Normally I’d argue with being conscripted by the police, but who am I kidding - this plotline is exactly my kind of Isekai trash. I’ll just have to keep an eye out, make sure this organization is more Men in Black or JAG than Serpico or MiniLove.
“Uh, sure! What’s the pay-” I cut myself off. “Never mind, I have no context for the value of money here.” I shake my head in self-deprecation. “Someone’s going to have to explain to me in more detail why you decided to give me the job, but I’ll trust it makes sense. How do I get started?”
Heather turns and yells. “Agnes! The visitor here is our new hard wizard. Finish the zombies, then give her The Talk and the last-ditch grimoire.” I can hear the capital letters when she says ‘The Talk’. “In the meantime,” she continues, “I’ll search their paperwork. Let me know if you need anything.” She gives me a sharp nod and heads back out toward the halls.
Agnes, a friendly middle-aged woman wearing a mix of metal plates and chainmail over a long blue coat, clomps over and waves a four-foot meat tenderizer to indicate that I should follow her. I trail her into a spot where all the desks have been pushed out the way and Ji is rapidly piling up mostly-defeated zombies that he’s carrying in from other parts of the building. I consciously force myself to pay attention to the two agents rather than the still-wiggling undead; they’re more video game enemy than corpse, almost stylized, but it’s still unsettling and disgusting. Especially when I can tell that their limbs are bending in way too many places. At least they don’t smell. I resolve not to ask whether this necromancer is the kind that can summon skeletons out of thin air or if I’m looking at the results of a dozen murders.
It doesn’t take Ji long to finish finding zombies. When he deigns to move at normal human speed he’s inhumanly graceful, effortlessly sweeping around in his grey-and-black silk robe and slippers like some kind of ninja vampire. I quickly realize that he’s the source of the snapping and popping noises from the beginning of the fight, which are a combination of fabric flapping behind sweeping kung-fu strikes and zombies shattering when he hits them. He immediately zooms out the office’s front entrance, where I can now see a stone street beyond the remains of the door. He’s presumably off to check out the surroundings or make a perimeter or something else suitably agent-y.
Agnes steps up to the pile, bows her head, holds out an imperious hand, and speaks an incomprehensible word that resonates through my head and leaves my thoughts ringing. An infinitely deep blue light that I hadn’t noticed gathering around the zombie pile winks out. The undead go completely still, presumably now properly re-corpsified.
She steps back, drops the head of her hammer on the floor, and leans on it heavily before changing topics to talk to me. It’s like she doesn’t even register the zombies any more. “Agnes, Priestess of Koze,” she says brightly, emotion seemingly at odds with her archaic diction, “And Special Agent of the Bureau of Isekai Affairs. She Who Follows ferried me to this world, near a decade ago, and I ferried Her with me.” She smiles warmly at me and holds out a hand to shake. “By Heather’s word you are our new hard wizard, but who are you other than that?”
“Whitney Ismael,” I introduce myself yet again. “Software Engineer. Cliche as it may be, I got hit by a truck and now my boring mundane education is apparently a life-changing advantage in the crazy fantasy world I’ve been dropped into.”
“A sentiment most common,” Agnes laughs. “Well, Heather’s word is good - she may have memorized every operating manual under our sun.” She grabs her hammer and sets off toward the entrance. “Come. We will find seating, I will talk, and you will read the grimoire.”
We emerge into a beautiful day in the most stereotypical old timey small town imaginable. Only a few puffy white clouds drift through the blue sky above me, and the sun is out and shining. Streets covered with rectangular grey stones, two-story stone and wood buildings, a few wooden crates and a single random twenty-foot log in the street, straw roofs, the works. Nobody is around, probably because they all ran away when the Isekai Police started a fight in the middle of town. A pile of backpacks leans up against the wall next to the door. I realize that there isn’t any horse poop in the street and crates must have been dropped by fleeing townsfolk, so I raise my estimate of the setting’s average power-level.
“I will recite the short version,” Agnes says, making a beeline for a nearby bench, “as time is scarce.” I nod in mute agreement, and she launches straight into her speech. “Welcome to the Republic of Eld, a major nation in the plane of Land!” Wow, she wasn’t kidding about reciting it; she’s clearly regurgitating a welcome package word for word. “You’ve just been transplanted from some other existence into our friendly little slice of the multiverse. Regardless of the cause, whether it was accidental or intentional, the Bureau of Isekai Affairs is here to help you start a new life here.” It smells like propaganda to me, but I try to not let my doubt show. “Land has been a destination for random travelers, Visitors, as far back as we can find evidence; Eld itself was established by a Visitor much like yourself.” Of course it was, though I find it a bit unlikely that they really did it single-handedly. “Even if you came from a setting with pervasive, powerful magic, Land will be more than you’re used to. Visitors to Land often carry fragments of their world with them, allowing them to not only continue to use their existing powers, but to share those powers with others.”
I perk up. “So I did see Heather dismissing an infobox earlier! At some point someone managed to bring a whole LitRPG system with them,” I hypothesize out loud.
“It is so!” Agnes smiles at me again. “I know not what a LitRPG is, but you did likely see Heather acknowledge a system message. Formally, Heather’s Gift is an Intrusive System.”
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
I decide to skip past explaining LitRPGs to Agnes. I’m not even sure why I used the term, really, since they also barely know what programming is. And I guess “System” is what they call their LitRPG powers in-universe? “Ah,” I say, “and of course it’s happened multiple times, enough that you had to create terminology to distinguish between Systems with different general properties.” I’m already happy with my decision to go along with the plot; the Isekai Police is going to get all the interesting jobs around here. “How many different Systems are there?”
“Thousands!” Agnes laughs when I boggle at her. “And more than Systems! My relationship with Her is termed a Soft Magical Gift, Ji and Bob are called cultivators, and Liv has an Extrusive System Gift, the Saga.” She nods at me. “You will be a spellcaster, with a Hard Magical Gift well-regarded as easy to share, hard to master, and bestowed of unusual ability to interact with the paradigms of other Gifts. Visitors of a certain personality are reputed to fit it well.” She cocks her head at me. “Is programming some craft or philosophy?”
“Sort of? I do software engineering, which is a level up from programming the way an architect would design a bridge for a mason to build, and programming itself is a kind of applied mathematics,” I reply absently. I have a dozen questions circling my head, about what intrusive and extrusive mean, what the difference is between hard and soft magical Gifts, how many different kinds of Gift there are, whether I can get myself a super-powered meta-Gift of some kind, and more, but I hold on to those for later. “If I can actually learn and analyze this magic system, rather than just putting points in fireball, I’m down for that.” I refocus. “Continue?”
Agnes focuses and returns to the recitation. “The Republic of Eld takes pride in being the friendliest places on Land for Visitors,” she says. “The Bureau of Isekai Affairs will help you find a place to live and share whatever you brought with you, whether it’s knowledge, language, a new Gift, or simply yourself.”
“Let me guess,” I say skeptically, “Making Visitors angry is just asking for one to instantiate with superpowers and blow up your entire nation, making Visitors happy means one will occasionally blow up another nation for you?”
Agnes snorts. “A cynical view, but not incorrect. Visitors are often great, but the Bureau has good purpose for us.”
“That necromancer you’re after, I assume?”
“It is so,” she says. “Even simple plants or animals may Visit and immensely disturb the natural order or threaten our safety.” She shakes her head, then goes back to the speech. “Some Visitors bring ‘Gifts’ that let them continue to use their powers despite their presence in Land. A Visitor might continue to be able to channel their deity, manipulate environmental mana, or absorb elemental qi, despite all of those things having been left behind when they departed from their original world.”
I know I look confused because Agnes stops and waits for me to ask. “How… far does that extend?” I try to think my way through an example. “Like, if I had a magic that was all about calling to the similarity of all things from a well-documented Creation event, would I still be able to use that power?”
Agnes nods. “Were you to carry that Gift, yes; you would still find those similarities and even use them, though they may be beyond your ability to explain to others. An extremely Soft Magical Gift, most likely.”
I grimace. “So Gifts are some kind of consensus reality thing, I guess? Yuck.”
Agnes shrugs. “I cannot guess; an expert would know. I begin to understand Heather’s decision, however - Hard Wizards enjoy thinking that sort of thought. And, now that we speak of Hard Wizards, and my recitation concluded…” she trails off, “One moment.” She bends over and starts rifling through the biggest of the backpacks, a huge thing with a rigid frame and many small compartments. “At last,” she proclaims, pulling out a small hardback book. “The last-ditch grimoire. Gifts are transferable. A cultivator can teach you to Awaken your qi and refine your body and spirit. A System user can enroll you or Identify you until the blue boxes visit you directly. I could help you see Koze’s magnificence. This grimoire,” she waves the book, “shares a Magical Gift.” She looks at it distastefully. “But Gifts are jealous. Only one may you have, and though you can choose anew, you must first abandon the old entirely. There are reasons why this grimoire is reserved for the most dire of situations.”
I wince. “Ouch. Have to start over completely? Decades or centuries to regain your cultivation, your god is now angry at you, etcetera?”
“It is so,” Agnes says. She holds the book out to me.
The “last-ditch grimoire” is a small hardback book, bound in blue leather with simple block lettering embossed on the face and spine. On Magic, the title says. No author is credited. It has nothing on the back, nor any illustrations or other embellishments. I take it, flip it open, and find some pieces of paper slipped inside the cover.
“WARNING,” the first paper says, in black ink on red paper. The indentations on the paper tell me that it’s handwritten, but other than that the lettering is absolutely perfect, mechanically regular. “This book transfers a HARD MAGICAL GIFT. If you do not have a Gift and you do not intend to gain one, STOP READING NOW. If you recently rejected a Gift and have been diagnosed as having anything similar to a ‘sensitivity to mana’, any irregularities with your ‘magical core’ or ‘mana channels’, or anything about a ‘thaumic resonance’, STOP READING NOW. If you have a seizure disorder, STOP READING NOW. If the terms of your parole prohibit you from gaining a Gift, STOP READING NOW. You MUST read chapters 1-3, 5-8, and 13 to gain the Gift. You MUST complete the exercises in chapter 13 to gain the Gift. You do NOT need to complete the reading or the exercises in a single sitting.” The next piece of paper is an inventory form of some kind, labeled boxes filled in with classic bureaucratic noise in much more normal handwriting - a reference number, a serial number in the thousands, acquisition date, property of the Bureau of Isekai Affairs on loan to the Bureau of Isekai Affairs, that kind of thing. This piece of paper looks like it was printed as a form and then filled out by a normal human hand at some later date.
While I find myself nodding along at most of the warnings, the bit about ‘the terms of your parole’ adds one to the 1984 tally. It’s more lenient than what I think I’d probably see on a similar item back home, but that’s still not the best thing.
Of course, now that I’m sitting here being philosophical and reading a nice book and enjoying the nice day outside, my body realizes that it’s safe and all that adrenaline I’ve been riding stops helping and I realize I’m shaking and about to throw up.
“I am impressed that you lasted that long,” says Agnes.
Thankfully, I get the book out of the way first.