A fortnight had passed when one day Joanne was woken up by a shaking in the ground. Sitting up slowly, she squinted around her little crater, still feeling the ground shaking in a broken rhythm.

Eating an apple, she stood and tried to place the sound that telegraphed the shakes felt underfoot. It took time, but once she had woken up a little more, Joanne was able to point in the direction the noise was coming from. Somewhere north-east. Maybe a little more east.

Once she had woken up more fully, Joanne slunk off into the forest.

She could feel herself getting closer as, not only did the noise get louder, but also because the tremors in the ground were getting stronger.

At last, she saw what had been causing the noise and the shakes. It was a giant.

Joanne had no confidence in being able to take down a giant. She had gotten herself to a respectful level 15. She had started using her magic far more, which was why both her Restoration and Destruction were now higher than her One-handed. This meant that she had to invest more in magicka and had invested perks in all of the magic schools, even if she didn’t actively use those spells.

Once Joanne had made her way back to her camp, she made her way to the Book binder. Upon opening it she created a new book and then started putting together a spell. What she wanted was a way to quickly get away.

She picked the 20% running speed boost from Longstride and tried to increase it as much as possible. She was able to get the speed boost to 120% for half an hour with the effect tripling in combat and have the magicka cost be unchanged. An idea struck Joanne and she added the effects of Strike as Lightning. This increased the cost from 20 mana to 100 mana with the effect time still being the same.

Confirming the craft she received the book and instantly learned the new spell, making the book disappear.

Spell learned: Be As Lightning

Be As Lightning

Rank: apprentice

School: destruction

Mana: 100

Description:

Increases speed by 120% and increases damage the faster you move and does equal damage to stamina. Effects are tripled outside of combat for 30 minutes.

With the new skill learned, Joanne made her way back toward the giant. She cast Be As Lightning and she immediately felt the world slow down. She could see small sparks trailing in her wake as she moved. Since she still had some mana left she cast Bound sword and as soon as she did, she felt herself speed up even more. Be As Lightning was now increasing her speed by 360% as she was now in combat. She charged the giant and stabbed at the calf. The moment the sword made contact with the giant’s flesh there was a huge crack of thunder and a bolt of lightning arced from Joanne and impacted the giant like a bulldozer.

Dispelling the sword, the world around Joanne sped up and she saw a ripple push dirt, rocks and shrubs several metres from their original position. The giant, with a bloody slice in its leg, was flung into the sky by the lighting in slow motion.

As she was experiencing time at more than half the speed of a normal human, the spell would last for an hour for her.

Destruction is level 75

One-handed is level 71

You are level 16

You are level 17

Ellipsis

You are level 26

What?! That couldn’t be right, could it? She had only killed one giant after all. But the experience gain for Destruction and One-handed scaled with the damage she did. She also had a 25% experience bonus from the Pioneer’s gift and rested effects. Had the amount of damage really been that high?

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Joanne saw in slow motion, the giant splash into the ocean several metres offshore.

While waiting for the spell to wear off, Joanne continued around the island at her increased pace, taking down several different types of trolls and looting them. In doing this she was able to get both Destruction and One-handed to level 100. At level 100 she got the option to make those two skills legendary. With a spell like Be As Lightning, she knew she could quickly get them back to level 100, given the amount of damage she was doing with her new spell.

Joanne fell into a rhythm again, although she began to feel the isolation. It had been more than half a month with no one to talk to. Joanne had never been the most social person, quite the opposite as she had often gone out of her way to avoid social activities. She had instead dived into science and video games. But she did need some amount of social interaction, as little as that was. A text here maybe, or a phone call every so often. After half a month with no human interaction, Joanne was starting to feel the seclusion from the rest of the world.

A lot of the technology on the island had been destroyed, which included any communication devices.

Despite her loneliness, she was far from being desperate enough to start talking to the packs of giants and trolls that had started appearing in higher frequency.

Over the next few weeks, Joanne wondered if trying to make her way to the mainland. She suspected that she could make a spell that would allow her to get across the sea. There was also a variety of potions that could help, such as water breathing if she planned on swimming.

While she levelled her skills she had collected a huge amount of materials which she had offloaded most of to the swirling light which spat out more ribbons that had given her several new avenues to spend her days doing. She had obtained an arcane enchanter and smithing equipment. The only thing that slowed the progression of Joannes Enchanting skill was the scarcity of soul gems, the most common found were the lesser and petty kinds. These were the lowest and contained the weakest souls, which meant she couldn’t make particularly powerful enchantments. What enchantments she did make that didn’t suit her were fed to the swirling light. The swirling light gave her many more gifts in return, including a few spells and enchantments she had tried out.

Unfortunately nothing she got could feasibly help her leave. The island she was chosen specifically because it was a bit of a problem to get to with the least frustrating method of transport being a helicopter.

Boats were unable to get to the island as the surrounding ocean was unreasonably rocky, which not only made it easy for boats to be damaged, but also made the water very choppy. This meant that even if a very skilled captain were to exist that could pilot the boat around the rocks that were both visible above the water and hidden beneath, the large waves would likely dash those efforts on the very rocks that were being avoided.

There was also no practical reason to get larger vessels either as the shore was too shallow to get a large ship close by and building a dock further out to sea would have taken too much of the limited funding.

Planes were also out of the question as any plane that could possibly have enough supplies to last a substantial amount of time would need a large runway to land and take off again.

The best solution Joanne and her group of researchers could come up with to get enough resources was to use carrier helicopters to transport supplies once a month to the island on a helipad that took up minimal space as to not require making any of the other, already minimalistic infrastructure even smaller.

All this to say that the island was either a hermit's dream or the world's most secure prison and Joanne was starting to feel as though the latter was becoming more and more true.

She often found herself sitting somewhere on the shore for long stretches of time, staring out to sea and hoping, perhaps in vain, that someone would remember that she existed on this island and come take her away.

But of course, that was impossible. It was, quite literally, by design, be her design no less. Her caution had convinced her that this experiment needed as much secrecy as could be managed and her peers had agreed. All who were informed of the experiment had cut ties with the outside world and had permanently moved to this island to keep the data safe from both those who sought to steal or destroy it or to keep from ridicule by the public and scientific eye. This had all come back around to bite Joanne in the rear as no one knew she was here and there was no one else here except for her as everyone else had died inexplicably.

“It’s not your fault” Joanne told herself “you couldn’t have predicted this would happen”. A little part of her said “yes, you could have” but she knew that was nonsensical. She was just feeling survivors' guilt, only made worse by the isolation.

This wasn’t to say Joanne hadn’t tried to find ways of the island. She had tried to be as meticulous as possible when going through her options.

Swimming was out of the question already and so was trying to fashion a boat, for the same reason a boat could reach the island, a boat would have a very hard time leaving.

Flying on the other hand was a viable way off. Joanne knew of a few spells and enchantments that would allow her to get off the island and back to the mainland. She also had the ability to make a large quantity of potions to keep up her magicka reserves if she chose to cast levitation on herself repeatedly.

Joanne just had one problem with this. She was deathly afraid of heights. She had nearly had a panic attack when she had first come to the island using the helicopter. At least with the helicopter she could lie to herself and say she wasn’t that high up, but if she was by herself she no longer had the safety of a several thousand pound vehicle that was designed specifically to fly. She was not designed to fly, even with her new bird-like appearance. Not to mention a freak storm could easily throw her to the sea and leave her to drown.

This all resulted in Joanne spending months just trying to survive one day to the next with no real goal in mind.