Maya shivered when she awoke in darkness. Fear, her old companion said hello and she nearly fell off the metal medical bed she had been occupying. It took a brief moment for her to remember that she was still on the ship, no HER ship, and that everything she had experienced was not a dream.
The beam of the flashlight, she summoned from her inventory, was weak and didn’t cast away much of the darkness. How many hours of life did it have left? Maya shuddered, thinking about surviving all of the machine attacks only to die because she got lost in the ship without any lights.
First thing’s first, Maya thought as she eased herself off the bed.
She shuddered from the chilled air, but in a twenty thousand year old tomb, there were no spare clothing around.
Although the ship was hers, it didn’t mean it was a safe place. She had gotten trapped and lost when she had attempted to explore the ship. Maya had a map now, but she didn’t remember where the exit was.
Finding an exit was the priority. Then clothing. Then exploration. Maya paused a moment, panning the light around the room. She remembered the knowledge modules that Nanaseto said she had released.
It took her a moment to find them, a small cabinet had opened against the wall and she glanced down at the black metallic cubes neatly stacked.
Knowledge Module 8S-4 - low grade, Tier 1
Emergency Medical Holograms and You
Garasany Medical Supplies’ handy guide to using your high grade, Tier 1 medical AI. Set up, diagnostics, and maintenance. When you need quality, buy Garasany!
Requirements: Mental Channel 1, Mental Recovery 1
Maya blinked as she realized it wasn’t her Evaluation skill that had been used to glean the information. She had read the machine printed demonic letters.
“Awesome, I’m no longer illiterate,” Maya said. She quickly pulled out the remainder of the knowledge modules and discovered that they were mostly maintenance and simple diagnostic cubes for running various medical machinery and tools. A few were first aid modules and a couple of higher grade surgery modules.
The cubes neatly stacked in her Inventory and she scanned her light around the room to find more stuff that had been unlocked. As with the storage room she had previously entered, the tools and items in cabinets were useless to her.
She headed back into the shady doctor’s office and pillaged the pile of modules, the gun, and the illegal chips. She didn’t know what to do with them, but the System had claimed they were valuable. She spent a moment nudging the bones of the dead Tier 2 doctor and found its chip.
[Looter] Level 1
Why leave loot lying around, even if it doesn’t belong to you.
+ 1 Physical Stamina
Maya idly looked at the window that popped up. She had been constantly startled by the pop ups, but now it felt oddly comforting. Nanaseto was gone, not dead, but gone. Yet still something seemed to be watching over her.
She laughed at the idea. It wasn’t religious or anything, but in a dark place with no sound and no living things about. The knowledge that the System was there, calmed her down a bit. It might not do anything for her, but it was there and she was glad it was.
The improvement to her Physical stamina gave her pause. It took a moment for her to remember that she had leveled up from killing the Boss AI, completing the quest, and then all the other titles she had gained from combat.
Maya sat down upon a cold bed and brought up her status screen.
“Well, look at that,” she muttered. She had leveled eight times and had even been the first person in her race to defeat a Boss.
Maya’s smiled faded as she thought about it. She wasn’t the only one fighting for her life. Back home, in her home universe, everyone was most likely fighting for their lives. Her mother, father, brothers, friends, and other family. They were all being subjected to the changes that Integration caused.
She didn’t fully understand what Integration was or how the System changed the world, but after seeing the chimera animal before being transported to this place, Maya didn’t think it was going to be a happy go lucky time for everyone.
Her phone was summoned into her hand and Maya was shocked to realize that it was only four in the morning. It had been less than a day since she had arrived to this place, yet it had seemed like days had gone by. She had experienced a lot in a few hours and then slept the remainder of it away.
She shook her head and focused upon her status.
The menu stated that she had 32 attribute points to distribute and she had zero credits. She frowned at that, shouldn’t she have been also gaining coin drops from what she killed? Games were like that, weren’t they? She vaguely remembered that the Welcome Notice had said she’d be getting universal credits for kills.
It wasn’t as if she needed to buy anything anyway. She had an entire ship to loot.
Looking at her attributes, it seemed she was heavy on the physical, moderate on the Mental, and light on the Soul. The gaining of titles and achievements seemed to boost her attributes, so that was good. The Tiny Terror title gave her a total of sixteen attribute points, which from the simple math she did was about four levels.
With 32 points and a level of 8, that meant she was getting 4 attribute points per level. The only thing that made sense was that the amount of attribute points she gained correlated to her Foundation level, which was 4. So a Foundation of 4 gave her 4 points.
The first time she had looked at her stats was when she had arrived. At the time she had only a Foundation of 3, but with the title of Tiny Terror, she had gained a point to Foundation. So would that have meant she’d only have gotten 24 points if she didn’t have the title?
She still didn’t know what Fortitude correlated with. It had also gained a point from the First! title she’d gotten from killing the rogue AI.
“More points means better survivability,” Maya remarked. “That fight was mostly dumb luck and no skill.” She grimaced at the memories of the fight. She could have died so many times and it was probably her high Luck stat that kept her from either being impaled by spiders or going full mutant from the mana.
She summoned a knowledge module into her hand and peered at it again. The requirements to use it were Mental Channel and Recovery of 1.
Nanaseto had said that high concentrations of mana could lead to her mana channels being damaged, so Maya figured that the Channel portion of her Physical, Mental, and Soul stats were that. She remembered the last strike she had taken upon the rogue AI. She had felt the electricity in her veins, the power that suddenly filled her as she struck the machine. Had she been channeling mana?
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Her Channeling stats were abysmal, but it had been a 2 for her Physical Channel. So that would have meant she had a better affinity to channel mana through her body and… that had augmented her strength?
More questions with no one to ask. Maya sighed and pondered what to do with her stats. She would have to assign them before she left the safety of the room. Who knew what other mechanical horrors were wandering about.
There were eight attributes to raise and she had only 32 points. The gaining of the Giant Slayer title had basically given her four free levels of points, so perhaps she didn’t have to fully focus on the Physical stats.
She had a mission now, that was to get Nanaseto back up and running. She didn’t know how to do that, but from what she was realizing it would mean learning how the alien technology around her worked. There were knowledge modules that could help her gain the information faster, but she would also have to look everywhere on this ship and possibly beyond it.
She was no scientist, engineer, or mechanic, but when stuck in an alien rainbow hellscape…
Maya sighed. She would have preferred using her business management knowledge instead of learning to become a magical space ship engineer from scratch.
Her points would go to her Mental stats, with a third of it to her Soul stats. She didn’t know how to use magic, but Nanaseto said experimentation was a good idea. Maybe not a good idea, but an idea. Plus of all her stats, those were pretty sad looking. A good rounded character build, to be able to adjust to whatever may occur.
Maya smiled at the thought.
Hesitation bubbled up as her finger hovered over the small ‘plus’ signs that had appeared next to the attributes. She knew if she added a point she would never get it back. What if she just added everything to her Physical build, then she’d be an unstoppable beast of a woman. She’d crush everything, recover from fights faster, and probably take less damage than before.
The spiders had nearly killed her and the pain she had experienced crawling back from the fight was still fresh in her mind. Yet, the logical portion of her mind knew that was a bad idea. She hadn’t played many RPG games, but she knew being top heavy in one area would lead to trouble in another. She was alone here, she couldn’t risk specialization.
“It’s for insects,” she muttered to herself, then distributed her points before she could talk herself out of it.
Points Distributed. Accept? Y/N
(All Attribute Points gained from Titles, Skills, and Abilities will be applied upon acceptance)
“Oh,” Maya said. It seemed the points that had been applied to her Physical Stats hadn’t been implemented yet. “Let’s do this!”
The numbers solidified. Maya blinked.
Name
Maya Sullivan
Race
Human (Tier 1)
Level
8
12,842/25,600
Titles
Stranger in a Strange Land, Lost Soul, Unstable Survivor, First!, Giant Slayer, Tiny Terror
Physical
Tier 1
Mental
Tier 1
Soul
Tier 1
Luck
18
Fortitude
3
Foundation
4
Physical
Mental
Soul
Strength
7
7
3
Endurance
6
6
3
Stamina
8
5
3
Dexterity
7
6
3
Perception
5
6
3
Willpower
8
6
3
Recovery
6
5
3
Channel
5
5
3
Attribute Points
0
Universal Credits
0
“That’s it?” she asked?
Then pain exploded throughout her body.
“I keep getting knocked out,” Maya complained as she woke up again. It was pitch black and she realized she was on the deck. She shivered as she summoned the flashlight to her hand.
The flashlight did not come.
She paused and good ole fear came back again. The flashlight had been turned on when she had accepted the changes to her stats. She didn’t know how long she had been unconscious, but the batteries on the light had already been low.
Maya cursed her stupidity once again. Her heart began beating frantically and the darkness clawed at her. There were monsters out there and she couldn’t see a damn thing.
Taking a deep breath, Maya shoved down the panic. She was getting good at suppressing her emotions, she thought.
“Panic’ll kill you faster than a bullet,” Pops would say. “So just don’t do it.”
She chuckled softly and brought up her inventory again. She saw her phone and summoned it to her hand. After a bit of fumbling she activated the flashlight and peered around the room.
There were no monsters. She just had to find the exit to this ship.
Even though she had crawled through most of the ship and had spent hours with the Map, Maya hadn’t really studied the layout. The ship was very large, measuring nearly a thousand feet in length, with eight decks and massive areas for cargo and equipment.
Nanaseto had said it was an exploration vessel, commissioned to explore the dimensional instabilities that had brought her here. There was a lot of area to explore, Maya realized. She didn’t even know where to begin.
Mana batteries was the priority, she thought. She had to get mana batteries to power Nanaseto and then the Medical AI could make her food, well something passable to food. Maya frowned, wondering what she would have to make it from. Organics and there wasn’t a lot of that in a world that sterilized everything biological.
Her stomach rumbled at the thought of food. Maya checked her inventory and saw she was out of anything edible. The sandwiches she had made were all eaten and the fruit she had brought had went into remaking her eye.
After a moment of perusing her Inventory Maya smacked her head. She had forgotten about the ice pack she had inventoried to see if it would melt. She brought it out and was surprised to see that it was still frozen and exactly as she had first put it in.
“Cool,” Maya muttered. She didn’t know how the dimensional inventory worked. Her phone still showed time passing, but the ice pack showed no change. Maybe it could differentiate between things?
There was a lot of questions. Knowledge modules were the only thing she could think of, they didn’t seem to need power. That put her back to finding batteries or making them or somehow tapping into that terrifying swirling stator of the mana core.
“I won’t get anywhere just sitting naked in the dark,” maya stated and got to her feet.
She promptly fell back down.
“Ow. What the hell?” Maya demanded.
She tried getting back up, but her body seemed odd. She realized she hadn’t moved much since her stat changes. Most of it was mental though, so why did her body feel weird to her.
Maya slowly moved her arms and hands, they flexed and she saw outlines of muscles and tendons that made her raise an eyebrow. She was athletic. Pops had always demanded physical activity from a young age and Maya had excelled in that. Yet she had never fully committed to it like some people. She liked long distance running, not body building.
As she passed the phone light over her body, Maya saw that she was ripped. Her excess fat had been dissolved away by Nanaseto when she healed her, leaving behind unblemished skin and muscles standing out in relief from the stark phone light.
“Damn,” Maya whistled. She slowly got to her feet and steadied herself against the medical bed. She felt taller, she realized. At five feet, seven inches, Maya wasn’t short. Now, though, she felt she had grown a few inches.
It couldn’t be from the stat changes, could it? It had been only a couple of points in each Physical stat, unless such small numerical changes brought some massive gains.
Maya walked around the medical room, getting used to the new feeling of her body. She felt amazing. She felt strong, agile, and clear headed, it was as if someone had…
Ah, Maya realized, the genetic cleansing.
It seemed Nanaseto had done a deep cleaning.
Maya threw some rapid punches and moved into doing calisthenic exercises. A few minutes later she stopped and felt her pulse thumping along steadily and her breathing unfettered by the exercise.
“This is cool,” she grinned.
The exercise had warmed her and with renewed confidence, Maya headed to the medical room exit. She paused for a second, looking around the medical room. It had been less than a day when she had stumbled into the room, nearly dead.
There was still some of her dried blood on the door and decking. Maya of eight hours ago was a different person, she realized. She hadn’t fought against a machine fives times her own level, she hadn’t had to crawl through a tube covered in injuries. She had just been a girl who didn’t want to work in her family’s food truck for the summer.
In less than a day, she had achieved a lot. She had leveled up, she had defeated a Boss, she had been injured so many times and survived it, she had nearly died. But she survived. She was now stronger.
There was still a lot that needing doing. She needed to figure out this world. She needed to find out how to go home. But first, she needed to get Nanaseto back online
She had a ship to her name and she had a world to explore.
Maya opened the door and walked into the darkness.