I had sixteen of my thirty-seven gold remaining, which was laid out on the green woolen blanket atop the bed in my room at the inn, along with everything else I owned. Well, my new clothes were on my person, my old ones were at the laundry, and my boots were by the door, but everything else I had to my name I’d splayed out to take proper stock of the situation. Red had bought me the leather satchel, which featured handsomely carved clasps and an inner lining to keep my items nice and dry. There was also what was sold as a week’s worth of dried fruit, nuts, meat, and cheese, as well as a small loaf of dark bread. I had a sturdy glass bottle for water reinforced by bits of wood, and two changes of socks and underpants. The undies were longer than I expected, but still fit similarly enough to my preferred boxer shorts that I felt comfortable. Remaining from what I started with was a faux-leather wallet which contained my ID card, debit card, and a few gift/membership cards to various stores I would be surprised to find had a branch on this plane. There was also a receipt from Panda Express that I was far too hesitant to throw away because I’d actually called the survey line and actually got a coupon code for a free meal that didn’t expire. Throwing it away would feel like wasted effort somehow, in exactly the way spending three hours scrolling reddit posts that refuse to load properly and aren’t the least bit amusing when they do somehow never did. It had been in my wallet for at least a year prior to the crash, and it would remain so for the foreseeable future.
Then, of course, there was the book: the Grimoire di Magi e Mythe inscribed as belonging to Glenn Anura, who was me, except I had never seen the tome before in my life. Even within the realm of fantasy fiction, while it bore a similarity to books in general, it was both more in-depth than a simple wizard’s repository of spells and it broke what I would typically consider an important part of the fourth wall, suspension of disbelief, or at least the meta-game. Theoretically a culture of magic-users could define the quantity for an expendable resource like mana by setting a value for a low-effort spell that they couldn’t literally cast all day and using that to determine how much mana an individual had, then compare that to how quickly other spells drained their pool, so on and so forth through experimentation and shared data. But they almost never did. Video games only referred to Magic Points and such as a way of relaying data to the player, and rarely if ever was it taken as an in-universe measurement. By the same token, it wasn’t often a sorcerer would say ‘I can cast two fireballs today’, instead feeling the energy that flowed through them diminish after the first casting. The major exception were the traditional Dungeons and Dragons spell system and the Dying Earth novels by Jack Vance they were inspired by. Even then, I’d been in D&D games where the DM tried to blur the line between the mechanics and the reality of the game by calling 2nd-level spells ‘spells of the second level of ability’ and such. As a result of all that, to see the Parting the Veil spell plainly list it required ¼ of my maximum mana as well as a mana value on my character sheet Personal Record felt strange, perhaps even like an unfair advantage within the world.
The Personal Record itself listed my name, height, physical build (pudgy was an apt description, if rude), birthday, and blood type. It had my eyes as blue and my hair as ‘blonde ombre’, which I assumed would change in the future since my natural color was a disappointing shade of brown and the blonde was a dye-job. All that I knew about myself. The more interesting portions were the entries listed under Attributes, Characteristics, and Traits. There were eight Attributes and a single skill attached to each of them: Strength (Muscle), Athleticism (Agility), Endurance (Stamina), Accuracy (Manual Dexterity), Perception (Awareness), Aptitude (Memory), Will (Focus), and Charisma (Persuade). There was also a Luck skill listed that didn’t have an associated attribute. The values listed were as follows…
STR 2 +0 Muscle (5 Base)
ATH 1 +0 Agility (4 Base)
END 3 +0 Stamina (6 Base)
ACC 2 +2 Man Dex (5 Base)
PER 3 +3 Awareness (6 Base)
APT 3 +0 Memory (6 Base)
WIL 3 +2 Focus (6 Base)
CHA 3 +3 Persuade (6 Base)
+2 Luck (No Base)
I found it interesting that the traditional Dexterity had been split into Athleticism and Accuracy, as well as dividing Wisdom between Perception and Will. Aptitude seemed to be the replacement for Intelligence, which I also found curious. Were any of these attributes tied to my ability to cast spells? When and if I got to level up, should I be focusing on one aspect of my ability over another? Regardless, as much as the gamer in me might like to protest my scores should be higher, they seemed like a pretty accurate estimation of my ability. Not knowing what the upper or lower limits of the system were, I might have a proportionately different opinion depending on the scale. Assuming they were ranked from one to ten, it made sense; I was overweight and out-of-shape compared to a lot of my peers, and while I was clever and charismatic in contrast to a lot of folks I knew, it wasn’t like I was a powerful politician or respected scientist. The fact that I had a bonus to Manual Dexterity, Awareness, Focus, Persuade, and Luck was interesting, as well as the concept of a ‘base’ for my skill check. Comparing the numbers, it seemed like the base check was the associated attribute plus three, but I had no clue what that meant functionally. Was it like Passive Perception in D&D, where that’s what the skill check was if I wasn’t actively trying to use it? If so, why didn’t Luck have a base? Had I made any skill checks yet? Putting the questions aside for now, I explored other areas of my Personal Record.
Under my Characteristics I was informed I could carry up to seventy-five pounds, had a movement speed of twenty feet, could take four ‘hits’ (whatever that meant) and my current wardrobe counted as one hit of armor. My initiative was set at four, with no plus symbol to denote it was added to a roll, and both my mana in blue-green and a yellow bar labeled ‘energy’ maxed out at sixteen. Both were full, and I wondered if my bath-nap counted as enough rest to restore my mana from when I’d used the Parting the Veil spell to pull Red into this plane, or if it didn’t count for some reason, like casting magic during a video game cutscene. The grimoire listed me as proficient with thrown weapons and noted that I spoke English (Ruben) and Spanish, which had no parenthetical beside it. Implying I was fluent in Spanish was a stretch, anyhow, since I hadn’t much spoke the language since my Senior year of high school, but I’d take what advantages I could get even if it seemed unlikely to come up. I had three bubbles of a meter labeled ‘Willpower’ filled in (the same number as my Will, and there were ten potential bubbles in total, hence my assumption we were working on a scale from one to ten), two ‘Connections’, whatever that meant, and a tally of experience points. According to the book I had accrued one hundred and eighteen experience during my lifetime, but only had eight remaining presently and gained them at a rate of four. Four of what, exactly, wasn’t clear. Was it four experience per battle? Did I gain one experience point every four days? Successful skill checks? I would have to monitor that closely to see if I could gain some knowledge on how the system functioned, since it would probably mean the difference between life and death at some point in the future.
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Finally, the Traits, which were split into two headers: Passive and Active. The Passive Traits I had were listed as Animal Whisperer, Attractive, Entertainer, Light Sleeper, Phobia, and Powerful Relic. Unlike the rest of them, Phobia had a little skull next to it, and I assumed that meant it wasn’t a good Trait to have. Having battled with my fear of heights from a very young age, it was never any fun and I hoped that particular aspect wouldn’t come into play. There were no descriptions listed, but they seemed fairly straightforward; I was good with animals, could put on a show, woke up easily, and apparently the book thought I was quite the looker. I imagined the grimoire itself was the ‘powerful relic’, and I agreed that having a peek behind the curtain of reality itself was a mighty asset. The Active Traits were fewer, listed as Dodge, Knock on Wood, and Stick the Landing, and they seemed to be arranged much like the spells with details blurred by unstable typeface. Perhaps I had to figure out how to use them before I could know what they meant?
The Record of Achievement was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a record of my achievements, and it seemed to have a World of Warcraft-style level of unnecessary depth, from what I could see. So far, I’d only unlocked ‘First Link in the Chain’ for linking my first esper and a mini-achievement ‘Willowbright’ on the way to ‘Exploring Teren Balt’, but the other stops I needed to make to get it were obscured to me. There were no new entries in the Esper Index or Spell Index, but Red was listed in the Esper Records section by name. Like my character sheet, there was a small, crudely-drawn picture of him as well as his own Attributes and Characteristics, but curiously no Traits. The entire entry was smaller in general, lacking in more personal details that one could gather as generalities from the grimalkin pages in the Esper Index. Some of his physical scores were lower than mine, but his Charisma was a point above me, and this was all reflected by slightly different values in his Characteristics. It would probably behoove me at some point to go over the math and see if I could extrapolate the value of an Attribute point, especially if I was able to gain a wider net of data from other sources, but my head was still a little swimmy from being jackknifed across dimensions, so it was a task for another day. Still, I needed answers. An anchor point to feel comfortable starting my existence in this world from, and the safest option was sitting in a wooden chair, eating handfuls from an odiferous paper bag labeled ‘tuna flakes’.
“Hey, Red? You said chainers and other wizards don’t—”
“Whoa, whoa!” he winced. “I know you got amnesia, but I wasn’t expectin’ you to forget that. You gotta give me a second!”
“Excuse me?”
“Folks in polite society don’t say that word, pal. It’s a derogatory term for a magic-user.”
“Why is ‘one who is wise’ a derogatory term for a magic-user?” I could feel my face screwing up in confusion. I wasn’t an etymologist by any professional definition, but I always found words interesting, and I enjoyed looking up their origins from time to time.
“Context?” he shrugged. “How does any word become an insult? Enough people use it only when bein’ an asshole an’ suddenly that’s all it means anymore. That word’s been taboo for as long as I can remember, and I ain’t exactly no spring chicken.”
“I see,” suddenly I was less fond of the bartender downstairs. “My apologies, then. What are more acceptable terms?”
“Spellcaster,” he answered around a fresh mouthful of dried fish shavings, “magic-user. Chainer, warlock, sorcerer, an’ a bunch of others, dependin’ on your profession. Sheesh, I’m gonna hafta help you remember a lot about the world, huh?”
“More than you know,” I sighed. Now was probably the best time to get all this out of the way. “Look, earlier when I told you I had amnesia… that was true at the time, but it was only short-term and I’m pretty sure I’ve recovered from it already. The more complicated truth is… I’m not from this plane.”
“Okay,” he shrugged. “Me neither.”
“Is that… common around here?”
“I mean, for espers, sure. But I’ve seen a lotta espers and, buddy, you ain’t one.”
“Your lack of a reaction is both surprising and concerning.”
“Whaddya want me to do, freak out?” He rolled up the top of his snack bag and set it aside. “So you’re from another dimension, or plane, or whatever. All right. You yanked me outta one earlier today. I was only aware of the two, but if there’s two there can be three, or more, probably. There’re likely spellcasters somewhere who already know all about it.”
“Oh, true!” That seemed like a viable path toward discovering a way home, which was more than I had a moment ago. A little voice near the base of my skull whispered, ‘do you want to go home?’ but I ignored it for now. “All right, so, I just need to find a skilled enough magic-user and see what my options are.”
“Ha! That’s rich! Good luck, chief. Common folk don’t really get access to powerful casters without a lot of money, unless your plan was to go around tellin’ people you ain’t from around here until someone important enough takes interest. But I would advise strongly against that if you know what’s good for ya.”
“I wasn’t planning on it, no. In fact, I’d kind of like to keep the whole ‘I’m from another plane’ business between us unless absolutely necessary. But I could use some help acclimating to this place, and so far you’ve helped me find a bed and not run off with my money, so I feel like I can trust you.”
“Well, I’m not sayin’ I wouldn’t have done either, especially after you pulled my fat outta the fire, but the link is a strong motivator.”
“That’s a great place to start, actually, the link. What… is it? What does it do, exactly? How did it get established?”
“Hoo, boy,” he rubbed at his eyes with both paws. “That’s a lot of exposition, chief. You sure you want me to prattle on about this?”
“I kind of need you to, yes.”
“All right. Well. I ain’t exactly an expert on the metaphysics of it all, but when a spellcaster reaches through the veil the magic they draw on to do so forms a bond between both parties. It’s like an involuntary enchantment you just kinda accept is gonna happen, like when you take that first bite of hot pizza, the cheese is gonna burn the roof of your mouth, but you know an’ accept the risks goin’ in.” This world had pizza, that was a definite plus. “It ain’t much, basically we’d have a hard time actin’ directly antagonistic to one another. There’s a vibe that sorta makes us… simpatico, y’know? Easier to get along. I also don’t think we can get too far from each other, but I ain’t sure the limit. It’s pretty big. But, like, I couldn’t go back across the veil to the Esperwild if I wanted to.”
“Do you want to?”
“Eh, not really. It ain’t that much different from here, an’ there’s more people I’ve pissed off on the other side.”
“Good,” I breathed a small sigh of relief. “Crossing one plane is enough for me for a while.”
“Well, if you change your mind, lemme know. I’d be happy to show ya all the best hangout spots. There’s a salmon-on-a-stick stand I hit up a lot that’s just…” He curled his fingers and kissed them in the apparently universal gesture of a chef’s appreciation for a delicious meal. “Anyhow, it’s not a huge deal. We’ll get you to someone who can maybe teach you how to cast the link-breakin’ spell when we can. I don’t mind helpin’ you out in the meantime. But that kinda instruction is gonna cost money, an’ you ain’t gonna make it anytime soon washin’ dishes or sweepin’ floors.”
“I’m hoping you have an alternative suggestion?”
“I do, actually. Most chainers use their ability to build a team of espers an’ fight other chainers’ teams. It’s like the national pastime around here. There’s a whole racket around it with prize money an’ high-profile fights in front of a screamin’ crowd against these big-shots called Gladiators, an’ then there’s the whole league ladder to climb… you wanna get rich quick? Build an esper team an’ lead ‘em to victory.”
I was listening as Red continued to elaborate on the concepts, I was. But suddenly a lot of smaller pieces of the world’s tapestry fell into place and helped to make sense of concepts I’d failed to connect on my own. There were magic spells instead of capsule system balls, of course, and all of the terminology was slightly different. There was an extra layer of complexity to everything with my own opportunities for growth and the prevalence of magic, but I had in my possession an auto-updating index of magical creatures that I could collect and train to fight for glory and prize money. Excitement welled up from my stomach and into my chest as I was immediately overcome with a burning desire to catch and catalogue them all!