Edgar awoke to find himself laying facedown on hard stone.
“W-What, where am I?”
His thinking wasn’t quite as clear as he had on Pharaoh’s platform. He felt… heavy. He jumped to his feet, realization seeping in as he patted his face and looked down at his arms and legs.
“I’m alive! haha!” He called. “I’m back, holy balls! I’m back!”
Very quickly, he realized his body wasn’t quite as he remembered it. He surprised himself by unconsciously slapping a tail in his excitement, scaring himself at the sharp thwa-crack.
“What the…” He said, spinning in a circle, well… chasing his own tail. After cringing at that thought, he relaxed, letting it fall to the ground where he could see it.
It was thin and gray, ending with a thicker, harder piece at the end shaped like a spade from a deck of cards.
“I have a… tail?” Edgar marveled.
It wasn’t all that different from how it felt to having an arm, only it was attached to his butt. As he flexed it and played with it, he realized he had an enormous amount of control over it too, much more than his arms. He could twist it into different shapes and coil it around itself. If he wasn’t careful, he could even get it stuck in a knot—which he instantly realized felt absolutely awful and he hoped to never do it again… sigh.
Experimenting, he found he could swing his tail with a fair bit of force despite how thin it was. The hard end was a bit like the head of a mace. After a few test swings back and forth, he heard a delightful chime and something like a holographic display appeared in front of him.
New Skill Acquired!
[Tail Whip]
The display grew and the text changed.
Skill: [Tail Whip]
* Strike a single target with your tail.
* Cost: Low stamina
* Cooldown: 3 seconds
* Level: 0
* Progress to level 1: 0%
Edgar stared blankly at it for a moment, poking it hesitantly, but his finger passed right through. He wondered if this were some of the “magic” Pharaoh had bragged about. The resemblance to an interface in a video game was striking. He had played his fair share of MMORPGs during his brief stint on Earth.
If it’s like a video game, there should be a way I can control it.
On console, he’d just hit a button on the controller to close it, but he didn’t have that. On PC games, there was sometimes an “x” button at the top of each window, but he didn’t see anything obvious he was meant to interact with. Maybe it was voice activated?
“Thank you?… No thank you?… Goodbye?… Sayonara!?”
Nothing seemed to work.
Whatever, I guess it will follow me around for a bit.
Frustrated, he waved a hand through it and looked away. To his surprise, the screen collapsed and disappeared with a whooshing sound that ended like a water drop.
“Huh,” he wasn’t sure if it was the gesture or the eye movement, but he was getting somewhere.
He scratched his chin, “if I got one skill that quickly, what are the odds I have any others?”
Another floating screen appeared, with his name at the top.
Edgar Voss
* Race: [Riftling]
* Health: 10/10
* Mana: 10/10
* Stamina: 10/10
Leveling
* Level: 1
* Essence to next level: 0%
Skills
1. [Tail Whip] (lvl 0)
2. x
3. x
4. x
5. x
6. x
7. x
Abilities
1. [Inventory] (lvl 0)
2. [One with Darkness] (lvl 1)
3. [Tasty Snacks] (lvl 0)
4. x
5. x
6. x
7. x
System Abilities
* [Friend of Pharaoh] (lvl 0)
Family: Voss
* Members: 1
* Descendants: 0
“Friend of Pharaoh…Really? Is Pharaoh a bit… desperate? What sort of all-powerful being goes to this length, rebranding their subjects as their friends… Wait a minute, I’m a Riftling? What the heck is that?”
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A second screen opened in front of the first one.
Race: [Riftling]
* One born in a Rift.
* Racial Abilities: [One with Darkness], [Tasty Snacks]
Edgar stared at the screen for a moment…
“Is it just me or is this dialog box giving me sass? Pharaoh must be messing with me,” Edgar sighed.
He glanced down at his hands as he processed the last message, surprised to realize the floating dialog boxes and strange skills were somehow less upsetting than finding out he wasn’t human anymore. If his identity were a Jenga tower, the “human” block was one of the lowest blocks in the tower. One of the ones you definitely thought nobody in their right mind would ever try to move.
Although, being a god probably meant automatic wins in whatever life creation Jenga they decided to play… sigh… On the bright side, he still had two hands and two feet. If he wasn’t human, he was at least humanoid, which was close enough? He couldn’t see his own face, but he pushed that thought as far away as he could for now, trying hard to look on the bright side. He had been dead, after all.
He’d rather adjust to a new body than be dead.
Glancing between his legs, he was very grateful to find the family jewels intact. Although, with a jolt, he suddenly realized that in all the excitement with his tail and then the various screens, he hadn’t even noticed the small fact that he was butt naked.
“Really?… Couldn’t an all powerful being at least have the decency to reincarnate a guy with some pants?”
Glancing back at his player details screen. Considering his gaming knowledge, Edgar had a decent guess at what the [Inventory] skill did.
“Any chance my inventory has pants in it?”
Another new screen unfolded, this one dominated by a grid of squares. Empty squares, unfortunately. No pants.
“Of course not…”
He did notice five fields along the bottom labeled with different coins. From left to right he saw a Platinum coin, a Gold coin, a Silver coin, an Iron coin, and a Copper coin. He figured Gold was definitely worth more than Copper, so Platinum was probably worth the most and Copper the least. The screen showed no indication of conversion rates between the different coins, though.
He dismissed his [Inventory] and glanced at his player details again. His eyes lingered on the skills and abilities. [Tasty Snacks] was probably lame and [One with Darkness] sounded like Pharaoh had turned him into a vampire or something. He shivered, hesitantly touching a finger to his canines and not loving that they were pointier than he remembered. He also didn't love that flexing his upper jaw seemed to extend them a few centimeters lower in his mouth.
Creepy…
Scanning his body for other anomalies, he found that his fingernails were hard and gray instead of the pink-ish color he was used to. Similar to his teeth, he could flex his fingers and his fingernails would extend about ten centimeters. The fact that they sounded vaguely like knives sliding from a sheath as they extended was not lost on Edgar.
Super creepy…
At least his little guy was a bit bigger, so it wasn’t all bad news.
“What’s one with darkness?”
Ability: [One with Darkness]
* Movement speed in shadows is increased.
* Side Effect: [Darkvision]. Sight through non-magical darkness up to 60 feet.
* Side Effect: [Rift Sight].
* Aspect: Darkness
* Level: 1
* Experience to next level: 0%
At least it was less sinister than he was expecting.
“What is rift sight? That sounds useful. And what on earth is tasty snacks?”
Side Effect: [Rift Sight]
* While active, a player can see the boundary between rift space and the material plane.
* Cost: 50 Mana per second
* Cooldown: 6 hours
* This side effect is leveled with its parent ability, [One with Darkness].
Ability: [Tasty Snacks]
* Monsters from Rifts can now drop [Monster Meat] as an item. Consuming [Monster Meat] restores health and mana.
* Level: 0
* Experience to next level: 0%
“Gak! Nope! No thanks!” Edgar reflexively shied away from [Tasty Snacks] and the screen closed.
“No way I’m doing that. Ever.”
Edgar shivered, collecting himself and turning towards his last skill, [Rift Sight]. He wasn’t sure what ‘rift space’ or ‘the material plane’ were, but it kind of sounded like seeing between two parallel universes?
Trippy…
Of course, glancing between his player details and the skill, he only had ten mana and the skill required fifty—per second!—so he couldn’t use it. His player sheet implied he could level up, so hopefully this would increase his stats and he’d be able to cast it someday. However, even if he doubled his mana every level—which seemed like an absurd growth rate—he wouldn’t be able to use the skill until level four…
”Bah,” he waved his hands, closing the remaining screens. “So much for that. Looks like it’s just me and you for now, tail whip.”
If this world is anything like a game, I’ll have to fight. Unless this turns out to be some sort of cozy crafting sort of game, but by the look of this gothic architecture I really doubt it.
Edgar shivered. I really hope I don’t die immediately… again! Dying once was enough for one lifetime—Although, does reincarnation even count as the same lifetime? Probably not—The real problem is I might not get reincarnated next time…
With thoughts of mortality creeping back into his mind, Edgar took a moment to look around. He was in some sort of ancient, gothic antechamber made of stone. Where the floors were still intact, they looked polished, but in many places the stones were damaged or missing. Piles of broken stone sat in the corners of the room, collecting at the base of the walls. An arched ceiling towered over him, decorated with a harsh, wrought iron chandelier. There wasn’t a single window to be seen. The only lighting came from candles on the chandelier and lanterns fixed to the walls, all of which flickered with dim purple light.
The only way out of the room was a hallway at the opposite end of the antechamber.
The foreboding atmosphere didn’t help with his thoughts of mortality. The look on Poppy’s face as their bus fell flashed in his mind. He hoped she was ok, wherever she might be. Pharaoh had said she was alive, so he just hoped it was true.
He could only imagine it was a side-effect of reincarnation, but there was an odd dullness to his memories of his past life, as if those things had happened long ago and maybe even to someone else. The memory of Poppy as they fell, floating in the bus in front of him, stood out as the clearest memory he could recall.
However, there was nothing he could do for her right now, beyond keep himself alive. He began walking towards the hallway leading out of the room. Idly, he kicked a rock towards one of the piles of debris at the edge of the room and nearly jumped out of his skin when he heard a snoring sound and a lump rolled off the pile, falling heavily to the floor.
“Oof!” The lump turned out to have a rather feminine voice and unfurled arms and legs, crawling tiredly to its feet.
“What the… where am I?”
~~~~~~~~~~
* Check out the Stats Page for this Chapter here