Revelatory Vertigo

Chapter 20

As the zero flashed and faded, I felt a vibration pass through my pseudo flesh. It started light, like a massage chair, and rapidly progressed to jackhammer level. The world around me seemed to shake apart at the same time, revealing something glowing and strange underneath.

Letters or runes I didn’t recognize lit up in a multitude of colors. They appeared and faded like the twinkle of stars as I felt an unrelenting wave of nausea. The runes disappeared, and I found my nose clotted with the smell of flesh and blood.

Before me was a tangle of limbs forming a single complex array. I wondered how many living beings had died to make it, and knew I’d never know the answer. The numbers didn’t match up. The number of legs was uneven, and there were more arms than legs.

The hands waved at me cheerfully while the legs remained aloof.

When I came to, I found myself looking into a burning pair of eyes, just before Stalin licked my face. I had no idea what was going to happen going in, but was still surprised. Huzzah.

“Are you well, Mistress?” Stalin asked, nose coming close to my face but not quite touching. It was an interesting question, and I wasn’t sure of the answer. I wasn’t in pain. My body seemed fine. Too fine, really, as if nothing had happened, which was disturbing in its own right.

“That was… a thing. Are you two alright?” I asked as I sat up. The lady hound was sitting back and to the left of Stalin.

“We’re fine,” The lady hound said. She seemed curious, but hesitant to approach me. Her personality was outgoing, but she was having a shy moment, which was cute.

“Your orbs burned bright, and you thrashed around for a while,” Stalin informed me bluntly. He leaned in and inspected me closely. I reached up to pat him, and he leaned into it, so I scratched his head. The coarse stone felt velvety to my dim sense of touch.

The lady hound watched us and started to fidget, then barked. I didn’t know what she wanted and looked at Stalin for help.

“She’d like a scratch too,” Stalin clarified. I held a hand out to her. She hesitated, then ran right up to me. Between her and Stalin, I was overwhelmed. Elemental hounds, lava dogs, it didn’t matter what you called them. Any sort of dog liked a scratch, and that was a universal constant I could get behind.

Velvety and warm, the hounds felt soothing to pet. I kept it up until I felt less weirded out by the upgrade. I couldn’t remember what happened clearly, but there was a lingering disquiet I didn’t feel like dealing with by myself.

Once I felt better, I checked the time. It looked like the upgrade had taken five minutes. That wasn’t a lot of time, but I’d felt like it had taken hours. I disentangled myself from the hounds and took inventory of the changes to my interface.

Previously, my display had nothing but the timer, unless I opened a specific interface. Now I had a series of icons in a top bar and tabs down the left side. The tabs were the same ones from my interface. It was a nice organizational touch.

I almost missed a small marble under the timer. When I looked at it, a countdown to refresh appeared. I could see I had several hours left at a glance. I could do the math with the regular countdown, but I hated math, so this was nice.

Along the top bar, the icons included an envelope, a person with a heart, a bell, and a magnifying glass. The message envelope and person with a heart had a red dot next to each. It wasn’t good to get distracted. Yet, like a lemming, I immediately selected the friends request.

Agony and someone named Steve had both applied to be my friend. I immediately accepted Agony’s request but chose to look at Steve’s profile first. The name was too basic under the circumstances. A profile popped up, but it didn’t contain any useful information.

There wasn’t much in it, just the name and a picture. I’d have denied it, but there was something about the little square of darkness that pulled at me. It felt like it was smiling in a familiar unenthusiastic way.

Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

“Holy shit…” I muttered, realizing my abyss-in-a-robe recruiter was named ‘Steve’ of all things. ‘How?’ and ‘why?’ were my first thoughts, ‘fuck it’ was my third. His name was ‘Steve,’ and it made as much sense as anything was going to.

I was giggling. He looked like a mopey middle schooler on picture day. How I knew so from what looked like a blank box wasn’t a mystery worth exploring for the moment. I accepted Steve’s friend request and then checked my texts.

Agony had sent me a picture of an ass-backward layout someone had constructed in the tutorial. Under it was a video clip of the architect freaking out and demanding to know why the heroes won. FML was the heading.

I wrote Agony back right away, since I felt like he could use some cheering up. Customer-facing jobs were always shit.

[Hey!

That guy sounds like a douche. Hope he’s not still being rude to you. I’ve had a crazy day, sending you the logs so you can see.

If you want to come hang out, feel free. I installed a pool!]

The message was brief, and I hesitated to send it. Reasonably, if Agony could send images then it was possible I could too. The system complied and I heard a click, followed by a smaller pop-up filled with the image of what I’d been looking at. Sweet.

Playing around, I tried doing it while I had the security feed open and found I could take pictures of myself selfie-style that way. Pleased with the development, I decided to play around. Since I mentioned the pool, I enlisted the hounds and got them to pose.

“Join us Mistress!” the lady hound insisted. Curious, I reached down to touch the lava. Mind bendingly, it behaved like water when I scooped up a handfull and even let me submerge. Deciding not to think too hard about the cartoon physics at work, I just went with it.

The final image I attached was of me and the hounds lounging next to the lava fall I hastily edited in next to the diving rock. The old layout had been alright but it lacked the right kind of aesthetics for a good photo.

I also included the event log entries to show how nuts my day had been. My aim wasn’t to compare miseries, but I thought he’d find it funny. Nothing like waking up from integration to find intruders to get whatever ichor blood equivalent I had pumping.

Done with that, I almost closed the message interface but thought better of it. Steve had sent me a friend request but no message. It was probably OK to leave that be, but I felt uneasy. I wasn’t sure if contacting him was a good idea, despite him telling me I could, but it was more professional to do it. Particularly since he’d been reasonably friendly.

[Hello Steve,

I just wanted to let you know I’m getting settled in fine. Thank you for the opportunity!]

Woof. It was waaay too flat. I tried twice more before hitting on something that didn’t sound like a corporate blow job.

[Hi Steve,

I just got communication privileges. Thanks for friending me. My core’s in place, and I’ve even earned some points. This was definitely the better option for me over demon lord. Killing isn’t pleasant, even when I don’t do it myself, but I feel like I can handle this.

Anyway, thanks. There should be a comma, but I haven’t picked a name yet. I’ll let you know when I do.]

I looked it over and felt better than I had about the previous versions. It might be a little too casual, but I thought that was better than being stiff. I sent the message and felt like a grown-ass adult for my basic professionalism.

Getting back to exploring the icon bar, I had two left to go. The bell was a notice log and had all the prompts I’d looked at earlier in a drop-down greyed out as read. The last icon was a lookup function.

Curious, I thought of “Sword” and it brought back an encyclopedia article. A really long one with a crap ton of disambiguations for related articles. I was pleased by this development and considered it worth the cost of the upgrade on its own.

I’d bought knowledge from the Savex Soldiers, but I didn’t really feel any different. A turn of events I didn’t mind in light of finding the encyclopedia. So long as I had access to it, I was OK with it being added to the encyclopedia instead of my head directly.

It wouldn’t be the weirdest thing to have happened to me, but I didn’t like stuff monkeying with my brain. My mind had already been messed with sufficiently for several lifetimes, in my opinion.

Continuing my inspection, I found a few minor changes in the store and crafting interface. The store had expanded to include some new low-level monsters and decor options. Nothing earth-shattering, but it would give me some flexibility later.

The crafting interface looked nicer, but I couldn’t find a specific improvement outside of aesthetics. Wanting to test it out, I placed the kids sword in the deconstruct tab.

[WARNING!]

[Legendary Item]

[Cost to Dismantle: 15 mana]

[ Yes / No]

I felt my orbs flicker as I looked toward the kid. Even though I was staring through yards of stone, I knew I was looking dead at him.

Yoooouuu’re a baby paladin!