I slumped down on the couch, accidentally squishing my wings and tail. Swearing under my breath, I carefully repositioned so that I would be more comfortable. Honestly, it was incredibly inconvenient having wings. Most furniture hadn’t been designed with wings or a tail in mind. I often forgot they were there, but occasionally when rolling over while asleep, or trying to get through doorways, I would find myself jammed in and pretty uncomfortable. With the wings folded behind me, I was about eight feet high and four feet wide. It made things difficult. Practically, the wings and tail were very handy, but when I wasn’t flying around or fighting, they were a bit of a pain. At least they were soft, now.

I brought my wings around the front of me, using them sort of like a blanket, and then I brought my tail around and up under as well. I probably looked like a big ball of feathers, but at least I felt comfortable.

Cindy walked into the kitchen, grabbing a cup of water for me and herself. Bringing them over, she sat down next to me with a sigh.

“Vic, you didn’t seem surprised when Jenny brought up the emotional suppression. I’m guessing you already had thoughts about it?”

Taking the cup from her hands, I took a sip and then set it down on the end table.

“Yeah. I knew something was up from the very beginning, right after we changed. I knew there was something done to make the racial transition easier, but originally, I thought it limited to just appearance. I mean, there were instincts added to the different races. Why not a little something else to make things better for people?

There were loads of things done to make this as smooth a transition as possible. The system explanations, the warnings. I bet the obelisks are located in cities to foster a sense of community, too. The lack of self-consciousness about the physical changes was just another part of the system there to make things easier, and I paid it no mind.

After the gems though… I started noticing things. No cars were driving around. The city was completely silent, until today. I didn’t think it was strange until I pointed it out to myself. It was like there was something on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn’t make the connection until this morning.

So yeah. When you told me this morning you were feeling a bit self-conscious, I knew something had changed. I honestly didn’t expect it to be this big though.”

Cindy nodded as I talked, waiting for me to finish. When I did, she took another drink from her cup, looking into the middle distance, thinking about something.

“I wasn’t able to see it either. I don’t think it is too farfetched to assume that thoughts around the manipulation were also suppressed. I think… I’d like to wait here for a bit longer. Then we can go check on everyone to make sure they’re doing fine.”

I smiled, but my heart wasn’t in it.

“That sounds good to me.”

After a 20-minute break, we moved from room to room, checking to see if everyone was doing okay. Most seemed to be doing fairly well, with only some minor embarrassment or other weirdness towards their new bodies. Surprisingly enough, the Garcia family was doing just fine as well, having become accustomed to their new forms rather quickly, and all embarrassment having been faced already. I guess having to run around on all fours was pretty embarrassing by itself, regardless of any emotional suppressing.

The problems came with the vast majority of the former slaves. They were all things considered, doing okay. According to Calvin Hardy, the carpenter, many of the captured people reported terrible nightmares the night before, which did make sense. The fact that they were out of that mess, and that they had a solid support system to rely on helped greatly, I’m sure. James was having a tough time as well, the emotional suppressant having lifted, leaving all of his experiences while captured raw and exposed once again. We found Trevor, Nick, and Taylor all just hanging out with him, helping him to not be alone. I was glad we didn’t need to explain the whole emotional suppressant situation to everyone. It seemed that they got the gist of it from their own experiences, and I didn’t feel like dumping my theories on anyone just yet.

Returning to the apartment, Cindy and I had a nice salad for lunch and went off to do our things. Just for grins, I checked the TV to see if any of the local channels were up. To my surprise, I managed to find one news station that was back up and running. They were reporting on what happened over the waves, the various beta testers, and even had some information regarding monsters and what to do if you encountered them. Generally, though, their advice was to stay inside and not fight, which made sense for most people but would probably stunt many people’s potential growth. This was particularly true in the southern united states where a large portion of the population was beastkin. At least, according to Steph, anyway.

Though the content was questionable, actually seeing the TV back on really made me feel like things were starting to get back to normal. It was crazy to think that this whole business only started two weeks ago. I just watched the TV run, listening in the background as I started to nod off. Pretty soon, I was fast asleep.

-------------------------------------- --

I woke up again and checked my watch. It was almost 3:00, so I had been sleeping for around an hour. Either Cindy or Taylor had come in and turned the TV off while I slept. I stood up, stretching my wings and tail out while bringing my arms above my head. Sleep was the best when you were dealing with stress. I always feel better after a nice nap. There was still enough time left in the day that I could try and get some magic training in, and I was pretty excited to get started with Hydrokinesis. I wanted this strange elemental imbalance in my body gone, and the only path I could think of to do that was through hard work.

I made for the window, but just as I started to slide it open, I felt an alert ping in my head. I hadn’t done anything, so it must have been something else. Curious, I went ahead and accessed it.

The fifth wave will begin in 15, 14, 13, 12, 12, 12, 12, 12, 12, 12, 12, 12, 12, ERROR

Uh oh. Suddenly, I could hear the voice of someone. It played audio in a young feminine voice at the same time as new menu alerts popped up.

Oops. Um, let me just… *CRASH* *BANG*

Don’t worry about that. Now, let me see… well, that’s not supposed to be there. I can fix this! Just… give… me… a… second…

Ah ha! There it is. Alright, everything is back up, so um. Yeah. Back on track.

After that, the voice faded into static. I could swear I heard the windows XP startup tone somewhere in there, but I’m sure it's just my imagination. After that, the countdown continued, just like always.

12, 11, 10, 9…

Before it was done, both Cindy and Taylor came running out of their rooms.

Turning to them, I quickly asked, “Did you both hear her too?”

They responded yes almost simultaneously while staring at the ticking numbers, waiting for the official alert. There was a fifth wave about to happen, and we were all waiting on bated breath, anxious for what we might find.

Update Version 2.4.1

H.G. Has lost direct administration privileges due to a suite of misdeeds that will be partially corrected in this update. I am terribly sorry for how many things have happened over the past two weeks. I intended to make this transfer as smooth as possible and to preserve the absolute maximum amount of human life, but due to outside meddling, many things have gone wrong outside of my control. I will continue working to fix the problems introduced in the system. I wish all of you the very best of luck.

Patch Notes:

An emotional suppressant had been applied to all members of the former human race. Over the past three days, this suppression has been slowly lifted, and as of 2 am this morning, it has been removed altogether. This suppression forced people to focus on survival over anything else. Symptoms might include an increased willingness to fight in self-defense, the ignoring of laws, overworking (particularly regarding self-improvement), and a whole slew of other possible effects. The original intent was to allow users to opt-in or out of the emotional suppression, but due to growing mental health concerns, it has been removed from the system altogether.

Menu optimization has been added to the system. The user can now decide exactly which parts of their status to access at any time. Alert messages for hunting and leveling up can now be customized based on personal opinions.

The metric system of measurement has been added as an option, and users can now choose this over customary. I am sorry about this, as this was H.G.’s idea of a joke within the system, and I caught it too late in the release to fix.

A heads-up display is now available to the user. This allows the user to monitor their health, stamina, and mana in real-time while in combat. It can be toggled on and off at will if you dislike the original intuitive stat monitoring method.

The pantheon system is now enabled. Pantheon deities are administrators created by the system who have some degree of control over system alerts, granted skills, and one-time buffs. They can also create some custom monsters and can manipulate and edit dungeons to suit their needs. You will likely encounter them as you continue on your adventures. By proving your affinity with a certain member of the pantheon, different boons can be granted, so pay attention to your actions.

Currently there are ten major deities, and an increasing amount of minor deities. The major deities are listed below with their moral alignment, as well as their major aspects.

1. Ellia – neutral good – life, light, healing

2. Sol – lawful good – the sun, fire, law

3. Aes – chaotic good – the moon, water, sleep

4. Norr – neutral – nature, change, growth

5. Zald – lawful neutral – magic, knowledge, improvement

6. Loth – chaotic neutral – luck, fate, coincidence

7. Onor – chaotic neutral – battle, warfare, honor

8. Gors – neutral evil – wrath, murder, pain

9. Balthar – chaotic evil – darkness, deception, theft

10. Mortus – lawful evil – death, undeath, patience

Beware; some of the members of the pantheon are evil and will attack and kill others unprovoked. Be careful in all dealings with them. While others may tend towards good, they are all immensely powerful independent beings capable of their own decisions. Be careful in all dealings with the pantheon.

Be forewarned, due to circumstances out of my control, the members of the pantheon have far more autonomy than originally planned. As already stated, they are extremely powerful, and while they do have limited ability to affect you, they can summon monsters and servants to do things for them. I will use system alerts to keep you informed about potential threats to human life in your area.

Please, be careful out there. Watch out for each other. You will need all the help you can get, so you must focus on both personal strength and teamwork while you still can. Good luck.

-Luna

Well, fuck. There we go. H.G. and Luna had a falling out, and Luna is now in charge. H.G. always seemed almost goading in his notes, particularly in the ones I got right at rank up, while Luna’s have always had a more compassionate tone. The big problem is that both H.G. and Luna have been constantly warning about coming dangers. Originally, I thought that the warnings just meant that as people grew in strength more people would try and take advantage of others, but now I’m not so sure.

Now that I know about the pantheon, I could start to get some idea of what some of those future dangers might be. The Dungeons and Dragons-style alignments helped as well. As a quick refresh, I went to my room and grabbed my players handbook and looked at where it considered different major alignments and what they each meant.

Good

Neutral

Evil

Lawful

You tend towards doing the right thing and you follow the laws ordained by your god, or by people. You could also follow your strict moral laws, but they must be incredibly clear. Note: Lawful Good does not mean Lawful Nice

You follow the laws to the letter, regardless of who you hurt. You could also follow your own strict warrior's code of honor. You might do some evil actions, and you might do some good, but no matter what you honor your code above all else.

You follow an evil ruler to the letter, or you follow your code that requires you to kill innocents or others for personal or collective gain. You have no care for people other than yourself or your organization, and you’ll stop whoever gets in your way with lethal force, no matter who it is. Following a genocidal regime is your bread and butter.

Neutral

You do the right thing. You might not necessarily follow laws to the letter, but you do the right thing when it counts.

You don’t care either way. You are so invested in your own world that the chaos of the world around you just passes you by. You generally have a non-interference policy.

You are a bad guy, plain and simple. You do bad things because you want to and because it suits you the most. Nothing is off the table, be it rape, murder, theft, or anything in-between.

Chaotic

You do good, but don’t mind how you do it. You don’t mind breaking a few rules if it means that more good can be done. Occasionally you can dip into more neutral territory, but you are still averse to anything clearly evil.

You are invested in your personal betterment. If helping others gets you places, why not? At the same time, if you see someone who has something you want, there’s no reason not to take it. You can drift both to the good side of things or the evil side of things, but you never take it too far in either direction.

You are an agent of chaos. Mass destruction and slaughter? Sounds like a plan. You are the kind of person who bombs a supermarket just to watch people panic. You aren’t in it for the money. You are in it for the blood. You don’t mind who you kill, be it your own men or otherwise.

You do not murder, rape, or other evil actions.

Neither evil nor good but has a mixture of both in actions and belief.

You are clearly evil and pursue evil goals that lead to mass slaughter and destruction to suit your own needs.

Most of the neutral or good members of the pantheon I could support or get behind. The three evil ones though all seemed particularly dangerous. The fact that they could make personal monsters was incredibly bad. What kind of self-respecting evil god wouldn’t try to take over the world? I knew that many people around the world would jump on board with the different evil gods as well, and that would only manage to exacerbate the problem.

There was a war coming, and I was afraid that the human race would be stuck right in the middle. We needed warriors, and we needed them fast. The symmetry of the pantheon was too coincidental, and to me, it stank of artificially created conflict. As I thought about the different evil gods, I felt something both terrifying and familiar, though the feeling was hard to explain or to wrap my head around. What I did know was that I didn’t like it one bit.

The sooner the guild was active and running, the better. I needed to be stronger, and a great deal of that strength would come from finishing up my training as soon as possible. I had only taken a vacation from adventuring for a couple of days, but it would have to be enough for now. It was time to hit up some dungeons and ruins. I would work for two days getting my magic all beefed up so I didn’t have to worry about the painful transformations while alone in the wilderness, and then I would be gone. My current class was good enough for now, and I could go pick up another one when I needed to.

Cindy and Taylor hovered over my shoulder as I held open the book, and I explained to them my theories regarding the pantheon and what the different alignments of the deities meant. Both of them had work that needed to get done, and I knew they were far better suited to getting the guildhall up and running than I was. They practically ran out the door together, as they left to gather up all of the new guild staff to brief and prepare for the worst possible outcomes.

For me, it was time once again to train.

------------------------ ---

The pond had been completed by this time, so I had my own little solitary space to work. I still wanted to get my supplementary abilities up to max first, leaving lightning for last, so up next on the docket was hydrokinesis. Because I was working with water, I was able to just spend my time sitting in the pond, constantly switching between using beginner chaos body strengthening and working on hydrokinesis. I would halt my work on my two combat arts as I couldn’t use them while in the water, but they were both high enough level that I didn’t particularly mind.

Now that I had already gone through maxing out aerokinesis, I knew that the most efficient way to do it was to come up with more ideas for using the ability. There were a few hints hidden within the spells I had already gotten for water leading me to believe that it had a large number of utility options. The most important one was healing abilities. It was hard to practice healing without actively injuring myself, so I had to forgo that. I wasn’t a masochist, and my pain tolerance still had some ways to go, so I wasn’t up for it. Healing was something I would need to work out while adventuring.

What I could do though was work on a barrier and work on some other water-based attacks. Using water, I could extend blows out of my body, reaching out with liquid fists to crush and break. I practiced creating lashing whips to entangle feet or throw incoming blows out of the way. The wind could make a cutting edge, but the water did the same thing with much greater efficiency, so I worked on throwing blades a few feet out of my body. Unfortunately, the further away the blades got from me, the worse they held together, but I could already see the combat potential.

Focus assisted me greatly and offered a noticeable increase in skill growth efficiency as I continued using hydrokinesis and working on body strengthening. I worked for several hours, well into the night, but even after the sunset, I didn’t feel like stopping. I was impatient to improve and felt like I could keep going, so I did. I checked my watch between body strengthening cycles, seeing that it was now 11:00 at night. I decided to hit another status increase with body strengthening, then check up on my progress through the menus. Once I was done, I would finally head to sleep.

Eventually, I felt the energy in my body reach a critical amount and then reset, signaling an end to my work for the night.

Skill Alert! Level Up!

General Skills:

Focus – lvl 1 -> 7 – (+7% skill proficiency)

Class Skills:

Beginner Chaos Body Strengthening – lvl 15 -> 18 – regeneration stats while using (+54%)

Magic Skills:

Hydrokinesis – lvl 25 -> 42 – can sense water around you in a 20ft. sphere, and completely control it at a rate of 1 pint/1 mana/second up to 20 pints.

Current Status Increases:

+2 Int

+1 Wis

+1 Cha

Max Status Increases:

+2 Str

+4 Agi

+2 Unassigned

I went ahead and pulled up the stop of my status page to look at my overall stats.

Abridged Status Sheet:

Name: Victoria (Vic) Gale

Age: 14 days

Gender: Female

Race: Storm Paraelemental Warrior (Rank 2)

Class: Way of the Storm Martial Artist

Job: Fighter

Level: 6/40, 141/198 to next level

Affinity: Heart of the Warrior, Physicality, Wind, Water, Ice, Electricity, Electronics, Crafting, Graceful Presence

Character Archetype: Lone Wanderer

Current:

Maximum:

Regen:

Health:

250

250

41/day

Stamina:

265

265

200/hour

Mana:

230

230

260/hour

General Stats:

Current

Maximum

Affect

Strength

22

29

Physical strength; pushing, pulling, lifting. Affects health.

Agility

22

33

Physical speed; running speed, acrobatic ability, inertial control. Affects stamina.

Dexterity

19

25

Ability to move with finesse and skill. To move the body as the mind wills it. Affects stamina regen.

Constitution

26

27

The sturdiness of the body; ability to resist damage, poison, and magic. Affects health regen.

Intelligence

23

26

Your capacity to learn and remember. Affects mana.

Wisdom

26

26

Your ability to reason out the best choice. Affects mana regen.

Charisma

17

20

Your likability; affects attractiveness.

Luck

18

19

Affects drop rates, and personal narrative.

Unassigned

4

Focus had a notable effect on the use of my skills, helping me learn the body strengthening technique much faster and helping hydrokinesis reach higher levels quicker. I also now had a bit more mana to work with and had maxed out my mana regeneration. The charisma increase was a nice touch as well. At this point I now had four unassigned stat points, but I wanted to save them until I started adventuring. That would let me put them somewhere they needed to go over somewhere I just thought might be useful.

From my training the day before, I had almost reached another status increase with body strengthening when I started, and I could sense a noticeable increase in the distance between increases. I had always suspected that the training method would have diminishing returns, but it was more obvious now. I assume that after a certain point, it would be impossible to increase my stats with the method, and I would need to change to another by gaining a new class.

The most noticeable change was in the hydrokinesis skill description. Instead of vague values and vague amounts of mana, I had a set rate. That would allow me to better customize abilities later in the future. One pint might not seem like a lot of water, but it was enough to make a solid blade for one attack. I would need to reinforce the blade with additional mana, but it was still extremely useful. I also received two more water spells to match the ones I already had, though both were rather expected, and while their mana cost was reduced compared to performing through manipulation, I still thought them both rather plain as I had already come up with facsimiles of them.

Spell Name:

Mana Cost:

Affect:

Duration

Purify

5

Cleanses water of impurities, making it potable.

Instant

Aqua Heal

25

Restore +15 health to a target.

Instant

Water Whip

15

Creates a lashing tentacle of water from your hand that entangles a foe.

30s

Water Blade

8

Creates a water blade for a melee attack within five feet, dealing 20 slashing damage.

Instant

One more day and I would be at the maximum level for hydrokinesis.