A horrid, metallic grinding filled my ears as I blearily opened my eyes, my vision filled with a slowly caving sheet of metal. Trying to move, I felt a pinching tightness on my arms and legs as I found myself unable to move them. The pain began to set in as the shock wore off. My arms, radiating slowly increasing pain, could not move from where I could now tell the crushed metal was pinning them down, blood beginning to seep out from where they were held, a similar situation with my legs.
My eyes snapped back up as I heard an ominous grinding from the metal, the sheet pushing inwards forming an edge as it slowly moved closer to my head as I slowly began to panic, before pushing that back down. My thoughts focused on the descending edge of metal hoping, wishing, fervently that it would stop moving, that whatever is pushing it would catch and stop moving, that it would slide back up, anything, that would stop it from moving towards my head. My heart began to beat erratically as the cold edge of the metal pushed against my now sweat-beaded forehead, I began to hyperventilate as I felt it began to mount pressure against my skull, beginning to lose hope that it would stop caving inwards.
As the pressure begun to hurt, my mind began to clear again however, apparently accepting the hopelessness of the situation, as I resigned myself to my death. As the pain began to grow too much to bear, one last thought ran through my mind, “Please, I don’t mind if I’m disfigured, I want to live”, before I heard a heavy thunk from something above the grinding metal, and the metal spiked down, instantly crushing through my skull and shearing through the grey matter beneath, splitting my head apart from the neck up.
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I shot up with a start, gasping for breath as I frantically touched my arms and forehead to check if they were intact, thankfully they were, before I noticed a floating, backlit, black screen hovering before me blank. I focused on the screen and watched as white writing began to appear upon the floating pane, capturing my attention.
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Ideal:
-Calculating-
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Stats:
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Skills:
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I marveled at the screen as it floated there, wondering what an Ideal meant and what it was calculating, as a few thoughts ran through my mind. I knew about LitRPG’s and other such stories, having read a couple of them online, but nothing really prepares you to be sat in front of a floating screen, faced with a system that you don’t understand, and given the realization that you will have to make decisions with a severe lack of information.
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Hoping for some explanation, I mentally prodded at the Stats title, causing a foreign thought to appear within my mind, ‘Stats beget power’, but unfortunately nothing more came forth about stats. Next, I turned my attention to Skills, receiving ‘Skills denote strength’ instead, leaving me to wonder how these worked as I suddenly heard, or rather felt, a bell like alert ring within my mind.
Turning my attention back to the screen, I saw that it had updated, showing me what was calculated for the ideal as well as more information on the other parts of the menu.
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Ideal:
Thrivation
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Level: 1
Stats:
Strength: 5
Vitality: 5
Intelligence: 5
Wisdom: 5
Luck: 5
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Skills:
Fate-Subversion: Lv.1
Telekinesis: Lv.1
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A few things caught my attention on the updated status, particularly my Ideal, Thrivation, whatever that meant, and my skills. I prodded Thrivation, only to receive the once again curt, ‘The desire to thrive’ for my effort, giving little information. Prodding Ideal gave a bit more of an explanation however, the sentence: ‘your Ideal encapsulates what drives you, what you aspire to, and affects all parts of your being’ appearing within my thoughts, still however vague on the actual effects of what my ideal did. Each stat gave a bit better of an explanation however, with strength giving ‘the power of the physical body, governing physical strength and speed, and ability to leverage both.’
Vitality giving ‘the resilience of the physical body, governing vitality, endurance, and your ability to resist physical and magical effects as well as the size of physical resource pools..’
Intelligence giving ‘the power of the mind, governing the strength and acuity of mental processes.’, Wisdom giving ‘the resilience of the mind, governing the power of ones will, and the size of ones ethereal resource pools.’
And finally luck giving ‘affects ones luck in a more abstract form, governing luck, fate and all else in a minor way.’
Looking further down, I prodded at my two skills, hoping for information on what they did, only for the first to return no information, and the second to simply return ‘the ability to use ones will to apply force upon the world’. Nothing useful for me at the moment it seemed, as I lay there pondering on what my Ideal meant for me, and what the Fate-Subversion skill meant, alongside how I had gotten it. The Telekinesis skill kind of made sense, but I couldn’t think of how I received that mysterious second skill.
At least stats seemed straightforward to me, Strength was how strong, Vitality was how tough, Intelligence was how smart, Wisdom however was particularly interesting to me given the Telekinesis skill mentioned my will, and Luck seeming to be a small impact on how lucky you were, I was surprised it wasn’t lower given I had died, but maybe my continued existence balanced it out. I noticed I was strangely calm about my death, but maybe that's a result of the resigned acceptance I had felt at the end there, alongside the calming knowledge that I survived such a horrific accident, although I got the feeling that i might react a bit more strongly when the fact i was no longer on earth properly kicked in.