Johanna Milton, Peter Donnall, Tom Welter, Laura Vogel, all four are so far down the line of inheritance that their prospects are limited, generations after the Fall. This is why they turn to salvage, braving the perils, imaginary and real, of the Ancient ruins.

This is where they stumble upon the mana-preserved skeleton of one Douglas Moore, dead 150 years before… and the consciousness of the Ancient, stuck in a most unnatural afterlife, restarts with input flooding from four windows into life.

Moore quickly finds access to a strange and utterly baffling gaming system that seems to overlay the world. The system looks like a weird version of a CRPG, and Moore decides to provide as much power as he could to the four, as his own consciousness is linked to their perspective. Based on their attributes, he settles on making Johanna a Shaper – a sorcerer – her boyfriend into a Battler – a melee fighter – her childhood friend a Discreet – a stealthy fighter – and the latter’s girlfriend a Fixer – a healing build – with a few appropriate skills to match.

Unaware of the existence of Moore, Johanna and the others quickly realize they had somehow acquired strange powers, the like of which is rare and almost unheard of. Fearing having been Changed by mana, they try to keep those Talents secret, but when facing threats to their homes, they have no hesitation to use any and all abilities to defend their families, while, behind the scenes Moore scrambles to allocate the experience points the system counted into more skills and levels, trying his best to guess what will work out for them.

Exposed, they settle in nearby Valetta, as they try to cling to a semblance of normalcy while slowly adapting to their changed condition. But those powers are out in the open and they attract the attention of the authorities. They get turned into bargaining pieces, drafted into a war involving their home state of the Montana Marches and the northern territories in what used to be Western Canada.

For the first time, they have to leave their home county and discover the world beyond their limited perspective. At New Benton, the capital of the new version of the Montana, Johanna discovers the informal Society of the Mages of America, and her mentor, Sorceress of the Mists Elena Worchester, discovers in turn the weird peculiarities of what appears to be the first four-fold archmage of history. And the even more anomalous case of Laura Donnall, who seems to be both sorceress and saint – as nobody but Moore knows the exact details of the System and her specialization.

Their training is cut short, as the enemies of the Montana mass at the Kootenai Gap, the main highway into the state across the mana-rich zones.

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While Moore improves Johanna and Peter’s builds into specialized versions, the wendigos, allies of the tribesmen of the North, notice the presence of mages, believing them to be mercenaries. And when the battle is joined, Moore uses the experience earned to provide a battlefield adjustment and adds a skill that has never been seen in the history of the Americas: Fireball.

In the aftermath of the battle, disastrous for the tribal armies, the wendigo hunter, Snowbound Glatteis, uses his own skill to sneak into the garrison, where he is quick to realize that Johanna and Laura are drugged with a contraceptive drug, to prevent them from slipping under the draft law and create more problems for the Warden of the Montana. He seizes the opportunity to turn them from the Warden’s most significant strength into potential enemies, believing chaos is worth the risk.

The four decide to desert. They may have loyalty to their homeland, but little to a ruler who betrays them. And they have the Talents to allow them to travel through dangerous zones, zones that Moore identifies as special through his ability to monitor people’s descriptors.

They follow the mana zone, using its dangers to keep pursuit away. The zone is peppered with isolated remains of pre-Fall structures, weirdly preserved by denser mana pockets. It is in one of those structures they find their second artifact, a pair of gloves whose properties escape them – as Moore is unable to provide them with that information.

However, the biggest shock of their lives happens after they leave the mana zone and arrive at the easternmost towns of the Montana. The local ruler, Countess Rocastle, shows them her collection of books, and Johanna – or rather, Moore through her – creates out of an Ancient book a parchment-like sheet that offers leveling, stat increase, specialization, and skill, all packaged into a single Settings Scroll. Tailored for Catherine Rocastle’s System status, the parchment grants her first skill, making her into a metal-element sorceress, and turning one of her guards into a partial Guardian.

Recognizing the massively increased stakes linked to the ability to provide Talents to other people, Catherine Rocastle does everything she can afford to pave their way out of State. Despite a group of locals, unaware of the impossible strengths their complementary abilities provide, trying to kill them for the bounty, the rest of the trip after they slaughter the hapless would-be bounty hunters is uneventful. Johanna, Tom, Peter, and Laura finally make it out of the Montana and into the plains of the Dakota.

But Moore finally has enough experience points to test one of his unique abilities – trying to grasp Johanna’s consciousness through the window into existence associated with her.

Alas, communication between the dead spirit and the living fire sorceress is difficult, and he can only provide ideas, half-speech, and half-unconscious intent. Still, he hopes that this will be enough to spur her into… well, creating adventurers. People with enough power to reclaim the world from the grasp of the alien mana and its attendant “System”.