Explorer of Edregon

In typical fashion, Vin had spent all day working on his latest spell and had completely lost track of time. While Lumel made her desires known, she hadn't ended up coming back until late into the night, and thus she silently agreed to wait until morning to make sure they didn't risk running into another one of those massive bear monsters while trying to move through the fragment in the dark.

Despite his best efforts, Lumel refused to talk about whatever had happened during her day with the capillans. Whatever it was must have been bad, however, as the pulmon actually came over and curled up with him on his small cloud bed, seemingly uncaring about the fact that Scule and Reginald were in the same room. To his credit, Scule didn't utter so much as a peep after seeing how distraught Lumel had been, and Reginald had done his best to rub against her face and show his support before curling up once again beside Scule for the night.

Come morning, Lumel continued to refuse to talk about what had made her so upset. At the very least, while she was a bit more quiet and reserved than usual, she was excited to hear all about his newest spell when Vin told her about what he and Scule had spent the last day doing.

Evidently, she was a big fan of him attempting to learn spells that didn't blow him up when he inevitably made a mistake.

Rather than grab breakfast from the village or even tell Forpurt they were heading out, Lumel took his hand and used Mass Dimensional Shift to teleport them all away from the village after they'd strapped on their snow shoes once more. Vin directed her with Mental Map, and after a few more jumps with a small handful of breaks to recover her mana, they'd made it all the way back to the sanctity of the Underside.

"Alright, I think Reginald and I are going to go show Bill some of this capillan hair and see if he can't discover any alchemical uses for it I may have missed," Scule said loudly, before leaning into Vin's ear and lowering his voice. "Whatever happened, you better figure it out and make her feel better. Just know I'm always here to help enact whatever revenge you think might be needed."

Having said his part, Scule hopped onto Reginald and directed him toward the Earther dungeon, lazily waving over his head before they vanished down the corridor. As soon as the two of them had gone, Vin felt his hands start to sweat as he tried to figure out how to broach the topic Lumel had clearly been avoiding ever since she'd gotten back. While the two of them got along fantastically, he still wasn't all that great when it came to social stuff like this.

Thankfully, he didn't end up having to do anything at all.

"I'm sorry about wanting to head back so quickly," Lumel began, tugging her hood a bit more over her face as she spoke. "The capillans… It ended up being worse than I expected."

"What happened?" Vin asked gently, taking one of her hands. "Did others react like Rickten?"

"No, no more screaming at the very least," she said, chuckling weakly. "Though that probably would have been better. Most of the people I tried to talk to reacted similarly to how that Shaman did. Without 'Trusted' Forpurt around to see their reactions, they didn't even try to hide their disgust or horror whenever the wind blew my hood back enough for them to catch a glimpse of my face."

"Lumel…" Vin started, his heart reaching out to the poor mage who'd dealt with this for the past few months. Lumel was more interested in other cultures and people than anyone he'd met on Edregon up until now, yet she'd been forced to deal with so many adverse reactions to people simply catching a glimpse of her pulmon biology. If anything, he was shocked that she still managed to keep trying all this time.

"It's alright," she said, offering him a weak smile. "It's nothing I'm not used to. It just gets tiring after a while, you know? I can't help that my people look so dramatically different from everyone else. If I had a way to change how I look, I'd use it, in a heartbeat."

"You shouldn't say that," he said, praying he wasn't about to say something stupid that would make Lumel angry with him. "Just because a few idiots can't see beyond what you look like doesn't mean you should change who you are."

"I know you're just trying to make me feel better, and I appreciate it, Vin, I really do. But it's not just a few idiots," Lumel said, sighing as she stared up at the roof of the Underside. "It's everywhere I go. This isn't a matter of me feeling insecure or not liking how I look, this is a matter of my people seemingly being the only race in the entire universe that have transparent skin. Of course everyone else is going to freak out when they see under my hood, how could I blame them? I grew up thinking seeing the constant movements of muscles and pulsing of blood moving throughout the body was normal. Imagine my surprise when I left my fragment for the first time only to discover that wasn't the case one bit."

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Vin didn't know what to say, so he simply stood there, holding her hand in his own. He wasn't the savviest of men when it came to relationships, and he'd be the first to admit he didn't have all that much experience, so he figured total and complete honesty would probably serve him best here.

"I can't pretend like I know exactly what you're going through… but I'd have to be blind not to see how much you're hurting," he said slowly, choosing his words with particular care. "More than anything, I want you to understand that regardless of what others think or say, I think there are plenty of beautiful things about you, and you never have to change how you look for my sake. That said, I certainly have no right to tell you what you should or shouldn't do with your own body. If you decide you want to start searching for some way to change how you look, maybe just temporarily to start, I'd be happy to try and help. Only if that's something you want."

"You don't need to act like you're swimming around broken coral," Lumel giggled, giving him a warm smile and finally pulling her hood down again like she usually did when it was just the two of them. "It is something I want. I like how I look and I'm not ashamed of being a pulmon by any means, but seeing as I live up on the surface now, I need to start being able to interact with people without giving them a heart attack or making them sick to their stomachs. It's just like prestiging into a new class. Change isn't always inherently a bad thing. And I'm not so superficial as to not see the pros and cons of adjusting the way I look. Remember, I'm a learned mage, not some Escort who values their looks above all else."

"Where would you even start looking for something like that?" Vin asked, racking his brain. Now that Lumel had made it quite clear finding a method of being able to interact with other people on the surface was something she wanted, he'd move heaven and earth to try and help her. "Maybe Theodore might be able to help us? He has his Adaptive Attire and Public Persona abilities. Those are the only ones I can think of that might fit what you're looking for."

"Trying to adapt passives and Capstones into runic formations is said to be all but impossible," Lumel said, squeezing his hand. "I appreciate you jumping right into trying to help me solve my problems, but I don't want to distract you from all the things you already have to work on. I'm more than a capable mage, give me some time to investigate on my own first. If I run out of leads, then I'll come to you and ask for help."

"If that's what you want, then alright," Vin said, attempting to force his mind to grind to a halt and stop trying to come up with potential ideas. "Just know I'm always here to help."

"I know." Brushing her gel-like hand against his cheek, Lumel leaned up and gave him a tender kiss that conveyed more emotion than words ever could. Once they broke away, she gave him a big hug, pressing her face into his chest. "Seriously, Vin, thank you for being so understanding of everything. I know this can't be an easy subject."

"No it is not," he said, laughing nervously as she tilted her head to grin up at him.

"Well for what it's worth, I think you're doing a great job." Finally letting go of him, Lumel arched her back as she stretched, before letting out a big sigh and looking far better than she had a few minutes ago. "Alright, it feels good to have a concrete goal to work toward other than the spell I'm currently working on. I'll admit, I'd been pushing so hard for that level 40 prestige that after hitting it, I somewhat felt a bit empty inside with nothing to focus on. There's the level 60 prestige, of course, but that's so far away it seems silly to make that one of my main goals at the moment."

"Is it really that far away?" Vin asked, trying to run the numbers in his head. "I mean, everyone talks about how much leveling slows down after the second prestige, but I'm already level 42. It doesn't seem to be slowing down that dramatically, if you ask me."

"Didn't you say yourself that one of those levels was basically entirely from seeing the World Eaters? From the strange, grand arcane discovery you made surrounding them combined with them being an epic monster?"

"Okay, fair point," he conceded, shivering at the thought of the World Eaters once more. The way he'd seen the hunger contained within the beings of flesh and blood and mana… He still wasn't even entirely sure what that supposed grand discovery he'd made even was, but the System had clearly felt as though he deserved some sort of massive reward for it. "Still, at the rate I'm going, I could see myself hitting level 60 in maybe another few months. Just seems fast compared to what everyone keeps saying."

"Vin, I think you're great, but you're a bit dense at times," Lumel said, unable to keep herself from laughing at his shocked expression. "Edregon is basically the optimal situation you could have possibly found yourself in. Going from Explorer, to Magical Explorer, to Adventurer of the Arcane in a world with so much to discover… It's basically the same as throwing a talented warrior into an unending stream of battles. Provided they survive, they're going to level up far quicker than everyone else. You're the exception to the rule. Even so, I still think leveling isn't going to be quite so easy as you seem to think going forward. But only time will tell."

"I'll admit I'm a little scared having no idea what bottleneck the Gods have chosen to use for the level 60 prestige, but I guess there's no sense in worrying over it," Vin said, scratching the back of his head as he thought. "If level 20 was being worthy of one's class, and level 40 was embodying one's class… who knows what level 60 will entail."

"Apparently, you'll find out in only a month or two," Lumel teased, getting a snort out of him. "Regardless, like you said, no need to worry about that for now. Why don't we head back to Terra and see what we missed while we were gone?"

"That's probably for the best," Vin sighed, walking hand in hand with her toward the dungeon that would lead them back to Edregon proper. "At the very least, with Extinguish in my back pocket, I can actually do something now if we show up only to find the entire town engulfed in flames."