Still no mention of levels. I could’ve sworn the initial system message said my class was level one, but now that I’ve seen every tab in my Card, there’s no sign of it. Either I missed something obvious or there’s hidden information somewhere I can’t access. Probably under some higher Mind threshold.
I press the ‘Twisting Fate’ skill and wait for it to fill the screen with its description.
Twisting Fate: Gambler Class skill.
Force an event to end in either its best likely outcome or worst likely outcome.
Gains (1) use every 100 hours, up to a maximum of (1). Recharges 2% faster per point of Fate.
Current uses stored: (1).
Upgrade cost:???
Upgrade requirements:???
High Stakes: Gambler Class skill.
Create a situation with a non-determinative outcome.
Any Worth you wager on that outcome will be paid out based on the situation’s odds.
If you are caught cheating, you instantly lose.
Worth gained in this way cannot be used again with this skill.
Current maximum odds: 1/1.
Upgrade cost:???
Upgrade requirements:???
Okay, one of those sounded way stronger than the other. But in tandem, I guess I could gamble away all of my Worth for the chance to instantly get way more? In… one to one odds. I’m pretty sure that means I’d win one Worth for every one Worth I bet, or effectively doubling whatever I bet. So no massive payouts for me.
“One to one odds, huh. Like a coin toss.”
I slip a coin through my fingers and let it rest against my palm. It barely feels there any more–almost like it’ll poof away at any second.
“Well, I paid three Worth for two spells. Can’t be too sad with that deal.” I tell myself as I position the coin over my thumb nail. “I wonder if this thing’ll still disappear if I wager it.”
I flick my thumb upwards, sending the coin spinning through the air. That same sensation as when I flipped the ghost quarter shoots through me. Two words pool at the tip of my tongue, equally viable in their chance at winning.
“Heads.” I eventually say mere moments before the coin flumps into the sand.
A sensation of loss plinks against my mind as I bend down to check it. The tally mark is face-up, and the moment I see it with my own two eyes, the coin fades away like steam on a windy day.
Well, that’s why I have two more. I line them up on both of my thumb nails and flick them upwards, but this time I don’t call anything. They spiral through the air, the sensation of potential nipping at my mind all the while. It dies the second they hit the sand, and when I bend down, neither the one that landed on heads nor the one that landed tails disappears.
“Don’t know what I expected, but at least I can’t accidentally use the skill.” I chuckle as I pick up the coins. “There’s got to be a way to abuse this, but even if I double all my Worth, I’m still stuck at thirty-four. Only nine-hundred and sixty-six away from the goal, and however many Worth thresholds are in between.”
I line one coin back up on my nail. I have one more idea I want to try, and if it works, it could mean almost guaranteed success. It was a simple trick I’d learned from my grandma a long time ago, and it had been good enough that I always ended up choosing where to go for supper when my family argued about it.
The skill description only said ‘if you are caught cheating’, after all.
With a glassy ‘ping’, I flip the coin straight up into the air. It spins multiple times before it falls back down, and I snatch it out of the air before it can fall to the sand below. Then, without looking, I press it to the back of my other hand. The tingling sensation never goes away throughout the entire ordeal.
Carefully and without making any unnecessary movements, I press my palm against the back of the coin.
“Heads.”
I peel my fingers away. The coin shimmers with a golden aura for a split second, and the single tally mark that I revealed to the world gains a luminescent twin.
A grin splits my face, only diminished by the fact that I’m still pretty damn poor.
“Oh, I can take advantage of this.”
The coin flickers once, then disappears. A pang of fear lances through my heart, but the message that follows sets me at ease.
Tutorial period expired.
All unspent Worth reclaimed.
I spend the next few minutes figuring out how to turn my Worth into physical coins. The search starts at the stat screen and ends at the ‘information’ screen. It’s like a combination help screen, options menu, and library for everything I’ve spent Worth identifying. After reading through a bunch of system garbage for situations I can’t even start to make sense of, I find a very short list of commands.
“Deposit, Withdraw, Confirm, Cancel.” I read with a nod. “The last two are probably for the purchases the system alluded to. So I don’t have to worry about them.”
I hold out my hand, palm-up.
“Withdraw.”
A tiny twinge responds from somewhere in my stomach, but it could just as easily be the first inklings of hunger.
“Uh… Withdraw five Worth?”
Another twinge, this time a little stronger. But still not quite there, as is made obvious by the lack of coins in my palm. I think back to the spell tutorial’s exact wording and find my answer there.
“Withdraw five glass lones.”
The twinge dissipates as five glass coins drop into my palm. I sigh in relief and tab over to my stats. Yes, indeed, my Worth has gone down by five. So that number is actually my Liquid Worth, and the one on the Class Card itself is my Net Worth. There’s probably some kind of trick here that I can’t think of, but nothing comes to mind at the moment.
So I shake off the feeling and get to flipping coins. One by one I rig the outcomes, and one by one they double their values. It almost feels like cheating–well, it kind of is cheating–but it’s not like I’m scamming anyone out of their money. Just the nebulous concept of an almighty system that might end up killing me in two weeks.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
Hard to feel guilty about that.
“Well, now I have a guaranteed thirty-four Worth. And one corpse.” I sigh and shake my head. “Shit. Really feels like I haven’t made any progress.”
…Wait. If I can make purchases with my Worth, that has to mean I can sell things for Worth. I couldn’t find anything like a store in the part of the system I’ve got access to, so there’s got to be someplace I can make those purchases. Not that it’s anywhere close, if the empty horizon’s any indicator.
But it means I’ve got a goal. More like a glimmer of hope, actually. I bend down and press my hand against the shark-dog’s skin, then touch one of the empty inventory squares with the other.
“Deposit.”
Another tingle. I roll my eyes and sigh.
“Deposit shark-dog, you hyper-specific prick.”
A gold-tinged film spreads over the shark-dog from where my fingertips touch it, coating the entire thing in less than a second. It flashes bright gold, then disappears and reappears as a simple 2-D picture in my Class Card.
Young Great White Dane corpse stored.
Predicted Worth: 31.
If untreated, it will begin to decompose in (63.5) hours.
Of course the system doesn’t keep things fresh. That’d just be waaay too easy. And the news that I’ll have to kill over thirty of these things if I want to meet the thousand Worth goal really doesn’t help my mood.
“No map, no hints, no nothing.” I mutter to myself as I collapse the Class Card and dismiss it. “I wonder if I can use Twisting Fate to find the right direction to walk. ‘Likely outcome’ can’t be too strict, right?”
I take a breath and look out over the sea of sand. “All I’ve gotta do is figure out how to use it.”
----------------------------------------
Hours pass in frustration. No matter what I try, I can’t get the skill to trigger. Flipping a coin to decide where I want to go–no trigger. Drawing a half-circle in the sand and dropping a coin? Nope, no trigger. Spinning randomly and stopping just as randomly?
You guessed it, no trigger.
By the time I give up and lie down for the night, I’m more confused than anything. As I lie on the sand, backpack under my head as a pillow, I finally get a chance to just stare up at the sky and contemplate what could be going wrong.
The first thing that comes to mind is that it’s way too complicated. If the place I’m aiming for is hundreds of miles away, then there are thousands of ‘wrong’ paths to take. Meaning the one ‘right’ path is so unlikely that my skill can’t trigger to bring it into reality.
But even when I tossed a coin to decide between two directions, it still didn’t trigger. Did that mean both ways were wrong, so there wasn’t a right option? Or were both equally right, and there’s not a set place I’m supposed to be aiming for yet? The destination might not have spawned yet, for all I know. Or it’s somewhere that’s completely inaccessible to me–like over the water–and something’ll show up when it’s time to go.
I pull out my Class Card just to make sure I definitely have a use of my skill left, then sigh and put it away. Whatever’s making the skill not work is damn consistent, I’ll give it that.
“I know I’m missing something. Probably more than one thing, honestly.”
I set my arm under my makeshift pillow and roll over on my side. The temperature’s still absolutely perfect–which is really weird, since the sun’s gone down and all–and I don’t even need a blanket to sleep. Parts of this weird world seem like they’re made with the absolute minimum necessary in mind, but everything I’m supposed to work towards feels completely impossible.
After making the effort to swallow around the lump in my throat, I close my eyes and try to quiet my mind. If there are more shark-dogs out there, there’s a real good chance I’m not waking up in the morning. Or at all, if things go really wrong.
----------------------------------------
The light of morning brushes against my eyelids like tiny butterflies punching me straight in the head. I groan in discomfort and shift away from the sun, reaching out with my right arm to grope for my phone slash alarm clock. All I feel is the sort of hard sand before it turns into silky grains between my fingers.
Right. The whole teleported-to-another-world thing.
With a mighty effort I roll over and pull myself to my feet. I smack my dry lips and glare down at my backpack, cursing past me for not filling up that filtering water bottle last night after I drained it. But… something’s off.
There’s a shadow lingering over it. Which should’ve stopped the sunlight from hitting my eyes. I lean in and frown at the thing, but even though the shadow should be over my face, the sunlight directly impacts my eyes. Sunlight that’s coming from literally every direction, which should’ve stopped a shadow from forming in the first place.
“What the hell is up with this place?” I mutter as I look out over the horizon. A band of light surrounds everywhere I can see, almost like the sun is rising from literally every direction at the same time.
It definitely wasn’t like that yesterday. And… uh, all those things casting shadows weren’t there either.
Massive walls snake through the beach and into the water, dipping below the sea level and disappearing shortly after. They’re decorated like I’d expect a designer sandcastle to be– shells, beach glass, brightly coloured rocks, and more than a few ghost quarters create an intricate pattern that gives off a sense of majesty.
Majesty that’s completely blocked me in from all sides, but which only creates a shadow from exactly one point. A single dark blue shovel, placed atop one of the walls like a flag, that glimmers in the morning light like a shining sapphire.
It takes a little longer than is probably healthy for me to realize that I’m seeing both the walls and the horizon at the same time, which is simply not possible. As my mind comes to terms with the paradoxical display, the walls collapse into nothing. The shovel falls with them, but right before it sinks into the ground below, it gleams orange-ish yellow for the shortest of split seconds.
The same colour as my Fate stat.
I blink and rub my eyes, then wince and try to blink out the sand I just put there. “Did I just miss my first Fate event?”
Something tells me that yes, I did just miss it. Another much larger part of me asks where the hell the walls and shovel came from in the first place. Did they protect me while I slept? Were they actually real, or some kind of magical illusion? And if I’d had a high enough Fate stat, could I have kept the shovel for myself?
“Maybe Fate isn’t such a dump stat.”
I pick up my backpack, brush the sand off of it, and prepare myself for another long day of hiking through nothing. My feet sink into the sand with the next step I take, reminding me how much worse the terrain is when the sand doesn’t harden under my feet.
Fifty-something hours to find a place to sell the shark-dog. I can’t imagine it being anywhere close to enough time, but it’s what I have to work with.
Something rumbles from deep below my feet. It slowly works its way up my legs until even my teeth are chattering. I look all around for the source of the disturbance, but there’s nothing to be seen. The sand is still, the water doesn’t have so much as a ripple, and absolutely nothing is making a sound.
But the rumbling doesn’t stop. If anything, it grows stronger and stronger as I start awkwardly jogging away. The sand slows every single step I take, drawing me in slightly deeper and sucking my foot in when I try to pull it out. It’s almost a full-body workout just to take a dozen steps, and the latent panic that’s starting to set in isn’t doing my rapidly rising blood pressure any favors.
Pull out foot. Struggle to keep the one planted from falling any deeper into the sand. Plant foot on sand, then pull the one stuck in deep out as quickly as possible. Every repetition of the pattern exhausts me incomprehensibly quickly, and even though no threat’s shown itself, my mind and body are telling me to get the hell away from where I slept for the night.
Slowly but surely, I run out of fuel. My breaths come as ragged gasps through a throat that feels like it’s been swallowing glass with every inhale. I slow down unwillingly, fumbling through a roaring heartbeat and trembling fingers to fill up my filter bottle and grab an energy bar. The cap twists off awkwardly, and I fumble with the filtering mechanism to get it to let the water inside of the bottle.
“Come on, come on.” I hiss through chattering teeth with a look back at absolutely nothing. My imagination’s doing far worse than anything real could ever hope to be. “I know I’ve been putting off going to the gym for the past few… years. God, it’s really been years.”
I cap my bottle as quickly as my shaking hands can manage and stuff it into my backpack. The energy bar finds itself between my teeth, and I scramble to my feet to resume the plodding escape from whatever’s shaking the earth.
Before I can take another step, a porcelain white shard erupts through the sand. It’s spiraled and matte like a sharp seashell, with tiny cracks inside that show a gleaming mother of pearl interior that’s been tinted black.
It isn’t alone.
Two by two, the shard is joined by more just like it. They close off a ring about ten feet away from me in all directions that moves as I do, then start shining a silvery-black that seems to bleed out from the interior of the spikes. Everything inside of me screams to get out of the ring. It promises that if I let them go completely black, then I won't have to worry about the shark-dog decomposing.
Because I’ll be rotting right along with it.
With shaking hands I call my class card and pull out a handful of ghost quarters. The rumbling grows to a fever pitch, shaking me so hard it feels like my muscles are detaching from my bones. The dark sheen spiraling up the spikes is almost at the tippy top. I’ll only get one shot at this, and I’m not even sure if it’ll work.
I clench my teeth to stop them from chattering and flick a ghost quarter less than an inch into the air, then slap it down on the back of my hand.
“Heads.”
It shines through my skin, doubling its value to a meager one Worth.