《New World Champions》 Chapter 01: Some Fresh Ink Most days, the pervasive presence of the B15-Terran system through out the capital of New Port City was only visible from the tap points littered on every third block corner and interface glasses worn by the well-off citizens. On a dreary day of smoggy rain like this one though, the drizzle falling through the system''s influence refracted the digital signals, forcing them into the visual spectrum on small sparks of electric toned colors. As if loose pixels were breaking free of the VR, feebly grasping at becoming reality. Terra wondered if that particular quirk of light would have been possible if the droplets hadn''t been polluted with who knew how many chemicals. She would rather be thinking about that as she stared through the glass front of the tattoo parlor she worked in, than listen to what her boss''s client was saying while he tattooed her bare shoulders. Unfortunately, willful disregard couldn''t stop the words of a frequent client''s voice from reaching her ears in the unusual quiet of the mostly empty parlor. Ajax had called out sick and her own client was starting to look like a no show. "Did you hear the bounty on the Administrator''s son went up again?" Daisy asked. Drew grunted inarticulately while he switched out needles and colors. "Doesn''t have anything to do with our crowd. Not unless that seduction talent of yours got turned into a tracking one somehow." The indifference of the scrawny, inked up man towards the politics of the system administrator''s family was just one reason Terra could kiss him. Not that she would have. Besides his face having distressingly few areas clear of piercings or scruffy beard that never grew in as anything more than thin patches of wispy hairs, he was an honest employer who had made it clear the day he offered her the job that he didn''t expect or accept favors from his artists. Which was just another reason she had chosen to work for him. "Oh, screw you, Drew." Daisy laughed. She managed the action without shifting her shoulders too much as he brought the needle back down on her back. "Who''s to say I couldn''t seduce the wayward prince back to his parents?" Drew shrugged with unconcern. "I''d have thought the fact that he ran away immediately after that engagement to one of the pretty admin daughters of Y12-Gaia would make that pretty clear." Terra said, pushing off of the wall she had been leaning against. She went to her station where her sketchbook was laying open to give herself something more productive to work on than staring out the window for a client that probably wasn''t going to make his appointment. Watching for him hadn''t been enough of a distraction to keep her ears or mouth shut. Then again, remaining too quiet when she was normally the one that chatted the most with the clients might have seemed more suspicious. The canvas clicked her tongue against her teeth with disappointment. "Fair point. But it''s not every day a contract for a million creds is put out. Unless it''s for someone''s head." "Good reason not to bother." Drew said with his usual ruthless practicality. "The real bounty hunters aren''t going to hand a contract like that to a novice." His words sent a hot itch of dread rolling down Terra''s spine and shoulders. "What would you even do with a million credits, Daise?" She asked, trying to turn the subject. Daisy turned her head on her crossed arms to grin over at Terra. "Get more of your ink in my skin, gorgeous." She teased salaciously. The words were accompanied by the gentle press of power and a sweet scent that warned Terra that the woman was invoking her talent. Daisy''s ability to entice people with pheromones was not a particularly rare one. It wasn''t even that insidious since it was only as effective as certain perfumes one could acquire. They wouldn''t even have to dip into the black market to find them. However, if Terra hadn''t had that sixth sense for when talents were being expressed, it would have been a lot harder for her to notice what was being done. Or resist it. "If you keep that up, I''ll slip Drew a skunk tattoo for your lower back next time." Terra warned. The threat was an empty one though, which Daisy knew. A glossy lip stuck out in a dramatic pout from Daisy''s pretty face as she played along. "You''re no fun." "Nope." Terra agreed cheerily without looking up from her sketchpad. She had been laying out the rough shape of a rose, her go to subject to draw when she was stressed. She etched in the ghost of an open book behind the blossom, letting it appear to be cradled between the pages. It occurred to her that if Drew looked over, he''d realize right away that she wasn''t feeling as at ease as her languid pose and banter implied. Not when she was drawing one emotional escape inside of another. Lucky for her, Drew wasn''t easily distracted from his work. Daisy sighed, then began to brainstorm out loud what she would really do with a windfall of credits. Her priorities seemed to be on more ink, more piercings, and a wild spree at the local stripper joints. She was shamelessly crude in exactly what strange kinks she''d be the most ready to drop credits to try out. Terra would have expected nothing less from the woman currently getting a pin-up girl across her shoulders. The woman in the tattoo was wearing a retro-space helmet, ray-blaster belt, leather boots, and not a stitch more. The design had been done by Terra, but Drew was the only one allowed to ink up Daisy. The woman had a history of causing trouble with his artists. The droning of hedonistic daydreaming finally allowed Terra to tune the client out, but her mind didn''t obediently turn away from the worries the beginning of the conversation had stirred up. She worked heavy shading into the heart of the petals on the page in front of her while her mind wheeled around her father''s apparent unwillingness to just let her go. A bounty like that was just as likely to get her killed as it was to get her turned over without harm. Not because the bounty hunters wouldn''t do their best to adhere to the details of the contract to get the full payout, but because she would never go back without fighting to the bitter end. Being trained up to be her father''s heir meant she wasn''t without physical training. Even if her Brawn hadn''t been higher than her Brains- which she was fairly certain was the case now, despite her avid avoidance of any system interactions providing her no hard numbers within the last 8 years- she would have been required to push her physical stats. Anyone slated to take over the role of system administrator on any world had to push all their stats into the upper range of mortal capabilities before reaching the age of 25, when their minds completed developing and made the intense administration bond to a system possible. Even growing up with her own personal trainers, she hadn''t been taught to fight. Her father had seen no point in that. He believed physical violence was ungenteel. Nor did the admin believe anyone would dare touch his son while they stood on "his" planet. ''Unless he sends them himself with a million reasons not to let me go. They''re sure to think returning my body would be better for them than returning nothing.'' Terra thought to herself as she added a few long, sharp thorns to a stem running down the crevice between the pages. She wanted to believe she''d be able to fight to the death, rather than the much more likely outcome that they''d rough her up, knock her unconscious somehow, and return her mostly alive. Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation. She wasn''t sure what her father would do to control her once he had her back, but she knew he wouldn''t let her go again. Maybe he''d drug her or use one of those VR collars that trapped a person in their own version of reality to control them. Whatever he did, it wouldn''t be illegal. Not for him. There might be higher powers when it came to management of the planet these days, but the admin would always be the ultimate authority on B15-Terra. Because he who controlled the system controlled the world. Not for the first time, Terra wondered if she should have done more to hide. Run farther or changed her name or appearance more drastically. As always, she came to the same conclusions. Leaving the city would have been what was expected of her. It was also much harder to do undetected than laying low in the underbelly. Something no one would expect a runaway noble with no skills or talents to be able to manage. As for her name, Terra was painfully common. As if it wasn''t bad enough that half of all human administrated planets were named things like New Earth, Terra, and Gaia, the latter two were some of the most common girls names among the human race across the whole universe. Much like her name, Terra''s golden tan skin, grey eyes, and cinnamon brown hair were none of them remarkable or unusual. She''d grown the hair out to her shoulders the night she left and stopped hiding the freckles her father had hated so much under concealer. She''d gotten various tattoos and piercings as well in the two years she''d been gone. No one should have any reason to suspect that Terran Starmer XI, the system administrator''s wayward, talentless, spoiled son, and Terra Baker, the book loving tattoo artist girl with an obscure talent to expel ink from her skin, were one and the same person. "What about you, Ter?" Daisy asked, interrupting Terra''s wandering thoughts. "Huh?" Terra asked, jerking her head up from her sketch. "What would you do with a million credits?" "Oh." Terra sighed. "I might buy a bigger apartment to hold more books. Maybe with room to set up a little art studio." She shrugged, unable to think of much more than that. She''d never really had to want for much in her life, materially speaking. Even after running away, she''d buckled down and found herself a job she could do well enough at that she could afford the basics of comfort an a new book every few weeks. "That''s it?" Daisy asked skeptically. "No running off to have grand adventures or moving to a better part of town?" "No." Terra agreed without elaborating. She''d had her fill of living in the upper city and as for adventure... well even if she managed to leave New Port City without going through a system screening, she wouldn''t be able to get in anywhere else without having one. Either boarding a shuttle to leave the planet or entering a new city would require a screening. As soon as that happened, she''d be flagged for capture and sent right back to the life that had suffocated her for twenty-two years. There hadn''t been any singular terrible thing in her old life. There had just been cushiony lies that had closed in on her over the years like so many pillows until she couldn''t breathe anymore. Her interests weren''t to her father''s tastes, so she couldn''t exhibit her skills among her peers. The way she looked and moved was displeasing to him, too much like her mother, so she''d had to disguise herself and act constantly. When she''d been young, she had balked against the leash of responsibility she was destined for, expressing to anyone who would listen- which wasn''t very many- that she didn''t want to become the eleventh administrator of her homeworld. By the time she was old enough to attend functions, she''d learned to put on a mask over that as well. Privately, she had still dreaded taking over the position. She didn''t want to be responsible for an entire planet''s worth of people and their interactions with the system that would make or break them. Worse than the work though, she feared becoming her father. Indifferent to the power he had except in so far as it could benefit him. In her father''s eyes, the fact that she was unwilling to bend to the yoke he had raised her for wasn''t her worst failing, maddeningly enough. Instead, her greatest crime was that she had dared to come out as a girl despite her parents'' careful genetic screening process they had used to ensure the embryo they kept would be another great Terran of the unbroken line. They denied it and tried to force her to be what they wanted, which was original Earth levels of bigotry that she found far more unbecoming of their family''s legacy than that she was who she was. When her talent for shapeshifting had emerged from her desires to confirm her gender in a way her parents would never grant her medically, she had hidden it from them. Which meant that on top of appearing to have no meaningful skills, she had also failed to manifest a talent. That alone would have solved all her troubles by making her an unmarriageable prospect for any decent administration family- which was the only kind of family her proud father would have been willing to marry in- if it hadn''t been for her horrible system screening at 12 years old. When she''d gone through her first assessment to determine her base stats, she''d actually pleased her father for once in her life. Not with anything she had managed to achieve. All her useful stats had been perfectly average at 5. Except for her Capacity. That had been a 10, the highest level possible without a system bond of some kind. Capacity was an unusual stat in that it didn''t represent some inherent capabilities a person had, but rather their ability to gather potential for and be enhanced by a system. That meant that unless a person was bonded to a system, Capacity was useless. It was also very rarely the highest stat a person had. It was usually capped by whichever other stat was the highest. In cases where a person did have Capacity as their highest stat, like Terra, they were almost always presented with a system seed by their system. The strange offspring of the reality warper race that would bond to someone as a familair in hopes of seeding their own planet. Terra''s father would have never allowed that of course, she was his heir, not her own person, but that kind of distinction had salvaged her reputation at least as far as her use as breeding stock had gone. She supposed she should have been grateful for the ridiculous stat. Her father had been too concerned that another screening would reveal the first rating to have been a mistake to put her through another screening at 18. He''d just had the system copy over the results from her first screening. No improvement through her whole adolescence was far and away preferable to him over any chance for her one valuable stat to have dropped by even a point. To Terra, the bitterness of having her accomplishments once more swept under the rug had been preferable to her parents realizing she really did have a talent. One that allowed her to actually be herself in every moment that she had not been under their direct scrutiny. One that had given her the chance to escape them. She''d made the decision the night she met Angia Bellet, second daughter of the administrator of newly settled Y12-Gaia. Terra didn''t run away from bitterness that her fianc¨¦e''s family had no issues allowing their administration heir to be a daughter. At least, that hadn''t been the deciding factor. That had been the fact that this woman her parents were going to make her marry and produce heirs with had disdained everything about her. Angia had taken one look at Terra''s system records and thought she''d known just what sort of worthless wash-up Terran XI was. She''d decided to make it clear to her fianc¨¦ the night they met that she would be marrying out of loyalty to her family and for the good of their future children. That she had no intention of getting to know her soon-to-be spouse as a person and would expect to be left alone whenever they didn''t have to be seen together. She hadn''t even let Terra get a word in edgewise. While Angia might have been willing to live that kind of fake life out of duty to her family, Terra wasn''t. She couldn''t look at every lie she had lived up until that point and stand the thought of living that way for the rest of her life. A life that would be elongated significantly if she became the administrator. "Terra to Terra, are you there?" "What?" Terra asked, looking up from her sketch again. She hadn''t added even a smudge of shading to it in a few minutes as she stewed over things she couldn''t change except by staying away from them. "I asked what you''re drawing." Daisy repeated. She sounded exasperated. As if she had asked a couple times. Which she probably had. "Oh, sorry. Rain''s got me down." Terra said, making the excuse before she lifted her sketchbook, just in case Drew decided to look too. She knew what he''d see if he looked at the sketched out rose in a book. So of course he did. He then glanced sharply to Terra''s face with the sort of concerned expression that told her clearer than words she wasn''t getting out of here without answering a few questions. Sometimes, Drew cared about his employees too much. Luckily for Terra, the client who she had been watching for earlier finally showed up. He came through the door in the glass-front, dripping water all over the floor. He apologized for getting caught in the weather. Terra assured him that she didn''t mind while she went to the back to get a towel and a mop. It made a convenient excuse for her to pretend she hadn''t seen Drew''s look. Even if pretending would only put off the inevitable questions for a few hours. Chapter 02: A Pathetic Stray In the evening, when they were finished with their clients and cleaning up their stations for the day, Drew came at Terra with the questions she''d been expecting. At least they were alone this evening. "What''s troubling you?" Drew asked her while passing her the bottle of disinfectant. Terra didn''t answer him right away. She soaked a spot on her fresh cleaning rag, then scrubbed meticulously over every inch of her tattoo gun. As if that wasn''t just going to make Drew more concerned. While she was used to speaking with care at social functions, she had always been quick to answer when speaking with him. Granted, most of what she''d told him about herself had been half-truths. Like the half-truth that had gotten her hired: that she had a special talent for pushing ink out of her skin. She hadn''t told him that she could change the color of her skin, hair, and eyes as well. Or shift the shape and size of her body within normal human constraints. She''d only told him about the ink purging in the first place to prove she could practice on herself until she learned how to illustrate on people as well as she could on paper. Today, she couldn''t think of a suitable half-truth like that. She''d been working here too long for him to believe the weather bothered her in the least. She slowly stopped scrubbing. She could feel his gaze boring into her. She didn''t dare look back at him until she found something to say. "Some stuff Daisy was saying brought up bad memories I guess." She knew it was barely an answer, but it was the best she could offer without giving away more details than she dared to share. She hadn''t always been careful enough with Drew. She knew he was sharp. If she gave too much away to him, he''d put the pieces together. Terra liked Drew. She had seen him slip Ajax extra payments when the man''s kids would go hungry and put himself between Lisa and the street gang she had gotten mixed up with. He might only watch out for his own, but he did so thoroughly. With ruthless efficiency. To the point where she was more than half-afraid, if he knew the truth, he''d turn her over to her parents himself. He''d do it for her own good of course. The low streets of New Port City weren''t the safest place for a young woman with no family. Even with system bonded law enforcement, the worst of crime still occurred here, where the creds were spread too thin to buy their protection. She hoped one of those grim fates was what Drew would fill in her reluctant gaps with in his mind, rather than reaching for the truth. It would be easier and more reasonable to assume Daisy''s pheromones and talk of what she''d like to do with raunchy dancer girls had brought up old trauma than that the administration heir she''d been talking about before that had been listening to them blithely discussing a massive bounty hanging over her head. If he just assumed that she''d been through one of the horrible things that could happen on this side of town, she hoped he wouldn''t ask for more details. At first, she thought it had worked. The silence between them stretched on for a while. The only sounds were the soft swiping of disinfectant wipes and clinking of rearranging inks, backed by the muffled patter of rain. She should have known it wouldn''t be that easy. "Do I need to worry about trouble following you here?" Drew asked without looking up from what he was cleaning. Terra froze in the middle of putting away a clump of ink bottles. She looked over at him, slowly. He hadn''t stopped cleaning ink off the outside of his bottles. "What do you mean?" She asked cautiously. Drew sighed heavily. He carefully set the freshly cleaned bottle into its place, neatly lined up with the other closed and clean inks. Then he stood and went to the front of the store to pull down the metal security fencing behind the glass. He locked it in place. Terra hurried her own clean up, screwing on the last bottle lids that were still open. Normally he wouldn''t have locked up until every bottle at his station was as clean and neatly lined up as if he''d never used them. Now, he had left a few on his work tray, closed, but not put away. One still had a red drop that had slid down its side. It was more organized than Terra ever left her station, but the hasty break from his normal routine unsettled her. After Drew had secured the storefront, he motioned for Terra to follow him into the back. Reluctantly, Terra left her own station in its half put-away state and trailed after him. Once they were sheltered from any view possible from the street, Drew crossed his arms and asked outright: "You''re Starmer''s son, aren''t you?" The words were like a double punch to the gut. The worst hit wasn''t that he''d figured it out, but that he''d called her that. "I''m not a boy." She hissed, while failing to meet his eyes. She probably should have denied it, but her mind was racing in too many directions, then freezing up entirely. She was pretty sure Brains was the one stat she hadn''t managed to improve since she was 12. Drew sucked in a slow, long breath and pressed his fingers against his brows, then pulled them down over his eyes and cheeks. He was clearly asking the system for patience. Then he looked at her. Staring hard until she finally dragged her gaze up to meet his. The pity she saw hiding behind the unflinching sternness of his expression almost made her turn away again. "How did you figure it out?" She asked instead, sullenly. With anyone else, she would have expected them to spout some sympathetic nonsense before they explained why they were going to send her back. With Drew, she expected he''d cut right to the chase that he was sorry but it had to be done if she didn''t distract him with a question first. It didn''t make her feel any better knowing he wouldn''t be doing it for the money. "I knew you could be a shifter. Only a shifter or a regenner could push ink from their skin the way you do. I had suspected for a while, but it didn''t make sense that you would change so little about yourself. Your appearance, your name, staying in the same town? I kept telling myself it had to be a coincidence." "That was the idea." Terra agreed. It would have been nice to be happy that her idea to change as little as possible had thrown him off, except that it hadn''t. Not forever. Not long enough. "I didn''t think anyone would be that stupid. Why didn''t you at least change the color of your hair or eyes?" Drew asked, as if getting her to go back in time and do a better job of hiding was a viable option. Terra puffed up at that. She had been told all her life that she had to change how she looked. What was the point of taking her life in her own hands if she didn''t live it the way she wanted to? "I like how I look. No one knew I could shift, so what was the point changing more than I have?" "I''m not trying to pick a fight with you, Ter." Drew said in the same soothing tone he used when someone came in too drunk or high to make proper decisions, but was too stubborn to take no for an answer. As if she were being just as unreasonable as them and needed to be calmed before she was turned away. "I''m trying to make you think." "Why bother? They don''t want me to think for myself." She muttered bitterly. She should have known this wouldn''t last. But she had wanted to believe it would. "I''m not going to turn you in." Terra stared at him. Her mouth hung open and worked wordlessly for a moment before she managed to think of something to say. "You''re... not?"Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions. "It''s not my decision to make. But I can''t have you working here anymore." "You''re firing me? How am I supposed to find a new job with a bounty this high?" Terra asked, her voice pleading. Drew''s parlor had felt like her first real home. He, Ajax, and Lisa were the only friends she''d ever had. This job was half of the life she had made for herself. The only work she had ever done that made her feel accomplished. She didn''t want to let go of all that. "By shifting to a better disguise." Drew answered simply. "I can''t protect you here the way you are. Someone like me would figure it out. Faster too, because they''d want to believe it. And they won''t be someone I can stop from taking you. They''d be the kind of person to burn the whole place down if I even tried." That was a thought that hadn''t occurred to Terra. She''d been so focused on what being found would mean for her, that she had never stopped to think what it would mean for those she''d have caught up in her mess. Her outrage crumbled away and she crossed her arms over her chest, hugging herself. She took a deep breath. If it was a choice between giving up the people she cared about or letting them be hurt because of her, it wasn''t really a choice at all. "Alright. Could I... No, I couldn''t come back here even if I look different next time. I can change my face, but I can''t change my style." Drew didn''t comfort her with an empty lie. Instead, he reached out and gave one of her tattooed shoulders a squeeze. It was the only comfort he could offer her. Terra went back out into the work area and gathered the things that belonged to her, which wasn''t much. Drew had taken her on as an apprentice two years before with no guarantee she''d be able to do the job and no gear or credits to her name to make it a cheap gamble. All he''d had to go off of was the promising work in her sketch book. Maybe he''d also seen the fierce determination she''d had to make a way for herself in the world. A drive to achieve what she set out to do. Even if all she set out to do was work hard enough to earn enough credits each week to keep a leaky roof over her head, food in her stomach, and a little extra to occasionally purchase one of the books she''d always had with her. She ran her hand over the back of her tattoo gun that actually belonged to Drew. She would miss it, but she was proud of the work she had done with it. A bundle of two novels, her current sketchbook, and a tattered old pencil pouch made up the entirety of what she had to take with her. She took the time necessary to pull out all the sketches that were commissions for clients. She left them in a stack on her station so Drew could still use them. She owed him that much at least. Probably more. Drew hadn''t come back out front to watch her pack. The faith he had in her to not take anything of value and run for the hills lifted her heart a little. She wasn''t entirely sure it was trust she deserved, even if she never would have stolen from someone who had done so much for her. When she shuffled into the back again with her books in her arms and her pencil case clipped to her belt, she intended to pass by Drew without another interaction. To rip the bandage off and leave his life before she could have a chance to really start regretting it. The same way she had abandoned her parents. Her parents who had never supported her in her strengths or forgiven her her weaknesses. Which Drew had. At the last moment before she was going to pass him, Terra turned on her heels and pressed herself into his narrow chest, tucking her head against his shoulder since her arms were too occupied to give him a hug. "Thank you, Drew. For everything." The tattooist patted her back awkwardly, but she could feel his throat tightening up at her temple. "Take care of yourself, Terra." He ordered her in a voice that was just a little tight. "Yeah." She rasped back, then stood straight and turned away quickly. She snatched her hoodie off the hook by the door and wrapped it around the books in her arms, then left before she could be pulled back to him again. It was harder to leave behind someone who cared about her. Even if it was to protect him and the others she cared for. She was glad for the rain that dribbled down through her side swept bangs to run over her cheeks. As long as she kept her eyes open and focused, it didn''t matter in this weather how many tears she cried. No lowlife waiting for easy prey would be able to tell them apart from the effects of the weather. The stink of the streets was dulled by the sweet, dusty scent of the downfall hitting pavement. The drip of awnings and splash of puddles as vehicles passed joined the monotonous hum of neon signs, just switching on for the low town''s infamous night scenes. Bar doors hung open, wafting the bitter scent of booze and warm, dry air out invitingly onto the sidewalk. Interface caf¨¦s glowed brightly, the rows of system taps inside switched over as she passed from the practical daytime selection of activities to more risqu¨¦ evening offerings. The deeper into the entertainment district Terra walked, the more such establishments gave way to the kind of dives Daisy frequented. The men she passed gave her less mind as she passed these places. There were more approachable women inside where it wasn''t miserably damp. The overcast skies meant that Terra was walking through darkness instead of the last rays of dusk when she finally passed out of the entertainment district into the narrow cubby of what passed for residential lots in her neighborhood. Security was a funny thing in downtown New Port City. One either had system assisted security that cost them almost all their disposable creds along with a virtual bank they''d keep their spare money in if they had any, or they holed up somewhere as isolated and convoluted to enter as possible and hoped all their savings, kept in physical form to avoid fees from the banks, weren''t stolen away. Terra''s solution to the problem was the latter, out of necessity. Opening an account with the banks meant interacting with the system. So like most fugitives, Terra only handled physical credits. She didn''t have to worry much about being stolen from, though. She never kept more on hand than what could buy her a meal and a book. She''d figured out pretty early on, when her apartment was broken into a few times, that the thieves didn''t see a lot of value in books or art. After a few months, word seemed to have gotten around that her place wasn''t worth hitting unless the raid was on her kitchenette cabinets. Her apartment complex was one of a series converted from an old office building, presumably for the administrative tasks associated with one of the nearby entertainment facilities before the neighborhood had soured. The structure had been broken up into smaller properties by bricking off hallways inside and converting old fire exits to official entry points for the inner halls. Getting into the section of the building that contained her unit involved going in through the side alley, climbing the narrow stepped stairs that were barely an upgrade from the old emergency escape ladders, and entering through a heavy, rusty door. When Terra entered the alley, she spotted something moving in the shadows. She slowed, wary of what could be lurking. It was too small to be a person, but that didn''t mean it couldn''t be one of any number of nasty devices meant to catch the careless off guard. Something to knock someone out or tie them up long enough for another person to snatch them away. Someone like a bounty hunter that had somehow tracked her down. The shape shifted in the shadows again. It staggered forward, seeking refuge from the endless rain by collapsing under the converted fire escape. It was no device or trap. Just a stray black cat, scraggly and soaked. "Well, you''re a pitiful sight." Terra said to the cat. The cat rotated its ears towards her, but did not open its eyes or move. Terra had pretty much no experience with animals. She''d never been allowed a pet growing up and they weren''t the sort of thing people brought to a tattoo parlor. Even so, she was pretty sure it wasn''t good for the weak looking thing to lay there, practically in a puddle, not opening its eyes. "Hey, psst, psst, kitty. That''s not a good place to rest. You''d be better off under a dumpster or something." She said, as if the creature would understand her. The cat responded with a whimpering sort of mewl. Rather than stand in the rain talking to a cat that was too weak to take care of itself, Terra knew she should go inside to dry off. Preferably, before the inescapable moisture in the air could seep through her jacket to get at the paper of her books. Instead, she moved around the ladder like steps and crouched down next to the cat. She reached out to and tapped the ground between the cat and the dumpster, hoping she could get it to look that way and realized there was a dry spot beneath it. Rather than open its eyes, the creature tried to get to its paws. When it did, one of the back ones seemed to curl unnaturally and wouldn''t hold its weight. It fell back to the ground with a soft splash, then began to shiver. "Oh for the love of..." Terra muttered, pushing her forehead against the side of the steps. The day she was fired and had her bounty quadrupled was not the day she needed to be taking in an injured animal she had no idea how to care for. She tried to tell herself that she absolutely couldn''t take it in with her, but it was no good. "Alright, then. I guess you''re coming with me." She said. She tucked her bundled up hoodie tight under her left arm, then reached out to scoop the cat up in her right. As soon as her hand brushed over the cat, she felt an electric jolt surge between the creature and her fingers. It wasn''t just a shock of static. It was too strong and there was a distinctly familiar feeling to the shock. Not far removed from the pressure she had felt when Daisy used her pheromones or what it had felt like to be analyzed by her father''s system when she had turned 12. "You!" Was all she managed to splutter out as electric green eyes flaked with yellow and blue opened triumphantly in the cat''s black face. The voice that entered her head was definitely synthesized, but in a sophisticated manner that allowed it to sound both masculine and obnoxiously smug. [Got you.] Chapter 03: More Uninvited Guests Birthdays had been the one day of the year that Terra had learned to hate most as she grew up. Each year her parents threw a lavish party, dressed her up in stiff, uncomfortable suits with too many layers, and invited half the other administration heirs from their galaxy to attend. While only a fraction of those invited came, it still meant crowds far too large to have meaningful interactions with. Her party guests ranged from infants carried in their mothers'' arms to 24-year-olds chafing in their last year before succeeding to their parent''s power. Of the children that were her own age, most were watched over just as closely by their guardians as her parents had watched over her. Chaperones ensuring the little puppets didn''t miss a line of script or dared to have any fun. One year she had secreted a drawing in her breast pocket and offered it to a girl she remembered from the previous year. Her mother had snatched it away the moment she''d unfolded it to reveal the picture. Her father made her write a letter of apology to the girl''s family. The drawing had been of them playing together: two princesses in a tower. One birthday had stood apart from the rest, not because it had been better, but because it had been different. When Terra turned twelve, she had been assessed by the system for the first time. Because a system directly manipulates the mind to communicate with and analyze a person, children were not able to safely interface until their brains had reached a certain point of development. Twelve was the age that had proven adequate in 99.9% of humans, so that was the age at which the well off children of B15-Terra got their first tiny taste of what the world''s system had to offer. What it had offered to Terra was a whole new world of her own. Or the promise of one. As soon as the strange screen projected into her vision had loaded up her stats, she''d felt a surge of... something shifting through the air and gathering at her feet. When she''d looked down, she''d seen a black tablet, similar to the personal taps children were normally given to interact indirectly with the system''s educational and gaming aspects. She had reached for it and felt a tingle of promise in the air, but her father had grabbed her wrist and yanked her back from the device. "No." He had said, not to her, but to the system. Terra had felt the resistance of the alien entity in her mind as it was pulled away. The system had not used words or feelings in its communications with her, but its influence tried to remain within her neurons. It had pulled at them and made her look at the tablet again. Forced her to reach with her other hand. Her father had blocked it from influencing her further before her fingers were anywhere near the tablet. The ordeal had set off a headache that lasted for days. The pain was unlike any Terra had known before or since. The party she had been dreading so much was cancelled. She hadn''t been in a state to celebrate.
The synthetic voice that spoke into Terra''s head was not one she had heard before, but the feel of it was familiar. It had the same feel as the tablet her world''s system had offered her. She hadn''t known back then what it was she had been offered. She''d assumed it was simply a gift her father didn''t approve of. Just another drawing of two princesses in a castle. In the years that had followed, she had not given the event or the tablet much thought. Her memories of what happened had been eclipsed by the painful daze it caused. Beyond that, she''d made a habit of avoiding any thoughts about the system, becoming its administrator, and everything else related to her family legacy whenever possible. When her father had informed her on her 18th birthday that he had taken care of her screening for her, she had been too relieved her talent wouldn''t be revealed to think about how odd it was. In the two years since she had left, the pieces had slowly come together, somewhere in her subconscious. She''d finally realized what the tablet had been during her 24th birthday a few months back. She''d been celebrating at the tattoo parlor by letting Lisa and Ajax ink calligraphy flowers onto her shoulders, one set up on either side of her. Drew had cleaned up the rest of the work stations for the evening so that he could be productive and talk at the same time. It was the first time she had celebrated the day. The year before, the idea of a birthday had still felt too loaded and unpleasant to share it with her friends. When the conversation veered off to a subject Terra hadn''t care about, she''d leaned her head back and stared up at the ceiling panels. Something about the pain of being tattooed on both sides and the black, rectangular shape of the air vent over her chair combined together and resurrected the memory of her screening. She hadn''t just remembered it. She had relived it. That was when it all clicked into place. She''d realized what it was her father had kept from her. What the system of her world had tried to give her the moment it analyzed her. And what that had been was the same thing that stood before her now, cleaning rain water from its black fur, looking quite literally like the cat that got the cream. A system seed. A system seed she had just bonded to by agreeing to keep him. What did it matter that she hadn''t realized until she touched the thing what he really was? If a champion had to comprehend the true, full nature of a seed before the bond could be forged, there might not be any system worlds in the universe at all. "Are you serious?" She asked him when her mind finally decided to reconnect to her mouth. "A cat? What is this, the 15th century on original Earth?" The earliest contact between human kind and systems had been on her species'' birth planet. As often happened with planets that developed sentient life independent of outside influences, the Interim had taken it upon itself to sprinkle unbonded system seeds into the world until one grew powerful enough to root the planet and bring the race into universal enlightenment. Those seeds had taken the form of small animals, serving as familiars to their champions who the world had called witches. Humans still used the word for the system seeds into the present day, even though familiars rarely took on true animal forms anymore. The term had even crossed racial lines, being frequently used by elves and selachins, whose species had similar mythologies around their birth worlds'' planted seeds, but hadn''t had a singular, convenient word for them. [It do be 15-Terra.] The voice in her head purred back with self-satisfied amusement. Terra stared down in horror. "You do puns?" [I can do a lot.] The cat answered as he stood up on all four- very unbroken- legs. In the next moment, Terra''s vision flashed over with the interfacing of a system, something she had only seen divorced from a tap screen once before in her life. The display was similar to back then, but there were notable differences. Instead of stark white windows outlined in green, blue, and yellow and kept semi-transparent to be seen through, the frames of her seed''s screens were thick black lines. The background of each was completely transparent until Terra tried to focus on one, at which point an opaque, cream color filled it in. Rather than using clean, smooth iconography and diagram-like outlines for images the way his parent system had, this one displayed only a few necessary images, such as a human outline on her physical condition screen, in chunky pixel art renditions. She tried not to be distracted by the windows, but couldn''t help looking over her new screening results, which the seed had automatically ran when he bonded to her.
Terran Starmer XI ?
Human - 24 - Female - First Order Stats Brains: 5 Brawn: 7 Finesse: 8 Heart: 6 Capacity: 10 Trained Skills ??? Athletics [ - ] ??? Drawing [ - ] ??? Disguise [ - ] ??? Performance [ - ] ??? Persuasion [ - ] ??? Streetwise [ - ] ??? Cooking [ - ] ??? Deceit [ - ] ??? Hacking [ - ] Skill Gifts -none- Talents Reality Sense [Unenhanced] Shifting [Unenhanced]
"My cooking''s not that bad..." Terra muttered as she glanced over her first assessment in a dozen years. [Trained skills are those you have at least some talent and experience with. Or just extensive experience in the case of you abysmal Deceit. If you could not use a skill competently, it would not be in your list. Such as Stealth.] The cat seemed to be willfully making his reassuring advice as condescending as possible. Terra would have made some sort of retort- likely about the cat needing to take Screening off his skill list since Hacking was on hers without her ever having used it- if something else hadn''t caught her completely off guard a few lines down. "Wait, I have two talents? What''s a ''reality sense''?"This novel''s true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there. [That one is... complicated.] After all his smooth confidence, Terra had not expected the cat to react with hesitance to her question. "If it''s my talent, you have to tell me about it, right?" [Sure, but we don''t have the time right now. The men in your apartment won''t wait nicely in there forever.] "What men in my apartment?" [The bounty hunters. Obviously. Why else would I pick now to come get you? It wasn''t because of the weather, I promise you that.] A cold fire rolled out under every inch of Terra''s skin. A storm of questions was tearing through her head, but she couldn''t focus on any long enough to ask them. The familiar rolled his unnatural eyes at her state of shock. [Come now, Terra. I''ve been waiting over a decade for you. I''m not going to let them take you back, so don''t make me wait any more.] The seed''s presumptiveness over his right to claim her made Terra''s roiling dread transmute into anger. "I didn''t ask for this." Terra protested, pushing herself back to her feet. "Why should I go along with what you want? You never stopped to ask what I want. None of you ever did." The cat regarded her coolly. [Do you want to be captured?] "Of course not!" [Then shut up and listen to me.] The fur along the cat''s back had lifted, along with the arch of his spine. Every drop of rain that fell on him sizzled away in a spray of sparking lights an inch before landing in his coat. [We''re going to go in there. You''re going to disable them. Then you''ll grab anything you want to take when we leave the planet. Got it?] Terra could feel the system seed''s power rolling off of him in small waves. He was posing, but she sensed he didn''t have the strength to force her to do anything she didn''t want to. Not even something as simple as making her reach out as his parent system had done when she was small. She hadn''t known a system could get angry, but that was certainly the impression he was giving off. She wondered if that was because he was young. As soon as she thought of that, of him as a twleve-year-old child, she couldn''t maintain her own frustration. He hadn''t asked to be made for her anymore than she had asked for him to be given to her. "How am I supposed to manage that? In case you missed it, fighting wasn''t on that list of skills you generated." Her voice was calmer now. She looked up the steep steps towards the door to her building. Her familiar''s posture relaxed and he stopped pulsing his influence at her. [These men are cybernetically enhanced. All you have to do is short-circuit them.] "Oh, is that all?" Terra asked tartly. [Yes. I''ll show you. Look at that light.] Following the cat''s gaze, Terra''s eyes found a flickering street light outside the alley. As she looked at it, it was outlined in the cream color of her system''s backgrounds and a nine pixel arrow pointed at the converter box at its base. It was the kind of box that pulled in system influence and processed it into electrical power. [Pull from that.] "Pull?" A hard shove of influence at her back nearly knocked Terra over. [That''s a push. Now you pull.] The cat''s synthetic voice was getting more and more impatient with her. "I''m not a system." Terra protested. [Of course you''re not. Do it anyways.] With a small shake of her head, Terra decided she would just have to show him that his plan wouldn''t work. She looked at the converter box and imagined pulling out the power she could feel it sucking in, even from the distance at which she was standing. To her utter surprise, she felt the influence come away at her will, feeding back into her system seed instead of into the air. The streetlight stopped flickering, going out completely. Behind her, the cat rumbled with pleasure. When she looked back at him, he was stretching out and flexing his claws as if he had just woken from a really nice nap. [Oh yeah, that was good. Be sure to pull as much as you can from them when we get up there, got it?] Terra stared at him. "You want me to get you power." She said, realizing it didn''t care about her getting her belongings at all. [She can be taught.] He flowed past her to the steep steps, flicking her leg with the tip of his tail as he went. "Sly little bastard." She muttered and followed after him. [Sly. I like it.] The cat said, taking ownership of the word, instead of insult. [Better than "the cat" by far. I can hear your thoughts, you know.] ''Oh?'' Terra thought while watching him climb the stairs that were almost a ladder. His little paws reaching up, grabbing on, and then hoisting his sleek body up each step looked absolutely ridiculous. ''So you know how you look right now?'' [Better than you.] Terra sighed and dropped it. He really was like a kid. A smarmy kid that thought he knew better than everyone else- and in all fairness, there was sure to be a lot he did know more about than her, just from his intrinsic nature as a budding system- but still a child. If he heard those thoughts as well, he didn''t comment on them. At the landing, Terra put her ear to the door to listen for anyone in the hall beyond. ''Are you sure they''re in my apartment? Can you sense them in there?'' [I can. You could too if you thought about it a little more. Your Brains stat isn''t that low.] Terra closed her eyes and took a deep breath to maintain her patience. She did not want to throw a child off a building, no matter how aggravating and probably impervious to damage he was. As her flaring temper came back under control, she realized he was right. She could sense people in her apartment. Because she could feel the power of their talents coursing through their cybernetic enhancements. As if the machine augmentations to their bodies kept the abilities in a perpetually active state. ''They all have cybernetics then?'' She asked the cat, just to be sure. [Not the cat. Sly. And yes, all of them.] That meant there were three men waiting for Terra in her apartment. She had no idea what their talents were, what other gear they had, or how much harm they would be willing to do to her. Her heart raced in her chest. She wasn''t sure she could go in there. Her hand was already shaking on the building''s door knob. [If you don''t want to go in, then don''t. You can pull from here.] "Right." Terra breathed in relief. She focused on the strongest pulse of power she could sense within her apartment, like she had done with the street lamp, and pulled. The result was nothing like what had happened with the light. The thread of the bounty hunter''s power fought against her mental hold like a writhing snake. At the same time, she heard muffled voices barking at each other beyond the door. "I thought you said this would be easy!" She hissed down at Sly. He was washing his face again, unconcerned by the mounting chaos in his plan. [I never said that. Pull harder.] Terra did. She pulled against the thrashing line of power with all her might, using her terror as a fulcrum on which to lever her efforts over. That gave her just enough traction to win out. Whatever it really was she''d been pulling from the man inside gave way with a snap, losing its resistance once it was pulled free. While Sly sucked the energy of it up out of the air, Terra swayed back hard from the unexpected release, even though it had not been a physical force. The barking within the building had mounted to shouts now. She could feel the two who she hadn''t short-circuited heading their way. She almost asked her familiar what she should do. This had been his idea after all, but there wasn''t time for anymore talking. Terra barely managed to step back into the corner of the landing that the door didn''t swing over before it flew open. Two burly men with carefully concealed cybernetics burst out, looking down the steps. Before they could turn back and notice her in the other corner, she shifted her body to pack on twice her weight in muscle and fat, then bull-rushed the lighter looking man. Leaned out as he had been to scan the alley below, she was able to send him flailing down the steep steps. Terra tried not to think too much about the sickening crack that cut off his surprised yell. She hadn''t seen what it was, already having turned back to the last man. She told herself it was just the wood slat of a step splintering. The third man was still heavier set than her, even with the rapid physical adjustments she had made. She wouldn''t be able to match him without shifting her bone structure first, which was far more painful and took far too much time. He probably could have sent her to the same fate as his comrade in that moment, but he didn''t want her dead, even if his glaring eyes told a different story. "I promised I''d take you quietly." The man growled at her while snapping up her wrist with an enhanced arm. He squeezed it until the joint creaked while he pulled her away from the edge and shoved her against the brick wall of the building. "Do you want to see what happens when you make me a liar?" Terra gasped in a pained breath and scrabbled against the slick brick wall as she tried to wrench her arm free. She had completely forgotten about the system seed that had been with her until a black streak of hissing and spitting fury launched itself onto the man''s neck. [Pull from him! Now!] The man had released Terra''s arm with a yelp of pain and surprise. He reached up to yank off the cat that was attacking him, but his hands swam through the inky black of Sly''s fur as if he wasn''t really there. The cybernetically enhanced hand came away sizzling with electric arcs fine as lace along its entire surface. Terra didn''t wait for any of it to make sense. She felt for the thrum of power pulsing through the cybernetic arm like a heartbeat, and pulled at it with every ounce of willpower she had. This man''s power didn''t put up half the fight the first had. It came free like a shoelace yanked from a loose knot. It snagged once, then passed through her and into Sly. Terra barely managed to catch the toppling man as he fell unconscious. If she hadn''t increased her muscle mass, the momentum of his fall still would have carried them both crashing down the steps. Grunting with effort, she pushed him backwards, letting his body fall against the building door instead. The air hung heavy with the quiet pattering of the rain while she leaned back against the doorframe, panting and staring at what she had done. She kept expecting someone else to appear, to punish her for her actions, but no one did. Her neighbors either weren''t home or had locked themselves securely into their own units. No one here would step out to borrow trouble from someone else''s bad day. She continued gulping down lungfuls of cool, damp air as her body began to shake. [You didn''t kill them. They will wake soon.] Sly warned her, though the haughty edge to his synthetic voice had been toned down. "All of them?" She asked, thinking desperately about the man she''d sent over the edge. The silence in her mind was answer enough. She stumbled to the back corner of the landing where she had avoided the door, leaned over the balustrade, and heaved up the contents of her stomach into the alley below. While her guts emptied, her morphed flesh shrunk back down to her typical proportions. The inky flowers on her shoulders had been distorted and blurred in the shifting back and forth of skin and fat. Sly waited for her just inside the open doorway, his tail wrapped primly up around his paws. When Terra had gathered herself, she pushed upright and strode into the building. She couldn''t think about what she''d done. She just needed to get her things and go. She didn''t know where to. Just that she couldn''t stay. What was waiting for her in her apartment stopped her cold in her tracks again. Her lower jaw quavered as she stared at the unconscious man sprawled in her reading chair. He appeared to have been getting up when he fell back into it. His laughing green eyes didn''t even flicker behind closed lids, but she knew the shape of his face beneath the ski mask he wore. She recognized the curled leaves of the rose tattoo he''d let her put around his wrist poking out of the edge of his black glove. Apparently, she hadn''t known him as well as she had thought. She''d had no idea he had any talents. At least the cybernetic plating along his collarbone was new. The skin around it still puckered and red from its installation by whatever mercenary crew he had signed on with to hunt her. Ajax had called out sick that morning. The morning her bounty had been raised from 250,000 credits to a million. From a price not worth selling out a friend, to one that would ensure his children never went hungry again. Terra''s eyes burned as she turned away to start gathering the few things she wanted to keep. The books and sketchbook she had brought back from the parlor with her had been lost in the fight, probably thrown over the edge of the stairs with the man she had killed. The hoodie had been pinned under her arm, saggy and empty, while she''d been pressed against the bricks, but it wasn''t with her now. She couldn''t make herself care. She just grabbed her biggest backpack, shoved in as much of her clothing as would fit, and slung it over her back. "Let''s go." She rasped, too numb to be surprised by the hollowness in her voice. [Grab the sketchpads.] Sly ordered. "Why bother?" [Because tomorrow, you will be yourself again.] The simple words couldn''t break through the thick shell Terra''s mind had thrown up around itself, but she nodded anyways. She gathered her sketchbooks, a few art supplies, and her favorite books under the direction of her familiar. She stuffed as many water bottles and granola bars as would fit into the large pockets of her dark cargo pants. She fetched her favorite bottles of shampoo and conditioner and other toiletries. Sly kept her busy packing until Ajax started to stir. Only then did he tell her it was enough. He led her out of the building. He blocked half of her vision with status windows while she went down the steps and passed out of the alley. Then, he led her to Drew''s place. Terra stood frozen at the door, staring at it. Sly let out a huff. He stretched up and scratched at the door knob vigorously, causing it to jangle in a manner that was not unlike someone trying to pick the lock. Drew yanked the door open on its chain a minute later, poking out the muzzle of a blaster with a scowl on his face. The hard expression fell away when he recognized who was standing in front of him. He set aside his blaster and unchained his door. "Terra?" Drew asked as he opened it to draw her inside. "What hap-" The question was cut off as Terra fell against his chest to cry. Chapter 04: Withered Roots Drew didn''t ask about what had happened again. Instead, he got them inside, closed and chained the door, then led Terra over to the beaten up old couch that sagged in the middle. It had served as a place for friends to crash when they were too far gone in their cups or on the outs with a spouse before. He saw no reason not to offer it to another friend in need for one night. Though he did throw uneasy glances at Sly every few minutes. Sly didn''t pay the man any mind. Instead, he found a place high up on a shelf to curl up and watch over his human for the evening. Once Terra''s tears had run dry, Drew brought her one of the worn quilts from his bed on the other side of the small studio unit. He tucked it in around her. "One night. You can''t stay more than that." "I won''t." Terra croaked. Her throat was sore from vomiting and crying. She curled up on her side, closed her puffy eyes, and tried to let sleep take her, but it wouldn''t come. An hour after she had arrived, Sly leapt down on her from the shelf. He landed on her hip, but quickly moved down and around to her face. [Don''t speak. One of them is coming.] Terra shot up on the couch. She almost asked her familiar which it was, then caught herself and instead used her ability to sense talents in the deliberate way she had learned to back at her building. The thrumming force had the feel of the one she had first grabbed. It was Ajax, and he was undeniably coming to Drew''s door. Terra darted up and across the room, shoving herself into the nook between the shelf and the kitchenette counter. She pulled the bag of trash that normally called the spot home up onto her lap, obscuring most of her torso and face from the room, but it wasn''t big enough to cover all of her, even when she ducked her head. A split-second later, there came an urgent pounding on the apartment door. Drew shot up in his bed, blinking sleep away. He looked at the place he''d last seen Terra, then the cat that was following her, but couldn''t spot either of them before he answered the door in the same manner he had before, keeping the chain on and his blaster ready. "''Jax? Why are you trying to knock in my door in the middle of the night?" "She came here, didn''t she?" Ajax asked, leaning back and forth in an attempt to see into the studio around his boss. "Who?" Drew asked, leaning back since he already knew no one was on the couch anymore. "Terra." "Why are you looking for her?" "Oh, cut it, Drew. We both know who she really is. She barely tried to hide it." Terra had put both her hands up over her mouth, to muffle her heavy breathing. She couldn''t see either man from her hiding place, but she could just make out Sly''s dark body, curled up under the couch. By keeping his eyes closed, he was nearly invisible in the dark space. She kept her eyes pinned on the furry lump of him while she mentally screamed at herself for being foolish. How had she ever thought they wouldn''t notice? Her ploy might have worked if she''d stayed on the move, but instead she had settled in one place. Let people get to know her. Given them details they didn''t need to know. Like the date of her birth. ''Stupid, stupid, stupid.'' "So? We''ve all got skeletons in our past, ''jax. She''s our friend." It was said in the same tired, calming tone Drew had used on Terra back at the parlor. His best de-escalation voice. It didn''t seem to appease Ajax anymore than it had Terra. There was a loud bang from the door as the red-haired man slammed his fist against the outer frame. "Well tonight she''s got a new one. She killed a man. Someone that had no intention of hurting her. Is that the kind of ''friend'' you''re going to protect?" Guilt and terror choked Terra as an uncomfortable silence stretched between the two men at the door. She was glad of her inability to breathe while the deafening silence gaped in the air. She was certain if she hadn''t been so strangled, she would have made some noise that would give her presence away. Drew finally sighed. "You can look around, but she''s not here." He said. Terra heard the door close, the chain jingle, then the creak of the hinges swinging wide open. "Thanks, man. She was here though, wasn''t she?" The light coming in from the hall cast the long shadow of Ajax''s pointed finger over the couch he was gesturing at. The quilt was still folded over where Terra had thrown it off herself. Her backpack was still tucked under the arm of the couch against the wall. Ajax didn''t wait for an answer, going over to the bag and pulling it out. Terra could see him then, so she closed her eyes, to prevent any reflection off of them from alerting him to her position. Drew finally answered the question in a weary breath. "Yeah. She was a mess. What did you do to her?" The scoff Ajax made caused Terra to flinch. The trash bag in her lap crinkled like thunder in her ears, but neither man heard it over the tumult of her bag being dumped out onto the old wood floor. "What did we do to her? I didn''t even see her. There was some kind of attack on my new parts and next thing I know I''m waking up with a splitting headache, her place is ransacked, one of my new mates is dead, and the other says she attacked us all." The anger in Ajax''s voice gave way to a broken crack as he rifled through what sounded like the pages of a sketchbook. "Damn it, Drew, no one was supposed to get hurt! It was going to be a clean job. We''d get her back safely to her parents and then we''d get paid. That was all. Instead..." "You miscalculated." Drew''s voice was gentle, but firm. "Someone doesn''t run away from a cushy life to live in the slums for no reason." Ajax sniffed loudly and threw the sketchpad against a wall. Terra heard the pages fluttering like the wings of a shot bird as it fell. "So what? At least she''d never go hungry where she belongs. And I bet her parents are worried sick." Drew didn''t try to reason with him more than that. Instead he said: "Check the bathroom. She probably ditched her stuff to buy time, but I''ll look around out here. Clean yourself up while you''re at it." "Yeah. Sure." The broader man grumbled, going into the only room separated from the rest of the studio by a door, and closing it behind him. Terra had kept her eyes squeezed shut the entire time. She didn''t dare open them until she heard water start to run in the bathroom. When she did, her heart nearly leapt out of her chest. Drew was standing over her, looking down with disappointment and pity blended into a potent mask of accusation on his face. "Why?" The simple question pierced into Terra. "I- I didn''t mean to. He- I pushed him. From the entrance to my apartment." Her mind scurried after more excuses. She wanted to justify herself, to say she had been scared and they had been in her home. She swallowed back the flimsy justifications and said instead: "I''m sorry." It seemed that wasn''t the answer Drew had been looking for though. His expression hadn''t changed as he crouched down in front of her. "Why won''t you go back?" The answer seemed so petty and selfish now. After hearing what a man she called friend thought of it. Knowing now that it had come at the cost of someone else''s life. She curled tight around the trash bag. She couldn''t meet his eyes. "I didn''t want to live that lie anymore." She whispered. Drew sighed heavily through his nose. "They were waiting for you in your home?" "Yes." "Did you know they wouldn''t hurt you?" "No." Terra had not lifted her head, so she jumped when Drew''s ink laced hand gently closed around her shoulder. "You should go. I''ll keep ''jax busy." "Oh, you''ll keep me busy, will you?" Neither had noticed when the water had stopped running in the bathroom. The door swung back open with Ajax''s words, silhouetting him in the bathroom''s light. [You need to drain his influence again. Now.] Sly''s voice was urgent in Terra''s mind. ''Will that hurt him?'' She asked in her thoughts while jumping to her feet, dropping the trash to the floor. [I don''t know. But do you think he cares whether he hurts you? He already has.] Terra forced the hands fisted in fear at her sides to release. She wasn''t going to risk harming someone else tonight. Especially not someone she had once called her friend. Even if he was probably the one who had led those men to her home, she just wanted to get out of this without doing more damage. "Let me go, please." She pled. "No." Ajax said coldly. He didn''t rush at her. He just walked across the small space slowly. He was a head taller and twice as broad at the shoulders as either Terra or Drew. His stiff frame and tense anger filled up the tiny apartment. "Just come with me, Ter. Joah''s family knew the risks his work entailed. Don''t steal the creds from them too when you already took his life." Before Terra could be jerked forward on the chain of her guilt, Drew took a step closer to her and asked Ajax: "How much is it? The amount you are willing to trade her life for?" Another incredulous scoff preceded his answer. "I''m not going to kill her." "Maybe, maybe not." Drew said calmly. "Terra, did you set out to kill someone today?"This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report. "No." Terra said, finally seeing the lines Drew had been thinking along this entire time. Her voice was still croaking like a frog''s from the damage she had done to her throat. "I thought I would be the one that died. I promised myself I''d go down fighting, rather than be taken back." "And that gave you the right to do whatever it took, huh?" Ajax''s voice dripped bitterness. Terra didn''t answer him as she looked past him. Drew followed her gaze and went wide-eyed. Sly had slipped out from beneath the couch a while back. Terra had noticed him slowly circling her emptied bag and the contents that had been spread over the floor. She hadn''t been sure what he was doing until his electric eyes started to glow a moment before. Ajax only turned to look as well when he saw a strange light reflected in their gazes. Terra could feel the lines of influence surrounding Sly. When his eyes lit, so did they. Then they shot out in arcs to each of the items in the room he had been weaving his gathered potential into. The lines hooked onto that potential and fed from it, growing brighter and solid. Each line''s other end broke from Sly and converged within the backpack, drawing the bag upright and throwing all Terra''s scattered belongings back into it. While he was spending a profligate portion of the potential Terra had gathered for him earlier anyways, he decided to push out just a little more to make the two men hear him. [I gave her the right.] The hissed words in their minds were accompanied by all the lights in the apartment building going out at once, including Sly''s lines of influence. Blinded in the sudden darkness, neither man saw the familiar leap to Terra''s shoulders, the bag following in his wake as it was still tied to him by the lines he had willed invisible. Terra couldn''t see any more than the others, but she could feel the shape of Sly as well as her bag and belongings, which were threaded through with his fading influence. She hurried her arms into the straps and ran for the door. She didn''t need him to point out to her that she wouldn''t have gotten through to Ajax. When Sly''s body on her shoulders went limp as she emerged onto the dimly lit streets, she reached up to catch him. "Are you alright?" She asked with concern, running without a destination in mind. All she knew was that she needed to get far away and stay away. From friends and foes alike. At least the rain had stopped. [Drained. I will recover. Feed me another street lamp if you''re worried.] Terra snorted. "I''m not that worried." She said, though a desperate smile tugged at her lips. After the tension in Drew''s apartment, running as fast as she could through the streets in the dark with a ridiculous cat laying limp in her arms and snarking at her felt liberating. "Can we leave the planet sooner rather than later?" [We could have before all this. Now, I have to get more potential first.] "Why?" A small paw batted lamely at her chin. [Use that puny Brains stat of yours and think for once.] Terra humored him for now, letting her feet go where they willed as she focused herself into her mind. She wasn''t used to thinking things through though. In all honestly, she tried to avoid thinking about anything besides art, stories, and client gossip as much as she could. Everything else she''d ever thought about felt overwhelming or crushing. She preferred to let her mind be a place she escaped to, rather than one she worked in. Whenever stuff cropped up, she would act first and think about it later. Maybe. If she really had to. Which might be why she was always running headlong from one problem into another. Like she had run into that man. Joah. If she had thought through what she was doing before she pushed him, she could have reasoned that falling forward down steep steps over a paved alley was dangerous. Instead, she had acted first. Like she always did. It was no wonder her Brains had not increased since she was 12. She hadn''t exercised her mind in any meaningful way after that point. For a stat to change, its limits had to be pushed. She''d actively avoided doing any hard thinking. Terra''s steps slowed as she processed through her chaotic thoughts, just as disorganized as her bag. [Here''s a hint. Why didn''t you leave town before?] Sly asked with sarcastic syrupy-sweetness soaking into his synthesized voice in a disturbingly accurate way. She couldn''t blame him for his impatience this time. He was right. It barely took any time to realize why they couldn''t leave until he had more potential to spend. "Because I can''t be screened. Unless you push a fake result for me." [Technically, you''ll be pushing the fake result. But I can''t show you how when I''m like this.] "Do you have to show me?" Terra asked. "Why not just tell me, then I can try it with you to see if I''m doing it right. You''re still a system, right? Even if you''re a tiny one." [I''m not small.] The petulant words sounded particularly like a boy grumbling about being a big kid, which made Terra smile. Even though she didn''t say anything, Sly glowered up at her grin. [We could try that. I don''t expect it will work, but it''s worth the shot. The sooner we get into the Interim, the better.] "To do this I''ll need to use my ''Reality Sense'', right?" Terra guessed. She began to orient herself on the streets now, figuring out where she was and what was nearby. Her blind flight had taken her into a residential district not quite as bad as the one her home had been in. The streets here weren''t safe, but they were the kind where someone would probably bother to come out if she screamed. What sort of payment they''d want for helping her with whatever had made her scream was another question, but she didn''t think it would come to that. She ducked aside into a clean looking alley to continue the conversation with Sly somewhere out of the light of lamps and the view of windows. She kept walking, but slowed her pace since she didn''t have a destination in mind. [Correct.] Sly agreed. He had regained some of his muscle tone in her arms as she ran. [You''re gonna want me to explain that now, aren''t you?] "Do you even need to ask that if you can read my mind?" Terra teased. Her playfulness was forced, but her heart was still pounding hard in her chest, her blood high on adrenaline. [For the record, I don''t read every single thought and desire you have. At least not all the time.] "Is this a thing you can do because of the bond, or have you been stalking me for a dozen years?" [It would have taken potential to analyze your mind before the bond was finalized. As a seed with no champion, potential wasn''t something I could afford to waste.] Terra frowned at that. "So why wait for me at all? Why not find someone else. Do you know how many people would sell an arm and a leg to get a familiar?" Sly went stiff, then sat up to hiss in her face. [Because you were promised to me.] "And I''m just that special?" She asked sarcastically. Maybe she shouldn''t engage with his little tantrum, but she didn''t want the guilt of his loneliness and hunger on her shoulders. He could have and should have just moved on. [On this planet? Yes.] Sly said, relaxing back into her arms stiffly. After a moment, his tail curled with reassured vanity. [You are the prize for my patience.] The next turn Terra took in the alleys led her past an alcove where a group of the homeless were bundled together sleeping under soggy cardboard canopies. One man was on watch. He narrowed his eyes at Terra, but she kept her head down and didn''t slow her pace. ''What makes me a prize? My Capacity? Is it really that unusual?'' She switched to thinking at Sly with an effort. It should have been easier to do than talking, since speaking with her mind let her throat focus on breathing, but she wasn''t used to it yet. [No. Your Capacity, especially at the age it capped out, is impressive, but not unusual. Almost any Second Order being will have equal or greater Capacity. It is useful, since it is likely to always be higher than most others within your Order, unless you reach Fifth Order, but what makes you special is the talent that high Capacity allowed you to develop.] It had been a long time since Terra had been lectured on the Orders, but the lessons had been so numerous that they came flooding back to her mind involuntarily. Orders were the means by which mortal sentients were classified by systems. The vast majority of people within the universe fell into the First Order. It represented folks whose stats were within natural mortal limits, namely, 10 or less. Any stats beyond 10 required some kind of bond to a system so that the system could manipulate the body to allow it to exceed normal limits. Anyone who had at least one stat over 10 was considered Second Order, which was the order almost all people with secondary system bonds belonged to, be they system administrators or VR athletes. Any stat over 20 marked the threshold for the Third Order, common only among experienced Interim explorers, champions travelling the universe while gathering strength for their system seeds and searching for their world. A world couldn''t even be seeded until a champion had a stat average of 26 or so, by which point their physical and mental capabilities were on par with the original Earth myths of superheroes. Anything less than that and they would not be able to generate enough potential for their system seed to take root and metamorphize into a full-fledged system. One stat over 30 put a being into the Fourth Order, which was when most Interim explorers would seed a world. It was unheard of for anyone other than a champion to reach the Fourth Order. Most experts in the field of system sciences hypothesized the primary system bond of mortal and familiar was necessary to achieve it since fostering that much growth beyond typical limits required a concerted and consistent effort on the system''s part. The Fifth Order was the last, and most powerful. At 40, a stat had reached the limits of what the physical laws of the universe could be bent to without breaking. Calling a stat at that level god-like was almost an understatement. Most champions would never reach the Fifth Order, meaning Terra didn''t need to worry about her Capacity ever being unimpressive for her Order. None of that told her how it had given her a talent. ''The reality sense?'' Terra asked. ''What does that have to do with my Capacity?'' The burst of static like sound in her mind gave Terra the distinct impression that Sly had just done the system equivalent of snorting in amusement. [Everything. Starting with the fact that if it was any lower, having my parent system ripped out of your head would have killed you at that age. Your aptitude for gathering and channeling potential for a system took what should have become massive brain damage without a bond to channel it away and instead grew it into the exceedingly rare talent that let your body handle and process it on its own.] ''It didn''t feel like I escaped brain damage.'' Terra thought. ''And how would this talent allow me do any of that?'' [I''m getting to that. You have heard of the space-time continuum, right? Also known as the fabric of reality?] ''Sure. It''s the higher dimension your kind works off of. Systems use potential as an energy source to weave threads of influence into it and change properties of the physical dimension within it.'' It wasn''t a feat of cunning on Terra''s part to regurgitate the core set of facts her administrational studies had shoved down her throat endlessly. [Good. Now, what do you think it means to be able to "sense" that?] Sly''s voice had taken on the condescending ooze of someone leading a stubborn- or particularly unintelligent- mule to water. Terra had already started to guess at this on her own, though. ''It''s why I can sense when other people are using talents, right? Why I feel where every tap is without having to look or know where disruptions are before they''re flagged.'' [It''s also why you can touch influence and manipulate it. Like a system. Most of you mortals can only expel it through your talents.] He was practically purring now, because she belonged to him and it pleased him to have something precious. [You can''t produce shaped influence from potential of your own- yet- but when you are holding existing influence, our bond allows me to absorb it and convert it back into unshaped potential. And I can use my potential however I see fit.] ''So how am I going to fake a screening result if I can''t shape influence?'' Terra asked. She came back out onto the main streets again. If she was speaking in her mind anyways, there was no point taking the risk of walking through alleys. [You can''t produce the influence directly, but the system running the screening will be doing that. All you have to do is nudge the results.] Sly had regained most of his physical strength by now and adjusted himself into a tidy cat loaf shape in her arms. He ducked his head down into the crook of his paws looking far too comfortable and relaxed there. ''Won''t the other system know I did that?'' Terra asked while staring at him. He was annoyingly adorable to look at. [What do you think your Hacking skill is?] The sharp change in topic confused Terra. ''Hacking is for breaking into computers or databases, isn''t it?'' [Something like that. Typically. In your case, it is the name I chose to give your ability to manipulate influence. It can go by other names: Weaving, Tampering, Molding. I chose Hacking because one thing it is capable of is reshaping a system''s influence without the system noticing. So long as the results are within the expected parameters a system sets on the outcomes for an expenditure, it does not know if the influence was tampered with. Full-fledged systems are too abstracted to focus on inconsequential details like that.] ''That doesn''t explain why I have the skill already. I thought you told me I had to have at least some experience and talent with a skill for it to be listed.'' [You have already used it.] ''When?'' [How should I know? A screening assesses what exists within you, not how it got there.] That troubled Terra. She went quiet and tried to think about any time she had interacted with a system or other sources of the influence she could feel. She was fairly certain that she had never even tried to do anything with what she sensed until today. Until Sly had told her to try, she hadn''t thought it was something she could touch. It would have been like trying to grab a rainbow. [Find a tap.] Sly said when he''d had enough of her brooding. [It''s time to practice.] Chapter 05: Skill Issue Terra and Sly spent the rest of the night hopping from one public tap to another, taking care not to create a pattern of travel that was too obvious in case their activities were being tracked. At each of the public booths with one-way displays inside the three glass walls, Terra had slipped in a one credit chip, selected one of the cheap games to play, and tried to change the outputs in whatever ways Sly told her to. They had started with the ancient card game Solitaire. All she had to do was tell the game to switch the positions of two cards. Her first attempt had been about as successful as trying to tattoo a client while flailing around in the dark. The tap''s screens had each been filled up completely by copies of the two card images she had tried to switch until the data leak she had caused short-circuited the interfacing system. The loud error sounds that had accompanied the flash of light just before she went darting out of that booth had drawn a lot of attention in the middle of the night, so she hadn''t tried again until she''d passed another dozen blocks. Sly had lectured her the entire time about how she was supposed to gently push her will onto the tap, not punch through it. So of course her second attempt had been too soft. [You still have to want to change it.] Sly instructed when nothing happened. Very slowly, like trying to find the right pressure for sketching with a new brand of pencil, Terra had increased how much force she was putting into the desire for the cards to switch places. When something had finally happened, the ace of hearts had shown up where the four of clubs had been, but the four had not replaced the ace. Instead, there were simply two aces. She''d moved one ace up to the building piles and intended to add the second, just to see what would happen, when Sly had slapped her cheek with his paw from his perch atop her backpack. [Do you want to short-circuit another tap?] Of course she hadn''t, but she''d made him walk after that. It didn''t take her long to figure out her mistake. She had been thinking about the changes she wanted to make one at a time, rather than holding them together in her mind as a single change. It seemed like such a simple mistake, but correcting it proved to be much trickier than she''d expected. A human mind wasn''t very good at multi-tasking. Terra''s mind in particular was like a muscle she had not exercised in years. She could see the image she wanted in her head as a whole, but she couldn''t easily make herself combine the two changes necessary to achieve that vision into a single, unified action. When she had tried to cheat by switching one card, then the other, Sly had not been impressed. [When you alter the screening results, you''re going to have to do it all at once. A full-fledged system might not notice your tampering directly, but it will be alerted if a reading that was supposed to be static is altered.] "I could just change my name." Terra suggested. [That won''t be enough. You''ll need to hide your Capacity and talents too.] "Even though you and I are the only ones that know them?" [We aren''t. The other bounty hunter that got away registered your talents with my parent system''s records when he made his report on the encounter.] "How do you know that?" [By communicating with my parent system, of course. This is its planet. Its influence is everywhere, and I am its seed. Your father would have to block my access on an admin level to keep me out.] So she had tried for hours to make multiple changes together. When she had managed it with two cards, Sly had pressed her to do three. When she had done that, he had her switch to a different kind of game that involved multiple pieces that had different functions. By having direct access to her mind, he had known exactly how she''d eventually managed to switch multiple cards at the same time by grouping them into a single unit in her thoughts. He used the more complex game to make her realize that wouldn''t be possible every time. By dawn, they had wandered into a much wealthier part of town. Terra was hungry and tired, which hadn''t been helping her concentration. She''d been stuck trying to alter a game piece''s shape and a token''s color or the number a die had rolled and the action card that was drawn for hours. She was also certain if she had to click through one more ten-step tutorial to a colorful children''s game, she was going to scream. When they passed the next park, she told Sly: "I''m going to eat my granola bars and crash in a bush. Wake me if someone calls the authorities or something." [Fine. If you fix your face first.] "What''s wrong with my face?" Terra asked him defensively. Sly gave her a flat look, then a screen popped up in her vision. An old image of herself, with short hair, freckles hidden under make-up, and no piercings stared back at her. WANTED UNHARMED: Terran Starmer XI. REWARD: ¡é1,000,000. Even though the picture was old, had a more masculine bone-structure, and other minor differences from Terra''s current appearance, there were enough similarities that someone wouldn''t miss them if they were looking for her. Especially since now, the bounty listing had an update beneath it. Last seen with shoulder length hair, multiple ear piercings, shoulder tattoos, black tank top, green cargo pants. May be disguised as a woman. "Alright, I get it." Terra said, willing the window closed with a snap of her newfound control over such things. She didn''t trust him not to keep it open just to rub it in her face. More. "It''s a miracle no one has stopped me yet with that update..." She added in a mutter while seeking out the park bathrooms. She kept her face down. [It has been dark.] Terra''s frustration mounted, but she held her tongue. In the bathroom, she used the deadbolt to lock off the entire women''s side. It wasn''t the kind of lock that needed a key and could be opened from the outside without much effort, but the scraping of it would give Terra the warning she needed to stop shifting if someone was going to come in. First thing after securing the door, she changed into a navy blue sweater to cover her tattoos and black joggers. She pulled out all her piercings, tucking them away with care into a case Sly had made her grab that held her extras. After the studs and bars were out, she used her shifting talent to close the piercing holes. She looked into the mirror as she made more changes, so that she could assess as she went if they made her look different enough. Her eyes went green, then black, before she settled on rich brown. Her hair was next. She let it grow down to her hips. She tried it curly and ginger first, but even with her freckles, that made her stand out too much. She didn''t bother trying out blonde, deciding to go with a simple lank and black look. [Are you done preening?] Sly asked, his artificial mental voice droning out in what was clearly an impatient whine. Terra reached down and scratched him behind his ear. "Soon, little boy." [I''m not really a cat.] Sly protested, despite the fact that he had leaned into her fingers. [Or a child.] "Uh-huh." Terra said dryly while she pulled her new silky black hair over her shoulder in order to braid it. She let her thick eyebrows thin down into elongated, tapering shapes while her fingers worked. Last of all, she reluctantly shifted her cute button nose- which she had been born with and adored all the more because her father had hated it- into one that laid closer to her face with a subtle hook. Satisfied she looked nothing like herself anymore, she twirled around with out stretched arms and asked Sly: "So? What do you think?" [I think you''re going to look suspicious sleeping in a bush.] "Anyone would." Terra huffed, dropping her arms and putting her scattered clothes and cases back into her bag. The joggers didn''t have pockets big enough for all the granola bars and water bottles the cargo pants had held, but she intended to demolish half of them before leaving the bathroom anyways, so she forced the rest down into her over-stuffed bag. Food and a nap did wonders for Terra''s mood. Especially since she''d let Sly talk her into climbing up into a tree, rather than hiding down under a bush. By propping a book up on her legs once she''d wedged herself into the tree branches, she''d been able to appear as if she was up there reading instead of sleeping. Sly made a very convenient alarm clock. His direct link into her mind meant he had been able to wake her as soon as she''d gone through a REM cycle, so she felt more rested than some mornings when her old styled alarm clock had to tear her from her dreams after a late night of reading. With a fresh head on her shoulders, the struggle to improve her Hacking skill became a lot more tolerable, even if she was still floundering just as much to make it work. They had crossed more than half New Port City''s length, zig zagging from tap to tap, before Terra finally figured out a way to do what she needed to in a manner that Sly was satisfied with.This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author''s work. It was a simple trick, in the end. All she had to do was lay out every change she wanted to make in her mind while holding the pressure of her will too light to effect the changes, but active. Maintaining the pressure was the key. Like tracing the lightest of sketches, if she let up, she''d miss a line, but if she pressed down, only the part she was currently touching would be added. Just like she couldn''t have drawn a design out in one smooth motion, she couldn''t have thought through each change of influence while also applying them simultaneously. However, when making a tattoo, she had been able to put the outline of her designs onto her client''s skin in a smooth, quick manner with a stencil. By keeping her intent focused but not forceful while Hacking, it acted like a sheet of transfer paper for her to lay out her intentions on, holding them in a state of limbo. When she was ready, she just increased her will on them all at once. It had taken until well into the afternoon for her to feel it out, but when she finally did it, Sly had actually been impressed. [I didn''t really think you''d be able to do it until I showed you.] He''d admitted. [It''s not a natural thing for a human mind. I expected you to be stubborn about if for a few days while I recharged or get impatient and feed me more street lights.] His grudging not-praise left Terra feeling inordinately proud. "Well now we don''t have to wait. Ready to get off this rock?" [Not so fast.] Sly had said, catching her pant leg on a claw when she started to turn in the direction of the nearest space port. [First, you need to get faster. You won''t have five minutes to adjust the results of a screening. You''ll only have the second it takes to run.] So they had gone on like that, Terra catching rest and food where she could, never staying in one part of the city for long, until she could consistently start a game up and make the changes she desired in it as soon as it loaded. Each time, she got a little faster with the practice, but the biggest help was realizing she could lay out her intentions as far ahead of time to the games loading as she wanted, so long as she could hold her concentration until it did. Which of course prompted Sly to add distractions while she waited. A lot of those distractions had involved teeth and claws. Each time her templates fell apart at his painful distractions, she was increasingly tempted to dump him down a sewage drain. Two days had passed by the time Sly was satisfied enough with her level of distraction management to say they were ready to go. [After one more test.] "Urgh." Terra groaned. "What now?" [Now, you fool a screening.] Terra''s first thought was to point out that would be risky, but she stopped the thought before it could reach her tongue. Of course it was risky, that was the whole point. They couldn''t afford what would happen if they ran that risk for the first time in a busy space port instead of at a- hopefully secluded- tap. [No, not a tap.] Sly said, trotting up to a bench. He jumped onto it and turned back. [I don''t have that much faith in you. You''re going to manipulate my screening.] "Oh." Terra said, sitting down next to him. "That''s a better idea." A few people walking nearby turned to give her odd looks for seemingly talking to a cat, but they didn''t stop. She still looked nothing like her bounty posting. Today she had lightened her skin to make the curly red hair and blue eyes work. She was also very plump, a trait she had chosen in rebellion against her growling stomach. And because she thought it made her cheeks look cute under the freckles and curls. [Do you remember what you need to change?] Sly asked, cutting off her thoughts about what she looked like before she could get started again. Terra sighed heavily, switching to speaking to him with her thoughts so that no one else would look closer at them. ''Name, Capacity, no Hacking, and Talents.'' She was pretty sure he''d been drilling her on it in her dreams while she napped. [Good. Now go.] She was startled by his lack of warning, so fumbled the attempt the first time, but managed it easily on the second go. When she knew to wait for it, she could feel the influence gathering and taking shape just before it entered her mind to analyze it. While it was pulling away with what it had learned was when she enacted her adjustments.
Terra Baker ?
Human - 24 - Female - First Order Stats Brains: 5 Brawn: 7 Finesse: 8 Heart: 6 Capacity: 6 Trained Skills ??? Athletics [ - ] ??? Drawing [ - ] ??? Disguise [ - ] ??? Performance [ - ] ??? Persuasion [ - ] ??? Streetwise [ - ] ??? Cooking [ - ] ??? Gaming [ - ] Skill Gifts -none- Talents Regeneration [Unenhanced]
Sly flopped down onto his side on the bench and stretched out languidly. [Good. We can go soon.] ''Soon? Why not now?'' Terra asked, more than ready to be done with her homeworld. [Because the ship I have in mind for you is leaving in the morning. Wouldn''t you like a good night''s rest and a real dinner?] Terra''s stomach roared an answer before she could. [Exactly.]
The next morning found Terra feeling like a person again for the first time since she had left Drew''s parlor four days earlier. Once she could alter screenings, she had been able to check in to a hotel without fear of discovery. The cheap mattress had given her the best night of sleep she''d had in a very, very long time. She''d never bought a bed for her apartment. Getting her reading chair up the stairs had been difficult enough to convince her she didn''t need any other furniture that hadn''t already been built into the place. She''d spent her nights sleeping in her reading chair, or on a pile of blankets on the floor. While the complimentary breakfast bar food hadn''t been anything special by comparison, she was still grateful to be heading out onto the New Port City streets for the last time with a full belly. Entering the space port was a much less exciting affair than Terra had expected it would be. She had never gone into one because of the screenings at the security gates. Travelling off the planet with her parents had always happened in their private ship, which docked and launched from the personal pad at their home. She had always imagined the public space ports would be full of interesting people and aliens, busy sales stands, and tourist gift shops. In reality it was a lot of waiting in lines and repeating the same thing you had said a few minutes ago to someone new. There were stores and shops, but they were clean, glass-fronted set-ups with rows on rows of identical products rather than the festival like explosion of variety and color she had imagined. By the time she reached the last point in the check in process, she had nearly zoned out completely. She was half in a daydream, repeating her name and purpose yet again to the security officer in the booth when Sly cut into her thoughts sharply. [He asked what ship you are boarding.] ''What? Oh. That''s a good question. Which ship am I boarding?'' Terra asked him quickly in her thoughts while out loud she was apologizing to the official waiting on her to get to the point. [The Chariot. Under Captain Surith.] ''Does Captain Surith know I''m boarding?'' [Not yet.] That seemed like trouble to Terra, but for the time being, she gave the information to the man handling travel. He ran her through a second screening, double checked it against the record of the screening she''d done at the front gates, then let her into the line that would take her to the ship pads. "The Chariot''s scheduled for take-off in fifteen minutes at pad 13. You''d best hurry." The man said to her in a bored voice. "Thanks, I will." Terra assured him as she hurried along. ''Maybe we should have come last night after all. Those lines were awful.'' [Maybe you shouldn''t have gone back for a second muffin.] ''Easy for you to say. You don''t eat.'' The two of them picked up their pace until they were nearly jogging up to pad 13. A series of machines were running final checks over the outside of The Chariot. They rolled around the much larger space ship like a flock of birds picking the teeth of a predator. Beneath the ship, a platform was lowering down to take in supply crates every minute or so. A large woman with rich brown skin and bushy black hair cropped short was overseeing the loading process. Each of the woman''s biceps were nearly the size of Terra''s head. Her torso was wide from hips up to ribs and vast from ribs to shoulders. Terra swallowed hard while Sly gave her a look of utter disgust. [Really?] ''Shut up.'' The woman turned to look Terra over from head to toe when she stepped onto the ship''s pad. "Who are you?" "Terra. Terra Baker. And this is Sly." Terra said, gesturing down to where Sly had been keeping pace with her a moment before. The place she had gestured to was empty. She looked to her other side, then up. Sly hadn''t stopped where she had. Instead, he had picked up his pace in approaching the ship. When Terra spotted him, he was leaping onto the loading platform as it lifted into the ship. "Sly!" Terra shouted after him, aghast at his methods. The woman looked down at a watch on her wrist. "You''ve got 2 minutes to tell me what you want or get your cat off my ship. I suggest you get your cat." "He''s not... Are you Captain Surith?" Terra asked, deciding she didn''t have time to waste explaining Sly until she knew if this was the person she needed to talk to. The woman chuckled as she returned to her work, hoisting up one of the last three crates as if it weighed no more than a pillow. "No, I''m just loading a month of supplies onto someone else''s ship for fun." Terra felt a shy smile creep over her face, despite the fact her familiar had put her into a difficult position. If she didn''t convince this woman to let her aboard, she might get separated from him. She had no idea what that might do to her or him. "Can I help?" "Knock yourself out." Terra lifted the second to last crate. It weighed much more than a pillow. She was decently strong, but clearly no where near the captain''s strength. Which meant the captain had probably had a system bond at one point in her life. Maybe she had been an athlete on another world. B15-Terra only celebrated VR sports, but there were plenty of worlds that enjoyed watching Second Order athletes dominating a field with their physically enhanced bodies. Sly was still no where to be seen when the platform settled onto the pad again. "Jenkins! Where''s the cat?" Surith shouted up into the open loading bay while she placed her crate onto the platform. "What cat?" A high tenor voice asked, echoing down. "No luck with your kitty it seems." Surith said. "He''s not a cat. He''s a familiar." Terra said as she laid her crate down on the platform next to the captain''s. "He said I should come with you." "Is that so?" The woman asked with a laugh while she grabbed the last crate. She walked back onto the platform without setting it down, looking Terra over again with more interest than suspicion this time. "Didn''t leave a lot of time for an interview." "Terra Baker. Skilled with art and athletics. No skill gifts. One talent." Terra said rapidly. She held out her hand, then looked down at the crate the captain was still holding and dropped her arm. "Sorry." Surith smirked at her, then threw her head back. "Bring us up, Jenkins!" Chapter 06: Into the Interim The moment heavy hatch doors slid shut beneath the cargo platform, filling in the 20 centimeter gap the platform and the bay''s grated flooring, Terra realized the ship was infused with influence. Worse, she felt some of it gathering around her in the now unmistakable presence of a system about to look into her mind to screen her. She was caught unprepared, but quickly altered her talents to hide her reality sense. Sly had given her the strong impression over the past few days that if she could only hide one thing, it should be that. "Starmer, eh? So you''re the runaway everyone in port wouldn''t stop yammering about." Captain Surith said, her eyes focused on an invisible place close to her face that indicated she was reading a system screen Terra couldn''t see. Which meant that the system feeding it to her wasn''t Sly. "I thought world systems weren''t supposed to spread their influence into harbored ships." Terra said warily, to buy some time. Her eyes darted around, searching for Sly in the few shadows of the tidy and well-lit cargo bay. She needed to grab him and run. Unfortunately for that plan, the only person she spotted besides herself and the captain was a man around her height with incredibly pale skin and a platinum blonde crew-cut pinching the bridge of his nose. "Another stray?" The man asked his captain in a long suffering tone. His was the voice that had called back earlier, which must make him Jenkins. "This one''s got a sizeable bounty on her head." Surith informed her crewman. Her deep voice rolled with good humor as she said it. Terra gave up the futile search for her familiar and let herself shift out of her disguise, back to her usual form. She hoped revealing herself fully now would show some good faith after she had blatantly lied to the woman a minute before. "Yes, that is my bounty, but I swear I''ll work hard and earn more than the bounty is worth. Please don''t turn me in." The exasperated man released his poor nose to pin her with a stern look. His eyes were a startlingly bright blue. "You had better." He then turned on the captain to continue his lecture. "Ruby, we can''t keep taking on extra mouths like this." "Why not?" The captain asked with a shrug of her shoulders that rolled like the crashing of a wave through her back muscles. She set her crate down. "It gives Laurie something to do when we don''t need patching up." Terra picked up the crate she had put onto the platform before and moved it next to the one Surith had just laid down. "So...you''re not going to try turning me in?" She asked, wanting to make sure she wasn''t just hearing what she wanted to hear. "Honey, I wouldn''t waste the time." While the captain went back for the last crate, Jenkins took it upon himself to elaborate. "The Chariot has much more lucrative work to be doing than cooling our jets here to chase down a handful of credits. The fines for rescheduling take-off alone would eat up a tenth of what we''d make off your head. Not to mention the actual contracts and objectives we''d be putting off." "Wait, objectives? As in... explorer objectives?" Terra asked. Then something clicked into place and she spun to look at the Captain with surprise. "You''re a champion too?" Surith grinned at her and tossed the last crate into place, causing her crewman to wince. "Me and half the souls aboard this ship. Not bad deduction for 5 Brains. Slow on the uptake though. Jenkins, why don''t you get her settled in?" "We could still drop her out the hatch." Jenkins suggested dryly. The captain laughed loudly while heading out of the cargo bay. "If you wanted to do that, you should have caught that cat." She said without looking back. The hydraulic doors of the ship shut behind her a second later. Terra felt like she''d been picked up in a whirlwind. "Is this normal for you?" She asked. Jenkins ran a hand down his pale face, the cheeks of which were flushed just from talking. "More or less. Strange things always seem to happen when you get more than one champion on the same planet. The Captain enjoys excitement, so she tempts fate by collecting you together into one ship." "You''re not one of us?" "Goodness no. Nor would I want to be. Ruby''s an old friend, so I signed on to handle logistics and resource management for her. I''ll take a secondary bond with the Chariot once it seeds a world." "The ship?" "Yes. The ship is her familiar." As he spoke, he led her through the ship. The cargo bay had been all smooth, silver surfaces with black metal shelving against the walls and crates neatly lined up in rows on the grated flooring. The halls had a different feel. They were lined with a bouncy red carpeting made of a material Terra couldn''t name that squeaked like rubber under their shoes. The walls, which arched inwards at their zenith, consisted of a matte-black, metal paneling. All along the panels, inlaid lines of alien crystal pulsed and glowed with influence. The layout gave the impression of integrated circuitry. [That''s exactly what it is.] Sly''s synthetic voice confirmed into her thoughts distantly. He sounded distracted. ''Where in the blackest of holes are you?'' Terra asked in her thoughts. [Communing with the Chariot. Pay attention.] When Terra returned her attention back to Jenkins, he was explaining the layout of the ship and what amenities were in which direction. It seemed the ship was laid out similarly to the ones she was accustomed to. The helm was at the front of the top deck, with the recreation and mess halls located to the aft. His and the captain''s cabins were the only living quarters on that deck. The middle deck contained gunning pods and viewing chambers along the outer edges. The inner part of the mid-deck hosted the general living quarters and infirmary. The lower deck had the cargo bay and engines to the rear, escape pods on the sides, and most the rest of the deck consisted of maintenance rooms full of reactors, piping, wiring, and power cells. There only room that he expected she would have any interest in on the lower deck was a VR chamber he pointed out near the lifts. "Maybe not. I''ve never used VR before." Terra admitted as they stepped into the lift tube. "Really?" Jenkins asked in a tone that was simply curious, rather than disbelieving. He had mellowed out considerably once the captain left. "I thought that bounty was for the administrator''s heir?" "Yeah, well... interacting with my father''s system was something I avoided at all costs." Terra said. "Was the bounty really being talked about that much?" "It was around us." Jenkins ran a hand down his face with weariness. "We''ve got five champions aboard- you''ll make six- so there was a lot of scrutiny on us after reports came in that you''d gained a system seed. They ran three or four extra screenings on any of us that stepped off the ship. It put a significant damper on our land leave. I suspect Ruby was keeping an eye out for you out of spite." That would explain why the woman had been so quick to bring Terra aboard, if she had suspected who she really was. Though it had sounded like the captain would have happily accepted anyone with a system seed. Jenkins got out of the lift on the middle deck and led Terra down a small hall with four doors on either side. "These are most of the crew cabins. I''ll put you in cabin 5 for now. If either of your neighbors has a problem with that, I''m sure I''ll hear about it." Cabin 5 was the second door on the left. Terra imagined keeping it empty had been done on purpose to put a buffer between rooms 3 and 7. "I won''t make much noise." She promised. "Good." The room of the cabin was smaller than her apartment had been, but much better furnished. A set of bunks was built into the back wall, each full sized bed having a meter of headroom and a black out curtain along the cubby entrance that could be pulled shut for privacy from roommates. Each sleeping cubby had a stasis shelf with a light strip at the head of the bed and panel storage at the foot. The side walls of the room were like the walls in the hallways with the addition of a large tap screen across from a built in couch. The door into the room was set up in a recess beneath more shelving. A desk was built into the shelving just in front of the couch, a smaller tap screen installed within the alcove for use there. Two narrow pull-out closets were built into the slender section of shelving on the opposite side of the doorway to the desk and couch. Jenkins told her to make herself comfortable in one of the beds for take-off and that someone would come to finish showing her around after they escaped orbit. He then left for the helm. Terra hadn''t left her homeworld in nearly four years, but she remembered the precautions for take-off well enough. She shrugged off her bulging backpack and managed to shove it into one of the narrow pull-outs by indiscriminately pulling out clothes and dumping them unsorted and crumpled into the bottom draw of the closet. She shoved the closet back into its alcove just as the taps in the room activated to display the 2-minute launch countdown. Accessing the upper bunk was a simple matter of climbing the ladder-like insets at the foot of the cubbies. She crawled into the low space, then flopped over onto the bedding with a bubbling feeling in her chest. She stared up at the ceiling, a large panel of which was yet another tap screen for the Chariot. It continued to tick down the seconds until take-off. Curiously, Terra reached up and touched her fingers to the screen. The countdown shrunk down into one corner, allowing a user interface to appear. The Chariot''s look was not what Terra would have expected based on what its champion was like. The controls and displays had a fantastical feel to them, all dancing diagram lines giving the impressions of crystals and arcane circles. There was such heavy integration of icons into the system''s interface that it was one-step away from using them as a pictographic language. Even when she pulled up her own screening result from earlier, things such as the stat names were shown only as icons. Her name, skills, and talent- she was relieved to see she had successfully hidden her second talent without notice- were at least written out in the universal script. She only had time to look at welcome screens and her results before the intensity of relative gravity during the launch forced her arms down. Terra closed her eyes and focused on breathing through the minutes of discomfort. When the pressure lifted from her limbs, her heart rose higher. She was free. Really, actually free. When she had escaped her home, it had only been into a bigger prison. She hadn''t been able to leave the city. Now she had left not only the city, but the whole planet. Her father might rule B15-Terra, but in the Interim and on other planets, Terra was her own person past the age of majority. He could not hunt her down out here with his measly bounties and if he tried to follow her, whatever method of control or capture he could have used to force her back home would bring the ire of the Interim down on him. Terra almost hoped he would try. She''d like to see how he liked it when a force beyond his control refused to reason with him.Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. The Interim stood for many things. The simplest explanation was that it was the empty space between worlds and stars. The complicated explanation was that it was a system like entity that existed throughout that vest emptiness. The Interim''s influence was far more vast than any world system, spanning the entire universe, but it was proportionally more abstracted. While each world system had unique quirks and showed favor to certain individuals, the Interim was a sterile, clinical thing. It did not communicate in any kind of personalized way and made no bonds with mortals. It had tenets it enforced with the high-handed, inflexibility of other natural laws. The Interim did not interfere with worldly matters, but anything that fell in between was subject to its laws. One of those laws was that personal autonomy could not be violated. Knowing the history of original Earth, Terra imagined if the Interim hadn''t enforced that law, the universe would have been rife with inter-stellar slavery and sapient trafficking. Those issues still existed on individual worlds, but in open space, only those who had been mind-washed, mind-controlled, or broken-willed could be traded. The Interim was too impersonal to differentiate between personal choice and coercion. However, anyone with the will to ask for freedom within its influence would be set free, one way or another. With that in mind, Terra did something extremely foolish. She reached her consciousness out of herself, attempting to call to the Interim. ''I will always want to be free. Do you hear me? I will never let someone chain or cage me. I will never willingly go back to my homeworld.'' She hadn''t really expected the Interim to react to her. She was just one tiny mortal in its entire vastness after all, champion or no. And she had never felt more than the lightest tingle of its influence when she travelled through space before. As soon as her mental call had left her mind though, she felt threads of influence thick as rope reaching out to her. The Interim''s influence was like nothing Terra had felt before. If Ajax''s influence had been a snake, what she felt now was a blazing star. She could feel Sly reaching out to her, but whatever he tried to do or say was pushed back like a leaf in a torrent. There were no words. No windows. No interface as she would have described it. There was only an intense feeling of offering. She had no way to quantify what the offer was, except that she knew down to her bones that it was an assurance of the freedom she had asked for. She should have taken the time to think about what she was doing. To consider that entering into a contract with the Interim when she had no idea what the terms were or the entirety of what was being offered was foolish. She didn''t. ''Yes.'' She answered. Until that moment, the worst pain Terra had ever experienced had been when her father''s system was pulled from her mind and the days that followed. That paled in comparison to the flash of agony that blazed through Terra for the short time it took the pain to knock her out.
[Do you have any idea what you have done?] Terra was not awake. She was floating in some dark, shapeless place, blocking out the pain. Despite the place clearly not being physical or real, Sly still manifested in the shape of a bristling cat to glare with his electric green eyes. He didn''t have anybody to glare at since Terra was not real in this place, she was just sort of... all around. So that was where he glared, turning his head slowly to cover every angle with his judgement. "Umm... no." Terra admitted. She did not take shape herself. She was subconsciously afraid if she gave herself a form in this place, the pain she had run away from would find her again. "I... entered some kind of contract with the Interim, I think?" Sly''s tail was switching back and forth behind him with agitation. [How many times have you heard of someone making a contract with the Interim?] "Lots? That''s what all the objectives are, aren''t they? Contracts with champions to earn potential." [Those are made with the system seeds. My kind. Not yours.] "Well how many then?" Terra asked, assured enough that her pain wouldn''t find her again in this place to start feeling defensive. [You''ve never heard of it, because it isn''t supposed to happen. If you didn''t have your reality sense, you wouldn''t have been able to do it at all.] Terra couldn''t help making a huffing noise of shock that ruffled Sly''s fur from all sides. "Are you telling me I shaped the Interim''s influence? I don''t think I can Hack the whole damn universe, Sly." [Of course not. What I am saying is a mortal mind isn''t capable of communicating directly with the Interim without that talent, in the same way a child can''t interact with a world system.] "Oh." Terra whispered as realization hit her. "You''re saying what I did would have scrambled my brains." [Worse than that.] He assured her while the fur along his spine finally started to lay down. [You''ll still be in a lot of pain for the foreseeable future... but there won''t be lasting harm. Obviously, you can''t tell anyone about this.] "So what did I agree to?" Terra asked. She should have been more worried about what her side of this bargain was going to be, but she couldn''t bring herself to care. The promise given had been for freedom, so whatever it was couldn''t tie her down somewhere she didn''t want to stay. She felt certain of that. [I don''t know.] Sly answered her sullenly. [A pact with the Interim is private between you and it. Unless you choose to share the details with someone, only you will know.] "Even though you can just read my mind?" [I can''t see everything inside of you. There are places even a system cannot reach. Unless that system is the ultimate power in the whole universe that you invited into those deep places to make whatever changes it felt like.] "I get it, I messed up." Terra finally let herself take on a physical form, appearing as she normally liked to. She looked around the shapeless void they were in. They didn''t even stand on anything, they were just floating. "Where are we?" [Your subconscious. I woke you here to yell at you.] Sly explained, taking the chance to glare directly at her. He then asked her: [Do you know what happens to me if you die?] The thought had never occurred to Terra, but she was pretty sure the subject had been covered in her lessons once. She closed the eyes of her imagined body and tried to remember way back to her system propagation lessons from her childhood. The subject had never come back up in her studies after her screening, which she knew now must have been her father''s influence. "I... think we weren''t sure? I''m guessing you''d just find another champion?" [I''d cease to exist.] "Oh. Oh! Oh no..." Terra understood then that she hadn''t just risked herself with what she had done. She had risked him. "Sly, I-" [Don''t bother.] Sly cut her off. He turned and began to walk away from her through the void. [It''s time for you to wake. Your friend is worried.] "What friend?" Terra asked, but she got no answer. Instead, the darkness closed in on her until the body she had imagined for herself faded away again and the pain returned.
"Terran? Terran! What happened?!" The female voice calling out to Terra was not one she immediately recognized. She swam back to consciousness slowly with a lot of groaning in pain. She put her hand to her skull which felt like it was trying to split into a million different pieces. "Should I get Lauria? She''s the doctor. I''ll go get Lauria!" The female voice from down on the floor continued fretting through Terra''s unresponsiveness. "No, wait. It''s... just a migraine." Terra said, deciding she would have to lie. She still wasn''t very good at that even after years of doing so out of necessity. She forced her eyes open to look down at who had come into her cabin. The young woman was near her in age with light skin and curly red hair. An anxious smile and rich brown eyes graced a chubby face that pulled at Terra''s memories. Searching her memories for this woman was like having a word on the tip of her tongue. She was certain she knew her and that when she remembered from where it would feel like it should have been obvious, but she just couldn''t place her. "I''m sorry, who are you?" She gave in to asking, rather than continue thinking in circles while her head was pulsing painfully with each heartbeat. The woman''s smile widened even as her eyebrows knit together further than they had been before. "Cassiopeia Dromedan. We met when we were children." The girl Terra had drawn as a princess with herself. The one who she had never seen again after her eighth birthday. "Oh, stars!" Terra cursed, hurrying down from her bunk in order to meet the girl she had once wanted to befriend properly. Without their parents staring over their shoulders dictating how they should interact. She reached her hand out and put on her best open smile, the kind she had used with clients and friends, not the carefully tempered thing she''d used at social functions. "It''s good to meet you again. I go by Terra now." Cassiopeia''s concern finally started to ease, though she didn''t take Terra''s hand immediately. "So that isn''t just a disguise? I thought it might not be, because of the drawing you made me. I didn''t get a good look at it, but that was supposed to be us, right?" "Yeah." Instead of taking Terra''s hand at the confirmation, the redhead wrapped her in a tight hug. "I knew it! I''m so glad Captain found you!" "I''m pretty sure I found her." Terra wheezed. Her arms were trapped within Cassiopeia''s vice-like hug, but she managed to tap the fingers of one hand against the shorter woman''s side. "Well, I''m glad either way!" Cassiopeia said before releasing Terra. She only stepped back about half a step. "You always looked so miserable when we were children. I worried about you a lot after my family stopped getting invitations to your planet." The way she said it made Terra feel guilty that she had almost never thought about any of the Dromedan family after they left her life. "Well, I''m fine now. What are you doing here?" "Captain and Jenkins sent me to show you around and introduce you to the others." Cassiopeia explained. "No, I mean, what are you doing on this ship?" "Oh! I''m travelling with this group in search of a system seed. I want to be a champion. Is it true that you already have one?" Before Terra could answer, spider-silk thin lines of influence peeled away from the crystal wiring of the walls in all directions and converged around Terra''s shoulders. There the lines wove themselves into the feline form of Sly. When the framework was in place, his full physical manifestation resolved itself. The cat familiar proceeded to walk himself around Terra''s neck, putting on a show of his graceful body and sleek, silky fur. He circled twice before settling down languidly. While Terra was tempted to push him off for his dramatics, Cassiopeia''s hands had shot up to cover her mouth while her eyes went wide and starry. "Oooh! It''s so cute!" She crooned, stretching up on her toes and leaning in to get an even better look at him. "Does it have a name?" [I''m not cute.] Sly grumbled. "His name is Sly." Terra said, thinking it sounded much more sinister and immature compared to "the Chariot". [Or immature.] "Hi, Sly! I''m Cassie. Can I pet you?" Sly lifted his nose and turned his head away from her. "I''ll take that as a no." Cassie said wistfully as she leaned back. The smile had never once left her face. Terra remembered that had been what she''d liked about her as a kid. That the girl was always smiling no matter what. After ensuring Terra didn''t have anything she needed to do first, Cassie took her around, showing her the ship in detail. Everything was where Jenkins had said it would be, but actually navigating through the halls and lifts was much more helpful for solidifying the layout into Terra''s mind. Along the way, they occasionally ran into another member of the crew. The first person they encountered was someone Terra had already heard mention of multiple times and the only one they sought out. Lauria Silver was the ship doctor and self-assigned cook to whom they''d gone for some medicine for Terra''s splitting headache. She was an elf with a long braid of hair that started black at her roots and faded out to white at the tips. Her figure was plump for an elf with curvy proportions. She was one of the other champions, her familiar taking the form of an arm-brace device not unlike the kind of personalized taps utilized on certain planets. After they parted ways from her, Cassie told Terra that Lauria had a brother who''d come along to protect her, even though he was just an ordinary person like herself but without any interest in getting a system seed. He mostly worked on ship maintenance. The second person they encountered had been an incredibly tall man from a race Terra had never heard of called Breminth. According to Cassie, the two and a half meter tall man with golden, leathery skin and no hair was apparently short for his kind. He''d introduced himself as Varse fer Karse, which turned out to mean Varse, son of Karse. The hand he''d taken hers in had borne three extremely long fingers and a thumb, each with three joints instead of two. When she had looked down, she had realized his feet were configured in the same way, but appeared more talon like. He''d been a friendly, but terribly shy man. Also a champion, his familiar came in the form of a vaguely humanoid robot the size of a small child that he called Dinky. The last person they passed on Terra''s little tour had not stopped to speak with them. He was the only mortal person that Terra had been able to sense within the ship before meeting him as he had two cybernetic prosthetics. His left hand and most of his left leg from the knee down had been replaced, though whether from choice or necessity she could not tell. The force of the influence flowing through those devices told Terra that he was someone much more powerful than herself. Someone she should not make an enemy of, even if the one look he had give them had been full of disdainful superiority. His skin had been tattooed more densely than any client Terra had ever worked on, but the ink had glowed like the lines on the walls or Sly''s eyes. "That was Devon Solkin. He''s Fourth Order, and only with us until his familiar finds a world it is happy with. It lives in his cybernetics and tattoos most of the time." The last detail wasn''t really necessary, but Cassie had proven to be obsessed with all system seeds. She had gushed in particular about how amazing it was that Captain Surith''s familiar had merged itself with her ship. "It''s almost like it rooted a ship instead of a world!" [She''s not entirely wrong, though a ship isn''t big enough to actually take root in. The Chariot will never metamorphize within these walls.] Besides Lauria''s brother, there was only one person Terra hadn''t yet met at least in passing. Cassie had spoken about her and her familiar on the way back to Terra''s room, but by that point Terra''s head was pounding again and she couldn''t concentrate. She figured there''d be plenty of time to meet and get to know everyone better later. For now, all she wanted was to take another dose of her pain medication and sleep. Once Cassie finally stopped chattering and left her in her room, that was exactly what Terra did. Chapter 07: The Early Days Life aboard The Chariot was new and exciting for Terra, despite the fact that most of what she did from day to day was grunt work. Her aching head lasted a little over two weeks while she got used to her role among the crew. She wound up splitting most of her duties between maintenance shifts with the reclusive elf brother, Thimel, and housekeeping work with Cassie and Ezra. Ezra had been the last of the crew that Terra had met. She was a nervous quiloc girl, a race with rounded, rabbit like faces and thick follicles that stood on end with sharpened points whenever they felt threatened. Ezra had shaved any part of her body that was frequently under her clothing to avoid ruining outfits constantly. Her black, retractable claws were always chewed up to the quick. She wasn''t the sort of person Terra would have imagined as a champion, but she had a familiar that followed her everywhere, shape-shifting to whatever forms would best support Ezra''s needs at the time. Sly was contemptuous of Ezra''s familiar. He claimed using potential in that way was a waste. As if the system seed was serving Ezra instead of the other way around. Terra thought it was sweet, just like the small young woman herself. Whenever they finished their work, Cassie would invariably invite Terra and Ezra to eat with her or hang out with her. She was always cheery and eager to spend time with others. While Terra enjoyed the company, she was well aware that Cassie was taking her under her wing the same way she had taken the nervous Ezra under the other. She had no doubt Cassie would have included the shy Varse in her mother-henning just as often if the massive man wasn''t impossible to drag along. He only had to stand in place to avoid being pulled in the extrovert''s wake. Even given that, the four of them ate more meals together than apart. So it came as no surprise to Terra that Cassie had been as much behind her winding up on the Chariot as the Captain had been. Cassie had heard about Terra running away on the night of her engagement- it had been prime gossip among the noble families throughout their galaxy- and had kept her in mind after that. Once she had signed up with Surith, she''d made the request that they stop on B15-Terra if they were ever passing near it. Cassie had tried to get subtle messages out to lure Terra in, but Terra''s father had caught onto them instead, prompting him to increase the bounty before his heir could escape the planet. "It''s funny... if he hadn''t raised the bounty I don''t think I would have left. I was happy with the life I had carved out for myself in the low city." Terra admitted. Cassie gave Terra a concerned look over the top of her noodles. "What changed?" She asked, her omnipresent smile quavering dangerously low. "It''s not your fault. One of my friends wasn''t as much of a friend as I had thought he was, you know?" "Shameful." Varse commiserated, patting one of Terra''s shoulders with a hefty hand. He pulled it back sharply at the jerk of her shoulder. He rarely remembered his own strength, something he needed to work on as a Second Order being since if his Brains didn''t catch up to his Brawn he would start doing a lot of damage. For now, he was mostly just clumsy due to his mind struggling to keep up with the force and nimbleness of his body. Terra had never seen someone with unbalanced stats before she''d met him. Disparity of greater than 5 points in stats created an imbalance in one''s body, with stats lagging by 10 or more points causing danger to the self and those around them. If someone significantly lacked Brains compared to their other stats they''d end up clumsy and eventually dangerously destructive. Brawn lagging behind would cause general weakness and eventually fainting from over exertion on an inadequate body. Inadequate Finesse would initially appear as clumsiness as well, though in the fine-motor skills instead of the gross-motor skills, but would eventually cause an inability to coordinate any physical actions properly between body and mind. A deficiency in Heart was not as immediately dangerous, but led to psychopathic behavior as mental and physical capabilities exceeded the ability to sympathize with others in more abstract ways. Unlike the other stats, Capacity would not impede a champion''s abilities if it lagged, but their familiar would stagnate and be incapable of supporting any further growth, creating a hard cap not unlike the mortal cap on all other stats. This was one of the lessons Terra was learning from Sly whenever she wasn''t working. He had taken it upon himself to instruct her in the intricacies of improving herself theoretically and would set her tasks intended to improve her stats. She wasn''t able to see how things were progressing right away since Sly refused to screen her again until she had healed from making her deal with the Interim. The pain going away was not enough, apparently. By the time Sly finally agreed to screen her again, she was not displeased with the results of her work over the three previous weeks.
Terran Starmer XI ?
Human - 24 - Female - Second Order Stats Brains: 6 Brawn: 7 Finesse: 8 Heart: 6 Capacity: 11 Trained Skills ??? Athletics [ - ] ??? Drawing [ - ] ??? Disguise [ - ] ??? Hacking [ - ] ??? Performance [ - ] ??? Persuasion [ - ] ??? Streetwise [ - ] ??? Cooking [ - ] ??? Deceit [ - ] ??? Maintenance [ - ] Skill Gifts -none- Talents Reality Sense [Enhanced - Elusive] Shifting [Unenhanced]
Besides her exercises having increased her Brains by 1, all her practice back on her homeworld, as well as her work since had pushed her Capacity past mortal limits, pushing her into the Second Order. Likewise, her Hacking skill had improved a star rank and she had gained the basic Maintenance skill from all the work she''d been doing with Thimel. Most surprising of all though was her first talent enhancement. [That shouldn''t be there.] Sly said, sounding both defensive and annoyed, rather than happy for her. ''What do you mean? It''s a talent enhancement. You had to give it to me, didn''t you?'' Terra had asked while mentally prompting him to pull up the full information on the enhancement. Nothing appeared. [I didn''t. This must be part of your deal with the Interim. That''s not fair. I was supposed to give you your first enhancement.] Sly pouted. ''I''m sorry, Sly, but can''t you please tell me what it does?'' Terra prompted. She still couldn''t shape her potential into even so small an exertion of influence to make a simple illusion like the windows he showed her. [Oh. Sure. Here you go.] Sly said sarcastically while a screen full of question marks appeared in front of her assessment. ''Oh, come on, Sly! I said I was sorry.'' [Sure you are. But even if you were, this is the best I can give you, remember? Whatever your super special "Elusive" reality sense enhancement is, I''ve got no clue.] Terra sighed over his bitter tantrum, but guessed he was probably telling the truth. Not knowing galled him too much for him to pretend at ignorance out of spite. At least on something like this. ''Alright. Should I scratch your ears, Mr.Grumpy-Cat?'' [I''m not a grumpy cat.] Sly sniffed. Then he had slowly tilted his head towards her, perking his ears up. [Well? Get to it.] She had given him a good set of ear scritches after that and let her mind feel out what the enhancement might be. It was an inherent part of her talent now, so on some level, she would instinctively know how to use it, but that kind of talent-discovery wasn''t easy to make blind. Most of the time, one only had to get the sense of what their talent''s nature was, then they could look up exactly what that kind of talent could do and what sort of enhancements it could get.Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author''s preferred platform and support their work! Trying that search on "reality sense" hadn''t turned up any results other than getting Sly to lecture her that she needed to keep it a secret. Again. For the time being, that meant she could not get a firm grasp on what Elusive did. She felt certain it was part of what would prevent her from losing her freedom again, but she couldn''t sort out anything more than that, yet. The knowledge would just have to come in time.
The course the ship was following was not one that gave most of the crew anything to do beyond upkeep and training. For the first month, the ship did little more than travel from one uninhabited solar system to the next, stopping to let Devin Solkin and his system seed assess the planets. The man was haughty and impatient with the rest of them. He kept himself apart from all the crew, coming out of his VIP cabin only when he had to or when he was investigating planets. Terra hadn''t been sure why Surith let him dictate where they went between delivery contracts until she found out it was his fortune that was paying for all their fuel and supplies. He had gathered significant wealth as he had gathered power on his way to becoming a Fourth Order being. He would use most of that fortune in the future to hire tradesmen to his planet, but for now he spent a portion of it to compensate Surith and her crew putting off more productive objectives in favor of helping him. That wasn''t to say the younger champions weren''t working on any objectives though. The Interim always had work to give, even if the meaning of that work made little sense to the champions that received it. The first objective Sly had presented to Terra had been one of those. "What is the point of this, exactly?" Terra asked him as she looked over the little Objective window he had generated for her.
New Objective! ?
¡ö Draw 15 pictures of Sly being cute. ¡ö Place drawings into separate delivery crates.
[The point of an objective is to create changes on a planetary level for the Interim, which then pays forward the potential it could have spent to enact that change itself. Usually that would involve changing something about the course of development on a planet, but in this case...] Sly had trailed off sounding annoyed. "It just wants to spread joy?" Terra asked, unable to think of anything else. She gestured for him to roll a little more so that his paws were curled up closer to his chest and his fluffy belly stuck out more. [Yes.] Sly agreed sourly as he turned. [The exact method is something I have to feel out for you, since the Interim doesn''t get this specific. What it asked of us was closer to "remove emotional rot." This was the task my judgement said would accomplish that best.] Terra bit the inside of her lip to keep from smiling at his angst over being made to bring happiness to the universe with his adorable form. "You could have chosen to be a watch instead." She teased while she lined in an expression completely out of her imagination. The death glare she was getting would have hardly been comforting to someone experiencing emotional rot. Except perhaps for her, who was having a very hard time not laughing in his adorably furious, furry face. Most of the time, the objectives made a little more sense than that. Such as "Rescue the girl on B15-Terra" which had apparently been one of Surith''s objectives the Chariot had given her after Cassie had told them about Terra. During their travels, many of the objectives the First and Second Order champions got boiled down to "grow stronger". This involved anything from exercising on the weight machines in the rec hall, to mini-tournaments of tactical war games, to sitting in a circle and sharing their dreams and feelings. Terra had never gone to any kind of school, but she liked to imagine that her early days aboard the Chariot were something like the boarding schools she had read about in her stories. Between making friends, learning lessons, getting assignments, and working on chores, she felt contented for the time being with not thinking about where she was going or what she was working towards. Because if she started to think about that, about what Solkin was doing and that it was her own eventual fate, she''d start to panic. She didn''t want to rule over a planet as a system administrator. She never had. Spreading tiny bits of kitten-shaped joy down with supply crates was fun. Molding the structure and future of an entire civilization was terrifying. She knew that Sly must be aware of her feelings and thoughts on the matter since he could see into her mind, but he never said anything to her about her fears, even when he was at his most snarky. She supposed he wouldn''t. They both had a lot of growing to do before they looked at planets as something other than stages for completing objectives to gain power. He probably thought she''d get over it before it mattered. Terra didn''t think she would.
"Can we go down with the shipment today? Please?" Cassie begged Surith and Jenkins as they loaded up one of the escape pods with the three small crates marked for delivery to X9-Jorbal. The plump girl had wrangled Terra into being her accomplice for this endeavor by virtue of grabbing her arm and dragging her along. Terra was just as eager for the chance to get off the ship though. She hadn''t stepped foot on a planet in the nearly six weeks since she had joined Surith''s crew. Visiting a system-world was more important for Cassie, whose goal of gaining a system seed couldn''t be accomplished on uninhabited planets or in space, but Terra was getting stir-crazy. She squeezed her arm tighter around Cassie''s and added: "We can look for local deals while you guys get the basic supplies." Surith raised a brow at her. "Or the other way around." She quickly corrected. "The point of taking a pod down is to save on fuel." Jenkins said. "If we start taking you all down in the pods, that''s going to add up fast." Terra looked around with exaggerated care, then shrugged. "I don''t see anyone else asking. Cassie and I are small. No extra trips necessary!" "That''s beca-" "Oh, let them come along." Surith said, slapping a hand down on her friend''s shoulder which caused him to stagger and would probably leave a big hand shaped red spot on his delicate skin. "We haven''t landed on a planet since picking Starmer up and Dromedan is still looking for her seed." Jenkins narrowed his eyes at his captain. "You just want to bring another champion down with us to sew chaos." Surith''s only answer to that was a booming laugh as she pushed the younger women into the pod. X9-Jorbal was an extremely verdant planet, right down to its capital city. Consisting of a series of massive trees with interlocking branches, carved and grown with pockets that were turned into buildings, High Trukaron was a city straight out of a fairytale. The living city trees were laced through with the world-system''s influence, glowing visibly through the veins of leaves and powering the city nestled on and within their bark. While large ships were forced to land in the main port that ringed around the outskirts of the city, the trees were massive enough that pods could land in a smaller port near the main trading hubs. There were still screenings at the small port- mostly to ensure the people who left at the end of their business were the same people that had come in at the start- but by now it was a simple matter for Terra to bend her results to hide anything too unusual about herself. The screening was much more important for Cassie. The redhead held her breath and Terra''s arm tightly with excitement, hoping this time her stats would impress a system enough to give her a seed. She had let Sly screen her to give his opinion on her.
Cassiopeia Dromedan ?
Human - 25 - Female - First Order Stats Brains: 7 Brawn: 6 Finesse: 7 Heart: 9 Capacity: 8 Trained Skills ??? Persuasion [ - ] ??? Dancing [ - ] ??? Mathematics [ - ] ??? Chemistry [ - ] ??? Deductive Reasoning [ - ] ??? Sewing [ - ] Skill Gifts -none- Talents Aquatic Affinity [Unenhanced]
Sly hadn''t been impressed, but then again, nothing seemed to impress him except himself. He had said her stats were more than adequate for a seed, but that her talent was unlikely to be of much interest on its own. Aquatic Affinity meant that Cassie could swim quickly and breathe water as long as her innate potential could hold out. There were well known enhancements that could make it a much more useful talent, but it was not a promising starting point from the perspective of a system. His assessment seemed to be the same as X9-Jorbal''s. No seed appeared as the smiling woman''s screening concluded. She was waved on without comment. Cassie''s perpetual smile didn''t leave her face. "It was worth a shot." She said with forced cheeriness. Terra squeezed her friend''s arm in hers. "What would a tree system know about water anyways? We need to find you a nice beach world-system. Maybe put you in a shell-bra." That earned Terra a laugh and a shove. It didn''t take long for them to acquire the basic supplies they were after. When Terra contacted the captain to let her know they were back at the pod, Surith encouraged them to sneak off and have some fun. "I''ll distract Jenkins." "You know I can hear you." Jenkins'' voice said softly in the background. "He won''t realize a thing." Terra and Cassie could hear the bite of the captain''s smile in her voice. "We''ll make the most of it." Terra assured with a bright smile of her own. When she got off the pod''s communicator, Cassie was giving her a knowing look. "What?" Terra asked suspiciously. "Yes, Captain. Anything for you, Captain." Cassie cooed while miming cuddling a communicator to her face. Terra scowled. "So you''re saying you don''t want to go explore the city?" "No, no. We wouldn''t want to disappoint the captain. Can''t sew chaos on the pod now, can you?" Terra didn''t deign that with a response. Chapter 08: Corrupted Seed It didn''t take Cassie and Terra long to figure out just the sort of exciting place they could go in the hopes of seeing a little bit of chaos. High Trukaron had its share of a downtown, though it was known here as "Trukaron Underground", largely because that was literally where the downtown was located. Vertical trains ran through the core of the living tree city down into thin, hanging roots that had penetrated a massive cavern. The hanging roots had translucent skin that allowed the train cars to look out over the cavern as they descended. The Underground was like a dark reflection of the city above. The roots descended to stations on the cavern floor around an underground river that had carved the space over eons. Rising up all around those stations were massive, bioluminescent mushrooms that served as host to the buildings and life of the downtown much as the trees had done for the uptown. The river itself was dotted with houseboats and glass gondolas. As they descended into the underground part of the city, Terra felt the tickle of a system over her mind without actually being touched. As if a system had started to reach out for her and been stopped. She frowned slightly and glanced from the corner of her eye at Sly to see if he had sensed it as well. Her familiar was squinting into the air, the fur along his spine standing slightly on end. He caught her looking at him though and turned to roughly lick down the unease in his fur. Well, if he wasn''t going to say anything about it on his own, she wasn''t going to bother asking. She knew by now that Sly wasn''t shy about saying what he wanted to say and was nearly impossible to cajole into giving away anything he didn''t want to. Cassie clearly hadn''t felt anything. She was watching the view as they travelled, pointing out interesting spots that they might want to go see. "Is that an amusement park? Who''d have thought they''d have one of those down here!" "The whole city is unreal, so... why not?" Terra said, wondering about the system of this world that had dedicated so much potential into influencing nature in such an unnatural and whimsical direction. Had it been the system''s choice, or had its champion been the one that wanted to live in a fairy tale land? ''Do you have any insight on the matter?'' She asked Sly in her thoughts, aware he had probably been following her inner dialogue. [It was the champion, obviously. Why would a system care about that sort of thing?] ''So you don''t want a city of skyscraper cat towers and catnip gardens?'' She teased. [No.] Sly said, his synthesized voice devoid of any inflection, even though his eyes were narrowed to thin slits. ''And if I wanted to build everything in caves where we''d never see sunlight?'' Terra pressed. Rather than answer her, Sly went over to Cassie and rubbed against her leg. Terra didn''t hear him say anything, but she felt him expend a bit of potential in order to reach out to the other woman''s mind. Cassie laughed and nudged him away carefully with her foot. "No, I want a nicer seed than you. You two need to stop bickering all the time." "Where would the fun in that be?" Terra asked while Sly sniffed dramatically and leapt onto her shoulders. He nipped the back of her ear as the train car finally began to slow. They got directions to the amusement park at the station window. Neither was sure how long the Captain was going to let them wander, so Terra was eager to take her first real friend to the place she had showed interest in first thing. The fastest way to reach the park was to take the river gondolas. It cost twenty credits to get a trip on one of the gondolas which was manned by a sleepy looking man who handled the exchange from Cassie with a smile and polite nod. He remained completely professional throughout the ride, despite the way his eyes lingering on Cassie screamed his attraction. Terra watched her friend obliviously missing it with a stifled smile. Only after they hopped off at the amusement park''s boardwalk entrance, did she lean in towards Cass and whisper: "You''ve got an admirer." A bright blush lifted in Cassie''s cheeks, matching her skin to her hair as she looked back at the boatman who was still watching them. When their eyes met, Cassie tucked a strand of hair back behind her ear and ducked her head. "Why didn''t you say something before we got off the boat?" Cassie hissed at Terra. "Revenge." Terra said simply, waving the man off with a bright smile. She had a good feeling he''d be hanging around this dock again when they came back. There was a substantial line at the entrance gate to the park proper on the end of the boardwalk. Terra didn''t expect a screening to enter a park, but kept herself ready for one when they paid, just in case. The exchange of credits was uneventful and without a screening as she had expected. When she passed under the arch though, she felt that same restrained brush of influence against the edge of her being as she had felt when they first emerged into the cavern. This time, the sensation was much stronger, and gave her the distinct impression that the force behind it was frustrated at not being able to touch her. On her shoulders, Sly had gone very tense. ''Okay, what is going on down here, Sly?'' Terra asked him, impatient with the inexplicable brushes against her conscious. [Something... unusual.] Sly explained reluctantly. [There used to be a subsystem for this amusement park. Maybe for the whole underground.] ''What do you mean there "used to be" one? I thought subsystems were as permanent as the parent system?'' In all honesty, Terra didn''t know much about subsystems. Her father and his father, and all their fathers before them, hadn''t believed in using subsystems on B15-Terra. A subsystem was a special type of system seed that was bonded to the parent system, rather than to a person, in order to create a self-sufficient and less abstracted system interface in a specific location, typically for a specific reason. The most common type Terra had learned about were academic institutions and major VR centers. [It is... but this one seems to have been corrupted and secured.] Sly explained. A chill crawled down Terra''s spine at that. Corruption was another matter she didn''t know a lot about, except that it was bad. ''What exactly happens when a seed or system is corrupted?'' She asked her familiar while Cassie was tugging them into line for a spinning saucer ride.Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. [They become a conduit that attempts to spread the corruption. A virus.] There was a hiss of disdain in Sly''s voice. [The corruption itself is a sort of power sink. A hunger for potential for potential''s sake. It can be spread to us like a disease from another source of corruption, or develop on its own when too much potential is stored without being expended in influence.] ''Is hoarding potential actually harmful though?'' Terra asked, never having heard of such a thing as too much potential. ''Doesn''t every seed hoard potential in order to seed a planet?'' [There''s a difference between storing potential with an intention for future use and gathering it for the sake of keeping it. Potential is shaped by will to create influence, so when the will is for it to remain potential... it becomes unstable and unpredictable. Potential isn''t meant to remain as potential forever. Even gathering it without a specific intent is fine since its presence should eventually induce a being that holds it to express it in some way, typically as a talent.] ''Like when my mind converted the potential your parent system left within me into my reality sense? I probably used it unconsciously to expel some of that potential, which would explain why I had the Hacking skill already.'' Terra mused, a few pieces of things he had told her before finally clicking together. [Exactly.] Sly agreed. He sunk his claws gently into her shoulder over and over, kneading nervously while they shuffled slowly through the ride''s line. [If you had instead told that potential to remain, it would have burned you up. A system cannot burn out from potential though. So the energy that''s had its nature warped attempts to be both potential and a potential gathering influence at the same time. The exact way that manifests is different in every case, but it''s never good. The ultimate fate of an unchecked virus is to become a blackhole.] ''You said this one is secured? Does that mean its been neutralized?'' [No, it has merely been contained by its parent system. Locked down so that it cannot touch the minds of mortal beings. Without the ability to connect to mortal beings, it cannot gather new potential, which has stopped it from growing stronger or spreading its corruption.] ''That sounds like a temporary solution.'' Terra thought. [It is.] Sly agreed. [The proper solution is to force the virus to expend all its potential and then destroy it. Doing that is much easier said than done though.] Cassie gently shook Terra''s shoulder, ripping her attention back to her friend. "Are you alright? You''ve been frowning and staring off into space for a while now." Cassie said, sounding concerned. "Yeah, I''m just talking with Sly about something. Don''t worry about it." Terra reassured her friend, forcing a smile onto her face. At the same time, she asked Sly silently: ''Is it safe for us to be here?'' [It should be fine. Unless you intend to try breaking the world-system''s security measures.] ''Absolutely not.'' Terra assured him, really relaxing then and resolving herself to put it out of her mind and just enjoy her time on the planet. It didn''t have anything to do with her after all. After the spinning saucers, they rode a roller coaster, then a Ferris wheel. While high in the wheel- the first ride Sly had chosen to ride with them, rather than waiting for them at the exit- Cassie pointed to a haunted house and expressed an interest in making it their last stop since they were both expecting a radio call from their Captain anytime now. Sly seemed uneasy about the haunted house when they approached it. Terra laughed at him and asked: "Are you a scaredy cat now? [No. I''ll just wait by the exit. Do not touch any influence in there.] He warned her. That made Terra sober up. ''Is the virus in there?'' Sly didn''t answer her right away, he just stared at the building as they made their way through the slow drifting line. By the time he did answer her, she had given up expecting an answer. [The virus''s reach diffuses the whole park, but it feels as if this is where it was seeded specifically.] Terra supposed that made sense. Entertainment districts were the most common domain of subsystems according to the examples she knew of. A haunted house that could personally interact with and engage guests would have been wildly profitable to the city as a whole. ''Causing fear would be an easy way for the workers to generate potential for the subsystem, wouldn''t it?'' She asked. [Exactly.] Sly agreed. ''Well I won''t do anything but scream. Promise.'' She reassured him. [Good.] When they reached the front of the line, Sly hopped down from her shoulders and hurried off towards the door laughing guests and a couple sobbing children were coming back out of. "Are you ready to suffer?" Terra asked Cassie with an exaggerated, haunting tone. Cassie giggled nervously as the line-keeper waved them in. The effects within the haunted house weren''t anything special. Most of them were done practically, with lots of flashing lights, smoke machines, and actors done up in grotesque costumes popping out of shadows or chasing after them. Cassie kept shrieking and laughing every time, but Terra found it mostly cheesy. Had the subsystem been functional, there would have been augmented reality aspects to the experience, and she couldn''t help noticing each place where they had been intended and were now shoddily filled in with out of place or overused props. One such place was a large room set up to look like a mad scientist''s lab. There were flickering, "smashed" computer screens and steaming beakers, but the big empty spaces would have been perfectly suited to host AR monstrosities that were depicted in the crazy chalk diagrams on the skewed blackboards. As it was, the space felt underused and empty. Terra was looking around the space and considering if a bouncy house in the shape of a monster in the empty place might have been a good break for kids or if it would have looked too goofy, when she heard Cassie open a fake "secret" panel with an "oooh" of appreciation. She turned to see what her friend had found and saw Cassie staring into a monitor that didn''t have a broken screen. A tap. "Cassie, wait!" Terra called to her friend as she felt the woman reach out to the tap with her influence. The moment Cassie interacted with the tap, Terra felt that restrained influence that had been trying to reach her since she had arrived take root in her friend. "Oh..." Cassie said softly, wincing and putting her hand to her head. "I don''t feel... Ugh..." ''Sly! What happens when a virus infects a person?'' Terra called frantically to her familiar with her mind. [What have you done?] ''What happens?!'' Terra didn''t have time to answer his questions as Cassie staggered into her side, shaking and breathing heavily. [They become a potential hoarding puppet of the virus until they burn out.] "Terra, what''s... happening?" Cassie gasped. If Terra hadn''t known it from Sly, she would have just thought the woman leaning against her was scared by the haunted house. How many times had this virus pulled this trick? Who would have known what to watch for in those leaving the attraction? ''How do I stop it?'' Terra asked, frantic for a way to help her friend. [Don''t try to be a hero, Terra. If it has gotten someone, it can''t do much damage to anyone but them. But if it got ahold of you I don''t know what would happen.] ''It has Cassie.'' Sly went quiet in Terra''s mind. Terra helped Cassie move far from the tap, unreasonably wanting to get her away from the source of corruption even if it was already inside of her friend. [I have an idea. Wait a moment...] Sly finally said, then went quiet again. "It''s alright Cassie. Just keep moving with me, alright?" Terra said to her friend while she waited for whatever it was Sly was doing. She felt helpless as her friend''s expression grew more confused and frantic. When a system reached out for Terra''s mind, she grabbed its influence with her will and was about to try draining it, before she realized it wasn''t the same touch she had felt earlier. It wasn''t the virus, but rather, the world-system of X9-Jorbal. What its influence was offering was a screen. She opened it.
New Objective! ?
¡ö Remove the Trukaron Underground virus
Chapter 09: A New Way In
New Objective! ?
¡ö Remove the Trukaron Underground virus
"How am I supposed to do that?!" Terra asked out loud. It was a sign of how far gone Cassie was that she didn''t even ask what Terra was talking about. [I have made a contract with the world-system. It will keep our secrets if we drain and destroy its virus. And it will not interfere with anything we have to do in the attempt.] Sly explained. ''Fine.'' Terra gathered her wits together by a force of will and found somewhere safe to gently lower Cassie into a sitting position. "Put your head between your knees. It''s going to be okay." She was relieved when Cassie did as she was told. She hadn''t been sure her friend would even hear her. Then again, if whatever this was had been that drastic and obvious, it surely would have been noticed and shut down by the world-system before, wouldn''t it? ''Sly, the world-system didn''t leave this access point on purpose, did it?'' Terra asked, wondering with a spark of suspicion if there was some way the parent system could have still been gaining potential from its subsystem by leaving it a tiny window of access to people from which it could feed on. [I do not know.] Sly answered her impatiently. [We''ll probably figure that out as you work. Remember how we explored Cassie''s channels?] That had been Sly''s most recent lesson for Terra on how her reality sense and Hacking skill worked. He had made a copy of Cassie''s channeling tree when he screened her, instead of just reading it. He had then projected the tree into Terra''s mind to explain to her what it was. Every living creature contained and generated potential. That core feature of life made up the trunk of a mortal being''s channeling tree. Simple, daily functions and energy needs expended miniscule amounts of potential but in a heavy myriad of ways. Those many small and twisting paths made up the root system of the channeling tree. The roots were able to divide potential out into an even spread, but could otherwise be easily overwhelmed with too much energy running through them. A build up of potential beyond what they roots could handle would either burn out the tree, or create an alternative escape in the form of a talent, which created a branch off of the trunk. Sly had explained to her as they looked together over his projected copy of Cassie''s tree how these channels were like the bed of a river. They could be changed with enough pressure while new, but would deepen over time and with use. A deeper channel was much harder to change, but would also become easier to use. A channel with enough depth could be given additional outlets in the form of enhancements. Terra had asked Sly why he didn''t show her her own tree to teach her all of this sooner, but he had said that was something she had to discover and explore for herself. ''I remember. What about it?'' Terra asked him now, still kneeling beside her friend and barely keeping her patience. [You know what her tree should look like, so you''ll know what has changed. I want you to look- don''t touch- for that change. That will be what is linking her to the virus. When you find it, you''re going to have to grab it with the will to drain it all.] ''Won''t that just corrupt me too?'' Terra asked him, thinking this sounded incredibly dangerous. ''I don''t really fancy becoming a living virus.'' [I don''t know.] Sly answered her calmly. [You could always leave Cassie there. We can drop the contract.] ''Absolutely not!'' Terra rebelled, furious that he could even make such a suggestion while sounding so relaxed and reasonable. She wished he had been nearby so she could read his body language. He gave much more away in his physical form than in his synthesized mental voice. [Then we don''t have much choice but to try, do we?] Sly asked, this time sounding resigned. ''Damn it.'' Terra thought, realizing what was going on. Sly knew he couldn''t stop her from trying to save her friend, so he was giving her the only plan that might work. ''You don''t think this will really work, do you? You just know I''m going to do something stupid either way?'' [She can be taught.] The rueful thought was almost warm in her mind. ''Okay. Can the world-system separate you from my mind? With that firewall or whatever?'' [Not without breaking our bond and forcing me into being a subsystem. I''d rather be corrupted.] ''Here goes nothing then.'' Terra sat down beside Cassie and closed her eyes. Apparently some day she should be able to see the channels of others without doing this- the same way she felt their influence without having to numb the rest of her body- but for now, she had to calm her mind and block out as many of her senses as possible to actually visualize what she could more vaguely feel. When she brought Cassie''s channeling tree into focus within her mind, she saw right away what had changed with her artistically trained eye. A tendril like a parasitic ivy had wrapped tightly around the trunk. In Terra''s mind, it took on a red, evil hue, ugly against Cassie''s pastel purples and pinks. She knew in reality channels had no colors. That was merely the way her mind filled in her impressions of them. Taking extreme care to not reach out to the red tendril, she followed it with her mind''s eye. As she did, she realized there was a sort of... coating around the red channel. Something it could not reach through, but which she had a feeling she could. Like a one-way mirror but for influence. That must have been the anti-virus measure the world-system had put in place. As she thought about that, the sheer coating took on the blueish tone the world-system''s windows had used. What the channel led back to was not a tree at all. The virus was instead something more like a cloud of vines. A tangled root system with no trunk and no branches. Terra almost reached back out to Sly with her mind, to ask if this was what all system channels looked like, but she stopped herself. She didn''t want to draw the thing''s attention towards her system. She could look closer at Sly on her own later. The cloud of evil vines had an odd feeling to it though. A sense of influence that was potent but directionless. Terra decided that feeling must be all the half-formed influence that was the corrupted, self-hoarding potential. She was not positive she could grab it like she had grabbed fully shaped influence back on her homeworld... but she thought she could. Despite thinking that it felt possible, she hesitated to do so. Did she really have more will power than a system? Even a minor and corrupted subsystem was still a being beyond mortal comprehension in many ways. After a moment of contemplation, Terra drew back from the virus and decided she needed to look somewhere else first. She needed to know exactly what tools she was working with, which meant looking inside herself. The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation. Sly had implied that she would be able to see her own tree, so she willed herself to do so. At first, she could find nothing. It was like trying to cross her eyes to make them see each other and her head began to ache in a similar manner from the strain. She tried to force it by sheer stubbornness, but that only made her head begin to ache worse. Gasping in pain, she lost her inner sight altogether and came back to her physical senses in a rush. Cassie had leaned into her shoulder and was trembling in what the people now standing around them asking if they were okay obviously thought was some kind of terror or shock. "We''ll be alright." Terra said to the concerned strangers. When they seemed like the would linger, she made a face mouthed "cramps" to the women in the group. They nodded in sisterly understanding and got their guy friends to leave the young women alone. Once they were alone again, Terra took a deep breath and focused herself on meditating back down. This time, when she tried to look at herself she didn''t so much attempt to look inward as she let herself relax and tried to feel her channels from within, rather than seeing them from without. She felt out the bounds of herself, and let the image begin to form up around her. When the walls of her channels started to fall into place around her, dark black and inky, with an opalescent sheen, Terra understood why Sly had told her this was something she would have to discover and explore for herself. He could not have shown her from without what she would only see from within. Despite being an internal view, she could still see the whole of her own channels at once. She did not bother to explore the tangle of her roots, but paid close attention to her trunk and branches. The trunk of her channel tree was scarred on the inside, rippled with shiny patches like burn scar tissue. At one point, there was an offshoot that was not her own, yet joined to hers. Its electric green color came not as a clue to who it belonged to, but from her understanding already that this was her bond to Sly. Without a moment''s hesitation, she willed her scarred trunk to seal shut across the opening, not dislodging it, but sealing it off. She hoped that would keep Sly safe, even if something happened to her when she made this attempt. An outflowing of influence on the other side of the seal she had just put in place told Terra that Sly was aware of what she had done and he wasn''t happy about it. She waited for a moment, but the wall of her trunk held against his attempt to batter his way back in, so she moved on. The first of her two branches was deep and steady. She knew instantly this was her shifting ability. It felt familiar and comfortable. She knew what it could do and how much she could push it without breaking herself. The second branch was older, ripped out of the heart of the worst of the scarring and with a similar scarring inside itself. Despite the age, it was thinner and the second branching off of it was like a budding twig, something she would have to grow into. That being her Elusive enhancement, she pressed into it, feeling over the delicate new walls and what their purpose was. It felt immature, as if some day it would grow into something far greater than it was now, but for now, it offered her independence. More specifically, it protected her from the influence of others. It made her reality sense resistant to the touch of other reality senses. ''Resistant to corruption too?'' She asked it hopefully, pushing more potential into the branch to strengthen it in anticipation of an answer. The answer was not something audible or even sensed. It was just something she knew of herself. Yes. She would be able to resist corruption better than others could have as well. It occurred to Terra that she was something odd. Her channeling tree was still much more like Cassie''s than the twisted mass of the virus''s channels, the capabilities of this talent made her function much more like a system internally. She wasn''t sure she liked that thought. With a newfound sense of confidence, Terra let her senses rise back up out of herself to see Cassie and the virus again. She found that place where the viral tendril was wrapped around her friend and was about to grab it to do as Sly had instructed her when something odd about it struck her. The tendril was connected to Cassie in the same way Sly was connected to Terra. In a moment of inspiration, Terra changed her plan. She did not reach out right away. Instead, she began to lay out a series of intentions in her mind, much as she had learned to do to manipulate the outcomes of a screening. She knew for certain if this idea was going to work, she would have to Hack these changes all at once when she seized the corrupted potential. First, she laid out her will that the potential come to her. Then she planned a new structure she wanted to use that potential to reshape the tangled vines of the virus into. Next, she formed the will to break off the virus''s connection to the world-system, which would merely be completing something the world-system had started itself, but never completely finished as she had suspected. Lastly, as she held those first three steps in consideration with a tiny thread of will running through them, she formed a promise of future power on the condition of purification and partnership. When her vision was a cohesive whole upon the palette of her will, she did not hesitate to reach out, grasp and enforce it upon the tendril she grabbed with her talent. The potential that came coursing in through the channels she had only just explored was nothing compared to what brushing against the Interim had felt like, and yet this sensation was not outside of herself, but within herself. It burned like acid running through her veins. She sucked in breaths of surprise, but did not let her determination falter. She could feel the desire of the corrupted potential eagerly chasing the promise of more power she had baited this trap with. She also felt when it realized the cost and started to rebel. It tried to turn back. Tried to pool itself within her instead of moving on where she intended it to go. ''No... you.. don''t.'' She snarled at it mentally, pushing hard for it to keep moving forward. ''You''re meant... to... be used.'' At the same time as the potential began to resist leaving her again, the virus began trying to connect to her. Its tendrils wrapped around her channels, trying to force an opening that would let it take back what she was pulling from it. Rather than resist letting it join to her, Terra made an opening. The moment the virus clamped on, she forced its confiscated potential back into itself fully infused with her will. She heard the virus shriek with the same searing sensation she''d been going through a few moments before. Now it was the one being reshaped by the will of another and it didn''t seem to like it much. It tried to withdraw from her, but she clamped the wall of her trunk down around its invading tendril, forcing it to remain open to her influence. The more of the corrupted potential she managed to purify through the prism of her willpower, the more easily the rest followed suit until the second half of her newformed influence was rushing out of her like a torrent of disinfectant through the virus. The vine-like subsystem was writhing with more than pain. It was shifting and changing. Terra''s influence finally began to peter out when there was nothing left to take from the corrupted subsystem. However, the last step was yet to come. For that, Terra first snapped the tiny tether still connecting the virus to the firewall of its parent system, then let her hold on the virus go as well. The moment she released it, it snapped away, recoiling like a rubber band towards the only connection it had left. One which Terra''s influence drew it towards. Rather than cutting off that connection as well, her influence strengthened it, forming it into a permanent bond once the last traces of corruption were gone from within the subsystem. With a deep gasp of air, Terra came back to herself again and turned to watch Cassie anxiously, to see if her attempt had worked. Cassie was no longer shaky or disoriented. Instead, she looked as if she were staring off into space. As she started to come back to herself, a shape shimmered into existence on her lap. The basketball sized creature in Cassie''s lap was like a living thorn bush with glowing red spots for eyes and two roses for ears, one pink and one purple. It had nubby little limbs made out of twisted clusters of more vines. And it looked completely confused. Terra slowly re-opened her bond to Sly, who immediately snapped into her thoughts: [What have you done?!] ''It''s alright. I purified it. And, hey, now Cassie has a system seed like she wanted.'' [You... what?] Terra felt a sizzling sensation in the air and the now familiar feeling of Sly expending his potential to reshape himself. He dropped out of the thin air into her lap to stare with intensity at the thing in Cassie''s lap. By that point, Cassie was putting a hand to her head and saying: "What... happened?" "You got your system seed, remember? From that tap in the secret lab." Terra said, not wanting to fill her friend in on all the details if she didn''t remember them for herself. The vine creature turned and looked at Terra with two marbles of glowing red light. Despite having a face made entirely out of vines, it managed to look both confused and nervous. Cassie was too busy looking at it in awe to realize her seed seemed to be afraid of her friend. "I did? Yeah I... I guess I did!" Terra got back to her feet and offered a hand to her friend. "Come on, the captain is going to be looking for us sooner or later. She can''t wait around expecting us to cause chaos forever. Let''s go share your good news." "Oh, yes, let''s!" Cassie agreed, eagerly accepting the help up with one hand while she scooped the vine-creature up in the crook of her other arm. "I can''t wait everyone to meet you, Rosy!" Sly pounced to his place on Terra''s shoulders and watched "Rosy" with narrowed eyes. Rosy curled in on itself as much as it could, wrapping its little nubs around Cassie''s wrist. [We are talking about this when we get back to the ship.] Sly thought sternly to Terra. ''Yeah, yeah.''