It wasn’t often that one blinked and the scenery in front of them changed. The blink of an eye is so fast … but sometimes it isn’t. What Alex saw when his eyes opened wasn’t quite as unexpected as before – but it was still unbelievable.
He found himself in a glade. Just an open spot in a forest – nothing unusual there – but what the open spot contained was rather surreal. Sunlight beamed directly through the missing canopy and highlighted the white streaks of flowers opened before the slightly warm day. Normal flowers, these, with yellow stamens and irregular bright purple splotches. While the actual flower appeared like a lily, the rest of this particular plant had a long stem – somewhere around 9 inches – stiff and surrounded with spiraling thorns. They grew one by one straight out of the ground, but in patches, seeming to have multiple stems per root system.
Maybe they grew from bulbs?
But the purple-splotched white flowers were still pretty normal for a glade. Most open spaces in a forest would have some kind of undergrowth, if only grasses. What surprised Alex were the second kind of flower he could see. They were glowing. Not just with light coming from the flowers, but a sort of gas flowing up from them. Blue tulips emitting a blue wisp which floated about in the breeze and dissipated about 6 feet above the glade’s floor.
Alex was standing inside the edge of the glade itself, but couldn’t smell anything from the tulips’ apparent gas. Meanwhile, there were bees and dragonflies flitting between the lilies for the nutrients they needed. Floating about near the top edges of the flowing blue gasses were fairies: winged women with what appeared to be armor and weapons like swords, axes, and a great variety of bows.
Some few patches of grass were visible among the swathes of these two flowers and these contained the same kinds of grasses visible beneath those flowers themselves: a simple green bladed grass, a shorter blue-green grass layer, and even a tall purple bladed grass.
The trees surrounding the glade appeared to be pretty regular oak trees with acorns and wide leaves. Only a couple of maple trees were visible among the oaks.
So. Magic or at least gaseous flowers. Fairies. And everything else appears to be somewhat Earth-like. Magic flowers … I hope they’re not poisonous. Ouch! What the fuck?
An intense sensation started inside Alex’s head. It felt like an acorn had been teleported directly into the center of his brain. A headache unlike any other was definitely coming Alex’s way. He opened his eyes quickly to see if he could find some kind of help or shelter to wait out the pain but nothing was visible.
Wait, at the edge of the forest – what is that? Ohmygod! Wolf!
Immediately, Alex looked behind himself and searched for some escape. There was a tree only a few yards away which had a low-hanging branch. A solid oak with prospects for climbing higher. Alex ran towards it. Behind him he heard a yip, then a growling which increased in volume as the wolf gained ground.
Just 5 more steps. 4. 3. Ohmygod!
He could hear the wolf’s footfalls now. Pounding like a horse’s gallop behind him.
Fuuuuuuuckkk! Jump!
Leaping the last foot, Alex grabbed the lowest branch and pulled himself up. He got both feet on the branch and extended upwards to grab the next branch when he heard and felt the wolf hit the base of the tree. Quickly, he lifted his legs – and not a moment too soon; the wolf’s teeth scraped the base of his boot pushing Alex into a bit of a wobble as he completed the motion to attain the next branch.
Heart in his throat, he quickly clambered up a few more branches making a complete revolution around the tree and attaining a height of 20 feet. The wolf, at the base of the tree, ceased growling for long enough to emit a few long howls. In the middle distance, a few more howls came back. Alex was safe for the moment but trapped up an oak tree.
After 2 minutes a second wolf arrived. More made their way under the tree over the next 15 minutes until there were 12 or so wolves underneath Alex’s perch.
Well, shit. Alex thought. Save civilization; quickly, pick some skills; oh, and by the way here’s a totally safe spawn point. Phoebe: what the fuck, man?
The acorn headache began to sprout tendrils throughout the rest of his mind and Alex realized that the danger below wasn’t all he contended with. Luckily for Alex, there was a second branch growing just a small bit to his right which he could slump upon. He was pretty sure that this headache was going to incapacitate him completely – yet he didn’t want to fall off his current perch to become the pack’s dinner.
The splitting pain continued to grow and Alex began to moan at the intensity. It went on and on. Later, Alex never knew exactly how long that first agony lasted because he didn’t note the position of the sun in the sky upon his arrival since things progressed too quickly. It was slightly after noon when his pain faded enough for him to reposition himself on his supporting branch and stop draping himself across the second branch. Looking down, he saw the wolves patiently bedded down waiting for him to try his next move.
Well, since it looks like I’ve got some time on my hands (Thanks Phoebe!!!), I might as well look at what my choices of skills actually allow me to do. status.
Alex’s base statistics showed up. The ten skills he picked were displayed directly beneath his base statistics, but there was also a tab at the top of the page of statistics. The original tab now had the name “Skills and Stats” whereas the new tab was named “Abilities”.
abilities.
Mapping (toggle)
Tracks the detected areas around the user and records information for later review on a map. Later levels record more detailed information about what is detected.
Map (active)
A spell which creates tiny visual detectors in a sphere around the mage. Visual data is then processed and used by an active Mapping ability to record information about the mage’s surroundings.
Blade (active)
Create a blade of force to cut. Strength rapidly diminishes over distance from the mage.
Push (active)
Create a wall of force which imparts energy to push objects away from the mage. Strength rapidly diminishes over distance from the mage.
Heal (active)
Rapidly regenerate some health in the target. Touch required. Speeds up natural health regeneration, taking the energy from the target’s reserves like fat/metabolism.
Detect herbs (toggle)
A passive spell which highlights useful plants in the mage’s interface.
Spell language dictionary (active)
A dictionary which records your known vocabulary in the spell language. When you activate this spell, your interface shows the dictionary. There is a separate tab which is available for notes.
Detect water (active)
The most basic need for survival is a source of water. This spell allows the user to search over a broad area for bodies of water.
Uhh. Well, there’s not much there. For offense, it looks like all I have is the force blade while I’ve got a lot of abilities that will allow easy orientation and utility. As for money-making … wait, what about Pot–
Alex’s mind opened a little bit more broadly and he remembered, somehow, how to make a simple healing potion, a simple mana potion, and a simple stamina potion. Despite knowing he’d never done any of these things he knew exactly which herbs were needed for each, how to mash them to the correct consistency with a mortar and pestle, how much water to add, and the duration he needed to heat each mixture in a crucible before cooling and pouring the final product into a vial for storage.
Maybe that’s what the headache was about? So much new knowledge had to be placed somewhere and for it to feel as familiar to me as instinct, it had to have affected large portions of my brain. Hmm. I’ll ask when I get to some kind of town.
With only one skill which offers any chance of driving these wolves away, I’d better get started practicing Blade.
Alex felt another expanding of his mind as he felt how he could cast the spell by mentally reaching into the center of his chest, pulling a tiny strand of mana from the core of mana spinning around in a sphere, directing that to his hand, and saying the spell language out loud. He knew he could direct more mana into the spell to place more force into the blade, giving the blade more damage at the same range and an overall longer range before the effect faded completely.
Aiming at a twig coming from the branch which supported his torso during his recent agony, Alex cast the spell using only the base cost of 3 mana. He felt the energy moving from his core, along his arm, and then spiraling out from his pointed finger to a glyph which appeared in the air before his finger. The glyph was shaped like a hexagon initially, but then parts of a second hexagon appeared above it and, in an anti-clockwise direction, other glyphs started appearing as his mana drained and he spoke the spell language. For every few syllables, a new hexagon appeared and spiraled out from the center of the spell forming just beyond his finger tip. About halfway through the incantation, Alex stopped speaking.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
I’m actually doing magic! Moreover, it’s beautiful. Orange hexagons spiraling out of nothing to form a piece of art before my eyes.
At that moment, Alex felt the spell waver. The hexagons distorted mid-air and sparks started to come off of them. He had just enough time to think Oh, fuck! before the spell’s glyphs sparked apart and rushed up his hand, along his arm, up his torso, and into his head – giving him his second headache in this wonderful world called Marin.
Luckily, the spell backlash didn’t last long. After 5 minutes, the pain had completely faded and he was feeling just fine.
Round two. And no getting distracted this time – that hurt.
Alex completed the entire incantation on his second attempt and the glyphs gave the briefest of glimmers before disappearing. The twig that he’d aimed at … well … it maybe bent a little? Alex was a little underwhelmed to say the least. His first magic spell backfired, then it did its best to slightly bend a twig. He sat there for a few minutes just staring at the twig, his mind completely blank.
Coming back to himself, he snorted. “I guess expecting the most basic spell at a tiny cost of 3 mana to cause effective destruction is far too much,” he said aloud. Grinning, he decided to target a twig a little closer than the original one – about three feet away instead of the original’s five or so. I’ll also put some extra mana into this spell – double the cost to see what kind of reaction I get.
Pulling more mana from his core and allowing it to extend down his arm, through his finger, and out into the spell form, he started the incantation. Once the incantation was finished, he kept channeling power while he mentally recited the incantation again – this was the best way he could imagine to get twice the mana placed into the spell. He just didn’t know how he could measure mana yet. At the end of the mental recitation of the spell, he cut off the flow of mana and let the spell complete.
The twig he’d been aiming at broke over away from him. Examining it closer, Alex saw that the twig was cut more than half of the way through, but that the last portion of the twig wasn’t cut.
This blade is not terribly mana-efficient. Well, I guess I don’t really know how much a point of mana usually accomplishes, but with only 230 mana in my pool, I surely will need to increase my capabilities if I want to be an effective mage. Speaking of mana – I wonder if it’s regenerated yet?
status.
He was surprised to see his mana at 223.4. His mana regeneration claimed it was 0.639 … but he was still missing some mana from the first attempt at casting unless he’d wildly overestimated how much mana he’d poured into the second casting.
mana regeneration information.
Mana regeneration
The number of mana regenerated every minute. Mana regeneration may be increased by drinking a mana potion or learning the ancient skill of meditation. Meditation benefits regeneration of health, mana, and stamina. While base regeneration takes between one and six hours, meditation can cut that time down to as little as fifteen minutes: learn to meditate!
Well, fuck. Meditation might be super-easy to learn once I get to some kind of town, but until then it looks like I’m not only a glass cannon but one with only – like – 3 or 4 shots depending upon how the force blade scales. I also can’t stay up in this tree for days waiting for the wolves to leave, so I’m going to have to channel a shit-ton of mana into the next cast of Blade just to hope that I don’t waste hours of time regenerating mana. That’s probably going to cause me to waste quite a bit of time anyway because I’m most likely going to over-estimate how much mana I need to cause the damage I need to do. Damned if I do and damned if I don’t. Thanks for the great spawn, Phoebe!
Since Blade’s description explicitly tells me that its power rapidly diminishes over distance, I’ll need to get as close as possible to the wolves as well. Before that, though, I need a way to accurately measure how much mana I’m channeling into the skill.
He opened up the status screen and began looking for some way to pin information on his interface. As soon as his eyes twitched to look for some element to use to drag his mana count around, his mind opened again and he received the memories he needed to pin a numeric or bar representation of his health, mana, and stamina pools on the interface. He also remembered that there was an option for displaying how much mana was being used by each spell he cast. This bar he pinned to the upper right of his vision while his basic pools were pinned to the upper left of his vision.
With not much else to do and time ticking away towards late afternoon, Alex began clambering down the tree. He was very careful to hold onto the trunk and another branch to be sure he was always extremely stable on the way down. When he got to the third to last branch, he was only about 16 feet off the ground. With how big the wolves were (they appeared to be about three and a half feet at the shoulder), he had no doubt that they could almost reach his feet on the branch. While he wanted his spell to have maximum effect, he wasn’t willing to risk getting any closer to the now growling beasts.
Aiming at one which was mostly stationary and almost directly below him, he began to cast Blade. He really wanted to hurt the wolf and hopefully begin to scare the pack away, so he channeled 100 mana into the spell on top of the 3 needed to form the spell form in the first place. This was almost half his entire pool, so he desperately hoped that it would cause significant harm. If it didn’t, he’d be stuck up the tree for a long time waiting for regeneration and have no real option but to empty his entire mana pool in one attack.
As the spell charged, the wolf he was aiming at moved around slightly and even went behind the tree’s trunk from time to time. He kept channeling and targeted whichever wolf was closest to being directly under him, but still far enough away that he didn’t fear that he might cut off his own feet. As he moved his finger, the entire spell form followed it through the air, never wavering from its perfectly shaped glyph form and never dragging behind or anticipating his movement. It was as if the form were directly connected to his finger.
Finally, the spell had absorbed 103 mana – leaving Alex at 130 after regeneration – and he cut the flow, completing the spell. A blade of force left his hand and whipped towards his current target. The wolf’s eyes dilated and it began to crouch in an attempt to escape, but the Blade was far too fast.
Crunch went the wolf. The wolf was cut in half from the back of his neck, through his shoulder blades and down and backward through his torso behind the front legs. The sound of the bones being crushed by the force blade was bad enough but his body was also sent flying in two different directions by the impact – organs and guts from the rear half of the beast splayed across the ground for 15 feet leading to the back and rear legs while the front half shot forwards and bounced off of several of its pack-mates. A deep furrow was dug into the earth next to the tree and a small explosion of dirt and rocks covered the closest pack members shortly after the blood.
Many of the wolves whined and, with their tails between their legs, moved back away from their slaughtered member. The whole pack ended up retreating about 30 feet away from the tree into the center of the glade. There they growled up at Alex and began to clean the blood spatter and dust off of themselves, but they retreated no further.
Meanwhile, Alex was dealing with his third massive headache. He’d had an information-overdose, a spell-backfire, and now he was dealing with mana-deprivation. Overexerting your body when trying to run too far or lift too much weight caused your stamina to run low and your muscles to simply refuse to work as hard as previously. Overexerting your mind by trying to pump far more mana than you were used to controlling into a spell caused your blood vessels to contract then rapidly expand, forming a headache exactly like a migraine.
Because of this immense and immediate pain upon releasing the spell, Alex was lucky enough to blink and miss the explosion of gore from the wolf’s death. He didn’t see the reaction of the pack of wolves and he didn’t really process their whimpers as they retreated. He simply grimaced with his eyes shut and waited for the pain to dissipate.
This has certainly been a shitty start to my new life. Alex thought after another 15 minutes or so had passed. And even after obliterating that wolf below, the pack only backed off enough so that Blade shouldn’t be effective: they can probably dodge it at that distance and they’ll certainly get tons of time to react since the chant and channeling take so long.
Well … what do I do now?
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As it happened, Phoebe really did have a good reason to put Alex in that glade. There was a huntress roaming the woods just to the south of the glade which he should surely have come upon if he’d scouted about a bit and noticed the smoke coming from the nearby smithy. Given that the smithy’s smoke was the only thing visible for miles in any direction, it wasn’t too much to ask him to simply look and travel towards it. Unfortunately, in her haste to get Alex in place she totally forgot about the information overload headache he’d receive from learning so many skills essentially instantaneously upon arrival in Marin and she’d not been too careful in checking the area for foes.
Nonetheless, the huntress had gone her way upon hearing the earlier pack cries and caught some game west of the area: a deer and three rabbits. She happened to be coming back through the area when Alex had fired his Blade and she heard the explosion of dirt and rock when it impacted the ground. She hung the deer and rabbits in a maple tree to allow herself freedom of movement in case she ran into the pack she’d heard earlier and moved towards the area.
Explosions don’t happen naturally without some kind of fire, but I’ve seen no smoke. There’s definitely someone over here either in trouble, or causing trouble. No one should need that kind of force to deal with level 1-3 creatures. She thought as she crept towards a clearing in the forest. There’s the wolf-pack I heard earlier. They’re looking towards the other side of – wow, that wolf is completely cut in half. It looks like the blow came from above and the crater’s under that tree.
Okay. That’s a man. He’s obviously low level or he’d know how to kill the wolves with lesser force than what he used, but he’s also suffering from a headache – probably from investing too much mana into whatever spell he cast. I guess I’ll have to deal with the wolves.
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Alex heard a yelp and one of the wolves fell over. While he was trying to see what happened, he caught a glimpse of an arrow embedding itself into another wolf who also succumbed instantly. As the wolves turned to face this new threat several more arrows thumped unerringly into the hearts of the pack and the number of live wolves plummeted from 11 to 5. With a bark and growl, one of them rushed towards the trees where the arrows originated and the rest of the pack followed. Before they entered the fringe of the trees three more fell to their final rest.
Alex heard two more thumps and assumed the last of the wolves fell. With his heart racing, he watched the edge of the forest and saw a figure emerge into the glade. She was a brunette with brown eyes and tanned skin dressed in leather armor and boots. She, like Phoebe, had a very nice hourglass figure. A chest that was slightly larger than it looked like her frame could withstand, a thin waist, and hips wider than her waist. While she walked out into the glade he couldn’t tell her height exactly, but it looked like she might be slightly shorter than his 6 foot 4 inches. She kept a long dagger in each hand and moved into the clearing stabbing each wolf to ensure it wasn’t just playing dead. While she finished with the wolves, Alex descended from the oak tree and walked into the open.
“Hello”, he said, “My name is Alex.”
“Well-met, I am Erin”, the huntress replied.
Alex noted that she’d replied in a different language than he’d used – she’d spoken Himmen whereas he’d started the greetings using Word. He made the switch to the new language mentally and continued: “Thank you for taking care of the wolves, I’d just arrived from Phoebe this morning when one of them howled and I had no choice but to escape up the tree. After I got up there, I had a ridiculous headache which kept me inactive until just a while ago. Then I didn’t know how much mana to channel, so I ended up blowing up one wolf and scaring the rest out here. I was just wondering what my next misadventure might be when you arrived.”
“Arrived from Phoebe? Where’s that?”
“Ah, I meant the Goddess of Change, Phoebe. She took me from my world and deposited me here.”
Erin blinked a few times but didn’t go on a world-traversing journey: lucky her! She said “… So you’re a Traveler? Someone from a different world?”
“I guess … I think I remember Phoebe saying that a couple of times. To be frank, she rushed through the process extremely quickly. I probably spent only about 10 minutes with her. I’ve certainly changed worlds, but I guess it just didn’t register that I should introduce myself as a Traveler.”
Erin looked up at the position of the sun. “We’d better go. Scottstown is still a few miles away and dusk is upon us. If you’re level one, you definitely don’t want to be outside when that happens. The deer I caught isn’t going to do us any favors with the local monsters after dark either.”
“Lead on,” Alex replied. He didn’t have much of a choice but to trust her and, really, as the last few hours showed he had no idea how he should be using his abilities to grow. It’d be a miracle if he survived alone during the night.