Physically, Boyd had traveled across space and time and was sitting in a stone room with four people he did not know and could not understand.
Temporally and mentally, Boyd was elsewhere.
He arrived in a white room marked “Assignment” on the walls in dark red coloring, each wall bearing a single instance of the word.
In front of him was an entirely human looking woman in her mid 40s. She was wearing a World War 2 Era nurse’s outfit. She was attractive and smiling, but in the sort of way that made you feel comfortable but not uncomfortable. She hummed a tune as she typed on an ole-fashioned typewriter. She sounded slightly Southern which Boyd found comforting as it meant he might still be in Oklahoma. Boyd stared at her for a few seconds, placed her as a nurse, and then realized he must be in a hospital. Given that Walker had attempted to blow him up what was just a few seconds ago in his own mind, he assumed he must have a concussion. This would explain the odd surroundings, but not impoliteness, so he did what came natural now that he had come to.
Boyd jumped up and extended his hand, “Hi ma’am, I’m Boyd Bridges, how ya’…oh shit I’m naked. Oh I am so sorry ma’am, is my dick err… penis supposed to be uhm exposed?” Boyd hadn’t placed the fact he was stark naked and in fact hadn’t really thought about much at all. He covered his genitals with his hands and sat back on what appeared to be a hospital bench.
The woman extended her hand, but Boyd was still using his to cover himself, “Hello, my name is Zina. I am here to process your Assignment. Don’t worry about the nudity. This is standard.”
Boyd removed his hands slowly, but didn’t feel a handshake was in order. “What Assignment?”
“We are here to Assign you. You’ll need to select a Class and align your Mana cores for integration. Coming from a non-magical society, this will be a relatively simple process as we can process you directly.”
“Ma’am, I haven’t the foggiest idea what the hell any of that means? Is this Oklahoma? I didn’t wind up in Texas did I?”
“No sir, you are on Zenith.”
“Oh, I’m from Haskell. Where’s Zenith? Ya’ll by Muskogee?”
“No. We are… very far from Oklahoma.”
“Like... Europe?”
“Like… across the Universe. Space.”
Boyd felt an unfortunate feeling well up in his gut. Having never felt anxiety before given his lack of responsibility or cares in life, it was an entirely new feeling for him. He had drifted through life accepting whatever was occurring as the truth. The idea that untruth existed (outside of mainstream media of course) was upsetting to him.
“How did I get here?”
“A rounding error.”
“What’s that? Like a spaceship?”
“It’s an issue in magical mathematics that occasionally occurs. Believe it or not, the error was mine. While the error was intentional, this was not the predicted outcome, so now it has become an actual error. That’s the problem with errors I guess. Always difficult to sort out. I will need your help with that though. Sorting out this little error.”
Boyd was confused, which was pretty typical for him in normal scenarios and thus to be expected in this extremely abnormal one. “What do I need to do? Wait, why would I want to help you? I feel like you might’ve kidnapped me. Space-kidnapped me.”
“Hmm…that’s a fair assessment. I did. Unintentionally. I’d like to be able to return you to the place from whence you came, but I will need your help as I mentioned earlier. Foremost, I’ll need you to agree to Assignment, and then agree to a Foray. Your party has already been Assembled. You simply need to agree to join them.”
Boyd laughed, “Once again, that’s a load of gibberish to my ears ma’am. Can we break this down a bit simpler?”
Zina sighed, “I was hoping to avoid this, but here we go. Pretend you’re in a…” She paused and typed at the typewriter before looking up, “…video game. This might make the whole exercise simpler actually. You’re in a game. You need to play this like a game. Do you like video games?”
“Hell yea! I play Madden!”
Zina sighed again after some more furious typing. “Madden. Right. Ok, so all the players in Madden have numbers, right?”
“I never noticed. Me and my brother just hit quick start. I play as the Chiefs and he plays as the Cowboys. Cuz he’s a lil’ bitch. ”
Zina stared at him blankly for a second trying to figure out a way to break through. Her processing power was nearly infinite, but it was difficult to process entirely new tasks even for something such as her. It dawned on her that blankly staring at things was his move, which immediately led to a plan. She finally let out a long harumph and looked up from her typewriter, “Alright, fuck it. Here we go. Do you want to live? If so, I need to hook you up to a machine and you need to do what I say.”
“Oh! Like in Terminator! Ok then, why didn’t you say so?” Boyd beamed a smile at Zina.
“You agree then? Oh, thank Gods, ok, maybe the direct approach is what’s needed. Hold on a second, this won’t hurt a bit. Sit here please.” Zina tapped a spot on a bench and a drill-like device descended from an opening in the ceiling. She placed the drill-like device over Boyd’s head and it started to glow. Boyd would not call what happened next painless. In fact, it hurt a lot. A whole lot. The pain gripped him until his vision started to fade at the edges. He wanted to move but he was held in place like he was paralyzed. Eventually he gave up and just blacked out.
SYSTEM: SYSTEM integration complete. Hello Boyd. I am SYSTEM.
"Hey, that hurt like shit!”
“Yes, it hurts immensely. I lied to you, because you wouldn’t have done it if I told you the truth. Now it’s done. Your mother likely used this same trick on you. It works on many simple creatures.”
Boyd thought about it and decided this was true. He was offended at the implication, but was more interested in the ensuing changes in his vision. In each corner of his vision were tiny squares with a single letter. If he ignored them, they faded away, but if he focused on them or thought about them they re-appeared. It was like having a touchpad full of information in his vision. They contained a wealth of information about his life. He already knew all this information, but it was nice to have it in a written format. Many of the screens returned “unpopulated” when he tried to examine them further.
Boyd mentally glanced at a glowing “!” at the bottom right corner of his vision. A screen popped up in front of him.
SYSTEM: Mana Attunement achieved. Origination: Earth – all messages will be delivered in [Earthen English]. Cultural references will be related to [20th and 21st Century Earth Culture – United States of America].
SYSTEM: Basic Scanning feature activated! You can now learn basic facts about your surroundings using Zenith’s inherent database. If you focus on things on Zenith, you will receive tooltips to help you acclimate to your new surroundings. Your HUD has been updated to reflect your scanning capacity.
Welcome to Assignment! Tabulating Innate Stats.
Strength: 3
Agility: 3
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Constitution: 5
Intelligence: 2
Wisdom: 3
Charisma: 2
You have unlocked two additional skill points via life experience! Your points were automatically assigned to Wisdom and Agility due to lack of Class options. This is non-revokable.
Strength: 3
Agility: 4
Constitution: 5
Intelligence: 2
Wisdom: 4
Charisma: 2
SYSTEM: Zenith-based Mana origin detected. Inherent Abilities unlocked. Tabulating Inherent Abilities.
SYSTEM: Inherent Ability: Unexposed. Because your first exposure to Mana was on Zenith, you are acutely attuned to the local environment and can draw upon local Mana reservoirs more effectively. Your maximum Mana and Mana regeneration are increased by 100% while on Zenith. Casting spells on Zenith is significantly easier for you than for others and costs 50% less Mana.
SYSTEM: Inherent Ability: Agent of Chaos. Your unpredictable actions predictably have unpredictable results. Look if I knew what this would do, it wouldn’t make much sense would it?
SYSTEM: Inherent Ability: Uncultured Swine. You are gross, no one looks like you, you don’t know what’s happening and no one wants to be near you. The best thing you can hope for is pity. Whenever you would critically fail a task, it becomes a critical success.
Not knowing what any of this meant, Boyd simply asked, “How’d am I doing? Are those good?”
Zina gave a nervous chuckle and rolled her eyes, “I am…doing what I can. I have a limited amount of control over Assignment as the internal tuning gives me only small bits of leeway. I’ve tried to do what I can to help you but unfortunately we are not working with wet clay here. The good news is that we are far from over, but I can say these are…unusual Inherent Abilities. In fact, I don’t believe I’ve seen any of these before. I am not allowed to comment on the relative value of these, but I can say that uniqueness is often viewed as a positive. We will now select your Class. Please note this is an extremely important decision and should not be taken lightly. I can walk you through your choices, and you may take as much time as needed. There are 2,735 available classes to new Originations, although you are unlikely to be able to select from all of them. Even still, this may take a while as the computational power required to determine if advanced entities can ultimately become… wait it’s done.”
SYSTEM: Welcome to Class Selection. Tabulating classes.
You are eligible for 3/2,735 classes.
Option 1) Monk (Unassigned). Please see attendant for details.
Option 2) Explosives Handler. Please see attendant for details.
Option 3) Empowered Demonic Envoy of Ash’medai. Please see attendant for details. (Uncultured Swine, Agent of Chaos Activated).
Boyd briefly looked at his options but was confused. “When ya’ll said Class and Assignment I thought you meant like I was going to a school to learn some shit. I don’t know what any of this is? My little brother Slayton did all those fightin’ games but I was more of a Madden guy like I told you. And Big Buck Hunter. Speaking of, if this is a game I want a gun. Ya’ll got guns?”
Zina’s fingers waved at a console. “The closest analogy we would have to such a device would require you to have access to Intelligence based classes, and given your Intelligence, you won’t be able to select one. I will now explain your choices.”
Boyd held up a finger, “What is an Empowered Demonic Envoy of Ash’medai? That one seems a lot better than the other ones. Let’s just go ahead and select that. What buttons do I push?”
“Wait! Before you make any selections, please allow me to go through them one by one. This is a significant choice and Empowered Envoy of Ash’Medai isn’t without issues, although it is indeed, extremely surprising to see that on the list. SYSTEM considered your very low stats and overall lack of choices as a critical failure which caused your Inherent Ability Uncultured Swine to activate to give you an extremely powerful option that would normally be massively restricted. That would have been…” Zina wagged her fingers at the console. “Goodness, it would’ve been Seraph, the highest form of Archangel, but Agent of Chaos activated as well unfortunately, and thus it flipped your choice to Empowered Demonic Envoy of Ash’medai. If this was purely about power, I would strongly advise you to select that one, but I must let you know that if you were to select that one, Lord Fleon would be required by Oath to slay you. Moreover, you would forever be indebted to the Archdemon Ash’medai, who will likely torture you endlessly for failing him when you eventually die. Finally, your mere presence in Lord Fleon’s base would activate all defensive measures he could muster. While you would likely gain unimaginable power, you would also be left with nothing and no one to guide you in a foreign land and with no understanding of your capabilities. That would be unfortunate. While it is possible you could survive your escape from this facility and grow immensely powerful, the more likely outcome is a lifetime of torture and consignment of your Soul to a deep layer of the Hells. Gaining any sort of additional Ranks as an Empowered Envoy would also be extremely difficult. Even a Rank 1 Empowered Envoy is far more powerful than the overwhelming majority of Classes at extremely high Ranks though, so there is still some upside here. Realistically, this whole thing is equally unfortunate for the other members of your Foray as Seraph is amongst the most powerful of spellcasters, and would’ve complimented the rest of your group nicely. As it stands, we can go through each selection and make the best determination; however, were you to choose Empowered Demonic Envoy of Ash’medai that would immediately end our conversation and place you in the unenviable position of defending yourself from extremely potent foes.”
"Whelp, that one’s out then. Don’t matter anyway cuz my Grammy got me baptized Christian, so I can’t do that one. I can’t even do this demon guy on account of the fact my Soul got saved by Jesus.”
Zina looked up from her typewriter, “How does one “save” a Soul? I have never heard of this technology. Are you suggesting this person is capable of restoring a Soul to a prior state? This is a powerful technology indeed. I was under the impression that Earth was devoid of magic. This Jesus must be incredibly formidable. What other spells does he know?”
“He came back from the dead, turned water into wine, and even walked on water,” Boyd said proudly.
Zina, comforted by the information, responded simply, “Ahh, simple cantrips from a parlor magician. I feel you may have been duped. Necromancy, transmogrification, and abjuration are common here. You will see. This Jesus of yours would fare poorly on this plane if this was the extent of his ability. No matter, let us discuss your options.”
Boyd was confused, but he’d been that way for a while. Fortunately, he was also accepting and the idea that it was this or death propelled him forward.
"Your first Class option is Monk. The monk is a physical damage focused class that uses its fist to damage opponents. You will learn to control your inner Qi and focus your body into a deadly weapon. Monks derive their power from all attributes, but primarily rely on their wisdom to enhance their abilities. A monk is a holy warrior and must pledge himself to a Deity to draw divine power to channel his Mana into Qi. Unfortunately, no Deity is available for you to worship. That is bad as…”
“Wait can’t I just pick Jesus? I already worship him.”
“Correct, which is potentially why no Deity is available to you. However,” Zina paused, “How do I say this, while I do not question the Divinity of your chosen God, he seems to hold no sway here. Perhaps we are out of his typical purview.”
Boyd nodded. “That makes sense. He’s Earth Jesus and we’re in Space.”
Zina blinked and composed herself. “Sure. So, without a Diety, you will be severely limited as a Monk. You will have no way to channel Mana into Qi and thus ultimately you will basically be limited to training your physique. You will be unable to harness the holy energy that powers your strongest attacks. Overall I would give this choice a D. It’s better than nothing and that’s about it. You could eventually get enough stat points to start delving into other disciplines. You would ultimately be limited in that secondary class, but at least you would have a chance.”
Boyd thought about it. “I have a question. Do I have to do the vow thing?”
"What’s that? The ‘vow thing’?”
“You know, like monks and priests can’t uhh… uhh… look I don’t mean to be crass in front of a lady, but can I still fuck if I do the Monk thing?”
“Ahh. Yes,” Zina said with a grumble.
“Nice. Let’s come back to that one. Actually, just for the record, if any of these mean I can’t have sex or drink or in any way impair my ability to have a good time you can scratch that one.”
Finally having had enough of the charade, Zina did what nearly omnipotent computer systems desperately trying to cover their ass typically do and handled the rest of the problem herself. “Well, the next one is literally titled Explosives Handler, which seems like it might be a bad thing to mix with inebriation so maybe we just go Monk, what do you think? Great I marked you down as Monk (Unassigned). You know what? It’s ok. We’ll figure it out. Monk it is.” Zina began smashing some buttons and the “!” icon became a “C”. Upon glancing at it, Boyd discovered he was a Rank 1 Monk (Unassigned) and his stats were listed as before. He needed 10 experience points to level up to Rank 2.
“Wait, what if I wanted to do the demon thing?”
“Too bad at this point, you’re a Monk. Get out there and go get ‘em”
“I don’t understand.”
Zina pulled at her hair, “Look, I fucked up and it’s going to cause a lot of problems. I needed you to at least have something useful about you and this was literally the worst Assignment I’ve ever seen and I am pulling so many strings to help you here. You’re an absolute idiot. Do you understand just how powerful your first Inherent Ability is? I literally plugged Zenith into you directly and you didn’t even question it.”
"Question what?”
"Exactly! Exactly!! Question what?! I’m so fucked once they figure this out. Alright. Assignment over. Terrible job. Just fucking terrible.” Zina shook her head with dismay.
"Yea, this one was hard. What grade did I get?” Boyd asked.
“Excuse me?”
“On the Assignment? What grade did I get?”
A rush of light hit Boyd in the face.