Thickenings

**Juniper meets the most beautiful girl he has ever seen.**

## Synopsis

Juniper investigates his character sheet and speculates on the nature of the game he's found himself in. He finds that he has two skill points, which he places into PHY—this causes PHY to increase by one, and for its three subskills (POW, SPD and END) to each also increase by one.

While escaping the undead, he unlocks ***"Dodge"***, brings ***One-handed Weapons*** to level 3, and brings ***Athletics*** to level 1. Ignoring another girl being chased by guys with pink mohawks and a giant creature made of corpses brings ***Cowardice*** to level 2—this in turn gives him a -1 debuff to both WIS and POI.

Once the coast is clear, Juniper continues towards the town. There, he finds a mechanics shop—and inside the shop, he finds the corpse of one of the guys with pink mohawks. He sneaks further into the building, unlocking ***"Deception"***.

At a workbench inside the back room is an exceptionally attractive girl—so attractive that Juniper can't help but feel as though she's been *engineered*.

The girl points a gun at Juniper, who's been taken completely off guard. She interrogates him, and he tells her that he's just a harmless student who was in trouble for distributing pamphlets—levelling ***Deception***. This prompts the girl to ask him which athenaeum he's from; Juniper recognises the word from one of his *Dungeons & Dragons* campaigns, in which the party had tracked a goblin ranger through the abandoned Athenaeum of Quills and Blood. The girl informs him that the pink-haired criminals are from the "Fuchsia Coterie"—part of the "Color Riot"—and that they've been dropped into the "Risen Lands" with a mission.

Juniper agrees to help the girl, getting a new quest in the process—***"Seven Bells for Seven Hells"***.

## Featured characters

* Juniper Smith
* Greg *(mentioned only)*
* Amaryllis Penndraig

## Quotes

After Greg had made his comment at one of our D&D games, my nickname had been ‘default’ for a while, at least until I stopped pretending to find it funny, and even after that my friends would use similar lines to trash talk me, saying that I was “the most generic man alive”, “a white bread with skim milk motherfucker”, or “the human equivalent of vanilla ice cream”. Not that I was any less of an asshole to them.

—**Juniper** reflects on Greg's opinion of his appearance.

“Don’t move,” she said.
“Buh,” I said. I’d wanted to say ‘but’, to start some sentence, but it caught in my throat.
***Skill unlocked: Romance!***

—**Amaryllis** and **Juniper** meet cute.
## Notes

### Real-world references

* When looking over his character sheet, Juniper compares the system it uses to the 5th edition of *Dungeons & Dragons* and *Pathfinder*. He later mentions *Call of Cthulhu*.
* The word "athenaeum" is, as Juniper explains, taken from the name of the Greek goddess Athena—associated with wisdom, handicraft and warfare.
* The quest name "Seven Bells for Seven Hells" is a dual reference:
	+ Time on ships is measured using a ship's bell—over the course of each four-hour watch, the bell is struck every half hour. Eight bells, therefore, signifies the end of a watch, and is occasionally used in obituaries as a nautical euphemism for "finished". The idea of beating "seven bells" out of someone comes from this idea—to beat someone within an inch of their eighth bell.
	+ "Seven hells", meanwhile, is a common motif in fantasy settings, appearing in *Game of Thrones*, *Dota 2* and *Final Fantasy*. The concept of seven hells may be linked to the seven deadly sins. As it later turns out, there are far more than seven hells in *Worth the Candle*...