“3… 2… 1!” yelled Luna’s mother as they watched the screen. What followed was a cacophonous banging of pots, pans, and yells.

Michael especially was going really hard with his pair of pans. His were the most beat up ones, which meant he could go as hard as he wanted with them. They were already replaced due to his christmas gift to Luna, which was a cutesy pot and pan set. It would mostly get used by the house, but Luna was always complaining about the old bent and uneven cookery in the house.

Luna couldn’t really focus on the reverie of the new year though. All she can focus on was the notification she has been glancing at once every few hours ever since she gained this ability.

Apocalypse Countdown

357d, 14h, 59m 51s

It has been one week since that fateful Christmas night. She has learned a fair bit about what she could do, but learned even more that she doesn’t have nearly the whole picture. Not enough to understand what all she has anyway. With a flicker of thought, she looks at the system integration percentage.

System Integration at { 94% }. Get stronger to complete System Integration.

A lot has been unlocked, though it seems that the final 6% is locked behind some threshold of power that Luna herself is far from achieving. She has much of the framework already. She can brute force a lot of the information she needs due to the information she has from her stories. However, she is unable to fully interact with the systems in place.

The last 6% is likely the instinctual understanding of the rest of the system. All of the mechanics feel like they are there, but Luna hasn’t been able to actually open it all just yet. It’s like she had a 6th limb attached to her. She is trying to get it to do stuff before the nerves are fully connected. The best she can do is move her whole ‘body’ to try and see if she can interact with it.

Luna has spent the last few days focusing mostly on rereading her stories, and seeing what ‘knowledge of these series have been removed’ means. It wasn’t completely removed from the internet or anything. In fact, nothing seems to have been removed. The series were still posted in full online if possible. They are still on Amazon. Her physical books can still be interacted with by her family.

What ‘removed’ seems to mean is that nobody remembers it but her. She tried talking about The Path of Ascension with Michael. It was Michael who introduced that series to her, even if he hadn’t gotten past the second book due to feeling like it was going too slow.

They were able to talk about it, but as soon as Michael got distracted with a different tangent in the conversation or something he saw, he completely forgot what the series was. The instant it wasn’t the active focus of his mind, it was wiped. Which was… weird to say the least of it.

Luna knew that trusting everything to stay online the full year was not a safe bet. The biggest thing was the discord servers, Patreons, and other similar forms of direct author interaction. She spent much of the last week finding as much objective information on the series and saving it on an external hard drive.

If she saved it as text it could all fit on a USB, but she couldn’t. She wasn’t able to blankly read the bare text for that long. She bought the books, but she spent most of her time interacting with these series in audiobooks. The physical copies were mostly to just further support the authors.

She had tried to interact with Shirtaloon, the author of He Who Fights With Monsters by DMing him on Discord. When she was about to hit enter she got a prompt.

Interaction Blocked

That was it. Every time she did so something seemed to physically stop her. Experimentation showed that she could interact broadly with many different creators. Buying Patreon tiers, sending posts in servers. Any form of direct interaction with them however, gets that same notification. She even managed to interact with a different creator.

Void Herald who made many different series on her shelf. It was a nice interaction, but as soon as she tried to mention any of the 10 series that were mentioned in her initial post, Void Herald went dead. He only responded again once someone else got his attention somewhere else. The whole channel was dead until Luna deleted her post.

Luna, to the best of her understanding, was alone in all of this. She was either going insane, or some aspect of the coming system had chosen her for… something.

The only system from any of the series that was sentient, or at the very least intelligent, was the one from Defiance of The Fall. However, that system would have just integrated this universe into their multiverse if it was that system.

Luna can also feel things that weren’t in any of those series. It’s… so weird. Everything was merged and blended together, but she can only see the silhouette right now.

The only thing Luna knew how to do now compared to when she went to sleep last week, was how to get stronger. It was the only thing she could interact with, as it came to her in the form of a prompt. One she opens up as the banging and yells finally dies down.

Story Quest: [ System Installation I ]

You currently lack the strength for The System to fully integrate within your soul. This strength isn’t in body or mind, but rather soul. Your soul must find a sense of balance in order to complete the integration.

Objective: Balance Your Soul 0/1

Reward: Completed System Integration

It was there when she woke up. A simple quest, but one that taught her a lot on its own. First, it’s a ‘story quest’. Something that wasn’t in any of the series she had known before. The format of the quest was more like HWFWM than anything else, though with the influx of information about the quest and its rewards common to The Land.

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

There were, however, only so many ways to format a Quest Screen, and Luna had already figured out that she couldn’t fully trust any of her books to be 100% accurate. The systems getting mashed together meant that nothing would fully ‘fit’.

Just looking at the Objective, she doesn’t have much of an idea of what that really means. None of the systems have a way for her to do that without already having some level of power. The ones that did imply such things required pain on a level Luna wasn’t ready for, or decades of training which Luna didn’t have the time to do.

She was half tempted to take the 4k she had saved in her bank account and go on a spiritual journey through Tibet. Try and see if Mt. Everlasting Peace actually existed, and see if she could learn from them what she needed.

It was a dumb idea, on multiple levels. Putting aside the incredible unlikeliness of such a place actually existing, there was a ‘pathbreaking’ aspect of Buddhism within Defiance of The Fall. Luna wasn’t a monk, and didn’t want to have her future path predestined, and in such a way that limited her actions.

If Luna wasn’t going crazy… She felt a need to keep her agency. She wanted to be free to do as she wanted.

“Hey Luna.”

Luna jumped in her clothes, suddenly feeling very out of place. She turned to see where the voice came from. It was Jackson. He had a faint smile on his face. Had being the operative word. He knew Luna. He knew that look on her face.

“What’s wrong,” he asked, worry clear on his face.

Luna shook her head, trying to shake off the funk within her heart.

“Nothing, I’m just tired. I haven’t been getting enough sleep the last few days,” said Luna.

Not a lie. Luna has read book after book after book. She was reading them so fast that she wasn’t really reading them, more skimming them to try and revitalize her knowledge. In the last week she had only gotten 30 hours of sleep, with the largest chunk of those hours coming on christmas night.

“You have to calm down your reading a little bit Luna,” said Jackson, “You are reading like you are cramming for a school exam. I don’t even really know why you are reading so fervently, but you don’t exactly have the books for your next semester at school, and it’s not like you study.”

Luna looks down at the pan and wooden spoon in her hands. That reminds her, she needs to get back to it. She has read big meaty chunks of each series, while finding as much information online as she can.

“I just… have a feeling Jack,” Luna looks down at her hands, “I need to kick my ass into gear this next year, If I don’t change things by Christmas next year I will just get left behind, I’ll have stagnated and missed my opportunity.”

Luna’s mom goes over and hugs Luna.

“Lucas, you don’t need to feel like that, it isn’t like there is some countdown to oblivion, You have all the time in the world,” said her Mother.

Luna looks over to the corner of her vision.

Apocalypse Countdown

357d, 14h, 57m 24s

“It doesn’t change the fact that it feels like something will go bad if I don’t do something Mom,” Luna said, “It’s like… a feeling that the world I know is going to end if I don’t do this one thing.”

“And what is this thing you feel you need to do?” asked Michael.

Luna looks at her slew of prompts, then over to her quest. She looks over to Michael, while scratching the back of her head.

“Balance my Soul?” she said, more like a question than a statement.

Luna looks around to her family… and then noticed the way their faces seem to ‘reset’. She can’t mention her quest objectives so directly.

“I feel I need to grow my confidence, Need to grow my willpower, Need to grow more sure in myself and what I can do,” she pauses trying to think about how to formulate it, “I need to become who I want to be. Not lock myself away.”

Luna’s mother looks at her, backing away slightly while still holding her child. This sounds very close to how the talks around her wish to transition to female sounded.

Everyone looks at Luna’s mother, seeing how she backed away. They saw the similarities just as her mother had.

Luna’s mother pulled Luna close, holding her child in her arms.

“How can we help?” she asked, “How can we help you?”

Luna looks at her mom, then the rest of her family who are looking at her with worry. For as many issues Luna had with her family… She loved them. Maybe not the extended family, but everyone in this room.

Luna wasn’t some leader. She was an emotional wreck, but if she wasn’t going mad, she felt that this System Integration was something that was putting her on a specific path. One of conflict and blood. One where she needed to fight at the front, and become the hope of humanity. It was one of the few constants between all of her series.

“I…” Luna sucks in a breath, “Acceptance.”

Luna looks down at her hands, tracing the lines of them with her eyes. Time seemed to slow down as nobody really knew how to respond. Jackson looked like he was about to say something, but George stopped him. He saw the look on his wife’s face. This was either going to go really good, or really bad.

“Lucas… is not here anymore is he?” asked Luna’s mom, “Lucas became something else a long while ago, his… her body is just not catching up to her, I’ll try better.”

Luna looks over to her mom, tears welling up in her eyes. She saw a mirrored feeling in her mother’s face. The first tear fell down Luna’s cheek.

“Luna…” said her mother, “I think… if you were born a girl I could have named you that.”

Luna’s mother wipes her daughter’s tears off of her cheek. A prompt appears in the corner of her eye, but she drives it away with less than an ounce of thought.

“I love you, I will always love you, you are the youngest of my children, You are one of the greatest prides in my life, and I can’t resist this my whole life,” Luna’s mother lets out a small laugh,

“Oh I was already giving in, it will take time for me to fully internalize it… but I can’t keep stifling you… so Luna… I won’t fully understand… but I will stop fighting this, Fighting you I-”

Luna’s mother was cut off by Luna grabbing her in the fiercest hug they have had since Luna was a teenager. Luna’s soft tears became ugly crying, which spread to Luna’s mother.

It didn’t take long for everyone else to join in, tears entering the eyes of everyone.

The family didn’t lose all of their issues with this act. However, the sword of damocles that was held above them ever since Luna came back was finally taken down. Luna felt the acceptance from her mother, and knew that her words weren’t empty. It will take time to destress… but now… now once she is all cried out, she can focus on her task.

QUEST COMPLETE

Story Quest: [ System Installation I ]

You currently lack the strength for The System to fully integrate within your soul. This strength isn’t in body or mind, but rather soul. Your soul must find a sense of balance in order to complete the integration.

Objective: Balance Your Soul 1/1

You have found a sense of balance for your soul within your family. Be prepared, for the force that ends one imbalance can easily start another.

Reward: Completed System Integration

TURN IN QUEST? Y/N