Act 2 - The pawn | Chapter 4_Colonization

The was a giant ass sheet of the System logs, which I should have looked through before going.. anywhere. Information is power or something like that, I don't know.

You have learned that your character has:

Quenta traits:

[Tail wing nature]: you can breathe even with a thin air. [Guide’s heritage]: sometimes, you may see unique dreams that reveal some part of a character's main quest/ world history/ irrelevant story.

[Mark of the Guide's killer]: Mark on your face and on your SOUL. As soon as revealed: reputation with Guide followers will be changed to hate; reputation with all the other parties in a game phase will gain one promotion level.

[Fear of Birds]: fear of birds - the bigger the bird - the greater the fear. Carcasses induce only a moderate amount of fear.

Quenta skills: elementary [Lockpicking], elementary [Knife fight].

Move forward the main quest chain to find out more.

New quest: Birds! (quenta quest chain): find a Zephyrus crash site and investigate the accident.

New quest: Pieces (quenta quest chain): find lost pieces of your memory.

You have died! It is your first death in a game. In random time within an hour, you will respawn with all tied items and items that cannot be lost on one of the respawn places you've encountered during your game phase journey, by your choice, or on your personal resurrection stone. This time experience won't be decreased, but watch out - each death decreases the current gained experience scale by 30 percent. After level 100 you may lose levels in case of death.

You are the last one from your lineage - you have:

Trait: [Still Standing] - all your quenta skills and traits are 10% more effective.

Item: Last of lineage…

At last. Nothing unexpected, except for new traits and skills from a cut scene - this is a peculiar game mechanic.

This Guide, my named father, was quite a notorious guy considering so much reputation for his assassination.

The new quest reassured me in my next step - crash site.

While I stood there figuring out all this stuff, my feet froze till the point of losing sensibility. I ran a few laps around the octagram to heat up a bit. It was quite hard to run at first due to the claws and extra joint, but I figured out a way to do it - I needed to bend around thirty degrees forward and toss my hands around my back, running naruto-style. It was ok, but when I tried to run on all four limbs, I discovered that this body should run like this - it felt only natural. The only thing stopping me from doing that all the time was moral discomfort - I felt too much like a human still and this kind of running scared me. I opened a minimap, and a new message appeared regarding a new basic skill - elementary [Cartography]. The map was automatically created from what I saw.

My map was filled with dark clouds except for a Zephyrus path while I was there and resurrection plateau. While holding very little value by itself, it gave me a vector of movement and it turned out this plateau was not the Plato Zephyrus was going to. It was just..um.. some plateau with a respawns place on it.

I aligned the information from the map, a position of a little cloud of black smoke that became barely visible already, and wind specifics, to figure out the crash site’s approximate position. After some calculations, I received a twenty-degree zone of search in a northwestern direction.

It was all good on words, but looking down from a fringe of a plateau, the revelation came. I've understood that when your XP coefficient is almost two - there won't be easy ways. I've understood that even though surrounding mountains’ heights are significantly higher than this plateau’s elevation, it is still pretty damn high. Based on a landscape, I've gathered that this plateau once was a mountain, which peak was evaporated. Someday it picked at around six or seven kilometers, but now I would give it three or four. Still pretty damn high. Ok. I didn't need to descend to the mountain foot, only to the mountain range, leading to my place of interest. There was only one such path, but there were two ways to reach it. The first one, which went around the mountain with a plateau, looked like it was artificial and more or less easy but quite lasting. The second straight and direct that led precisely to the required altitude, but it was significantly harder.

The second one it is. Don't blame me for being too risky - in the current situation, the risk was much lower than it could have been. Wanna know why? Claws.

Remember while standing in the cabin of an observational post I.. he.. um.. you've understood me.. either way - the claws on my toes that have significantly more levels of freedom than ones of a human body, helped me to resist the wind. The current situation was alike. The soil of the mountain was not as pliable as the wooden floor of the cabin in Zephyrus, but, using claws on both feet and hands, the descension appeared to be more or less comfortable as well as reasonably fast. To some extent, or rather altitude.

I don't know the reason for such a behaviour, but as soon as I lowered about one kilometer, the wind got crazy. Its velocity increased drastically. It almost blew me down to the mountain foot, but I got saved by its ever-changing direction. After it pulled me down, almost immediately, it pulled me up to the line of serenity as I named it. I laid there to rest for several minutes. Even the cold here was warm compared to the one few meters below. I've gathered that I will never be able to move through that. Plan B it is.

I started to move along the horizontal axis. The plan was simple - to reach the artificial trail that goes around. I assumed that if it is genuinely artificial it must be somehow protected from a crazy wind. It took me about two hours. Maybe it is because it indeed was not very hard or this body had a much wider safety margin, but when I stood onto the path carved in the flesh of a mountain, clearly, by a sentient form of life, I was not exhausted. Only when I started to walk down the road, I noticed a message from the System.

[Borrow from tomorrow] occasional trait is activated. Your body mobilized its resources due to the significant amount of adrenaline released into your blood. Your stats have tripled. Try to find a safe place till tomorrow morning. Your body will pay for today with all your stats zeroed out for a day. Try not to use this feature until you advance your [Body control] skill at least to the intermediate level. 7 hours 43 minutes 2 seconds left. 7 hours...

Holy fuck. I needed to hurry. I almost ran on the road, and haven't noticed that I'd passed the line of serenity a while ago. The wind blew ordinary here. The road was wide and its angle was comfortable just enough to move downwards. Moving upwards would be at least problematic - the crazy wind appeared with the first steps. The game phase is as real as the real world.. my ass.

On the other hand, it is almost an ideal place to respawn if you have a lot of enemies.

It’s all lyrics, though. I have problems that need to be solved now, like finding a nice cozy place not to die there.

As I was descending, the hope of finding something suitable faded away with every step. A smooth straight line of the road, inhabited mostly by shrubs and dust, lead to a gravy valley on a mountain range.

As I reached the valley, I felt it instantly. The feeling was hard to explain. It was like a dream plot after awakening, like an aftertaste of water from your home. It was one weird feeling.

I turned around and there was neither road nor plateau - only a solid mountain wall with a peak hidden above in clouds. Frankly, I was not even surprised.

This short voyage unexpectedly took a lot of time. Three hours left till the imminent death.

Mark on an inner map showed the approximate direction of search. The needed way was blocked by an impassable steep rock. Genre cliches appeared to be a cornerstone of any RPG game including this one.

As an experiment, I tried to find the path to the resurrection plateau. Only cold, coarse stone stood where several minutes ago the road was. Maybe some skill or trait would have allowed me to crack this secret. Perhaps, even high perception is the one that does the trick. The time was tight though.

I went down the path to a valley trying to walk as close as possible to a stone wall - my hope to find some shelter was still there. Small dots flew high above in the sky descending every once in a while to combine with other small dots on the ground below, just to ascent as one bigger dot. Those were giant animals - both winged and grounded - carnivorous birds roaming in the sky and herbivorous mammals as their victims.

I didn’t know if this body had any instincts to react to the scene before me or my mind, or fear of birds trait, or just common sense, telling me to retreat, but no matter the source - I was feeling almost primal horror watching onto the tiny dots in the sky. It cost me a significant amount of neurons, or whatever my brain contained now. If I had any feathers they would all stand erect in horripilation. It was ironic that I had goosebumps watching the birds. However, this paradoxical feeling helped me conquer the fear and start moving further. Even if I die one more time, a little reconnaissance won't hurt.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Sounds good, does not work. Each step I took was filled with despair. I was able to move only due to the claws on my feet and the pretty convenient absence of footwear. The air became thick and heavy. Each breath was harder to make than the previous one. The Borrow From Tomorrow timer, though, seemed to have frozen. Its seconds were like minutes, and minutes were like hours. Huge birds, now I knew that for sure, were lurking in the sky waiting for me to stumble, to lose my pace, to fall. I wouldn’t let them such a pleasure. Not now. Some System windows tried to appear, but I dismissed them every time. My vision became blurry. Not in an instant, no. At first light purple mist appeared at the fringe of my perception. I saw it, I could smell it, tiny needles of it poured all over me. I was completely tangled with it, with my lungs full of sand but not air. From time to time a flash of lightning struck in the corner of my eye. Blue airy lace. More like a spider web than lightning. Thunder was missing, though. I tried to remember why there should be thunder when I imagine flashes of lightning, but without success. I glanced around and noticed that I no longer walk near the rocks but in the middle of a wide mountain valley. It was weird because I was so focused on the mist I missed my track.

A wise thought appeared in my mind. It said something about turning back, or at least back to the rocks. The thought was alive not for long, though. After the mist, the rain came and washed all the reason leftovers from my mind. It tried to drown me while I walked through the deserted valley. When it failed, it tried to dehydrate me to death. Its dusty raindrops were falling onto my skin with the feeling of sandpaper and salt. I walked despite it. I remember smiling or even laughing. It was so funny that the rain was purple and dry, but the trail I left on the ground was red and wet.

Noisy minor irritation distracted me from these masochistic observations like a buzzing drake flew around in the brain. At first, it seemed random and pointless, but the more it lived the more particular it became. I noticed that when I walked in some direction buzzing was decreasing. It gave me some peace of mind. I knew that walking in the right direction I could self-reflect all the way to the bottom of my soul, or what was instead of it in this patchy inconsistent hallucination called colonization game phase.

This was the first semi sober thought in, it appeared, months. Once again I was almost near the stone wall behind which the crash site should be. I looked at myself and almost fainted. My skin was covered in a thick layer of coagulated blood. All my life a felt dizzy around blood and it turned out to be pretty ironic - a vulture with traits for eating raw meat is scared of blood. Fucking perfect.

My clothing’s cloth was completely wasted, and even, once neat and comfortable, jacket started to look like a prop from a cheap trashy horror movie.

As I walked further, more rational thoughts started to appear in my mind, and the first most significant one was “What the actual fuck was that?”. Hard thinking brought zero results, but several steps further from a valley and to the rocks, and I dove into the character interface to find a log of messages I dismissed before.

You are entering SOUL Weeping valley [The valley of eternal sorrow]. SOUL disruptive field. The chance of random divine skill or trait developing raises 5% for every 100 meters towards the center. Consider avoiding visiting SOUL Weeping valley without special preparations.

SOUL Weeping valley: Long before even gods were born, eternal order ruled the universe. Everything was what it was supposed to be, where it was supposed to be, and when it was supposed to be. For eternity and beyond. Until order beared chaos. And chaos brought wars, pain, and suffering. Being unable to accept it, young god, whose name is now forgotten, decided to bring order once again. Forgotten he has, that along with tribulations, chaos also brought peace, love, and happiness. Being god, he was able to find eternal order. Being a child of chaos made him vulnerable to its nature. At the end of his search, he found a small pond of what once was an ocean of order. Only after he bathed in it did he understand his mistake. He decided not to bring order to the universe. For him, it was too late though. Order already corrupted his body and soul.

Many millennia later he came back from his journey. He looked and acted like a madman, mostly crying, from time to time he burst into laughter. Forgotten and abandoned he managed to carve a path back to hearths of men under the new name - The Weeping Joker. Many dared to go after him, but the trail was dangerous and filled with almost impassable obstacles. Most failed, vanishing along the way. The remaining few received a genuinely divine gift - for their entire existence, they always were what they were supposed to be, where they were supposed to be, and when they were supposed to be. For those who hesitate The Weeping Joker left SOUL Weeping valleys - places of order in the center of which a small pond lays. Bathing in that pond is the first step down the path of order. It is not an easy task though, cause we, as seeds of chaos, can withstand order only so much. Even the strongest warriors failed, even the small children succeeded, for that is the nature of the order.

You have finished one guest of the main quest chain “Pieces”. Continue to collect your lost memory and get rewarded. Your remembered your time studying in the Great ort Sanno library: [Wisdom] +1;