Levelling up was a quick affair, I distributed my stat point equally between mental and physical, then turned to look at my skills. As I asked for it to open, a few green prompts popped in front of my face.
You have unlocked General Skill:
[Track Smell]
[Trapping]
You have set a new standard in the General skill: [Trapping]
Experience awarded: 250 000 EXP
You levelled up
You have unlocked Offensive Skill: [Bow Mastery]
[Berserker] levelled up
[Berserker] levelled up
[Berserker] levelled up
[Berserker] levelled up
[Berserker] levelled up
[Berserker] levelled up
“Wait, hold on.” There were too many green screens on my face.
“What?” My sister said out loud, and I began explaining what had happened before realizing she was also looking at nothing, in other words the system, so I stopped myself. She didn’t notice as she talked out loud: “I set a new standard in trapping? Show general skills…where is it where is it… Did you get that too Nielle?”
“Yeah, and I also unlocked [Bow Mastery] and [Smell Tracking]. And six levels in my [Berserker] class.”
“Just six? Just for the [Trapping] bonus, right?”
“No, that’s with our fight with the [Tooth-Bear], I didn’t get a new class skill either.”
“That’s bullshit. So your class levels work differently than your normal ones. As for a new skill, we probably get one every ten levels, or maybe every fifteen? This System doesn’t exactly follow the rules I’m used to.” She abruptly changed subjects as she finally found what she was looking for on her status page. “Aha! Wait, what?”
I raised an eyebrow. “What is it?”
“Could you check your [Trapping] skill for me?”
I did as she asked, and after scrolling through the long list of general skills with my eyes, I finally found it close to the bottom.
“[Trapping = 7]. Wait, shouldn’t it be 99? We set a standard, right?”
“Exactly? Maybe…What about your bow and smell tracking?”
“I saw [Smell Tracking] at level twenty-one.”
Gaëlle whistled appreciatively.
“Considering it’s relative to the best tracker in this world, that’s pretty great.”
“And as for the bow…Offensive skills… level 3! It considers I’m that bad?”
“You did archery in middle school, right?” My sister seemed to have an idea in mind.
“Yeah.”
“But did Bonnie know that?”
That made me pause for a bit. “Couldn’t have, there weren’t any computer registrations at the time, it was all very informal, maybe a risk clause that dad signed somewhere? It was all paper documents though.”
“So it didn’t know. So Bonnie could not have told the System about it! When it saw you use the bow not too badly, it gave you the skill! It’s confirmed! The System is descriptive! We set a new standard for trapping as we showed it the most powerful trap it had ever seen, but it didn’t see anything about our actual skill! As for the levels, I’m pretty sure the Offensive, Defensive and Movement Skills, and probably Class Skills, work differently from the others. Their levels are not a comparison to this world’s best. If you check your level in walking in the movement tab and the one in the general tab, they are not the same. I’ve got level three [Walking] in the Movement skill and level thirty [Walking] in the General.”
“Erm…” I was now officially lost.
“Fine! Just to say, being level three in a skill in the Offensive skill category isn’t bad at all. The more of those we unlock, the stronger we’ll be in this world.”
“Mhh…And we set a standard in trapping without showing how we actually did it. A bit like if I had just given a good answer to a teacher without providing the reasoning behind it.”
“Yes! Anyway, I levelled up again, so I’ll quickly put my stats into mental.”
“I’ll continue my physical and mental balance.”
It took a few seconds, until we finally were ready to go back to the station. Beepy had been waiting for us for a while now.
“I need a shower so badly.” Exclaimed my sister.
I wasn’t going to argue with that.
After getting back to the station and taking a well-deserved rest, we were back on the drawing board. Our simple plan had been effective, but not for the right monster. Now we had a completely new problem on our hands.
First, me and Gaëlle discussed the idea of creating a new permanent door in LA, so that we could go back there without cost. It would force the station to recharge for two weeks, but we decided it would be best to do this as soon as possible. We wanted to know if Aaron, subject 249, was okay, we wanted access to real books, and real cooked food. We had access to free money, Bonnie could replicate fake bills to the point they weren’t fake, so why not use it? It wasn’t infinite though, because of inflation and the IRS who would notice a large rise in bills in one city. As long as it was under ten million, Gaëlle told me it would be fine.
“How do you know that, exactly?”
“Economics.” She responded factually.
“Why do they teach you how to cheat the IRS in economics?” I was especially puzzled now.
She gave me a condescending stare. “Oh, my sweet, sweet big sister. That’s the whole point of studying economics.”
I wasn’t even sure if she had been joking or not and decided not to delve into the subject matter any deeper.
It would take some time to set up a new drone to create a door in a discreet place, but Bonnie told us it would be ready in three days.
That removed our emergency measure if something bad happened in the S world, but my sister had convinced me to wait those days inside the station.
If the crow wasn’t really a monster, then the whole village wasn’t on the verge of collapse. Maybe a few more people would be killed by Henry, but we had no way of saving them until then.
So we had a bit more than two weeks. Two weeks to train, to learn, and much worse, to delve deeper into Benedict’s notes to get all the information we could. This, both me and my sister pushed away the best we could. Just reading some of the ideas this man could think of… Me and my sister were slowly able to keep apart and not touch every single moment, but a few sentences retracing Benedict’s thoughts…and we were back to hugging each other in shivers.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
In what we managed to read through, we found one important detail.
It was a description of Gorunt Fay, our buyer. It gave us pertinent information about his whereabouts and especially the names of the people Benedict was using as in-betweens to reach him. I called him a him, but that was me assuming his gender. I didn’t really expect a woman to buy two barbie doll bodyguards. Benedict hadn’t met Gorunt himself, so he hadn’t written anything about his or her appearance. That was a problem. What we now knew though, was that Gorunt Fay was First Secretary of the City of Solace. And that one of the people he was employing was…Ascensus Henry.
We had discovered that after three days of research, at the same time the door to LA was finally finished. Me and my sister had taken a stroll on the beach, eaten some ice cream, then had come back after being catcalled one too many times. The undesired rudeness had dampened our mood, but when we had continued our research on Benedict’s notes and found about Henry. We were pretty unhappy.
So the pervert maybe wasn’t just a pervert. Maybe that’s how he acted. Because he was the one who was supposed to bring two tanned twins with different hair colours to Gorunt Fay in two months’ time. He had wanted us the second his eyes fell on us, but maybe it wasn’t for personal ‘consumption’, maybe he had realized we had escaped and that he needed to reclaim us to uphold his contract with the First Secretary of a City.
That made us extra motivated to find a way to breach into the tower. The Ascensus would have Skill Books, most likely even Class Books, and intel on our target. He seemed to be a direct underling of one of the most powerful people of one of the big ‘Cities in the Upperseas”. He needed to die.
We needed to find a way into the village.
That brought the second reason why we wanted to wait a bit.
We needed to contact Rik again.
He hated us, me especially, but had seemed reasonable, even during the most difficult of times. He also seemed honourable, even though we couldn’t be sure of that just yet.
That’s why there was one of Bonnie’s drones hovering over him during the day, far enough for no one to ever spot it, but not far enough for Bonnie’s cameras to miss what he was doing. We were spying on him, which made me feel slightly bad, but I reasoned it was for the greater good. We didn’t need to make him like us, we needed to make him see the truth.
Because the crow was tamed. The same drone had caught the giant bird exiting the tower every night since we had come back to the station.
So we needed to catch Rik when he was hunting outside, as he was now tragically alone during his hunts, and convince him of the Ascensus’ role in the death of so many people.
With him we would have a way inside.
We would also need his help to get to the tower. If we could reach the nest during the night while the [Dark Crow] was away, we would place a new set of explosives inside, wait for the day then blow it all up. We expected that the whole village would see the remnants of the crow fall from the tower, and the villagers would then do the rest. I didn’t think the Ascensus would live long after that.
Now, our plan was nowhere near feasible at the present moment. Convincing Rik would be especially difficult, but so would be sneaking inside the village and inside the Ascensus’ tower… And that was why we were waiting, studying, and plotting.
The day before the start of our operation, me and Gaëlle went home. It didn’t really feel like home, both of us having left the suburban house years ago. Decades even in Gaëlle’s case.
But it was hard for me not to see it as home as nothing had changed. The garden was still this picture-perfect thing, the classical mailbox was still nice and coming straight out of an American documentary, and the two-story white house with a grey roof was still as unoriginal as all the houses of the neighbourhood. It was luxurious, bourgeois, and like the whole area, smelled of racial segregation. Whites in the beautiful and big spacious districts, with sometimes room for one or two quote on quote well-integrated Asian families, and then the others who could live in shitty condos around the bad parts of the city. LA was clearly not the worse American city in that regard, but it wasn’t completely free of it either.
It had felt good to leave.
Reminiscing about the past and our family’s sins wasn’t why we had come though. We were here to break in.
With the knowledge we had, it should have been extremely easy, and it served as practice as well as a way to say goodbye.
I had picked up gifts and a new letter for our parents. Telling them we weren’t coming back.
Me and Elle had decided on that together. We looked nothing like their children anymore, and we hadn’t been their children in spirit for a long time anyway.
Still, parents remained your parents, even when they were assholes, and I had convinced L that some sort of closure was necessary.
The Range rover and my father’s Porsche wasn’t parked in front nor in the garage, so we knew that the house was empty.
My sister picked the key under a loose brick of the entryway and unlocked the door. The smell of heavy air freshener and full blasting AC struck me immediately. I had never understood why we couldn’t just turn off the AC when no one was inside. It was such a waste. But no, my mother liked her house cool when she came back from work.
The stairs, the side door to the living room, and the house’s alarm making its soft beep beep to claim its dominance over burglars came directly into view.
I opened the panel of the alarm and pressed 5555. It stopped beeping.
“I’m setting things up in the living room.” Elle told me.
“Ok. I’m going to our rooms then; do you need something from your old room?”
“No, that ship has sailed ages ago.”
“Got it.”
Most of my stuff at my apartment on campus had been brought back to my room, according to my sister, and what I needed should have been inside.
Now, you may think that we weren’t really sneaking around, but from what we had gathered, to look inconspicuous, you just needed to act natural. We had dressed the most casually possible. We should have dressed in a way to hide our above average looks, but that would only have been possible with winter clothes. That wasn’t going to happen in California, ever, so we made do with simple jeans and t-shirts. Then strolling like we belonged in the area, go to the house as if it was the most natural thing to do, and enter quickly, but without rushing.
A neighbour would get suspicious if he saw us, especially old man Francis, but I was pretty sure we had gone in unnoticed.
I climbed the stairs two by two and turned left in the white corridor filled with family portraits of us and our parents. I stopped a second, despite trying not to, to look at myself and my sister. I was smiling uncomfortably, and she was scowling. We had to have been twelve at the time it had been taken. I didn’t even remember where it was. An attraction parc somewhere?
Seeing myself…it felt like a hammer hitting a gong in my brain. That was how I was supposed to look like, not…I looked down. I was such a beautiful woman now, and it brought such a large disconnect that I had barely taken the time to examine myself. I had asked Bonnie about undoing the changes. She had told me I would need a certified PhD in approximately ‘way too many fields’ of medicine before I could be allowed to operate on myself on that scale. But it wasn’t impossible.
I could have asked Nielle to help too.
The real issue wasn’t feasibility.
The real issue was that I would never be alive and back on that operating table at the same time. I could barely look at it.
Which meant that I needed to accept this body as my own, or slowly fall into a dysphoric state of depression. And that would mean losing Lila and breaking my promise to my sister.
Thinking about my daughter brought me back to reality, and I pulled myself away from the pictures.
I entered my room. I expected to find it unchanged, as it always had been for more than ten years but was a bit surprised when I saw it filled with carton boxes.
“Of course it changed, they brought my stuff here.” I shook my head as I talked out loud.
It smelled like books, dust, and detergent. I picked the boxes and started my search.
After a few minutes, my sister appeared on the doorstep.
“Knock knock?” She asked, mimicking the action.
“Come in.”
She looked around for a second.
“Sure you don’t want to see your room?” I asked again.
She gave me a half-smile. “I’m certain. You took your time, what are you trying to find exactly?”
“The picture of Lila’s first steps. I only started to look for it a few minutes ago, I got stuck on the picture of my old self in the corridor for I don’t know how long.”
“Yeah, I did the same downstairs in front of the Christmas album.” She confessed as well.
We stayed silent for a few seconds, before she finally broke it by asking: “Want me to help you find it?”
“Sure, we shouldn’t stay long.”
She knelt down next to me and started picking up boxes.
With the two of us, it didn’t take long to find the picture.
“That’s it, right?” My sister showed me the familiar easel and frame.
I took it and turned it around. The little face of Lila stared right at my heart.
“Yeah. Yeah, that’s it.”
“…You know what we should do?”
I felt the little clench of a hand in mine.
“…No?” I responded softly.
“Let’s buy extra furniture, some cool posters, decorations and everything. Let’s make the main room of the space station like home. Our new home. Fuck everything Benedict used, trash it all into the black hole or Bonnie’s incinerator and live like kings. We’ve got the money, we can loan a car or a truck, and we don’t even need any help to move because look at these guns!” She flexed her arm muscles. They didn’t look like much, still seemingly soft, but I knew that it was an illusion created by overwhelming science and magic. Benedict had built our bodies to be strong, and with the system, we could probably beat a large man into submission.
“That sounds like a plan. We’ll do it after fucking up Henry.”
“Agreed.”
I stored the picture in my backpack, and we left the house.
“Shouldn’t we have turned the alarm back on?” I asked as we closed the door and put the key back in its place.
“Please, mom will be back in an hour, no way a burglar comes, and we did leave proof that we were there. They’ll know it was us.”
“…Yeah. It was a dumb thing to ask.”
“No. It’s the normal thing to ask.” Gaëlle countered. “But that normal is behind us now. We’re rich. We’re beautiful. We’re strong! We’re fucking dimension hoppers! A slew of universes to explore!”
I smiled at her, I had plenty of negative counterpropositions I could have responded with, but I preferred to stay silent.
We left without looking back.
When we arrived back at the space station, I put my picture on the night shelf, picked up the food and silver water we had prepared in the fridge, and teleported to the Doors room. There, I grabbed my weapons and changed into camo gear trekking clothing with the addition of an iron helmet and a bulletproof vest. I wasn’t sure how a bulletproof vest worked against arrows, but I expected it to work. I had hoped that Bonnie would be able to create something like an individual forcefield generator, or something equally futuristic and lifesaving, but the only things that she could build with her 3D machine were things that she found freely on the Internet. One of the permanent drones on Earth’s sole role was to provide great Wi-Fi. Every futuristic thing about the station had been created through a wish, which left us with an impressive 3D machine that could create almost any material and small object known to man with ease, and a relatively intelligent AI to use it. There was no way we could work the machine ourselves, and even if I was certain there were better things than an iron helmet and a bulletproof vest, me and my sister didn’t know about it and so couldn’t ask Bonnie to make them. At least the vest was the one with the greatest protection/weight ratio available on the market… according to our very limited research.
My sister stood next to me, dressed like me, and we waited for Door System 5 to be brought up.
Our mission today was to establish contact with Rik, who would be going hunting in five hours around the inverted river. He always went there after heavy downpours, and that had happened the day before. This was the perfect spot and timing to get him alone.
But it was also a time where he was nervous and with his bow ready to shoot.
Which explained why we had decided on an iron helmet and vest.
I prayed for me and Gaëlle not to get shot today, and touched the rope of the trans-dimensional door.