Warlock Blast/2! Warlock Ward/2! Warlock Whim/2! Warlock Caster/2- ugh...

Okay, that tempered the flow way, way down. Those were the fundamental Warlock Masteries, which led into sub-Masteries to develop.

Nothing happened with Warlock Caster/2, I was rather aloofly ignored. That meant from a Class Level standpoint, I was a Three. You needed to be a Four to take Warlock Caster/2...

Three... in what? If we were to consider this Character Creation, and go back way to the start...

I eyed my Matrix again, noticing that it was definitely a Wizard Matrix, but not Div Spec.

Because Div Spec was taken after you decided the Class.

It also definitely wasn’t a Three. Only the first Valence was active, and all the Slots were dark and empty, no magic feeding them.

No magic indicating more Levels anywhere, so that meant a non-magic Class. A Class I was a Three in before magic? Or rather, Aelryinth had been?

Expert? From before the Fall?

Being a Three meant, ummm, useful things...

Assuming Expert/3, that meant a +3 Will Save, 3x(d6+Con) Soak, 3x(8+Intellect) in skill points, and another automatic General Feat at Three. Potentially a Power Feat!

The cost of all my Levels would be at least the same as getting to Expert/4, which I wasn’t going to do, as Expert/4 would then be my main Class. That wasn’t going to happen...

I wanted my magic back, dammit!

So, let’s assume I was Human/1; Expert/3, Wizard/1 right now. Four Class Levels meant twelve Mastery Tiers possible, if I had the Karma to feed them.

Ael had taken craploads of Advanced Classes JUST so he could keep taking Heavenbound Masteries. Total Karma sinks, but Karma was the currency he had to spend, so he spent it...

A great deal of the fogginess I’d had, the nausea and disorientation, and the feeling like an electric charge was flashing through my brain intermittently, was gone. When it wanted to flare up, I pushed it out to my hands, and heard a crackle and felt a popping around them.

One, I didn’t want Expert/3. The skill points were nice, but the true power lay in Feats, not in Skill Points. There were plenty of ways to make up Skill Points, but you could always use more Feats, especially at start.

Two, were there limits on how many Levels I could take sideways? I already knew this wasn’t the Power of Ten, as it had already let me take six Tiers, and I didn’t feel like I was finished.

Three, what were the limits on Classes I could take? My Wizard Class was basically stillborn. Did that mean it wasn’t viable at all? That meant I would have to retrain it. Obviously, Warlock-something was still useful...

Would I have to advance the Human Racial Class? Assuming I was human. Felt human. Different gender then Ael, but felt that way. Or had the three Expert Levels done something?

Regardless, I didn’t want the Expert Levels if I could help it. There were ways to get the Skill Points back.

Retrain Expert/3 to Vizard/3!, I ordered silently. I had taken nothing from them, they had merely been set up by default, so reorganizing them before anything became locked in stone should be good, yes?

Something shifted in my head, a centering of focus moving from extracting reams of knowledge to a narrower view, but potentially deeper.

But what did I need? Ugh, I hated this situation. But then again, if I had no limits on what I could take, I could ‘Level up’ very quickly, potentially.

I just had the feeling that taking lots of lateral Levels was not an option here. Mmm...

Well, I will just have to play it by ear, I guess...

It wasn’t forcing me to make my choices-? Although I likely would have to before I added any new Class Levels.

Well, I suppose I should at least make my Level One stuff formal.

Talent: Naturally Focused! I wanted my damn official Concentration bonus, thank you.

Level One Feat: Dauntless! Immune to the effects of fear was going to... ahhhhhhh.

The shadows and webs and legs and eight red eyes in that darkness scuttling underneath all of reality ceased trying to dominate all my thoughts and perceptions, and waved kind of impotently at me from the back of my head while I debated what to do about them.

Existing in a permanent state of PTSD and hallucinatory recall overlay from getting a Pact forced on me by an eldritch horror and being made its puppet was not going to happen. I felt everything stiff and frozen and tingling and skin-crawling and all just relax abruptly, and if I hadn’t wedged myself into a corner, I’d’ve fallen over in relief.

Oh gawd not having a mountain of fear looming over me felt so good...

Level One Human Feat: Disciplined Intellect. Swap all Wisdom-based Saves and Skills over to Intellect. If Intellect is going to be a Power Stat, then make it a bloody Power Stat, thank you!

The first six skill points I had to choose were those for Human/1. They would be Class Skills regardless of what Class I was paying from.

Concentration, Meditation, Stealth, Perception. Those were basically what I considered adventurer skills, tying into so, so much. Concentration was required for any kind of activity that needed focus, like, oh, assigning skill points while heavily traumatized. Meditation allowed one to rest while still aware, a uniquely powerful survival skill, and was required to regain most kinds of internal energies one wielded. Stealth and its counterpart Perception were about awareness and avoiding the same, also survival skills.

Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

Did I actually need Survival at this time? More importantly, was it core?

No, I decided it was not. Spellcraft and Alchemy went on the default Human stack, cementing my nature as someone who wielded energies and used their brains, one way or another. Alchemy, or Weird Science, could be applicable just about anywhere. It was all about bending the existing rules with Energized Elements and weird combinations of substances and energies of various kinds, after all.

Four skill points per Vizard Level, plus Intellect bonus per Level. Just enough to max out three Ranks in each of these Core Skills, and leave my Intellect Bonus in skills floating.

Oh, and bonus languages, too. As of right now, I only understood Human...

Clickity-click-click-click...

Concentration and Meditation harmonized, although my ability to focus was clearly of an order higher than my groping at serenity with surges of voltage or something surging through me with every heartbeat.

Heartbeat...

I folded my legs below me, dropped my hands on top of them, and inhaled long and slow.

My tripping triple-time heartbeat began to slow.

No threat. No fear. No uncertainty, no need for the power. Peace, calm, tamp it down, control, conduct the power, don’t let it surge out uncontrolled, and why was it synched to my heartbeat, anyway?

---------

“Well?” the doctor asked the dark-skinned man in the eagle-motif mask, who was carefully watching everything through the reinforced window in the door to the room.

The electrical discharges from the girl had fried the cameras in the room, seeking them out with wild yet seemingly precise purpose, leaving them no recourse but personal observation to assess the danger level inside. Certainly nobody wanted to risk going in while the green-white streams of voltage burned randomly over the walls and ceilings. If they hadn’t moved her to an insulated room not so easy to set on fire, the fire extinguishing system would have kicked on.

As it was, the steel bracing behind the walls, floor, and ceiling seemed to be grounding out most of the effects now.

“She’s set herself up in the lotus position in the corner and looks to be meditating,” the incredibly fit man in the tight uniform of brown and gold reported, his intense yellow eyes watching everything without blinking.

“Really?” The doctor present was startled. “That... is quite a leap from being as terrified as you described her, officer Hawkeye.”

The man nodded slowly, also surprised. “I don’t know what she was seeing, but even when her eyes were closed, parts of her were twitching uncontrollably in terror. It’s not something you mistake. The discharges are continuing between her hands, like a flickering light bulb. Have a look.” The Powered officer stepped back from the door, and let the doctor step up to see the room inside.

It was completely destroyed, of course. The bed, tables, and drawers looked like a bomb had gone off in there, but there was surprisingly little flame, only scorched marks of something hot cutting through so fast and intense that what was left behind didn’t have the opportunity to ignite.

Every couple of seconds, there was a green-white pulse in the far corner, where a dark-haired, pale-skinned teenage girl in a hospital gown was seated in the lotus, hands on her knees, eyes closed, her face lit up in relief before receding into the darkness.

It wasn’t serene, but intense, while trying to relax, as if it was fighting for that harmony.

Still, the pulses seemed to be spacing themselves out further and further...

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but this is a remarkable display of self-control just after an Awakening, right?” the doctor asked, watching several more flashes with professional interest.

“Very much so, doc. It often takes a day or more, when complete exhaustion takes over, and the body puts in some regulating mechanisms,” the Powered officer replied.

“A mutant?” the doctor asked uncertainly.

“Unlikely if radiation was the triggering mechanism. Mutants are usually triggered by some physical or emotional event after they hit puberty, not something as slow and wasting as radiation poisoning. She was comatose from the moment she was found, right?”

“Yes, and lethally hot with rads. We basically just provided her with basic sustenance and waited for her to die. Then she didn’t die, and her internal readings began to go down. Some weird things were going on with her blood chemistry, like her red blood cells were eating the radiation, and metamorphosizing as they did.”

“Radiation is an artificial way to replicate the effects of a natural X-gene, but like most such methods, not very effective,” Hawkeye nodded grimly. “That doesn’t stop all sorts of people from trying all sorts of things to see if they will work, and if they can finally crack the secret of granting powers to people.”

Doctor Wade Kennedy could only nod. It was widely known that many ruthless people wanted the secret of unleashing the full power of the Powered gene in humanity. They were totally happy to replicate the triggering events encountered by various mutates who had gained that status on the hapless and unlucky, too.

As a matter of fact, Doctor Kennedy was being paid a great deal of money to make sure the medical information of this girl was forwarded to some interested parties, with the accompanying threats that if this was revealed they would not only kill his family, but destroy the hospital outright to cover their tracks... and he believed them.

That didn’t mean he didn’t cooperate fully with the government. As long as those people got their data, they were fine. Making him do more might attract attention, and attention from the official Powered could be quite murderous.

Doctor Kennedy was pretty relieved when they sent out a basic street-level hero like Hawkeye over for this Awakening. The man’s primary gift was the acuity of his eyes, which made him an excellent sniper and ranged combatant, as well as a scout and spy. His ability to fly was from Coretech, and he, like many Core-users, relied on weapons for offensive power, not that much different from normal people.

Doctor Kennedy wasn’t too worried about being found out if they didn’t send a telepath or something, and since his hands were basically forced, he just refused to worry about it. The hush money had already gone into an anonymous charitable fund for orphans of Powered fights, after all, and he certainly wasn’t going to sacrifice his colleagues and patients for some random girl, Powered or no.

“How well did you read her file, officer?” the doctor asked politely, having intimate knowledge of said file, as he had composed it himself.

“Fairly well, if briefly. What are you asking about?” the Powered asked, his golden eyes uncomfortably intent.

“Did you see the section where she had trace chemicals related to cryogenic suspension in her initial blood and urine?” the doctor inquired blandly.

The Powered frowned, and his eyes flickered as if he was looking at something else. The art of a Visual File was very, very popular among Core-users, and the doctor could only envy having a built-in computer display for your own memory. It wasn’t the same as having the information truly memorized and working with it, but only a notch down, and it certainly applied to far more, as literally everything someone knew was available for recall.

All the patient charts, all the medical journals, all the health alerts and latest medical knowledge, instruction manuals and videos for new devices... Doctor Kennedy could only envy those who had managed to touch and unleash their Cores. If it didn’t match the true abilities of the Powered, they were still enormously useful in day-to-day life, ranking just below the Powered as the true elites of society today.

“And naturally any cryogenic devices were lost when Phoenix slagged the place,” Hawkeye sighed. The hot site had been melted down to liquid slag, then drained of energy completely to take away the radiation, fusing it very cold and hard once more. They still didn’t know who exactly had been responsible for the leaking micro-reactor, but clearly they hadn’t been willing to be their own test subjects for whatever was going on below.

“Another point, although it’s not in the report, and we didn’t test it out, as it isn’t our job,” the doctor went on meaningfully. Hawkeye lifted an eyebrow at him. “She was discovered at the edge of the site, after Phoenix melted the entire place down. The air temperature alone... but there was not a single burn on her.”

“Interesting.” Hawkeye considered that information. “Let’s just keep that out of your report, Doctor.”

Doctor Kennedy had the impression the Powered knew more than he was saying, and sighed inwardly in relief. After all, it wasn’t his job to test for Powers, only watch her health...