Jessica Grace Samson
> ???
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> ???
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> [Stats]
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> [Growth]
>
> ???
As far as existentially terrifying things to wake up to went, having actual sentences floating in your vision was surprisingly up there. It wasn’t quite a solid thing, somewhere between an intense memory and a hallucination, and if Jessica didn’t pay attention to it the words faded from her attention, but with a simple thought it became front and center in her sight. It was incredibly unsettling to have something like that just present.
In terms of existential terrors, the words in her vision were in a vigorous competition to claim the current top spot with the fact that Jessica only knew her own name because of those words. Her name felt right, but she had no memory of anyone ever referring to her by name. Probably because she had no real memory of who she was, where she was, or what was going on.
Fortunately for those existential issues, they were currently overshadowed by the fact that she was naked in a cave of some sort with no idea why or how she had got there. She still felt remarkably calm for all of that, and decided that “Jessica” sounded right so therefore the words were at least somewhat trustworthy. She also had a feeling she had some understanding of what the words might mean, and focused in on [Stats].
Almost immediately the word expanded outwards, revealing more information that took up her vision-attention
[ S t a t s ]
Talents
Physical
Mental
Social
Physique 6
Cognition 20
Charisma 5
Grace 5
Reaction 8
Empathy 12
Vitality 5
Focus 14
Willpower 8
Skills
Physical
> Athletics 1
>
> Driving 1
Mental
> Craft (electronics) 2
>
> Computing 4
>
> Engineering 5
>
> Knowledge (biology) 1
>
> Knowledge (chemistry) 3
>
> Knowledge (physics) 8
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> Knowledge (pop culture) 5
>
> Language (English) 5
>
> Mathematics 5
>
> Research 8
>
> Science 10
Social
> Presence 2
>
> Persuade 2
>
> Teaching 4
Feats
> Child Genius
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> Scientist
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> Thesis Defender
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> Philosophical Doctor
Special Abilities
> ???
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> ???
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> ???
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> Please see [Growth] for further details
The information was a lot to take in all at once, but Jessica found that focusing in on any particular element caused it too to expand. Since it stood out so much, Jessica looked into the Cognition 20 first, and had her attention zoom in further.
> Cognition Level 20
>
> Cognition is the ability to understand, integrate, correlate, recall, and utilize information. It is the ability to work through complex problems, although not necessarily quickly. Higher Cognition does allow for better memory of solution processes and already solved versions of a problem. True ‘fast-thinking’ falls under the purview of [Reaction].
Running through the “Talents” section, Jessica found that each section seemed to be divided up into a sort of power, finesse, and defence trio. The division was subtly familiar, and from everything Jessica could only assume that she was some sort of scientist, and a fairly high level one at that. Like her own name, the information felt “right” to her, even if she couldn’t actually remember any specific details. She also went a bit more into detail for the feats, since they seemed different.
> Child Genius
>
> Recognized as a prodigy from an early age, this person received significant praise for their ability to pick up skills easily, although this has also bred certain bad habits in regards to sticking with things they do not excel at. You gain bonus experience when learning Skills rank 3 or lower, but suffer reduced Focus when encountering setbacks.
> Scientist
>
> Through extended, advanced level study you have learned the skills and mindset necessary to perform the scientific method. You gain bonus experience when making new discoveries, especially when using a systematic methodology.
> Thesis Defender
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> You are able to convince people of the truth of something based off a foundation of evidence. You gain large bonuses to convince people of something based off of arguments from evidence.
> Philosophical Doctor
>
> You might not be a healer, but you have earned the right to be called Doctor. Through considerable advanced education you have made a novel contribution to the body of human knowledge. You gain bonuses to all academic type skills, and bonus experience when making new discoveries or teaching others. All bonuses explicitly stack with other similar bonuses.
Jessica was definitely a scientist of some sort, a physicist if she had to guess, although she felt some ambiguity on that designation. She still had very little idea what was going on, but she now at least had some idea of her identity, which was something. But this information was all fundamentally about her past, when really what she wanted to know what was going on now, in the present. With that in mind, she figured that she would be no more confused by looking into the only other bit of data available within her own mind.
[ G r o w t h ]
Available Upgrades
> 0 Talent Points Available
>
> 0 Skill Points Available
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> 0 Feat Selection Available
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> 5 Mutagen Points Available
Current Growth Modifiers
> Child Genius
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> Scientist
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> Philosophical Doctor
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> ???
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> ???
There were two immediate mysteries. The first was the fact that the “???” continued to haunt her, and even the tooltip to look elsewhere didn’t seem to indicate where to look in the Growth screen. Jessica had a suspicion that where she was supposed to look was also hidden. However, the other mystery was the “Mutagen Points”, which seemed profoundly out of place from everything else she had seen up to this point. Focusing her attention there, she hoped to get more information.
> Mutations (5 Mutagen Points available)
>
> Additional CNS Nodes I
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> Additional Bioreserves I
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> Enhanced Chemoreceptors I
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> Improved Digestion I
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> Mirror Neuron Mutagen Synthesis I
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> Reinforced Titin I
Enhancing the first element on the list, Jessica tried to figure out if there was more information to be had before she gave up on learning anything new from the words in her vision.
> Additional CNS Nodes I (1 Mutagen Point)
>
> Extra nodes of grey and white matter are generated outside the brain and spine, producing a secondary control network that improves the development of muscle memory. Improves the growth of Physical Skills.
>
> Prereq: ???
>
> Required For: Additional CNS Nodes II, Enhanced Reflexes I, Proprioception Learning I
Jessica soon found herself going down a rabbit hole of information, as while she could only get about two or three nodes deep before everything turned into question marks, the amount of entries she could encounter was staggering. She had no idea how much she believed some of the claims, but just like with her own name and implied past she felt that these fantastical claims were true. Somehow these ‘Mutagen Points’ were under her control and could cause radical but beneficial changes to her body. Things like Additional Bioreserves and Muscular Hypertrophy seemed to be fairly direct enhancements to her body, while Additional CNS Nodes and Improved Digestion were more about adding in new features that would serve as the foundation for future growth. Mirror Neuron Mutagen Synthesis was just plain weird in that it seemed to imply that it would allow her to earn mutagen points by copying others, with Enhanced Chemoreceptors being apparently about better detecting sources of mutagens, which seemed to be the theme of the other, similar mutations dealing with mutagens directly.
So, basically, Jessica had confirmed that she had access to her own character sheet. She suspected that she already had at least one mutation that was hidden by question marks, but that was about all she was going to get for the time being.
She wanted to immediately start spending her mutagen points, but she decided that before she did that she should probably figure out what exactly was going on outside her head. She had just sort of been lying on some gravel in this cave, aware of diffuse light, but she had spent most of her time since becoming aware of the world just absorbing information. Getting up, she went to explore her situation in greater detail.
What she found was disappointing in its mundanity. The cave she was in appeared to be some sort of short side tunnel off of a sink hole or something like it. The chamber was essentially a stone tube about four or five times Jessica’s height and twice her arm span across with an opening at the top that let sunlight through. The bottom was littered with rotten leaves and a few scattered bones from animals that had fallen down here. The walls of the cave had numerous cracks that looked like they lead to various other fissures, and there were stains from water all around.
Jessica wasn’t really a survival expert, but she definitely knew that even setting aside the lack of food this place was not safe. It was clearly prone to flooding, and just the structure of it screamed that this place had to be away from where humans lived; otherwise they would have covered it over as a hazard long ago. Summing up her situation, she needed to figure out a way to get out of a hole with literally nothing, and then survive in what was a sufficiently remote area that a hole like this could exist.
And she still didn’t know how she got here.
Reviewing everything, she formally developed two hypotheses. The first was that she was suffering some sort of psychiatric episode featuring hallucinations, delusions, and a fugue state. The second was that something absolutely fantastical had happened and all of the information available to her was accurate. She then reviewed the implications of each hypothesis on how she got here.
If she was crazy then somehow she had got down this hole completely naked with no sign of gear that could have got her here. Further, there was no sign of injury from a fall. On her own that was essentially impossible unless she was a much better climber than her instincts were suggesting she was. That meant that either the extent of her hallucinations were such that she could not actually trust any of her senses, or someone had placed her down here. The sort of person who would put a naked woman down a well was not the sort of person Jessica wanted to encounter.
Alternatively, if something fantastic had happened as implied by the existence of a character sheet that included mutations, then there was any number of ways Jessica could have ended up down here. She could have been teleported or been somehow entombed in the stone until she awoke, or other things that she would normally consider impossible.
So barring her being completely delusional, Jessica could only conclude that no matter how she ended up in this hole, she absolutely needed to get out of here. She then checked her two hypotheses against how she might escape. If she was having some sort of psychiatric episode then her only hope was that she was a much better climber than she considered herself to be or that she could learn quickly how to climb. If on the other hand the fantastical was real then she might actually be able to improve her chances of successfully extricating herself from this hole.
Checking her hypotheses against each other, she also found that investing in distributing her Mutagen Points had a neutral to slightly positive effect on her odds even if it wasn’t true. She needed to get out of this hole, and she saw no way that indulging in a delusion in this particular instance could hurt her odds. If anything, it might give her confidence to help her overcome the challenge.
She then of course had to figure out what she wanted to buy. Additional CNS Nodes claimed to improve the growth of Physical Skills, and whether climbing was a subset of Athletics or was its own thing, it definitely sounded like it would definitely help. It sounded like it even had explicit synergy with Child Genius, considering how poor her physical skills were. The problem was that all involved training, which would burn through calories that she did not necessarily have in order to build skills and strength.
Jessica narrowed her attention upon Improved Digestion.
> Improved Digestion I (1 MP)
>
> The digestion of food and conversion into useful energy becomes more efficient. Less food and water is required to sustain you, and can make do with more marginal foods. Foodborne pathogens are also more efficiently neutralized and digested, reducing the risk of consuming marginal foods.
>
> The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
>
> Prereq: ???
>
> Required For: Improved Digestion II, Mutagen Scavenging I
Well, if her assumption about being crazy was correct then this one could hurt her, but then again if she got stuck down here then she would probably reach the point of starvation where stuffing the rotten organic detritus down her throat would appeal anyway. With an act of will she spent points on CNS Nodes and Digestion, and then had a look at some of the new options that had opened up.
> Proprioception Learning I (3 MP)
>
> With additional neural matter increasing response times and refinement of muscular actions, the brain requires fewer dedicated neurons for certain tasks. This speeds up processing and allows for more room to develop cognitive pathways. At Level I this mutation has the practice of Physical Skills contribute to Reaction development.
>
> Prereq: Additional CNS Nodes I
>
> Required For: Proprioception Learning II, Cognitive Predictive Preprocessing I
She additionally received information on what lay beyond P-Learning that had been hidden before and was immediately intrigued by Cognitive Predictive Preprocessing.
> Cognitive Predictive Preprocessing I (5 MP)
>
> With the growth of additional neural clusters and distribution of tasks away from primary cognition centers, additional processing can be devoted to unconscious prediction of possible responses, greatly decreasing response times as correct actions are already prepared. At Level I this provides a boost one tenth of Base Cognition to Grace, Reaction, and Empathy.
>
> Prereq: Proprioception Learning I
>
> Required For: Cognitive Predictive Preprocessing II
She obviously couldn’t get it yet, but given how high her Cognition was and how much her skills and feats focused on intellectual tasks that seemed like a good way to make up for her lack of Grace and Reaction. P-Learning also seemed like a fairly good thing to pick up if she was planning to devote a great deal of time and energy to learning physical skills just to get out of this hole. Making up her mind, she picked up P-Learning as well, expending all of her initial supply of MP.
Looking at the stone wall before her, she was thankful that there were plenty of cracks and fissures, as without them she would be completely screwed. As it was, she had enough hand and footholds to begin practicing. She figured that she would start off slowly, figuring out how to move horizontally and how to get back down rather than seeing how high she could go. If she fell from any significant height then she was in some serious trouble, so she would have to hedge against that.
By the time she had to stop because the available light had dipped too low, she had discovered a number of important issues. The first was that climbing naked sucked. There was the obvious damage the rough stone inflicted upon her hands and feet, but she had fallen more than once and she had taken bruises and scrapes to her butt that she wouldn’t have had she been wearing pants. She was also pressing against bare stone while trying to move about, so she had the additional misery of chaffing in sensitive places like her breasts and thighs.
Deciding that she wasn’t yet hungry enough to scavenge from the floor of the cave, Jessica retreated to the little alcove she had woken up in to spend the night and try to recover some of her energy. She hurt, she was hungry, her mouth ached from thirst, and despair was gnawing away at the back of her mind. The only thing that was keeping her from completely breaking down was the tiny changes that had happened to her stat page.
Everything else was the same, but Vitality, Reaction, Athletics, and most importantly of all Climbing had all ticked up one point each. She still had no idea how true any of that might be, but it gave her something to hold against the fear. There had been times when she was making so little progress and her arms were aching that she wondered if maybe she could make it high enough that a swan dive onto her head would kill her faster than the slow, wasting death if she couldn’t get out within the next day or two. The combination of fear that such an action wouldn’t actually work and the encouragement that she was making some progress was all that was keeping her going.
As the light faded to the point that Jessica was in absolute darkness, her mind started to wander, and the tentative control she had achieved based upon being in pure survival mode started to flicker. The temptation to start doing push-ups or sit-ups or something to burn off energy and build her stats was there, but she suppressed it for the time being. She needed her energy for climbing, and she worried about over doing things.
Instead she tried to meditate. She’d never really done that before, but she knew the basic methodology. She had to focus on her breathing, had to draw her attention inward and away from all the external pains. Breathing in and out, focusing on the cycle, allowing all the lurid nightmares of the day to drift into her conscious mind so she could set them aside. It wasn’t exactly easy, she had a lot for her mind to wander to, but the fact that she was already exhausted meant that keeping herself distracted long enough to drift off to sleep helped quite a bit.
Waking was brought on not by light but by discomfort. While sleeping on stone was exceedingly unpleasant, what actually roused Jessica was the fact that her bladder was starting to get rather full. She felt utterly awful, dehydrated like she had just gone on an all-night bender, but she still had to pee. While it was still mostly dark, a little light was seeping into the hole she found herself in, enough to navigate by. The question of where exactly to go caused her a long pause, but eventually she came to the conclusion that she couldn’t afford to literally piss away her water.
Despite having some dew creeping into the hole from the night to dilute things, Jessica was still thoroughly disgusted by both what she had done and the fact that she actually felt a slight amount of relief from getting any liquid. She also shoved some half rotten leaves into her mouth in an attempt to get something in her stomach and try to cut the pains starting to grow there. She just hoped she would be able to keep it all down or she would be worse off than if she had done nothing at all.
Fortunately, despite some initial misgivings, she managed to hold everything together. Focusing on breathing helped enormously, and she imagined the oxygen in the air travelling directly from her lungs to her stomach to burn away any toxins or pathogens. She also tried to visualize herself as a fire, using her breathing to slowly control her own metabolism, bringing it down from a full burn to a controlled smoulder. She didn’t need dancing flames; she needed glowing coals that would eat through their fuel slowly while retaining heat. Jessica had no idea how useful it was, but it was something and she would cling to the idea that it might help all the same.
Time slipped away into a river of general discomfort, until Jessica found that enough light was slipping through the hole in the ceiling to resume attempting to learn to climb. She did have to wait a bit longer than that for the moisture that had seeped in through the night to not be a hazard, but she tried to extract as much water from the walls as she possibly could while she waited. She was going to be sweating again, and she needed as much water in her for as long as possible.
When it came time to attack the walls again, Jessica discovered that when her body protested at how long she had been clinging to a handhold she could instead settle herself and let her strength and stamina renew. It was all about pacing and breathing, and her meditation practice had already paid dividends by helping to get her focus back to the task at hand. It also blocked out some of the pain of holding tightly to bare rock.
With skills, confidence, and the time she could remain on the wall growing by leaps and bounds, Jessica discovered that the next step for her to escape was figuring out the best path. She had already worked out the best place to go up and down when she was just a body length from the floor, but as she went higher it became harder and more risky to try to change her path, so her practice became in part a scouting mission. The best handholds did not necessarily flow from one point to another smoothly, and getting stuck at the top because she used up too much energy on a bad path was a death sentence.
Unfortunately, as the day ground on, Jessica realized that she was in considerably more danger. While the upper sections of the hole had intrusions of soil from fissures that allowed her to obtain some bugs and other things, she also realized that she was running out of energy faster. There also wasn’t an exit path directly, she would have to either hang from the ceiling with one arm or possibly even jump to reach. That was an excessively harrowing prospect.
Despair and panic gnawing away at her, Jessica decided to take a break and consider her options. Settling down, she let her breathing even out as she imagined her worries and fears as actual butterflies in her stomach that she could exhale. Eventually when she found some measure of calm she summoned forth her character sheet to examine her progress.
[ S t a t s ]
Talents
Physical
Mental
Social
Physique 6
Cognition 20
Charisma 5
Grace 6
Reaction 10
Empathy 12
Vitality 6
Focus 14
Willpower 8
Skills
Physical
> Athletics 3
>
> Breathing Control 2
>
> Climbing 2
>
> Driving 1
>
> Endurance 1
>
> Pain Resistance 1
Mental
> Craft (electronics) 2
>
> Computing 4
>
> Engineering 5
>
> Knowledge (biology) 1
>
> Knowledge (chemistry) 3
>
> Knowledge (physics) 8
>
> Knowledge (pop culture) 5
>
> Language (English) 5
>
> Mathematics 5
>
> Meditation 2
>
> Research 8
>
> Science 10
Social
> Autohypnosis 1
>
> Presence 2
>
> Persuade 2
>
> Teaching 4
Reviewing the changes, Jessica wasn’t surprised to see that she had developed meditation or breathing control, but “Autohypnosis” was a big surprise, especially since it was under the Social subsection. Of course Social was kind of weird anyway since social skills ultimately still keyed off of human cognition, but from the descriptions she had read the distinctions were both arbitrary and vague anyway. After looking over all of the changes, she also flicked her attention over to the Growth tab.
[ G r o w t h ]
Available Upgrades
> 1 Talent Points Available
>
> 0 Skill Points Available
>
> 1 Feat Selection Available
>
> 0 Mutagen Points Available
Current Growth Modifiers
> Child Genius
>
> Scientist
>
> Philosophical Doctor
>
> ???
>
> ???
>
> Temp: Desperate Survival
Huh. Jessica had a point to assign and a feat to select, as well as a rather appropriate modifier. Zooming in on it, she discovered that she was gaining skills that related to surviving the challenge immediately before her at an accelerated rate while everything else was suppressed. That made a significant amount of sense, even if she was just crazy, because her attention was very focused on learning what she needed and nothing else.
While she was fairly certain that the Talent Point she had available was going to have to go into Physique to make the climb and escape easier, Jessica figured she should review the feat selection, as potentially she might find one that she would desperately need that had a requirement or something like that.
As it was, her decision was a quick one, as one of the feats stood at as being head and shoulders most useful for her immediate situation.
> Natural Athlete
>
> Learning how to move your body comes naturally to you, to the point where trying to integrate the teachings of others or teach others can be difficult. Athletic-type Physical skills are gained at a higher rate, but learning from others is reduced and teaching others is harshly reduced.
Under the category of things Jessica needed, “athletics” was at the top of her list for the foreseeable future. Even after she got out of this hole she was still almost certainly somewhere in the wilderness, naked and without supplies. There were all sorts of ways that would be useful, and the drawback wasn’t important at all to her. Even if she made it back to civilization and this somehow wasn’t a delusion, her career was in science, and this would just become a good way to get in exercise.
Taking the feat, she then upped her Physique to 7. While she was doing that, she continued her breathing exercises and visualizations. She imagined the oxygen flowing into her lungs and then out to her body, willing her body to burn its fat reserves for fuel and for her muscles to grow stronger and more coordinated. She imagined the banked coals from before, and imagined blowing into them carefully, some growing hotter while fully burned ash that just got in the way floated off.
When her energy had recovered enough, Jessica went back to climbing, and she felt that her muscles were responding more smoothly and her body just felt lighter. By the time the light was dying she had figured out how to make it to the top of the hole and back down again, but her earlier assessment was correct: she would have to make a pretty complicated transition from the wall to the ceiling to the exit. Yesterday she might have just given up, but she knew that she had a shot at this.
Returning to the bottom of the chamber, Jessica used what light she had left in the day to practice the risky but necessary trick of jumping from one handhold to the other. By the time she had to call it quits for the day, she was feeling about as miserable as she thought it was possible to be. The scrapes and cuts from yesterday had multiplied tenfold, she had bruises all over her body from repeatedly slamming into rock walls, and her fingers and toes felt like they were going to fall off. This was of course on top of the yawning pit of hunger in her stomach and how absolutely atrocious she felt from dehydration.
And yet Jessica was also surfing on a wave of exhilaration and elation. She could feel herself getting stronger; she could feel her body responding more quickly; and most of all she felt that her impossible task was within reach. Instead of crawling back into her little alcove to shiver away the night, she instead stayed splayed out at the bottom of the chamber, staring up at the hole in the top. At some point the little patch of sky above darkened to the point where stars were visible through her little window, and she felt like she could reach up and grasp them.
“I’m gonna be an astronaut!” A half-remembered child’s voice echoed through Jessica’s mind, and she wondered if that was her, or if she had a daughter somewhere. If it had been her she had certainly given up on that dream at some point, given how out of shape she was.
A smile crossed her face then. If – no, when – she got out of this, maybe Jessica would take this experience to apply for training. She already had a PhD in what had to be physics; if she took the time to build her physique up to astronaut levels maybe she had a shot. Closing her eyes as exhaustion took her for the night, she tried to dream not of fire but of great tanks of fuel and oxidizer, of a machine that shed unneeded elements as it ascended into the heavens.
A splashdown abruptly brought Jessica’s dreams of space flight back to Earth as she was awoken by unexpected water on her face. Spluttering away, she found almost no light to guide her way, but from the sounds and the water splashing about everywhere she could only assume that it was raining. Despite the danger of getting flooded out and the fact that this would make her climb so much harder, Jessica still giggled in excitement as she began to greedily gulp down cold rainwater. Her stomach almost immediately started to cramp up from the cold water reacting with its emptiness, but she just laughed away the pain. Scrubbing away the accumulated filth and allowing herself to release her bladder without having to contemplate drinking back the increasingly brown rather than amber liquid was an indescribable luxury.
Eventually the high began to wear off as Jessica realized that she was starting to get remarkably cold, her teeth starting to chatter as shivers rushed through her. She needed to warm up, but she had neither shelter nor any way of making a fire, so she supposed that the only way to stave off the chill was to warm herself up. Given her circumstances, that meant that the best use of her time was exercise.
Running tight circles around the chamber, doing push-ups, sit-ups, and jumping jacks to burn away the hours was not necessarily the best use of her limited caloric reserves, but it was better than just sitting and shivering. She would probably be less exhausted on her final ascent if her muscles were warmed up rather than all cramped from a night of sitting and shivering. Continuing to hold her visualizations, she imagined her breasts, butt, thighs, and belly all shrinking in real time as she urged her body to burn fat for fuel while reinforcing muscles and keeping the brain supplied with energy. Hell, she even tried to visualize her ovaries stopping the conversion of testosterone into estrogens and ramping up their production there. She needed anabolic steroids more than she needed a period, and the absolute crash in calories had probably shut down her cycle for the month anyway.
After only a short time the rain stopped, but by the time Jessica felt that she wouldn’t slip into hypothermia if she tried to sleep light was already starting to seep into the sky. While the ability to replenish her internal water supply had massively buoyed her spirits, she still felt like garbage, and knew that today was her last shot. She still had no idea what awaited her above, and she had been burning through energy reserves at a breakneck pace. Either she got out of here before the sun set tonight or she was going to die in this hole.
Settling in to rest and let the limited amount of sun dry out the chamber as much as possible, Jessica slipped into meditation and then sleep. She was going to escape, she was going to figure out what was going on, and then she was going to go home… wherever that was.
Upon awakening to a semi-dry cave, Jessica focused on the information she had on herself to see what had changed.
[ S t a t s ]
Talents
Physical
Mental
Social
Physique 7
Cognition 20
Charisma 5
Grace 7
Reaction 11
Empathy 12
Vitality 6
Focus 14
Willpower 8
Skills
Physical
> Athletics 4
>
> Breathing Control 3
>
> Climbing 3
>
> Driving 1
>
> Endurance 1
>
> Jumping 2
>
> Pain Resistance 3
Mental
> Craft (electronics) 2
>
> Computing 4
>
> Engineering 5
>
> Knowledge (biology) 1
>
> Knowledge (chemistry) 3
>
> Knowledge (physics) 8
>
> Knowledge (pop culture) 5
>
> Language (English) 5
>
> Mathematics 5
>
> Meditation 3
>
> Research 8
>
> Science 10
Social
> Autohypnosis 2
>
> Presence 2
>
> Persuade 2
>
> Teaching 4
Checking in on her Growth also showed that she had another Talent Point and a Skill Point, although she did not have any new Feats or MP. Debating back and forth for a time she decided to up her Physique one more time and to upgrade her climbing. The walls were still damp, so the climb was probably going to be even more difficult, and she still had to make that final transition at the top.
Steeling herself, Jessica began her ascent. Scrambling up the wall she had more than one scare when a hand or foot slipped on slick stone, but she managed to not tumble down to the bottom, and instead made it all the way to the top. Leaning out, she carefully tested the handholds available to her at the top and discovered that she was actually on the wrong side of the chamber to make her final approach, as the roof up here was still relatively wet and slippery, while the other side was more dry and also appeared to have more handholds.
Taking the time to drop down to where she could transit around the wall of the chamber and then head back up to the top, Jessica took one final examination as she worked out how to do this. Her best approach would be to reach out for a handhold on the lower edge of the hole, then kick off from the wall and swing out to grab onto the upper edge of the exit hole. She would have to put everything into that swing or she probably wouldn’t get high enough up to get a good grip, but that also meant that she couldn’t be in any way cautious.
Inhaling, Jessica visualized her inner fires being built up, the coals being rearranged as air was blasted over them, flames that had been banked down to nothing flaring to brilliant, roaring life. Exhaling in a sharp, explosive shout as she flexed her muscles, she pushed off from the wall with her legs, hauled upward with her right arm, and reached out with her left.
For a single heartbeat she was swinging free, her fate up to her preparation as she would either catch herself or she would crash into the rocks and then tumble to her doom. In the next heartbeat her left hand emerged from the chamber for the first time ever and she started to scramble for a handhold. In the third heartbeat her torso made contact with the lip of the exit hole and she started to rebound, legs swinging free over the void.
Still less than a second had passed, and Jessica released her grip with her right hand, redirecting it to find a new handhold. For a horrible, fleeting moment she was entirely unsupported, her left arm dragging against stone being the only thing slowing her freefall. Before all hope was lost and she plummeted to her doom, Jessica managed to get both hands into a crack in the lip, her momentum halted with a sudden jerk that threatened to dislocate her shoulders.
Kicking and scrambling as she flexed and did the most important pull-up in her life, Jessica pulled herself up enough to grab something higher up, and then she had both hands out of the cave, followed by her head and arms. Taking in a deep breath to regain some strength, she managed to get her feet on the ceiling to help push as she pulled herself all the way out of the hole.
For several minutes Jessica just lay there, staring up at a blue sky marked by fluffy clouds, breathing heavily as the adrenaline wore off and she realized that she had almost no energy left in her body after all of that exertion. The giddy elation of success was starting to kick in, but Jessica knew that she had just moved from one part of her ordeal to the next. She had to get up and figure out where she was and what to do next.
Sitting up despite the bone deep exhaustion, she found that she was in some sort of mountain range or canyon or the like, the region made up of numerous hills of stone marked with patches of greenery. There was a tree relatively close to the hole Jessica had woken up in, as well as ripples of grass and shrubbery that told of wrinkles and fissures that she knew extended deep into the rock. Surveying further, she saw a large valley somewhat downslope of her position that was covered in patches of dense forest over grassland occasionally interrupted by rocky outcroppings. A river wound its way through the region, with a small lake glittering in the midday sun.
Jessica could also make out animal life from here, and upon taking in the herds of elongated behemoths, she muttered one of the few things she had felt like vocalizing since waking up.
“Hypothesis update: something fantastical is definitely happening.”
The kilometers distant sauropod dinosaurs did not react to this declaration.