I wake in a space not my own, without sufficient room to move freely. I shift myself into a sitting position and open my eyes, revealing nothing. I blink several times, enough to give me the visual noise from being in complete darkness. I then feel around the room before realizing that I’m wearing something harder than cloth. I sigh realizing that what my father said about the beyond was true, though his advice is all I have to live by now. Let's start with one of his meditation exercises, and my environment reveals itself to me.

I’m in an empty sphere wearing some type of black armor, while a shadowy shroud covers me like a cloak. The armor apparently is my default outfit, while the shroud is apparently one of my skills. My vision explodes as my powers formally activate for the first time, as my reactive analysis skill kicks in for the first time. I chuckle to myself as my father said “words do not describe how bad it is.” The dragons will find me to be a slightly harder opponent than my father, realizing that my resistances do nothing to stop environmental damage. Or being dropped.

My vision, having finally stabilized into its final configuration, reveals that I enjoyed a cocktail of dehydration and a meal of starvation long enough to bleed out all but my last health point. That fact reveals where I am, as It was drilled into me ‘the final point of damage dealt to a Lord in their realm must be inflicted by another, be it monster, rival, or traitor.’ My father noted that Villains and Raiders are treated as though they were monsters by most lords. I stop for a moment in introspection realizing that I still miss my father and wish I had him to guide me through this. Checking back on my health It appears my realm can still heal me as my health has gone up, while my hunger and thirst are going away, which means that I can just focus on preparing the tools I do have.

First is my armor, and in fact it is actually armor, from all the pissing and moaning I’ve heard on the forums is actually fairly rare. Most as far as I can tell start with no clothes whatsoever, and Nem are the most common group that gets this perk. I drew a blank on the other, before deciding that it wasn’t relevant. A Nem receives the full complement of equipment slots, though all of mine including my rarer ones are all filled with a matching set of integrity. Integrity means that they all get damaged together and attacks powerful enough to send part of me flying sends all of me flying. The other two are a pair of starting armaments, a knife and a plinker.

I fumble around for them and instead find the entirety of my internal status screen, against my now barely functioning HUD. My Hud like everyone else's is separated into five sections: Identity, skills, equipment, and realm. At the very top is my name, Jack Walker and below that is my primary race Nem. It also includes my subrace of low yellow, which has to be the worst of the bunch given what I’ve heard about it from my father’s contacts. Below that is the reams of stats that I have access to; no points to improve any of them, but lots of potential nonetheless. The only thing of note are my physical scores, so I search for them to find all of them. Stats are unfortunately only updated once a week, and for me it was yesterday. So in the meantime my stats are jumbled and have to be picked out manually.

It isn’t too long for me to pick out the big four: Action, Durability, Reaction, and Utility. Most divid start at ten total for all of them. Action is for active skills, and each person starts with a number of active skills equal to this score. With mine being two, one was spent on my plinker, a type of gun that makes a signature plinking sound when it dings off of armor, which is a firing skill, while the other is a movement skill. I test the movement skill in my realm but without the description or a frame of reference it is hard to tell if it is a blink or dash.

Durability is next and at five, including a plus one from being a low yellow, is the highest of my four, and probably has the most potent instantaneous effect. Sundering a point here gives you the highest power per unit effect of anything, which is mostly not renewable, divine intervention notwithstanding. When you die you get to bargain with the divines that have a claim on you for where you respawn, with random without memories being the default at a net zero. Keeping your memories will either cost you part of your durability or require a challenging start. All in all, Messing with durability is something I’d like to avoid with everything else being equal.

Reaction is next and at two I get two abilities that are conditional to effects or other things happening. The sentiment in the forums was that Reaction skills on items tend to be better, for as long as you set the trigger correctly, it can cause massive chain reactions. Mine sound much more tame and that makes me hope that they can be exploited in more subtle ways. The first is skewer, which triggers on stabbing an object unclaimed by anyone else or the last health point of a soul. The resulting effect is the entity so targeted is converted into a card for easy storage. The first is straight up abduction, the skill. At least I will not have to be searched for theft over it. The other is an on object damage skill, which attempts to push out other people’s claims. Nevermind, I do have a theft skill, well it’s not the skill but how you use it.

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Finally is Utility, which is the marker for passive effects. The first is Lordship which gives me authority over my realm. The other is my cloak skill which apparently is much more involved than it first appears. As it is an aura skill it must go in the Utility slot and notationally affects everyone in it. This aura affects people depending on your current feelings about them, and works on each component independently. It also affects anything that requires perception or analysis if that ability affects a person in the aura in the same manner. While the stat buffs do not apply to yourself the sensory interdiction part of the aura does. My aura also affects everything in my realm for free.

By this point some of my resource pools have been artificially inflated back up to full, so now my health and shields are back up to their full total of fifteen each. Without food or drink though my stamina, mana, and aura resources will not regenerate. Being at full health also released whatever locks were put on my armaments which set them into their sheath and holster respectively. My knife beyond the skill seems plain at first glance right until you realize that at twenty damage or one shield per strike, that without my relatively high shields for low level that my own knife could kill me with a nick, and that’s before the double damage critical strikes.

The plinker on the other hand, as compared to the cannons that have a resource that must be loaded into their chamber, doesn’t have any external ammo requirement. This means that plinkers are exclusively a power focus, while cannons may or may not have external requirements. Wands, staves, and other magical foci tend to be for more complicated abilities which cuts down on the throughput with all that complexity. All this causes the common bow to be a cannon, with the ability to fire the effect of a wand. Two handed and encamped plinkers, while rare, do exist and are hybrid of the power of an arcane staff with the throughput of a plinker. Yet the wielders of such arms attract all of the ire of their opponents army and appropriately so while leaving the user devoid of defenses to deal with said ire. In any case the most common place for a two handed plinker is on the butt of a spear but those are split weapons and take penalties accordingly.

Mine on the other hand is in the shape of a pistol and is a one handed sidearm, and accordingly less powerful than all of the aforementioned variants, still like all the aforementioned items, it does have a bit more complexity than I would have otherwise anticipated. My plinker has a slide on the top that when manually articulated, held in two hands and slit back and forth, refills the entirety of the internal power capacitor. The other is that it uses one of the reality interaction measures for something unusual, usually the endurance stat makes the object you hold more durable but neither of mine do, instead both of my armaments can be instantiated as an action dispelling the old version. The pistol gets created without a charge unfortunately, while the knife gets the crazier effect here with the ability to remove an effect on myself of up to my effective endurance value in trade for losing access to both of my armaments for fifteen minutes. Downtime only for that, and it does not work on food requirements. The only other odd thing about the pistol is it’s damage as it deals six damage and twenty stun if it is not being blocked by a shield.

I go over my body one final time checking how my perception interacts with my aura, and realm skills. The realm interaction gave me a headache as it must be assuming that things must be in your realm for you to check it, while checking my shroud while leaning on the border lets me see through into the void. It takes me a bit of searching to start finding nearby realms but once I start finding them it is quickly apparent that I’m surrounded by higher level monster realms, and other such zones. The other thing I notice is that all the zones point in the void equivalent of up. This also means that I’m at the bottom of existence which is one of the hardest starting positions, though it beats starting as a slave most of the time.

I continue trawling the surrounding void to find an area that seems low level, so I can farm some resources to set up my realm properly. I get lucky and notice a level seven undead zone nearby and push toward it to breach my way in. My very weak void affinity kicks in and I arrive in not so short order. The realm seems pretty small which means that the number of undead might be low, but I do my best to try not to get my hopes up. I have to get in and out, surviving all the while. I’m as good as I’ll ever be; let’s breach.