I sighed. “Okay, long story short. I was born on a world sort of like this, but no one had any aspects. Most people looked a lot like me. Different color skin, different sizes, but no ears like yours and your sister’s. No tails, and most importantly, no essence.”


    She listened quietly while I continued. “I died. I think. Or maybe I didn’t. I was dying of a disease that was rotting my bones and killing my body for decades. And then I woke up. And I was someplace else. Someplace small, and white, and filled with machines… I don’t think I can talk about this.”


    “Because of the protected status of this world?”


    “You know about that?”


    She nodded, smiling. “Oracles can access the nodes. When we do, we get stopped and turned around by that damned protected planet label all of the time, it’s more an irritant than anything else. So… I take it you must have been a player from a world other than ours?”


    “Player?”


    She nodded, “Yes, Player in the game. I know it is a stupid term, but that’s how the system refers to us. Players in the game. I mean, I am real, my life is not a game, but it uses that to distinguish those who belong to the system from all of the worlds and creatures that have not been exposed to it yet or have refused to permit it.”


    “is that an option? To refuse?”


    She shrugged, “Yes, but unless you belong to a species that has an incredible arcane and technological resource base to help you find your own paths, it’s a bit like cutting off your own feet in protest for having to walk to the outhouse. Could we find or create our own paths without the system’s help? Of course, but at this point, with our aspects tied into the protection program, it’s silly to try and reinvent the wheel just because we weren’t the first ones to think of it.”


    “I can’t help but wonder if this IS my Earth. Lots of the plants are absolutely identical, so I have to wonder if I just slept for a long time frozen.”


    She nodded, “That is possible, but not terribly likely. There are hundreds of protected Earths out there. Something to do with wanting to preserve humanity. Some of the Jade elderlords like the Emperor are over ten thousand years old, and even they never claim to have met a base human.”


    I nodded, plus, from what I understood, cryogenics at less than absolute zero and a perfectly radiation-free environment still slowly introduced errors and damages. If I were tens of thousands of years frozen, what was left would be a human-shaped mummy, like the ones they found in Iceland. Still human, but beyond dead.


    “So there’s no chance of me getting home?”


    “Do you want to go home?”


    I shrugged, “Not really, but it’s what I am used to. I mean, I woke up inside of a tiny ship crewed by creatures I never saw, and they gave me some kind of tool that let me look at my character sheet. I wasn’t… totally there mentally, and so they made me go clean out some rifts for resources. I got a helpful spirit, called a virtual intelligence, and the first thing it did was alert the system that someone was breaking some rules or something. The system said it was sending me to a protected planet since my own wasn’t available, and then I woke up at a crossroads next to a pile of rocks.”


    She nodded, “Where I detected the essence burst. If the system dropped you next to a shrine of the wanderer, that would explain it. Can you tell me what you remember about your sheet?”


    I nodded slowly, “Yes, but I was very different at the time. I mean, I was trapped in my body, all… uhh… neutral, my brain was acting funny, I had no willpower or anything, but when I woke up here, I was restored to what I looked like in my former prime. Better than my prime, actually, because when I had muscles like this in my prior life, I also had leukemia and didn’t know it, and had wrecked knees from too many high-altitude jumps.”


    She smiled, “It probably was compensating you for having to pull you out of your situation. The system may not be fair, but it tries to be just, and throwing you at a foreign world without an ideal restoration would have basically been killing you. I do have a very important question for you, though.”


    “What would that be?”


    “Well, it sounds like this virtual thing might have been the closest a base human could come to an aspect. Do you still have your character sheet?


    I shook my head and held up my wrist with the leather band with a flat copper plate on it. “No, it was called a transtator, and when all of my clothes changed, it became this.”


    She nodded slowly, and touched the band, closing her eyes, after a moment she opened them again. “That will help. I think that virtual int...thing,”


    “Jessie,” I supplied.


    “Your Jessie is a lot like an aspect. I detected a very low-powered intelligent pattern, like a golem core, inside. It’s possible if you can learn to channel your essence, you could activate it again and regain its assistance as a spiritual affinity. Oracles mostly just communicate with aspects to help people find their path, and you don’t have one like that… although certain parts of you are odd and very powerful. But they are outside of my experience, and I doubt any other oracle could assist you that way. But back to my question.”


    I smiled a little, “I thought that was your question.”


    She shook her head, “Sorry, I sometimes get sidetracked. The most important question I can ask, really, is what do you WANT to do?”If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.


    I thought about it for a few seconds, before I let out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding. “I don’t know.”


    “You don’t know?”


    I shook my head, “No. I mean, in my life… my first life, I spent most of the first thirty-five years of my life rebelling against my parents. My dad was a fast-tongued charlatan who pretended to be a… noble ruler, eventually a senator or hopefully president someday, and my mom was a rich girl who got everything she wanted handed to her on a silver plate. Everything I did, dropping out of high school, joining the servi… the military, learning to disappear for years on secret assignments, it was all based around getting away from their plans for my life.”


    “The second half of my life I spent trying and failing, to survive my body rotting away from the inside. I never really DID anything other than what I was told or rebelling against what I was told. Even my girlfriend… my previous mate, was only there for the rush of being with a handsome bad-boy celebrity rebelling against his destiny. I found that out the hard way when I stopped fitting in with her fantasies.”


    “Are you a bad boy?”


    I shrugged, “The depends on how you define a bad boy. Some people thought I was a hero, some thought I was a walking nightmare. In my own mind, I am both. I did some very, very bad things, and I enjoyed doing some of them. But I don’t think of myself as a bad guy. Then again, everyone is the hero of their own story, even villains, or especially villains.”


    She looked confused at that, “You knew they were bad things, and you didn’t think they were bad?”


    I smiled slightly, “Sometimes girls like things they probably shouldn’t enjoy, and I enjoyed doing those things even though I knew it might be bad for them.”


    She shook her head, “I don’t mean like that… I mean, have you ever murdered someone?”


    I chuckled and quoted, “Yes, but they were all bad.” I shrugged, “Yeah, I have killed people in cold blood, right in the middle of having sex, enjoying an early morning bath, or surrounded by their beloved families and children. Sometimes in remarkably grotesque ways. I didn’t enjoy the killing part, I am not a psychotic killer who gets a rush from ending lives, but I certainly took pride in being very good at what I did.”


    She nodded slowly, “Stolen? Lied intentionally?” at my nods she continued, “Raped?”


    I shook my head, “I was a killer, a soldier. Not exactly an assassin, but my team was sent in to do things that no one else could do. We called it black ops. If a king of one land was supporting criminals in another land trying to overthrow that ally, we would send him a message or end his life, while he never even realized that we knew what he was doing.”


    She smiled slightly, “That sounds like an assassin.”


    I shrugged. “Maybe, but we didn’t do it for money or fame, or because we enjoyed it… I mean, some of the guys did, but that wasn’t why I did it. I thought it was the right thing to do. It turns out that in some cases I was wrong, I will freely admit that, sometimes when you cut the head off a monster, a new head grows and it’s twice as awful as the last one, but I am not a god, or a prophet that can tell the future.”


    She nodded, “But you enjoyed doing what you thought was the right thing, and being good at it?”


    I nodded slowly.


    “Hold out your hands.”


    I did as she asked, and she put her own very soft, beautiful, and delicate hands on mine and closed her eyes.


    After a few moments, she started to wiggle slightly, and then let out a hiss, before opening her eyes. “You… I know what you will spend your life doing, and if you survive, you will enjoy it and be very good at it. But you might not like it right now.”


    “So hit me.”


    She slapped my palm.


    “No, I meant, hit me with the news. How did you figure it out?”


    She sighed, “I could still see your essence affinities. They were complicated, and one of them was powerful while the other was just… too expanded, almost ridiculous. You are an imaginer?”


    I nodded, “Yes.”


    “I heard of one once. The affinity is incredibly broad, and can be used to create things that do not exist, build new laws or destroy old ones, and bestow or remove affinities from others… In the empire, Imagination affinities are illegal.”


    “Why is that?”


    She sighed, “If your imagination paints the rulers as unfit if you get powerful enough, you could remove their ability to rule, even their noble or warlord affinities. They are not illegal here in the borderlands, but I haven’t even heard of one existing for the last several thousand years. It’s a bit of a curse, but it’s also a bit of a blessing because umm...”


    “Umm?”


    She smiled a little, “Some aspects are incompatible. If an ursan and a rodan chose to marry, not only would their physical union be challenging, because ursans are typically huge, much larger than you, and rodans can be very tiny, but they would be unlikely to ever have any children. Imaginers can adapt to any aspect without challenge. Maybe not physically, but you should be capable of uhh… reproducing with just about anyone. Any aspect, Fey, Greenskin, dragon blood, merfolk, you can adapt to any of them if you are with them physically.”


    She was clearly blushing, but I just nodded. “That’s a little creepy to think about.”


    “The second affinity is purely physical. You would make an incredible hunter, warrior, anchor, guardsman… if it involves combat or physical activity, you probably could master it with ease. I am not sure what Chimera is, exactly, but it sounds like something that would again, make you very adaptable.”


    I nodded, “That’s not uncommon.”


    “No, it’s not. And you are fairly far along that path for a wood-stage essence manipulator. Your imagination affinity, though, is odd. It is based on your willpower. It is not well-developed yet, but you can develop it. Its lack of development is why you have not already felt its call. Your affinity allows you to interface with reality in a very basic way, and feel the pressure of what reality and essence require. It’s very similar to the oracle gift, spiritualism, but much more broad and able to access not only ideals but the concepts behind those ideals.”


    “Such a simple word for such a complex concept embodying the realization of ideas and concepts by will alone. I shudder to imagine what you may be capable of when you are a golden core. I was tempted to call an alarm when I touched it, especially after what you said you did without regret, but then I realized that you possessed a potential trait that could define your existence if you choose to embrace it.”


    I had a bad feeling about this. Like I just got tossed into the deep end of the pool before I’d ever learned to swim, which had actually happened, only I was wearing fifty-pound weights locked around my wrists. “What is this ever-so-mystical path that requires my ability to define concepts in reality by willpower alone?”


    She leaned forward and whispered, “Lawkeeper.”


    I started laughing.