>>5286660You excitedly report on this new mystical development to your closest (?) friend (??), the Novice. She is characteristically aloof about the whole affair, though you sense a mix of envy and respect for your progress in her usual jibes.
“I suppose a one-hundred-percent improvement is easily attainable,” she says, “when you are starting from absolute zero.”
“And what have you accomplished in YOUR ample downtime, Oh Learned and Brilliant NOVICE Fleshweaver?” you ask cooly.
The Novice smiles and saunters closer, altogether too smug. Too late, you realize she was waiting for you to ask that very question.
“Funny you should ask,” she says, “Because I am INDEED learned and brilliant,a nd while you were gazing into your own mammalian ‘navel’—”
“I have no navel,” you remind her, “having hatched from an egg, just as you did.”
She presses on, ignoring you, and tells you of her ‘great advance in the fields of alchemy and mysticism’. This consists of…
>An Amulet of Disguise that can work on you, disguising you as a ‘dark elf’>An improvement to Glowie’s disguise, and a means of communicating with her>Several Amulets of Disguise for your retinue, so they might disguise them>Perfected madness poison, courtesy of those plants you defeated, which can be thrown in the form of a bomb or applied to an arrow or blade>A small supply of healing potions made from fungus as you traveled, enough to allow for the healing of otherwise-debilitating wounds 