Careful, measured footfalls of booted feet allowed Alexander to trail the two survivors of the goblin horde to their origin. They were, in fact, headed up the underbrush riddled track that led to an abandoned silver mine, its owners having closed the doors on the facility when it became more costly to extract the silver ores than to simply invest their fortunes in the stock market. A good broker made better return on investment than risking the silver seams thinning out and so, an entire town’s livelihood was stripped away overnight, the miners and their families left high and dry without so much as an “attaboy”.
He and his classmates learned about the history of the mine and its owners in elementary school, they even got to visit on a field trip. It was kind of exciting, seeing a system of corridors carved through solid rock that extended three miles deep into the northern Appalachian range. In addition to silver were all sorts of subsidiary metals, copper, some gold, zinc, quite a bit of lead, a reasonable titanium occurrence, iron, of course, and others. In short, the mine had been a bit of a catch all source of precious metals, only, it was some tough digging to get to them.
The goblins patter of bare feet led him surely until they turned onto the unkempt road to the mouth of the mine.
The mine exterior was all big rough timber framing, six by sixes arranged in methodical spacing to support the tunnels dug into the Maine mountain side. He’d been there before, so he knew what to expect. What he did not remember seeing before was a shimmering blue wall, sort of like a mirror that reflected an azure reflection of the world outside the mine entrance. The interior was completely blocked by this decidedly supernatural phenomenon.
His tour of the complex had been restricted to the upper level alone, he was on the clock. He now knew, for certain, that this was the source of his trouble. Should he go in? Should he let the goblins report their failed mission and plan a follow-up ambush?
Trust in the violence of action, Alexander.
It was something his mother used to say, mostly when she was telling him to get off his ass and lay hand to whatever chore she had planned for him, in response to his asked question why he was the one who had to do it. But he knew its proper meaning: when you had initiative you could dictate the course of events. Attack first, and you chose the time and location of battle, push the enemy into reactive action and you controlled them.
The pair off goblins became a singular goblin when he put the crossbow sights between the shoulder blades of the one with all its limbs and pulled the trigger on the weapon.
*thump*
A muted sound of string whipping forward and the bolt flew with incredible velocity, taking its target squarely in the back. That one fell without a sound, as if tripped on a stone. Its companion stopped, turning to see what happened. Alexander didn’t stop to reload but, instead, dropped the crossbow, drew his knife, and, running full steam, tackled the one-armed creature, ignoring its shrill screams while ramming the knife down into its neck and chest until it stilled.
The violence of action, indeed.
With both of the last members of the war band dead, Alexander decided it was time to go on offense. For whatever reason, there was a delay between rounds of monsters. They didn’t come one after the other. The length of time between the offenders had even increased. Perhaps they were weakened, or it took time to grow more of them, or something. Only one way to know.
He retrieved the crossbow and approached the shimmering blue wall that separated the interior of the mine from the outside world. Gingerly, he put a hand against the barrier, almost expecting an electric shock. None came. There was no sensation as his hand passed through the field covering the mine.
Withdrawing his hand, he looked at fingers that showed no ill effect at all.
A few deep breaths were all he allowed himself, forcing himself through before his courage failed.
Tirnanog Contested Space Entered!
A pulsing blue scroll erupted before his eyes and Alexander bit down on a shriek that might reveal him to the goblins that might haunt this mine. Heart rate around mach two, he breathed sharply through his nose to avoid hyperventilating. While he did, he considered the scroll that seemed to remain centered in his field of view. It was transparent, he was aware of the landscape behind it, as if he’d closed one eye and was viewing the scroll from a different perspective.
It’s all in your head, Little Falcon, he realized. Since he was a lunatic, visual hallucinations were just par for the course, and the last Garifalte took comfort from that knowledge.
Tirnanog? Alexander recalled that being the name for wherever the hell the goblins had come from. And he had just entered it. Or, at least, a piece of it shared the space that belonged to part of his world.
Once through the barrier, he recognized the interior as belonging to the abandoned silver mine. It was just like it had been all those years earlier, dry, dusty, dark, and most assuredly claustrophobic. There was the impulse to bend over, even though he wouldn’t quite be able to touch the roof of the mine with hands stretched overhead. Even so, the place gave him that sort of feeling.
Alexander realized, that one thing was off. It was dark, but in that way that an under-lit room was. Already his eyes were adjusting to the interior. Where was the light coming from? There were no lamps glowing, no torches, no indication anywhere that a source of light should be permitting the mine to be anything but pitch black. Behind him, the glowing gate shimmered with a soft blue glow, but that didn’t come close to providing enough light to allow him to see down the carefully hewn corridor.
Crouching, stepping softly, he slowly stalked down the dusty stone floor deeper into the mine. The not real things had come from this place. It was here that he might find a way to stop them from returning. A risk. Necessary. Alexander continued to justify his presence in this creepy place, every step taking him farther from safety and pitting him against the unknown. Turning back wasn’t so appealing either, he knew, while peering around a bend in the tunnel; it was already dark outside. He was safer inside the mine than in the darkness of the forest, where more of those enormous panthers might be hunting.
Slowly, Alexander’s senses adapted to the low light and he could see fairly well, eyes penetrating the gloom to let him perceive a solid hundred feet into the carved stone path. He wasn’t a geologist, but something was off about this place. This was once an active mine, they’d carved deep into the mountain, over three miles deep from the guided tour lecture way back when. Where were all the side corridors, the prospecting tunnels? The gradually descending, almost winding spiral of his path didn’t seem like it was very efficient in terms of delivering ore.
“Hey now.” He whispered softly to himself, coming to the realization that there was no sign of mine carts, rail, heavy equipment, wiring or any of the kinds of trappings of a modern excavation operation.
He stalled, noticing now that the carefully reinforced and squared off corridors had gradually become smooth and round, almost like a naturally eroded formation, but that didn’t make any sense, how did a mine shaft erode? It didn’t. He was experiencing more unreality.
One booted foot forward. Then another. Carefully, Alexander continued his hunt. He was coming closer to the source of the nightmares; he just knew it. Clammy hands gripped the crossbow, shifting to sure up his hold while he crept. The satchel on his hip was heavy, but he wouldn’t have left behind some way to deal with another Ogre. The real trick would be not killing himself if he had to use its contents. Better not to think of it, he chided.
A gradual bend opened up, widening, the pressing roof receding up to form a cavern, and Alexander got an answer to one of his mysteries. The missing people. The folk not amongst the statues frozen in their places, petrified in the act of going about their small town lives, were in the widening chamber ahead. Smell assailed him. Rot and filth. The townsfolk, or, more correctly, their remains, were found. Skeletons stripped of flesh were jumbled in piles. Skeletons of all sizes, from teenaged to adult. Clothing ripped away was stacked in a nearby heap. Big cook pots and spits sat empty, no burnable wood remained in the rough stone circles, the charred remnants long, long turned to ash. Except for the bones. A multitude of crudely assembled chains and manacled rings staked to posts held no captives, but human scat, some of it only a few days old, told the story.
The goblins had been scouting for food. They had been running out of theirs and were coming for fresh meat. Alexander’s insanity, the slaughter of the scavengers and their leaders, and then his ambush, had deprived them of resupply. He had, unknowingly, been starving the creatures. They ate all their remaining prisoners and came out in force.
Goblin life must have been simple, brutish, and absent any but the barest similarities to civilization. Dirty, soiled fur blankets covered parts of the cavern floor. A primitive forge lay cold to one side of the huge chamber. Hunks of metal, the same color and form as that of the Ogre’s weapons and King Goblin’s armor could be seen tossed in a jumble nearby. He saw a claw hammer lying on a cut stone block about the size of a kitchen table, scraps of beaten and dented metal left behind. Failed products, probably.
But where had they all come from? That was the real burning question.
Driven by a quiet anger at the fact that he hadn’t been alone, that there had been those who could have joined him, that his neighbors had been taken by these monstrous fuckers for cattle, Alexander carried on through the cavern. The cavern narrowed to another set of corridors at the back end.
One led to a pool of sullied water. A spring that spurted from the wall, carrying fresh water into a deep cleft in the rock. It had to drain, maybe through another cavern below, he didn’t know. And that explained how the creatures were getting water. They didn’t appear to care overmuch about boiling it though, their human soups aside. Or shitting near it, he realized grimacing against the smell.
Hate flared, a cold fist in his chest.
Retreating from the goblin’s toilet, Alexander tried door number two. Here he found another mystery’s answer. Goblins were born from eggs. Eggs that were about the size of a beach ball, slimy and anchored to the floor by webbing of fibrous material that almost appeared to be sinew. He also learned that goblin eggs were laid by a goblin Queen, because, at the end of the chamber laying upon a pile of furs, with tributes of metal scattered about, animal skulls, including humans, and even other goblins, was the hulking monstrosity herself. Ogre in size, teen feet or more would the thing have stood, if it could have stood. It lay supine, gigantic swollen breasts pendulous on its chest, and its pregnant belly heaved.
Alexander watched the creature deposit another egg to the cave floor, ignoring him completely. He wanted to be sick. This was what his people had died for? To feed this fucking monster? Nope. Not anymore. Too late to save anybody he might have been. Too slow to put the pieces together for where the monsters had come from to find this charnel house before they’d eaten what remained of the people he’d grown up with. But not too late for vengeance.
Without further thought, Alexander hefted the crossbow and sent a bolt toward the Goblin Queen, the dart penetrating deep into the creature’s thick neck. Alexander didn’t bother reloading; he was already swinging the satchel into a spin. Two good spins and he loosed the thing, ignoring the monster’s pained shriek. It was so fat with more goblins it couldn’t stand. The satchel thudded to the cave floor next to it, scattering black sand, or so it appeared. Alexander pulled a road flare from his coat pocket and struck the brilliant red torch to life. He tossed the flare in a high arc and ran, diving around the corner. Nothing.
“Keep running then, idiot!” He yelled, caring nothing for stealth now.
His boots and voice were the very least of the noise about to-
The detonation roared behind him deafening him, a fist hit him and knocked him down, and dust filled the big cavern. Whatever magical effect lit the interior of the old silver mine didn’t affect the space being filled by dust, it appeared. Some sort of ventilation had to exist, else the little bastards would have suffocated themselves with the fires they used to make their shitty armor and to cook his friends and neighbors.
He crawled to one wall of the cavern, away from the smell of old death and feces, and stayed there watching, listening for any sign that reinforcements were coming. Nothing. Long minutes passed and, eventually the dust cleared from the chamber, rising up he noted. So, some kind of updraft, probably the cave ceiling had some kind of access to the surface.
Rising slowly, hand against the cool cave wall, Alexander stood straight. He had to be certain that the creature birthing the goblins was, for absolutely certain, dead. Retracing steps, he returned to the site where the satchel of Tannerite had been thrown. A gigantic, mangled form lay against one side of the birthing chamber. The eggs that had been laid were still burning somewhat, although they appeared to be too moist to really take off. Alexander drew his knife. Easy fix.
After slitting open each egg and thoroughly killing the still developing goblin inside, he examined the corpse of the Goblin Queen. It was an up-scaled version of the female Hobgoblins, made more grotesque for its bulk. It smelled awful, too. Quickly he drove off imagined couplings between the goblin royals, before he made himself sick.
The monster was dead, that much was certain. Its bloated body had been torn open by the circular saw blades inside the satchel of Tannerite, and viscera formed a shallow pool near its corpse. Without further thought, Alexander carved open the creature’s chest and pulled free the prize, a fist sized jewel so similar to that of the Ogre, but of greater size and increased number of facets. The crystalline thing almost burned with inner light. He didn’t know what to make of that so he stashed the gem in his coat pocket and left, after making certain no goblin eggs had gone undestroyed.
If he’d had any salt, he would have scattered it around, just out of principle.
Steeling himself, Alexander strode toward the last offshoot of the cavern, the largest diameter one. Whatever lay beyond here, he would face it with a knife in his hand. The last Gerifalte was getting awfully tired of being afraid. It was someone else’s turn. Like whoever had done this to him, had inflicted this long nightmare on him.
The corridor wound, deeper into the mountain. He walked calmly, boots echoing off the cold stone. Eventually, maybe half a mile of winding corridor without branches later, he turned a corner and found a chamber of glimmering crystals growing from the rock walls. Like a massive geode, the chamber glowed brilliantly compared to the rest of the subterranean space. A space that was illuminated by magic. He saw the source of that magic before him, a singular pillar of crystalline perfection, blue-white, facets glowing powerfully.
His skin felt tight, like he was being squeezed, almost as if he’d dove deep beneath a pool of water. The air he breathed was too thick in his lungs. Alexander realized that if he was going to do what he knew he was going to do, then he had to do it now, while he still could.
Rapid steps carrying him forward, Alexander Gerifalte charged the source of the magic and brought the knife down in a hammer grip against it as hard as he could. The blade sank into the crystalline surface to its hilt, smooth as stabbing modeling clay.
Sight vanished in a sapphire brilliance and a voice, melodic, vaguely female, filled his mind, body, and soul.
WORTHY. WORTHY. WHAT IS THY DESIRE?
What…what was his desire? He laughed, even though he couldn’t feel his body or hear anything. A laugh born of immense pain, rage, and rejection of disbelief. His desire? He wanted to go back. He wanted to wake up in his bed, before any of this had happened. He wanted his parents back. He wanted to punish whoever had done this to him.
IMPOSSIBLE. IMPOSSIBLE. POSSIBLE. POSSIBLE.
More of the all-encompassing voice. Like the Earth itself was speaking to him. Which it was, a newly conscious god manifest, projecting its will toward one of the few of its beloved children who had proven themselves worthy to speak with it. Who had conquered the challenges it laid to test them, to refine them. It would give a gift of itself, a reward for its promising children. All they had to do was speak their desire.
Alexander’s mind rocked with the wash of the presence he had accessed by stabbing the crystal pillar.
What did it mean? Why did it repeat itself? What was impossible? What was possible? What were the fucking rules? ! He raged, furious with himself for not understanding.
You know what I fucking want? Alexander asked himself, I want to know the rules. And I want to be strong enough to break them.
WORTHY. WORTHY. THOU HAST ASKED WHAT CAN BE GIVEN.
Another wash of the attention of something so far beyond his perception he couldn’t attempt to see its edges. A heat began to grow inside him, filling his body. A fire lit within his soul.
SEEK. SEEK. TOUCH THE DRAGON PULSE.
Those last cryptic words echoed through him before the presence receded, drawing back like an ocean tide, leaving the human hollow, except for the imagined fire that warmed him with its vital energy.
His senses returned, over a period of time that he would never be able to describe later. Hours. Years. It could have been anything at all. Spongy grey meat in his skull lacked the capacity to speak with gods or world minds.
Slowly, he realized that he was standing in the crystal chamber, the geode that held the massive glowing pillar. A pillar that wasn’t glowing brightly at all now. It was dim, a pale blue light that barely would have made for a nightlight.
The unearthly radiance inside him was fading, retreating, leaving him feeling…altered. Alexander had the vague impression that he was like one of the pieces of metal stock he’d hammered a few days ago fresh from the forge, losing its cherry red temperature, returning to the dark grey of unworkable steel. Made of the same stuff as before, but distinctly changed.
“I have no clue what just happened to me,” He told the geode, rocked by the encounter with some sort of ascended being, “But I think I’m done being here.”
Retracing his steps from the noticeably darker corridors of the unnatural cavern, Alexander uttered a silent prayer to the pile of bones that they would be allowed peace. He also offered, for what it was worth, an apology for not saving them. It didn’t make sense, but, then, nothing did anymore. And hadn’t, for a while now.
It was all too much.
Heedless of anything, absent thought, Alexander left behind the goblin cave, exiting the also faded barrier at the mouth of the mine. It was dark outside. He didn’t know how long he was inside, but he had only experienced perhaps an hour’s worth of subjective time. Which was why, when he turned toward the south, preparing to head home, he stopped mid step when he realized that there was the faintest hint of dawn to the east.
Dawn? He’d gone inside just at nightfall.
“Fuck it. Time dilation. Sure. Why not?” He mumbled to himself, resuming egress toward his borrowed home.
Unable to shake the niggling feeling of wonkiness from himself, he pushed to make it to the Laboratory.
He had one stop first though. The Goblin King. He wanted to pull the jewel out of its chest to compare to the one in the horrendous matriarch of the little bastards. His samples required experimentation to understand and he would feel better about destroying something potentially useful if he had duplicates. The firetrap should have left at least a couple of the biocrystals intact. Given their toughness, compared to their size, he didn’t doubt that he’d have plenty. He needed to hurry. The gradual lightening of the horizon promised daylight soon. It was the third day; the sun’s first light would erase the corpses. Alexander had until then to extract the jewels from his prey or see them evaporate away. He doubled his pace, pushing through the tiredness.
Operation Kill With Fire had been a complete success. Grimly satisfied, he permitted himself a moment of gloating as his eyes canvassed the square that was the site of his trap. Scorched asphalt, corpses burned to blackened husks, and scattered bits of shrapnel lay strewn about the kill box. The Goblin King lay where he’d stood when Alexander began hurling Molotovs down at him.
Intent on his objective, he was stunned utterly when his focus on the corpse caused his vision to flicker, an image akin to the blue glowing doorway into the mine unfurled before him.
Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.
Goblin King
Status:
Deceased
Soak: 0%
LifeForce/Armor
Head
Mana: 0%
Might
44
Height
12’2”
LifeForce/Armor
Left Arm
0/0 broken, 3rd degree burns, shrapnel
LifeForce/Armor
Right Arm
Grace
7
Weight
760lbs
0/23 2nd degree burns, shrapnel
Goblin Crown
0/2 damaged, 3rd degree burns, shrapnel
Impetus
12
Age
67
Crude Pig-Iron Vambrace
LifeForce/Armor
Chest
Crude Pig-Iron Gauntlet
Cogitation
6(-5)
Core
Imperial Topaz, pear
empty
0/12 damaged, seared lungs
Great Goblin Cleaver, dropped
Wisdom
4
Origin
Tirnanog
LifeForce/Armor
Left Leg
Pig-Iron Half plate
LifeForce/Armor
Right Leg
Ingenuity
3(-5)
Monster Race:
Goblin-3rd Tier (Ogre, King Variant)
0/7 damaged, 2nd degree burns
LifeForce/Armor
Abdomen
0/0 broken, 3rd degree burns, shrapnel
Durability
25(+10)
Pig-Iron Schynbald
0/0 broken, shrapnel perforated organs
Pig-Iron Schynbald
Valor
15(+10)
Pig-Iron Half plate
Traits
Physical mitigation, Flammable, Nobility, Dull wit, Cannibalistic, Goblin King’s pride
Skills
Bash, Greater throw, Rallying shout, Sundering strike, Berserk, Savage flurry, Demoralizing growl
Arcana
Ogre Aura
Information assaulted his mind, as if he’d opened one of his father’s advanced calculus books, the scrawling formula reverting into letters and words, heavy with context.
Alexander tripped over himself and threw up, vertigo tilting him upside down from the torrent of knowledge pouring through his consciousness, a valve opened with tons of pressure behind it, pounding down channels too narrow to confine it. Too much!
As quickly as it had come, the sensation of falling vanished, leaving him merely slightly motion sick, a construct holding a wealth of knowledge about the Goblin King hanging in his vision.
Curiosity replaced agitation and discomfit. Here then, was the gift of the strange omnipresence that had spoken to him. He’d wanted to know the rules. Well. Perhaps not exactly what he’d had in mind, but it was a close enough thing.
Alexander saw a bewildering array of data on the creature, including a rough summary of its injuries. Some of it he didn’t understand. Okay, that was a complete lie, there was an incredible amount that he didn’t understand. But at least he had something to even attempt to wrap his brain around. A few things seemed to be obvious enough. Integer numbers reflecting physical and mental parameters, okay. Mana, fair enough, he already knew there was a great deal of magical nonsense in his unreality.
Soak? What exactly the fuck was soak?
Unbidden another scroll unfolded in his eyes, overlaying the previous one, but not replacing it, another flash of vertigo, swiftly gone and much less potent.
Soak: the imbuement of the mundane with the magical. Creatures possessed of cores concentrate mana within their bodies and this mana resists alteration to their bodies by a fixed amount so long as they possess mana reservoir.
“Oh, okay, uh…thanks…insanovision.” Alexander said to the newest manifestation of his madness and it vanished, as if knowing his use for it had vanished.
He tried again, concentrating on something else within the data array. How about Ogre Aura? Nothing. Not specific enough? Not intentional enough?
Alexander tried again. What is an Ogre Aura?
Ogre Aura: a natural ability of ogres to exchange their mana for increased might, durability, and passive increase in soak. Deactivated when mana insufficient.
“Hohoho…Alright!This. This is what I’m talking about!” He crowed, overjoyed for the first time in a long time.
It was like being blind and learning you could see. In an ecstatic frenzy of exploration, he concentrated on each of the corpses and a new window appeared to him, replacing the prior one, unless he really focused to keep both in sight. It was a little like crossing your eyes to hold two objects in view. Five minutes of indulging his euphoric access to information hidden by this nightmare reality and Alexander calmed. Standing in the ruin of the square, pockmarked by metal flung by explosives, surrounded by charred monster bodies stinking with the smell of burned asphalt and diesel fuel, he remembered his purpose for coming back to the flame trap. The cores.
He now knew what the gem inside the bodies represented.
They were magic stones, like in stories. Fantasies. Escapist trash that a purposeful human like Alexander Gerifalte would never in a hundred years have wasted his time consuming. Why would he have ever read about nonsense when he could bug his father to take him to the airport to fly a real plane? Or, failing that, he could put himself in the digital cockpit of an F-18 Hornet, dog-fighting Russian Migs with shockingly realistic physics and controls.
Except that, now, flying a plane was a distant fantasy, and the magical stone he ripped from the King Goblin’s chest, still covered in gore, was as real as cholera. What a twist.
Quickly, before he lost them to the rising of the Renewal Sun, as he had come to think of that third sunrise that cleansed injury and evidence of the evil things from the land, he carved free the cores of the Hobgoblins and as many of the smaller goblins as he could.
A glance at the horizon revealed that he didn’t have much time. Instead of removing the tiny little amber gems from the small goblins, considering he had a dozen of them right now, he turned back to the Goblin King’s body. He had seen what “soak” was, but he wanted to understand it. There were percentages next to the values, which Alexander interpreted as a certain amount of damage reduced due to trauma.
Pulling open the cavity of the Ogre variant, he inspected the dead thing and found about what he was starting to suspect, terrible, terrible damage caused by the flame, extensive wounds caused by the explosive flung metal, but nothing like what he would have expected. The Goblin King had been standing nearly on top of one of the crates containing his improvised explosive device, the shitty metal armor it wore was deeply dented, gouged, and outright penetrated to reflect the power of the flung steel shards. Its insides though simply did not reflect the energy that those fragments would have possessed. So…if he was understanding this correctly, soak sort of was exactly like it sounded. It, somehow, magically, absorbed some fixed percentage of the energy in a collision or attack.
That explained how the first Ogre had withstood so many heavy slug rifle shots. It explained why even the little ones were tougher than expected. They were passivating his rounds spontaneously. It explained why the heavy forty-five caliber had managed to do its damage too, he’d put enough rounds into the creature to probably deplete its mana, permitting the bullets to exert their full lethality on the ogre.
He grinned, satisfied as a predator that had discovered a limp in its prey. Guns were of limited usefulness against the soak property, in the long run. You had to wear it down or have exquisite shot placement and massive overkill. Both could be arranged, but he wasn’t made of ammunition and he’d blown through quite a bit of it in his trap.
He regretted nothing about that though.
Fire had probably relatively swiftly eroded whatever magical protection the passive reduction imparted, after all, fire was aggressive change, but mag dumping the Shamans had permitted the flames to access the threat that was the Hobs and their Ogre king.
“Ten out of ten, would napalm my enemies into submission again.” Alexander giggled, slightly off kilter at new revelations and not a small amount of combat fatigue.
Dawn reached out with golden light across the valley, the sun having crested the mountain. Bathed in its phoenix aura, Alexander was refreshed, mentally and physically.
Two things immediately occurred to him, firstly, the goblins all came from somewhere called Tirnanog. Whatever the fuck that was. Secondly, if he could examine the monsters, maybe he could do the same to himself.
Alexander Gerifalte
Class: Entropic Neophyte
Status: fresh
Soak: 15%
LifeForce/Armor
Head
Mana: 150%
Might
9
Height
6’2”
LifeForce/Armor
Left Arm
12/0
LifeForce/Armor
Right Arm
Grace
12
Weight
160lbs
9/5
None
9/5
Impetus
13
Age
17
High quality Hunting jacket
LifeForce/Armor
Chest
High quality Hunting jacket
Cogitation
14
Core
Black Fire Opal, brilliant
empty
14/5
Hunting Knife
Wisdom
12(-5)
Origin
Gaia
LifeForce/Armor
Left Leg
High quality Hunting jacket
LifeForce/Armor
Right Leg
Ingenuity
15
Sapient Race:
Human-2rd Tier (Shaggoth)
10/5
LifeForce/Armor
Abdomen
10/5
Durability
11
High quality Hunting pants
10/5
High quality Hunting pants
Valor
25(+10)
High quality Hunting jacket
Traits
Raptor Gaze, Fantasia, Spatial Adept, Back from the Brink, Lethal, Artisan of war, Scholarship, Gaia’s Child
Skills
Heart’s blow, Rage, Greater Focus, Greater Analyze, Lesser Stalk
Arcana
Entropic aura, Chaos bolt
A less disorienting explosion of information assailed him but it was still a chunk to take it. He’d concentrated on himself, and, to his surprise, he witnessed now the same kind of scroll of knowledge that he’d gotten from examining the Goblin King. What he saw both made sense, and, didn’t. At all.
Firstly, what by the good grace of all the gods above, below, and in between, was a goddamned class? This sounded like the dungeons and dragons stuff. Real hard core nerd shit. Alexander didn’t indulge in escapist entertainment, he liked his world, and he’d mostly ignored fiction of any kind as a pointless distraction. Shooters and simulators had been his thing.
“Joke’s on you Little Falcon,” He rued allowed, “I bet those geeks would already be plotting how to use this…whatever this is to start kicking asses, while you sit here with your thumb up your ass.”
With his full attention on the words, each of which on their own obvious enough, but together forming a conundrum, his curiosity and full throated need to know triggered another unfurling of scrollwork, an answer to the question unuttered, but deeply desired.
Entropic Neophyte: the WORTHY whose purpose is unweaving of mana, to pierce the shroud of mystery and lay bare the reality beneath wields chaos as a weapon. Talents multifaceted from uncommonly diverse experiences and diligent training leave branching paths toward the future. Martial tendency dominates, as does the inclination to engineer answers. Walk the path to find the way.
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” He complained, but no answer was forthcoming.
Alexander’s shoulders slumped when he realized Gaia, a name plucked from nowhere to give personification to the planet that had so marvelously fucked him over this past month, enjoyed her riddles and obfuscations. The wretched clow of a piece of water-logged rock circling a dust speck of a star. Maybe he was a touch bitter
An instinctive dismissal sent the near useless class scroll back to the void of unreality from which it came. Alexander needed something more concrete to focus on, so he turned to the numbers, which had always seemed to him a firmer ground on which to build..
His physical might parameter was, compared to the Ogre, pitiful. Yep, that was pretty much expected. He was more graceful than the hulking monster, which was, slightly surprising, the creatures moved plenty well for something that big. Well, or, maybe not, if the one chasing him could have used its incredible strength properly, it probably would have been able to hit him with its thrown weapon or navigated the flea market fast enough to snatch him. Alright, so, notably, the mental parameters for Alexander were much higher. He tried not to get too excited about that, he’d spent his entire life being educated by very competent humans. The goblinoids were shitting around their drinking water, so, you know, not real bright.
Things got interesting when he saw, to his absolute disbelief, that he had a core. How? When? He couldn’t feel it, could he?
“Oh fuck, wait. I remember.” Alexander not quite moaned, recalling the flood of heat that had kindled inside him when he touched the crystalline pillar and communed with…a fucking god or something.
It must have catalyzed something inside him. Why? He’d only asked to know the rules, the lines between that and the blue scroll phantasm of his addled mind didn’t add up to anything that made sense. A ghostly whisper from his subconscious said “You’re insane, nothing will ever make sense. Run with it.”
Standing in the cool morning of Main’s November, he tried to think back to just that last night. Things were slightly jumbled in his head. So much had happened, too much unreality to keep track.
It took almost five minutes of trying to piece the moments between stabbing the crystal core of the space that must have, somehow, brought the goblins across from some distant place to Earth. An alien world. Or a parallel one. Poh-tay-to. Poh-tah-to.
Ah! It dawned on him; he’d wanted to know the rules. He’d wanted the power to break them. That must have been it. To know the rules, he had the gift to see reality in a way that let him understand it. To break the rules, he had the gift of magic to change that reality. There was a twisty, fae kind of logic to it. Not quite a monkey’s paw, more like something so very much vaster than he, giving him an answer to the wrong question. Giving him the answer to the answer he wasn’t smart, wise, or knowledgeable enough to ask.
The bodies of monsters around him finished evaporating while he had his epiphany.
Now clear of goblin corpses, Alexander saw the mess he’d made. Not too shabby, for a young man with a siphon hose, some copper wire, and a redneck supply store. He wasn’t even certain why Tannerite was even legal to sell like that. Thank all the gods above, below, and in between that it was. Explosive powder had allowed him to finish the goblin royal family.
“I gotta go lay down.” He decided, voice echoing across empty streets, off the faces of the buildings that had made up his world, not very long ago.
Steps fresh from the renewal, he sought the comfort of his soft mattress, one of the few luxuries left to him. One doesn’t appreciate the delicious hedonistic wonder that is a hot shower until it is gone.
Ensconced under a down comforter, flannel sheets keeping him toasty in spite of the roughly sixty-degree Fahrenheit interior of the modern cottage, Alexander let himself peruse the information that he could, at will, summon about himself.
For over an hour he did nothing but catalogue the various pieces of information, gathering the corners of the puzzle that was this unreality.
Firstly, the numerical parameters, deceiving for their simplicity. He just went down the list, focusing on a specific question regarding the function of each of these quantities, starting with the ones that seemed to dictate the function of one’s physique.
Might: the strength of body, power to move heavy objects, to wield weapons, to use one’s form as a weapon.
Grace: the link between mind and action, increases the deftness of movement, reducing unintended motions and wasted effort.
Impetus: rapidity of action and reflex. Improves the subtle speed with which the body responds to command as well as the velocity of its movement.
Alexander didn’t spend much time pondering those descriptions, they seemed relatively self-explanatory. The numbers themselves were without direct context, he didn’t know what the unit values themselves meant, which somewhat robbed the numbers of their informational value. Trying to compel an answer to that question revealed nothing, indicating that he didn’t know what question to ask, or how to ask it. Moving on, the mental.
Cogitation: this attribute reflects the ability to recognize patters, and apply logical thought to interpret information as well as to retain and recall that information accurately.
Wisdom: reflects the mental faculty of making sound judgements, assembling experience and instinct to create a holistic understanding of events and their relations to one another.
Ingenuity: mental quickness and flexibility of thought, this attribute describes the ability to synthesize mental constructs and adapt to new information or engage in creative thinking.
He had to admit, he wasn’t entirely certain he understood the subtle differences between some of these. He was debuffed, something called Fantasia was inflicting a negative five, that was something like a thirty percent penalty to his wisdom. Alexander resolved to look into it as soon as possible, but, for now, he was concentrating on the core attributes. Maybe if his cogitation score was a little higher or he was a little more ingenious he’d be able to connect the dots. That seemed like a good way to generate anxiety, so Alexander turned to the last two parameters, which seemed to be referencing the resistance to injury or harm.
Durability: robustness of body and fortitude against illness or infirmity, this attribute also reduces the effects of Time’s passage by substantial margin.
Valor: resilience of mind and enduring spirit, this parameter guards the sanity of a sapient and defends against the intrusion of another’s will.
Rolling over on his side, forming a cozy burrito of goodness, Alexander had to reflect that his highest stat appeared to be the one that guarded his mind from insanity. He didn’t like that implication, especially not with the additional thirty three percent boost to Valor that suggested he was probably not, in fact, insane.
The main reason he found that unpalatable was because, if he wasn’t crazy, then there was a better chance that this world wasn’t some kind of very involved delusion. That would mean that everything was real, that his parents were truly gone, and that he was going to have to fight menaces like the goblins for the indefinite future, however much future he might have.
For a few minutes he simply hid from that realization. When he couldn’t force himself to any longer, he wanted to weep again for the loss of his life. It took an effort to choke down that grief, surprising for its intensity, but he managed. One of the things that made it easier was the advice of his parents delivered after a funeral for a grandparent of whom he had been fond.
“The dead don’t weep, Little Falcon,” His mother said, wiping the tears from her own face after the service, while his father drew him away gently to leave, “Nor do they feel pain. Pain is for you, and so is memory. It’s good to be sad. But remember too that your grampa loved best to see you smile. So, smile for him, Little Falcon, and laugh, and remember the joys you shared.”
It took a long time for him to understand her advice. It took even longer to be able to use it. It would take longer still to ever be able to apply it to the wonderful woman who had given him that advice.
Alexander, for all his tender young age, was going to have to be a man. There wasn’t anybody else to lean on. He’d known that, ever since returning to his home to find the curse on everyone here. Knowing wasn’t understanding, and, certainly wasn’t accepting.
So, he shelved the hurting that had started anew and continued to catalogue whatever information was available to him. Basic information for his body was a skip, he didn’t need to look at those more closely, likewise the health and armor indicators, there just wasn’t a whole lot to look at there, he was healthy and he wasn’t wearing armor.
Life force, that was kind of nebulous. He knew if it was zero though, that the critter was dead. Mana at one hundred percent, he was topped off. Shame he didn’t know how to use it. Soak was five percent, which didn’t sound like a lot. By all the gods above, below, and in between, the young man dearly wished he had a good way to test that in detail. It very likely would have prevented his desperate tangles with wolves and panthers from being quite so desperate. Best not to get cocky though, just look at what soak had done to keep the goblins alive.
Onto the meat and potatoes, traits, skills, and arcana, by which he assumed he was to infer his ability to do magical horseshit of his own. He would test that out, later. He would test it all out. Later. For now, he was just getting the edges of the puzzle in hand, he’d put things together after.
First though, he’d had enough lying in bed being sad. Trust in the violence of action.
He rolled to still booted feet, abandoning the warmth and headed outside, mid morning Maine offering him its very finest.
Clear blue skies, absent cloud. Yellows, browns, golds, and reds turning the mountain into a painter’s dream of color. It wouldn’t last much longer, the frost and a good wind would soon strip the deciduous trees for Winter but, damned if it wasn’t a sight to be treasured while it lasted.
“Alright.” Alexander told that open air, and those empty streets, “I guess this is real after all. As real as what came before anyhow. And hating it, and being hurt over it, doesn’t change it.”
“I’m gonna whip your ass!” He cried out, telling the world that had changed so abruptly his intentions, “I’m gonna get strong! I’m gonna learn how to use this, and then, I’m gonna fuck you up!”
All the rebellious fearlessness of youth was in him now, “My Name is Alexander Gerifalte, son of Etri and Minerva Gerifalte, and I will not stop until they live again or you and I don’t!”
Thus, was his challenge laid against the world.
He turned to the very real, very magical words upon a scroll of magic in his sharp green eyes and he began to study his talents, so that he could begin working toward victory. Victory against anything, and cold winds blew down the valley, carrying his words.