The first thing Ben noticed were all the undead with extremely deadly looking plasma shotguns patrolling around the brand new ten foot wall. Each undead was tall, humanoid, and clad head to toe in sleek, highly machined power armor. They were, he also noted, decidedly not mindless. About fifteen different flavors of Game Over immediately pointed at Ben the moment he approached the obviously damaged Mice Labs. Ben decided that, given the opportunity, he’d like to get a couple of those shotguns, and a few sets of that armor. Really, any kind of power armor would be nice to help him do The Dishes, which was still kicking his group’s ass.
The lab was crawling with undead, who were literally crawling along the outer surface of the building and repairing it. There was now a sign out front that said Mice Labs, with the logo of a mouse with a six pack of abs, along with a smaller sign that said ‘and Exitus Embassy’.
“State your business,” the lead undead super-soldier said, his voice sounding all badass and hyper modulated. Before Ben could respond, the soldier looked a little closer at him and then lowered his weapon a fraction, “Human,” he said, and the rest of the undead stood more at ease.
“That’s my name,” Ben said, still staring at the [Plasma Shotgun of Instant Death], or at least that’s what he was calling it in his mind, “human. I was just wanting to see who was still alive in here.”
“Someone will be here to see you shortly,” the undead said, sending another guard into the complex, “while we wait, I will read you your rights.”
“Wait shit am I under arrest again?” Ben asked, suddenly both nervous and exasperated.
“Negative,” the power-armor clad undead said, “you and the rest of your species have been granted the protection of the Enelim, along with an offer of full citizenship in Exitus. You have the right of immediate passage into the kingdom of eternal life. Should you accept the offer of citizenship, our [Life Planners] will chart out your course for the rest of your natural lifespan. Upon your death, you will be transformed into an undead form which you have previously chosen, and you will attain full citizenship. This offer may be redeemed at any embassy of Exitus. You are not required to make a choice at any time.”
“Oh,” Ben said, “that’s cool. Hey, before I become an undead, what do you look like under that helmet.”
“Remarkably unpleasant,” he said honestly, “though I am a [Soldier], built to convey information and deliver death. The forms of the Enelim are as often beautiful as they are terrible, and their bodies are extremely well maintained. Please direct any further questioning to the embassy ambassador, as I am reaching the limit of my pre-programmed responses.” Ben was tempted to keep pushing the undead soldier with the plasma shotgun, but then decided he’d rather go to work tomorrow as opposed to dying from a stomach full of burning liquid plasma.
Moments later, an entire group came out of the front door. More soldiers in power armor, a tall floating skeleton with a cheery disposition, a decidedly [Magical] and pissed looking Nick, and riding on his shoulder? Atomis, alive, and armed with two shiny mechanical front legs, as well as a replacement tail. Atomis looked even more pissed than Nick.
Ben rushed past the guards and gave Nick a hug, slapping him on the back hard and giving him a good squeeze.
“Fuck man! They got you!” Ben said, looking at Nick’s ghostly, hyper-vivid form with disgust. Atomis jumped from Nick’s shoulder to stand on Ben’s. He immediately bit Ben’s earlobe, prompting a shriek of pain and outrage. Atomis deftly avoided being swatted away, then jumped back onto Nick’s shoulder.
“Fool,” Atomis said, “I heard all about what you did after our complex was attacked. Cragg is one of the most ambitious, power-hungry precinct leaders in the Outer Ring, mostly a good man to work with, but he played you. He’s been looking to take over precinct six for longer than any of us have been alive, and you handed it to him. If you had just come here immediately, you would have seen that the damage wasn’t nearly as severe as he made it out to be.”
“Atomis,” Nick said, “you shouldn’t have bit him, but Ben? He’s right. You do realize we had a basement full of undead super-soldiers, right? We weren’t exactly defenceless out here, and we had allies.”
“How many did you lose?” Ben asked, rubbing his ear.
“Too many mice,” Atomis said, sounding weary, “those things from the Dark Cities were disgustingly cruel to any one of us they got their hands on, as you can see,” Atomis said, flicking his silver tail. “Nick here died to save me, and it was the damndest thing,” Atomis continued, “because those ugly fuckers saw Nick die, and then they started screaming and ran away from the room. None of them would even get close to his body, and they avoided the area religiously.”
“Yeah, I was hiding in the corpse,” Nick said, “and it was the damndest thing. They seemed terrified of me.”
“They’ve got this super fucked up morally inverted religion,” Ben said dismissively, “it’s all about being as much of an evil grease stain as possible, and apparently I’m like their Devil. Which,” Ben said, a bit of a chuckle in his voice, “is pretty fun. You’ll have to meet with The Girls sometime,” Ben continued, “they’ll give you all the details. If I had to guess, I’d say you did the equivalent of some horribly blasphemous act by sacrificing yourself.”
“Oh,” Nick said, “huh, that’s stupid.”
“Yeah, I declared war on them all pretty much as soon as I learned about them,” Ben bragged, much to the discomfort of the Enelim [Lich Ambassador] who was politely waiting for his opportunity to introduce himself.
“Yes,” the Lich said, floating forward and extending an extremely clean skeletal hand for Ben to shake, “we’ve heard all about your declaration of war with every Dark City in The World. You may call me Ambassador Fetidor, or Fetidor, whichever you prefer. I must formally and immediately rescind our offer of citizenship to you. I apologise for the necessity, however Exitus has no wish to engage [Dark Zealots], [Hell Clowns] and [Black Fanatics] in addition to the Apocalypse Passage we are currently fighting. Also, formally, we have never met. If you will excuse me, I will vacate the premises while you visit.” Fetidor gave a polite nod of his skeleton skull, then quickly floated away, surrounded by guards. Ben watched him go, then looked at Nick’s [Magical] body, then at his own [Magical] body.
“Does this suck or what-”
“Oh my God this is the worst,” Nick interrupted, “come inside, we’ve been working on something to fix being [Magical].”
--
“Are you familiar with the Ship of Theseus?” Nick asked. They were in a room with a single large glass cylinder inside of it, a cylinder large enough for a person to comfortably float inside of it. It was filled with a clear, viscous goo.
“Sort of, but go ahead and explain it,” Ben said, looking at the ‘Regeneration Chamber’ with a healthy degree of skepticism.
“It’s an old bit of Greek philosophy,” Nick explained, “about a boat with a broken mast. So they replace the mast. Six months later, the deck of the ship is ruined, so they replace the deck. After that, the hull needs to be replaced, so they replace the hull. On and on, year after year, piece by piece, every single part of the ship gets replaced. The question, then, is this: Is it the same ship?”
“Oh yeah!” Ben said, laughing, “it’s like the riddle at the beginning of John Dies at The End!” Ben modulated his voice to be deep and menacing, “that’s the ax that slayed me,” then he brought his voice back to normal.
“Right,” Nick agreed, though it was obvious he’d never read or listened to John Dies at The End, even though it was a great, albeit extremely weird book, “So that’s what being [Magical] is. When you die, you become a mana ghost and leave your corpse behind. As time goes on, and you eat physical foods and liquids, the mana ghost gets replaced, piece by piece, by physical matter, until one day, you are one hundred percent physical. Fun fact, or not so fun,” Nick continued, “but if you are foolish enough to eat any kind of conjured food, all the physical matter in your body will be violently ejected in a gross burst of fluid. You’ll be fine, but you’ll have to start over in terms of becoming physical once again.”
“Noted,” Ben said, suddenly having a great idea about how to ruin any dinner party.
“The regeneration chamber takes advantage of the replacement theory,” Nick explained, “by gently cycling nutrients and fluid through your body, it will be able to bring you fully back to normal in eight hours.”
“Sweet!” Ben said, emphasizing and enlongating the ‘e’, “one question: How come you haven't used it yet?” Nick grimaced.
“Because I have a lawsuit against Precinct Six, and Fedidor says being a mana ghost will garner sympathy. The chamber’s been successfully used several times,” he paused, “and it was designed by the Grays-”
“Nope,” Ben said, turning around and starting to walk out of the room.
“They’ve changed!” Nick said.
“Nope,” Ben said again, starting to walk.
“Ben, the one who gave this to me was weeping. He had this little tear bottle with him and kept putting drops in his eyes so he could cry. He said he felt terrible for all the awful things he’s done, and that he just wanted to make things right.” Ben felt a tingle of goosebumps across his body.
“Really?” he asked, for his own sense of guilt as much as curiosity. A guy doesn’t get to curse an entire species without his conscience taking its pound of flesh, after all.
“Really,” Nick said, “they aren’t very good at it, but a lot of them are trying. Hell, I’ve had Grays come by here nearly every day just to apologise.” Nick paused, and the goosebumps came back even stronger. “They ask about you, you know.” Ben gulped, and it’s worth noting that it was likely the first real guilt induced ‘gulp’ he’d ever experienced.
“What do they say?” Ben asked, suddenly wanting anything, anything but the answer to his question.
“They ask me if I know you. I tell them yes, and they say,” Nick gulped, experiencing his own case of goosebumps, “they want to thank you. That you set them free, and they can never repay you.”
“Oh that’s good,” Ben said quietly, then turned around to look at the suddenly more emotionally significant Regeneration Chamber. He sighed, stripped off all his clothes, and climbed in.
It was going to be a long eight hours alone with his thoughts.
Timeskip (1 Month) Part 3
Ben had never been one to be afraid to be alone with his thoughts. He was in actuality, quite the opposite. Every chance he got back in the old world, he would close his eyes and drift through the ocean of awareness between waking. Thought untethered from language in that state, Ben was able to actually think, unshackled from the many limitations of the English language.
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Truth be told, even if Nick had said to Ben ‘those Grays were acting super suspicious when they brought this regeneration chamber in’ and then followed it up with ‘I think it might be a trap’. . . Ben would have gotten into the chamber anyways. Though he knew not why, he needed some extreme isolation and sensory deprivation.
He had it, and with every moment that his half open eyes saw nothing, and his stuffed ears were silent, and his skin sent no signals, he and his mind unhooked from one another. Ben’s consciousness expanded and he, without words, considered the future and what he must do next.
‘Bright lord,’ he thought, and realized he needed to do something about The Girls. It would be an insane disservice to them to have taken them in and then given them nothing to do. To have given them no purpose.
‘The Quest,’ he thought. It was critical that he not complete his quest for as long as possible. His ‘Training Sessions’ were the only reason he was able to actually leave work, and doing The Dishes was the only way he could get time away from his bodyguards to scheme with his party. Simultaneously, he needed to have a way to complete his quest, or he would die. He might need to roll this problem in with the next one.
‘The Bank.’ Ben had no illusions that he wasn’t at war with his employer, but he was painstakingly selling the illusion that they weren’t at war with him. It had only taken him a month of keeping his nose to the grindstone, a month of taking on extra work, a month of total dedication to his job. . . but he had been watching as, one by one, each of his co-worker’s brains turned off. He watched their watchfulness die. He saw their scrutiny disable. He had become one of them, and they didn’t have a scrap of evidence to the contrary.
All he was required to do at his job was sit quietly at a desk and wait for his manager to tell him that The Vault was casting a wish. He would then be used as a component in the wish process. After it was done, whatever fragments of the wish he’d caught with [Split Wish] were given back to The Vault, and he would return to his desk.
What Ben actually did was study wishes, all day, every day. He read the technical manuals of how wishes were constructed; he read lore books that identified how wishes could become biased towards being ‘honest’ or ‘cursed’; he read about how to appropriately utilize useless wishes with harmful prefix’s. He also read about the history of The Bank of The Sun, and The Vault. He read the employee handbook and had practically memorized it, learning what every position did.
Ben also socialized with his co-workers, and this was the most important thing he did with his time in-between wishes. He learned their names and he learned their jobs. He learned how important they thought they were, and he learned how important The Vault thought they were. Ben made a little mental note every time someone’s self image didn’t line up with reality.
Ben took the time to learn who his co-workers were, who they really were. He learned about their hopes, their fears, their desires, their frustrations, how long they’d been working at The Vault, what their opinion was on The Vault and The Bank in general. Were they loyal, or was this just a job?
It was frightening how much information someone like Ben could accumulate over a month of friendly conversation. But now, finally, everyone had let their guard down, and the shape of the awful thing he was going to unleash on The Bank of The Sun was starting to reveal itself to him. It was the most destructive and subversive force Ben could conjure up without a wish at his disposal, and once he unchained this hell-beast, he’d be riding the tiger.
It was, in a way, the single most shitty thing Ben could ever do to any organization. It was guaranteed to completely ruin The Bank, and allow its wholesale and open robbery.
He was going to start a union. Only here, safe from mind-readers and the extremely invasive security mechanisms of The Bank, was Ben even comfortable daring to think about his terrible scheme. He simply needed the right combination of people.
Someone who was very important to the organization, but didn’t think they were. Someone with no value to the organization, but who thought they held everything together. Someone who everyone respected, and who had the honest interest of the organization in mind. And, finally, their ringleader; A dishonest son of a gun who wanted to rob the place.
Ben had that last part covered.
His scheme was going to take time, and Ben in truth didn’t want to rush things. He was in a unique position to study wishes, to study the primary resource of his [Prince of Wonders] class in a way he never would have been able to before. Some of the books and scrolls Ben had free access to were both highly restricted, and unique. They contained the accumulated wisdom of eons worth of research. Ben had already gained a skill from reading them, [Wish Lore], which had caused quite a stir in the office. In addition to allowing Ben to quickly understand the nature of a wish, it also granted a flat five percent bonus to any wish he cast.
No rush to get out of The Vault, not yet anyways.
Ben still hung suspended in the Rejuvenation Chamber, unsure of how much time had passed- two hours, according to his new interface. He’d have to get Shelly a present, though Ben was at a total loss as to what an Eggman would want as a gift. That was a problem for later, he supposed.
He knew he was forgetting about something, but he just couldn’t remember what it was for the life of him. Ben mentally shrugged, then opened a tiny Utility Pocket in one of his arteries and injected himself with a gentle sedative.
‘Ah,’ he thought, ‘now that’s a good way to use the Utility Pocket,’ then he drifted off to sleep.
-
[Congratulations! You are no longer magical! Initiating Human racial traits!]
[Instant Digestion]
[Instantly reduce all food eaten into pure energy. Food can be eaten to restore health, mana, stamina and other specialized resource pools.]
[Titanic Physique]
[In the Ageless Age before time and reality, the Primordial War raged in endless deadlock. The universe? Merely an infinite battlefield. This is the womb from which humans were born, or into which it was summoned, or from which humanity was engineered. The truth is lost to the vastness of time, and the turning of reality itself.
[Titanic Physique is a unique and exclusive upgrade on the Ultimate Soldier passive ability. Titanic Physique provides an ever increasing buff to all attributes the longer a fight rages. This buff wears off at the same speed at which it was gained. Unlike the Ultimate Soldier passive ability, there is no cap on the buff.
[Out of combat, this ability greatly increases the rate at which all basic physical skills can be mastered.]
[Reality Distortion Field]
[The Human aptitude for magic is Legendary. Because of how bad you are, as a species, at doing it. Luckily, you don’t need magic, because you are constantly and directly influencing reality around you. This process is mostly unconscious, but can be consciously controlled.
[Fun fact, all humans had this ability back on Earth. An entire planet of competing and clashing reality distortion fields. Just take a moment to bask in that.]
Ben emerged from the Rejuvenation Chamber with shaky, rubbery limbs. The words from his system update were still ringing in his brain. He was so, so, so hungry. He had some food in his Utility Pocket, but the idea of putting it into his mouth and chewing it up and swallowing it seemed way too slow. Instead, Ben began directly dumping food into his stomach via Utility Pocket, and felt his [Instant Digestion] take immediate effect. He perked up, pushing himself from the floor, filled with energy to go do something.
“Fucking hell,” Nick said, looking at Ben, “I’ve got to get in there. You need a mirror, go, go!” Nick rushed Ben out of the room and then immediately started stripping down to jump into the Rejuvenation Chamber.
Ben left the room and walked with still unsteady, blessedly physical legs, towards the nearest bathroom. Ben deposited more food into his stomach, and felt himself perk up even more, felt the weakness in his legs and body get blasted away like dampness exposed to flame. Note to self, buy more food. A lot more food.
Ben entered the restroom, stark naked, and admired himself in the full length mirror. He didn’t so much look like an olympian body builder, no, it was more like his body had been perfectly proportioned and balanced. Every muscle group was in total sync, and larger than they’d been before. Ben guessed that he’d gained a couple inches of height, not that it mattered in a world of literal nine to twenty five foot giants. He felt his face had become slightly more handsome, but that was likely an effect of his muscles being in proper proportion to one another.
More than anything, Ben felt more fluid than he’d ever been his entire life. He felt strong in the way chimps were strong, able to lift their entire body weight with a single arm, and repeat that feat for a full day of navigating treetops. He felt strong in a way he’d never been.
Ben noticed a blinking icon in his new interface. He focused on it and heard a little voice in his mind.
“You have a pending System Update. Would you like to view it now?”
Ben could have kissed Shelly, because now he didn’t need to sleep in order to view system messages.
[System Update]
[Easy Mode Clarification]
[Congratulations, you have successfully evolved your way back to Human. Your [Evolution] racial trait may now be activated at will in order to alter your physical body at the cost of experience points. These changes will not be carried over to your [Magical] state, which will always reset you to being a ‘baseline’ human.
[You have not met the hidden requirements to evolve into the next stage of Human Evolution. Seek out the human exclusive Primordial Dungeon for more information on the High Humans, also commonly known as Super Humans.]
Having an interface, Ben decided, was pretty much the best thing that had ever happened to him in The World. He couldn’t wait for Shelly to finish designing his.
He rubbed his chin, staring at his own face.
“Super Human,” Ben said softly to himself, “now that sounds interesting. I wonder what that’s all about?”
Then, Ben tried really hard to warp reality around him, because who wouldn’t at least try? He scrunched his face up and really pushed, and after about a minute of this, concluded that everything he’d learned about reality warping powers from movies and television was completely wrong.
Still. . . he couldn’t shake the feeling that reality around him was. . . looser somehow. It didn’t mean anything yet, and the feeling was faint, but he knew it was a start. If he had to put it into words, he’d just say that it suddenly felt like reality itself was listening to him more closely than it had before. Like it was paying extra close attention to him.
It wasn’t, Ben concluded, an entirely pleasant sensation. Still, if he ignored it, the feeling went away.
“Hm,” Ben said, looking into the mirror, “Ok, I rate this [Evolution] five out of five stars. Good job, System. This was totally worth the fairy bullshit.
--
The System watched Ben scrunch his face up like he was trying to take a world ending shit, viewing him through his flatscreen cloud wall TV, and then silently praised himself for his foresight in removing the pooping exploit entirely.
“That’s not how it works,” he said, laughing as Ben gave up trying to use his [Reality Distortion Field]. “Oh well, you’ll probably figure it out.” The System sighed, and then switched his viewpoint to check in on the Inevitable of Humanity. He was currently at the base of the Ultima Tower, slaughtering monster after monster, an endless engine of carnage.
“How’s that for a concession,” The System muttered, still quite annoyed with the Inevitable for his trick. “Now your species is just like how it was during the war, absolute monsters.” The System shuddered. “Am I the only one left who remembers how annoying those things were to fight? Once they got going, they were pretty much unstoppable. You always had to kill them twice, that was dreadful; and then they’d just eat endlessly until their bodies regenerated. Ugh, and then they’d just use that horrible [Evolution] ability to adapt to whatever managed to kill them the first time!” The System sniffed, then made a rude face at the Inevitable.
He flinched when the Inevitable turned his head to look directly at The System through the screen, and then he cut off the feed. He coughed, then acted like he hadn’t just flinched for the first time in literal eons.
“Yes, well, I’d say I’ve more than lived up to our bargain by restoring your species to its former glory.” The System sighed.
“Now if only you weren’t fighting to break my entire world. Then things would be perfect.”