In which we force adorable creatures to fight for our amusement- Let's Play Monster Rancher 2!

My vote goes to Henrietta.

HenryCheese? It's not great, but eh.

Either that or Henrietta.

Save the Henry<food product> for the next jell or colorpandora sub breed.

And HenryCheese would be the best name for a Jell/Suezo imo.

You'll wash the shame away from our ranch, won't you, Henrietta? Yes you will!



Guys, I think Henrietta is trying to seduce us.

A-anyway, let's get this ball rolling, shall we? We got an errantry coupon earlier this month, so I suppose we'll ship her off right away!




Er, Colt? Maybe we shouldn't be sending our sexy lady monster off with that guy? Colt?

Colt had been ignoring me ever since the Henry incident. She was attached to that thing to unholy levels.



Nonono, this is not going to go anywhere good! Abort, Colt, abort!



Sigh. Henrietta, if anything happens, you have my permission to go for the balls.

There are three areas available for Henrietta: one that trains power and life, one that trains intelligence and life and one that trains skill and life. Pixie attacks mainly use intelligence, but I'll leave it up to the majority to decide.

Skill and Life, because apparently Intelligence and Skill aren't compatible. :(

Intelligence and life! We don't want our fairy to be no bimbo!

The benefits of errantry, by the way, are that unlike heavy drills (which raise stats a lot on the cost of decreasing others), you get lots of stat increases without any decreases. It normally costs 2000G, but with a coupon it's only 1000G. Coupons only last for a month, so it's a good idea to take advantage whenever you can.

I vote for Intelligence and Life. Having Henrietta hit hard with her attacks would certainly be useful.

I want to say power and life but...yeah no let's go with that.

Intelligence and Life! Her Skill stat's looking healthy enough for now.

Int Life. Her Skill is decent enough at this point. Depending on how much her Int goes up you can just do alternating drills between Int/Life/Skill.

I like the Life bit of that, but the only Power attacks Pixies have, IIRC, are close range.

I vote Intelligence and Life. Skill and Speed would be nice to raise, too, especially Speed.

Also, Pixies eventually get healing spells, don't they? Or is that only in the later games?

With all the paperwork signed, Colt and I handed Henrietta over to the Errantry man. I still didn't trust Molesty McRapestache, though, so I secretly followed them to the training location. Colt opted to stay behind, muttering something about how we wouldn't have had this problem with the jello worm.



First, Henrietta was put to work outrunning a monkey.



She started off by slowly sexy-walking behind it. Henrietta, dear, I don't think that's going to wo-



Huh.

The monkey got distracted by the swaying of her hips and paused just long enough for her to go around it. Henrietta flashed it a rather rude gesture before continuing on at top speed.



The monkey tried to regain ground, but when it attempted to jump ahead she leapt into the air with wings spread wide and roundhouse kicked it in the face.



Huh.



I'm not sure how kicking a monkey in the face made her smarter, but I'll take it!

No, they can heal themselves (which is another reason I like them).

... There are not enough rage words to describe how much I hate it when any attack misses. NONE! ALL ATTACKS MUST HIT!

Hope she'll learn a new attack, I've always seen that as the main reason for errantries.

I just want to make a point of this. Henry Blobber should take notes from his cryo-stasis pod... THIS is how you deal with your competition.

...Henry would have probably just wiggled menacingly at the monkey and made scary faces.

Indeed. Hence my preference of high Speed / Skill monsters (like the Tiger).

Well, that too. You can fail to learn a technique and still get some stat boosts out of it, though, so it's almost never a total loss.

True, but don't errantries reduce their lifespan by a little bit? That's the part I've always been a bit OCD about.

Work = Grim Reaper?

Not big surprise.

To be fair, if I was that monkey, and saw something like:

Or:

Or even:


There's a good chance that I'd be frozen to the spot, deer-in-headlights style.

That, or it could encourage me to move faster. I'unno.

Henrietta's next Herculean effort was to avoid making a shapely smear of herself on the opposite cliff wall.



Hello, oddly well-rendered derriere. I see where this game's polygons went.



She took a moment to steel her nerves, gathering her courage.



Henrietta starts the jump...




...and she sticks the landing! 10.0!



Does using this gif make me a traitor since I'm actually a Slytherin?



Henrietta is already doing better than Henry could ever hope to. Three cheers for our girl!

Well, that's why you shove them in the freezer when they start getting too old, then use them as breeding stock for their stats. Hell, the later games automate the process!

You know... effective breeding measures would be downright barbaric if monsters were real... Brace for PETA "game" in 3... 2... 1...

The best part is, I didn't make that up. That's really what she did. I think I'll stick post-it notes describing Henrietta's exploits to the outside of his pod so that when he wakes up in the year 3000 he'll know his sacrifice wasn't in vain.

I just realized something.. Colt's attraction to Henry will take a new light after a certain food event.

Darn. I'm sorry I just like power.

Oh god

Next, Henrietta put her wings to use and attempted to climb up a rock cavern.



She had already found much success with her jumping abilities, and so started out confident.



Unfortunately, a passing stalactite found her cockiness unbearable and sought to bring her down a peg.

Ouch.



Our Henrietta isn't one to give up, however, and she sprung back up for another try.



Uh... I think we might need a new monster. We're really running through them, aren't we?

I dragged Henrietta's unconscious body back to the ranch before the Errantry guy could find us. After a few days of recovery and relearning basic motor functions, Henrietta was (mostly) okay.



Gee, Colt, you seem really intense about this. Don't you think getting hit in the face with a stalactite and a boulder is punishment enough?

Unfortunately for Henrietta, we just had to deal with an overly-willful blob of Jello. We're not going down that road again. I chastised her gently, making sure to pat her reassuringly on the head.

What?

It suddenly occurred to me that there are better uses for Henry Blobber than freezer fodder.



Much better.

So

So that's how they make it.

I guess some people raise their monsters to be fighters and some raise 'em for other purposes.

Wh-what?! What if Henry did some mind mumbo-jumbo on the jelly!?

WHAT IF HENRIETTA CATCHES THE CRAZY "WILLFULNESS"!?

I wouldn't put it pass the jelly to try and murder us. Be on your guard.

Could work both ways.

After a bit more rest and feeding her the remains of the last monster to cross us, Henrietta is looking much less concussed.

Some weird ruins had appeared in our garden overnight, and since we had no other use for them we tossed Henrietta in the middle of them and told her not to come back until she was smarter.

Eyewitness reports say she glowed like a flashlight...



...did an anime pose...



...and then her brain grew three sizes.



Huh.

I had a bad feeling about those ruins, so I grabbed Henrietta and told her to go to anime school, instead. Colt chimed in and mentioned that Joy had studied education at an Ivy League school, so I let the toucan oversee the lessons. That seems plausible, right?



Henrietta's attention stayed for a while, but quickly wavered.



How she expected to get away with sleeping in a class where she was the only student, I have no idea. Joy noticed and threw a piece of chalk at her head with his beak.



Henrietta promptly threw a fit, threatening to murder everyone Joy loved in a fit of pique. As Joy is a sociopath who loves no one, this didn't affect him one bit. Instead, he branded her a...





Hilariously enough, Henrietta gets better stat gains cheating than Henry did normally. She's still a dirty cheat, though, so we sent her to her room and took away her cell phone. I heard the sounds of Simple Plan music through her door earlier, but I figure it's just a phase.

You fool! You should have sent her to anime school! There she could have met 4 to 6 boys who embody various archetypes/fetishes and found true love! Now you've doomed her to a life of spinsterhood and soylent green-esque cannibalism!

Or she could've met Fatbird.

... would that've been bad?

Eh, when he came at her with a cleaver she'd have just roundhouse kicked him in the face. It would have been fine.

So I guess it's not only Henry who should be taking notes. -pointed look at Cloaca "Head-in-a-Jar-Yes" Mahoney-

It's been a nice vacation, but it's time to get back to work. Sort of. Updates coming soon.

Woo hoo! A glorious return to ranches and the monsters therein!