As my hand pierced the glow surrounding the stone and touched its surface, I soon discovered two things:

1. The glow surrounding the stone seemed to be flowing from the stone into me.

2. I was stuck to the stone.

Try as I might, I could not retract my arm as the glow faded from the stone. Strangely, my own glow didn’t seem to be intensifying. Instead, it seemed to be solidifying around me like a shell, and a low hum began to build up. As the last of the glow faded from the monument, the hum built to a crescendo and cut off with an audible snap.

Finally, I could remove my hand from the tablet, and as I did so something quickly assaulted my senses - like I was seeing but without vision, or hearing without sound. More words entered my perception.

Initializing artifact interface.

...

Bonding Mask of the Unbound.

…

Bonding Complete. Awaiting Host Input.

The new input stunned me for a moment. Was this part of The Bargain I had struck? This mask? I couldn’t feel anything on my face, though at the moment I couldn’t feel anything at all. This seemed to be related to my current lack of any clear body. My current status was a bit in question.

As soon as the thought crossed my mind, a new stream of information flooded into my consciousness.

Status

Name: ???

Age: 0

Heredity: ??? (Temporary Protoplasmic Entity)

Soul Level: 0

Favoured Class: ???

Classes: ???

Str: 10 (0)

Dex: 10 (0)

Con: 10 (0)

Int: 10 (0)

Wis: 10 (0)

Cha: 10 (0)

Feats: ???

Skills: ???

Abilities:

Unbound (Legendary)

Equipment:

Mask of the Unbound

This new set of information certainly made me pause. The format seemed familiar to me for some reason, though the context definitely wasn’t. Something about it excited me, though - not that there was a lot of useful information in there right now.

The lack of anything, including heredity, was concerning. Once again, however, it seemed that focus and intention had implications, as I found myself drawn into another stream of information.

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Analyzing available heredities…

Physical markers unavailable. Searching for alternatives…

Supplemental markers available in Bargain payload. Protoplasmic markers require psychic resonance to activate. Initiating resonance fugue.

Without giving me a moment to process the meaning of those words, my world went black, and I found myself floating in an empty space. No sight or sound around me, though I felt myself buffeted by a swarm of emotions. Trying to navigate them was incredibly difficult, and it took all of my faculties to try to sort out the various sensations I was experiencing. I wasn’t used to dealing with things on a purely mental or emotional level.

I’m not sure how much time passed while I floated in that space, though as a “protoplasmic entity” on a “timeless isle”, who knows what time actually meant. Still, an uncomfortable place to find yourself soon after waking up with what amounted to complete amnesia. I didn’t know who I was, where I’d come from, what I was meant to be doing, or what I’d given up to be here - IF I chose to believe that this “Master of Games”, who had apparently been my business partner in whatever this Bargain was, did in fact have no reason to lie to me.

A storm of emotions and a lack of interruptions seemed to be the necessary final piece needed to unblock my current feelings and let me process what was happening to me. I could feel that I felt mentally slower than I expected to, and that I knew there was so much I should know that I couldn’t quite reach right now, like grasping at clouds. Sensing that that endeavour was currently futile, I finally settled and decided to grasp a bit more about my surroundings. I tried to recall the words I’d seen right before the world went black, but the only one I couldn’t currently call up was “resonance”. I was surrounded by a storm of emotions - maybe I needed to find the one that most resonated with me?

I focused whatever constituted my senses in this space on the emotions around me and tried to sort out what I could feel.

The first emotion that I found was a true sense of solidity - a stoic understanding that what was happening was just the way of things, and that this would pass as all things did, and I would either endure or not. While I’ll admit that it was certainly tempting to lean into that comforting sensation, a strong part of me disagreed - this would only change if I made it change. If I was looking for resonance, this would be an incredibly weak one.

Sensing deeper in that direction of sensation only led me further down the road of forbearance and eternal abidance, which felt distinctly strange from my current understanding of myself. I moved in another direction, to see what else I could find. Some of them felt so alien and wrong that I immediately discounted them - alien sensations of sadistic pleasure or beatific acceptance I jerked away from like being scalded.

I soon found myself wrapped in a sense of carefree ambivalence - less a sense of weathering things, and more one of my concerns being beneath them. While a part of me wished that these feelings mirrored my own, I knew that they didn’t truly resonate with my current being. Reluctantly, I moved on.

My next major encounter was with an infinite curiosity into exactly how I’d found myself in the current scenario. How did the mask work, what did it mean to be Unbound? What was the writing on the stone? I found this feeling to be the most similar to my current sensation at the moment, though there was an obsession to the minutiae and details of the process that I couldn’t quite find myself dwelling on at the moment. Still, it was the closest I’d found til now so I decided to remember it as I proceeded.

The following emotion made me pause for a different reason. I found myself surrounded by a strong urge to quickly find and build myself a new home as soon as possible, and a desire for family that was accompanied by such a sense of loss that I felt like I’d been physically cut.Once again I lamented my lack of memories, as I was sure that I was missing something profound, and I couldn’t remember what it was. Though if the stone’s message was to be believed, I’d chosen this. Sought it out, even. Wondering what things had been like for me to make that decision considering that pain I presently felt, I moved on.

A few more clouds of emotions passed by as I processed, and if I’m honest, wallowed in, the emotions and visceral reaction I’d felt after that last cloud. I went through clouds of rage, indignation, utter bliss and sadness, before I found myself drawn to a curious confluence of emotions I had yet to notice.

I found strains of that curiosity I’d initially found appealing, as well as a desire for freedom to explore that curiosity. I felt a resilience through adversity, a determination, and a desire to be free. Most of all, I found a sensation of excitement and exhilaration at the new opportunities my situation presented. Ultimately, I had an an absolutely fresh start - an Island to explore, an identity to define, and what clearly seemed to be magic to delve into.

I might not remember how I ended up here, but it was clear to me, based on all of the information I had and what I could sense from my own emotions, that it was my choice, and that seemed fundamentally important.I decided there and then to stop my search, as I couldn’t imagine another area resonating with my current emotions more clearly.

As soon as the decision was made, I saw the words again.

Psychic Resonance has reached thresholds.

Merging supplemental markers with protoplasmic entity.

Generating Heredity: Human