Jules’ brow was crowned with sweat, and the droplets sparkled in the noontime sun like jewels. His eyes were closed, scrunched up in focus. His body sat cross-legged in front of a flat rock. On the rock lay a few twigs, some grass, and a few berries. He’d used his [analyze] ability to identify the best possible materials for this monumental task. Jules’ previous failures haunted him, but he pushed past them. Carefully, he called upon the thunder and reached out to touch the materials in front of him.
Skill Activated: Rearrange
He felt the wood being lifted up and bent into shape. The twigs shifted and warped, the plant material flowing like honey as he tried to bend matter with mind and impossible lightning. His thoughts weaved a schematic for them to fill, and they complied with all the discipline of a well-drilled army. After five minutes, the lightning ceased sparking, and he opened his eyes…
Only to curse like a sailor at the misshapen lump in front of him.
Jules, for the last 3 hours, had been trying to make rabbit traps using his Rearrange skill. As far as he could tell, it allowed incredible control over matter down to the molecular level, but his dreams of creating hyper-advanced materials from natural materials with ease were quashed by the sheer difficulty of controlling the skill. He collected more twigs and winced at the sound of his growling stomach. It’d been a full day since he’d actually eaten something. Idly, he wondered if Nia was having any better luck with whatever she was doing...
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Nia, unaware of her brother’s difficulties, was having the time of her life. Adorable animals! She could talk to them!!! Okay, maybe she couldn’t talk to them yet, but she was rapidly figuring out some of the words, and the intriguing grammar structure.
Thankfully, rather than rely on memory alone, she’d been able to use the… status-window… thingy… Nia was still at a bit of a loss on how to term it.
Well, whatever it was, Nia had figured out she could open, edit, and save ‘text documents’, using her thoughts to cause floating screens to appear. Custom characters seemed to be supported too since when she came up with a new symbol for some different guttural wolf-language inflection, it simply appeared within the document without any issues.
Figuring out the vocabulary had also gone much faster than she’d expected; the wolf-pup had been very helpful. It seemed to understand what she was trying to do, and answered a lot of her questions about the words for various things. These questions were, essentially, rough gestures mixed with broken Wolf-Tongue, but they’d managed despite this. She’d hit a bit of a wall with some objects, apparently the Wolf-Pup was, well, a pup, and thus didn’t know all the words.
The pup, whose name she’d found translated into something akin to ‘Time-of-Seed’, ended up dragging the older wolf she’d seen earlier over. She’d managed to get a few words out of him, before she asked him his name, at which point the old wolf merely glared at her, before stalking off. Seed, as she started calling him, answered her in the older wolf’s stead, and she dutifully noted it down as “Hundred-Year Claw”. Her studies into the wolves’ language were interrupted when Jules finally returned from his day-long sojourn into the wild, walking into the glen with head held high. Nia glanced up at the sky, noting that sunset was upon them, before looking back at her brother.
“So. You actually get anything?” Nia asked, in a bemused tone.
Jules held out a hand, from which dangled a bundle of fur. He smiled in the same self-satisfied way she’d seen when he’d gotten an A on one of his exams.
“It took me 7 fucking hours, but I did it. I caught a rabbit!”
Nia blinked.
“Huh. You actually managed to do it.”
Jules smirked.
“And what have you been up to?”
“Figuring out how to speak the language. Do you even know how to handle that rabbit? You don’t have a knife, right?”
Her brother shrugged.
“I hadn’t thought that far yet. But, I did figure out some things…”
Jules laid the rabbit on the ground before he dashed out of the clearing. When he returned, he was carrying a large flat rock like a tray. There were sticks and stones and… mud?
“... The hell are you going to do with that?”
He grinned.
“I figured out some of the functions of the System.”
“The what?”
“The fucky lightning-thing, with the pop-up boxes.”
“Ah. What about it?”
“Well, aside from being the platonic concept of TMI, it also lets me do something like this…”
With a clunk, he laid the rock on the ground, before he kneeled and stretched his hand out over it. The System crackled out of his hand into the materials, seemingly melting them away. Over the next half-minute, Nia watched as the lightning remained on top of the rock, twisting into a new shape, before vanishing to reveal a makeshift knife.
She recognized the handle as being one of the sticks that had been on the rock, now adorned with a dull brown ceramic blade. It looked as though the clay had been baked around the stick somehow. She noticed a small sphere of frozen ice appear as well, sitting next to the knife and forming a thin layer of frost around the base.
Jules picked up his creation and looked at it proudly, dismissing a status message that popped up with a flick of his free hand.
“It lets us… reorganize matter and energy, I guess? The ‘skills’ seem to be like… functions. the [Rearrange] Function lets me do the whole reorganize thing, but the [Storage] skill lets me store matter in my body. Somehow.
Anyway, the trick here was that the dirt was clay, from the stream. The System let me… remove the water and transfer heat into it? Shaping it around the stick. All the heat came from the water, which is why I had to move the water out into a frozen ball. Which, by the way, is really cold, don’t touch it.”
“... Thermodynamics doesn’t play nice with it, then.”
“Well… no,” Jules answered, “it still does obey physics since I had to freeze the water to balance out the heating of the clay…”
“You broke entropy.”
“In that sense,” her brother admitted, reluctantly ceding the argument, “yes, Thermodynamics does not play nice with it.”
“... Can you use it to start a fire?”
“Yeah.”
“How?”
Jules attempted to explain, trying to use similes, metaphors, and all manner of things to describe what the experience of utilizing the System in this way felt like. And he failed miserably. What the hell did ‘like stroking a river with iron’ mean?
“Use English,” she said irritably.
“I’m doing my best, alright?”
“There’s gotta be a better way to do this…”
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Nia and Jules were both taken aback by the sudden and convenient appearance of the box. They flicked it away, and found that using the ability wasn’t even a point of confusion, it was as if the instinctual knowledge of how to do so had been implanted into their heads. The experience of discovering a new instinct was rather… strange, and it was with great hesitation that the sister walked up to Jules and put a finger on his forehead.
They barely glimpsed the box, before they found themselves in a flow of information. Thankfully, it wasn’t nearly as overwhelming as when they had used the [Analyze] skill. Instead of raw physical data, they were experiencing each other’s… memories. They witnessed through each other’s memories, their various efforts over the course of the day.
When the siblings’ vision cleared, they were briefly disoriented. It took them a few moments to realize that despite the hours they’d experienced, it was as if no time had passed at all. The Sun was in the same position in the sky, and the frozen orb of water still lay on the rock.
“Okay, that is very handy,” Jules remarked. “Good thing it only shows what you want it to show, or-”
Nia gave him a stern look, before getting straight to business.
“Hand me the knife and I’ll take care of the skinning and deboning and stuff. You just make a fire, I’m pretty hungry.”
“Got it.”
Jules marched off into the woods, searching for dry leaves, twigs, small sticks, and adequately sized logs, while Nia sat down and gingerly picked up the rabbit’s carcass.
“Alright, let’s get you and that rock washed in the waterfall first. Jules got both of you absolutely filthy.”
The rabbit was washed, and... mangled into something akin several bite-sized chunks of lean meat, which they roasted on washed sticks over a roaring campfire, which Jules nearly burnt himself lighting. The pup, with absolutely no shame, nuzzled into Nia’s side, forcing her with sheer might of adorableness to yield several chunks into his waiting maw. From the pup’s mutterings, the wolves assigned to the dinner-hunt were running rather late.
The reason why was quickly revealed, when the party returned panting and exhausted, one of their number limping with a large wound. Nia and Jules both turned their heads in alarm when the returning hunters barked out warnings in panicked voices. They didn’t recognize the word, as far as they could tell it translated to ‘The Brown Beast’, which was entirely unhelpful.
The pack gathered, leaping out of their burrows and moving forward to confront the intruder. It turned out to be a massive, massive bear, who spoke in what they could best describe as a thickly accented-form of the wolf-tongue.
“You have failed the Forest,” the bear roared, prowling forward. Its scarred features were revealed by the light of the campfire, as it continued. “The Waterfall-Pack must yield the Voice to me, or face my fury.”
“How have we failed, ” snapped Hundred-Year-Claw, “The old pacts are still held true by all parties.”
The bear looked at the siblings vengefully, before turning back to the pack.
“Humans in the forest, who keep not the pact! You harbor them!”
As the bear advanced, the fire’s glow revealed arrows studding his hide.
“Those two assaulted me!”
“Impossible,” Claw retorted, “I have had them watched whilst they were our guests. Every step they took, I know, and they walked nowhere close to your territories, Red-Claw! They didn’t even have bows or spears.”
Jules’ face paled as he realized that he’d been followed during his entire outing. He’d gone to the bathroom out there… He hadn’t even noticed.
“Then explain these arrows! Attacking one of my kind, without provocation, without the ancient rites, this breaks the pacts! Hand the Voice over to one who will uphold the old oaths, or there will be blood shed between the Ironhide Tribe and the Waterfall Pack!”
Time-of-Seed had remained silent, content to watch at Nia’s side, but at this they trotted forward. Their eyes glowed brighter than before, and the trees around the clearing bent inwards as if to listen.
“The forest knows your falsehoods. I am the Voice of the Wood, and not something to be bartered for your ambitions.”
The winds whipped through the glen as if a storm had appeared out of the blue, and Red-Claw shrank back. Time-of-Seed no longer sounded like a pup, or indeed, a wolf at all, their voice having become far older and louder.
“The trees see that you overstepped your territories and attempted to clear men out of the hunting grounds allotted to them, for otherwise, you could reap their bounties. They resisted, and wounded you. These are the fruits of your breaches of the pact, and adequate punishment. But now you scent men in the Waterfall Pack’s glen, and pounced on it as...”
At this, the Voice of the Wood actually snarled.
“Pretext for seizing the power of the Voice for your own. You demand the Waterfall Pack turn over their guests so you could maul them out of spite, for the wounds other men inflicted upon you rightfully, when the Voice itself has taken them as the Forest’s guests. Such flagrant breaches against the old laws will not stand!”
The ground around Red-Claw shuddered, and roots rose up to tie themselves around the bear. Red-Claw’s hide shuddered, and glowing red veins appeared all across it, like precious metals in a mine. The roots began to burn, with the flames themselves somehow shaped like despairing faces.
“The Voice will be mine,” Red Claw snarled, “the Forest belongs to the Ironhides by right of strength!”
The young pup was actually taken aback by the moment, and hesitated for a moment. A single moment, that was all the bear needed to snap the burning roots, and rush forward towards the siblings. His eyes were locked on the young pup.
The pack rushed to stop him, but the bear moved impossibly fast, apparently enhanced by the red light in his body. The pup backed up in panic, before being stopping when he felt the heat of the fire at his back. He might not escape.
Nia scooped up Time-of-Seed in her arms and attempted to make a run for it, though the hope of outrunning the beast was slim. Not very clever, but very sensible. Jules, however, had never been sensible, and concocted in that split second a plan that was very clever, but also profoundly idiotic.
Time slowed to a crawl as he stood up, watching from the corner of his eye as Nia broke into a sprint. He saw the bear begin to close the distance, and looked for the right timing. He knew the bear was focused on the pup, from the look in its gaze, so he knew he could catch it off guard. It had to be just before the bear was in the right spot… yes, now!
Jules plunged one hand into the fire, ignoring the pain. With the other hand, he grabbed the bear’s foot, before closing his eyes.
Skill Activated: Rearrange
He didn’t have the time for some complex creation, but that was never his intention. It was a rather wild gamble, but he channeled all the heat of the fire that he could in that instant into the bear’s leg. He had no idea if the System’s function would work on a living thing, but without hampering the bear in some way, Jules figured they didn’t have a chance of survival.
There was a flash, and the bear screamed in rage, toppling to the ground as his leg was seared by the burst of heat. The fire was completely extinguished, the ashes and wood frosted with the amount of energy lost.
His hand was covered in ugly burns, but he’d done it! Though, Jules would have to congratulate himself later, because the bear was getting back up.
“Your sorceries are nothing before the might of an Ironhide. Your trick will not work a second time.”
Red-Claw’s attention was now fully turned to Jules, its eyes filled with a primeval hate.
“All you have done is made your death much more painful.”
Spoiler: Jules Stats
STATUS WINDOW UserID: Jules Parin LEVEL: 10 Main Class: ??? Lesser Classes Scholar, Artificier, Champion Health: 100% Mana: 30 Status Effects: ATTRIBUTES Might: 13 Agility: 17 Intellect: 20 Perception: 13 Dominion: 13 Reign: 16 Willpower: 17 Vigor: 9 CLASS SKILLS ???: Analyze Rearrange Store ???(cont.): Memory Transfer - -
Spoiler: Nia Stats
STATUS WINDOW UserID: Nia Parin LEVEL: 10 Main Class: ??? Lesser Classes Naturalist, Healer, Speaker Health: 100% Mana: 30 Status Effects: ATTRIBUTES Might: 12 Agility: 14 Intellect: 18 Perception: 16 Dominion: 21 Reign: 18 Willpower: 14 Vigor: 14 CLASS SKILLS ???: Analyze Rearrange Store ???(cont.): Memory Transfer - -