At this point, she formally introduced herself
“I am Junior Maid Elizabeth. I will be working with team Red 1. Trainer Steven will be our liaison with the servants supplied by the Citadel.
Move, there is no point cluttering up the mess hall. I am sure that you will sleep the rest of the morning. What you both have achieved today would take many multiple weeks. Be pleased.
Return in 4 candle marks to eat, then we will talk about your training.”
We both headed to our room and started to rest on the cots. Before I knew it a bell chimed and I woke with a start. Dang, I had fallen asleep without even knowing that it was happening. I heard the chime again. I looked over at Fanny who looked like she had just woken as well.
“Do you hear something?” I asked
Her response was “Yes but I cannot tell where it is coming from”
I glanced at the table and noticed that the time candle had moved down 4 marks. So I said “Looks like it is time to eat, I still feel as if the river of power is still flowing in a sluggish manner but it is a lot better than when I sat down on the cot earlier. Are you feeling any better”
She replied with a shrug “ Yes I feel just like normal but I did not use as much power as you did, so I was not injected with Elizabeth’s power to the same extent.”
I nodded because that made a lot of sense. I had certainly found that I had pushed or been pushed multiple times to that extent that was only close to those times that had resulted in my ‘Total exhaustion” titles. But because Elizabeth had refilled the river I had not run dry.
At that point, the Chime rang again and louder this time.
We both jumped. We moved quickly. Upsetting Elizabeth just felt like an awesomely bad idea.
We both immediately headed back to the mess hall. Things had been rearranged. Half of the hall had been fenced off. There was now a large empty space on one side, while on the other were the tables and the servery. The meals had taken a significant step up. When previously there had been a lot of food, there had been such little choice that it could only be called choice by the most generous definition. Now there was a wide array of what looked like vegetables and fruits, a number of meat dishes, different types of bread, and Cheese Glorious Cheese.
I drooled, at the sight of the food, the scents sent me into rapture. How had I slept through this beautiful food being prepared? Rather than bland on bland, there was taste, scent, and texture. All glory to the Chef.
I thanked the servers, I asked them to thank the cooks, and I begged them to thank the Chef. I took a little of this and a bit of that.
While I was completely distracted, Elizabeth approached “Mhmm. Fonial we have an appointment”
I spun and found my hammer in hand even before completing the turn. Once the turn was complete and my mind had caught up to my body, I froze. I was not sure if I froze or maybe I had been paralyzed. There was that damnable smile again Yet this was Elizabeth, not Holly. At least there was a trace more humor about the edges of her eyes.
I then heard the tray hit the floor, plates break, and cutlery scatters across the floor. It had felt far longer than I could account for, the tray should have hit the floor well before I had completed the turn, drawn my weapon, moved towards the perceived threat, and fallen into a ready stance. On top of that, I just knew that I was standing frozen for seconds, not split seconds.
My perception of how time moved changed. How I moved within time blurred.
Skill improved - Basic Perception - 8 /10
Attribute Improved - Speed +4
There also was a hint of skill or skills yet unmastered. I stood there shocked and wondering what had just happened.
A servant appeared and started to clean the mess up. It had covered quite an area. I started to move to help, but Elizabeth stopped me. “That is their job, you have other work to do that will be much harder”
She gathered Fanny and Robert with a wave of her hand, and a flash of something.
Since the start of the day, I noticed that the seals that had appeared over the doorways were changing. Becoming in some way more real. There were hints of color appearing, They were more three-dimensional.
We gathered in the cleared area. Someone had provided small round tables with chairs, I noticed that Red 2 had already gathered about one.
Elizabeth started with
“No questions until you have enough information so that you can make intelligent questions.”
She waited to look at us all. Me in particular.
We all quickly nodded. There was a strong feeling of pressure, something that I had experienced here in this world before, but never in my previous life. I had felt uncomfortable internally before but this experience was much more an external force.
“So Stephan is a low to a mid-level trainer. He is very capable to take recruits that have just awakened to the system and making good troopers from them. They tend not to be able to develop very far, but they are excellent shock troops that are put in the line to break attacks apart and to protect the more important elites.
His purpose was to stunt your growth. The purpose that you were summoned is not as simple as he or James suggested. And no I am not telling what that is. You could not understand at this time. All you need to understand is that we want you to be more. We have a different agenda than those that caused your training to work the way it did over the last week.
All you need to know is that what we are doing is not safe, but even in the short term, your individual chances of survival are far higher. You were summoned as sacrifices just as the thousands of slaves were sacrificed to enable your summoning. You need to make their sacrifice worthy because at the moment they and you will be sacrificed for the continued power of the elite families within the elite septs.
In time you may learn more. But if you want to survive more than for a few years you have to learn and conceal some of what you learn.”
As she talked, the weight of what she was sharing ground against my mind, and against this other part of me that I was coming to understand as my spirit.
She looked at us all, we were all looking very serious. What kind of people would slaughter thousands to summon less than a hundred, just so they in turn could be sacrificed. The concept that had lived in my mind for the last few days was true: they were monsters, monsters in human form but still monsters.
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I don’t know what I can do but I will stand against this type of evil.
Elizabeth quietly nodded at all of us. “Our sept and clan cannot save all of those summoned. You that have come from “the Earth” have much promise, but be aware you are mortal as are we. We stand against powerful forces that could crush us all in an instant.”
Silence stretched for a time. She gave us time to start to accept that our fates were in the hands of others.
Suddenly she started to lecture
“Stephan was misleading when he said that there are limits to the power that you can obtain. There are no limits, but if you grow too fast and demonstrate skills and titles that are dangerous to the powers they will end you, without a second thought.
His solution and those like him is to limit you. Ring fence those skills which make you dangerous to the powers.
Even the more powerful members of the sect are subject to these risks. Only one or two at the highest possible levels are immune, but the best they could do is to flee. If they were to openly challenge the current structures.
You have no choices left to you. But we will help you reach the places where you can choose. Choose wrong and we will finish you. You walk a narrow path with danger on every side and around every corner.”
There was another period of silence.
“The more skill that you acquire the more power that flows through you.
As skills improve they become both more powerful and harder to progress.
For a skill to advance it requires insight. It is what makes the skill more!
Skills are clustered. Skills that are similar or related reinforce a skill. Learning a skill will lead to new skills. When your ‘understanding’ skill has improved sufficiently and advanced you will learn the skills that are related to those which are dependent, Until you master that particular skill you will be unable to learn those advanced skills.
Skills can and do merge. To ‘understand’ what can be merged requires a level of understanding that I am only now starting to reach.
There are various mastery’s that encompass particular skills Weapon skills are a particularly common area where such masteries are well known. It is difficult to improve a mastery but each level of mastery will have an extreme impact on your skills that are related.
The first exercise is to strengthen your will. I will use skill and make you pick up the cup that sits in front of you. You will attempt to not pick it up in the first place, and when you do you will attempt to put it down. You will put it down, dropping it will be punished.
It seemed so easy, Don’t pick up the cup, why should that be that hard.
Then I realized that I had already picked up the cup. “Blast”, putting it down did not seem so hard. I glanced at Elizabeth. Then I noticed I had picked the cup again, and clearly not noticed that I was doing it.
I put the cup down and pushed away and as I drew my hand back, it was in my hand. How is this working, I cannot even stop picking the cup up, and as soon as I put it down and am even momentarily distracted I have picked it up again.
So this was not going to be easy at all, the others were also showing a significant amount of frustration already. I tried to focus on the being on the table, but no, the slightest bit of noise and my attention slipped and I picked it up. I sat on my hand and the other hand picked it up. I tried to sit on both hands and as I went to sit down I found I was sitting on the cup that my hand was holding.
I was going to have to get more systematic about this. There was a skill involved, I wondered what it could be. Thinking about the words Elizabeth had said while trying to not pick up the cup getting distracted by my thoughts and finding the cup in my hands again was both frustrating and illuminating. I wondered what it would be like to be in combat with someone that could alter my actions without me being aware of it.
And the cup back in my hand, actually now I had both hands wrapped around it.
“Arrrr”
“Quiet Fonial don’t distract the others.”
Rather than just putting the cup down, I had to work through the process, step by step. As silly as it felt but it had got to that point. First, hold the cup in one hand. Put the other hand on the table away from where I planned to put the cup, As I had noticed that a couple of times as I was putting the cup down my other hand was picking it up. So now the cup was in my right hand, and my left was flat on the table. The next step was to put the cup on the table without letting go.
That was working, I thought. So I picked the cup up, held it in both hands, and repeated the steps. I did this four more times. The next step was to have the cup on the table and hold it down with one finger. I checked my other hand still on the table but my fingers had wrapped themselves around the handle again. One finger at a time. Check is the cup on the table, is my other hand on the table far away from the cup. No move it. Put the cup back down. Around and around I went getting ever closer to letting the cup go. At last, I had released the cup and was only holding it on the table with one finger, Final Check. My other hand is flat on the table, not close to the cup. I Lifted my finger and checked that my hands had no cup.
Skill improved - Basic Perception - 9 /10
Attribute Improved - Awareness +2
It struck me that it was very likely that I previously not even managed to put the cup down I could not believe it but had to. With that, I checked the table as I felt my hand move back to my side. The cup was gone again, it was back in my hand
Skill improved - Basic Perception - 10 /10
New Skill - Common Perception - 1 /20
I looked around at both Fanny and Robert, they were waving their hands about, moving a cup each from hand to hand, not getting even close to putting it on the table.
I also noticed that a lot of time had passed as I had worked on this problem. I felt that I was not going to gain much control of the situation until I could put the cup down without spending however much time I had spent on that last attempt. It did not feel like a short time.
So practice was what I had to do. Get the cup on the table, get distracted, put the cup on the table, and concentrate on not picking the cup. Not getting distracted and putting the cup back on the table.
As the day passed I was able to put the cup down quickly once I realized that I had picked it up. I was becoming aware when I was picking it up. But if I let my concentration slip in the least. Then one of my hands would pick the cup up without my conscious decision.
Fanny had reached the point of realization that she was not putting the cup down, But Robert was just getting angier. At one point I could tell he was about to throw it so I interrupted him and said “Don’t none of us want to see you punished again, you need to work out what is happening”
At that point we had spent all afternoon waving cups around. At each of the tables, something similar was occurring with some everyday object. The only people that seemed to have made much progress were me, Dakota and, Shamhila.
Holly announced to everyone,
“you will keep the item that you have been given with you at all times until you can return it to your instructor. Now eat, wash, and clean yourselves at the moment you all are objectionable. You may talk amongst your team, but keep it amongst our teams.
Tomorrow you will meet new team members, Until you are capable and reach a satisfactory standard you will remain here and they will reside elsewhere.
Getting to sleep while holding a cup was bad enough I was so glad that I did not hold a knife as Red 4 had been given. It did seem a little tough on them as they were the only group that did not have a person from the earth as a member.
Still in the end I had managed to organize myself sufficiently to be comfortable. As a group, we quietly chatted, about the new circumstances that we found ourselves in. I told the team how I had found that it had taken me hours until I had realized that I had never actually put the cup down, I could see that they were still having the same problem. Rather than detailing how to solve the problem I suggested that first, they needed to work out how to put the cup down.