Kenny’s POV: Day 1

I’ll skip the freakout. It went on for ages, and we didn’t really get much done during it. A lot of screaming, I suppose, a bit of flailing around and running about. Other than that, though, it was fairly uneventful. I certainly wouldn’t describe the ordeal as particularly productive or useful, and frankly it lasted an embarrassing amount of time.

What came next was possibly more embarrassing, but it’s also too important for me to just skirt over. Yay.

Around the ten, maybe fifteen minute mark for our freakout, there was this big light. Now ordinarily, you understand, we were fairly normal guys, not prone to screaming over something as minor as a sudden glow. But as of the last half hour we’d all gotten a fairly particular experience with mysterious, incandescent energies, and as a result we’d all developed a fairly unified response.

I screamed and turned around to run away, Cádo squatted in some martial arts stance, and Bernard chucked one of his several newly-acquired self-defence-rocks at the source. Not one of us actually achieved anything with the actions, but if nothing else they gave us something to focus on besides panic.

Except for mine, seeing as my response was to just panic.

The source of the light turned out to be some tall, veiled lady standing just a few metres from us. We couldn’t see her face, though her eyes were glowing in the shadow of the hood, and she seemed to be looking at all of us at once. She didn’t need to ask for silence, it just sort of happened, and then she spoke through it.

“Welcome, dreamers. You are, I take it, confused as to the current situation.”

Bernard opened his mouth to answer, and I hit him before he could pollute the conversation with his latest conspiracy theory.

“We are.” I cut in. “Are you here to educate us?”

Bernard was at least my equal when it came to planning and strategy, and he had plenty of his own experience in negotiating, but for now he’d be no use to any of us. Given a few hours his mind would calm down and he’d be lucid again, until then it seemed I’d be in charge of the talking.

“In certain areas.” The woman replied, paying no heed to our little scuffle. “In others, I am afraid, you will need to be your own mentors. Tell me, Emperor, have you yet discovered your innate gifts?”

So, she spoke like someone who’d gotten lost on her way to the renaissance fair, too, rather than just dressing as such. Brilliant.

Hold on, innate gifts? I frowned.

“Well, I am aware that I have a remarkably big-”

“Gifts new to this world,” She clarified, before I could go on to describe any of my several abnormally large organs. “They will have existed only upon your arrival, but will never abandon you now that you are here. Yours, I suspect, will be the only one accessible for the time being.”

I frowned again. I didn’t like being left in the dark, and this lady was dumping me into challenger deep.

“How do I discover these gifts?”

She turned at that, starting down the hill. Every step she took, the woman grew more and more translucent, then transparent. Fading away like misty breath dissipating on a cold day.

“Look at your companions, the way you’ve learned to look at everyone. But moreso.”

With that, she was gone. A rock cut through the air where she’d just been standing, and I turned to glare at Bernard.

“Had to make sure she wasn’t just invisible.” He shrugged. “She’s not. Unless…She can simply phase through things and turn invisible at once…”

I ignored him,focusing instead on my vision, thinking back through my memories to try and discover what the hell that lady had meant.

“She called me The Emperor.” I said, thinking aloud. “So what if she means I need to look at people…As if I’m weighing them up for some manipulation?”

It wasn’t nice to give voice to, but I couldn’t doubt it held weight. Years shadowing my dad had taught me just that sort of thinking, and decades of practising it had made him a billionaire.

Bernard, though, shook his head.

“Can’t be that, I’m at least as big a bastard as you are in that area. Though…She did say Emperor. We don’t really have those in our civilization anymore, right? So what’s our equivalent.”

I nodded, catching his train of thought, then running alongside it.

“Well, my dad and his class, obviously. But I already tried…Hm.”

That was when it dawned on me. I didn’t get taught to manipulate as much as I got taught to weigh, to…Appraise. Everything has its value, as dear old dad used to say, and figuring it out will make you rich.

Hesitantly, I eyed Bernard.

Tall, wiry. Like some big, stretched-out rat. His hair was unkempt, eyes big and blue, face edgy and scruffed. The face was most notable, really. Looking used, in the same way that a bare knuckle boxer’s fists did. In the same way most everything about him did. I’d never known whether he did that on purpose, looking like he’d just crawled out of a fight and through a sewer by choice. It certainly seemed in-line with him, he was actually proud of being born in a-

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Everything flashed before my eyes at once, so rapidly, so deeply, that it almost floored me for the shock of seeing it.

“Are you alright!?” It was Cádo asking, concern warping his voice. I struggled to give him an answer beside just grunting acknowledgement.

“Yes.” I hissed. “Yes, but shut up and let me focus.”

I stared at Bernard, studied him. Studied him like I’d spent a lifetime studying people, but moreso. I picked up his demeanour, his mood, his likely goals and all the classic hits, but so much else was joining it now.

[Appraisal]

* Class: Revolutionary

* Level: 1

* Condition: Fine

* Modifiers: None

* Statistics: Strength 6, Speed 6, Dexterity 8, Stamina 5, Toughness 6, Alertness 8, Charisma 3, Intelligence 10

* Inventory: Jeans, T-shirt, flick knife, rocks(x7)

* Class abilities: Detect Element I

Good God, it was like a game. I’d never played that many, but I knew a character sheet when I saw one. This wasn’t pen and paper, though, more…Yes, RPG. RPG mechanics, squeezed into a real world. We’d been shunted into a fucking LitRPG.

Bernard and Cádo were confused by my swearing, but they soon joined in once I explained the situation. It took us a while longer to gather our wits after that.

“Alright.” Bernard hissed. “Well whatever we end up doing, we need shelter soon. It’ll be colder at night than it is now, and I’m already losing feeling in my toes. We can talk while we travel.”

It was a good idea, so we followed it. Heading downhill in a direction Bernard assured us held some small villages and a town. His memory rarely ever failed us, and unless god had decided to be even crueller than he already had been today then I saw no reason to assume an exception was incoming.

“We’re next to the River Grazgry, a few hundred miles south of Shadervhor.” He explained, confidently, breath visible in the cold air. “You added them in yourself when we were making the maps, remember?”

I didn’t, but I took his word for it. Grazgry and Shadervhor were two of the most important places in our book’s setting, featuring heavily in its earlier arcs. If Bernard said we were near them, he was probably right.

Cádo broke our contemplative silence first, always the hardest of us to faze. That particular trait would do a lot of life-saving in the coming months, but I didn’t know that at the time.

“What are my stats?”

I eyed him.

“Seriously?”

“Yes, seriously, it’s important we know.”

“He just wants to get a dopamine hit from seeing his big number.” Bernard snickered. I figured he was probably right, but all of us could use the distraction, and I in particular would benefit from practising this weird power a bit more.

So I looked. Tightening my eyes, concentrating as I did before. It still took a while, but if I wasn’t imagining things the display came quicker this time. I was more cognizant of it, too, able to examine how it appeared to my eyes. A stream of numbers and letters, running through my mind. Not quite visual, and not quite entirely imaginary, it felt like remembering a sheet I’d read before with perfect clarity. Interesting.

[Appraisal]

* Class: Dragonknight

* Level: 1

* Condition: Fine

* Modifiers: None

* Statistics: Strength 8, Speed 8, Dexterity 8, Stamina 9, Toughness 7, Alertness 8, Charisma 6, Intelligence 5

* Inventory: Jeans, flannel shirt.

* Class abilities: Beloved I

Cádo was a simple man. He heard that he belonged to a class called the fucking Dragonknights, and he squeed. It took a while for me to calm him down enough to convey the more particular points of his reading.

“Eight Strength then.” He grinned. “So I could body Bernard.”

Bernard made a deliberately exaggerated show of shock.

“What?!” He cried. “No way! Y-You mean I’d lose to an olympic athlete? Cádo, mate, that’s just impossible to believe!”

He shared a bickering laugh with Cádo while I frowned to myself. Suddenly curious about something else, now.

Holding a hand out, I stared at it. Studying the creases of my skin, scrutinising the dark sheet while I tried as hard as I could to examine myself as if I was just some random person, and muster all the cold distance that let me bring up my friends’ information. It was blessedly quick.

[Appraisal]

* Class: Emperor

* Level: 1

* Condition: Fine

* Modifiers: None

* Statistics: Strength 5, Speed 5, Dexterity 6, Stamina 5, Toughness 5, Alertness 8, Charisma 9, Intelligence 9

* Inventory: Jeans, shirt, jacket.

* Class abilities: Appraisal

I was a bit miffed, after my second read of the information. Somehow “appraisal” sounded rather mundane compared to whatever the fuck Cádo’s “Immortal” did. Then again, we’d gotten more use out of my power than either of the others so far. Names could be unassuming.

We were halfway down the hill by the time we started to make sense of the information, and the sky was darkening.

“So we know that bigger numbers are better.” Bernard noted. “Unless we’re just horribly wrong about how our respective strengths line up. It seems like a stat of five is about average?”

I could agree with that, I was tall but fairly wiry, average strength seemed about right.

“Makes sense that I’m the only one with double-digit intelligence, considering how dumb both of you are.” Bernard continued, doing a remarkably close impression of someone who was three words away from being shoved down a fucking hill. “Other than that…I don’t think we can use the rest of this data until we have more information. There wasn’t exactly a hint about how we might use our class abilities.”

I nodded, having come to more or less the same conclusion. Although…

“We can level up, most likely.” I pointed out. That was how these things tended to go, at least, and it seemed pointless to have a listed level if it couldn’t increase. Bernard nodded.

“Probably, unless we’re just stuck at whatever level we start with. That would be just typical. I wonder how we level, assuming we can.”

Cádo gave us the answer to that, oddly enough.

“I hope it isn’t the traditional way we strengthen ourselves in real life.” He grinned. “If I’m still level one after all these years, you two’ll be stuck at it forever.”

Bernard nodded, thoughtful.

“Good point.”

Cádo frowned. “It was?”

Ignoring him, Bernard continued. “If you of all people are still stuck at level 1, then either we won’t be growing at all, or the growth will come through means other than just…Exercise. That, or it is exercise, but we couldn’t benefit from it before coming here.”

He studied us both, and it was me who caught on first.

“Are you thinking of killing one of us and seeing if you get experience points?” I asked, pointedly. Bernard snorted.

“God no, of course not. No, I’m just wondering what would happen if I did. Anyway, it’s getting dark.”

It was, at that. Dark enough to move conversation on from that particular ravine by force.

“I say we make camp for the night.” Cádo declared, and neither of us were in a state to argue.

If we’d known what sort of evening was awaiting us, we’d probably have started preparing to sleep hours earlier.