Blood And Chlorophyll Ch 17

The following day, for the very first time since Alicia and Katrina had met each other, they woke up at roughly the same time. Alicia technically woke up first, confused at the position of the sun. It was halfway above the horizon, yet the colors were all wrong; they were the dull oranges and purples of dusk, not the invigorating pastel hues of dawn. Had she really just slept through an entire day?

Then she remembered last night. Staying out late to go to a strip club, returning home with the honest intention of going to sleep. Her beautiful girlfriend, however, had derailed those plans by stripping down to her lingerie and sitting herself down in Alicia's lap.

She'd been so nervous. The Change had been so hard on Kat, and Alicia had been terrified that the dance they'd both gotten might have accidentally coerced her into moving too fast. Kat had assured her that wasn't the case, and with her promise, as well as the impossibly beautiful vampire sitting in her lap, Alicia's resistance had fallen apart in moments.

Their first round had been electric, passionate, and everything Alicia had hoped for. The second had been slower and more explorative, the girls talking through what they might want to try in the future. The third started downstairs, had a brief intermission for water, then continued on the staircase as they pretended like they were attempting to go to bed and get some sleep. They had eventually made it to Alicia's bedroom, which resulted in rounds four and five as they cuddled underneath the pile of blankets.

So yes, waking up at dusk sounded about right.

Alicia sat up, her hair a tangled mess, and looked around. She yawned and tried to blink the exhaustion away, her Dryad body obviously protesting the dramatic change in sleep schedule. As she looked around, her eyes inevitably fell on the naked body of her girlfriend. Even asleep, in a slightly awkward position, Kat still looked like she belonged on a magazine cover.

It took all of Alicia's strength not to squee in excitement. Of all the people in the world, Kat had chosen her! They were dating! She still couldn't quite believe it. With a silly grin on her face, Alicia laid back down and wrapped her hand around Kat's waist. The movement appeared to finally wake her, and Alicia leaned in for a kiss.

"Morning, gorgeous," Alicia whispered, kissing Kat's cheek.

Kat grumbled in quiet appreciation. "Mmm if it isn't my insatiable girlfriend. What time is it?"

"It's sunset," Alicia said with another kiss, this one on Kat's neck.

"Sunset? Why does it look like you just woke up?" Kat said, happily craning her neck to give Alicia more space.

"Because I just did, silly."

"Seriously? Hm. I think the Change might have made a mistake."

"What do you mean?" Alicia asked.

"Well, after last night, are you sure you're not a Nymph?" Kat chuckled at her own bad joke.

"Oh, hush. It's your fault for being so hot," Alicia said, sliding down to kiss Kat's collarbone.

"Oh, that feels amazing..." Kat whispered. "Shouldn't we, like, check in with Tab? What if she's been trying to text you? You already lost an entire day; we probably shouldn't spend the whole night in each other too."

"Don't you mean 'in each others' arms'?"

Kat turned to Alicia, deviously smirking as she nibbled at Alicia's ear. "No, I don't."

"You don't get to say that while also biting me there! That's not fair!"

"Says the person who bent me over the stairs instead of letting me go to bed last night. I'd say we're even now."

Alicia giggled. "I didn't hear you complaining. Quite the opposite, in fact."

The girls' hands were all over each other within seconds, their lips meeting passionately as they pulled closer. Alicia was in the middle of digging her nails into Kat's backside when she heard her phone go off. She groaned in frustration, then reluctantly pulled away from her girlfriend. "Ugh, fine, I'll go be a person."

She stood up, moved to her desk, then answered her phone. She had a quick conversation with Tab, who had been trying to reach out for the last several hours, and confirmed that everyone was safe and sound.

With the moment lost, Alicia and Katrina committed to actually getting up. They set up a time with Tab, then briefly went their separate ways so they could wash up. Alicia took a quick dip in her stream, while Kat happily discovered that Alicia's shower still worked. Soon enough, everyone was clean and presentable, and ready to get back to work.

When Tab arrived, after a predictable barrage of sassy questions about why they'd lost so much sleep, the group started putting together a real plan for tackling the Key Dungeon.

The first thing they realized was that it had already been a week since they'd reported their discovery to the Dungeon Camp. This meant they only had two weeks left, and they'd only barely started training. Alicia was still only Level Two, they still hadn't finished Elias' pond, and Kat hadn't yet practiced any of her spells outside of creating them in the first place.

The afterglow from last night faded quickly as the sobering reality of their situation sunk in. They spent the next several hours putting together a tight schedule, assigning nearly every hour of every day to preparing for the Dungeon.

They decided to give themselves three days of training before the delving began. The days would be spent with Alicia alternating between preparing for Elias and training with Tab, while spending every possible minute outside to maximize her Solar Regeneration. In the best-case scenario, they suspected she might be able to hit Level Three before the end of the week, which might give her time to start experimenting with whatever subclass she ended up with.

Kat's schedule was much more regimented, as she had a tighter bottleneck on her resources. She didn't have Regeneration, and her MP was perhaps the most valuable status bar of the whole party.

Thankfully, not all of her training needed to be magical. In addition to practicing with her magic, it was also decided that she would benefit from a slightly trimmed down version of Alicia's combat training. If nothing else, the training would hone her reflexes and help her understand how Alicia and Tab moved in combat. Additionally, in the worst-case scenario, she wouldn't be completely helpless if she were forced into a fight without any mana.

Her nights would also be spent working on Elias' pond. Tab had stressed repeatedly that Stamina simply recovered too quickly, and that not using it was a waste. Plus, the extra activity would help with her physical conditioning, and the sooner they could get Elias out here, the better.

Finalizing the plan was a bittersweet moment. Alicia was happy to know what to expect, but it was harrowing to think that she was prepping to become a delver. Preparing to march into a hostile dungeon and willingly throw herself into life-threatening situations. Tabitha was a great teacher, and she could already feel her body adjusting to the fight training, but going up against actual monsters still scared her. Real monsters wouldn't pull their punches. They wouldn't playfully dance just out of reach while flirting with her. They wouldn't laugh with excitement at hearing that Alicia and Kat had finally sealed the deal.

With Kat by her side, though, Alicia felt like she could accomplish anything.

The next few days passed quickly. Many of the small comforts she'd gotten used to faded away out of necessity. She needed to be up at the crack of dawn, every day, which meant less time cuddling with Kat. Alicia needed to spend every possible minute in the sun, and while her Dryad physiology made it easy to spend hours doing nothing, the stress of their upcoming delve made it easy to lose herself at times.

When Tab wasn't around, she spent time tending to plants and training on her own. She practiced her footwork, rehearsed maneuvers, and spent time exercising. She started going for runs multiple times a day, looping around the abandoned neighborhood while keeping an eye on the dungeon entrance.

Then there was Elias' pond. With a delve date in mind, she redoubled her efforts to get it ready in time. Progress slowed the deeper she went, as the ground grew more compact and the composition changed to denser materials. After the first day, her routine had to regularly incorporate concentrated plant growth so that she could break up small pockets of frustrating material. If nothing else, the chance to take small, hour-long breaks to bask in the sun while manipulating plant growth forced her to slow down at regular intervals.

Training with Tab continued as well, and each afternoon was spent with the Foxgirl pushing her harder and harder. Alicia was amazed at how much there was to learn. Every single movement needed to be practiced, committed to memory so that she had a plethora of experience to draw from when in actual combat.

After the first day, Alicia had a small epiphany about just how helpful her Regeneration was. She'd always thought of herself as fundamentally human, but with the ability to recover from injuries faster, but that simply wasn't the case. The point of exercise was to break down existing muscle, then regrow it to be stronger and more durable, and Regeneration accelerated this process. While Alicia had never been a fitness nut before the Change, she had exercised enough to understand what a typical recovery process felt like. The standard cycle of exercise, rest, soreness, and recovery that normally took a week now only took a few hours.

She noticed it first on the second day. She spent most of the morning exercising, muscle soreness had set in for a few hours in the middle of the day, and by the time Tabitha arrived in the afternoon it had already vanished.

That night, Katrina also explained that Alicia's specific regeneration was the perfect storm of conditions for exercise. Other forms of Regeneration, the most common being given to Gormor, often necessitated an equivalent amount of food to power it. Delvers with Regeneration often needed to create a distinction between food eaten for enjoyment and food eaten for necessity. When your body demands five times its normal diet in a single day, flavor was often sacrificed in favor of cheap, easy to consume food bought in bulk.

Conversely, Alicia's ability to photosynthesize negated the need to provide additional food. The obvious downside was that she only Regenerated when in daylight, but Alicia was thrilled that she didn't have to add speed-eating to her list of delving preparation skills.

That schedule quickly became Alicia's life. Mornings alone, afternoons with Tab, and evenings with Kat while Tab went back to work. Her time alone with Kat, however, wasn't always filled with her preferred activities. Their delving schedule demanded that everyone practice sparring with everyone else, which meant less time for cuddles and intimacy.

Of course, on the second night, Alicia and Kat lost the fight to control their arousal. Their sparring sessions were always ripe with sexual tension, and on that particular night, they abandoned all pretense and wound up making love in the middle of the street.

Having an entire suburb to themselves certainly had its benefits at times.

The third day was when everything came together. Alicia spent the morning diverting water from the river into Elias' pond, and even found the time to steal decorative bricks from all her neighbors to line the edge of the water. She had only just finished when they received a text from Elias, confirming that he was on his way over. The four of them had pooled their money to purchase a Race-inclusive rideshare service, and after days of nonstop texting, Alicia was ecstatic to finally meet him.

His arrival, sadly, had been set for later in the evening. Rideshare services that accommodated mermaids were few and far between, and only had availability at fairly restrictive times. Elias' only other choice was early afternoon, which would have prevented him from properly preparing for time off from work.

On the bright side, this meant Katrina would be up to greet him as he arrived. On the downside, this meant Alicia spent the entire day battling her nerves. She felt like a kid on Christmas Eve, desperately waiting for enough time to pass.

Meeting Katrina had been completely on accident, and incredibly sudden, while meeting Tabitha had been a blind affair. After texting Elias nonstop for nearly a week, she was confident they were going to be best friends, which gave her plenty of time to stew in her nervous energy.

"Do you think it's big enough? What if it's not big enough? Ughhh we should have made it bigger!" Alicia moaned, walking along the side of the pond.

"Alicia, you sent Elias thousands of pictures the whole time we were digging this out. He knows exactly what he's getting, and he's okay with it," Katrina said mid-yawn. She had only been up for about half an hour, and was still sipping on a ration to try and wake herself up. "Besides, it's not like we had any more time. We need every minute we can get for this dungeon."

"What if I picked the wrong plants? I tried to pick things that were native to Lake Michigan, but is that offensive? Is that, like, the mermaid equivalent of putting fake kelp in a fish tank?" Alicia knelt down and dipped her finger into the water.

"If anything, I think the most offensive thing would be likening this to a fish tank, Cherry Blossom," Tabitha said with a smirk.

Alicia jumped up. "I'm going to go check where I diverted the river, just in case!" She ran quickly, taking yet another mental inventory of all the plants she'd filled the pond with.

I went over them all with Elias, but what if the plants I make are subtly different than ones that occur naturally? Do they have weird thaumic levels because I basically make them with magic? What if I have a poor understanding of them, and accidentally make some weird new variant? I already know I'm able to make brand new plants, I did it with Katrina's orchid. Would that mess anything up?

Alicia sat down at the fork in the river and connected with all the plant life one last time. She had purposely lined much of the new riverbed with different types of plants so that she could monitor the structural integrity, but also to reinforce everything,

After some time had passed--Alicia's inner clock still couldn't keep track--she jumped back up and decided to head back. Her eyes were glued to the river the whole time, watching the water, looking for abnormalities, and checking her brickwork. The myriad distractions almost blinded her to the fact that she'd spent longer than she realized at the fork in the river. When she finally looked up, she saw the rideshare driver carefully lowering a short-haired Mermaid into the water.

"ELIAS!!" Alicia shouted excitedly.

"Alicia! There you are!" Elias responded.

Alicia broke out into a sprint, her feet pounding against the ground as she picked up speed. Elias was now floating in the middle of the pond, which meant there was plenty of room for Alicia's greeting.

After closing the distance, Alicia dove forward with her arms outstretched. Elias managed to catch her, and the two plummeted several feet under the surface. Elias was laughing hysterically and even spun Alicia around a few times while hugging her tight. Despite every chloroplast in Alicia's body urging her to laugh back, she made sure to keep her breath held as they danced around under the water.

After the initial burst of excitement, Alicia returned to the surface. She looked up to see Kat smiling down at her, and Tab waving goodbye to the car as it drove off.

"You keep that up and I'll start getting jealous, Alicia," Kat said with a smirk.

"What, don't you want to come greet Elias with me?" Alicia said, a playful glint in her eye.

"I've never really been much of a swimmer, at least since--Hey, wait! Stop!!" Despite Kat's higher Agility, she was unable to stop Alicia from grabbing her wrist and pulling her into the water. After another loud splash, Kat swam to the surface. Her long black hair was plastered to her face, and she shot Alicia a dirty look before surrendering to the absurdity of the situation. "I'll get you back for this, Alicia. But, since I'm here, get over here, Elias. It's good to see you again."

Elias swam closer for another hug, even helping to pull the hair from Kat's eyes. "You sure you're okay in here? Isn't running water supposed to hurt vampires or something?"

"Well, for one thing, this is a pond rather than a full river. However, that part of the Vampire mythology didn't actually take hold during the Change. Not really sure why, if I'm being honest. Maybe the idea wasn't widespread enough? If anything, I'm better suited to the water than Alicia is since I don't have to breathe."

"But you still do!" Alicia said, splashing Kat. "I see you breathing all the time! When we're cuddled up at night, your chest still rises and falls!"

Tab spoke up next. "Just a holdover from being human. It's pretty common, actually. There are a bunch of Races that technically have full control over their form, but still opt to stay humanoid, like Slimes or Elementals. For many people, it's hard to forget their formative years as a human." She set her shoes down, rolled up her pants, and dipped her legs in the water.

"Yup. Even though I know I don't need to breath, I still have a panic response built in. If I dive down to the bottom, my brain still thinks that I need to surface soon or I'll drown," Kat said.

"I've met other people with aquatic Races that have similar problems, honestly," Elias said, floating up on his back. "It's a little easier for us, because the instinct to breathe is still valid, it just also works with water now. That being said, most people have an innate fear of open water, and changing Races didn't do anything about that. There's a reason so many of us stay close to land, and even still keep houses and stuff."

As Elias floated closer to Tab, she held out a hand. "Also, it's good to meet you, Elias. We're happy for the extra help, and Alicia here speaks quite highly of you."

"Tabitha, I presume? I could say the same about you; I've heard all about the harsh schedule you're keeping these two on." Elias returned the handshake, then paused briefly to pick his next words carefully. "Do you think you're ready? Tomorrow is the first delve, isn't it?"

"These two are tough cookies, and they've come a long way. We don't have a huge party, but we've got a solid composition," Tabitha said, leaning back as she talked.

Alicia jumped on Elias again, wrapping her arms around his shoulders. "And we've got extra healing because of you!" The two started laughing again.

"It honestly is a huge help, Elias," Kat said. "It feels like I have a lot more room to breathe now that I'm not the only person with healing magic. Between that and the extra mana regen I get from Alouette, I really think we've got a solid handle on things."

"Alouette?" Elias asked, looking back at Alicia. "Right, the dancer. I heard she was... inspirational."

Alicia locked eyes with Kat, both girls blushing as they remembered that first night after the strip club. Alicia didn't quite feel like making her sex life the new topic, however, and tried to steer the conversation elsewhere. "Right, well, we should probably fill you in on the details, right? What our schedule looks like?"

"I'm all ears!" Elias said.

Tab looked over at Kat, gesturing for her to take the wheel. Kat nodded, then floated out of the water before sitting at the edge of the pond. "We're going to be delving as soon as the sun sets every day. This lets me walk around safely, and it ensures that Alicia can spend all day in the sun. This also means that, if I get injured, it's easy to get to you for healing. Alicia goes to sleep immediately after we return from each run, but I'll still have a few hours left in me, which will give me time to visit Alouette. Other than that, we just kinda... keep going. Change plans if needed, adjust to what the Dungeon throws at us."