Day 8: Under Pressure Ascensination

I did have a stroke of luck, in the sense that it *was* clover day, but it was also the planning, and a few clever tricks that helped me through it in the end.

PvP went cool. I won 12/13 fights, although I did seek out low-level targets. I mostly wanted to improve my flower mini-game, before Ascending.

Then I had to race to Ascension, first of all, because I didn't want to be PvP-hit by people, now that I had become vulnerable, secondly, because I suddenly found myself having to work unexpectedly.

To shorten stuff, I chose to starchart the crossbow, instead of the Star Sword. I spent a lot of meat on the schnapps shots that were available at the brewery. They give a very good advs/drunkeness and stats/drunkeness ratio. They are just terribly expensive. I got reasonably lucky with the wheel, and ate some quality food (pr0n chow mein and lucky surprise eggs) when it got around to hitting the Lair. First part went well, until I got to the Star Key. I had gotten 67 point of moxie, but not enough mysticality, yet. And I had forgotten that that's the minimum to wear the Star Buckler. Again, I got lucky with the wheel. The Topiary Golems were nasty, but manageable.

I found myself at the bottom of the steps, with about 30 or so adventures, a few statpoints short on my secondaries and my familiars unleveled. I got a piece of genius advice from my clannies: Hovering Sombrero. Since the level of the Tower Monsters is so absurdly high, the Sombrero, even unleveled, far beats a Volleyball type of stathelping familiar. It also helps for your offstats. I got the Sombrero to level 14 and fought my way up the tower. I crossed my fingers and lo and behold. Cow nor Globe. I got a spider web in one turn.
I still needed one moxie point. Four adventures later, I got those. The Heavy door, bolt and shadow were no problem, but now I had 20-odd turns to level my familiars. Time for some math.

A familiar has to be level 20 to pass the Tower challenge. A level is reached when you have the square of the level in xp (kills). So...400 kills for level 20. Assuming theoretical perfection of 5 xp per fight at the Arena, that's 400/5=80 fights. Each fight takes a turn (and costs 100meat, but meat isn't important here).
Luckily, I have some skills. Amphibian Sympathy (+5 pounds) and Empathy (+5 pounds).
Also, I had 3 Tiny Plastic Familiar accessories from the LSE's. (+1 pound each).
20 - 5 - 5 - 3 = 7 pounds of familiar required. The square of 7 = 49.
49/5 ~ 10 turns of Arena fighting.

Now you see my problem. 2*10 turns of Fighting would end my number of turns. Familiar equipment is only gotten at the tenth win and only helps that specific familiar. So, I devised at trick. I fought 9 battles with my first familiar, getting him to 6 pounds. I used my tenth fight to get a lead necklace by winning a fight with the Flaming Gravy Familiar. Suddenly, each familiar had to get to 7-3 = 4 pounds. 4 square = 16 xp. Divided by 5 ~ 4 turns.

(In retrospect: I could've also fought 4 turns with familiar A, 4 turns with familiar B, 1 turn with familiar C, then the Gravy fairy, and hope that I had guessed the second familiar right. That could've saved me 0,3 or 4 turns)

That meant I had 6 turns left to fight the Naughty Sorceress. *beep beep*. Time to go to work.

[supsenseful cliffhanger]

Luckily, no-one had tried to PvP me. At work, I dove immediately into the NS fight and beat her, with some trouble, on the first try. I did all the stuff that I needed to do (well, almost all the stuff) and Ascended.

*sigh of relief*

Keypunch (#30036)
Level 11
Crocodile Lord
Ascended in 1,086 turns, spread over 8 days, under the packrat zodiac, under no-path Hardcore conditions.

p.s. My fastest run so far, by 2 days!
p.s.2 I also was on the Hardcore PvP leaderboard, with a ranking of about 180. Nice for my "ancestral ranks", I suppose.