Taylor and the Twisted Game Part 20

"There's something seriously wrong with the designers," Taylor muttered as she read the notes on the quest one of her puppets was working on.

Leet looked up from the book on magical theory that Skitter was letting him read. "What did they do this time?"

"One of the quests in the Blasted Lands involves blasting goats off cliffs with a goat punting device," Taylor replied as Ember walked into the lounge.

Leet laughed. "I remember that quest, you should bring the gauntlet back, Dragon can probably figure out how to reverse engineer it so we can use it on monsters or annoying brutes."

"That would be awesome!" Sherrel squealed, thinking about all of the fun things she could do with a device that tossed people a couple of hundred feet.

Dennis pulled his stylus away from Sherrel's back before she wiggled enough that he made a mistake with her tattoo. "No moving."

"Sorry," Sherrel apologized. "I was thinking about the trade guild."

"Let it go," Taylor suggested, "it's not like they can stop people from using the auction house or the mail and we're going to be back in the bay in a week."

Ember glanced between Skitter and Leet then focused on the half naked girl sprawled on the couch that was getting a tattoo from Clock. "Assuming we can max everything out in a week, I'm not looking forward to maxing out my mining."

Leet glanced at Skitter. "I bet Skitter could help you max out your mining in twenty minutes."

Ember pulled her attention off Hyper's panty clad ass and looked at Leet. "Not a chance, I need over a hundred points."

"What are you willing to bet?" Leet asked as Kid Win and Vista walked into the lounge behind Ember.

"Table dance?" Ember offered, fairly sure that they couldn't pull it off and not particularly worried about paying up on the off chance they could help her max out her skills in a reasonable amount of time.

Kid Win glanced between Ember and Hyper, not quite sure where he was supposed to be looking as Hyper wasn't wearing much of anything and Ember's outfit was practically see through. "What did we walk into?"

Leet glanced at the two wards. "I was trying to con Ember out of some extra pocket change. Skitter mentioned that she has a couple of dozen puppets scattered around mining and Ember was complaining about her mining skill."

"Dozens?" Taylor asked with amusement. "Try hundreds, I've got a dedicated team of puppets farming Scarlet Monastery for silk and two dozen puppets in the workshop turning out puppets as fast as I can make them so I can park a puppet next to every mineral and herb node in the low level zones outside of Elwynn Forest."

"Doesn't that get boring?" Vista asked as Amy walked into the lounge with Admin.

"Not really," Taylor replied as she opened a void portal in front of her, placing the other end next to one of the puppets she'd sent to Darkshore. "The puppets can use my resource tracking which means they can wander around killing monsters while waiting for the nodes to respawn. I have a couple of dozen puppets scattered around digging up archeology sites and the rest are working on quests or claiming land and building structures to improve my construction skills."

"That's because you're crazy," Amy teased as she walked over to check out Sherrel's tattoo.

Admin shook her head. [It's not crazy when you can multitask.]

"Speaking of crazy, do you think you can hack a location restriction on a quest item if I turn it into a symbiote?" Taylor asked as she had her puppet walk through with the cloak she wanted Amy to look at.

"I can certainly try," Amy replied, happy to have a distraction from dealing with her father and Armsmaster.

Taylor turned the cloak into a symbiote then handed it to Amy. "Here."

"Thanks," Amy replied as she checked the symbiote, trying to figure out how everything worked.

"What does it do?" Ember asked.

"It turns you into a catgirl and gives you access to a decent stealth ability, unfortunately the cloak only lasts twenty minutes which means we're going to have to grab Tats and move the ability to something else," Taylor explained as she had the puppet hand her the bag she'd filled with herbs and animal skins. She dropped the bag into her bag of holding then handed the puppet an empty netherweave bag.

"Did you make netherweave bags for all of your puppets?" Leet asked in surprise.

Taylor shook her head as she sent her puppet back through the portal. "No, but she's one of the Netherweave puppets so I'm not all that worried about anything in Darkshore killing her."

"That reminds me, what do you want for some netherweave bags?" Chris asked, figuring he might as well check.

Taylor pulled four imbued netherweave bags out of her bag of holding and tossed them to Kid Win. "Have fun, I have a decent amount of cloth and spider webs from running Karazhan."

"Thanks," Chris replied.

"If you're giving bags away, can I have some?" Vista asked hopefully, wanting to replace her smaller bags.

Taylor let the portal close and redirected two of her puppets in the tailoring workshop to start making bags. "You'll have to pick them up from the workshop, I'm out."

Dennis finished the runic tattoo then stood up and stretched. "That should do it."

"Thanks, I was getting tired of buying reagents for my slow fall spell," Sherrel replied as she sat up, giving everyone a nice look at her generous breasts. "Do you want me to run you through a dungeon or something?"

"I wouldn't mind some company," Dennis replied with a grin, not even pretending that he wasn't looking at the catgirl's breasts.

"Cool," Sherrel replied with a grin, appreciating the attention and having nothing better to do until she picked up more ingredients and engineering schematics.

Amy grinned when she managed to remove the location restriction without breaking the symbiote. "Okay, I broke the location restriction, let's find Tats before the cloak vanishes."

"Sounds good..." Taylor trailed off as one of her puppets finishing putting together an archeology collection and received an ancient looking tome bound in some type of snake hide or possibly dragonhide and a curse. "Huh, one of my puppets just got cursed."

"With what?" Leet asked.

"Nymphomania and unnatural rage," Taylor replied as she examined the book's description. "On the upside, if my puppet has sex with thirty people while holding the book, I'll get an inscription schematic for cursed books and break the seal on the book."

Vista shook her head. "I'm not sure that's worth it."

Dennis glanced at Vista. "That's because you don't have inscription."

"Are you having any trouble controlling your puppet?" Amelia asked Taylor.

"Not yet," Taylor replied as she opened a portal to the courtyard where Tats was working on enchanting. "Tats, can you step through the portal?" she asked using one of her puppets in the enchanting workshop that was working on disenchanting a bag filled with 'useless' magical items.

"Sure," Lisa replied as she stepped through the void portal. "What did you need?"

"We need a magical quality moved to something that's going to last," Amy explained as she handed Tats the symbiote and one of her cat trinkets.

Lisa looked at the descriptions for the cloak then used her power to move the magic from the cloak to the cat figurine. "I'm going to want a copy."

"You and everyone else," Leet said as he went back to reading Skitter's book on magic, curious if there was a way to modify the spells they'd learned from the trainers because some of them could stand some adjustments.

Taylor glanced at Hyper's tail which was swishing back and forth lazily. "I'll talk to Noelle about it when she gets back from running Stratholme, we're going to need extra trinkets unless we want to get stuck as catgirls."

"Catgirls are awesome," Sherrel replied with a grin.

"I can't complain," Dennis said with a grin before looking at Skitter. "Can we get a portal to Stratholme?"

Taylor opened a void portal to just outside the dungeon. "Best of luck."

"We're immune to shadow damage and we've got gear that makes legendaries look like vendor trash, we'll be fine," Dennis assured her then stepped through the portal, figuring it would be a good test case before he stepped up his game and tried some of the harder dungeons.

Sherrel grinned then walked through the portal, looking forward to cutting loose and practicing her spells in a 'safe' dungeon setting before she tried something harder.

"I should probably do the same," Chris said before following Hyper, figuring he'd jump into a different version of the dungeon and work on leveling.

Lisa glanced between Skitter and the portal to Stratholme. "Did you need something else or can I get back to work?"

Taylor shook her head. "Nope, we're good."

"Cool, let me know if you find anything else." Lisa stepped through the portal back to the workshop.

"I need to grab the bags," Vista said as she headed out of the room.

"Let me know when you want a portal," Taylor offered as she closed the portals she'd opened.

"Thanks," Vista replied as she headed towards the tailoring workshop with a spring in her steps, glad that she had people willing to help.

"What would I have to give you to open a bunch of portals so I can boost my mining?" Ember asked, curious what Skitter would charge her.

Taylor considered the question for a couple of seconds before realizing there was something Ember could help her with. "How about an hour of trying on clothes so I can pick up more transmogrification patterns? I'm curious what your flaw will do to some of the higher level material."

"Sure," Ember replied with a grin, more than happy to spend an hour trying on costumes if it meant she didn't have to spend the rest of the week flying around so she could level her mining and crafting skills.

Amy activated her cat trinket and turned herself into a catgirl. "How…" she trailed off when she looked down and realized she was naked. She quickly hit the icon for her new invisibility skill and vanished from sight. "I should have expected that," she mused as she glanced around the fog shrouded room, barely able to see her ghost-like companions. "You're barely visible and everything is covered in a light fog but we should still be able to fight."

"It should make clearing the bosses easier." Taylor grinned when Admin cast her detect invisibility spell and her second head could see Amy as a ghost-like outline.

Amy turned and focused on Admin when she went from a ghost-like outline to her normal appearance. "You cast detect invisibility, didn't you?"

Admin gave her a thumbs up. [It's a useful spell.]

Taylor grinned at Amy. "It's useful."

Amy opened her training menu and grinned when she saw her new invisibility skill on the list of things she could teach. She selected the ability and taught Skitter. "We're going to have to see if you can teach the invisibility skill while you're a catgirl."

Taylor checked her skills page when she noticed Amelia's smug grin. "Probably. We should probably go through the various racial skills while we're thinking about it. Having the ability to shadowmeld would be nice."

"It would certainly make things easier," Amy replied as she canceled the catgirl buff and everything went back to normal. "I should probably get back to working on my alchemy, do you have extra plants I can have?"

"Yep," Taylor replied then grinned when one of her puppets finished a puppet and she got a notice informing her that she'd unlocked an upgrade for her puppet schematic. "Nice, I just upgraded my puppet schematic, I can include mana gems or cores to give them a mana pool."

Leet looked up from the magic book. "Just those two or mana infused items?"

Taylor double checked the schematic. "Technically, it just says mana infused objects and lists golem cores and mana gems as examples, why?"

"Because you can probably use some of the crystals from the blood elf dungeons," Leet suggested, figuring they'd be easy to collect.

Amy shook her head. "Let's avoid sticking a bunch of tainted crystals in puppets she's going to bring to life, especially since the Curator core probably holds more mana."

"You're assuming the corruption would survive the crafting process and the Curator core would require running Karazhan every time you want to make a puppet," Leet pointed out, fairly sure they could cleanse the crystals.

Amy glanced at Skitter then focused on Leet. "Do you really want to chance Skitter going nuts?"

"Not really," Leet admitted after reconsidering the risk and the reward.

[You could always have Amy attach the core to a stick and transmogrify it into a symbiote club so that she can tweak it before changing it back], Admin suggested.

Taylor laughed. "I like the idea but turning the cores into symbiotes so Noelle can copy them would probably force us to figure out how to charge them."

"You won't know unless you try," Amy pointed out, curious what she'd learn.

"If you just want a mana pool, does it matter if they're charged?" Ember asked thoughtfully.

"It's worth running some tests," Taylor mused as she opened a portal to one of her puppets that was standing in front of a silver mine that had just respawned. "Step through and mine the node then step back through and I'll send you to the next node."

"Cool," Ember replied, then jumped through the void portal.

Taylor pulled a branch out of her bag of holding and some thread then pulled out the core she'd picked up when she'd 'killed' the Maiden in Karazhan and started tying it to the end of the stick, so she could turn it into a club. "Don't start, it just has to work."

"I wasn't going to say anything," Leet lied, unable to keep from smirking.

"What are you going to use for gems?" Amy asked, doing slightly better than Leet at hiding her amusement.

"Epic gems or maybe gems of legendary power if I can find any," Taylor replied as she had one of her puppets pull up her transmute menu, toss in ten of the highest level and rarest fish she had into the box then hit the button to transmute everything. "Let's see, ten high quality fish that a minion pulled out of the pond, one alchemy transmute and I have a bag of gems."

"That's cheating," Leet said as Ember stepped back out of the void portal carrying her pickaxe.

"It's not my fault I can basically ignore the transmute cooldown," Taylor replied as she closed the portal and opened another portal in front of Ember to a gold node. She grinned when her puppet opened the bag of gems and saw the large collection of gems. "I either got insanely lucky or my loot perk works on the bag of gems because I just got fourteen uncommon gems, three rare gems and a Kraken's eye out of the bag."

"Nice," Leet offered as he went back to reading.

Ember shook her head and stepped through the portal, wishing she'd had the option to pick a more useful unique ability.

Taylor finished securing the Maiden's core to the stick then transmogrified it into a symbiote club and handed it to Amy after looking at the description. "A club made of twisted flesh that has been imbued with holy fire by the titans."

Amy smiled as she started poking at the club and realized that it actually was useful for storing magic. "Give me a couple of minutes and I can probably duplicate the club."

"Go for it," Taylor replied as she had her minions start transmuting her high grade fish into bags of gems so she could work on her jewelcrafting and craft her epic puppets of doom.

[What are you planning on doing with the cursed book?] Admin asked.

"No idea, I'm trying to figure out if breaking the curse is worth it," Taylor's second head admitted in a whisper.

[You get a schematic for cursed books and you can unlock an ancient tome which might have something useful in it. It also gives you a chance to have fun with your cute minions, is there a downside?] Admin asked as she turned and headed for the hallway as Ember stepped out of the void portal.

"It's just weird," Taylor's second head replied in a whisper as Taylor opened another portal for Ember and they left the lounge, feeling rather conflicted about sex because of the trio's attempts to ruin her life.

"Problems?" Amy asked after Ember walked through the new portal.

"No, I'm trying to figure out the best way to deal with the curse on the book," Taylor admitted a touch reluctantly, a bit embarrassed about the whole thing.

"You have cute puppets and maids, I'm sure you'll figure it out," Amy replied with a grin as she pulled a wiggling fish out of her inventory and started duplicating the club.

"Probably," Taylor agreed as she opened a portal in front of the girl with the cursed book then had her walk through. She pulled a netherweave puppet out of her inventory and activated it then cast her Red Riding Hood spell on it, turning it into a naked teenage girl. "Any idea how we're supposed to block teleportation or hearthstones yet?" she asked, trying to change the subject.

"Unfortunately, the book doesn't have an index and the author tended to wander," Leet complained without looking up from the book he was reading.

"You probably can't block hearthstones or at least it's going to be annoying," Amy warned them as she added another fish to her makeshift club.

"Figured I'd check," Taylor replied as she used Amy's transformation skill on the puppet to change her into a void elf. She opened her training menu and taught the girl the portal and invisibility skills then sent her through the portal after handing her a wand. She closed the extra portal then sent the cursed girl into the hall to find the maids, figuring they'd be a good place to start, mostly because they were giddy at the idea of getting her in bed and might have some idea what they were doing.

Leet glanced up from Skitter's book when Ember walked back into the room. "Are you getting points?"

Ember nodded. "Yeah, my skill just turned yellow."

"That means we should be able to jump to mithril," Taylor mused as she closed the portal then opened another portal to a mithril mine, wanting to make sure Ember stayed in the orange skill range so she'd get points more consistently and get done faster. "Let me know if you can't mine it yet."

"Sure," Ember replied as she stepped through the portal.

"Any progress?" Leet asked Amy.

"Maybe," Amy replied as she handed both of the clubs to Skitter. "I think I managed to duplicate the mana capacity but not the mana."

"We'll have to run some tests," Taylor mused as she stuck the clubs in her inventory then pulled a stick and the core she'd extracted from the Curator out of her bag of holding and started making another club.

"Can I cut your extra gems when you're past the point where you'd get skill points for it?" Leet asked, fairly sure she wouldn't have an objection.

"That's the plan," Taylor replied with a grin, not seeing a point in wasting skill increases if they could reasonably avoid it.

"What do you need to max out the rest of your skills?" Amy asked, not sure how far he'd gotten before he ran out of resources.

Leet glanced at the void portal. "Same thing as Ember for mining and a bunch of outland metal for engineering and dust and shards for enchanting. Speaking of enchanting, have you considered using an enchanting shard as a gem?"

"Not since I unlocked mana infused objects," Taylor mused as she had one of her minions in the enchanting shop grab a bag filled with shards and dust and head for the tailoring workshop to run some tests. "I'll have to run some tests."

"That's the spirit," Leet replied with a grin as he went back to reading, looking forward to seeing what they came up with.

Taylor dropped her completed club into her transmogrification box and turned it into a symbiote club then handed it to Amy. "Here."

"Thanks," Amy replied as she checked the club's biology, trying to figure out the differences between the mana storing club and the club imbued with a titan's fire. "We should probably get Tats to combine them."

"Sure, that gives me a chance to hunt down the spell thread schematic," Taylor replied as she pulled her phone out of her inventory and pulled up the tailoring webpage so she could try to figure out where she was supposed to go for her tailoring quests.