As expected, Sophia woke up in a respawn pod, entirely covered in slime. At least, the advanced warning somewhat helped and she quickly found the hatch to escape her pod without needing any assistance.
"See? Sleeping Beauty finally woke up. Now that the team is complete, can we fucking go outta here?"
It took her some time to adjust to the light of the respawn room. The guy who had called her names was dominating everyone else by about a head and a half and had the muscles to show for it. She would be really surprised he picked anything but Fighter. But no one had collected their gear yet and were still in their slimy respawn combination.
Yet she blatantly ignored him and the other and casually looked around the room in search of her personal safe.
'Got it.' She had to reckon the safe was well hidden. But the small round button with the Twin Blades crest of her Archetype was unmistakable.
It was supposed to keep them in the resting area long enough to give them pause, so they would consider training over rushing ahead. But because of the Cleric and their two-day timers to impress their future gods, it has likely never happened. A design flaw she would gladly point out to the designers if she ever got to talk to them.
So she walked straight to it, pressed the button, and started undressing as soon as she confirmed the mechanism was indeed opening for her.
"What the heck are you doing?" The only other girl in the group asked. Seem like the system did not care about parity either.
Sophia rolled her eyes. Count on girls to shame any other girl's 'improper' behavior.
"I'm getting changed. So I don't stay in ugly see-through slimy clothes. Sorry, I did not wait to get some privacy. Your own clothes must be inside a similar safe. A round button with a crest to the liking of your Archetype. You're welcome, by the way."
As soon as she was done talking, all the guys had quit staring and went on their merry way to search for their own clothes while the girl kept gawking at her, disbelieving.
Sophia was still underdressed but at least, the essentials were covered. So she sighed and humored her:
"Look. The Aliens who kidnapped us don't care about us. The question is: do you want to get dressed now or once everyone else is done?"
This finally talked some sense into the prideful girl head who immediately rushed to find her own clothes.
Seconds later, she was dressed and already searching for the way to exit the Respawn Room.
Count on aliens to make sure every single door is a test of some sort. Although this one was fairly simple.
No one could leave before all six of them had woken up because the keys to leave lay in the slime, at the bottom of their respective respawn pods. Six triangles which put together formed a hexagon that fitted perfectly into the indentation of the door.
Preschoolers-level puzzle, that is, Sophia thought as she opened the door.
"How the hell did you know about the safe and the door?" A guy in a blue dress asked accusingly.
So he was a mage. And he was pretty fast to be all dressed up already. Although he did have quite an advantage over the big guy his heavy Armor when it came to dressing up.
"I did my own kind of magic trick, smartass. But I won't leave you hanging: While you were rushing in and by the look of it, were probably fruitlessly arguing with each other, I took my time and... I milked... the system... for answers. You should give it a try." She replied, pedantic, before tuning down her own aggressivity. "By the way, Hello, I'm Sophia and I'm a Rogue. So, what's the name of my favorite Wizard?"
"The name is Paolo." He said between gritted teeth but started to relax anyway as she did not prolong her playful banter and waited for the others to be done.
The girl was first, adorning a grey Robe shortly after. 'So she chose Cleric. How Surprising.' She thought sarcastically as the girl started a staring competition she could not care less about.
Then another guy in Wizard Robe joined and introduced himself as Eric, leaving the only two remaining guys, respectively with medium and heavy Armor gear to be both Fighters.
Big guy had chosen a longsword and a backup Axe. While the other Fighter had surprisingly gone for the Spear and Shield combo. Someone had been listening in their history classes, or so it seems.
However, just like the girl, none of them bothered to introduce themselves once they were done.
"So the Rogue know-it-all figured the exit? Why are you still here then?" The giant asked as soon as he was done.
'Waiting for you, obviously.' Sophia rolled her eyes but did not dare say out loud, eagerly walking away instead.
The layout of the Rest Area was fairly simple.
The Training Room was right behind the door, with the dorms and kitchen on the left, the library on the right, and the access to the Trials dead center on the opposite side of the room. There were even signs stating that much if one could read Common, which she couldn't, yet.
Yet she started to explore and pretend she didn't know just like everyone else cause she did sign a non-disclosure agreement and some dangerous questions were better left unanswered or better yet, unasked.
Eric whistled his appreciation before commenting: "Damn, this place is huge."
It indeed was. The resting area was supposed to house all six of them comfortably and provide them enough food for months, while also giving them all the tools they needed to train BEFORE they attempted the trials.
Each floor had a resting area following the same design with only one big caveat: The system only invested in someone if one was promising AND did not waste the resources it was already offered. So most of the teams got minimal support simply because they skipped the first resting area, effectively 'wasting' all its resources.
If only for knowing that rule, Sophia did not regret to have signed off the system terms of services. And she planned to make good use of that knowledge.
"Guys, I think I found the monsters. However, it seems like they can't see us." The spear lad said.
Another cool feature of the resting area. Out of reach, out of mind. She did not know exactly how it worked, but from the outside, it was as if the resting area never existed. It protected them from the monsters. But also prevented them from getting back in.
The only way to get back to a resting area was to die. Which was not recommended as they only had three "lives", otherwise said, two death-free permits, for the entirety of the twelve floors.
And while Sophia did not know the exact layout of this floor, she expected from her reading that everything there should be pretty benign. She was confident the challenges were not that hard for the few morons who might not have found their gears safe and still decide to walk out.
"They will probably see you if you walk out, so just don't!" She shouted, pointing out the obvious, as she was unable to tell them 'Don't walk out or you won't be able to walk back in.'
"Sure." The boy said, hastily removing his hand from the invisible one-way portal, blissfully unaware of what he almost did.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
"Found the library!" Paolo said. "Although, all the books are written gibberish."
"We are all from different countries and the system did not assume we are all speaking English." She told him back "So I guess they are trying to be fair to everyone and introduce us to their own writing system."
"What I said: gibberish. Where is the dictionary to translate gibber-speaking to English?"
She rolled her eyes and entered the library, only to be left speechless at giant bookcases and the already ludicrous amount of books that were already lying on the floor thanks to Paolo's effort at finding the Rosetta Stone.
"Are you freaking mad already? Look at what you've done. Those books were probably sorted in some logical order. And now, it's gone. Now, this is a library. There should be been a masterbook meant to help us search the library. It was probably the first book you have seen. Where is it?"
"How was I supposed to know?" He shouted back before realization dawned on him. "It was a big purple one. It should be somewhere in the pile."
"Don't touch another book on those cases or I swear I'm going to knock you out." She threatened and he nodded, at least making an effort to look contrite before they worked together to dig out the precious book.
In the meantime, by the shout that came from the opposite direction, someone had apparently found its way into the kitchen and dug in. But she could not care less. There were months of food there so she was not worried in the slightest.
Then, finally, Paolo found the book they had been talking about and gave it to her without any prompting.
Upon opening it, she could tell at first glance that this writing system was not alphabetical. Too many symbols. It made sense if the common was primarily a written language only spoken by an elite. Logograms could be taught to many people regardless of their native language. Back on earth, she knew it was how Chinese worked, although she did not know a word of it.
"Let's proceed in order. I'm an alien and I want to teach others my language. The book we are looking for is most probably the first recommended. And we don't know in what direction this language is reading, only that it seems to prioritize horizontal over vertical. So it has to be either one of those two titles: the one on top or the one at the bottom. Commit the symbols to memory and keep digging."
It took them half an hour to find the right book. But finally, they found what they were looking for: A picture book teaching the very basics of their language. Each page only had two symbols, one at the top, and one at the bottom with vivid illustrations on the outer side of each page.
Person, Home, Food, Water, Fire, Tree, Sun, Moon, Sky, Earth, Air, Animal, Fish, Bird, Flower, Fruit... all the basics we're covered. And the list was going on and on, for several hundreds of pages.
"It's finally hit me but do those aliens truly expect us to read all this on top of learning their language? This is madness." Paolo finally said after they had perused through about fifty pages.
"But there is a method to their madness. Besides, we don't have much of a choice. Either we die here, or we live and learn. Think about it: you survive the tutorial and then what? We are probably going to be surrounded by aliens using this very writing system to communicate and trade with one another."
The wizard took his time pondering what she just said but was not in the mood anymore and left her to it.
Of course, whatever the aliens did to her brain did not give her an eidetic memory. She just had the system tools and the patience to create her own dictionary. She had already read a fifth of the book so she could tell that once she would be done, her vocabulary list would only be something like 500 words long.
Even that much was already a huge task. But memorizing 50 words a day? 5 words an hour? She could do that much. And by the end of next week, she would be proficient enough in 'Basic Alien' to give a tentative try to the other books.
Or at least, that was the plan.
People had started shouting in the room next door and so she extracted herself from her reading to go investigate the matter after marking the page.
"[...] the tutorial as soon as possible so we can get back to our family and friends" the Spear guy was shouting at Paolo's face.
Sophia had missed a good chunk of the argument but had a good idea of what was going on here. The spear guy, sword guy, and Cleric Lass wanted to press on. And Spear guy was under the impression that after beating the tutorial, they would be allowed back to Earth.
"It's not going to happen." She barged into the conversation cynically, casually standing against the wall.
"What?" The spear guy immediately directed his anger at her, leaving Paolo be.
"Returning to your family and friends. It's not going to happen. Not a single survivor made it back to earth. What makes you think you will be the first?"
"Survivors? What are you talking about?" The sword guy asked, perking up immediately at her words.
"What I just said. We are the fifth wave. About one hundred and twenty people survived the other four. If I remember correctly. No one else in our group asked the system about it?"
The look on their faces answered her questions and she almost facepalm. The system picked the most intelligent and physically fit people of her age and that is what she got? Arguably, since her accident, she might have herself something to compensate for in the physical department but still.
"The system cannot be trusted. It's responsible for getting us here." Spear guy immediately tried to invalidate her argument.
"Let's ignore the system then and concentrate on what you already know: before we were kidnapped, how many missing teens were reported to have been found, dead or alive?"
The answer was zero but it was essentially a rhetorical question. Yet, it gave the spearman pause.
"Anyway, this guy here wants to stay here and study some books." The girl said as if it was some valid counter to the current argument.
"His name is Paolo. Mine is Sophia. And though I do not see what your point actually is: I do plan to stay here as well and study some books." She stated calmly.
"See?" The girl said as if her statement proved her point. "Those two are messed up in the head and have no sense of priority. Trust it or not, the system claimed our family and friends would die if we do not complete the tutorial. And those two want to stay here reading books."
Truth be told, the Cleric did have a valid point, which was hard to counter without knowledge Sophia was not allowed to disclose.
"Okay. Let's assume that the library full of gibberish is a trap designed to make you waste time." She conceded, no matter how much it pained her,
"So is the gym and the cellar full of food I suppose? And what exactly is the point of all this then? Do you perhaps think all this is some sort of temptation meant to divert your attention from your rightful goal? Or is it simply that you are anxious to prove yourself within the next forty-eight hours?"
"I do admit I have my own reason to want to go out here right now. But you, what can you possibly hope to learn here that might help you survive there?" She asked, smirking.
"I can learn to shoot with my shortbow. I can learn to defend myself with my daggers." She retorted patiently "Not everyone here has offensive spells or a magic weapon to help them fight the monsters, you know? And maybe there are books about magic in that library and we have two wizards here whose Archetype description stated they SHOULD be eager to learn."
"Still, I think we should head out and see what we can do." Eric, the other mage stated eagerly. "After all, there is no rush and we can always rest, eat, and learn about spells later. After all, Stella also needs to get stronger as well and none of the things here are going to help her. Come on, don't be selfish."
And that was about it. There is no way she could counter that unless she specifically told them there was no way back. It was the first of the long list of nasty surprises they were supposed to figure out by themselves.
Besides, she was outnumbered two to one. Her only way to get out of the situation, aside from telling them to fuck off and plausibly starting a fight she might lose, was to trick them and let them go.
"Okay. Fine. I'm pretty useless in a fight right now. Friendly fire isn't gonna help anyone. I can't do anything but watch our back."
Everyone accepted her statement at face value. And then, they spend the next fifteen minutes preparing.
The Fighters and the Cleric decided to go first, which was exactly what Sophia wanted. Then, she simply kept Paolo by her side, distracted by the simple virtue of talking to him. Then, when all four of them had crossed, she took his hand to keep him from crossing the one-way portal.
"What are you doing?" He asked. "I was the one against it!"
"Trust me. I have a bad feeling. Just wait and see, okay?"
He looked between the group and her but didn't cross.
Until the group realized they were not coming and turned around. That's when they started shouting about the missing door, cursing about the two of them. And that was the exact moment the monsters chose to attack.
The battle was quick and bloody but easily won. Then the group turned around once again. One hand reached out for the door but disappeared. Others kept searching for the walls. Any sign of the structure that was now gone while Paolo contemplated the scene, absolutely horrified.
"They are trapped on the other side? How could you possibly know?" He exclaimed. Then he passed a hand through the portal trying to reach for them and help them back in. But his hand passed through Eric's shoulder as if it wasn't there.
"Fuck!" He exclaimed after realizing his efforts were in vain. "You knew!" He accused her. "From the moment you woke up, you knew everything! Why didn't you warn them?"
"I can't." She admitted, plain and simple. "Rogues know things they can't explain." It was the absolute truth and yet, also the perfect lie. "I won't blame you if you choose to join them. But I'm staying."
She could almost see the gears turning in his head as he was pondering his options: the safety in number he could expect from the group versus the unknown resources that awaited him there.
"Okay. Fine. I'm staying." He finally decided. "But still, can we at least do something for them? Like giving them food or something?"
It was the nasty part of Eric's argument. They had been so certain that it would still be waiting for them when they were done that they left with absolutely nothing, including some equipment they had no immediate need of.
Sophia already had claimed the first aid kit Stella had carelessly left behind. Seriously: they headed out to fight monsters and the girl had left the first aid kit behind? What the hell had she been thinking?
She nodded and stated: "I will throw them their gears. Hurry up to the kitchen and take as much non-perishable as you can carry, before they change their mind and turn around."
And so he nodded right back at her and did as he was told without questioning her judgment while she did her part.