It wasn’t ‘shit’.” Anyone wants to borrow some lead, they are more than welcome. 0% APR interest-free lifetime loan. I grinned, I’d only collect it after they were dead. Wait, that didn’t make total sense but the first half was cool enough. Mentally saved into my one-liner file.

  Make your Own Luck: It’s easier to be lucky when you make it yourself.

  Terribly, stupidly vague. Like most ‘luck’ shit in video games. Glad that feature got ported into RL.

  “Huh?” What was this referring to? Oh, that’s right, when Gramps tried to kill me. Ugh. PITA. And now that acronym made me hungry again. I really needed to check these regularly, mental health week be damned.

  Asking about *Delayed Gratification* didn’t give me an answer and I didn’t know why it was asterisked on both ends of the Feat. Regardless, I didn’t really want to play a guessing game at the moment. I got out and laid in bed, still kind of wet, which seemed like a pretty bad thing to do on my mental health week, but I was beyond caring. Maybe that was the key to mental health, not giving a shit.

  That sounded wrong but I didn’t care enough to get back up. As I was laying there I remembered my Will-Blade, name-pending, and decided to try it out. I couldn’t form it infinitely, but I kind of had the feeling that it restored the ‘charges’ each day. When I closed my hand into a grip it formed easily twice in a row. It was somewhat costly from a Fortitude aspect, somewhere around 2 points. I tried to form it again but just ended up bursting Will from my hand. The long day as well as the drop in Fortitude from the Will-Blades sent me quickly to sleep.