WARNING REINFORCEMENT: Seriously read the Author's Note today. :V
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His Notes journal entry the next morning was significantly less full, but still exciting!
I have achieved Level 25 minimum in all of the Dragon's skills!
I have achieved Level 20 Crafting!
I have achieved Level 35 with Cooking!
I have one-third of the Mastery for the Creative Kitchen!
I have sharply accelerated the process of building on a [Dream Affinity]!
Even holding back enough magic to keep both the Dreamspace Control and his 'reverse-montage' song going at the same time? It had felt like Spike overslept in the short four hour span of his meditation. It was still strange and unfamiliar, but not too not familiar. He had always been a drake of vivid dreams: Hay, the very thing that awakened him to being The Gamer was waking up from one! So it felt right that he was en route to an Affinity to match... He would need to remember to thank Luna, and then ask her for advice immediately after.
Spike also made a lot of smaller progress that he didn't bother noting: Gains of HP and MP came in semi-regularly, his Stamina seemed to increase with exercise, and a few stat point dings here and there were unsurprising. He even got a few more bursts of actual level-up Experience from his Crafting excursions, but nothing close to his next true Level. Maybe a trip out into the Diamond Dog warrens or the Everfree were on his future schedule at this rate, see if subduing a live opponent was enough to count for combat...
But that was all future stuff! Today was a wide-open free day, one he planned to spend trekking out to Sweet Apple Acres in order to tell Applejack about his situation. Probably Big Mac as well: They hadn't actually gamed together, but he vaguely remembered Shining Armor talking about miniatures with him at one point. Between Mac and AJ they could certainly provide him with insight, but more than that they were his friends. He wanted to tell everypony in their inner circle before the party on the weekend so that he didn't cause much fuss and detract from Twilight's big news.
Of course he was still going to cause a little fuss, because he wanted the party to be special. Since he was in charge of the food, that meant going the extra mile. Ideally he'd be able to make a nice varied service so that everypony could have something they loved. As nice as that idea was? He couldn't spend all day in the kitchen testing recipes, so the rest of his time was going to be spent on attribute training and looking for ways to progress his skills.
Visiting the Apples would probably be best done around lunch if he didn't want to interrupt them in the orchard. As anypony in Ponyville knew, you stopped making that mistake after the third or fourth near-miss with falling fruit to the face. Twilight had gotten back into gear with her work, so she took a very simple breakfast before he even made it to the kitchen himself. He'd have to do something about that soon, make some better options for her when he wasn't available.
He understood most of Twilight's tastes better than she did, after all these years: It wouldn't be hard. Maybe something like a snack bar? He could get to that later. First on the docket was his own breakfast, and then recipe testing for the weekend. Diamonds seemed like a good start for both come to think of it...
- - - -
By the time The Lunching Hour came around Spike had put on another point each for some of his stats (putting him further out of sync with Balanced Soul) and made more headway to the so-called 'Creative Kitchen'. A lot of his initial successes, even before he got Dragon's Kitchen in fact, had come from very common and 'primary' gemstones: Emerald, ruby, that sort of thing. He was trying to go back to those roots and work with the big-name stones, the rock stars if you will, instead of using obscure gems that fit his ingredients more precisely.
While none of those experiments had actually yielded a working dish, he was on pace to have the new skill Mastered by tomorrow night at the latest. If that was the only gate holding him back? Then he could easily have everything ready in time for the party. And if not... Well, he had backup ideas. He'd been thinking about food for most of his life now, so it was all second nature in a way.
First nature was being a dragon, of course! He didn't have any other dragons to base his example on, but sometimes that felt like it was a benefit more than anything. No role models means no expectations he could fail to meet, right? Right. That was the easy way to keep from feeling bad about it. For sure.
...He should probably just clear his head and get over to Sweet Apple Acres.
Rather than go straight through Ponyville however? Spike decided to take a detour around the outside of town. It was a long and loping path that would arc out past the edges of the forest and deep into the woods, just on the right curve to put him at the Clubhouse on the way. He wanted to double-borrow a few of their already-borrowed tools for inspiration when he crafted his own... It would only take a minute to get a feel for their structure and design with Observe and his new memory, after all!
He took his time with that relatively speaking (a full minute per tool instead of just Observing the entire lot in one rapid-fire chain), primarily so he could put it all back in order instead of leaving things in disarray. Despite their reputation, the Cutie Mark Crusaders liked to have things where they could find them... If only so they could use them to cause more chaos later. With a proper lexicon of tools ingested, Spike took the second leg of his trip at a much faster pace. Layering (and Layer-ing) all of his buffs and bonuses along with a hefty helping of Dragon's Heart... He blasted off in a dead sprint to the Acres.
Spike was pretty pleased with his time when he checked the system Clock on arrival: He wouldn't be coming close to Rainbow Dash anytime soon, but he was way ahead of the curve otherwise. Let's just ignore the fact that he bottomed out his mana twice and spent two solid minutes casting buffs, yeah? Yeah. But before his thoughts derailed further he heard the reason he'd come here.
"Load's comin' up!"
"Eeeyup!"
Up in the loft of the barn Big Macintosh was hauling a rope back with each heavy step he took. Down below, Applejack was steadying and pushing a crate attached to the rope. Spike could hear the faint clinks and sloshes of full bottles inside even at this distance, so he waited until they had everything clearly under control before he spoke up to get their attention.
"Stocking away cider?"
"Hay Spike! Yup, just makin' room for a new batch of the hard stuff up there: Gotta age it purty well before we put it to use, right? That sorta thing's best done out of the way. Once it's done it'll go into the cellars with the rest."
"Awesome, good to see it's going smoothly. Might have to pick up a few bottles myself for cooking in the future."
The farmpony tilted her hat at that, looking Spike up and down. Applejack had already seen the change to his height and bearing the other day, but it was clear she was looking for something else.
"...Ah reckon we could swing that, yeah."
It was nice that it didn't come down to his age at this point, or even Twilight's enforcement of his legal majority. AJ was a consistent top-shelf judge of character: If she vouched for him? That spoke volumes all on its own... 'Speaking volumes' being a contrast to Big Macintosh, who had just made his way down from the hayloft-slash-aging-room.
"Afternoon, Spike."
"Yo Mac! How're things on the farm?"
"Reasonable."
"Glad to hear it. I don't wanna intrude too much, but I promised Applejack the other day that I'd explain some stuff, and I figured I'd tell you at the same time. Mind if I sit in on lunch?"
Big Mac didn't ask for clarification, just looking over Spike's new height and turning to his sister. She gave a curt little nod, and he did the same.
"Nope, don't mind at all."
"Great! I'll pitch in any help if you two want, but I already ate so don't worry about that."
"Nope. You come for lunch, you get lunch."
"...You know what? Fair enough. I pulled the same thing on Rainbow Dash yesterday, least I can do is be consistent."
Within a half hour they were all settled in around the farmhouse's dining room table. They had tall glasses of milk and thick sheets of crispy hash browns arrayed in front of them, along with a crock of beans and a plate of hay bacon. For anypony not doing the kind of heavy labor farm life required? It was a lunch that would knock you out for a nap. For the Apples it was standard procedure.
Granny was sleeping upstairs and Apple Bloom was still in school, so Spike took his time explaining the situation. He gave them just as thorough of an overview as the one that drove Rarity to drink the other day, plus the highlights of his new findings since then. True to her nature AJ just took the entire thing in stride, letting him talk uninterrupted. Macintosh asked questions from time to time that showed he was pretty knowledgeable about tabletop, but not much in the way of arcade gaming.
"...and so that's that. So far my best guess is that this is somehow part of how dragons grow up? I guess it would be different for every dragon, like a Cutie Mark is, and since I like games so much..."
Applejack leaned back from the table (and her clean plate and cleaner glass)
"Whoo! That's a lot to take in there, Spike. And I guess ya wanted us ta know 'bout it, so you don't gotta be secretive or nothin'?"
"Well, there is that. But also, you're my friends! Even if I was being secretive, I wouldn't really want to hide it from all of you... And I probably wouldn't be able to if I tried. Plus, I figured getting more eyes on the problem would help me get some new perspectives. I mean if you're going to do something then do it well, right?"
"True 'nuff. Mac?"
"...Ah might try out some of those digital games later. Keep my peace until then, 'stead of run my mouth about problems I don't quite get."
"Feel free! The arcade here in town expanded a lot recently, so there'll be plenty to try. The owners are some of Rarity's family, real nice ponies."
He left out the bit about them being Night Guards, in part because of his new understanding of that role. Plus it was always cool to see ponies get surprised out by the unexpected, and he'd hate to ruin the surprise.
"As fer me... Well, Ah aint' much into games of any stripe mahself. But that don't mean I've got no advice for yah, it's just what came to mind."
"I'm all ears!"
Applejack leaned back and looked up at the ceiling... Spike rarely saw her doing that, and it usually meant she was deliberately avoiding eye contact. He'd only seen her lying for a short while during the whole Discord incident, but he imagined this might have a lot in common with that. In this case she was probably just trying not to get too emotional.
"Ma 'n Pa... Me and Mac both grew up knowin' a pony couldn't do work unless they had the energy in 'em. That can be hard sometimes, finding the fuel to keep goin'. And ah can't speak to that on an emotional level, that's Twilight an' Fluttershy's sorta thing. But ah do know it applies just as much to hard work: Look how we just ate, right?"
Spike didn't want to interrupt, so he simply nodded and waited.
"Ah guess what Ah'm trying to say is... Keep yerself goin' both ways. As long as ya stay grounded with yer friends and family, that right there's the first kind of fuel . And for the second one, you can see how winded ya are, and how hurt, with numbers?"
"Yeah, I do: I've even got skills that let me work on those directly."
Her expression brightened as she swiveled her gaze down to look at him again, and he politely ignored the barely-noticeable tear at the corner of one eye.
"Well there ya go! That's mah advice: Work real hard on that. Even if'n ya got a thousand different skills or what-have-you, aint' none of it means a thing if ya can't pay the bills for 'em."
That made... a lot of sense. Some of his skills got more efficient as he levelled them, but so far he'd yet to see anything change from having a cost to being free. That made his resources a bottleneck for everything, and in turn that made meditation even more important. It was a one-stop solution for directly training HP, MP, and Stamina. Second in importance would be the raw stats that fed into those resources, and so on.
"Thanks, Applejack. And thanks to you too, Mac, even if I'm taking a rain check on that advice."
"Eeeyup: Get back to ya sooner than not, Ah imagine."
"Never a problem Spike: Y'all come back when need be, ya hear?"
"Absolutely!"
He had a lot of food to work off after that extra meal (could The Gamer even gain weight, or did he have a strict 'size class' for that now?) so Spike took the long route home again, this time testing even more skills at a slower pace. A little bit of harvesting here and there to get material for working on Crafting and Cooking, the occasional claw workout on a downed tree or a sizable rock... He filled the time until dinner happily working away and making progress, piece by piece.