Auntie Toasts The VRMMORPG 19 19. Trick-Animations

The toxic waste was a tier 1 material, that meant someone fed it to the printer. It wasn't part of the standard material selection, and most importantly, the amount was limited.

Flora bought the 150 kg left in the printer and fas.h.i.+oned some sheets out it. While working, she had to drink health potions and cast Refresh regularly to offset the debuffs. She didn't deem it possible or at least practical to calculate the perfect amount of toxic waste because her defense attributes and resistances rose to fast. Additionally, Flora didn't want to repeat the process every day. So she created tracks for Aidan to push the sheets away from the coffin or towards it. The mana consumption of the coffin rose because of this, but Aidan gave her a useful tip. You could hook up devices to the mana grid. The system granted you ten mana per minute free, above that you had to pay.

"I'm not paying utility bills in a game! Aidan, add building a generator to my ToDo-List!"

Still, she integrated a plug for the grid in the coffin.

When putting her a.s.sorted equipment back in her inventory, she noticed that the free slots had dwindled. Of course, she carried around a lot of junk, ordinary people would have gotten rid of, like the marbles, old versions of the mech-suite and used dishes. She discovered that she even had Mr. Twitchy's gun from the bank robby adventure.

Instead of putting her collection in the trash-bin or 3D printer, she tested if she could store crates in her inventory. That worked, but she couldn't access the items in the containers directly but had to pull out the box and then look for the object in it manually.

A few tests later, she figured out the maximal size of a container to still fit into one inventory slot: 3x3x3 meter. Conveniently the blueprint section had s.h.i.+pping containers in the right dimension for sale. Instead of building a crate herself in half an hour, she bought the blueprint and took 15 minutes to airbrush the container that it looked like a treasure chest. Though, she was conflicted about wasting money to buy a crate. 'Maybe it would have taken even longer than half an hour if I had the urge to get sophisticated with the door and locks.'

Back in her apartment, she set up the new coffin.

"Aidan, here is the training strategy when I'm asleep. Train as many of my attributes as possible with an emphasis on the magic stats. Use the toxic waste debuffs for holding my health low. When it's not enough, use poison, only activate the tasers when you need them. Cast 'Refresh' as often as possible. If you have mana to spare, cast 'Magic Pull'."

"Yes, Milady!"

"When I'm working, reserve 20% of the manpool for my use and work with the rest. Oh, and mana I get from potions or the battery is for my use as well! And take notes when you notice room for optimization."

"Yes, Milady. I recommend that you activate the Agility Boost for your nap. Boosts level slower than other manskills, and they raise the training efficacy for that stat."

"Very good." Flora nodded.

"May I now remind you of the items on your ToDo-List, Milady?"

"No, thank you. My nap is overdue. We go over it first thing in the morning. Maybe second, I will check my growth first."

To clear the slate, Flora sped through the notifications. Her magical power, physical vigor, and metal affinity grew significantly. Nothing else stood out, so she could finally take her nap. Only then she realized that she still had no bed. In the marketplace, she found a tier 1 white queen-sized bed that looked just right.

Name: Dream well, Sweetheart

Type: Bed

Effects: + 5 OV to both regenerations while sleeping

Tier: 1

Rating: A

Price: 55 VirDos

After she fetched the 2x1,50 m bed out of the 30x40x20 cm Mailbox, she got back in the coffin and had another idea.

"Aidan, start the vibrations. System, I'm going to balance," she said out loud. The seconds pa.s.sed by without her getting any notification. Therefore she switched to standing on one leg. Finally, the message appeared.

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Do you want to form the ability specialization 'Balancing'?

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"Yes, please. Set it to automatic mode, Aidan! I want to balance the whole time in the coffin, System."

Back in the workshop, she finally hit the bed.

After her nap, Flora loaded the development-kit of Huffgrin Skateboards. They offered 16 different models of skateboards, longboards, hoverboards, and rocketboards. The tool-kit included a simulation mode, where you could select a trick, and a skater would perform them on the board you were testing. Before Flora started to play with it, she updated her old "Granny's Knickers'-board to 'Granny's Knickers - Stained Edition'. Now, as she had become a granny herself, she had insider knowledge to share. She decided to start slow and easy and gradually progress to more complicated designs.
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Next, she made her first skin, a slice of toast. The kit offered slots where you could put in your animations for hundreds of tricks and combos. And additional slots for states of the skateboard like accelerating, deaccelerating, wheels in the air, grabbed by a hand, only one food touching the board, etc.

Aidan told Flora how to access the statistic data.

"I call Statistica!" said Flora, feeling silly.

An Indian woman with her straight black hair in a bun wearing secretary gla.s.ses and a yellow streaming-data blazer appeared next to Flora and made her jump in surprise.

"h.e.l.lo, Flowing Flowers. I'm Statistica. How may I help you?"

"Oh, h.e.l.lo! Please tell me the most common tricks performed by skateboards at the Trick Temple."

"1. Ollie, 2. Manual, 3. Nose-Slide, 4. Frontside-180, 5. Pop shove-it, 6. Kickflip ... "

Flora burned the name of the maneuver in the toast and slotted it in the kit. Next, she queued the tricks in the simulator. As a result, she not only familiarized herself with skateboarding but learned about the timing of the animations as well. The timing was way off. From a technical standpoint, Flora understood, that the system needed time to identify the maneuver, but it made animating tricks harder. Her tests on the states went better concerning the timing. The animation appeared as soon as the wheels were in the air. But you never knew how long the state would last. Say, she would decide on animating a big explosion when one hand touched the board. But it was just an accidental touch before doing an Ollie. This would result in cutting the animation awkwardly because trick-animations had priority over stat animations.

Flora had to admit that she knew too little about skateboarding and how they chained and combined tricks to make sophisticated animations.

In the name of keeping it simple, she wanted to make a transformation from white bread over golden to burned toast depending on how many tricks the skater performed in a row. After looking for a while, she couldn't find a combo-counter. Because she was puzzled about the kit missing such a basic function, she sent Aidan to the forums for research. He came back with the information that it was formerly part of the interface. But the rules changed often and regionally on what to count as a combo. Coupled with the whining of the community, the developers got fed up and discontinued the feature. Of course, this intensified the whining, but so far the developers didn't cave in.

'Alright, then I built one myself. Or something similar, let's call it intensity-meter.'

First, she blow-torched white bread until it was basically coal and recorded the process. Then she dived the record into twenty animations. The first problem she encountered was that it was tough to find out in what condition the toast currently had. This was a prerequisite to changing the shape in the right order. The crudest way, comparing how the toast looked to the definitions, would stop functioning if she decided to add specific animation for tricks.

Therefore she defined a 1x1x1 cm area in the middle of the animation, invisible to the viewers. Here she added little squares for every successful trick, deleted squares when the skater was cruising or standing and wiped it clean when he crashed. Then she bound the rising and falling of the little squares to the 20 animations (The ten animations she recorded and the ten animations played backward for the sinking amount of squares).

While this sounded easy enough, she had to solve dozens of smaller and more substantial problems and fought a several hours long heroic battle with the s.h.i.+tty interface. In the end, she was drained but very pleased with her work.

'I would love to have something like that for free-running as well!'

In no time she found the API for free-running skins. The Huffgrin-Kit just cut out the skating part from the general trick-interface, which included all kinds of sports like free-running, acrobatics, dancing and many more. She cleaned up the construction in the skating kit to alleviate the portability to a new interface before transferring it.

,---------

You created an auxiliary template for the Cetviwos trick-interface.

Name: "Intensity Meter"

Type: interface template

Effect: Allows to bind animations according to the continuous performance of the athlete.

Rating: S

Price: 10% royalty

'---------

On the design for the free-running skin, she went simple, just a strip along her legs and arms which changed color from deep purple along the color spectrum to fiery red. To reach the red part you had to chain at least 50 tricks in short order. Nothing she would achieve soon, but a girl got to have goals.

Satisfied with the day's work, she went to bed.

The next morning Flora woke up feeling recovered and relaxed. That might not bode well for her attribute gains, but did miracles for her mood. She only had the metal handicap, the radiation and poison debuff. Her health and mana bars were empty, but the concentration and stamina bars remained nearly full. So everything looked what only a training-fanatic like Flora would define as 'okay'.

Physical Power + 0

Physical Macro control + 1

Physical Micro control + 0

Physical Vigor + 5

Physical Regeneration + 0

Physical Defence + 1

Physical Perception + 1

Magical Power + 7

Magical Macro control + 5

Magical Micro control + 4

Magical Vigor + 1

Magical Regeneration + 1

Magical Defence + 6

Magical Perception + 0

The magical attributes did grow, but now Flora was unsatisfied with the physical attributes. She crosschecked her current attribute values and saw, that she was over 50 LV in most of the physical stats. 'Guess that explains the slow progress.'

Only metal, poison, and radiation resistance did grow around 4 points; tempering stayed the same. 'This might be another reason. Getting banged around in the coffin helped my physical stats and with the balancing that didn't happen.'

Magical Push, Refresh, and Agility Boost were the big winners; they all rose over 30 points.

Flora was disappointed that Modeling and Design only moved up by 2 points. Her epic struggle with the interface should be worth more in her opinion. Balance, on the other hand, climbed up by 27 levels in one go. As a senior citizen, she knew the value of having stability, but at the moment, tempering seemed more useful. Therefore she deactivated the automatic mode.

Next Flora checked her stats on the overview page. She was more than satisfied with what she saw, but magical perception stood out like a sore thumb. 15 LV! 'Is this what stats look like when you don't train?'