--- Mia ---
Class Nekomancer Level 1 Experience 0 / 1000 HP 100 / 100 Mana 100 / 100
"Why is there a HUD in front of my eyes, nyaa?" Mia asked.
It was the weirdest thing. She could clearly see the text floating in front of her, and yet she had no trouble seeing Tom behind it as well. She remained fully aware of her surroundings.
"That's the Faith Engine Interface, or FEI. It's pronounced "Fey", because it's basically magical bullshit." Tom replied. "We use it to make it easier to interact with Faith Engines, because they are even less intuitive to understand than quantum physics. Without FEI, it would take years of study just to learn the basics. FEI is basically a dumb AI that communicates between you and the Faith Engines, with a gamified interface slapped on top of that. It makes reality warping much more intuitive, not to mention more fun and engaging."
Mia felt a shiver going down her spine at the pun. Luckily she had enough adrenaline in her system that she was able to ignore this and focus on asking questions that might help her survive, instead.
"So this is just an abstraction, nyaa?"
"Yes. The mana costs of an ability roughly reflect the effort the Faith Engines need to put in to make those effects happen. Unlocking new talents and abilities basically means that you are telling the Faith Engines to lay some expensive ground work to make later changes easier."
Mia never thought the day would come, but she was suddenly glad that she had spent so much time playing VR games over the course of her life. Her slave masters provided many games for free: Since they owned the companies it cost them nothing, and it was a very efficient way to keep slaves happy and docile. Not to mention, playing VR games was an effortless activity that allowed the slaves to recharge energy, so that they would be more productive the next day. It was the same reason the slaves were provided with plenty of energy drinks, pizza, and other high-energy foods.
"Bread and circuses" went the original saying, about the minimum investment a slaver needed to make in order to keep their slaves from revolting. But over time that had evolved into "Pizza and videogames".
She had never been that deeply into VR games herself, since she spent a lot of time studying to become a nurse, and because she preferred personal connections over digital ones. But her girlfriend Kate was an avid gamer. She was part of a clan and had a lot of online friends. Mia was really not that good at these games, but she had picked up a lot through cultural osmosis while spending time with her girlfriend.
Hopefully that knowledge would come in useful now.
A small part of her brain that she tried not to focus on right now also wondered if Tom would like Kate. Gaming was traditionally more of a woman's hobby, so it usually hurt her chances with finding a man, but the humans were gamifying the universe itself, so maybe their men were more open to the idea of spending an evening just playing videogames and eating pizza?
If she was very lucky, Tom might find Kate's hobby attractive, or at least not repulsive, like most men did. Convincing someone as popular as Tom to enter a harem relationship with herself and her girlfriends was an unrealistic dream, of course. Men just weren't into that sort of thing. But a girl could dream!
She mentally berated herself for letting her mind wander in that direction. The man had just saved her life! And now she was planning to hit on her savior, and probably make him uncomfortable? That would be beyond rude. What was wrong with her? She had been raised better than this.
She brought her mind back to the present and noticed something odd: "If FEI is a gaming abstraction that just shows the effort the Faith Engines have to put in, doesn't that mean that experience points and mana basically reflect the same thing? What's the difference?"
"Don't think about it too hard." Tom responded.
When he noticed her confusion, he quickly added: "I'm being serious. Don't think about it too hard. Faith Engines are influenced by belief and the more questions you ask the more variables you generate that they have to account for. It's similar to the Observer Effect in quantum physics: The more awareness you have of a topic, the more that topic is influenced by your thoughts. That's why Faith Engines work so poorly in the Facinus Sector: The Malumians have spent millennia thinking about magic, and gotten most of it wrong, and now this is the magical equivalent of a swamp.
"Ask too many questions and stuff gets more expensive. We even keep the AI that runs FEI deliberately stupid because too much introspection makes miracles more expensive."
"What? How does that work?" She asked. It was a lot to take in, and frankly disturbing. It sounded like deliberate ignorance was a virtue, and that just felt dirty to Mia to even think about.
"Look, I would love to explain this in more detail, but the demon will probably be here soon."
Mia was shocked. With all the confusion and novelty of her new HUD, she had all but forgotten about the approaching agent of their imminent demise.
"How is it not here yet? We have been talking for minutes! That roar sounded really close!"
"Oh, that's just my passive skill 'Talking is a Free Action'. Only seconds have passed while we discussed all this. I haven't levelled that ability up very high though, so it won't last for much longer. You should look through your character sheet and check if you have anything useful! I should be able to solo this, but you never know, so some support would be great!"
As if echoing Tom's suggestion, a message popped up in Mia's HUD:
Tutorial quest obtained: Defeat the Demon Lord ...You may be skipping a few steps here.
Mia had to agree with that message. Weren't tutorial quests usually simple stuff like 'kill a dozen rats'? She felt a little bit like a fish out of the water, having to fight a demon lord only subjective minutes after obtaining unfathomable reality warping powers from an alien civilization.
But this was real life, and not a game, and if growing up as a slave had taught her anything it was that life had no obligation to be fair or to present level-appropriate encounters.
She stared at her HUD and tried to make sense of it. One thing stood out to her: Her class was "Nekomancer".
Nekomancy was an ancient and storied term with great cultural significance for Purrians everywhere.
It was derived from an old word for "the people", and meant "Those who coordinate the people".
Purrians had a strong sense of community and personal empathy, and tended to live in very close-knit communities. But these strong ties to their immediate relatives and neighbours also made it more difficult for them to coordinate in larger groups. The village was more important than the country to them.
As a result, Purrian rulers often had difficulty coordinating their people, which was another reason why their species was enslaved throughout most of the galaxy. There even was an idiom about the difficulties of "herding Purrians". Fittingly, the term "nekomancer" could also be translated as "shepherd of the people".
Unlike most Purrians, nekomancers took responsibility for society as a whole and tried to help others, even beyond their own immediate friends and family.
In ancient scriptures, nekomancers were mythical sages who possessed powerful magic that brought people together. They gathered large numbers of people, far beyond village size, and enabled them to work together towards a common goal.
The term had immense religious significance, and several schools of philosophy derived from it.
Unfortunately, almost all of this was apocryphal. The Malumian demon-gods ate the Purrian gods when they enslaved them. As a result, much of what she knew about nekomancy was heavily censored. She was pretty sure that her Malumian masters would not just give her access to an unbiased and true account of history, and over the millennia their propaganda would likely have distorted the true stories that Purrian slaves tried to pass down through the generations through oral tradition.
She found it awe-inspiring that FEI referred to her by such an important title.
Did she really have what it took to be a nekomancer?
Unfortunately, now was not the time for navel-gazing. She had much more urgent practical problems right now, such as figuring out how to defeat a demon lord.
Luckily, she had some ideas about that. Due to its strong cultural significance, many of the VR games she played with Kate featured nekomancers in one way or another.
In these games, nekomancers were usually a support class. They focused on healing and buffing, but also often had features for leadership. The more evil versions focused on subtle social manipulation or even mind control. Non-player characters who were nekomancers were usually shown to be good at strategic planning, and tended to take the long view.
In games, villainous nekomancers rarely took to the field themselves and instead relied on massive armies. Conversely, if your own leader was a nekomancer then you could expect that all of your allies would work together like a well-oiled machine. However, it was a common trope that allied nekomancers were going to betray you at some point in the second act, by sacrificing you and all your friends to achieve some larger goal of theirs.
That part made her feel kind of queasy to think about.
Religious scripture made nekomancy out as an honorable thing, a pillar of Purrian society. But their portrayal in popular fiction was very different. Nekomancers were often depicted as deeply troubled individuals who forgot about the ties to their friends and family in the pursuit of some abstract greater good. It usually turned out that that greater good was too difficult to achieve and remained out of reach anyway, or that the nekomancer tricked his followers and the greater good was really just their own personal good. Stories involving nekomancers almost invariably resulted in tragedy for anyone who decided to follow them.
They made for great villains and tragic figures, but it was deeply unappealing to roleplay one of them unless you deliberately wanted to be edgy.
The Malumians likely did this on purpose: After all, nekomancers were exactly the sort of people who had both the drive and the ability to organize a slave revolt. Of course they would want to make it unappealing to be one.
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For a species that cared so much about culture, they seemed to have no qualms about rewriting Purrian history to suit their purposes.
No matter what the Malumians might say, she knew that nekomancy was a great and honorable thing. She vowed to treat her class with the seriousness it deserved, to try her best to live up to the ideals of this most ancient role that FEI had bestowed upon her, and to avoid any of the pitfalls that Malumian propaganda so clearly laid out.
All in all, she was very happy with this class.
Given how Tom acted, she had half expected FEI to be similarly lighthearted. Some of the games she played tried to be original and funny by making up class names. The worst of them even resorted to puns! She hated those, and she always gave those games a hard pass on general principle. She was very happy to see that FEI instead chose a class name with strong cultural and historical importance to her.
"I'm a nekomancer! I think that's a support class!" She called out to Tom.
Tom chuckled to himself for some reason, and Mia wondered what he found so funny.
"Can you summon undead cats?" He asked while barely suppressing a smile.
Undead cats? What did those have to do with...
Oh! Clever!
Tom was clearly referring to the well-known parable of Schroedinger. An important philosophical conundrum about the influence that the dead could continue to have on the world through the changes they made in life and through the memories the living still held of them. The parable was central to many aspects of nekomantic philosophy, and it did indeed feature a cat that could be described as undead, from a certain abstract point of view.
Didn't Tom say he didn't read the cultural primer? And yet he knew obscure religious lore like this? That man was just full of surprises!
"That's clever!" She praised Tom. "But how do I do that? I don't see any buttons on the interface."
"Just think at FEI really hard and it will respond to your thoughts!"
Well, that sounded convenient.
She thought about Schroedinger's Parable and directed her will at FEI.
New skill unlocked Name Summon Schroedinger Description Summons a quantum zombie cat Tags Conceptual, scouting
It worked! This was certainly more user-friendly than the games she was used to.
But the spell description was odd. What did Schroedinger's Parable have to do with quantum physics? That did not look very historically accurate. Maybe the Faith Engines were taking artistic liberty with the concept in order to make it fit with whatever they were doing in the background?
And what was up with those tags? She had no idea what to make of the 'conceptual' bit, but at least 'scout' was clear enough: This was going to be a weak, low-level summon. Probably not very useful in a fight, but it could likely serve as a cheap distraction if nothing else. Summoner builds always were some of her favorites, so she was happy to have that option.
But wait. Something about this was off. Very off.
"Tom, where are the numbers?" She asked. "If it's like a game, then where are the numbers? How am I supposed to optimize if there aren't any numbers?"
"You aren't supposed to optimize." Tom responded, and Mia instantly felt a flash of existential confusion.
"It's not actually a game. FEI just presents it that way, and the Faith Engines handle the optimization in the background. You can ask FEI to display numbers, but I strongly advise against it. Displaying numbers creates additional constraints and increases the Faith Engines' workload. Once something is quantified, it becomes more fixed in reality and harder to change later."
Something in her expression must have shown her disappointment, because he looked at her and then continued in a softer voice: "Look. I don't want to dampen your enthusiasm, but I think, realistically, you just aren't going to optimize better than a machine that can create a god of mathematics as a subroutine."
Ok. That was fair.
Still, this newest revelation had crushed her spirits.
She was an optimizer at heart. Crunching numbers was the one part of VR games that she really enjoyed, besides the communal aspects, of course.
And now it turned out that she couldn't actually do any of that. Nevermind that FEI gave her unfathomable cosmic powers, it just wasn't the same if she couldn't fiddle with the numbers herself.
Mia tried to ignore her immense disappointment and cleared her head. There was no time to lose. She thought very hard at FEI that she would like to cast "Summon Schroedinger".
Her hands started glowing.
She was doing magic! She just thought about it, and it worked the first time, and now she was doing magic!
It was awesome!
She looked at her glowing hands for a couple of seconds with a steadily growing grin, before she noticed that nothing was happening.
As she thought this, FEI immediately provided her the answer to her unspoken question:
Casting "Summon Schroedinger" 12% complete
Oh, great. Her spell had a long casting time. Well, at least that probably meant that it would be fairly powerful, if her experience with games was anything to go by.
"Good job, Mia. Let me know when you are ready, I think the demon lord is about to arrive." Tom commented.
As if on cue, a nearby building exploded as an enormous claw tore through its wall.
The demon lord was here!
The first thing she noticed about the monster, even before she took in his looks, was the large, red health bar that her HUD helpfully placed over his head. How convenient!
The demon lord was easily ten meters tall, with dark red skin, enormous horns on his head and spine, and bat-like wings on his back.
An aura of fire surrounded him, and Mia had to wrinkle her nose as she was hit by the smell of brimstone.
He carried an enormous flaming axe, easily twice her size, and his body was adorned with ceremonial golden armor that seemed to offer very little actual protection.
If her knowledge of demonic lore from videogames carried over into the real world, which was a big 'if', then the armor was both entirely for show, and functional at the same time. Demons were memetic entities, which meant that people's perception influenced their abilities. Golden armor that accentuated your physique looked more impressive than steel armor that actually covered your important parts, and that made it work better.
At least that was the excuse that game designers gave when people complained about the stripperific armor their characters wore. Among Purrians, men often had to deal with the fact that their most powerful armor left very little to the imagination. Looking at this demon lord, apparently this actually had a basis in reality.
Or maybe it was the other way around? People made games with stripperific armor, and then the demons, being memetic entities, adjusted to that by actually starting to dress like sluts?
Mia spent a couple of seconds staring at the demon lord's semi-naked body and soon found herself comparing him to Tom. If anyone were to ask, she would insist she was doing this as part of her tactical analysis, and not because she was easily distracted by the sexy.
The demon lord roared again, and the nearby windows shook from the sound.
"Hear me, mortals, and tremble! I am ..."
But Tom interrupted him in the middle of his introduction: "I hope you brought your sunscreen, demon, because you're about to get burned!"
Mia winced. That one-liner was just awful.
The demon lord appeared to agree, as he gained a look of sheer disgust and immediately charged at Tom.
Tom met the demon lord's enormous flaming axe with his own enormous flaming sword.
...what was it with men and enormous flaming melee weapons, anyway? Mia never understood this.
When the two weapons met, Mia was expecting an epic lightshow. That was what would have happened in a game.
Instead, reality ensued.
The demon was easily ten times Tom's weight, and inertia was apparently still a thing. The force of the blow launched Tom across the street and against a wall.
Fortunately, he seemed relatively unfazed by the impact. If reality was still operating on ordinary laws of physics, this should have turned him into a bloody smear on the wall. Instead, he just dropped to the ground with a handsome smile and wasted no time, charging right back at the demon.
As he ran, the demon tried to introduce himself a second time: "My name is..."
But Tom interrupted him once again: "Time to put the 'slay' in 'demon slayer'!"
The demon lord looked offended, and Mia could empathize with that. It might be a horrible monster and a literal incarnation of the concept of evil, but nobody deserved to be on the receiving end of one-liners like that. Especially not when you were just trying to make introductions!
The one-liner was so bad that it made the demon lord hesitate for just a fraction of a second, which allowed Tom to dodge past his guard. Mia chose to believe that this was part of the plan and Tom had deliberately chosen a terrible taunt in order to distract the demon lord. The alternative, that he actually thought these sorts of lines were cool, was too horrible to contemplate.
As Tom charged, the demon lord pulsed his flame aura, and the human was instantly engulfed in flames.
He did not seem to care. She wondered if he was hurt, and in response to that thought a health bar appeared over the human's head, too. He seemed to have taken some damage from the demon lord's earlier attack that launched him into a wall, but being on fire did not seem to faze him.
The fire did cause damage to his clothes, though. Mia appreciated it.
As Tom passed the demon lord's guard, he moved his sword to intercept the axe's backswing and punched the monster in the face with his left fist instead. This made her realize that he was oddly muscular for a human. She hadn't really noticed that before, since dense muscles and biceps like a tree trunk were normal for Purrian men, and not something that she or other Purrian women tended to pay attention to.
Their earlier collision had followed the rules of reality classic, with inertia and everything. But now it seemed that reality was shrugging its metaphorical shoulders, as the impact of Tom's fist sent the demon lord flying backwards, accompanied by a deafening crack that Mia assumed was probably the sound barrier breaking.
And yet, Mia noticed that the demon lord's health bar had not moved an inch.
"Hey ugly," Tom said, "did it hurt when you fell from... well, you know where."
Oh by everything that was holy. Please stop talking. That didn't even make sense. Demons were supposed to come from hell, which was below the ground, and angels from heaven, which was above the sky. Why would the demon lord have fallen down from hell?
Mia felt her sanity draining away just thinking about it.
Wisdom Save succeeded: Sanity loss prevented
Wait. What?
She was not the only one who was affected, either: This time, when the demon lord winced in pain, she actually noticed his health bar move. It was just a tiny amount of damage, but even that was better than the damage Tom had inflicted with his punch.
It made sense. Listening to Tom's one-liners was hurting her in her very soul, and she wasn't even on the receiving end of it. Of course it would be much worse for the demon, and as a memetic entity, it should be susceptible to words.
"Keep insulting it! It's working! The cringe is hurting it! Nyaa!"
"What are you talking about?" Tom responded, while parrying the demon lord's oversized flaming axe with his oversized flaming sword.
He didn't know what she was talking about?
Did that... did that mean that he wasn't making his insults cringey on purpose, after all?
She felt a mental breakdown coming. Luckily she was spared from it when FEI distracted her with a mental notification: 'Summon Schroedinger' was finally ready to cast.
She wasted no time, and cast it immediately.
A cat appeared in front of her.
There was no animation or visual effect, and the cat did not look special in any way. There was just suddenly an ordinary domestic cat sitting in front of her that wasn't there before.
At the same time, she instinctively felt as the spell drained away her mana. It felt like a much larger drain than she was expecting, and her suspicion was confirmed when she checked her stats:
Mana 8 / 100
That spell had cost her 92 of her 100 mana!
So much for this being a spammable spell to summon distractions. It looked she would only get this one shot.
She looked at the cat, who was apparently named after the famous Schroedinger of legend. He looked back at her and meowed imperiously.
At least she assumed that the meow was imperious. That was just a baseline assumption when dealing with cats. She actually had no idea what that meow meant. Purrians looked sort of cat-like, but that did not give them a magical ability to understand cats, and apparently FEI did not translate for her, either.
"Go on! Help Tom fight the demon lord, nyaa!" She ordered her summon.
He looked at her and tilted his head in disbelief. She did not need to speak cat to understand that one. He was asking her if she was an idiot.
Fortunately, he then immediately turned around and followed her orders by charging directly at the demon lord.
He was fast for a cat, and gave off his most intimidating meow while he ran. Given that Schroedinger was a house cat charging a demon lord the size of a building, that was not very intimidating at all.
Mia was anxious to see what he could do. This would be her major contribution to the fight.
The demon lord paid Schroedinger no attention as he continued to do battle with Tom. Around a dozen meters before Schroedinger reached the demon lord, he entered the monster's fire aura and instantly burst into flames.
He made it another five meters or so before his burning corpse collapsed to the ground. The cat's burned husk immediately started to dissipate, just like the lesser demons Tom had slain earlier.
Neither the demon lord nor Tom ever even noticed Mia's contribution, or Schroedinger's sacrifice.
Well. She was off to a great start.
Then she noticed Tom open his mouth again, and she felt a knot form in her stomach in anticipation of his next crime against linguistics.
"Looks like it's time to send you back to hell... on a one-way ticket!"
New skill unlocked: Cringe Resistance Due to repeated exposure, you have developed a resistance to cringe.