OSOS 0x1B
Subterlabor
( ❭♢ )
Day twenty-two, and I am still a fish.
*Bi-luup*
A small bubble emerged from the aerator nestled in the center of the enormous fish tank, dressed up to look like a small volcano. Around, several fish-safe structures had been placed, from a multi-room castle, to a sprawling plastic-tree forest. In total, the tank itself was probably about four meters wide, however scales had gotten hard to grasp since Alexander had awoken to find himself covered in them.
Outside the glass walls of his watery abode was a room filled with leather-backed books. Bookshelves from floor to ceiling in a circular room, a staircase on one side, and a fireplace on the other. The two windows placed on the other two cardinals only revealed bare blue sky most days, with a dash of white from the occasional clouds. Alexander’s best guess was he was in some kind of tower, where he knew not, for the night brought no stars, just a faint orange hue on a canvas of black.
Swimming past the endless glass wall of his home, Alexander was once again reminded of the cream-tan body he’d found himself in one random morning. At first, it seemed like some sort of fever-dream, but three weeks in, his new reality had begun to set in. Swimming instead of walking, water instead of air, most of it he got used to fairly quickly. However, sometimes, he’d get the urge to blink, and, suffice to say, ‘eyelid phantom pain’ was a hell in and of itself.
*Schk-Chk.* … *Schk-Chk.* … *Chk. Chk.*
From the top of his tank, Alexander heard the automated food chute release three times, but only dispense twice– A sound he’d been dreading since the old wizard’s recent absence began to extend beyond more than a week, at this point it had been at least two since he was sure he’d seen him.
And there was that ominous quake only a day or two after he left– The tank almost shattered…
Alexander’s eyes swam with what-if’s and dreaded-thoughts, his attention half-submerged in the waking tide of worry he had building up in the back of his mind.
Maybe he’s just preoccupied with cleanup or something…
Nibbling up the chunked up bits of freeze-dried worms he was fed every day, Alexander gazed beyond his tank. There was every chance that the blue-coat would be back any day now, but he just ran out of food, and there was a definite chance he’d starve to death if he just stayed. But he was a fish, there wasn’t a lot on hand to get him out of the situation.
The tank itself was on a circular pedestal of the same diameter, and the glass embedded into both it, and the ceiling. The glass itself was relatively thick, approximately three centimeters deep, and would normally be beyond him. However, the recent quake had left several fractures that, given the right stress, might give way.
Yet he was a fish, unable to breathe beyond the bounds of his watery prison. Escaping into the dry room beyond, filled to the brim with water-soluble books, would be a death sentence for both him and a large swath of arcane texts.
The wizard’s books…
Through the curved glass, Alexander was a persistent observer of the disarray left in the wake of the blue-robed mage, who never seemed to have time to clean or organize in his tower. Though that presented an opportunity, gifted in the form of several open tomes strewn about the floor. Not that they did him much good, all he had in his repertoire was English and ‘glub-glub’.
Maan… If I was gunna get isekai’d as a fish, couldn’t I have at least ended up in a world with a cool monster-leveling system? At least then I could probably ‘buy’ the skills I needed–
“[ System Request Received… ]”
Alexander bolted back from the edge of his tank, startled by the sudden intrusion of a disembodied robotic voice projected directly into his mind. It had sounded real– like, really real, as if he’d heard it with his old ears, unimpeded by the ever present water that now surrounded him. However, as spooked as he was, once the words made it to his brain, his eyes couldn’t be wider. Not that they got smaller either, he was a fish.
A System?! So this world isn’t just wizards in towers after all…
“[ Evaluation Mandated for Request. Alpha simulation in progress. ]”
An alpha simulation?? It’s got a whole process and everything… That’s kinda cool–
“[ Exponential increase in simulated Alpha Refinement noted. Beta Approved. ]”
Just as soon as the words of the System registered in his head, Alexander’s fishy body erupted in an outpouring of energy as he entered some form of magical metamorphosis.
Ha– You’re kidding me. A transformation sequence? This better not turn me into some magical-girl– I’ll take the fins over that.
In the end, the whole thing was more of a burst of power, but the water was still bubbling around him as the sudden explosion of light ceased. Yet, however quick it was, said nothing to the effects it had wrought upon his fishy-body.
Through his reflection in the glass walls of his tank, Alexander could see his cod-like form had been enhanced, transforming his marble-tan scales into a golden-sheen, with fins easily four times as large as they’d been before, now easily long enough to sway on their own with a glistening shimmer.
Well, it’s not exactly ‘magical girl’, but… I suppose it could be worse. Though, that begs the question– Did this little power-up actually come with anything useful?
“[ Evolution complete. ( Stats ) and ( Skills ) are now available in the Beta. ]”
As if it were actively observing his thoughts, the omnipresent voice spoke up to answer him once more. However, this time the slightly-robotic monotone was intercut with two words, heavily emphasized upon. Each seemed to press an awareness of what they entailed into his mind, like a mental definition written directly onto his frontal lobe.
( Stats ) – Numerical ability rankings based on the peak median of your race, out of twenty.
( Skills ) – Ability enhancements, augmentations, and additions.
Wishing he had the physical ability to wince at the sudden migraine he received in tandem to the info-dump, Alexander tried not to besmirch his luck with wallowing in the inconveniences.
Skills and Stats? Ho– That’s perfect. So how do I–
*Bloop* – *Bloop*
Before he could finish composing the thought that comprised the question, the System conjured two teal-colored glass panes in the water to answer him. Each was engraved with their own fair share of words, inlaid in white, and the top of each clearly stated their purpose. The one on Alexander’s left was ‘Skills’, and to his right, ‘Stats’.
———————————————
= Skills =
Points Available: 2
< No Skills unlocked. >
Skills Available:
Vocality [1]: Message
Abjuration [1]: Mending
Manipulation [1]: Shape Liquid
Transcendence [1]: Guidance
Transmutation [1]: Acidic Splash
Conjuration [1]: Phantom Hand
———————————————
————————
= Stats =
Race: Beta Fish
Level: 1
Strength: 8
Dexterity: 3
Agility: 18
Constitution: 12
Mana: 60
Fable: 666
————————
Hell yeah! Now we’re cooking with gasoline. Though ‘Fable’ is a weird stat to have, and quite a particular number at that. Mana’s pretty decent too… Though how that correlates to these skills is a whole other thing…
Switching his attention from the panel on his right, to the one on his left, which was rather easy given how his eyes were affixed to the sides of his head rather than the front, Alexander was pretty impressed with the array of options he’d been presented with.
Six skills to choose from, each labeled by a category and a number– How orderly. So it’s either indicating the point-cost of the skill, or the level of each category; perhaps both. Regardless, it seems I have to choose two from the six…
‘Vocality’ might get me something like a ‘universal translator’, but ‘Message’ seems rather wasteful given my current predicament. Abjuration’s ‘Mending’ would certainly fix the tank, but without solving the food problem… Well, ‘Shape Liquid’ seems like the perfect counter argument. Who needs a tank anyways?
“[ Skill Unlocked: Shape Liquid – Mold and maintain 1000 liters of liquid. ]”
As the System sensed his ‘no brainer’ choice, its voice echoed in his ears as the glass panel updated to reflect his changes.
—————————————————————————
= Skills =
Points Available: 1
Shape Liquid – Mold and maintain 1000 liters of liquid
Holds shape for 1 hour
1 Meter Range
Skills Available:
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Vocality [1]: Message
Abjuration [1]: Mending
Manipulation [2]: Slingshot
Transcendence [1]: Guidance
Transmutation [1]: Acidic Splash
Conjuration [1]: Phantom Hand
—————————————————————————
Ooh– Convenient. And it looks like I can’t purchase ‘Slingshot’, so that number is both the cost and rank. Let’s see, from the remaining three, I’m pretty sure ‘Phantom Hand’ has to be my second choice. I’m Not sure what Guidance might get me at the moment, and I’ve certainly no use for ‘Acidic Splash’ with nothing around to fight. However– If it’s anything like what I think, I could certainly use a less ‘watery’ appendage.
“[ Skill Unlocked: Phantom Hand – Summon a selectively-solid floating hand. ]”
Upon announcing the acquisition of his second skill, the left-hand panel updated once more, this time lacking the list of available skills.
———————————————————————————
= Skills =
Shape Liquid – Mold & Maintain 1000 Liters Of Liquid
Holds shape for 1 hour
1 Meter Range
Phantom Hand – Summon a selectively-solid floating hand
Lasts for 1 minute
10 Meter Range
Physical limits derived from caster strength
———————————————————————————
Perfect. And those limits are pretty reasonable, though a thousand liters sounds like a lot… No, wait, that is a meter cubed. Neat. Now to test these out… ( I’m sure they’re just as easy to use as they were to buy, right? )
As he assumed, all it took was a bit of a mental nudge, and a ghostly appendage materialized outside of his tank. To the side, he could see the ‘Stats’ panel update with a single change, ‘Mana’ now listed itself as ‘59 / 60’.
Okay, so each time I cast one of these, it’s a single ‘mana’. Makes sense. Given twenty-four hours in a day, I definitely have the budget to maintain a floating sphere of water. Though, moving is going to be obnoxious. I’m basically playing a board-game with sixty moves, which hopefully replenish each day, at the minimum.
Swimming away from the two glass panes, which dissolved behind him, Alexander approached the walls of his tank for, what was hopefully, the last time. Beyond, the room remained scattered with books and valuable parchment strewn about the floor, but also, freedom.
He wasn’t sure why some eclectic wizard calling himself ‘Merlin’ had turned him into a fish and entombed him in his library, but one problem at a time. Sure, he was assuming it was the wizards fault, he just woke up here instead of his bed at home, but clearly it was the wizard’s library, and his automatic fish-feeder which had now run out.
At first, Alexander had been content to think this was all some sort of rogue fever dream, mayhaps, even a coma– He’d never had one himself, so how was he to know if he was vegging out or not? However, the day-in and day-out of life as an aquatic pet, trapped in one location, with nothing to really do, was getting really old. Especially with the constant teasing by the plethora of real magic lurking just beyond the translucent walls of his cage. But now, Alexander had powers of his own, and he was getting out.
Ensuring his ‘Phantom Hand’ had finished cleaning up what seemed like half the library, Alexander backed up from the glass and traced the fissures to a central weak-spot. With only eight ‘strength’, he wasn’t sure how well this was going to work, but at least his ‘constitution’ was higher.
Welp, if at first you don’t succeed…
Lining himself up, Alexander put everything he had into his tail-fin and fired himself full-tilt at the crack on the top-half of the tank.
*DaBlum*
With all the fury and might of a small fish slapping the inside of a sturdy glass tank, Alexander rebounded off the inner surface, jittering backwards as he seemed to reverberate more than the glass he’d struck.
Owwww… What’sadsf– Oh ff– Stats.
Struggling to put even two words together in his likely concussed state, Alexander conjured up the respective glass pane once more.
Constitution… 7. Makesssense. Okay, but– I definitely made progress. Maybe once more is all it’ll take…
Glancing back to his tank, modeled in miniature after what looked like an old European castle and its surrounding lands, Alexander knew his chances of survival were slim to none if he didn’t risk it for his biscuit.
Swimming back, even further than he had before, Alexander lined himself up once more. If his math wasn’t wrong, which it honestly could be given the rattling in his cranium, he at least could tank one more hit before zeroing out, and finding out what that entailed.
Hoping he wasn’t about to plow head first into his own demise, Alexander prayed to whatever gods might be watching over him in this world of magic, and gunned it, full-send.
*DU–PTCHSSHHH*
Smacking into the recurved interior like a mass of non-newtonian fluid pitched by a major league baseball player, Alexander exploded out the other side in a tremendous flurry of glass and water.
He couldn’t see it, much less consider it given his state, but in that moment, Alexander’s constitution dropped to two out of his total sixteen, just as he too dropped to the now-drenched carpet that encompassed the floor outside his tank.
D-b-sd-poh-nnnnnn…
Try as he might, Alexander’s brain was two-steps removed from mashed-potatoes, and his cranium was definitely caved inwards. Thoughts were a luxury, complete ones an outright joke. Above him, the water in the tank continued to gush out, thankfully encompassing him as he struggled to place a single thought, let alone the crucial, time-sensitive, next step of his plan.
As the seconds crept by, and the water level in the aquarium continued to deplete, the flow of the waterfall above Alexander began to decrease, drooping closer to the edge of the tank and slowly revealing his water-bound body to the death sentence that was air.
Ssssssshaaapikid— Shhhhape. Licked.
Struggling to keep his head together, quite literally, Alexander felt a rush of relief as he saw the water around him freeze in place like a partially filled invisible cube. Above him, oddly enough, the water expelled from the tank seemed to flow over his bit of ‘locked water’, but he was definitely able to shimmy a little to ensure he could actually move about, if his fishy body wasn’t completely wracked with debilitating pain.
Uuuuuuuuughhhh… I need a long nap. Or maybe I’ll just die… That sucked.
Thinking back to his skills’ description, Alexander knew he had an obstacle to deal with before he could drift into unconsciousness. ‘Shape Liquid’ had a fixed duration. And sure, he could keep recasting it, but he was screwed if he wasn’t awake to do so.
Let’ssss see… Alarm clock… Alarm clock…
As his left eye settled on the phantom appendage bobbing nearby, Alexander felt the lightbulb go off in his puddy brain. By instructing it to hold a chunk of glass in the air nearby, when it disappeared in thirty minutes, he’d be awoken by the sudden clattering, and he could recast shape water.
It was awkward, and he’d have to spend the night sleeping in half-hour increments, but until he had a more permanent solution, this would have to do.
Wait… The hand is only one minute, not thirty, and I could just go back in the tank for the night… Duh.
Trying not to picture just how bad he looked at the moment, Alexander recast Shape Liquid twice more to shift and shimmy his water cube into a water ferry of sorts before plopping himself back within the half-drained contents of his aquatic home, and settling in for a long night of rest and recovery.
M{ -.- }RA
Blinking awake in the bright light of the morning, Mara found the sight that awaited her both familiar, and somehow both expected and unexpected. Gone was the pale paint of her apartment’s ceiling back in New Phoenix, now replaced by a tell-tale wobbly sun that lingered directly above her head, heralding only one place she knew of, and the chilly stone beneath her back only reinforced that assumption.
Sitting up, Mara found her surroundings on the grassy knoll rather unchanged, but a sudden clattering on her right showed that some things had. For one, her white sweater, black pleated skirt, and flip-flops had made the trip, but surprisingly, she’d brought along more than just a change in garb. Scooping up the small black rectangle that had fallen to her side as she’d sat up, Mara mashed the sleep-wake button on the side of her phone.
“Oh– Oh-ho-ho.”
With a sly grin, Mara gave her smart-phone a once over, and powered it off for the moment. Sure she’d been gambling, there was no guarantee her ‘magical quirks’ would work back home, but her idea had paid off in spades. Bringing along her phone was honestly a bonus, the real feat was just getting back, but it seemed, in hindsight, that she was now quite literally tethered to a rock for eternity.
Unless it’s destroyed, or I figure this rune out…
“Eh. Who’s gunna destroy a random boulder in the middle of the woods anyways?”
Glancing around at the rapidly fading red illumination that surrounded her on the surface of the sun-bleached rock, Mara knew she’d be biting off one heck of a challenge, but at this point, time was just a number of days she’d have to starve to death.
Though, that’s a rather grim prospect, even if it’s a viable route… Yeah, I’m not too keen on that… The better idea might be finding out what happened to ‘me’ back in Thelma’s garden…
Standing up to survey her surroundings, Mara found it took her a moment to place her landmarks, but eventually she landed on where she thought she’d gone last time. She wasn’t super sure, she definitely went either uphill or downhill, but binary states were something Mara always struggled with, and for the life of her, she honestly couldn’t remember which she’d taken last and which led towards the obelisk.
Well, whatever. Downhill it is this time.
Sliding off the edge of the waist-high boulder, Mara set off towards the edge of the grassy clearing, intending to retrace her steps to meeting Celeste, and from there, back to civilization.
And, perhaps, ‘other’ me.
Reaching the edge of the clearing, Mara started to pick up her pace as she bounded through the woods feeling a lot more confident in her abilities after her day-long run behind the strangely persuasive Celeste.
That really was weird. There was that scent… Chestnuts I think? Then it seemed like every idea she had was the best, and, while she did show me out of the woods, I actually don’t think I had a lot of choice in that. She had to have used some sort of skill or spell on me.
“Damnit girl.”
Maybe it was just precautions on her part, but drugging people, magically or not, is so not cool.
Ducking beneath a low-hanging branch, Mara slid and immediately resumed her jog through the towering redwoods of the Lost Wilds dungeon, intermixed by the ‘Ironwood’ trees, which made up a healthy quarter of what was in sight at any one point.
I wonder why they were studying the bark from those trees in the Obelisk? The only other thing they had in that lab was stuff on me, and vials of my hair.
Shuddering as she remembered the ‘fridge’ full of samples, Mara slowed to a stop near one of the craggy, twisted, but undeniably dense and girthy iron-wood trees.
Why would they be studying these, and not the giant redwoods. Aren’t the big ones older? I suppose I’d need to see the rings to know for sure… But, I keep going back to that lab.
Placing her closest palm on the tree to her left, Mara gazed up into the towering branches above her head. It felt like it’d been weeks, and simultaneously, just days, since she’d climbed up a similar tree to ambush her favorite forest predators.
“Why study you though? What secrets do you hold?”
*fffrrrssshhhhhh*
Yanking her hand away and stepping back, Mara looked up at the giant tree as it suddenly began to seize like it was being shaken to its very core. The weakest of the leaves sprayed from the erratically jambling branches above her head, and the wood within the trunk creaked and groaned like it was threatening to twist itself in two.
However, just as quickly as the tremors had begun, they ceased, leaving the only sounds in the air the slight groaning of a giant tree finding rest once more. However, now it was clear, the Ironwood trees weren’t just trees.
Embedded in the center of the trunk was a sleeping face, one that was both alien and uncanny in all aspects. Underneath all the bark that composed a visage easily five times larger than it should have been, was what could only be described as her own reflection, grown out of wood.
Oh… Oh that… That would explain why they were studying you but…
Stepping closer, Mara replaced her hand upon the tree, half out of pity, and half hoping she was actually communicating with ‘it’ in some way by doing so.
“I’d be hard pressed not to recognize that face… What happened to you?”
However, this time her question went unanswered, despite appearances, it was pretty obvious that no one was home beneath the wooden eyelids, what was left was just a shell– Or a headstone. Sliding her hand from the rough bark, Mara watched as the tree returned to its former state, creaking and groaning until her visage meshed back into the unblemished trunk she’d first stumbled across.
Glancing around, Mara shuddered as she subconsciously began counting the number of Ironwood trees in sight, before quickly stopping herself. The number was clearly huge, and now, she really didn’t want to know the answer to ‘how many beans in the jar’. She had enough on her plate for the moment.
Pivoting away, Mara wasted no time in falling back into her running rhythm as she processed what she’d just stumbled upon. She had a lot of theories, but only one thing was really sounding like it held water.
That damn race selection.
By the numbers alone, Mara was pretty sure she’d just found out what would happen if she were to die as an ‘Elevae’.
If it wasn’t for Debug changing my primary race to Daemon, there’d probably be one of these growing right out of that stupid spaceship by now.
“Heh. Feels a bit like a missed opportunity somehow. Wrecking a whole lab dedicated to studying me with one of the very trees they were collecting samples of.”
Above her, Mara sighted the wobbly sun through the spindly branches of the towering trees above her, almost asking it for what to do with all the thoughts racing through her mind.