Jill MacLeod gripped a mug of steaming coffee in her hands and inhaled, her eyes fluttering closed in satisfaction, as dawn broke. The first rays of sunlight flashed over the Midwestern plains, through the armored windscreen of Bertha, Jill’s big-rig truck, and onto Jill sitting in the driver’s seat. To the south, the smoke of a burning city clogged the sky, but to the east it was clear. Jill smiled and took in the wafting scent of coffee. She ignored, for just a moment, all of the stress and horror that had crashed down on her - on everyone - at midnight the previous night. When the world as everyone knew it had ended; when technology had failed; when homicidal monsters had come to Earth, thirsting for blood.
The scent of coffee faded, crowded out in Jill’s senses by a scene from the night before playing on her closed eyelids: the brothers Babu and Ras Bati, caught on the road like her, fighting for their lives in the dead of night, taking refuge on top of their crashed U-Haul moving truck. Jill’s heart sped up as she remembered the brothers desperately holding the monsters off; how Ras’ sword flashed in reflected headlights, how Babu’s conjured fire lit the night.
The two had only survived because with the monsters had come magic, imbuing into people the means to fight back. The magic didn’t depend on mystery or esoteric secrets. Rather, all of the powers a person could take were laid out for them in boxes of text, a System of options and statistics suspiciously similar to those found in a video game. Jill had at first dismissed the text-filled blue boxes that had sprung into her vision as hallucinations, but before long accepted that no, they were real, and that she could gain magical abilities of her own. Every monster she killed gave her Experience; enough Experience increased her Level; every Level increased her physical and mental abilities, and gave her a Class Point to spend on a specific ability.
Jill hadn’t given herself the ability to cast spells or to infuse magical powers into her guns, or anything else like that. She’d become a Battle Trucker, with nearly all of her powers dedicated to enhancing Bertha. Through luck, circumstance, bull-headedness, and a lot of help from new friends, Jill had gained Levels quickly. Her old, faithful, beat-up big rig had been transformed into a magic-enhanced Soulbound Vehicle which, while truck-sized on the outside, now held an entire burgeoning town on the inside of its dimensionally stretched trailer. Not to mention the half-dozen machine-gun turrets on its top and sides, or the horn on the front that blasted out sound waves powerful enough to explode an elephant.
“Good, you’re finally up,” a voice said from behind Jill. The speaker, Sangita Bati, mother of Babu and Ras, stood between the two seats of the cab. The dark-haired, dark-skinned, middle-aged midwesterner held a clipboard in one hand; the other was occupied spinning a pen at inhuman speed. From the bags under Sangita’s eyes, Jill doubted that the other woman had gotten a minute of sleep. She started to say something else, but Jill spoke first.
“Sangita,” Jill said to the woman, “it’s officially ass-o’clock in the morning, and I haven’t gotten any of this cup in me yet. There are less than a dozen people awake in the whole truck - trust me, I can tell - so don’t give me that ‘finally’ duckshit.”
“Sorry,” Sangita said, not sounding apologetic in the slightest, “but those military folks in the airport are awake and demanding that you meet with them and talk supplies.”
“Of course they are,” Jill grumbled. “You did tell them that I put you in charge of keeping everyone fed, right?”
Sangita let out a huff of annoyance. “Apparently, I’m not good enough to talk with.”
“Bunch of asshats,” Jill said. She sighed and gestured at the seat next to her for Sangita to sit. “Gimme five minutes to wake up and I’ll go yell at them.”
Jill’s truck was parked at a gate on the tarmac of Billings-Logan International Airport. Bertha had no airlines to compete with for the spot, as there were no flights during the apocalypse. The airport had instead been transformed into a haven for thousands of refugees. Jill didn’t know exactly how many, but she and Bertha had delivered a staggering forty-six hundred of them the night before in a deadly rescue mission. The System had rewarded her for saving those people, giving her a mountain of Class Points.
Rather than spend them, she had collapsed asleep at the first opportunity, getting to sleep shortly after midnight after being up for forty-six straight hours. She’d woken blearily just before dawn and forced herself out of bed, fighting a lack of sleep that clung to her like a sodden blanket. That wouldn’t normally have been an issue for Jill, as any self-respecting long-haul trucker could go a while on low sleep, and the magic coursing through her should have made it even easier. But constant terror and adrenaline had taken their toll, not to mention being shot and operated on to remove the bullet while still awake. Twice.
Phantom pain flashed through Jill’s shoulder and upper chest, where threads of metal had wormed their way through her flesh, extending out from a cursed bullet to torture her. Jill swallowed and shook her head, reaching up without thinking to rub the site of the former injury.
“Is the wound still bothering you?” Sangita said, a hint of concern in her voice. “I can wake Karen up.”
With a flicker of thought, Jill willed a summary of her statistics to appear and a blue box popped into the center of her vision.
Jill MacLeod
Class: Battle Trucker Level: 82
HP: 1710/1710 MP: 2550/2550 XP: 3,355,427/3,403,000
Body: 171 Mind: 168 Spirit: 255
Conditions: Well Rested
Class Powers: Hold Together (1), Battle Hardened (1), A Deal’s a Deal (1), Synergy (1)
36 points available to assign.
(+) Bonus to Class Power effectiveness.
(+) Bonus to Class Powers which boost Soulbound vehicle
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Dedication slots available: 3
Cross-class dedications available: Malediction Bard
Her Hitpoints were full, and she had no adverse conditions.
“No,” Jill said. “It’s just in my head.” Magic and a night’s sleep had cured what would have taken months of recovery. While Jill had invested almost every of her Class Points into enhancing Bertha, the stat gains from leveling still represented so much magic coursing through her that she was nothing short of superhuman.
During the hectic fighting of the night before bullets had bounced off of her skin, leaving nothing but welts behind. Not that she was invulnerable: System-enhanced equipment with magic of its own could hurt her easily enough, especially those wielded by someone who had invested their powers into fighting, rather than trucking. Point by point, level by level, offensive and defensive magic were in an arms race with each other, leaving mundane weapons behind.
Jill wasn’t just tougher; she was much stronger as well. She dropped her hand back to her mug, gripping it with exaggerated care; thinking about her strength was like thinking about breathing, and she was suddenly acutely aware that she could shatter the mug with the slightest effort. Ceramic shards and scalding liquid couldn’t hurt her anymore, but it would be an absolute waste of coffee. “Just because it’s in your head,” Sangita said, eyeing Jill’s gripped hands, “doesn’t make it not real.”
Jill snorted. "Tell me a fucking about it.”
The past day had been traumatic, to say the least. On top of being physically injured and nearly killed, Jill had been assaulted mentally by both magical powers and just the sheer horror of what she’d been through. First had been the bloody violence of killing monsters. The act of shooting animals was nothing new for a woman who’d grown up hunting with her father and brothers, but there was a horrible difference between killing a deer for food with a single clean shot versus the wholesale exploding slaughter she’d wreaked with Bertha’s front grille and machine. That had been necessary though: those monsters had all been hellbent on killing anyone they could get their claws on. And Jill knew that many had succeeded. Thousands of people had died in the towns and cities she had driven through.
But that was yesterday, and today was going to be different. Today her starting point wasn’t confusion and terror, it was a giant armored magical truck covered in machine guns, with a whole pile of class points to make it even better.
Jill raised her coffee to salute the dawn and took a long, deep swallow.
“That right there,” Jill said with a sigh, “that hits the goddamn spot.”
“I’m so happy for you,” Sangita said, her voice flat and back to business. “Now get ready to listen; I’ve got a lot to coach you on if you’re going to be getting us what we need.”
“My five minutes aren’t up yet,” Jill said, eying the clipboard with distrust. “You know, you were a lot more friendly when you made me coffee at your place.”
“That was when you were my guest, not my boss,” Sangita said, her disgruntled tone betraying her feelings at their new relationship.
Jill felt the same. She hadn’t wanted to be in charge of anyone, but events of the day before had pushed her into the role. It seemed that everywhere she went people needed rescuing; she couldn’t in good conscience abandon people to die to monsters, and her truck could carry hundreds, thousands, of people to safety thanks to its magic. Jill had meant to just drop the newly-minted refugees off at the first safe place, but a huge number of them had decided they would rather live inside the truck than out.
The deal had been simple: Jill was going east all the way to the coast and everyone who wanted to come along could, as long as they would help out as best they could and do more or less what Jill said. They could get off any time they wanted, but Jill wasn’t going to stop and wasn’t going to let anyone else tell her what to do with her truck.
At the end of Interstate 90 Jill’s father, brothers, and girlfriend were waiting for her. They had to be waiting for her. If anyone could survive the end of the world, it would be her prepper father, and his bunker of a home would be a natural meeting point for anyone who knew of it. Jill told herself for the hundredth time that everyone was ok and that the worst thing waiting for her was that her father, proven right, would be insufferable.
The door at the rear of the cab swung open and another woman, blond this time, stuck her head in “Good morning,” she said, yawning. “Is that coffee I smell?” It was Karen, Sangita’s sister-in-law. She had showered since the day before and so her hands were clean, but the sleeves of her blouse were still stained brown with blood from her work in the truck’s medical bay.
“Hell yes it is,” Jill said, taking another swig. She eyed Karen over the rim of her mug. “You were asleep just a minute ago; I checked. Did you come straight here from waking up?”
“My ears were burning,” she said, giving an innocent smile. Karen shut the door behind her and walked over, leaning on the back of the passenger seat. “What are we talking about?”
“How she was nicer to me yesterday,” Jill said, gesturing at Sangita.
“Bringing her sons home alive will do that,” Karen said. “Just about the only thing that will!”
Sangita fixed Karen with a glare, making the younger woman laugh. Sangita gave out a huff and stared down at her clipboard. “Where are those boys, anyways? It’s not like Ras to sleep late, dont’cha know."
Jill raised an eyebrow at Sangita, but the other woman didn’t notice. Karen shook her head.
“I’m surprised Babu isn’t here,” Jill said. “He was so excited about Bertha’s mega-upgrade that I thought I would find him sleeping outside of my door, ready with some sort of game-inspired strategy to make us all shit diamonds.”
Bertha wasn’t just a Soulbound truck anymore. Spurred on by the number of people living inside of it, the truck had undergone an evolution the night before, becoming a Settlement and presumably gaining some of the same types of powers that the towns and cities they’d passed on their route already had. One thing however was conspicuously absent: the glowing dome of a barrier shield that helped protect every other Settlement from monster invasion.
Sangita sighed. “That would be something he’d be excited about.”
Jill opened her mouth to say more, but Karen’s now furiously shaking head and a hand drawn across her neck silenced Jill before she said anything. Instead, she closed her eyes and expanded her senses, letting her mind flow into her truck to look for Babu and Ras. Bertha was hers, tied to her by magic in ways that she didn’t entirely understand. She could feel what happened to Bertha as if it was happening to her own body, for good and for ill. When her truck was in good shape, running clean and straight down a smooth road, it was as if everything was right in the world. When Bertha was bent and torn, with monsters ripping their way inside, Jill felt excruciating pain.
The same connection gave her a more subtle sense as well, something that, when combined with some of her Class Powers, gave her an amazing ability to monitor what was happening in Bertha. When she had the chance to concentrate and some Mana to spend, she could feel the location of any object, hear any conversation, and even sense if someone truly considered themselves as working for her.
Maybe one of her later powers would add sight to the mix; that she would take, but she would give smell and taste a miss. There had been far too much monster gore spread on Bertha, inside and out, for Jill to want to monitor those senses.
She took another sip of coffee, holding the ambrosia on her tongue for a long moment to banish the thought of tasting Bertha’s deck plates. That distraction gone, she found the brothers soon enough: Babu, asleep in one of the small rooms made by Bertha’s Habitation module, and Ras, slumped down by the cargo doors at the back of the trailer.
“Found ‘em,” Jill said, “both are asleep.” She stood, threw back the rest of her coffee in one swig, and put her mug onto the dashboard with a clunk. “Sangita,” she said as she strode towards the rear of the cab, “how about we walk and talk? You’ve got things to tell me and I’ve got places to be.”
“Where are we going?” Sangita asked as she stood.
“Whatever you tell me, it’s going to take magic to deal with,” Jill said, “So we’re going to wake up my chief advisor on super-powered bullshit.” She paused her walk and looked over her shoulder to grin at the two women. “Break’s over and I’ve got a truck to upgrade.”