The Past...

The first spell she cast was Assay.

It took hours to get all the mana she needed to fill her Valences, and all that time she had a really bad feeling, as if something was happening around her. The second heartbeat she heard seemed to be getting weaker, and the breathing shallower. She couldn’t see, but she could hear, and also feel to a limited degree.

She couldn’t feel the magic around her; something was wrapped around her and interfering with that sensitivity, despite her ten Ranks in Meditation.

Something alive.

She was curled up and couldn’t move, surrounded by something warm and wet, like being in a womb. And... she wasn’t breathing...

She had enough power to do something if required, and it looked like something was going to be required very soon.

She couldn’t move her hands or say anything, which meant that the spell had to be Still and Silent, forcing her to spend more Valences on it than a I normally required. On top of that, she didn’t have a Focus Implement, and she was very sure she didn’t want to Channel a spell physically, so the Casting took a full minute instead of a handful of seconds.

The fact that it actually worked, and did so exactly how the massive amount of information in her head said it would, was a totally wondrous moment unleashing a thousand dreams and possibilities... and also totally anti-climactic, proceeding exactly as it should for a Ten Caster.

Assay, the bread-and-butter assessment Divination spell of the Power of Ten. It was the spell that put numbers on Stats, Classes, Levels, everything. Assay was the spell that turned magic into understandable math.

Normally, you just Cast the lowest I version until you could Siege it for no cost, then never truly Cast it again. She could remember doing just that, but her rep counts seemed to be no more, regardless of what her memory told her, so spending Valences even on the Cantrip version was the only way to go.

The spell was directed at herself.

Magic rippled through her, reading everything from physical condition to spells in memory. Normally this would be transferred into a Visual File for ease of updating and reference, but she hadn’t Cast that yet, either.

Hazé, NG Wizard/10, Sorceress/6, Arcane Theurge/5, Archwizard/5, Archsorcerer/5, Female Human/1

Bloodline: Arcane

Okay, nothing wrong with that...

Strength: 1 (Infant) (-2 Female Human penalty not applied)

Dexterity: 1 (Infant)

Constitution: 5 (Infant)

OMFG!

Intelligence: 26 (18 Base, +2 Human, +2 Intelligence Mastery, +1 Age, +2 Levels, +1 Ten)

Wisdom: 18 (14 Base, +2 Wisdom Mastery, +1 Age, +1 Ten)

Charisma: 23 (16 Base, +2 Charisma Mastery, +1 Levels, +1 Age, +1 Ten, +2 Female Human)

She whipped her eyes around at her Matrix.

No Cleric levels, no additional Wisdom bonuses or Domain spells, no Mystic Theurgy on her Class Levels.

Health: 1 (1d8 -3, minimum 1)

Soak: 10 (10d4 -30, minimum 1 per Die)

!!!

She didn’t look at most of the remaining information, as it was basically just breaking down what she had already done with spells, plus listing out her Feats and Masteries.

She only had the Mental Stat, Visual File, Spellcraft, Shards, Meditation, and Concentration Masteries.

There were no lists of Rep Counts, not even a shadow of Detect Count at work, matching the untampered, slightly dissonant hum of her Matrix.

She was this ridiculously powerful Ten spellcaster, and she was a baby still in her mother’s womb!

And right then, she heard, or rather, didn’t hear that heartbeat, and the gentle swell of breathing went silent.

A shudder went through the magic around her, a skirl across the manaweave as necromantic traces moved in. She felt a tug and release, as if something around her had just let go... and everything around her began to die.

Her mother had just died.

She was an unborn child and she had to Get Out of her own mother’s womb, and she didn’t have much time at all...

Sudden Silent Spell, Sudden Still Spell!

She cast the Greater Flight from Valence on herself, feeling aeromantic power coming in and giving her the ability to manipulate her position in space.

Still Silent Shards, bringing in the force energy; hers were shaped like crescent arcs, and she let them go.

They sliced open her mother’s belly and severed the umbilical cord. Warm amniotic fluid gushed out, and the cold world beyond began to creep in.

Still Silent Extended Resist Energy/Cold! Warmth wrapped her up in magical arms of the perfect temperature for a premature new-born.

She was still going to die if she couldn’t breathe.

Still Silent Mage Hand. The telekinetic Cantrip was weak and couldn’t do much... but it could pull the placental membrane off her and clear the gunk out of her lungs. As she rose shakily from the bloody coffin of her mother’s corpse, a stream of liquid was forced out her tiny lungs, and the tiniest of magical jolts was enough to get her breathing.

It hurt. Her body was extremely vulnerable, and this was a major shock to her system. She could hardly believe this was happening.

Couldn’t they just have made a duplicate of her Earth body if they were going to send her here and set her up as a shadow of her game character? Really? Making her go through reincarnation, and then almost getting her killed before she was even born?

She coughed weakly, hovering there in midair, and the magical hand of force slowly wiped the goo off of her. She still had a short length of the umbilical cord drooping from her belly, but that would have to wait for a moment.

She couldn’t see, her eyes wouldn’t open, and she couldn’t focus them. She could barely move her tiny limbs.

She was going to get hungry very soon. With no divine magic, she couldn’t conjure actual living, healthy food, especially some that a newborn could eat.

So, she had to get out of wherever she was, and find some place that could provide her food and shelter... without making her bleed Valences to do it. Three Valences for every Valence I spell... ugh.

So, she had to be able to see, now that she could fly.

She needed something fairly long-term for this effort. She looked at the See Invisibility spell, noted that it overlaid the visual information in the direction she was looking with the extra information of the invisible, but that meant it also had to convey the real information about it.

A decent alternative to total blindness. It was a II, so she spent a IV Slot slowly bringing it into existence on the point of her third eye, and suddenly the world winked into existence in front of her.

It was a narrow view, literally the area right in front of her, no width of vision, but it was certainly better than nothing. She had to change her viewpoint by changing her orientation, as she certainly wasn’t strong enough to move her head.

There was barely any light to see, coming in through cracks around the shuttered window and boards of the walls. She looked like she was in some sort of wooden structure, barely holding itself together, replete with flies, and probably smelling really bad... especially since it had just inherited a corpse.

She turned over and looked down at the corpse of her mother.

She was wasted from some sort of drug dependency, Hazé had seen the signs before. It looked like she had overdosed and crashed hard. From the position of her body, she had been wasting away on the straw mattress at least two days.

She’d been fairly dark of skin, but the yellowing of the dependency made her paler, and her skin was tight on her bones. The swollen flesh of her belly, combined with the gaping wound now there, looked almost unreal given the thinness of the rest of her body. Her brown hair was patchy, and the flies had long started to gather on her silent body, picking up as the scent of death began to spread above the filth, leaking amniotic fluid, and bodily waste.

Well, mother, I don’t know who you are, but I can guarantee that I will never forget you, Hazé thought, memorizing the girl’s face. She couldn’t be even in her late teens, a castoff of whatever this society was, abused and thrown away without anyone to depend on.

It was totally overpriced at Valence III, but Energy Fan, the first of the Cone spells, with vivus accenting the fire, washed out and over the corpse. It was better than leaving her for the worms or whatever uncaring funeral she would have. The unwhite-limned fire, a color not in the visual spectrum, washed over the corpse, and consumed it all utterly and completely, seeping down into the bed and eating away the stained straw as it did so.

She didn’t bother to look for anything useful, as she simply had no way to carry it.

It was light out, and a flying baby would attract a lot of unwanted attention. She had to find a food source, shelter, and do it within hours.

Well, she was a Ten. If she had to, she could force the issue, although she didn’t want to. First, to make sure she wasn’t seen until she wanted to be.

There were two ways to cast Invisibility; one with a short duration allowing a bunch of actions, and one that lasted until broken, but required almost utter passivity. Neither would endure combat.

She picked the second, blowing another IV Valence with a sigh, and then directed the Hand to open the crude window carefully.

It swung open with a creak, a bunch of confused flies coming in and circling around before flying off, probably irritated at the fresh air from the vivic flame taking away their meal.

Hazé flew into the daylight, off to find a family to live with.