Seras spent over ten minutes poking around the rest of her HUD, looking for other places that had changed with the update. She found that her map app had changed, now instead of the familiar pock marked and cratered surface of Ruin she saw a completely different world. One with six or maybe seven major landmasses divided by huge bodies of water. As opposed to Ruin’s three remaining continents separated by massive inhospitable basins and one remaining ocean. The details were fuzzy so she couldn’t really see where she was, the most she could figure out was that she was in the center-ish of a massive continent in the northern hemisphere.

When she tried to access her street-view map it zoomed to reveal a box shaped room that had a narrow exit into a hallway. She would likely need to explore more to fill out the rest.

Her ID page had changed as well. Before it had contained her personal info, Net ID, and other such things that she could quickly ping to a new contact or a cop actually attempting to do their job. What she saw instead, however, was something she would feel way too embarrassed to share with anyone.

Seras ‘Blackiron’ Cross

Race, Outworlder

Normal rank, essences 0/4

Racial traits

* Astral affinity

* Biomechanical Physiology

* Pocket space

* Stranger in a strange world

* Net connection

* Blue Printing software

Essences

Power no essence: normal 0/5 attributes

Speed no essence: normal 0/5 attributes

Spirit no essence: normal 0/5 attributes

Recovery no essence: normal 0/5 attributes

This had to be the nerdiest shit she had ever seen!

Seras had always been a girl for the here and now, the physical and not made up. She could never get invested in the fake worlds of Holo-games anymore than she could suddenly become a true believer of the dead Gods. Something within her just felt repulsed by the idea of sitting on her ass spending time in a world of ones and zeros instead of living in the real one, no matter how shitty it was.

But she had some friends when she was younger obsessed with that shit, so she had learned a bit by proxy. But games like this were supposed to have some sort of disconnect, a point were the graphics and sensations felt fake. That wasn’t the case right now. She could feel every rock poking into her bare skin, the slight breeze wafting through the cave, she could even smell the vague scent of flowers. And not the fake lab made synthetic stuff, but the real ones grown in highly controlled greenhouses that filtered out the smog and carcinogens. It was all too real for her to be in a holo-game.

And besides the fact that everything was too realistic, she had died!

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She was in space, floating out a pressurized air lock, the helmet she was meant to put on before had been floating just out of reach as the heat was sapped away from her body and her lungs burned with a need for oxygen. She had seen the world go black, and had felt the end coming.

Or, wait, actually now that she thought about it, there had been a moment of impossibly bright light, and then a sense of time passing but no memory of why. Did she actually die, or did something happen just before she died.

Great! Now she knew even less than before!

Well the only solution to ignorance was learning, and she had a lot to learn.

Seras ignored the fact that her race was listed as Outworlder and not human, and focused on the ‘racial traits’ section instead.

Astral affinity: An enhanced affinity for the astral, resulting from the astral energies your soul was bathed in during transmigration. Reduced effects of astral anomalies and attacks. Cost and side effects of astral abilities is reduced. Enhanced Transcendent damage.

Biomechanical Physiology: The deep integration between yourself and your cybernetics has resulted in a unique physiology. No body form could be made not including inorganic cybernetics, resulting in a physical manifestation of your cybernetics. Vitality has been reduced in proportion to your remaining biomass. Healing/cleansing effects reduced by 90%. Immunity to poison, unholy, holy, afflictions and attacks. Power stored in your cells may be exchanged for mana. Natural system repair feature added, so long as the damage to your artificial limbs does not exceed the threshold of ‘unsalvageable’ your limbs will slowly repair.

Pocket space: access to an extra dimensional space.

Stranger in a Strange world: Language adaptation, the ability to convert Essences, awakening stones, and skill books into an appropriate format for absorption.

Net access: HUD GPS upgraded to world map. Street view map upgraded to tactical map. Access to public and divine knowledge repositories. WARNING Divine knowledge repositories require permission to access.

Blueprinting Software: The ability to recall designs and technologies you have seen before and create a plan to recreate or alter them.

Okay. Someone was definitely fucking with her. What the hell even was a pocket space!

As if summoned by her thoughts a light blue portal opened in front of her. Within was a boundless void that faded into a white mist. Sitting just within arms reach of the portal was a palm sized icosahedron.

Okay, just because a magic looking portal appeared out of nowhere didn’t mean she was buying this pocket space bullshit. It was probably just a hologram. It wasn’t like she could reach out and grab the fancy paperweight looking…thing. She blinked at the very real sensation of her hand grasped around the mysterious object. She pulled the object and her hand out of the portal before it closed as if it had never existed in the first place.

Seras looked at the object she had pulled out of the mysterious extra-dimensional space rather than think about the implications of such a space. It was palm size with a glassy exterior. Within Seras saw what looked like a miniature neutron star in the middle of a cloud of white sparks. But more strange than its physical appearance was the inexplicable feeling of potential and passion that Seras felt coming from it. Like someone had high hopes for her.

A tag appeared above it.

Awakening stone of the Celestial Book: a gift from an extra-dimensional entity. Requires one open essence attribute to be used.

Would like to convert it into an appropriate format? Y/N

Seras mentally chose Yes just to see what happened, and watched as the icosahedron shrank down into a pinky sized data shard. Just like the shard labeled Technology essence.

Her mouth was dry. The rest of the strangeness she could explain away. It got a harder and harder with each explanation, but that was easier than accepting the impossible. But too many things were adding up.

The racial traits like Astral affinity and Stranger in a strange world. The lack of Net access and the foreign world map. The pocket space that appeared out of nowhere and contained a memento supposedly left by an extra dimensional entity.

Volta station, the station Seras had been hired to rob was supposedly dabbling with some sort of extra dimensional energy. She and her accomplices were supposed to steal the shard she was now holding and upload a virus that was supposed to wipe their servers clean.

Then the station had exploded. But hard as she tried, Seras couldn’t think of a reason for it to blow the way it did. It hadn’t burst into a ball of flame, or ruptured along the pressure hull. It had exploded in an impossibly bright light, that was chased by nothingness.

Had she been blasted into another world?

It was crazy, and ordinarily she wouldn’t even consider it a possibility. But when you rule out all plausible explanations all that was left was the implausible.

The impossible.

Or, maybe just the very, very unlikely, considering her circumstance.