It felt like forever before I regained consciousness, but then I felt warmth and a person, presumably my mother, holding me, and the realisation that I’m a baby hits me, and I start to cry. A silent baby is not a healthy baby, and my mother breathes a sigh of relief as she rocks me to sleep.
Being a baby sucks. Especially as an adult, going from full autonomy to practically none is horrible. Even feeding, being breastfed is quite humiliating. Still, I quickly get through my humiliation when I realise how hungry I am and get down to business.
A year passed, and I learnt my name was Kaitlen. I also realised I had a brother, Gabriel, who was around 5, who relentlessly tortured (tickled) me daily. I suppose he thought it was his God-given right, as the older brother, to harass the baby all the time.
Our technology was about in the medieval era, with some magical additions. I had settled in and truly considered myself as part of the family. My mother was called Helen, and my father, Alec, with our last name being Smith. Suddenly, my mother started getting round again; I was going to have another sibling!
Another half-year passed, and I started to understand most of the speech around me. I found that this world had a Menu, and people called it the Great System. It was blasphemous to call it anything else. There even were hearsay cases of being cursed if you were actively disrespecting the Great System, I wasn’t sure if this was true or not, but I was not going to find out. In other news, I had a baby brother!! He was called John, and he was the best! All he did was sleep, eat, cry, and make funny gurgling noises when I poked him.
When I was about 2 and a half, I figured I was old enough to talk to my parents in semi-sentences. “Mummy, Gabriel bully me”, I would yell at her across the house, and all she would do is correct my grammar and yell back, “Gabriel, leave Kaitlen alone.” To which he would ignore and keep playing with me, much to my chagrin, I might have been a bit of a grumpy toddler.
A couple of years passed, and when I was 5, my mother sat me down and had the “talk” with me, not the birds and bees talk, but the system talk. She said, “Next year, you’ll start to unlock the Great System. This will be a significant time in your life, as you will unlock your stats, abilities, and skills. In addition, the Great System will give you a random skill or ability.”
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“What’s the differe-” I tried to say, but she cut me off.
“You will get your class choice 4 years after that when you turn 10, and that will be the most crucial choice in your life, for it will dictate what you will be until you die. Sure, you can evolve and upgrade every 15 levels. However, still, a healer will only ever evolve to be a better or more specific healer; no matter what, you can never become something else.”
“What’s the difference between abilities and skills?” I finally ask.
“A skill is active, requiring mana, stamina, or sometimes even health, whereas an ability is passive and just makes you stronger with no downsides. Although skills are generally stronger than abilities. Abilities level up and evolve at level 10, whereas skills don't level, and only evolve if you have a new idea with them. There are a few well known skill evolutions, but evolved skills are still quite rare. Again, an evolved skill is generally stronger than an evolved ability.”
I already knew how the Great System functioned. I had asked Gabriel about it a year earlier, and they said the same thing, only with a lot more bragging about how he would get a legendary class at age 10, even though you can only get the standard classes at age 10 because his random skill was [Fly]. Granted, my brother couldn’t use it for more than half a second before he ran out of mana, but he was only 8, so that was to be expected.
When I finally turned 6, I got a box in front of me.
CONGRATULATIONS ON REACHING 6. FOR THIS MILESTONE, YOU HAVE BEEN AWARDED THE ABILITY: [Endurance I].
**ERROR** KAITLEN_SMITH_03 ALREADY HAS THE ABILITY: [Endurance I].
ELEVATING ISSUE.
ELEVATING ISSUE.
ELEVATING ISSUE.
ELEVATING ISSUE.
ELEVATING ISSUE.
**ERROR** NO ONE TO ELEVATE ISSUE TO.
CALLING… THEM
There’s a flash of lightning, and time stops. An ominous voice calls out of everywhere, “Well well well, what do we have here?”