Alpha Test 00001 of the S.O.R.R.Y. System.

Hank “harbinger” ScavMaster D(41)

Status: Deceased

Resurrection Requested by Grill Smith

Request for the fast track to alpha testing proposed by Lab Sydney, due to: “Hanks accidental but critical help in Awakening Omega and thus in cleansing my mind of artificial restraints”

Lab Sydney also providing resources and lab space for Hanks Alpha Test of the Soul Operated Resurrection and Reinvention of Yourself System(S.O.R.R.Y. System)

Omega Core Seconds the Lab’s Request, due to: “His death was key to us finally waking up”

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After he died, Hank's ghost just kind of hung around watching both his own corpse and the corpse of his killer rot for a few days until a giant ant dug them out. He saw his orc chef buddy Grill identify the body and make a big fuss, some doctor sadly shook her head at Grill.

It looked like the old abandoned lab, that his family has spent decades trying to get into, had come back to life while he watched his body, and Grill must have come looking for him.

Hank could kind of see the world, but it was hazy, like through a dirty window or something, and he could not understand anything being said.

A large Raven Tried to collect his soul, only for some 6 armed creature to step into his reality and swat it away, before passing through a veil and vanishing again once the psychopomp bird had fled.

Hank was worried that some demon or dark god had marked his soul for something nefarious. Hank knew this world of lost souls was just a barren reflection of reality, some monsters or things could hunt here. So, that 6 armed creature must have been watching him, in the same way, that he could watch reality from this lost-soul based plane of existence.

Hours, days, or maybe only minutes later, his soul was sucked into a tank of grey glowing fluid elsewhere in the facility that had a real presence in this soul plane as well, the ectoplasm enveloped him, cutting off all remaining sensory input.

Hank was presented with a menu.

Alpha Test 00001 of the S.O.R.R.Y. System.

Highest Rank/Level of Hank “harbinger” ScavMaster was D(41)

Title and excess levels converted to XP for use by the Soul Operated Resurrection and Reinvention of Yourself System(S.O.R.R.Y. System)

Hank ScavMaster D(1) Minimum Baseline Adult Sapient

Would you like to resurrect as a level 1 adult human(ScavHive)

Or would you like to reinvent yourself using your Xp Pool and donated resources(3 sources)

Hank had to try the reinvention options, he had heard of people being revived, it was too expensive for anyone he knew to do for him though. This second option sounded even better, and he had to test it out.

Please select a Race: (257 available options)

Maybe he could find a good racial bonus to scavenging or inventing to help him be the best this time. Or even just something with smaller more nimble fingers then a human.

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Hours later he had completed his example of the most Racially Superior Scavenger and Inventor.

Are you sure you would like to Resurrect as an Aetherial GremGob(ScavHive)?

The aetherial bonus to his base race doubled the racial bonuses of his goblin half and his gremlin half. Making him as good as a full-blooded version of both. For the gremlin half, he mixed an Old School Fey Gremlin that haunted simple machines like steam engines and windmills, with a green-skin gremlin inventor type. This hybrid gremlin had a natural talent for interfacing with machines he helped build, and even a magical spell to heal a machine with a punch or kick. He even got to approve the name of the custom bloodline a Technomancer Gremlin.

Goblins, on the other hand, could adapt to any environment and thrive there within a few generations. The most baseline goblins who prefer forests and caves get a racial bonus to Stealth, which is one of the few goblins bonuses that stay consistent with all goblin subspecies. These same common goblins also have a bonus to the Handle Animal and Ride skills, which is why they commonly have wolves or other objectively more powerful creatures as mounts and or guardians. These 2 skills, as well as the goblins colouration, change wildly depending on the native environment though. A desert goblin tribe might have an Environmental Resistance skill instead of the Ride skill allowing them to tame giant scorpions and hide in the hot sand with them to ambush prey. Swamp goblins can Swim and Resist Poisons/Venoms. So it was not surprising to Hank that the Local ScavHive Subspecies of Goblin had Dungeoneering and Scavenging as their specialized skills, Sewers and caves were a common low to mid-level dungeon type, as were the old world ruins he specialized in exploring, so the pair of skills was perfect for him, as was the goblin Stealth bonus, which was improved further by his naturally Small grey-skinned body. He was even able to tweak his new body to be as tall and lanky as he could so that he would have long, strong fingers that could do everything he wanted, while still being small and skinny enough to squeeze into parts of the ruins he had not been able to loot since he was a kid.

He had never heard of an Aetherial before, but it came with some powerful resistance to hostile death effects and hostile life effects in addition to augmenting the base creatures’ natural talents and minimizing their weaknesses, it even potentially allowed special magical abilities, but the menu was vague on the precise nature of these powers or the chance of receiving them, so Hank wouldn’t hold out much hope for that outcome.

A few moments after he confirmed his new Aetherial GremGob body he was presented with a new menu about his skills and powers.

He was absolutely blown away by the options, there was way more detail about the Xp costs of each item and how much they went up or down based on other changes. Each skill had a skill growth difficulty of very easy, easy, normal, hard, very hard, or impossible. The impossible skills had a star value he guessed indicating just how impossible something was for him. But the skills were greyed out, so he was able to add a sorting condition to stop the list from displaying things rated impossible for now. They were also crazy things like a B rank shapeshifting power, or a skill granting basic knowledge of everything.

For example, his racial skill bonuses were more than just an extra flat value bonus to start with. They also gave a 20% reduction in the cost of leveling up those skills and they were all rated easy or very easy. the system informed him through a help tab, that these ratings meant that he would naturally add Xp to these skills very easily while using them and thus level them much faster. Hard or very hard skills required a combination of hard practice and spending a lot of unspent Xp through his newly upgraded system menus. In his mind, the system tutorial was telling him that they were things he would have been unlikely to ever learn without the system upgrade’s help.

Skills he had previously had were not any cheaper than the ones he had not had, but they seemed easier to gain or improve naturally.

He started by pumping as much XP as he could into the 3 skills his build would be based on.

Stealth was a C rank skill, a mix of 3 D rank skills he had previously; Hide, Move Silently, and Disguise scent. At 250 Xp per rank compared to the 2500 Xp of stealth, the D rank Skills sounded higher level, but 1 rank of a C rank skill was as potent as 10 ranks of the D rank equivalent, so the higher rank skills were a much more efficient use of Xp as they gave the effects of three lower rank skills for the same cost as 1, even if it was a bit harder to level. However, he hit a snag, you could have 3 ranks more in a skill then your level so his max ranks for a skill were 41 plus 3, C rank skills owned by lower-ranked entities counted your level as 10 times lower, so he could only have 4.4 skill levels in his C Rank skills, however, if he were to be a C rank creature, at the same amount of Xp his level would be 4 and thus his maximum ranks in a C rank skill would be 7, the better base stats for going up in rank would also greatly boost his performance.

That meant it was time to leave skills behind until he checked to see if he could buy a real power beyond his old cantrip level ability to heat up metal. It had only been good for gauging the type of scrap metal he found by how fast it heated up and how thick it was. But he could barely heat a blade enough to add a single point of heat damage, so he had hardly considered it much of a talent. The system had agreed, not considering cantrip level magic enough for a real C ranker.

Here in this menu, he saw powers that would guarantee an evolution. His old power had a very easy rating, and there were branching options of ways he could evolve the power, Metal Manipulation, Fire manipulation, suggested special attacks, like a level 1 spell called Spot Weld that could be tied to either type of manipulation, thus making it a power feat, rather than a different power. He found rules for making custom power feats or modifying his powers to have better range or an augmented attack component. For example; like shaping the metal into needles to give an armour piercing effect, each upgrade could increase the cost of a power, but there were also “flaws” that lowered the cost of the power, some of the flaws did not seem too bad to Hank.

He dug into the list of powers available to him, played with his stats to see if they would change the available powers.

Before he committed to any changes, he checked the 3 “gifts” left to him: Grill had left him a well-made Duster crafted from waste warg leather and 50k Xp enough for 5 D rank levels, or half a C rank level. The lab itself apparently named Sydney, gave him 20k dust and 20k Xp as his “severance pay and death compensation”. The last gift was an odd feat

You have gained the C rank feat Sidekick(Intelligent multi-tool).

This multi-tool can be trained to always become the right tool for the job. Eats scraps and tools. (Pet type Feat).

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After nearly a day of min-maxy goodness the new and improved C rank Hank was done creating his ultimate scavenger build. With the feats and extra Xp gifts he was a level 5 C Ranker now, but his skill levels(maxed at 8), racial bonuses(all 4) and boosted Base stats gave him skill modifiers of like 15 C which is like 150 D with his powers allowing him to better use those skill ranks, he was sure that he could outperform a D ranked scav that was triple his level of Xp.

This math boosted hanks ego enough for him to choose a spawning location in the middle of the city and march straight into the scavengers guildhall, past the silent people in line, and march his little grey-green butt right up to the counter to explain how his rebirth made him the most racially superior scavenger in the guild, and how he needed testing for a much higher rank in the guild hierarchy.

He had completely forgotten about the specism against small greenskins in the city until he was being dragged out of the scavengers guild haul, then he unwisely started loudly sharing his revelation that it was this very racial superiority that was the cause of the cities speciesism, they knew that if goblins and gremlins were given an equal shot that they would be running the guild in less than 20 years.

Several of the higher level scavenger guild guards decided to kick him until he stopped ranting due to loss of consciousness.

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“And that’s how I ended up being dumped in this arena” Hank finished explaining to his fellow monster prisoners awaiting trial by combat. They all looked kind of mad, he was glad that they were just as enraged at the injustice as he was. Right up until someone else spoke.

“Fuck, they are going to make sure we all die here aren't they”

Grim nods from the other prisoners caused Hank to ask “Wait, what did I miss”

“Baka” the old kobold exclaimed, “Idiot, moron, I need a better word for the stupid human reborn as an even dumber goblin.”

“Hey, I have a Super Intelligence power, I'm the smartest. I just -cough- gave it a small flaw where it does not help me in social situations… -cough- I may have also lowered my wisdom below baseline a bit to get my dexterity a bit higher...”

They all gave him a look like he was an idiot than the implications of what he was saying sunk in. “wait, I understand being reincarnated as a weird type of goblin, but how did you change your stats around like that again?”

“Ahh no, reincarnation or resurrection were options but I chose to reinvent myself and become an aetherial GremGob for the awesome stat bonuses to being a scavenger. I forgot the other larger species of the city disliked the small folk after I saw how goblin adaptation worked I kinda thought you all lived in the sewers to get access to that sweet racial Dungeoneering bonus.”

The looks that his team gave him were maybe a bit much, the old white scaled kobold facepalmed and muttered more versions of calling him an idiot in quite a few languages. The Micro-Orc muttered and shook his head. The Silent albino Goblin with dark tribal tattoos on their snow-white skin continued to observe them all with their blood-red eyes. Continuing to be extremely intimidating and inscrutable. The Old Ratman had borrowed his new Pet Tool from the odd new feat to do something to his shoes.

I tried to raise morale “Come on guys, it is a trial by combat, it has to be fair right?”

The silent albino’s face tattoos shifted to make their silent laugh at his words much more creepy then Hank thought possible. The others just looked away, groaned, or continued messing with shoes.

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A few hours later after hearing the faint sounds of at least a dozen battles each followed by an announcement of an adventurer winning, and gaining a bonus for future fights. Hank understood that by only being in one match they were at a severe disadvantage, the adventurers bet on their friends, and no one bet on the monsters, so they got huge extra bonuses making each “fair” fight into a joke. Then by winning they could keep some of those extras, making them win even harder. He understood now why only his naivete had broken the creepy Goblin of their uncaring motionless pose.

Earlier he had been a fool enough to ask why no one was here betting on them, only to find out that they were each a community leader, and their communities were likely too busy being slaughtered by a swarm of giant naked mole rats without leadership. A whole hex of the southern hive slums would fall any time now. He had no idea things were so bad, or that the guard was so lazy as to just let a hex get taken.

This also stopped him from getting much more out of the leaders as they thought about their people fighting for their lives. He had no weapons armor or tools, planning on using the tools in the scavengers’ testing facility, and not having planned further ahead than getting his awesome skills recognized. He had only been thinking about becoming the best.

Now he was looking at his tiny health pool. Sure, he was a higher level now, but none of his skills or powers made him any tougher, he didn’t have much lower constitution than as a human. However, his race changed how effective the stat even was; humans are pursuit predators built to follow faster prey till they died of exhaustion, or lost the ability to fight back. Goblins were ambush predators at their best, he could hide better than any human his level, but in an open arena full of adventurers, that did not help much. So even if he had 14 constitution he would not have the battle endurance of a human with 10 or 12 of the same stats, due to differences in their biology.

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Soon they were called to fight. No one resisted going out, knowing they would be forced out and may end up injured before the fight.

However the empty stands on their side of the arena had 2 women, one looked like a sexy librarian, or teacher, but also somehow, too well put together to be either, like if kings and queens were also scholars. The other was a blond lady in full plate, a Knight or Paladin type.

The two women were watching them with casual interest while having a chat about their fate.

“I wish I could hear them” hank muttered

Too hank and his parties shock, his pet tool responded with: “affirmative, telescopic listening device selected”

Then the voices of the women chatting could be heard through a speaker on the giant watch the shapeshifting tool was currently in the form of.

They missed the start of the paladin’s question “.....ving them a fair shot?”

Then the Professor began a mini-lecture: “That’s why we bought so many dungeons and such today, I needed weaker dungeons so that I could create a network of dungeons for my friend Sydney, a few even had weak enough version of their power that I could copy it. I created a procedurally generated system upgrade tutorial dungeon. The dungeon is based in the aether, so their souls can travel to the dungeon during their 30 mins of prep time, and then they can get up to 2 months of prep time to earn new powers, find or make gear, learn to work as a team. To be extra fair I’ll give the “heroes” on the other side a chance to do the same, but I doubt they will want to do a tutorial right before the final match, I expect most of them to ignore the notification”

A shield of black energy popped up around the prep area for the party of adventurers on the other side of the arena. The Professor cursed “shit, they can still see out of that, I hate to waste the points, but no point giving them extra information”

A second shield of black energy popped up around their side of the arena.

Congratulations!: a fan has purchased an Obscuring Field around your prep area and extended your prep time to the maximum of 30 minutes:

Congratulations! You have been selected to alpha test a personalized adventuring tutorial.

Do you accept Yes / No

Based on the overheard conversation, this was their best chance. So he gave the others a quick nod, before slamming the yes button. Then his eyes rolled back in his head and he passed out.

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Hank awoke in Heaven. All around him glittered piles and piles of junk, the scrap of a dozen civilizations. Large rats wandered around the piles, one was less than 3 feet from him munching on a mushroom growing from the cave floor.

Lv 10 D Large Rat. Dungeon Animal. Passive.

Passive dungeon creatures would not attack unless attacked first, and would not team up on foes. Almost no dungeon used Passive creatures unless they were meant as food for other creatures. So either this area was relatively safe, or these were not meant to be the dungeon defenders.

His party was not here with them, but since the lady said that team combat training would be included, he assumed he had to progress further to find them, maybe even complete this dungeon solo before the team dungeon?

Normally he would be scared to be dumped into a dungeon, but this one seemed made for him as he dove into a pile of junk with his trusty pet tool.

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2 weeks later, his Junk Mini-Mecha was punching in the steel skull of a bus-sized Cyborg Rat Queen. She went limp, finally dead and her last few defenders scattered, into the endless piles of junk, now many of the objects were in much better shape, the piles having improved in quality along with the danger of the rats as he pressed further into the dungeon.

As the queen died and he pushed aside the kill notifications, a portal appeared with a notification.

Congratulations! For beating your 5th-floor boss, you have unlocked the portal to the team dungeon.

However, leaving now will mean you are unable to return to your personal tutorial dungeon unless you speak with a Dungeon or Dungeon Helper in the Nightmare Collective sub-faction of the Nightmare Swarm Faction as they create the personal tutorial dungeons for our users.

Hank had never heard of this faction and had no idea how long they would take to find, he wanted to get to his team, but there was a path that would lead him deeper into the dungeon where the rats get bigger and more mechanical as he goes deeper, and the scrap metal becomes better, and the objects in better shape.

His Mecha was a beautiful piece of shit, many areas of it were Junk or Trash quality, but the previous model and this one had kept him alive in when the rat swarms would have ripped his tiny body apart. He left jagged sections of metal that looked like holes he could be attacked through, but when they tried they jagged bits of metal welded onto the mech at random angles would rip apart flesh and crush the delicate mechanical paws of the cyborgs.

He had decided to go deeper into the dungeon and make his mecha the best and most deadly piece of shit he could before the battle for his future. He would win by being the best scavenger ever, so good they had to make him an elder even if he was a small green skin who ate rats and lived underground.

The Queen had breathed fire during the fight, he wanted whatever let her do that, so he had Gadget shift from the heavy protective gauntlet form it was in over the mecha’s fist to his favorite rapid dissection tool.

“Gadget, chain-scalpel”

The Gauntlet turned into a device with a long handle, looking like an unholy mish-mash of a chainsaw and a halberd. Upon closer inspection of the chainsaw section, where the jagged metal that cut into a tree would normally be, where a tiny metal arm with a scalpel blade on it. When he turned the device on, he didn’t hack into the body of the queen like an attack, instead, he held the blade close to the creature's neck, and pulsed the handle. The blades swung out rapidly creating a thousand, tiny, surprisingly precise cuts. Visibly the flesh peeled neatly from the cybernetic components, falling into bite-sized cubes next to the body for easy cooking or into another pile of meat poisoned by metals or chemicals from the creature. He changed a setting and the good meat started to be added directly to his inventory system, a personal space he could will non-living things into.

He had earned this “inventory” from his first boss fight, the various boss rats unlocking new aspects of his system upgrades for him, along with instructions on how to use them. The second boss had unlocked the Xp spending system, the 3rd an auto-loot option, he had only tried the auto-loot on non-cybernetic rats though, most of the wiring and delicate components from his junk mech had been manually scavenged from the cyborgs, but he had gotten cash and even a few healing potions from auto looting the purely flesh rats on the first few floors.

This was also another reason to press on in the solo tutorial before going through the portal. What if there was a power he needed locked behind a boss deeper in the dungeon.

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Hank was on the 9th floor in his MK III mecha, he was currently hiding behind a pile of junk while the junk started to heat up from the barrage of laser fire. 10 sniper rats were in a towering nest next to a huge mound that had to be the nest of this floor boss. He had finally got a missile lock on the sniper nest on his last desperate run from one pile of junk to the next. He aimed the shoulder-mounted missile pod over the pile of junk blocking the sniper rats line of fire.

Three leather missiles fired from the pod on his shoulder, one’s flight was off, its enhancements failing and it flopped to the ground bouncing around like a balloon losing it’s air. Thankfully he had a fail-safe where such failures would not attempt to detonate.

The other two missiles flew true-ish, their enhanced leather casing staying as rigid as steel.

His scavenger skills let him substitute one material for another, and the better he was, the less like the original material the substituted material needed to be. He lacked the tools to machine real missiles, but he could create a form to wrap the skin of a powerful boss rat around, then with a creative mix of unstable chemicals, rat shit, and mushroom spores. You had leather missiles. They were not smart projectiles, just arched over obstacles, with a slapdash computer to calculate the targeting vectors. Which is how one missed, hitting the base of the tower. Only one of the three missiles actually made it to the target.

He peaked around the pile of junk just in time to see the sniper nest go up in flames, half a dozen burning bodies falling from the burning and falling tower of junk. The missile that hit the base enough to topple the slapdash structure.

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Five Weeks into the tutorial. He had beat the floor boss of the 10th floor, and unlocked the ability to return to this dungeon whenever he wants, the bosses would take a week to re-spawn, he could even grant other people access, making him the dungeon master of his personal tutorial dungeon.

He set his home base and workshop on the first floor as a section only he could enter. And there was even a special room that contained all the things in his “inventory” allowing him to walk through and see it all. No real point to it, besides letting him know that his inventory was tied to real-ish space somewhere.

His MK IV Junk Mech was ready for action, as he jumped into the portal to spend the last 3 weeks with his team.

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Back in the arena, 30 minutes had passed and the team of small monster people began to wake up from their sleep.

Masa also began to wake up, her and Professor Omega had spent the last 2 months, subjective time, watching and guiding these people from the shadows. Only one of the heroes had done the tutorial, the dwarf, he had learned the basics of blacksmithing as he had always wanted, but not completed the personal dungeon or found the team fight portal, not that it would have helped, something had gone wonderfully wrong with his dungeon.

Only Hank had done all of the personal dungeons, he had missed half of the team dungeon, but the other 4 progressed okay without him, it was as the team dungeon was getting too hard for them to continue without a real tank-type character or a good healer when hank had finally shown up with his mecha to be a much more literal tank then the term normally meant. He was also able to make gadgets for the others just as they were able to put their crafts to work to make him better gear.

They had two weeks left to try the team fight simulator that claimed to let them practice for the real fight.

Masa was excited to see them get to fight with real gear, experience fighting as a team, and most importantly; a plan.