Apocalypse Countdown
242d, 5h, 28m, 15s
It has been 2 months since Luna finished her second System Integration quest. In that time Luna has gained a much better understanding of what it is she has available to her. She even has a vague idea of what it may look like in the end. There are only so many ways to handle things like jobs and classes. However, with how long her current Limited Quest will take to complete, she may only have a few weeks of full system integration before the Apocalypse. At least if her On A Roll quest chain is just staying on the Honor Roll.
Luna is just psyching herself out. Things have been progressing quite nicely. Plus, today is going to be the day she completes her next Story Quest. Luna hadn’t been able to complete as many Push It To The Limit optional objectives as she would have liked in the last 3 months.
The good news was that she was able to complete her Story Quest through completing the Optional Objective of her Studious Student quest. She just needs to complete this day of school and then it will all be done.
Luna stops watching the fairly familiar view of the bus’ path and Instead, she focuses on something much closer. Her current character sheet.
System Interface Character Sheet Shop Cultivation NON NON NON General Information Attributes Titles Name Luna Alicea Gonzalez Strength 17 { 20 } Incomplete Superhuman Nature Human Dexterity 20 { 20 } Alignment Earth ( Humans ) Constitution 16 { 20 } Tier 0 Intelligence 29 { 100 } Level 0 Wisdom 25 { 100 } F Grade Credits 8,500 Charisma 24 { 29 } Character Points 0 Luck 30 { 100 } Active Quests Story Quests System Installation III System Installation IIII System Installation V Limited Quests On A Roll I Radiant Quests Daily Conditioning Studious Student
Luna had focused on her Wisdom Stat for a while. However, as soon as she got that stat to 100, she got a new Title.
Title: [ Incomplete Superhuman ]
Some of your stats have reached the limits of non magical capability for beings of your race. This has granted you this Title. Each ability which reaches the threshold ( 100 ) will grant you a boon. A major boon will occur once you raise all of your stats to 100.
Superhuman Intelligence: The effect of Intelligence on your total mystical energy reserves has been increased.
Superhuman Wisdom: The effect of Wisdom on your total mystical energy regeneration has been increased.
Superhuman Luck: Your Luck has increased.
This title has been upgraded from the Title [ Average ]. This title can be upgraded for increased effects.
After Luna got this title she was convinced to raise all of her stats to an even 100 before focusing on anything else. Completing this title seemed like it would have incredible benefits. Likely increasing the effects of her stats across the board given the individual effects of each stat reaching a ‘superhuman’ level.
What surprised her though, was how easy it was to get to superhuman levels in her stats. It meant that the power scale is on the higher end of all of her stories. More like Defiance of The Fall than The Land. That meant that Luna could expect to be doing some comic book superhero business as soon as she reached full system functionality.
It also meant that a lot of people were going to die. Her speed of growth was only possible due to her slow but steady easing into the system. The panic from the full worldwide integration that Luna suspected will occur when her Apocalypse Timer ran out made her sick to her stomach. So many won’t get a handle of the system, and if it was anything like the ‘Ruthless Heavens’ from Defiance of The Fall, many will be culled simply to empower the elites that rise.
It was that reason that made Luna wonder about the whole purpose of the System. Why had she been given a year's head start? Why isn’t she allowed to share her understanding of her series? Why did it only mention those 10 series?
That last one was one of the most confusing. Why hadn’t it also mentioned something like Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint? The removal of the series from anyone else felt very much like it was ripped right from that story.
Before Luna even fully recognized it, she was at the bus station. Luna needs to travel through 2 different stations on 3 different buses to get home or to school. All in all, nearly an hour and a half of bus ride both ways, oftentimes delayed due to getting out of school at 6 pm. At least it gave her a lot of time to do her homework, but not today.
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The bus ride home was very different from the ride to school. Instead of being bored out of her gord, she was giddy. Her last class was a breeze, and the final was online, open book, and incredibly easy. She saw that her score was a perfect 100 before she even left the classroom.
All Luna could do was wait for her quest to update with barely contained excitement. She was ready!
THERE!
QUEST COMPLETE
Radiant Quest: [ Studious Student ]
Enrich your mind through study and scholarly practice by getting the best grades you can!
Objective: Complete Semester With B Average 1/1
Reward: 60 Attribute Points, 10,000 F Grade Shop Credits
Optional Objective: Complete Semester With Straight As 1/1
Extra Reward: Epic Random Loot Box, 10,000 F Grade Shop Credits
QUEST COMPLETE
Story Quest: [ System Installation III ]
You have balanced your soul, allowing you to begin to follow the path laid before you. You have gained full interactivity with the system, but many parts of the system are still beyond your grasp, and must be earned.
Objective: Complete 50 Optional Quest Objectives 50/50
Reward: Unlock Talent And Skill Systems
Luna could almost bring herself to stand up and do a little dance right there on the bus! Almost. Instead she just has a giddy laugh as she punches her arms out. Sure Luna got some strange looks, but she had her earbuds in. People will just assume she was overreacting to what she was hearing and promptly ignore her.
Luna doesn’t turn in her Radiant Quest just yet. She had absolutely no idea how big an Epic Random Loot Box was, but didn’t want to risk getting an item that won’t fit into her backpack, or worse, be technically illegal.
Instead… she turns in her System Installation quest. That, at least, she knew won’t backfire…
Talent And Skills Systems Integrating...
Wait didn’t she purge a ton of impurities the last time she completed a quest like this? Hopefully something similar doesn’t happen again. She does not want to have to deal with that sort of embarrassment in the middle of a crowded bus.
Integration Complete!
Talents have been automatically added to a new tab.
Skill systems have been added to a new tab
Quest Rewards Updated
Luna smiles as she takes a look at her character sheet and the new tabs. The smile widens even more as she realizes that there won’t be any… inopportune side effects due to her accepting of this quest. One thing she does notice is that she is going to need to restructure her whole character sheet. Well… perhaps not the whole thing. It’s nearly unintelligible right now with all of the new info.
Good thing she has another hour and 10 minutes to her bus ride at a bare minimum. She has more than enough time to fix it before she goes home and opens the loot box.
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Luna sits down in her chair at home. She hates how it feels like it is almost falling apart, but she isn’t going to send any waves right now with her money situation. Aka the fact she has nearly 80k in her bank account at the moment. 80k tax free money that just appeared out of nowhere without even a bank statement to trace it back to where it came from.
Nowadays Luna just uses the money to buy herself food on the long ride to and from school. She knows it’s bad for her, but she is working out so much that a subway sandwich won’t hurt her.
First thing’s first, Luna does the thing she has been itching to do since completing the quest. She turns it in. With an offhand thought, she places all of the attribute points into her Charisma stat, trying to raise that to 100 as fast as possible. As suspected, each point raises her stat by 1, rather than needing 10 as it had for Character Points. The stat went from just 29 to 89 in an instant.
But what took her attention… was the Epic Loot Box on her lap. It was the size of 2 of her desktop PCs taped together. Aka, it was massive. She slowly shifted it off of her lap and onto the ground to avoid damaging it. It was surprisingly heavy compared to how the Common loot box was. Even just scaling a common loot box to this size won’t make it this heavy.
Next… she opened it, and found it empty. Half a second later, a prompt appeared in her vision.
50% Shop Coupon Code x 3 Acquired
That was… actually quite useful. She won’t lie to herself and say it was the best thing she thought she could have gotten, but it was still a really useful reward. She would hold onto those. There was a reason why she hadn’t yet used the shop or gained any cultivation abilities, even after saving for 3 months.
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Ki Cultivator ( Quartz )
Requirements: At least 50% Affinity
Start on the path of cultivating your Ki and empowering your body.
This ability can be upgraded naturally or through further shop purchases.
Cost: 5000 F Grade Shop Credits ( 50% Off! )
All cultivation abilities cost 10,000 shop credits as a base. This included Body Cultivation, Soul Cultivation, Mana Cultivation, even the more obscure or difficult types like Beast and Mind Cultivation were all still just a flat 10,000 credits. She hadn’t had enough for any cultivation ability before today.
Oh sure there were useful things in the shop for the 100 credits per day she made. For example, one thing was immensely tempting.
Ability Card Shard ( Common )
Gain a piece of an ability card that can be combined with 20 other ability card pieces to create a random Ability Card of the Common Grade.
Cost: 50 F Grade Shop Credits ( 50% Off! )
Ability Cards are from All The Skills. They aren’t called by that name in that series, but the mechanics are simple enough for her to understand. Complete the card, get an ability. The only reason she hadn’t been buying ability card shards and already had a quartet of new abilities she may have been able to use was quite simple.
Luna didn’t want any Common Ability Cards. Luna knew she was greedy, and knew she may be wasting time in holding out. However, there was a concept that rang true among almost all of the series mentioned in her little ‘introductory’ prompt.
There is the concept of one’s ‘Path’. The road they walk down in order to get stronger. Luna has a full year to ponder and understand how she wants to grow. Has a full year to read stories to see how their protagonists handled things. Has a full year to wait.
Luna knew she would be losing out on some of her early progress due to her hesitancy. Knew that the early lead may very well be lost to others with genius level talent. She also knew that most ‘geniuses’ smack face first into a wall they will never be able to climb over due to not understanding all of the bottlenecks. Luna isn’t trying to be the best of the best from the start. She is trying to become humanity’s beacon of hope. To save as many lives as she could.
So, she needs to understand these bottlenecks as much as she can before she confronts them, and needs to set herself up as well as she possibly can to break right through them.
It’s why Luna hadn’t bought a Cultivation ability. She had the Credits… but she needs to make sure that her form of cultivation fits her path. Plus, the Shop was tens of thousands of pages long, and that was just the abilities section. The list of artifacts that could be bought was equally long. She could even buy almost any mundane item she could think of using her Shop. Who knows what else she might need before she starts.
At least Luna had taken an eye to the shop, searching and filtering for abilities she knew would be useful. Some existed in the shop that she didn’t expect. Others were nowhere to be found. Others she just hadn’t gotten to because she was still at the damn Js and haven’t been able to take the time to slog through it. She has been making use of a spreadsheet to take note of abilities she liked and could afford before the apocalypse. That spreadsheet alone had nearly 300 abilities, and had been pruned down multiple times to get to that number, even with damn near 2/3 of the shop just barely skimmed.
With a sigh, Luna takes a look at her new Character Sheet.
System Interface Character Sheet Shop Cultivation Skills NON NON General Information Attributes Titles Name Luna Alicea Gonzalez Strength 17 { 20 } Incomplete Superhuman Nature Human Dexterity 20 { 20 } Alignment Earth ( Humans ) Constitution 16 { 20 } Tier 0 Intelligence 29 { 50 } Level 0 Wisdom 25 { 50 } XP 0% Charisma 24 { 25 } Character Points 0 Luck 30 { 30 } Active Quests Story Quests System Installation II System Installation III System Installation IIII System Installation V Limited Quests On A Roll I Radiant Quests Daily Conditioning Studious Student Racial Talents Racial Talents have not been unlocked. Please purchase a ‘Character Overhaul’ in the shop, acquire a Racial job, or use a Character Package to unlock your Racial Talents. Personal Talents Personal Talents have not been unlocked. Please purchase a Talent Awakening in the shop, acquire a Racial job, or use a Character Package to unlock your Racial Talents.
Sadly, not much has changed. Well, not ‘much’. She moved talents from their own page into a subsection of her front page. She felt that was the easiest way to have it for now. What’s more important is the ‘Character Overhaul’ mentioned in her ‘Racial Talents’ section.
Before she integrated this part of the system, such a thing did not exist. Now though, it was in her shop. It proved the fact that things get added to the shop as she integrates more systems, which to Luna proved that she was right to wait before buying anything.
This though? It was something she wished for since she was a young child.
Character Overhaul 1/1
Requirements: User must be > Tier 1
A ‘Character Overhaul’ is a single use ability that brings the user into a mental realm. Within this realm, the user is able to completely configure their looks and species, as if using a character creator in a video game. This does not change any bloodlines or affinities a person may have.
This ability can only be activated if the System has fully integrated within the individual.
This ability can only be used once, and after it has been used, it removes itself from the user’s Shop Abilities.
Cost: 25,000 F Grade Shop Credits ( 50% Off! )
Luna will lose the overwhelming majority of her credits in an instant if she buys this. She will still have months to wait until she can enjoy the benefits of the changes.
But… this is an instant transition. No months of HRT. No recovery from surgeries. All Dysphoria gone in an instant.
Luna has internalized that she is a she. She thinks of herself using the ‘She’ pronoun. All of her family members use ‘She’ when talking to her. However, there was always this moment of hesitation from everyone as they remember the pronoun she prefers. The way that people will assume ‘he’ whenever they meet her for the first time always feels like a new cut against her back. The way that people react when she tells them that she is trans.
Without even thinking all that much, Luna spent the 25,000 credits, using one of her 50% off coupons. She feels the ability settle into herself. It was… instinctual. It wasn’t as if it was always there, but it was a learned skill that she got instantaneously. Like a new hobby you were just getting the hang of.
She tried to use it. Some part of it wanted to work, but it didn’t finish. She didn’t have all of the prerequisites to activate the ability because it didn’t fully integrate itself.
Luna opens her shop page in a panic, collapsing the actual shop itself in order to not get distracted.
System Interface Character Sheet Shop Cultivation Skills NON NON Shop Page Shop Abilities Mind NONE NONE Body NONE NONE Soul Character Overhaul NONE Shop Mundane Items Magical Items Abilities ( Shop Collapsed ) Page 1
A bone deep sigh of relief allows Luna to calm down. Somewhat. The ability didn’t get its one use burnt on her knee jerk use of it. As she looks at her Shop page, she frowns. She really should have ‘Current Currency’ clearly plastered somewhere on it. A change for later.
For now… Luna has spent all of her credits that she wanted to. With a lazy glance, she looks at her Cultivation and Skills pages.
System Interface Character Sheet Shop Cultivation Skills NON NON Cultivation Sheet You lack any cultivation potential. Cultivation potential can be unlocked through abilities in the shop, acquired with a class/skill, or through innate ability.
System Interface Character Sheet Shop Cultivation Skills NON NON Skills Page Shop Abilities Mundane Skills Cultivation Skills Combat Skills Body Enhancement Skills Social Skills
Luna knew that the Cultivation page hadn’t yet had any changes. It stung that she didn’t have enough innate ability to cultivate, but she suspected that if she had that before, she would have shown the capability at some point.
It was the skills page that made her the most intrigued. She had done a lot of things that she considered ‘skillful’ even in just the time since she was on the bus. However, nothing has worked yet to really gain a skill. It, however, wasn’t something that was limited by her not having bought the right ability. She just simply didn’t know how it worked.
She wished she could just ask the system what that meant, but the system didn’t work like that. It wasn’t interactive in that way. That was part of what was helping her formulate a plan of her path.
First though… Luna needs to acquire a skill.
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Skill Acquired: Creative Writing
Creative Writing is a Mundane skill. Due to your proficiency with this skill you start it as level 6.
Luna stared at the prompt in front of her eyes confused out of her mind. She had spent all day trying her hardest to get a skill. She did so much stupid stuff with the intent of getting a skill out of it. After all of her normal stuff didn’t work, she even volunteered to clean the bathroom, kitchen, and living room in hopes of getting a cleaning skill.
The moment she sat down and started to wind down though, that was when she got a skill. She wasn’t even trying to get a skill. She was just…
Luna may very well be an idiot. She wasn’t putting her all into any of her previous tasks. She was only trying enough to maybe get a skill. Creative writing is both a passion and something she did for months as part of three different classes last semester in different ways. She was wholly focused on her writing. That focus must be what she needs.
This made Luna even further appreciate the hints she got from her different series. If she didn’t already read all of them, she may very well have spent days single mindedly focusing on getting skills rather than knowing a calming break would be just what she needed.
Now… Luna has a firm idea of what her next steps should be… and an even more firm idea of what her path may be.
Perhaps it was somewhat prophetic that her first skill would be ‘Creative Writing’.