[SS 2.54] Every Waking Moment (Part 1/4) (Patreon)

Ambidextral Mastery truly was an incredible Skill, and Angelica had been fortunate enough to get it at Lv.7, so she never had to experience and toil with it at its basest form. She’d never tried to cultivate her left hand’s abilities, and her legs rarely did more than move her, but just from life experience that likely accounted for most of the initial boost. Some might have come from her brief stint as a millipede with her oodles of legs, but the second largest contributor was likely her wings. Though she’d only had them for a few days, and there was a steep learning curve, she was getting used to manipulating them as extra hands when her claws as a Puck couldn’t be relied upon.

And it was through her wings that the bulk of her training with the new Skill took place. First, though, how she’d been using her left hand took precedence. The entire time that Angelica was drawing Merlina’s Boutique, her left hand had been committed to art as well—no surprises there. Though, regrettably, it wasn’t in service to the comic. Initially, she’d want to relegate her left-hand to the backgrounds and less critical details, but even with the Skill, even at Lv.7, it just wasn’t up to her quality standards.

The split focus wasn’t the problem. That was definitely the best part of the Skill. It was genuinely as if she had two brains, one to operate each hand. Both had her undivided attention, though running her actual mind to the max was undoubtedly what had been building up her fatigue. Her left hand just didn’t have the dexterity and years of experience for the muscle-memory when compared to the right. But it was undeniably better than before, and as she improved the Skill and her extremity’s natural grace, it would only get better.

For now, however, she was forcing it to perform drawing drills on her old tablet and computer. Fortunately, her desk had enough room for that and the new laptop, so she was working nonstop with both hands the entire time, holding a stylus in each. Annoyingly, her eyes were still a bit of a problem. She could mostly focus on her laptop, with her peripheral vision serving as enough feedback for the drills. But anytime she needed to change her canvas or select a specific setting that wasn’t programmed into one of her stylus’s buttons, she had to give it a proper glance. 

It took a little bit, but she eventually got used to the workflow of dividing her vision. Now she had a greater appreciation and envy for Gawk’s omniscient Skills. Maybe there was something she could get that would naturally increase her field of vision as well. There were a couple ideas she had about how Transfiguration could help as well, but they would have to come after she was less tired and had more experience in morphing her base forms.

Because with her wings, it already felt like she was stretching the Skill to its current capabilities. Angelica had enough practice with Transfiguration that she could become entirely different humans, most animals and even other Demons, but when it came to mixing them, akin to something along the lines of a chimera, that became more of a challenge. 

Her Puck hands couldn’t draw. That was simply out of the question. Its claws were too cumbersome for such refined precision and delicate touch. Her Imp form could do it to a lesser extent, but its smaller hands and body definitely made it difficult with her current computer set up, so her human form was still definitively the best option. But of course, neither of the latter two had her flexible fairy-like bug wings. Or at least they didn’t.

Through the wonder of Transfiguration, Angelica sprouted her four Puck wings out of the back of her human body, adjusted to form and scale. They even protruded out of her fake shirt without causing any incident or dishevelment. Truly, she had become a fairy from her imagination, just one much larger than traditional folklore would imply. And… it was a mistake, a huge mistake. 

Ambidextral Mastery immediately threw a fit, making damn sure she knew it was a bad idea, that it didn’t take kindly to the new limbs foreign to that form. And if that didn’t tell her off, her mind certainly did. It was as if someone was taking chisels to her skull, attempting to split it apart into eight separate entities, since her feet and legs counted as two more as well. 

She stripped her wings away until only one remained. Apparently, that was her limit for the time being. Honestly, she’d rather have two more wings than her feet while sitting at her desk, but she wasn’t quite ready to commit to that level of figurative mutilation just yet. Even at human size, the wing was just as flexible and dextrous as it had been in her Demon form, almost serving more like a monkey’s tail. 

Through a few quick tests, it became quickly obvious that the more she used her limbs boosted by Ambidextral Mastery to perform complicated tasks, the faster she’d become exhausted, at least while the Skill was still a relatively low level. It was still all one brain after all, even if its computational power was being more efficiently distributed. So while her left hand focused on somewhat complex drawing drills, the rest were allocated to simpler, more mindless tasks.

For her wing, she mostly used it to do weight training. Perhaps that was a bit silly, since the wing itself didn’t really have any proper muscle, but where it connected to her back definitely got a workout. And while her direct physical strength may not have been increasing all that much, her overall power was, regularly receiving Might increases as the day pressed on, along with the occasional Vigor. For the first day, since she didn’t have proper weights, she used a dumbbell made of ice. It wasn’t as heavy as she would have liked it to be, but it got the job done with enough reps. 

Still, she went ahead and ordered a fancy dumbbell with adjustable weights so it wouldn’t take up much space, along with a few things to hopefully help her train Ambidextral Mastery. Getting it to Lv.20 had immediately become one of her short term goals. Maybe not the highest priority in her list, but definitely something she wanted as soon as possible. Besides just being a ridiculously useful Skill she wanted to train, that was when she’d unlock whatever it was the condition for that the DGS had mentioned, which was apparently a Fabrication Skill. While Evoke may not have gone off without a hitch, she still wanted as many of them available to her as possible.

Sadly, her poking around the Weave at the time didn’t find much else of interest. There were quite a few that required higher Evolutions outright. Gnostic Attunement had actually reached a dead-end entirely, with nothing she could purchase, and nothing showing ways to unlock further nodes. It must require something else she didn’t yet have, like another Attunement, since there was no way she’d gotten them all, doubting that gnosticism began and ended with just senses.

One thing of note was that she could now purchase Hold Fast as of her most recent Balletic Attunement increase. While the ability to suddenly float in mid-air or stop her momentum was interesting, it definitely wasn’t a high priority. In a way, it was the antithesis of Multi-Bounce which was all about continual movement. Maybe she’d figure out a way to get it for free someday by using Bumble to suddenly stop a hard fall. 

For her feet, Angelica went ahead and bought one of those under-desk elliptical machines. It wasn’t really something she’d need dedicated brain power for, so it was hard to say whether it’d actually require or train Ambidextral Mastery or not, but it would still be good for her overall. Except, even after it came, she found she hardly used it, more enraptured with the training method discovered in the meantime.

And that was to use her feet as little factories. She spent the time making small ice sculptures of her Imp and Puck forms, able to shrink them down to just a couple inches thanks to Editable Reprint. One at a time, they spat out of her soles and clinked to the ground. She’d then pick them up with her toes, trying to train their dexterity as well, and place them into neat rows. Then where there was no room left under her desk, she whisked them all away with Salvager and repeated the process.

This was to primarily train Manufacture, which just also happened to train a few other Skills at the same time. Really, Angelica wished she had another manifest Skill besides just ice. It had proven strong and malleable, especially for her creative needs, but at the same time, it was well above most of her other Skills. Training it felt like a waste comparatively, but that felt like the best use of her time with those extremities. If there was a Manifest Minerals, or even a more specific Rock or Soil Skill, she’d happily take that at some point in the future. Gawk had mentioned a Petrific Attunement before, so they would likely fall under that category. 

For her other Glacial Skills, she could train Frost Touch by holding her wing out to the open air if she wanted, but that didn’t feel too crucial. Flash-Freeze could probably use some levels, but she didn’t really have a good way to train that at her desk while working. It would require going out to a lake, or the ocean, or risk ruining her bathtub some more, which still hadn’t completely unfrozen the last she checked, but there was enough wiggle room for her Puck form to squeeze in and shower. Maybe if she could make water or another liquid at some point, then she could double up the training. 

Because she was so focused on Evoke and her Merlina chapters, her training didn’t expand much beyond these select things during the first few days. After the generosity incident was resolved, she finally went and got some proper sleep, giving herself an Order with a limit up to a full day of rest if her body needed it, since she knew it was going to be a heavy slumber. Angelica woke up refreshed, ready to start anew, and finally remembered to cycle her lifeplan Order that had been active all that time.

[Summoner Rank: Novice Lv.15]

[The number of Simultaneous Orders you can issue has increased from 2 to 3]

Well now that was something fantastic! So far, the two slots had been preoccupied by her lifeplan and making sure her art stayed on track, but now she could dedicate the third to training. And what a difference it made. Immediately noticeable was that it allowed her to shift some of the mental load of Ambidextral Mastery over to her subconscious and Order obligation. 

It let her fine-tune what her feet and wing were doing. She was able to have her wing cycle through various different exercises, since before she’d just been doing curls with the dumbbell. But now she added a whole array, including some without the weight, like shadowboxing the air. For her feet, she shifted away from just the ice figurines and began creating cold building blocks, the simple ones with pegs from her childhood that snapped together, so she began building an ice cabin.

With those underway, and thanks to some Ambidextral Mastery levels, she was able to sprout a second wing. What to do with it? She tried out a few different things, but the one that stuck was slapping herself, usually on the back of her neck, sometimes her shoulder or upper arm, and the occasional swat to her head, wherever the wing felt like it at the time. The attack didn’t really hurt at all, sort of like being lightly swatted by a duster, and she honestly stopped feeling it after the first few. 

What she did feel was the stacks of Irritant she was purposefully inflicting upon herself. Because of the randomness of Venomous Strike, she never knew when the annoying poison was going to afflict her, which definitely put her more on edge at the beginning. But thanks to her training Order, she was able to specifically tell herself to ignore both the attacks and the accompanying discomfort as much as possible, reducing the effects of both to little more than feeling of having a skin rash that would flare up on occasion, something she could deal with due to her mind being focused on so many other matters.

This was to train Venomous Strike, Irritant, and Swipe, the lowest of her base Destruction Skills, all at once. By having looked at her Weave, she knew that once Swipe reached Lv.7, it would unlock the enhanced version for her to purchase like had been the case for Stab and Bash. Not that she would, since that would be a waste when she could inevitably get it for free when fighting something in the future.

As for the poison, she didn’t mind raising Irritant, since it certainly had its uses, but it was already pretty potent from what she’d seen. Ultimately, Toxic would always likely be a higher priority. Even with all of her developments on the Glacial front, Toxic would likely be her heavy hitter for a long time to come, so making it stronger was never a bad idea. But she wasn’t quite ready to inflict it upon herself just yet. She got close to considering just a single stack, but sanity won out, especially because of an unexpected problem with this training method.