It was done. Finally done. She had finally finished the machine that would allow her to enter her favourite game. Joanne had slowly built a complicated machine that would allow her to travel into a copy of the game called Skyrim. Despite the fact that they had gotten some government funding in the beginning, Joanne and her team of researchers had been ridiculed by most of the general public and all of the scientific community and most of the funding they now received was from eccentric individuals and whatever money they could gather themselves.
It had taken years, but they had finished the machine and now all that was left was to open it and send a probe through. With a few flicks of switches and button presses the powerful machinery began to power on and put the game disk into the disk reader.
A rip in space began to open in the frame of the portal. Streams of lightning seemed to grab the edges of the rip and pull them towards the frame. The rip was seven feet long and one foot wide when it began to slow down and the lights began to flicker. Minutes later and the power went out all together and the rip stopped growing. There was a moment of silence as Joannes' whole team looked on in anticipation before the rip snapped shut and exploded where the two sides met, throwing a forceful wave outwards and shoving all in its way as if it were sand and not solid concrete and Joannes' senses went dark.
A sharp dagger of pain woke Joanne up. It felt like her body was being contorted. She felt the need to contort her aching body but the rubble that surrounded her only allowed her to scream in pain. Her hands and legs felt the most pain and her head pounded like a hammer was trying to break both in and out of her head at the same time.
She slipped in and out of consciousness, with each slip back into consciousness bringing less and less pain until Joanne woke up to no pain at all. At first she didn’t think she had woken because her vision seemed to be blurred somewhat. Only the large amount of sweat and the pain in her lungs from the shaky breaths she was taking told her she was indeed awake.
It took some time for her mind to focus and her vision focused on what was in front of her and it turned out that the blur she had thought was a familiar symbol. One she had seen many times during her time playing Skyrim. It looked somewhat like a compass with each of the four points directed at a word. The top point was skills, the one to the left was magic, the one on the right was items, and the one of the bottom was a map.
After some time Joanne stared at the magic tab and her vision changed and showed a list. At the top was a tab called ‘favorites’ followed by: all, alteration, illusion, destruction, conjuration, shouts, powers, and active effects. Joannes' eyes dropped to the active effects tab and it opened showing multiple effects.
Severely wounded:
-50% health, -25% stamina, -25% health and stamina regen.
Resist magicka:
+10% resistance to spells
Poison claws:
Has a 10% chance to inflict brain rot when attacking in melee.
Ever so slowly, Joanne forced herself to open the restoration tab, more out of habit than any real thought. In the restoration tab was a single spell, fast healing, and selected it. With an intense force of will she was able to activate the spell in both her hands. The moment the spells activated she felt relief. Her breathing became easier and she felt her body slowly repair itself. Only one spell was able to be cast, but regardless, she could now think properly.
“What the hell?” she said, still in a daze but now able to think. She looked around at her surroundings and found that she was held by rubble.
It took some time and many scratches and bruises, but she was able to get an arm free and…
That wasn’t her arm. Well it was, she could feel the cuts that ran down it. But it wasn’t her normal arm. Her hands were birdlike, the rough skin running half way up her forearm with fuzz akin to the soft follicles on feathers growing like hairs. She studied her new arm for a very long time before it struck her to check her skills menu as there was a section that told her race. Upon opening the menu she saw what it was: Hagraven.
If she remembered correctly, Hagravens were magic focused creatures. She shook her head and began moving rocks around her right arm and eventually got it out too and she was able to pull herself free of the rubble around her. Once freed, she saw that her legs, much like her arms, had rough skin and fuzz covering the bottom fourth of her legs. Thankfully her clothes were intact for the most part.
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She looked around again at her surroundings. For the first time she noticed the crater and began to stumble closer to it. At the center was a swirling mass of light and after some hesitation, Joanne reached out a hand and she was welcomed with several notifications in the corner of her vision.
Spell learned: longstride
Spell learned: strike as lightning
Spell learned: bound bow
Spell learned: bound sword
Pioneers gift gained
Joanne quickly checked the spells.
Longstride:
School: alteration
Rank: novice
Mana: 20
Increases running speed by 20% and carrying capacity by 25. Effects are tripled outside of combat.
Strike as lightning:
School: destruction
Rank: novice
Mana: 15
Your melee attacks deal an additional 5 damage to health and stamina for 120 seconds. The damage increases with speed.
Bound bow:
School: conjuration
Rank: adept
Mana: 206
Creates a magic bow for 120 seconds. Sheathe to dispel.
Bound sword:
School: conjuration
Rank: novice
Mana: 93
Creates a sword bow for 120 seconds. Sheathe to dispel.
The last notification wasn’t a spell but an active effect:
Pioneers gift:
As you are the one who brought the gift of power to your world, it only makes sense for you to gain a reward. +50% health, stamina, and magicka regen. +50 health, stamina, magicka. +20% skill experience.
The swirling light had dimmed slightly in brightness as the notifications finished coming through and with nothing else to do she looked around in nervous agitation. Where were her colleagues? Were there others like her? Well there must be others like her. The pioneer's gift suggested that there were others like her.
Joanne sank to the ground, hugging her knees and began to cry. She had been going off adrenaline for some time now and only once she had gotten the extra spells and Pioneers gift had the full weight of what had happened crashed into her. Time slipped away from Joanne as she fell into an uneasy sleep.
When Joanne woke up she could see the sun hanging high above her. She knew that it wasn’t the same day she had fallen asleep on so it had to be at least 24 hours.
She stood and, now more rested than she had been before, began to look for something to eat. She was famished.
To her surprise, the surrounding area was filled with shrubbery. The blast from the portal had reduced the surrounding 5 meters to sand and the 15 meters beyond that to fine gravel meaning it was possible for plants to take root.
“But surely not in a day though?” Joanne thought to herself.
She walked over to a juniper tree and picked some of the berries off of the tree and ate some. A notification appeared in the corner of her vision:
Discovered effects:
Weakness to fire (Juniper berries)
Joanne was stunned for a few seconds. Then she picked another bunch of berries and concentrated on bringing the compass up and moving to her items list.
There she saw her clothes and one bunch of juniper berries with a list of effects, one being weakness to fire and the rest being unknown.
She then hurriedly grabbed up as many of the berries as she could find, as well as going from plant to plant and picking as many ingredients from them. There were quite a few of them too. She knew for a fact that many of these plants didn’t grow in the same areas in the game but she didn’t particularly care at the moment.
After collecting all that she could, she sat under the glowing light, eating some of the plants and learning some of their effects. She had never memorized all the effects of the plants when she had played the game, but the alchemy skill had always been one of her favorites to use. Unfortunately she didn’t have any alchemy equipment or bottles to put the potions into.
The thought of the alchemy skill reminded she hadn’t taken a look at her skills despite the fact she had briefly opened that menu to check her race.
She opened the menu for the second time to see which skills had gotten a bonus from her new race, if any.
Skimming through, she noted that all were the base 15 levels with Restoration, Destruction, and Alchemy being at 25, and sneak being at 20.
Her health, stamina, and magicka were all at 150, a third of that being from the Pioneers’ gift.
Joanne decided to explore the area around her small crater to see if there was anything more that berries and root vegetables for her to eat. The lab had been placed on an island in the middle of nowhere so that no one could stumble across it.
As she traversed the island she found many more animals and plants that she knew weren't supposed to be there.
Fox, deer, skeevers, and other creatures were spread here and there. Joanne snuck through the trees and bushes and was able to level her sneak skill, killing a single cow. Joanne had hoped that she could just use her bound sword spell to cut some of the meat off to eat but what she hadn’t expected was to feel a tug at the back of her mind. Following the tug she was surprised to see the cows hide and meat seemingly disappear off of the cow and she felt a small weight rest on that part of her mind where she had felt the tug.
Opening her inventory she found beef marked with a ‘2’ and cow hide. Feeling a small kernel of excitement inside of her as she gained a level in her One-handed skill, she slunk off.