The Outlands

Now that all of the tasks that had piled up while Tess was on her honeymoon had been taken care of, it was time for her to sit down and properly re-arrange her Attributes. By the looks of it, she now had sixty core slots and Attribute slots, as well as nine User Fundamental and attendant slots.

The numbers were a little higher than they had been when Amy had checked up on her, but she had been told to expect that; she was still building her nascent Domain, and it was likely that the process would take a couple of decades to finalize. In the meantime, she was to expect that certain aspects of Monster Breeder would remain in flux, particularly in the next month or so as she got the brunt of the changes finished.

She still didn't really feel like she was doing this herself, though; her Worship was near-constantly empty nowadays, yes, but other than that it just kind of felt like things she had thought of on a whim were being breathed to life. Yes, she had been told that this was normal for someone who was as in-tune with Worship as she supposedly was, but it still felt odd.

Regardless, the fact of the matter was that she had a lot of work to do; not only had the number of her Attribute slots nearly doubled in size, but Skills she obtained from cores no longer degraded, meaning much of what was currently in there was pointless. So, she started off by placing all of those Skills into one of the cores she was using as Attribute storage.

As she began removing them, she was pleased to find that the five or so minutes it took to remove an Attribute from a slot had been reduced to only around ten seconds, another convenience she had been afforded. And, since the process was automatic once she began it, she could stack as many removals as she wanted, meaning she had gained the capability to swap in and out large portions of her abilities in combat.

Or, she could once she was actually able to fill her slots. She had twelve Skills in her slots, and their removal left her with a whopping forty-two slots to fill, something she wasn't sure she was even capable of at the moment. Or, at least, not capable of doing so productively; there were plenty of junk Attributes that could fill space, but she didn't particularly feel like stuffing her slots just for the sake of having them full.

And, as she began moving things around, she noticed yet another new feature; when she focused on an Attribute, she got a sort of…sense of what Attributes it could combine with. And, looking at some of the options she had, she was pretty sure that there were some new combinations. At the very least, she didn't think that more than two Attributes could be combined before, but now they could.

Tess took a moment to pull up the window, focusing on taking a picture of it to send to her mother.

Tess stood up and moved to the center of the living room, prompting Ellie to give her a curious look. "What's up?"

"Testing a new Attribute for Mom. I seem to have expanded whatever system was in place for combining Attributes, and this one in particular needs space."

Ellie put her phone down, watching attentively. "You've got me curious now. What is it?"

Tess activated the Attribute, looking down in fascination as her legs began to change, becoming longer and thinner, her pants melting into her form as a spider's abdomen grew behind her. It almost felt like she was on one of those moving sidewalks, except it was just the area around her pelvis moving. She felt more of her legs make contact with the floor as they sprouted from her abdomen, and then the whole thing was over, having taken no more than a couple of seconds.

"Woah." Ellie said. "We're gonna have to play around with this."

Tess twisted and turned to look back at herself, experimentally moving about. "No difficulties moving or anything…but it's kind of weird being tall again."

"I think you're only a little taller than you used to be, surely it can't be that weird." Ellie replied, smirking.

"Really?" Tess asked. "Guess I'm just too used to seeing this house from my new height. Uh, this give you any answers, Mom?"

"Looks like Silky's personality is kinda coming from me?" Tess said, deactivating the Attribute and returning to her spot on the couch. "Sort of? It's complicated, but Amy says it's expected to be working like this, and she guesses that if Silky had the Attribute that she'd end up looking similar to me because of that."

"Ah, good." Ellie said. "Anything else cool you've found so far?"

"Well, all the ear and tail Attributes have merged into one that lets me pick from any normal animal."

"You don't mind if I make some requests later, do you?" Ellie asked.

"I figured you would." Tess chuckled. "Most of the new stuff just saves space, though. Like, I have a few different camouflage Attributes that were merged together, all the elemental affinities were merged together…you get the drift. Honestly, I'm becoming more and more certain that I'm not actually going to be able to fill all my slots with useful stuff for some time yet."

"We'll have to do research into bosses with notable abilities." Ellie said. "We'll want to aim for those going forward."

Maven walked into the room, and Tess could clearly smell the soap from the shower she had just taken. Tess had, finally, decided that it was time to put on the smell-strengthening Attribute she had; at this point she was almost fully used to her tremorsense, and now that she had more space, she had decided that she needed to get used to a sharper sense of smell, too.

"Are we talking about Monster Breeder?" Maven asked, sitting down on the couch next to Ellie.

"Yeah, I'm not going to be able to fill all the space for Attributes I have now." Tess confirmed. "With Skills not taking slots and a lot of regular Attributes being consolidated, I just have way too much free space."

"Well, that's far from the worst problem to have." Maven replied. "I'm not doing anything right now, so I'll do some deeper research on the dungeons around our level range and see if there's anything that jumps out at me."

Tess gave her wife a smile. "Thanks." She said. "I'm going to finish up with what I have here, then I'll help, okay?"

After her wives indicated their assent, Tess turned her attention back to her list of Attributes, combining those that had useful combinations, then taking notes on what she had, what she wanted for future attendants, and what would be actually useful for herself. Unfortunately, she had gotten in the habit of taking anything remotely useful off of cores and stashing them within other cores to store them, so even though she had only thirty or so cores in her at the moment, there were more Attributes to go through than just that number indicated.

Fortunately, the only cores in her bag were those from the savage dungeon, the rest having gone to Alice to pay for the house, so she wouldn't have much more to go through than what she had on her. Even so, there was still at least half an hour of work remaining, so she buckled down, and got to it.