Infinite Farmer: A Plants vs Dungeon

Tulland blinked a few times. Yuri soaked it in, visibly confident he had no idea what she was talking about.

“Run that by me again.”

“It’s what it sounds like. They give buffs to other buffers. Or, more specifically, they give buffs to buffs. The most common kind of them increases the longevity of buffs. You could go to five different people in town before you hit a dungeon, get five different kinds of buffs, and then have one of these guys follow along refreshing them all day, keeping them from wearing off.”

“Really?”

“With weak enough buffs and a strong enough meta-buffer? Absolutely. But it gets way more complex than that.” Yuri looked at both Tulland’s and Necia’s faces. “Are you actually interested in this?”

“We have to be,” Necia answered for Tulland, which meant she was also trying to make sure he understood what was going on. “If all this means what I think it means for Tulland, we need to be.”

“Okay then. So, in this group, I’m not sure what combination of buffs we are going to use yet. But one thing we are going to use for sure is what’s called a lobber.”

“The help you throw things?”

“Better. They throw buffs. It’s a wartime class. Imagine your army is down in a valley fighting and all your buffers are up on a hill trying not to get killed. How do you get the buffs from the people who can supply them to the people who need them?”

“You got it. And best of all, like I said, a meta-buffer buffs a buff. So if someone is giving you, say, increased attack, someone else can enhance that buff if they know it’s coming, then the lobber throws it.”

“It gets even better when you understand that…”

Yuri proceeded to describe several aspects of buffing, meta-buffing, and the various ways they could be combined that Tulland had no hope of understanding at all. Necia seemed to be following along just fine, but Necia had not only always been smarter than him but was also much better educated than he was. He had learning of a sort from his uncle and tutor, but neither of them had understood classes to the extent someone smart from a world full of classes did.

Are you getting any of this?

Of course. I’ve had to adjudicate problems having to do with many of the combinations she’s describing. She knows her stuff, as is sometimes said.

So what do I do to understand this?

Right now, it’s enough to know that they have enough tools in place to do a great many things. For the rest of it, you’ll have to hear the greater plan.

I suppose I knew that. How much do you think I should be suspicious of this plan?

Not at all. These people want to succeed, as Rand said. The only suspicion I’d recommend paying attention to is if they seem over-hopeful, willing to try anything at any cost so long as it has even a slight chance of succeeding. They might commit to risks you wouldn’t.

I’ll keep that in mind. Although I’m inclined to take big risks too.

“Anyway, that’s everything.” Yuri looked at Necia and bowed. “I hope you explain it to him later.”

“No point. You don’t even know what you are doing yet.”

“Well, true. But the meeting should be starting soon. Amrand just wanted to explain who you were to everyone. The rest of the plan can be planned after we know the plan. So to speak.”

Amrand came and scooped up Tulland and Necia just a bit after that. He had lined up all the warriors, hunters, and various combatants on one side of the depression while setting himself, Tulland, and Necia up on the other side.

“Most of you have caught bits and pieces of what’s going on, and even more of you have been around for big parts of the lead-up. But some of you don’t know anything except that there’s danger coming. I thought it would be worthwhile to get us all on the same page. Everyone ready for that? Good.”

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Once again, Tulland thought that Amrand had probably missed his calling as a lawman or a mayor. He seemed to really love giving speeches. Amrand held out his arm, showcasing both Tulland and Necia as he continued.

“These two are, believe it or not, the best chance of taking down the blight that we’ve ever had. Does anyone need details on why?”

Three people raised their hands.

“I was hoping to avoid it, but fine. Tulland is some kind of magic farmer sent from The Infinite. Necia is the best blocker I’ve ever heard of, and nearly as high level as Tulland. Both of them are over level eighty, if I get my guess correctly. And Tulland thinks he has the key to all this.”

“I don’t know how it works.” Tulland hissed low enough that Amrand could hear him, but hopefully not the crowd. “Don’t put me on the spot.”

“Just watch.” Amrand whispered back. “Not going to be a problem.”

Somehow, remarkably, it wasn’t a problem at all. The crowd started asking questions, but almost all of them were focused on who would be doing what jobs, and how long it would be until they started doing them. To the extent anyone asked what Tulland would actually be doing, Amrand gave vague answers saying it was a hard-to-explain something to do with plants, and that it had a chance of beating the blight.

They all went for it. Not in a desperate way, either. They just sort of shrugged, accepted that they couldn’t know, and moved on with trying to figure out what to do.

The plan slowly emerged. There would be a group hanging back, taking potshots at beasts and moving closer and closer as if they were planning an attack. That, consensus agreed, should draw the rage of the blight no matter what kind of mind it had. If it was exhibiting a mindless rage response, it would send everything it had. If it was a planning type, they’d get the same results for a different reason.

Tulland would be sneaking in under the cover of that distraction, hopefully facing much thinned or eliminated resistance from the usual defenses in the way.

“What kind of things can we expect?”

“Nobody has attacked the blight directly since the retreat. At least nobody that came back.” Amrand frowned. “We could get crushed in a stampede. I’m not going to lie to you. There might be tons of them.”

“Couldn’t there be surprisingly few?” A man raised his hand in the back. “We might have an easy time.”

“No chance of that, I think. Just the number of monsters we can see are a real threat. We are hoping that’s about it. But whatever comes, we’ll take them,” Amrand stated.

“How?”

“We’ll be geared for defense. We’ll put our buffs on our defenders, we’ll attack in a way meant to keep them safe as long as possible. We’ll try to keep the monsters enraged without actually pushing into blight territory.”

“Why’s that?” A man in the back finally asked a question that Tulland understood from front to back. He would have asked the same thing himself. “Why not do some damage? Can he do more from the inside?”

“Maybe he can, and maybe he can’t.” Amrand looked at Tulland and nodded. “But I’ve seen enough of him to know that if he can, it’s gonna be big. And he’ll have to get close to do it.”

To Tulland’s surprise, the actual timing for the attack wasn’t planned out yet. From what Amrand was saying, it could have happened that day, in a week, or even in another month. They’d only get one shot at it, he said, so they needed to make sure it would work.

In the meantime, Tulland got to feel useless. There were real experts here, people who functioned like White and Potter and who understood warfare and how to organize troops in a way he didn’t even begin to come close to. The buffers were even worse. They knew everything about his class while he only understood them as those guys who make you stronger somehow.

“I don’t know what to do about it. I’m the crux of this whole thing and I can’t even help.” That night, Tulland was holding on to a cold bowl of food that he hadn’t quite been able to bring himself to be hungry for. “I can’t do a single thing to make this work.”

“Tulland. You are my favorite person. You know that, right?” Necia took the bowl from his hands and snuggled up a bit next to him on the rough-cut log of wood they were using as a campfire chair. “You get it?”

“I do.”

“That’s why it’s frustrating when you do this. Show me that seed again.”

Tulland pulled the seed out. It didn’t look like much, just a bit of wood that even failed to look like something you could plant and grow. His Farmer’s Intuition told him it was something much different, but infuriatingly didn’t seem to care much about telling him exactly what it did.

“That’s the key to all this. I don’t even have plant powers, and I can tell. The Infinite thought you could do something here, and that’s the absolute most you could do. I saw you putting what you had into it. Even without a potion, that’s a whole different kind of thing compared to the liar’s grass. It has a bit of your soul in it, Tulland.”

Tulland looked at the seed. He couldn’t see what she saw, but it was comforting. Necia was somehow never really wrong about anything.

“And it’s a nice soul, Tulland. You aren’t doing nothing. You are doing everything. We are all just trying to have your back while you do it.”

Somehow, the plan seemed to be coming together the next day. What had been arguing and bickering at a group level slowly organized into practicing and experimenting. The chaotic bolts of light the buffer group were sending out started to become smoother combinations of color and light, and Yuri reported they were finding all the “best synergies”, which he took to mean things were going well.

It all helped, but Tulland got so antsy that eventually Amrand sent him away to hunt dungeons just to keep his spirits up, and to protect the morale of anyone who might be watching their supposed savior pacing up and down the perimeter of camp like a restless madman.

Tulland made a wide circle around the capital, heading towards one of the areas where their overall efforts to grow liar grass had been harder because of terrain and the positioning of the cursed city itself. It took a few hours of searching before he was finally attacked by a group of small, four-armed warriors wielding one spear in each of their hands.