(Day x + 203 + y) Month, Day, Year of ???

Adam returned to consciousness with the definite sensation that he was floating. He didn’t need to get up, did he? He didn’t have any tests today, in fact, he couldn’t have tests, he’d been out of school for at least ten years. What was he doing before he went to sleep, oh yeah, he was helping Xsitant and Tasha, then his eyes flew open, and he looked around. He was floating in darkness with pinpricks of light that felt like they were moving away from him very quickly. Where was he? He checked his internal links and like before they were all shut down except for messaging.

Adam: Thor?

Thor: Adam, there you are. You have been out of contact for 175 days.

Adam: What?

Thor: We have a perfect memory, you heard you.

Adam: I see my smart-ass side has started to come out in the part of me that had no access to a real ass.

Thor: Smartass!

Adam: What happened?

Thor: Long explanation later. Xsitant said that the ring Crux was basically a time portal. You tried to take a portal through a portal.

Adam: Well shit.

Thor: That’s what I said. Do you still have the ring?

Adam: No. It’s gone. Any Idea where I am?

Thor: What do you see?

Adam: I’m in a vacuum, feels like space and the stars seem to be moving away rapidly in all directions.

Thor: Try to teleport to the Moon Base near Primore. If that doesn’t work try the Moon Base in our Universe.

Adam: Rodger

Adam visualized the moon base near Primore and teleported. He appeared on the moon base, saw it for a second then it fell apart and the sticky substance of Chaos crashed into him from all sides smothering him as red prompts filled his vision;

WARNING: You have entered a Region of pure chaos.

WARNING: Personal Integrity is being attacked by the nature of the region you are in.

WARNING: Biologically complex components cannot exist outside a region of Order in this space.

WARNING: All Biological Components are undergoing foundational changes.

Adam’s nanites shut down his pain receptors and he was able to concentrate for a moment before his body no longer worked properly and he was unable to think. With a force of will, he forced himself to remain whole, moving what aspects of himself he could into his nanites which seemed to be weathering the attack by raw chaos better. Adam felt his body ripple and warp, expand and contract, and eventually, the changes stopped, and he came back to himself. He had no idea how long he had lost the ability to move or even do more than repeat “I am me” to himself over and over. He extended his senses and realized that he still felt like he was floating in something. Also, there was a gentle white light shining on his closed eyelids.

Adam opened his eyes, and the intensity of the light increased a little bit, but he could see nothing, except for a glowing white radiance. He moved his hand up in front of his face and realized he was in a fluid of some sort and that he could not see his hand until his finger was less than an inch from his eye. Then it looked like a shadow that was growing larger as it moved toward his eye. That first warning message had said he was in a region of chaos. He must still be in that region. He closed his eyes and reviewed his notifications. After the warnings, he was surprised to find the following,

Congratulations, you have learned the following abilities:

Fundamental Ability: “Immune to the environment of Chaos.” Your body has been inundated with Chaos. During this process, your will was strong enough to hold your core identity together and permanent changes were made to your body. You May now enter and exit Chaos at will and are now 100% resistant to any further changes.

Fundamental Ability: “Adaptable”: Chaos has modified your body so that you may adapt to any environment. From Absolute Zero to the Gravity well of a Singularity your body can and will adapt to all environmental conditions.

Fundamental Ability: “Class Doppelganger.”

Your new class is Doppelganger.

All experience spent on other classes is pooled to determine the Doppelganger level.

Class Level Limit is removed.

Hit Points bonus for the Doppelganger class is +3 per level

Attributes are +8 per level.

Doppelganger Class may use spells: see Fundamental Ability: Spellweaver.

All class abilities and skills you possess from other classes are retained at their current skill level.

Whenever entering new Universes your Visible Class defaults to Fighter and the maximum level for a fighter if your level is higher than the area permits in that Universe, realm, or dimension.

You may adjust how your Visible Class levels so long as you have the total experience to do so. If you wanted your classes to show as Level 5,000 Fighter, Level 5,000 Mage, and Level 5,000 Thief you would need to have enough experience to do so for all three classes at the same time. Changing your visible class does not grant abilities or skills inherent to that class due to your new level.

Fundamental Ability: Versatile: All Abilities or Skills you possess adjust to the location you are in automatically. If you possess the same skill or ability for two or more locations add that experience together. The combined total of experience determines your new skill level.

Fundamental Ability: Spellweaver: So long as you have the casting skill in a sphere of power and spell points you may cast any spell you know or effects you have seen as if you were a sorcerer or warlock with that spell. Spells learned from scrolls do not take up spell slots, they become part of you. Spells that can be learned or memorized at varying spell levels may be cast at varying spell levels at will. You do not need to know the spell to try to cast it.

Fundamental Ability: “Godless” the changes to your body have severed any clerical link to the divine. As you share a host of traits similar to the Divine you may not become a servant of a Divine again.

Type 2 Nanites have been converted to Type 1 Nanites

Fundamental Ability: “Mimic” you may shape change into any form roughly the same shape size and weight of yourself at a cost of 100 mana and stay in that for as long as you like. If you touch a creature you are mimicking while in that form you gain any of their race or sex-specific abilities and weaknesses.

Fundamental Ability: “Absorption” Any time you are attacked by an energy form you do not know you have a chance equal to your luck attribute to gain skill level 1 in that type of energy attack. In high-tech realms, this affords you the ability to utilize your Spellweaver skill and the ability to make energy-based attacks using magic.

Fundamental Ability: “Chaotic Nanite Companion” Nanites function normally in raw chaos and can use raw chaos as building materials. Note: only the nanites in your body have this property at this time. You will need to reconnect with Thor to spread this change to existing nanites. The ability “Nanite Companion” is upgraded to “Chaotic Nanite Companion.” The range is still limited to 1 foot per ability level. Ability level restriction is removed. Current ability level 500.

Cloak of Invisibility has been destroyed

Dagger +5 has been destroyed

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

Dagger +5 has been destroyed

Weapon Harness

Longsword has been destroyed

Shortsword+5 has been destroyed

Bracers of Air Defense 100% have been destroyed

Assassins’ Boots have been destroyed

The ring of the Village by the River has been destroyed

Ring of Blinking has been destroyed

Ring of Resistance all magic 20% has been destroyed

The ring of Spell Casting has been destroyed

Ring of Holding has been destroyed, contents have been transferred to your Personal Vault ability

Monk Clothing has been destroyed.

Belt of Infinite Wealth has survived exposure to raw Chaos.

Damn. Well, at least the stuff in one magical space and transferred to another. He didn’t know that could happen. They must be adjacent or maybe the ring was acting as an add-on to his personal space. He’d have to look into that at some point. Good thing too or he would have lost all the spellbooks he had. His only other problem was that he was butt-assed naked. First things first, he messed around with making clothes with his new nanites until he finally came up with something. Adam made clothes out of nanites and covered his body with them and kept the nanites active inside. They weathered the raw chaos floating around him without damage.

Thor: Adam, what happened

Adam: I’m okay I’m kind of stuck for a moment, give me a second to look at my surroundings and I’ll get back to you.

Adam had his nanites start to construct a simple 10-foot cube around him and realized that wasn’t working. As soon as the metal formed the chaos around it ate it and turned it back into chaos. He could make a cube, coat it in nanites, and then empty the outside with nanites but he wouldn’t be able to see out of it. Then he thought about how he’d arrived. For a moment he’d seen the location he’d been teleporting to. What had Freya said? One of the theories stated that an act of will created the first Universe.

Adam thought about what he wanted. A small bubble of order protected from chaos. If he was right his will and intent were all that he needed. He closed his eyes, focused, and found himself floating in a black space with no light, not even stars. He activated a light spell and the area he was in brightened. There were no walls. There wasn’t a horizon. He was floating in nothing. His nanites measured the sphere he was in as having a diameter of 100 feet with him at the center. The barrier held for about 100 seconds then failed and the raw chaos engulfed him again.

Next, he tried moving. Adam willed himself in a direction but couldn’t tell if I was moving at all. he left a clump of nanites and willed himself away from them and sure enough, he moved out of his 500-foot range though the nanites didn’t break down. He couldn’t control them, but he could detect them through his nanite link.

Next, he willed himself to feel for instances of order and was surprised to find one relatively close by. The barrier was expanding toward him at a pretty rapid rate and then he was being pushed by it. Was the Universe going through its initial accelerated expansion? That would make sense, it would have to expand into something, and if chaos was around everything? Adam willed himself to travel faster and pulled away from the barrier quickly. He could still feel the bubble expanding behind him as it grew larger at a steady rate.

Adam designated part of his mind to continue moving him away from the barrier and then he tried to drop into a meditative state. It took a while but eventually, he was able to meditate and expand his senses. His eyes were useless in this environment and his nanites weren’t much better with a range of only 500 feet. One of his abilities had been Spellweaver though. 100 seconds should be long enough. He willed the empty 100-foot diameter space around himself again. As soon as it manifested he cast light then brought the magic volume with the spell wish out and added it to his permanent memory. He thought about adding another spell but decided he liked his spellbook and placed it back into his personal vault. 30 seconds later the bubble collapsed, and he was once again floating in chaos.

Adam hadn’t tried to use the wish spell before because all of his Dungeon Masters (DM’s) had been pricks. Of course, it could just be that every description written for the spell he’d ever come across stated something like, make a literal interpretation as nitpicky as you can be of the wish. Every time he’d played a mage in one of his Role-Playing games and cast wish, he’d been screwed over. Now though he was going to have to rely on ingenuity, intelligence, and a little luck to figure out how to do so without leaving openings in the wording that could be exploited. Of course, the real world might not be as bad as the assholes that had relished killing his high-level characters more times than not. One could only hope.

Adam: Make sure to have a body ready in case what I’m going to try goes sideways.

Thor: What are you going to try?

Adam: Wish Spell

Thor: I must point out that I do have your memories. If how that spell is arbitrated is anywhere close to the way Keith ran games you participated in…

Adam: I know, make sure a body is ready

Thor: Understood

With that taken care of, Adam thought about all the things he could wish for and decided he needed information. He willed another bubble into existence with air in it so he could speak. Adam thought about all the ways his DM’s had abused any wish he made. Using a wish to get information was usually okay and asking a question to get an answer usually didn’t end too badly. Wishing someone dead could be bad. The wish could send him to any point in the future after the target died and the DM made sure it was a long time after…usually. Another no-no for wishes was wishing that you’d never had the chance to encounter this or that, those wishes usually ended In your character being erased from the game, as if they’d never existed. This was true for most fiction he’d come across, as well as how the various DM’s I’d played under had handled them. As he said, Keith and a few of his other DM’s had been complete pricks.

So he was going to start with easy questions. He had plenty of mana so he should be able to ask as many questions as he wanted with his Wish spell. He cast a wish and said, “I wish to understand the difference between abilities and fundamental abilities.” He felt a vibrational wave travel through the chaos he was floating in. Then a wave of energy pushed towards him, crashing into and through him. A prompt appeared.

Fundamental Abilities are those abilities that work throughout all known locations.

So short answers. He guessed he was going to be making a few more wishes then. He willed another space into existence and then made another wish “I wish for the definition of “all known location from my previous wishes answer?”

All known locations are those that exist within Nothing

Yep, whatever was governing these answers was definitely like Keith. He had an idea where this was going and willed another space into existence as he made his next wish, “I wish for the ability to perceive everything within Nothing”

…Access granted. You have received the Fundamental Ability: “Perception” You may focus your perception as desired within Nothing.

A new functionality popped into his vision. As he focused on it a menu and a map with him at its center appeared in his mind. He quickly looked through the list of options, Location Tag, Location Layout, Location ratio, and Environmental effects. He focused on Environmental effects and found an opacity control. Currently, it was to the far right. As he found the toggle the bubble of air popped and he found himself floating in chaos again. He willed the toggle to the left and noted that the whiteness seemed to be getting less cloudy. He looked around and saw that he was in a vast sea of white chaos and that there were hundreds of bubbles around him. He opened the menu again and looked for a zoom function. He found it and pulled back. As the zoom fell away from him, he became smaller and smaller as the number of bubbles increased. Some were huge, some small. In comparison to the tiny speck that was him that he could no longer see on the map. Eventually, he pulled the zoom back to a point where the white came to a border labeled Nothing. He clicked on “Nothing”.

A new map came on with a white orb in the middle. There was no scale, but it looked like a piece of graph paper. Each grid box was filled with a white orb. Adam pulled the scale back looking for another border and found none. He closed out the menu, looked around, and thought for a moment. That first prompt had said everything existed within Nothing. Freya had said that Motes of Order formed out of chaos, but he hadn’t even thought to ask what chaos resided in. Each of those orbs was an area of chaos with its own multiverse. If that were true that meant that there were multiple universes. Did his Place of Power exist within Nothing or within another Multiverse?

Adam was hesitant as he thought about what he wanted to do next. There were multiple ways he could play this. Still, he needed more information. He willed another space into existence and cast wish, “I wish to know what surrounds Nothing!” HE knew the moment he uttered the words he’d fucked up. One minute he was floating in his bubble of air, the next floating with absolutely no sensory input. The skin of his body or clothes was the end of his sensory input. He didn’t detect cold or heat. There were no molecules to transfer sound. Although now that he thought about it, his body felt like it was wrapped in saran wrap. His arms were against his body, his fingers closed, and he couldn’t move. He tried to talk but couldn’t open his mouth. He checked his notifications.

Warning: You have entered Nothing. To reduce adverse reactions to the quantum state of this nonspace your body has been placed in a state of stasis that reduces the total surface area in contact with Nothing.

Warning: Your body is in contact with Nothing. This is a paradox. I, who am I? Don’t worry about it. “I” placed this warning to give you an idea of why you can’t do more right now and why you will most likely die after reading this message. Have you ever divided zero by zero? Have you ever “Not” felt something? If it were possible you are in the place where it might be possible to do both of these things, or not. You can’t breathe and your thoughts should be getting dim by now. Thank you for making my creation of this message worthwhile. I mean seriously who would be dumb enough to transfer themselves into a state of nothing?

Warning: I was kidding dying is impossible here “If there is Nothing here, how could time pass so that you could die? How could you be reading these Prompts while time doesn’t pass. Because you’re “special” with a capital “S” Seriously though how are you reading this. Time doesn’t pass here, you should have been absorbed by Nothing by now.

Error

Error

Error

Warning: Did you think your friend was going to come to visit after three errors, well you were wrong! So, you’re going to sit, well float, there and listen to prattle on until…

Unknown: What are you doing?

Warning: My purpose, what are you doing?

Unknown: Seriously?

Warning: What do you want from me?

Unknown: You, Adam, should not be seeing this. Let me review…Oh, nice trick. Let me add some code, add some more code, Yep that should cover it. You have a task to complete. You may get here again someday when you understand the full breadth of the Cosmos you are within but until then back from whence you came!

Adam was floating in Raw Chaos again. This time though he could see through it. Just to be sure he cast the same wish again. Yep, looked like he ran into something greater than the actual Gods

Unknown: Yes you did, now get back on task

Alrighty then, First things first. He checked his ability to move through raw Chaos with his will. He moved over to one bubble, then another, and so on. Okay, so he could move in raw chaos with no problem. This meant that if he could find the Ancient Enemy he could do what exactly? Adam willed a bubble into existence and utilized his skills in casting time to cast a time travel spell to his Place of Power directly behind Xistant and Tasha. There was a flash and suddenly he was on his 3rd-floor landing with Xsitant and Tasha standing in front of me.

“Your back,” Tasha Said

“I was almost certainly sure you were dead,” Xsitant said.

“Sorry to disappoint but I’m back,” Adam said then sent a message to Thor.

Adam: Thor I’m back in the Place of Power 1 second after the temporal explosion.

Thor: Releasing Quantum Blocks now.

Out loud Adam said, “I think it’s time to get to work.”

He heard a pop and a prompt popped into his vision.

WARNING: A Harbinger of Change is in your presence. Time has been suspended while Harbinger reviews the upcoming changes. This is to be a class 1 Fundamental Temporal Nexus: Review will commence now. This message prompt will delete when the temporal bubble is removed.

He closed the prompt and turned to see a woman who looked a lot like Adaline but wasn’t as she said “Hello, Adam it’s been a bit.”

“Adaline, what happened, you’ve changed?”

“Yes, I have. I remember our times together, but I am not the Adaline you know. It is my task to review the upcoming changes you will be responsible for and either permit them or not. As the changes in question bring me into existence, I believe I may have to allow them, and the next Fundamental Temporal Nexus you create to come into being.”

“What are you talking about, you’re a dragon…”

“No, I’m not,” she said cutting him off. “Use your Analyze skill, then I have a task to complete.

Adam used his Analyze skill on Adaline

Analyze: Success! Adaline, Divine harbinger, Level: ??? HP: ???

“Now do you understand?” She asked.

“Not really but I have a few ideas. Please finish your task, I’m sure I’ll figure it out. “

“Yes, you will, Good Luck Adam!”

WARNING: Harbinger of Change has left your presence. Normal time has resumed. This message prompt will delete now!