MDW:
----------------------------------------
The first arc has ended! Hooray.
With many edits, moving pieces of text back and forth, adding new stuff, deleting old stuff, I sometimes get confused as to what went into the official version. This appendix is a reference guide for myself, but it might help some readers so I'm publishing it.
Maybe I'll also post a list of characters. Who am I kidding, I need to make one or I'll start to make a huge mess. Like forgetting people or mixing them up.
*
----------------------------------------
*
October 7th
----------------------------------------
Sara starts her day going to school. English teacher asks her about her essay, then she is intercepted by Mary, who invites her to a fake party at Pamela's house. She cancels her RPG game with Simon and goes home to wait for a phone call that won't come.
She feels something odd and goes to the roof of her building. There, she witnesses Armageddon, the final battle between Heaven and Hell. It is so fierce both dimensions crumble and fall on Earth as a meteor shower.
A golden bolide shot in her direction, tethering a smaller golden sphere next to it. A blast shoves all the meteorites inbound for Sara's vicinity away, clearing the skies above Forest Park. The larger sphere vanishes, being teleported a thousand years into the past. Meanwhile, the girl and all of humanity suffers the pain of being infused with Mana for the first time. Most don't survive the ordeal.
The smaller golden orb is revealed to be Verachiel, the last Seraph alive and a survivor of Armageddon. Verachiel seems to be deadly wounded and requests Sara to consume a crystal. He reveals Sara to be one of four candidates for his gift. Her tasks are to help the restless dead find closure and to activate the main System Core, who fell a few miles to the northeast. After she accepts, he gifts her his power, and expires.
The world burns. Only a roughly circular region centered on Sara's building and Lake Stonecrest, created a thousand years ago by the larger golden orb, which Verachiel revealed to be a System Core were spared the meteorite shower.
Sara goes back home and checks on her foster parents. They are dead on their bed. Sara goes back to her bedroom and sulks, worried, fearful, and skeptical of what she just witnessed. Feeling very hungry, she goes to the kitchen and starts to eat everything she can put her hands on. She finishes her day by thanking her foster parents for taking her.
October 8th
----------------------------------------
Sara wakes up to a world of darkness. She is forced to throw up some unidentified black stuff that is awful in both taste and smell. She ends up taking a bath and eating even more food.
An entity contacts her. It is the consciousness of the crystal she ingested. After a heated discussion, she tells the fairy living in the Personal System Core to not contact her, and immediately regrets it. The girl decides to doubt everything. She is at the end of her wits.
A few survivors woke up. One of them, a soldier that got mentally unstable after the Mana Infusion, decides to take over Fort Gillem. He then drafts every other survivor he can find into his army, killing a few that refuse. He also kills everyone who he deems dangerous around his new domain.
Sara wastes the morning questioning her new reality, but spends the afternoon trying to gather supplies. She finds Mr. Taylor dead in the building hallway, then witnesses the interaction of two survivors who took a police cruiser for a joyride and the deranged soldier. The Necropolis King, as the soldier became known, kills one survivor but the other escapes.
Sara meets Mr. Taylor's ghost and is disgusted by his appearance. She learns she can see the sins of a person on their souls as physical deformities. Mr. Taylor reveals to be a child pornography trafficker, and a disgusted Sara decides to fulfill his wish of destroying the hard drive with the illegal materials just to remove it from the world. She sees no other way to get rid of the annoying ghost.
The surviving visitor attempts to enter Sara's building, hiding from the Necropolis King (NK). The survivor is killed by the NK after she smashes the computer and sends Mr. Taylor to the afterlife. Sara has a breakdown and eventually goes to sleep.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
October 9th
----------------------------------------
She wakes in the middle of the night, and the crystal fairy decides to try a quest system with Sara. She is issued some quests and is introduced to the concept of Skills, which can grant passive bonuses and new abilities. She decides to go along with the quests but is not very happy with it. To avoid the stench and attracting vermin, she starts working on removing the dead bodies in her building.
A few more survivors wake up. Being infused with Mana takes a toll on their bodies, and most will remain unconscious for a week or more. One Detective Winston Keynes tries to contact other LEO and finds out that a small militia formed to fight NK's oppression. He joins them and they try to attack the NK.
Late at night, Sara burns the dead in a funeral pyre, and meets a ghost of an elderly tenant. She hopes that the night would hide the pyre from prying eyes but fails. The survivors fighting the NK notice the glare. She completes the quests before finishing the day but decides she didn't like it. The fairy obliges and refrains from issuing them.
October 10th
----------------------------------------
The skies are still dark. Sometime in the following days, the moisture released during Armageddon will precipitate and clear the dust and smoke out of the sky.
Sara understands how to deal with the fairy by reading fiction novels. She chats with the fairy and learns a bit about the nature of her new world. Overwhelmed, she understands little of what the fairy explains to her.
She also learns that to improve her body, she needs to cleanse her mana channels, or meridians of impurities. The black stuff she vomited the other day. The fairy starts with her digestive system, and she is forced to purge it in the toilet.
The rest of the day is spent looting the apartment building.
October 11th
----------------------------------------
Sara keeps looting the building, and meets Joseph, a child ghost. Joseph asks her to build a LEGO set his parents intended to gift him on Christmas. They spent most of the day assembling the thousands of pieces. Joseph leaves a lasting impression on Sara.
October 12th
----------------------------------------
She starts to clean up the building and gather more loot along the way. The fighting of the survivor militia against the NK is still underway.
October 13th
----------------------------------------
She meets the last ghost in the place, a woman who asks her to fetch a dog from the apartment building next door.
She finds Rudy, Shiba Inu that is diligently keeping the rodents from reaching its dead owner. Unknown to her, Rudy has eaten rats who ingested human flesh and became tainted. When she takes Rudy back to the ghost, the specter turns into a wraith, a hostile undead that pulls the dog's soul out. Sara recognizes it as an act of mercy because Rudy would become a monster if left alive. The ghost vanishes but not before warning Sara of creatures that consumed human flesh.
October 14th
----------------------------------------
Sara works on looting both buildings now. She also spends some time organizing her loot in luggage cases and bags. She gets her period and becomes extremely moody. The fairy also convinces her to cleanse her skin channels this night.
October 15th
----------------------------------------
Detective Keynes and Officer Jones enter Lakeview Apartments to investigate the funeral pyre. Sara is warned by the fairy and panics, going into hiding covered in the impurities black stuff. The LEO follows her trail and find Sara, who's scared and still panicking. Keynes decides that it is too risky to leave a child alone and wraps her in a blanket to carry her out of the building. Sara protests and struggles, drawing the NK's attention with her screams. Outside, she escapes the cops and flees back into the building before the NK shoots a hail of bullets at the cops.
Jones is mortally wounded and Keynes has a blasted knee. Sara hides and falls unconscious. Waking up in the late afternoon, she decides to move out of the building but she needs to take her loot with her.
October 16th
----------------------------------------
Sara keeps looting apartments and preparing her escape plan. The survivors intensify their offensive. The fairy convinces her to cleanse her bones.
October 17th
----------------------------------------
Sara remarks the impurities are getting grosser and nastier as more channels are cleaned. The fairy creates a Status screen for her, showing the growth of her Skills.
The militia decides to do a final attack on the NK. Officer Jones, who mysteriously is still alive despite the huge abdominal gunshot wound, offers to do a suicide run with a SWAT van filled with explosives.
The survivors go on the offensive, but first send a unmanned vehicle full of explosives. If this succeeds, they'll spare Jones but the car blows up before reaching the psychopath's entrenched position. Jones then drives the SWAT van all the way to the NK building and blows everything up.
Sara is glued to the ground, watching from the window. She is unable to hide or look away as the fairy reveals the survivors plans to her. She witnesses the blast and is wounded by broken glass and debris as the building she was looting is ruined.
Heedless of the girl's predicament, the survivors withdraw to celebrate their costly victory.
A wounded Sara wakes up in the ruined building and puts her escape plan to work after she tended her wounds. She's afraid her face would become scarred but the fairy reassures her that her improved body will be fine.
While moving her stuff out of Lakeview Apartments, she learns about the fate of the children and the elderly. With weaker bodies, none of them survived Armageddon when mana was forcefully pushed into their bodies. As a silver lining, the fairy assures Sara the children will be the first ones to be reborn when new babies come into this world. Sara is skeptical.
She eventually finds a fancy home to settle in. She meets the ghost of her classmate, Christine Appleby and fulfills the confused ghost's last wish, "inheriting" Christine's fancy wardrobe.
*
----------------------------------------
*
MDW:
----------------------------------------
Sara is free of her cage. The Necropolis King is dead. Survivors are trying to survive and rebuild while a crazy girl goes around doing her thing.
Free to roam the area Verachiel mercifully cleared of debris, what will happen when the girl meets other survivors? What of the billions of restless souls trapped on Earth now that Heaven and Hell no longer exist to take them in?
Trapped by highways on all sides, they are restrained to Forest Park and surrounding neighborhoods. Is the dead township too small for them?
This week's chapters are already scheduled. Thanks fo reading.