Gathering up the rest of the kelp was a bit of a pain, between the running around and Namcha’s forceful attack loose kelp had been spread all over the chapel, as had spines and fragments of King Urchin. Fortunately, most of the King’s shell remained in two pieces that, with a bit of careful handling, Dya and Zuchi were able to get over to the altar and haul on top of the bowl, which they did not fit in. The guts and gonads took a bit more to gather up and were gross, according to Zuchi, but that was ok. The King Urchins took their time being absorbed by the altar, but when they were done there was loot left behind. All four of them leaned over the bowl to find that what was left was not what they expected.
Blessed King Urchin Steaks
+1 HP recover per second for 1d4 seconds per bite
+1 stamina recovered per second for 1d4 seconds per bite
+.25 ST per bite
Blessing of Salt (+.25 random attribute per bite)
There were two steaks, which were actually just the gonads of the King Urchin, the same part they ate out of every other urchin. However, as might be expected from the original size of the urchin in question, the uni was bigger than Dya’s face. If her namcha hadn’t been preserving uni already she’d have been afraid of just how much she would have to be eating in one sitting. As it was, this was going to take some time to go through.
Dya was glad to find out that they didn’t have to scrub every surface of the chapel or collect all the spines of the King. Instead, once they passed a threshold, the goddess seemed to deem it “good enough” and the magic of the system took over. First there was the chime for the kelp, then the final urchins of each type followed after the absorption of the King Urchin. As the last Monster Urchin was stabbed and tossed into the altar bowl there was a grand chiming, Nängay gushed “pa-raise SALT!”, and a light show commenced where the knot of water completed itself into an intricate design and the stains and errant growths of kelp and sea grass were all pulled back into tastefully trimmed kárle-kelp planters that lined the walls to produce oxygen for the air bubble of the chapel.
Now the chapel gleamed like the soft rainbow of a polished mother of pearl interior of a shell, with softly rippling walls arching up out of the water in a 20 ft arch that conformed to the shell of coral that made up the exterior. The benches were a soft sensual pink and the kárle grew out about 1.5 ft from the wall with a gently waving bed of sea grass dancing behind the altar. Small fish found their way in and started darting around, and the bright light of the god light brought a sense of sunlight into the room. It was a simple, peaceful place.
Then Zuchi and Dya saw the status update that they were waiting for:
Quest COMPLETED: Cleaning the Temple!
You saw what lay beneath a festering mound of forgotten mulch and sought to reclaim it. The source of the of the thick mat of seaweed was an aggressive battle of growth and consumption between the magically sustained temple kelp, voracious sea urchins, and a misplaced King Urchin that had nested in the temple kárle. You thinned out the over-abundant sea urchins and got help to utterly destroy the King Urchin, with only minor damage to the chapel floor. Really, someone overreacted there. The frantic growth of the temple kelp has reduced and has been trimmed back to its proper place in the temple. Now you may bask in the holy light of the goddess and receive your rewards.
1000/1000 small sea urchins
500/500 medium sea urchins
100/100 large sea urchins
25/25 monster sea urchin
1/1 King Urchin
2000/2000 lbs of kelp
Awards achieved:
+Title: Little Cleaning Service – any contained space you spend 10 minutes in will become 10% cleaner than when you entered in it.
+Healing Light of Salt (sphere, soul bound, growth)
-heals for 1d4 per second all that its light touches within a 3 ft radious
-heals for 3d4 burst directed, 30 min cool down
+150 silver pearls
+2 strength
+2 dexterity
+1 luck
+access to common jobs
Jobs available:
Brawler
Battle Mage
Gatherer
Mage
Witch
You may not choose a job at this time.
“Hey, Nam?” Dya grinned, accepting the changes, “The status thinks you over-reacted.”
To her surprise it was Nängay who responded, “The system can bite it. Zhulma responded perfectly.”
Both of the girls giggled while Namcha said, “Thank you, Nängay.”
Nängay healed everyone up and later that night Dya and her namcha had Zuchi, her namcha, and her adra Uye over for a celebratory dinner. Namcha was a cook for her third job and was able to both prepare the steaks and preserve the left overs so that they could be consumed at a later time. Considering that both steaks were the full spans of both Namcha’s hands put together each, this was a good thing. Both girls were encouraged to eat as much as they could, while the parents partook of a modest, 4 bite portion each of the rare and delicate ‘meat.’
Dya couldn’t help but feel a little resentment that a portion of her reward was going to go to her adra and to Zuchi’s adra, despite the two men not being there in the chapel bringing any sort of aid. Nängay had brought less intense healing and no one was going to argue that her nam didn’t deserve her portion, but Adra was still on his building trip and Uye, Zuchi’s adra, had been performing with the choir in the temple at the time.
But this was the way of things, Namcha made clear as she prepared the steaks for the meal, cutting them into bite sided chunks and dropping them into a spicey ginger sauce to soak. “The young give their parents a portion of their catch, when they have one, to thank them for all the support they are given the rest of the time.”
When she had pointed out that she had given Namcha all of her ‘catch’ with the medium urchins which had been quite sizable and were going to bring a good price at the market so she was already contributing to the household and from this quest, Namcha had sent her to her room for being selfish. Dya remained unimpressed but also unable to do anything about it.
So the adults greatly enjoyed the fruits of their children’s labor, and Dya had to admit that it was very good tasting, even if unfair. At least she got 2 full strength points out of dinner that night with another one point five on the way. Then there was the random 3.5 characteristics that came from the Blessing of Salt, which hit her in the Luck, Dexterity and Intelligence.
The best part of the night was when Zuchi and Dya went up to Dya’s room and Dya showed Zuchi that by grabbing onto the clothes platform and kicking they could turn her room into a whirlpool, and with the two of them they got it going strong enough that the two of them spun around and around the room, laughing like idiots and making a mess of the place.
It was a lot of fun and it felt like a time when the game was allowing them to truly revert back to childhood and just enjoy existence, the act of being alive and discovering the world around them, with no penalty for being stupid or undignified. In fact, she was fairly certain there were bonus points for being undignified, as she crashed into Zuchi and shrieked with laughter as they bounced off the walls.
This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.
The next day the two of them met up to just explore the reef, and the next day after that. Then they had school which was a much more involved and active affair than her human experience had been, praise salt. As time passed, she realized that some of what she had experienced had to be false memories, but they were more smoothly integrating with the real ones. Though sometimes, sometimes she could tell. Sometimes it felt like she just woke up in class from a day, a week, a month, or even a year of dream. For some reason, the system didn’t think her being nine years old was really that important, apparently.
Moments of small adventure, tests, arguments, explorations, and friendship seemed to glow with the solidity of reality, but then she couldn’t be certain. An out and out bare knuckle brawl between herself and Zuchi over them both thinking the other was dating a 14 year old boy was definitely real, as was the fight resolving when they finally realized that neither of them were ok with someone who was mentally an adult dating a 14 year old, even if in a computer program. However, why she felt such clarity and reality around having to city through a lecture on the major Thiaseasea and the Five Great Drifts of the Sâsyû Sea was beyond her. So boring!
Still, she was not going to forget that Weyfout Tú! was the oldest great drift, and that the weirdly named Widh Noüj Aseasea (Pear Magic in English) was 69 miles to the northwest of !nano Landsby, which was her home. She also gained a deep understanding that a Landsby was a city, town or village that was next to the land and even incorporated land elements to have trade with the glavwiesh, that a aseasea was a town or village, and very very rarely a city, that was out in the reefs away from shore with no contact to land but by boat (at least for the glavwiesh) and a Drift (Tu! in Jayin) was like a gigantic collection of mer homes all grown together into a great floating reef that was guided along the currents and maintained by those that lived in the great structure.
She definitely wanted to see a drift someday.
Sometimes she or Zuchi would check in and they found that they were not experiencing all the same full waking moments, when they were certain they were fully awake. This was made stranger still by the times they knew they were awake with the other around but apparently, not fully awake and aware. Or maybe just a very good simulation of them? They weren’t sure but it did creep them out pretty bad to realize that they couldn’t be certain which of their memories were real and which were fake anymore. Ever since they cleaned the temple the feeling of distortion was gone and they could no longer really tell the difference between their real experiences and the implanted memories.
In a moment of honesty at age 15, Dya admitted to Zuchi she’d stopped trying when she was 8, because she just couldn’t sustain the paranoia necessary. Life as a mer child was too interesting to try to worry about the nature of reality like that. Besides, what was really real anymore anyhow? The real world wasn’t much more real than the digital reality of the world they were in now, perceptually speaking. She was so hard pressed to find a difference in the experience of it that she wasn’t certain she was not imagining it. Sure, there was the whole “mermaid” thing, that was a dead giveaway between the different realities, but the pure experience of it? It felt real and implied only that they were in fact the different but equal. Add to that, she said that philosophers and computer scientists had been proposing that “really real reality” was actually a computer simulation for a very long time, and she was going to let this reality real the real.
Zuchi had blinked a few times at her, and said, “um, yeah, I thought something like that too. Sorta. Just less complicated.”
The system had given her a +1 intelligence for the explanation, and she’d unlocked the philosopher job.
It wasn’t until their 18th Thouspa that they were finally able to make sense of it.
Birthdays for merfolk were community affairs, by which they meant an entire generation would be spawned from the egg over the course of a week to two weeks. Every year the merfolk who wanted children would stop using birth control spells and allow their bodies to submit to the currents and the natural urges as driven by the seasons, the temperatures, the movements of the moon and weather. Or, as the Priests of Anthozoa put it, the will of the gods of nature would tell their bodies when the best time to become pregnant would be. They would or wouldn’t become pregnant as nature decreed.
Those with wombs would find themselves pregnant and within three months of the season of successful mating, whenever that had been, the community toschá (creche) would be filled with the fertilized eggs laid by the thinamcha. The eggs were transparent jellies with wiggling tadpole like embryos inside with a placental yolk sack attached. It was like the womb had filled out pregnancy with a protective gel and membrane, then was birthed out of the namcha’s body before the baby was too large or bony to pass easily through the birth canals. The resulting mass of eggs was watched over by the community of adra, who constantly checked and rotated to make sure that all the little embryos were kicking around and moving in their little jelly sacks.
The next six months were a fight for the adra, constantly chasing off every curious fish great and small, every crustacean or worm that thought that the eggs looked or smelled tasty. Making sure that every egg got cycled to the top for fresh water, making sure the eggs stayed clean.
It was during this task that many relationships were formed, and tones were set that could determine community spirit for the life of the child. If an adra was selfish and refused to help out with eggs other than their own, tensions would flair, fights could break out. If an adra was lazy and just relied on the good will of others to keep their egg alive, anger towards that mer could lead to ostracization, or even outright expulsion of the mer from the larger community if they didn't get their act in gear.
Meanwhile the namcha were bringing food and supplies, checking on the eggs, and driving off large predators from the area of the toschá. In larger cities this was purely ceremonial, but for Dya’s landsby, more than once Dya had seen where a pack of sharks had to be killed after they were brought in by the scent of the eggs being cycled. Namcha had been hired to help cook the meat for the families as they protected the eggs.
!nano Landsby was a midsized town, large enough that there were usually about 20-30 eggs a year. And since the fertility of the merfolk was driven by the seasons, most eggs hatched over a course of a week in the spring sometime in what on earth would have been May. That month was celebrated by all as Thouspa, the spawning month, the collective birthday of the community. A month long festival was held, a collection of feasts as each generation got together on their birth week and celebrated together their particular solar journey, as well as ceremonies and of course, the welcoming of the years newborns.
It was after their generation’s feast when Dya and Zuchi swam ashore to watch the sunset. They had an hour to find a good place and Dya had convinced Zuchi to climb with her to the top of the Great Altar, a cliff face that the priesthood held their secret internal ceremonies on. The secret was what went on in the ceremonies, not that they happened, nor that they involved a fair amount of cliff diving. There was no hiding either of those things with the landsby nearby. However, there were no ceremonies on it tonight though, and the view promised to be spectacular.
As they climbed up the steep trail to the top, Dya watched Zuchi scramble over rock and root with strong human morphed legs and mused over the changes they had undergone. No longer was she the frail little thing that was bullied and forgot to use her legs, that was certain. Her human form was still a little rough, with blue-brown hair and purplish skin that had lurid orange color points, though it went well with the sea silk leotard she wore today. No one was going to mistake her for human any time soon, but her feet were perfect and her balance strong.
Dya herself was lucky to be starting from a closer to human color pallet. As she had aged her lurid blue spots had shrunk down to freckle size and beyond, and now as a mermaid she was just damn orange. In human form, she was able to form her feet perfectly, having practiced with Zuchi, but her skin was a little too golden orange, and only the lack of weird white raccoon eyes kept her from looking like she had some sort of spray tan on.
It made her skin crawl and she hated it. Zuchi didn’t understand, not really, being too young to remember the insurrection and the political upheaval that surrounded the bad actors that allowed it to go on. She couldn’t really explain it to her, though she did try. Zuchi thought she was just being over dramatic. Whatever. Dya didn’t care, she just couldn’t wait until she got her first job and it changed her merform and the color of her human morph.
If only she could decide what she wanted to be! Merfolk only got 3 job slots, though there were some rumors of being able to acquire more job slots, which was good because the limit was already making Dya squirm. Only three! There were so many interesting options, and those were the jobs that she had unlocked. She summoned the list of unlocked jobs to ponder again while waiting for her turn to cross a narrow bit of trail.
Brawler, battle mage, gatherer, witch, philosopher, hunter,
stalker, chanter, craftsmer:cook, adventurer, reefsmer, thief,
clerk, jester, shaper, craftsmer:potter, craftsmer:weaver,
craftsmer:tailor, craftsmer:felter, tradesmer:builder
And then there were the jobs that you could only get through training, like enchanter, pathfinder, scout or bard. She at least knew she didn’t want to have cook or thief as her primary job, but then, well, what if they were components for second tier jobs that were even better? Every merchild learned that the sailors got their jobs by taking either trader or mercenary, and then a secondary job as a tradesperson in something relevant like tailor, woodworking, weaving or the like. There were some other prerequisites, like learning to tie knots and Foup insisted that they had to reach some sort of swearing achievement, but then the jobs would merge together to form a whole new job that contained the skills of the first two jobs and more: Sailor.
There were all sorts of jobs like that out there, and then there were third tier jobs which could build from second tier jobs, and even rumors of a fourth tier job, but that could just be speculation.
Dya would really hope that job would really be worth it because holy crap would it be hard to achieve! Besides that, rampant curiosity was Dya’s problem. All the possibilities stood out to her, all the different things she could possibly do or find with even the jobs she already had unlocked, much less the ones she knew about that she could find a trainer for. Of course, she'd have to choose if she wanted more adventure type jobs or more stable jobs, and it was better if she could choose a job that started out as an adventure type job but that had a later evolution or would merge into a second or third tier job that could be more stable later in life. She hadn’t had to choose yet but she was already feeling the creep of choice paralysis.
It wasn’t much longer before she and Zuchi scrambled onto the flat cliff and she was pulled out of her head and her worries for her future. The cliff top hemmed in with well cared for shrubs, and the 20 ft wide yard before the prominence covered in a soft, short clover like plant. In the center of the courtyard was a large stone basin, wind and rain worn.
They had been up here a couple of times before, sneaking up as daring 14 year olds on their trembling new human feet before they realized that as long as the priesthood wasn’t using it the rest of the community was welcome to the open air temple to view Salt’s vast domain. It was just kinda a pain to reach which is why most didn’t. Well, most adults.
It had become a favorite hangout for Dya’s generation. They happened to be the first up, but they wouldn’t be the last, they knew, so they grabbed the best seats in the house, out on the ledge with their feet dangling off the edge. And as they sat there, chatting about the day’s event, laughing about Oudloukra’s antics and Dhaj’s over serious proclamations (that one was definitely aiming for the priesthood) they both found themselves greeted with the first system message they had seen in over a decade. Dya was startled and a little confused as she read:
Congratulations! Your full Neural integration is complete. Your full SAE has been completed with full memory integration of cultural memes, histories, and languages. SAE took longer than expected at 45.6 days, to fill out the experience.
RES_435: +349
VIC_283_+143
COR_-163.265
POS_111
INT_152.265481
…. It went on like this for some time, all codes and numbers and all sorts of inscrutable arcana before at the bottom it read:
Congratulations on making it to the Tutorial!