Birthdays had been the one day of the year that Terra had learned to hate most as she grew up. Each year her parents threw a lavish party, dressed her up in stiff, uncomfortable suits with too many layers, and invited half the other administration heirs from their galaxy to attend. While only a fraction of those invited came, it still meant crowds far too large to have meaningful interactions with.
Her party guests ranged from infants carried in their mothers' arms to 24-year-olds chafing in their last year before succeeding to their parent's power. Of the children that were her own age, most were watched over just as closely by their guardians as her parents had watched over her. Chaperones ensuring the little puppets didn't miss a line of script or dared to have any fun.
One year she had secreted a drawing in her breast pocket and offered it to a girl she remembered from the previous year. Her mother had snatched it away the moment she'd unfolded it to reveal the picture. Her father made her write a letter of apology to the girl's family.
The drawing had been of them playing together: two princesses in a tower.
One birthday had stood apart from the rest, not because it had been better, but because it had been different.
When Terra turned twelve, she had been assessed by the system for the first time. Because a system directly manipulates the mind to communicate with and analyze a person, children were not able to safely interface until their brains had reached a certain point of development. Twelve was the age that had proven adequate in 99.9% of humans, so that was the age at which the well off children of B15-Terra got their first tiny taste of what the world's system had to offer.
What it had offered to Terra was a whole new world of her own. Or the promise of one. As soon as the strange screen projected into her vision had loaded up her stats, she'd felt a surge of... something shifting through the air and gathering at her feet. When she'd looked down, she'd seen a black tablet, similar to the personal taps children were normally given to interact indirectly with the system's educational and gaming aspects. She had reached for it and felt a tingle of promise in the air, but her father had grabbed her wrist and yanked her back from the device.
"No." He had said, not to her, but to the system.
Terra had felt the resistance of the alien entity in her mind as it was pulled away. The system had not used words or feelings in its communications with her, but its influence tried to remain within her neurons. It had pulled at them and made her look at the tablet again. Forced her to reach with her other hand.
Her father had blocked it from influencing her further before her fingers were anywhere near the tablet.
The ordeal had set off a headache that lasted for days. The pain was unlike any Terra had known before or since.
The party she had been dreading so much was cancelled. She hadn't been in a state to celebrate.
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The synthetic voice that spoke into Terra's head was not one she had heard before, but the feel of it was familiar. It had the same feel as the tablet her world's system had offered her.
She hadn't known back then what it was she had been offered. She'd assumed it was simply a gift her father didn't approve of. Just another drawing of two princesses in a castle.
In the years that had followed, she had not given the event or the tablet much thought. Her memories of what happened had been eclipsed by the painful daze it caused. Beyond that, she'd made a habit of avoiding any thoughts about the system, becoming its administrator, and everything else related to her family legacy whenever possible. When her father had informed her on her 18th birthday that he had taken care of her screening for her, she had been too relieved her talent wouldn't be revealed to think about how odd it was.
In the two years since she had left, the pieces had slowly come together, somewhere in her subconscious. She'd finally realized what the tablet had been during her 24th birthday a few months back.
She'd been celebrating at the tattoo parlor by letting Lisa and Ajax ink calligraphy flowers onto her shoulders, one set up on either side of her. Drew had cleaned up the rest of the work stations for the evening so that he could be productive and talk at the same time. It was the first time she had celebrated the day. The year before, the idea of a birthday had still felt too loaded and unpleasant to share it with her friends.
When the conversation veered off to a subject Terra hadn't care about, she'd leaned her head back and stared up at the ceiling panels. Something about the pain of being tattooed on both sides and the black, rectangular shape of the air vent over her chair combined together and resurrected the memory of her screening. She hadn't just remembered it. She had relived it.
That was when it all clicked into place. She'd realized what it was her father had kept from her. What the system of her world had tried to give her the moment it analyzed her.
And what that had been was the same thing that stood before her now, cleaning rain water from its black fur, looking quite literally like the cat that got the cream.
A system seed.
A system seed she had just bonded to by agreeing to keep him. What did it matter that she hadn't realized until she touched the thing what he really was? If a champion had to comprehend the true, full nature of a seed before the bond could be forged, there might not be any system worlds in the universe at all.
"Are you serious?" She asked him when her mind finally decided to reconnect to her mouth. "A cat? What is this, the 15th century on original Earth?"
The earliest contact between human kind and systems had been on her species' birth planet. As often happened with planets that developed sentient life independent of outside influences, the Interim had taken it upon itself to sprinkle unbonded system seeds into the world until one grew powerful enough to root the planet and bring the race into universal enlightenment. Those seeds had taken the form of small animals, serving as familiars to their champions who the world had called witches. Humans still used the word for the system seeds into the present day, even though familiars rarely took on true animal forms anymore. The term had even crossed racial lines, being frequently used by elves and selachins, whose species had similar mythologies around their birth worlds' planted seeds, but hadn't had a singular, convenient word for them.
[It do be 15-Terra.] The voice in her head purred back with self-satisfied amusement.
Terra stared down in horror. "You do puns?"
[I can do a lot.] The cat answered as he stood up on all four- very unbroken- legs.
In the next moment, Terra's vision flashed over with the interfacing of a system, something she had only seen divorced from a tap screen once before in her life. The display was similar to back then, but there were notable differences. Instead of stark white windows outlined in green, blue, and yellow and kept semi-transparent to be seen through, the frames of her seed's screens were thick black lines. The background of each was completely transparent until Terra tried to focus on one, at which point an opaque, cream color filled it in. Rather than using clean, smooth iconography and diagram-like outlines for images the way his parent system had, this one displayed only a few necessary images, such as a human outline on her physical condition screen, in chunky pixel art renditions.
She tried not to be distracted by the windows, but couldn't help looking over her new screening results, which the seed had automatically ran when he bonded to her.
Terran Starmer XI ⛝
Human - 24 - Female - First Order
Stats
Brains: 5
Brawn: 7
Finesse: 8
Heart: 6
Capacity: 10
Trained Skills
✦✦✧ Athletics [ - ]
✦✦✧ Drawing [ - ]
✦✧✧ Disguise [ - ]
✦✧✧ Performance [ - ]
✦✧✧ Persuasion [ - ]
✦✧✧ Streetwise [ - ]
✧✧✧ Cooking [ - ]
✧✧✧ Deceit [ - ]
✧✧✧ Hacking [ - ]
Skill Gifts
-none-
Talents
Reality Sense [Unenhanced]
Shifting [Unenhanced]
"My cooking's not that bad..." Terra muttered as she glanced over her first assessment in a dozen years.
[Trained skills are those you have at least some talent and experience with. Or just extensive experience in the case of you abysmal Deceit. If you could not use a skill competently, it would not be in your list. Such as Stealth.] The cat seemed to be willfully making his reassuring advice as condescending as possible.
Terra would have made some sort of retort- likely about the cat needing to take Screening off his skill list since Hacking was on hers without her ever having used it- if something else hadn't caught her completely off guard a few lines down.
"Wait, I have two talents? What's a 'reality sense'?"
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
[That one is... complicated.]
After all his smooth confidence, Terra had not expected the cat to react with hesitance to her question.
"If it's my talent, you have to tell me about it, right?"
[Sure, but we don't have the time right now. The men in your apartment won't wait nicely in there forever.]
"What men in my apartment?"
[The bounty hunters. Obviously. Why else would I pick now to come get you? It wasn't because of the weather, I promise you that.]
A cold fire rolled out under every inch of Terra's skin. A storm of questions was tearing through her head, but she couldn't focus on any long enough to ask them.
The familiar rolled his unnatural eyes at her state of shock.
[Come now, Terra. I've been waiting over a decade for you. I'm not going to let them take you back, so don't make me wait any more.]
The seed's presumptiveness over his right to claim her made Terra's roiling dread transmute into anger. "I didn't ask for this." Terra protested, pushing herself back to her feet. "Why should I go along with what you want? You never stopped to ask what I want. None of you ever did."
The cat regarded her coolly. [Do you want to be captured?]
"Of course not!"
[Then shut up and listen to me.] The fur along the cat's back had lifted, along with the arch of his spine. Every drop of rain that fell on him sizzled away in a spray of sparking lights an inch before landing in his coat. [We're going to go in there. You're going to disable them. Then you'll grab anything you want to take when we leave the planet. Got it?]
Terra could feel the system seed's power rolling off of him in small waves. He was posing, but she sensed he didn't have the strength to force her to do anything she didn't want to. Not even something as simple as making her reach out as his parent system had done when she was small. She hadn't known a system could get angry, but that was certainly the impression he was giving off. She wondered if that was because he was young.
As soon as she thought of that, of him as a twleve-year-old child, she couldn't maintain her own frustration. He hadn't asked to be made for her anymore than she had asked for him to be given to her.
"How am I supposed to manage that? In case you missed it, fighting wasn't on that list of skills you generated." Her voice was calmer now. She looked up the steep steps towards the door to her building.
Her familiar's posture relaxed and he stopped pulsing his influence at her. [These men are cybernetically enhanced. All you have to do is short-circuit them.]
"Oh, is that all?" Terra asked tartly.
[Yes. I'll show you. Look at that light.]
Following the cat's gaze, Terra's eyes found a flickering street light outside the alley. As she looked at it, it was outlined in the cream color of her system's backgrounds and a nine pixel arrow pointed at the converter box at its base. It was the kind of box that pulled in system influence and processed it into electrical power.
[Pull from that.]
"Pull?"
A hard shove of influence at her back nearly knocked Terra over.
[That's a push. Now you pull.] The cat's synthetic voice was getting more and more impatient with her.
"I'm not a system." Terra protested.
[Of course you're not. Do it anyways.]
With a small shake of her head, Terra decided she would just have to show him that his plan wouldn't work. She looked at the converter box and imagined pulling out the power she could feel it sucking in, even from the distance at which she was standing.
To her utter surprise, she felt the influence come away at her will, feeding back into her system seed instead of into the air.
The streetlight stopped flickering, going out completely.
Behind her, the cat rumbled with pleasure. When she looked back at him, he was stretching out and flexing his claws as if he had just woken from a really nice nap.
[Oh yeah, that was good. Be sure to pull as much as you can from them when we get up there, got it?]
Terra stared at him. "You want me to get you power." She said, realizing it didn't care about her getting her belongings at all.
[She can be taught.] He flowed past her to the steep steps, flicking her leg with the tip of his tail as he went.
"Sly little bastard." She muttered and followed after him.
[Sly. I like it.] The cat said, taking ownership of the word, instead of insult. [Better than "the cat" by far. I can hear your thoughts, you know.]
'Oh?' Terra thought while watching him climb the stairs that were almost a ladder. His little paws reaching up, grabbing on, and then hoisting his sleek body up each step looked absolutely ridiculous. 'So you know how you look right now?'
[Better than you.]
Terra sighed and dropped it. He really was like a kid. A smarmy kid that thought he knew better than everyone else- and in all fairness, there was sure to be a lot he did know more about than her, just from his intrinsic nature as a budding system- but still a child.
If he heard those thoughts as well, he didn't comment on them.
At the landing, Terra put her ear to the door to listen for anyone in the hall beyond. 'Are you sure they're in my apartment? Can you sense them in there?'
[I can. You could too if you thought about it a little more. Your Brains stat isn't that low.]
Terra closed her eyes and took a deep breath to maintain her patience. She did not want to throw a child off a building, no matter how aggravating and probably impervious to damage he was. As her flaring temper came back under control, she realized he was right. She could sense people in her apartment. Because she could feel the power of their talents coursing through their cybernetic enhancements. As if the machine augmentations to their bodies kept the abilities in a perpetually active state.
'They all have cybernetics then?' She asked the cat, just to be sure.
[Not the cat. Sly. And yes, all of them.]
That meant there were three men waiting for Terra in her apartment. She had no idea what their talents were, what other gear they had, or how much harm they would be willing to do to her. Her heart raced in her chest. She wasn't sure she could go in there. Her hand was already shaking on the building's door knob.
[If you don't want to go in, then don't. You can pull from here.]
"Right." Terra breathed in relief. She focused on the strongest pulse of power she could sense within her apartment, like she had done with the street lamp, and pulled.
The result was nothing like what had happened with the light.
The thread of the bounty hunter's power fought against her mental hold like a writhing snake. At the same time, she heard muffled voices barking at each other beyond the door.
"I thought you said this would be easy!" She hissed down at Sly.
He was washing his face again, unconcerned by the mounting chaos in his plan. [I never said that. Pull harder.]
Terra did. She pulled against the thrashing line of power with all her might, using her terror as a fulcrum on which to lever her efforts over. That gave her just enough traction to win out. Whatever it really was she'd been pulling from the man inside gave way with a snap, losing its resistance once it was pulled free. While Sly sucked the energy of it up out of the air, Terra swayed back hard from the unexpected release, even though it had not been a physical force.
The barking within the building had mounted to shouts now. She could feel the two who she hadn't short-circuited heading their way.
She almost asked her familiar what she should do. This had been his idea after all, but there wasn't time for anymore talking.
Terra barely managed to step back into the corner of the landing that the door didn't swing over before it flew open. Two burly men with carefully concealed cybernetics burst out, looking down the steps. Before they could turn back and notice her in the other corner, she shifted her body to pack on twice her weight in muscle and fat, then bull-rushed the lighter looking man.
Leaned out as he had been to scan the alley below, she was able to send him flailing down the steep steps.
Terra tried not to think too much about the sickening crack that cut off his surprised yell. She hadn't seen what it was, already having turned back to the last man. She told herself it was just the wood slat of a step splintering.
The third man was still heavier set than her, even with the rapid physical adjustments she had made. She wouldn't be able to match him without shifting her bone structure first, which was far more painful and took far too much time. He probably could have sent her to the same fate as his comrade in that moment, but he didn't want her dead, even if his glaring eyes told a different story.
"I promised I'd take you quietly." The man growled at her while snapping up her wrist with an enhanced arm. He squeezed it until the joint creaked while he pulled her away from the edge and shoved her against the brick wall of the building. "Do you want to see what happens when you make me a liar?"
Terra gasped in a pained breath and scrabbled against the slick brick wall as she tried to wrench her arm free.
She had completely forgotten about the system seed that had been with her until a black streak of hissing and spitting fury launched itself onto the man's neck.
[Pull from him! Now!]
The man had released Terra's arm with a yelp of pain and surprise. He reached up to yank off the cat that was attacking him, but his hands swam through the inky black of Sly's fur as if he wasn't really there. The cybernetically enhanced hand came away sizzling with electric arcs fine as lace along its entire surface.
Terra didn't wait for any of it to make sense. She felt for the thrum of power pulsing through the cybernetic arm like a heartbeat, and pulled at it with every ounce of willpower she had.
This man's power didn't put up half the fight the first had. It came free like a shoelace yanked from a loose knot. It snagged once, then passed through her and into Sly.
Terra barely managed to catch the toppling man as he fell unconscious. If she hadn't increased her muscle mass, the momentum of his fall still would have carried them both crashing down the steps. Grunting with effort, she pushed him backwards, letting his body fall against the building door instead.
The air hung heavy with the quiet pattering of the rain while she leaned back against the doorframe, panting and staring at what she had done. She kept expecting someone else to appear, to punish her for her actions, but no one did. Her neighbors either weren't home or had locked themselves securely into their own units. No one here would step out to borrow trouble from someone else's bad day.
She continued gulping down lungfuls of cool, damp air as her body began to shake.
[You didn't kill them. They will wake soon.] Sly warned her, though the haughty edge to his synthetic voice had been toned down.
"All of them?" She asked, thinking desperately about the man she'd sent over the edge.
The silence in her mind was answer enough. She stumbled to the back corner of the landing where she had avoided the door, leaned over the balustrade, and heaved up the contents of her stomach into the alley below. While her guts emptied, her morphed flesh shrunk back down to her typical proportions. The inky flowers on her shoulders had been distorted and blurred in the shifting back and forth of skin and fat.
Sly waited for her just inside the open doorway, his tail wrapped primly up around his paws.
When Terra had gathered herself, she pushed upright and strode into the building. She couldn't think about what she'd done. She just needed to get her things and go. She didn't know where to. Just that she couldn't stay.
What was waiting for her in her apartment stopped her cold in her tracks again. Her lower jaw quavered as she stared at the unconscious man sprawled in her reading chair. He appeared to have been getting up when he fell back into it. His laughing green eyes didn't even flicker behind closed lids, but she knew the shape of his face beneath the ski mask he wore. She recognized the curled leaves of the rose tattoo he'd let her put around his wrist poking out of the edge of his black glove.
Apparently, she hadn't known him as well as she had thought. She'd had no idea he had any talents. At least the cybernetic plating along his collarbone was new. The skin around it still puckered and red from its installation by whatever mercenary crew he had signed on with to hunt her.
Ajax had called out sick that morning. The morning her bounty had been raised from 250,000 credits to a million. From a price not worth selling out a friend, to one that would ensure his children never went hungry again.
Terra's eyes burned as she turned away to start gathering the few things she wanted to keep. The books and sketchbook she had brought back from the parlor with her had been lost in the fight, probably thrown over the edge of the stairs with the man she had killed. The hoodie had been pinned under her arm, saggy and empty, while she'd been pressed against the bricks, but it wasn't with her now. She couldn't make herself care. She just grabbed her biggest backpack, shoved in as much of her clothing as would fit, and slung it over her back.
"Let's go." She rasped, too numb to be surprised by the hollowness in her voice.
[Grab the sketchpads.] Sly ordered.
"Why bother?"
[Because tomorrow, you will be yourself again.]
The simple words couldn't break through the thick shell Terra's mind had thrown up around itself, but she nodded anyways. She gathered her sketchbooks, a few art supplies, and her favorite books under the direction of her familiar. She stuffed as many water bottles and granola bars as would fit into the large pockets of her dark cargo pants. She fetched her favorite bottles of shampoo and conditioner and other toiletries.
Sly kept her busy packing until Ajax started to stir. Only then did he tell her it was enough.
He led her out of the building. He blocked half of her vision with status windows while she went down the steps and passed out of the alley. Then, he led her to Drew's place.
Terra stood frozen at the door, staring at it.
Sly let out a huff. He stretched up and scratched at the door knob vigorously, causing it to jangle in a manner that was not unlike someone trying to pick the lock.
Drew yanked the door open on its chain a minute later, poking out the muzzle of a blaster with a scowl on his face. The hard expression fell away when he recognized who was standing in front of him. He set aside his blaster and unchained his door.
"Terra?" Drew asked as he opened it to draw her inside. "What hap-"
The question was cut off as Terra fell against his chest to cry.