The Nemesis Engine could sense a lot of individual emotions, but it wasn’t good at a mix of emotions. It was just a machine with a coded language. Programmers have a saying, “Garbage in, garbage out.” If the inputs were garbled, then the outputs of programming were going to be a mess too. Those are also the times that they say that the errors are between the keyboard and the chair. Even the greatest programmers in the world couldn’t compensate for the User/ID-10-T errors.
The good news is that Sammi found me crying on my bed again. The bad news was that I couldn’t hide the edge of my emotions. Sammi had been such a good friend to me. I was terrified that I’d do something so foolish in this first encounter that Sammi wouldn’t be that friend in later chapters of my story.
“Yeah, and a pony an the latest doll,” Sammi rolled their eyes, while the quill quivered with mirth. “What do I look like? Santa Claus?”
“Just tell me if my family is alive,” I begged Sammi.
“I’m noting a Kat, Cliff, and…” their brows creased as Sammi read off the clipboard.
“Good enough,” I cut Sammi off. “I want them. How do I get them? My family?”
“You have to defeat your Nemesis,” Sammi explained, “and lookie here! You’ve already got some nice stats and skills. You’ve even got a class already.” Sammi frowned again. “Looks like you got into your character sheet and expanded your stat types.”
“I need spells, Sammi,” I jumped to what was most important.
“Mage-ish,” Sammi’s brows were so furrowed that they were knitting something in the middle of Sammi’s forehead. “That leaves a lot of room for customization. I’m not sure I’ve seen that before. What is it you had in mind?”
“I want fireball, my cat Terra as a familiar, a heal, and a buff please,” I stated firmly, adding in a sniffle and Terra-worthy pleading eyes. And the Oscar goes to… not me.
“That’s oddly specific,” Sammi’s eyebrow sweater was growing suspicious.
“I… I just need a piece of home... just my cat, that’s all,” I stammered, grasping for how I’d gotten what I wanted last time. “Something that I can level up into fireball someday and a heal so I don’t die tomorrow on a splinter.”
“With health that high, I doubt you’ll die from a splinter… woodworking?” Sammi ran a finger down the page. Had I screwed it up by getting too much too fast. Would they nerf me somehow instead of helping me? “This almost looks like a Jack of all Trades build. Are you sure you wouldn’t like that better?”
“Is it a bard thing?” I asked, knowing the answer but needing to pretend I didn’t. “I don’t want to be a bard. Anything but a bard.” It sounded flat to me, so I rushed on. “Please, just a few little basic spells and I’ll be a good little nemesis killing machine for you. Please, Sammi?”
Sammi tapped the clipboard and I noticed that it operated more as a PADD from Star Trek or something. Sammi dragged a few boxes around the paper. “Pet, fire, heal, and buff,” Sammi muttered as if to themself. “Basics only. Yeah, we can do almost that.”
I batted my eyes at Sammi, watching the quill out of the corner of my eye. Was he watching through the quill right now? I knew that Fizzbarren used the quill to watch sometimes, the voyeuristic sadist. I shoved the thought away and counted on that charm I’d been building up.
“Take a look,” Sammi handed me a spell book and I almost felt complete as I took it in my trembling hands.
“Thank you,” I skimmed the pages carefully. Flare, Basic Heal, Basic Buff… where was Terra? A panic grasped me by the throat. “Familiar,” I choked out. “there’s no familiar.”
“Mages don’t really get familiars,” Sammi protested with a stern look.
I’d talked Sammi into Terra by refusing to pick a class until they did. I scrambled, grabbing Sammi’s coat jacket, the memory of burning handprints flashing across my mind.
“I’m not a mage,” I reasoned desperately. I couldn’t do this without Terra. I just couldn’t. I checked my character sheet and the class had been changed from Mage-ish to Mage. “You can’t do that. I’m not a mage. Sammi, I’m not a mage. Mage-ish. I chose Mage-ish. You can’t change it.”
“I just figured you didn’t understand,” Sammi patted my hand, but I felt like I was losing my balance. The depth of how I might have changed everything shook that foundation of rage from me like the stuffing out of a ragdoll.
“I don’t want to be a Mage!!!” I shouted, shoving my spell book back at them. “You changed my sheet without my permission. You can’t do that.”
“Alright,” Sammi held up their hands and took the spell book reluctantly. “But Mage-ish isn’t a class.”
“Then make it a class,” I demanded, knowing that my eyes looked like something out of Orange is the New Black. “Because I’m not accepting any class unless I can have my cat.”
“Cat?” Sammi flipped pages on a clipboard that looked more like the clipboard instead of an electronic device. “Terra or Damon?”
“Terra,” I pounced, babbling like an idiot. “Mage-ish. A little witch, a little mage, and a lot of one little cat from home.”
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
“Whatever,” Sammi grunted, shrugged off my grasping hands.
You have chosen the class Mage-ish.
You have gained a Familiar. Please choose the Familiar tab in your character sheet to access stats and progression.
“Thank you,” I slumped back, taking the spell book he shoved at me. I flipped the pages. Spark, Basic Heal, and Summon Witch’s Familiar. I was missing the buff, but I didn’t care to fight anymore. I’d pushed Sammi enough. I clutched the book to my chest. Sammi was gone.
I had plenty of mana to cast the spell, so I cast it immediately. I expected the delay I’d felt the first time I’d summoned Terra, but it wasn’t there.
“Terra, the totally awesome,” I cooed at her idiotically.
“There you are,” she said to me. “For a while there I wasn’t sure any of it had worked.”
“You remember?” I gasped out loud but kept the words of the discussion in my head as we’d learned to do. From the outside, it probably just looked like I was crying over her.
“Not only that,” Terra professed, her whiskers twitching with cat ego. “I still have a lot of my old stats.”
“Better than me,” I pet Terra and began to cast heal around the room. “I’m having to rework everything back up.”
“I see that,” Terra purred and pushed against my hand. There was Meditation. Two more heals around the room and I got my Mend spell too. Terra had been able to read my character sheet from level ten on. “No cat box?”
“I forgot,” I laughed out, just glad to have her back. She hadn’t needed a cat box since we’d moved to the cottage, but I could see that we might need it for the night here.
We tripped down the stairs, almost literally, as Terra wound between my ankles the way we’d started doing to get my dexterity up. With Mend, I managed to back-engineer it into my Basic Buff spell. I’d needed Heal and Buff to get Mend. I was casting constantly. I cast clean until it finally clicked into place. I had enough mana to choke a not-horse.
I’d gotten this far on fury and grit. I realized I’d been waiting for Terra to be myself again. Part of me hadn’t believed we could pull any of this off until she showed up with her memory intact. We grabbed the box and some broth.
As I was banking the coals for the night, I cast Freshen automatically on what was left of the pot of stew. Once I’d learned Freshen as a potion, it was easy enough to finagle my mana into the spell, but I hadn’t done that the first time until much later. My spell book didn’t know the spells, but my body and mind remembered. Once I knew that, my spells skyrocketed and so did my level. I repaired the kitchen counters, not caring if Mabel ever paid me for them. With the silver and change I’d earned from the entertainment, I had more coinage than I’d had most of the first week.
“Did you see Kat?” I asked Terra, keeping our conversation tightly mental by focusing on the joy of casting my spells again. My flinging spells turned Mabel’s kitchen into Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather’s house when they were preparing the princess to go home.
“She’s fine,” Terra told me, ducking another Spark. “And beautiful, if sad and confused.”
“But alive,” I marveled, my heart not daring to believe even as my mind grasped at it, or was it the other way around?
“Time was acting different, though,” Terra admitted. “It seemed to take more time to get here. Or a little less?”
“The only thing I want to turn out differently is that she stays alive,” I pulsed the clean spell at the dishes. “I need three people to stay alive this time.”
“She doesn’t know about the time loop,” Terra’s tail fluffed as she darted through a clean spell I was casting on the counters. I needed my constitution up, but there had to be a better way.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” Terra affirmed with a nod, or was she chasing something? “She’s still talking to Joey on her phone all the time. She can’t know he killed her.”
My heart gasped.
“Sorry,” Terra leapt from the floor and into my arms. I caught her automatically. Terra didn’t mind me wiping my tears in her fur because she knew another clean was right behind it.
“Just,” I took a few calming breaths, my hand over the ache in my chest. “How does it still hurt so badly?”
Terra treated it like the rhetorical question it was. I stayed long enough to stir up some overnight oats for morning and we headed back upstairs. I pulled up the character sheet, happy with the progress. It was definitely more robust than I’d done before. I hadn’t had stats this high until after hunting with Chester and Lily, if then. I didn’t remember.
Name: Karma
Class: Mage-ish
Level: 3 (420/800)
Profession: Cook (Level 2: 310/500), Carpenter (Level 1: 20/300), Seamstress (Level 1: 20/300), Singer (Level 1: 50/300), Storyteller (Level 1: 75/300)
Health: 182/182
Mana: 231/231
Intelligence: 20
Will: 18
Strength: 15
Constitution: 15
Charm: 17
Beauty: 10
Perception: 17
Dexterity: 20
Luck: 15
Skills: Cooking (10), Bartering (5), Dodge (5), Singing (5), Intimidation (4), Storytelling (4), Alcohol Tolerance (3), Sewing (3), Woodworking (3), Comedy (2), Knife Fighting (2), Meditation (1)
Spells: Basic Heal (7), Basic Buff (6), Spark (5), Mend (4), Basic Clean (3), Freshen (1), Summon Witch’s Familiar (1)
Recipes: Pie (2), Stew (2), Porridge (1)
With my new constitution, I wasn’t physically tired, but I was emotionally drained. My body had been processing some serious hormonal changes as well. I felt a headache that I couldn’t heal budding up behind my eyes. I let myself fall asleep with the image of Kat smiling at me instead of her eyes glossing over in death.
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Hey, I know this is against the rules or something but… Hey! You. Yes, I’m talking to you. I just wanted to take a minute to thank you for sticking around. Yeah, I whitewashed some of what happened with my daughter, but you get it, right? She’s a teenager, right? I mean, you knew she wasn’t as perfect as I see her, but I do see her that way. And so what if Terra is scared of her shadow? I don’t see her that way either.
I’ll try to be more transparent this time. I’m just saying. Did you see that guy? The one that just hit the unfollow button? Can you believe the nerve? I wouldn’t care but… Mana for the Nemesis Engine is calculated using followers. The more followers we have, the more mana I have to make things different this time.
This is your first time through this story, so you have every right to ignore that next chapter, but you didn’t last time. I don’t want to know what’ll happen at the first bad review. Comments help, but… yeah, I know you commented. Thanks.
It’s stupid, but I feel like we have some connection here. You and me? Silly, right? Do I really have to write in all the times Terra ran away or can you read between the lines? Just a little.
This time will be different. I promise. I’ll tell you everything, just… don’t go. Alright?