To say things were tense would be the understatement of the apocalypse. Theon had trouble focusing as he felt Vasuki, who he had ordered to be silent, squeezing and wringing his brain like a wet towel. He couldn’t rule out the possibility that Vasuki was actively trying to manipulate him, but he doubted it. It was like Vasuki was literally a tightly wound bundle of nerves.

The Drow, who was at the center of all this, still laid on the bed sleeping peacefully, her trust in him seemed absolute. He couldn’t rule out the possibly that she wasn’t as defenseless as she looked, but he was certain they could kill her at a moment’s notice if they needed to.

After he had promised her safety and protect last night Theon had Kate come up front, while he and the Drow sat in the back of the cruiser. Ben and Kate kept firm grips on their weapons and they were mirrored by the Drow with her staff.

They decided to find a place to crash for the night and headed for a motel. Theon ‘spoke’ with the Drow briefly while they made their way there. They exchanged names and she said hers was Baltana but that was all she would say about herself. She started to become upset when Theon pressed her, and she argued that they had not agreed she would reveal personal information to him for protection.

So, he decided not to press her at the time, but he was burning with desire to know about her life before she came to Earth. He wanted to know if she was some sort of spawned NPC that this game had created or if she was an actual person from another world, an alien as it were.

He suspected she was an alien, he had never heard of drows with that sort of pattern on their skin. It made sense though, drows live underground and the stone pattern in their skin would be a sort of natural camouflage. Such a thing could have been gained through natural evolution or adaptation. Also, her hair was black, typically drows had solid white hair in stark contrast to their black skin. This was insufficient evidence for him though, it was technically possible for a drow to have black hair, albeit rare he supposed.

They were in a double bed motel room, Ben and Kate had taken one bed and Baltana had slept in the other. Vasuki had kept watch, though Theon doubted he had just sat in this chair all night. Everyone except him was utterly exhausted, he’d had a four-hour nap, well technically he’d passed out according to Vasuki. The world, as far as they knew it, had ended yesterday, so Theon let them sleep in.

Theon turned his gaze from Baltana and looked out the window to check on the cruiser for the thousandth time. He’d parked it where they could keep an eye on it through their motel room window, but it wasn’t worth splitting up over.

“Thanks for keeping watch Vasuki, did anything happen?” Theon whispered.

“Oh, I can speak now?”

Theon was starting to come to terms with the fact that Vasuki was perpetually paranoid and a habitual cynic. He tried to not let it annoy him as he said, “As long as you don’t nag me.”

Vasuki sputtered for half a minute before he could piece words together and said, “Nag?!”

Theon thinned his eyes and grit his teeth until his jaw started to ache.

Vasuki sighed loudly, then fell silent for a time while Theon felt him squirming.

Theon took comfort in the fact that Vasuki hated to be ignored. He couldn’t wave or gesture, he had no body to speak of. Theon was his only companion, the only one who could hear him. Until Theon fell asleep Vasuki was essentially imprisoned within his mind. The thought of such an existence made Theon shudder and cringe.

Theon decided to be the one to give a peace offering and he explained his reasoning. “I trust my instincts, they’ve kept me alive so far, that’s why I did it. When I picked a companion, I scrolled through the list of all sorts of cheap creatures, but when I saw yours I randomly chose it. Before that, my instincts kept me alive as I killed three wargs and an orc.

“I don’t know if it’s because of my high psychic ability or something else. Hell, it could just be luck I don’t know. But I have to trust myself, and if you’re going to be in my head I need you to trust me too. I need to be able to trust you as well if you’re going to use my body. Can you do that?”

“Yes, of course you can trust me totally. I have both our best interests in mind always, you know that.”

“There’s more,” Theon said. “The information she can provide could be invaluable, I could find out if she’s from another world or fabricated, made up.”

“She looks real enough to me, what are you talking about kid?”

Theon’s eyebrows shot up as he asked, “Is she from another world Vasuki?”

“Maybe, she could be from another dimension that doesn’t have worlds, we may never know. Why would it matter though? She’s here now, and she’s dangerous. Ask her how many humans she’s killed, probably more than me.”

“I will, when she wakes up I have a lot of questions.”

“She’s been awake for over an hour now.”

Theon turned back and looked at Baltana, she was lying on her back and he could see her chest rise and fall rhythmically.

“How can you tell?” Theon asked.

“Her eyes, she was peeking out and watching me, then I saw her eyes follow you across the room from under her lids. So, unless she sleeps with her eyes cracked open, and has some freaky REM sleep, she’s been awake.”

Theon quietly walked across the room and stood next to her. He couldn’t tell if she was awake, whatever Vasuki could see he probably needed higher perception for. He reached out a hand to touch her face, but before he could he felt something touching his groin. He looked down and saw her hand extended with a grey metal dagger pushed up against his manhood. He slowly withdrew his hand, and the blade echoed his movements, returning under her cloak.

Theon frowned as he noticed her red eyes peering through cracked lids. She didn’t make to get up, and Theon wondered if she was the literal definition of sleeping with one eye open, or if she was awake.

He walked back to the chair he’d been sitting in and pulled it aside. There was a small desk that went with it, and on it were what you’d expect, a phone, lamp, some pamphlets. He flipped over a sheet of paper that indicated good places to eat and began drawing his HUD. On another paper he wrote his stats page as identically as he could on the top half, then did it again on the lower half but left the values empty.

As he approached her he wondered what level she was while reprimanding himself for not doing it earlier.

Name: Baltana Maearn

Level: 43

His heart skipped a beat as he read her level. She was significantly higher than him and he wondered if he could have killed her. As he stepped up next to the bed again, he held the two papers facing her. He watched her for a moment as her eyes fluttered slightly, then slowly opened. She glared at him briefly before noticing the HUD paper and then she snatched it from his hand, giving him a paper cut.

Vasuki bucked for control, but he forced him down. “Vasuki!” Theon hissed. “You can’t kill someone over a papercut!”

Ben and Kate started to shift restlessly as Vasuki said, “Sorry kid, just my instincts is all.”

Theon gritted his teeth at the mockery, but Baltana drew his attention with another outburst of incomprehensible words. The HUD image had meant something to her, and Theon tapped his cheek, so they could speak.

She reached out and touched his face again before saying, “I see this! What does it mean?”

Theon grinned mischievously and said in his mind, “That wasn’t part of our deal.”

She took on her own mischievous grin that made Theon uneasy before responding, “Tread carefully, Hero. Speak!”

Vasuki was unusually calm at the veiled threat, it seemed that he was equally curious about all this.

Theon carefully, and slowly lowered himself to sit on the bed. Once he was comfortable he said, “Tell me about where you come from.”

“A world called Beivisu.”

Theon was upset about the terse answer, so he said, “It’s called a HUD, or heads up display.”

She tilted her head to the side, and he took effort to mirror her exactly, until she started scowling. Theon just shrugged and moved to get up when she didn’t start speaking.

“Wait!” She said as she moved to grab him. “I’ll tell you, just ask me.”

Theon lowered himself with obvious satisfaction and got comfortable before he began a barrage of questions. She told him about how her people lived under the world, and there was great strife amongst them. She was of a high birth and was destined to rule in some capacity had she lived long enough. Most of it was in keeping with what he knew of drows, except their world had no elves, and she claimed to have never heard of such a thing. She also claimed to not have any other type of intelligent beings known on her planet, though she did admit that it was a large planet and it wasn’t totally explored.

That was when things became truly interesting for Theon. She claimed that one of her worlds gods, a being called Nomegom, appeared to her. He told her it was a blessing, and that she would have a chance to fight for him. Baltana wouldn’t tell him what the reward was, or what her specific goal was, but she said that she didn’t really have a choice in coming. She also wasn’t told where it was, or who she was supposed to fight, or so she told Theon.

After that she flat out refused to say anymore until Theon explained the HUD. Which he did, but in doing so he also had to tell her about games, and about how their world had changed. It was like opening a can of worms and Theon was trying not to give away too many of his aces all at once. Instead of going into it further, he brought out the stats sheet, and had her say ‘stats menu.’ It took a couple tries until she was able to say it, and when she did her eyes looked like they might pop out.

He brought her to the table and had her copy what she saw on the paper he held. By then though, Ben and Kate were already up, and were looking for orders. Theon had them get some food for everyone to eat, and gather more paper for him to write on, then they were free to do whatever they wanted, but he suggested they practice magic.

Her writing was exact, and he could easily read her stats.

Name:

Baltana Maearn

Race:

Drow

Gender:

Female

Title:

None

Level:

43

Unspent Points:

1

Health:

70/70

Mana:

121/150

Stamina:

80/80

Strength:

4

Vitality:

7

Endurance:

8

Dexterity:

18

Agility:

18

Intelligence:

24

Willpower:

14

Psychic:

15

Perception:

16

Charisma:

19

Luck:

0

Unless she understood what was going on, which he doubted, there was no way she could have faked this. To his disappointment he found that her base stats were one hundred and one, while his was ninety-one. It made sense that a baby wouldn’t have a strength of ten, which also led him to believe he could raise his stats the old-fashioned way.

Everything he saw just raised more and more questions for him. Either she’d started as level one and gained forty-three levels, and tricked him, or she’d started as level forty-two. The easiest explanation was that she was an NPC and magic is as magic does. But if so, then why wouldn’t she know what elves are, it made no sense.

He was inclined to believe that whoever, or whatever, spawned monsters from other worlds was calculating their abilities and automatically assigning levels to them. There was an easy way to determine if that was possible.

“Hey, Vasuki, you said before that I’m stuck with this game design for life, right? Even if I go to another planet. Tell me what would happen if I was on another planet and I guessed someone’s level, who didn’t have this type of level system?”

“Simple, the system would calculate their level based on your system. It’s like auto-translate, but way more sophisticated.”

Theon held back a laugh at the absurdity of that as he said, “Thanks. Any idea what luck does?”

“I have a guess that it makes you luckier, just a guess though kid.”

“Yeah but how would that work? It makes no sense!”

“Kid, you’re standing next to a fantasy creature called a drow, in a world with magic, and you’re complaining luck makes no sense? Don’t get me wrong, I have no idea how it works and anyone who says they do is probably lying, but is it really that much of a stretch?”

“You’re right, but it’s going to bother me until I understand all this.”

Vasuki was cut off by Baltana demanding vehemently to know what everything meant. Theon told her what everything meant once, but then demanded that she learn how to read, write, and speak English.

Kate brought him two bowls of oatmeal before vanishing, and Theon handed one to Baltana, who reluctantly ate. She didn’t complain to him personally, but she did rattle off in her language and made a disgusted face after every bite.

He left her like that as he went outside to find Ben and Kate trying to set paper on fire. With Vasuki’s coaching he was able to get them both using all five forms of magic within half an hour while Baltana watched. She didn’t seem that impressed by the fire magic, but the other forms had obviously left an impression.

She seemed to be waiting for them to extend their practice to other types of magic, and Theon suspected she had some form of dark magic. He knew that she had mind control, and some form of telepathy, and so he decided to practice and see what he could do.

The motel was in an L-formation and inside was the parking lot where they stood near the cruiser practicing. The place was secluded and so they felt relatively safe. This afforded Theon a moment to reflect on everything that had happened, and what he’d spoken to the Drow about.

He stopped his pointless fooling around, since he didn’t seem to be making any progress, and he walked over to the police cruiser. He sat on the grille guard, not unlike countless drunks or criminals probably had, as he pondered the game the world had become.

“Every game has some purpose, or end goal. I wonder what the endgame is for all this?” Theon muttered aloud to himself, Vasuki, and no one in particular.

Theon noticed a blinking exclamation point as Vasuki said, “Kid, why does everything have to have a meaning or purpose to you? Human’s have an expression, curiosity killed the cat. Can’t things just simply be?”

Theon ignored him as he brought up the new notification and was assaulted by a downpour of cascading messages.

Seek out The Elder One

Wow, out of all the humans, you’re the first one to wonder what the purpose of the game is. It’s been over a day! I can’t believe how stupid humans are!

Be still and listen, Theon Adam Osman. Seek out The Elder One in Palisade, CO. There you will find the next clue. There’s so much you don’t know! Oh, it sounds so mysterious and cool, doesn’t it!?

P.S. Don’t tell him your true name.

Reward: Try not to die small fry, it’ll be worth it.

As reward, and perhaps punishment, for being the first to unlock this quest you have gained the notice of the gods. The hidden trait and accompanying title Psychic Detective has also been unlocked.

Congratulations! You’re the first human to attain a title without Earth’s Controller bestowing it upon you! Fun fact: the first human title was Turdy Turd Face.

Reward: Double experience gain for one week. +10 Unspent Points.

Congratulations! You’re the first human to attain a trait!

Reward: Triple experience gain for one week. +10 Unspent Points.

Bonus (Hidden): 250,000 GC

Vasuki started laughing manically as Theon tried to swallow but found his throat too dry. He could feel the gods watching him, his every action intensely scrutinized. His skin tingled, and it felt like an oppressive weight was pressing down on him.

He tossed his concerns aside as he opened his magic tab, or spell list as he called it. At the top it had the five he was used to, but under it was easily thirty more. He had to scroll down to read everything, they ranged from telekinesis to dowsing. The only things he could immediately see missing were the abilities to summon spirits, such as mediumship or automatic writing.

“You’d think a psychic detective could contact spirits, to like, you know investigate?!” Theon bemoaned to the sky.

He got a new notification as Vasuki said desperately, “Kid are you trying to get us both killed!? Quit while you’re ahead!”

Where have all the spirits gone?!

We’d be disappointed if you hadn’t noticed that, good job. Here’s your reward, we call it Contact Spirits. It’s kind of an all-in-one, instead of that nonsense humans make up. The twist is you can only contact spirits of those who’ve died since the Galactic Internet initialized. How you do it and what it costs, well that’s up to you to figure out.

No, seriously, where did the spirits or souls of the dearly departed go before The Galactic Internet initialized? Can they be contacted? Resurrected? That’s for you to figure out too.

Reward upon quest completion: +100 Unspent Points. 1,000,000 GC. Title: Metaphysical Investigator. Variable hidden reward(s).

Theon couldn’t hide his grin if he wanted to, when it rained it poured. He noticed that he had everyone’s attention, but instead of explaining he focused on a small potted plant. He used his telekinesis to lift it off the ground, and they all gasped, even the drow. The plant started wobbling vigorously once it was about five feet off the ground, and then his mana struck zero.

Vasuki screamed out, he must have felt the backlash too. The pain was stifling and sudden, causing Theon to black out for an instant before he stopped himself from falling. He was panting as he made his way back to the cruiser and sat down.

“Did you see that! I did that!” Theon proclaimed proudly.

“Yes, how did you do it? Can you teach us?” Kate asked as Ben nodded his agreement.

“It’s Telekinesis, I have a whole gambit of psychic abilities now. It unlocked with a quest, and I don’t know if I can teach you, but I can try. First though I need to distribute my stat points, so I don’t run out of mana so easily, it hurts.”

They wanted to know what quest, so they could gain the abilities too, but Theon put them off with assurances of doing it later. He desperately needed to find out what the stats meant, especially now that he had so many points to spend.

Most games came with an instruction manual, or you could mouse over something to gain details about it. He couldn’t remember how much he had tried to discover their exact meaning before, but he knew it wasn’t enough. He had been too busy running or fighting for his life. Now though, he couldn’t put it off.

He focused on strength and it was no surprise that nothing happened. All he’d had to do to bring up his notifications was to focus on the exclamation point, clearly that didn’t work in this scenario. He poured his mind down on the word strength as he wondered what it meant.

“Christ, it can’t be that simple can it?” Theon asked himself in a whisper as a new popup appeared.

He went down the list and each stat would reveal its secrets if he focused on it and wondered to himself about it. He even did it with his mana, health, and stamina to see what his regeneration rate was.

Strength was what you would expect, physical power, ability to hit hard and carry heavy loads, no surprises there. Vitality was his health and durability, making a person more difficult to damage not just inflating his health bar. Bones muscle and skin became thicker and more durable. Endurance and Vitality both had an affect that negated poison damage and prevented illnesses or diseases. Endurance was his stamina, how hard he could push himself physically, but it was also his endurance to resisting pain, not unlike a physical version of willpower. It seemed that if it could be endured, endurance was at play. Endurance also had an innate regeneration of one point per level per minute.

Dexterity and Agility had been confusing Theon before but now they were clearly explained. The easiest way to explain the difference that Theon could think of was imagining a paralyzed individual. They may have incredibly high dexterity, but zero agility. Dexterity was the ability to make small yet precise movements, like hand-eye coordination. It was good for things like drawing a map or shooting a gun. Agility on the other hand was much more like speed, and the ability to control and coordinate your body precisely. A gymnast, dancer, or a professional runner would have a very high agility, but potentially no dexterity.

Then there were the mental stats, intelligence, willpower, psychic, perception. Intelligence was literally just that, how smart you are. Typically, in games this dictated a person’s mana, but not here. Sure, intelligence could help one perform magic, but it wasn’t necessary to perform simple magic. The more intelligence a person had, and the more knowledge they had about what they were doing allowed for more precise magic, more bang for the buck as it were.

Willpower dictated mana regeneration, and it also helped one keep focused, resist agonizing pain, and mental magic. It also helped perform more precise and powerful magic, along with mental domination, whatever that was.

Psychic the most unique stat in Theon’s opinion, dictated the amount of mana available and he’d already figured as much. It also determined the power of one’s spells, or psychic abilities and enhanced one’s connection to The Galactic Internet.

Perception was the weakest ability according to Theon. It relied heavily on intelligence because it was one thing to notice something odd, but another to understand why it was odd. It did however, increase one’s senses, such as the sense of pain, hearing, sight, taste, touch. Theon was unsure if it affected a psychic sense, but he didn’t doubt it did.

Charisma was essentially just beauty, or how others initially perceive you. It might make Theon sound good, and look good, but it wouldn’t force people to like him if he was cruel. That was of course, unless he got the ability extremely high, in which case it had a psychic aura effect that would make others lust after you unwillingly even.

Luck was surprisingly believable, even to a habitual cynic like Vasuki. It tilted The Galactic Internet in his favor, like dropping rewards in his lap, giving him awesome bonuses, or a break when he needed it. With a high luck he could expect not to fall asleep and wake up to orcs and wargs chasing him.

What really surprised him was what the points meant. After focusing on the numbers, he found out that five was ‘middle’ for humans. Each additional point adds a ten percent boost meaning Theon was at least fifty percent more powerful than the average human in every category now, except luck which everyone seemed to be zero at. Theon theorized that meant the ‘median’ human was at fifty percent, or half that of an optimal human.

He had just gotten twenty stat points for becoming the first to get both a title and trait, that’s a two hundred percent boost in total. If he manages to complete the quest ‘Where have all the spirits gone’ he would gain a thousand percent boost worth of points.

Before he distributed his stat points, which were really starting to pile up after killing the seventy-nine imps, Vasuki stopped him.

“You need to focus on your willpower kid,” Vasuki told him. “Once your mana is full, the excess energy is pumped back into the grid, so to speak, and you get paid for it. The so-called Galactic Credits is just energy, if I had to guess why it’s not called galactic energy, it would be because humans would be thrown off.

“Everything costs energy, to fabricate, teleport it to this planet, store it in stasis. Humans like to think money is credits or paper, but it’s not.” Vasuki laughed and said, “When you work, you expend time and energy in exchange for this paper money. When someone builds something, it requires time and energy, among a thousand other things, but when you boil it all down it’s just energy.

“Sure, there are other factors like high scarcity, high demand, rare materials, politicians skimming off the top of the pile. At the end of the day though you can’t transfer cash, or even human credits across the galaxy without energy, but you can transfer raw energy freely.”

Theon agreed emphatically, the willpower stat changed him in some tangible way that allowed him to generate one mana per point every minute. So, he had ten mana regen per minute, it was way too slow. He did some more research on his HUD and found out that one thousand mana equaled one credit. It seemed negligible, but when he was constantly generating mana it could add up. He gained over one credit every two hours as it was, it came out to over fourteen GC a day at ten willpower. He was only being offered one hundred GC per kill anyways, and this was far safer. That was all besides the other benefits willpower could offer him.

He distributed his points and pulled up his stat menu.

Name:

Theon Osman

Race:

Human

Gender:

Male

Title:

Psychic Detective

Level:

29

Unspent Points:

0

Health:

100/100

Mana:

027/290

Stamina:

100/100

Strength:

10

Vitality:

10

Endurance:

10

Dexterity:

11

Agility:

10

Intelligence:

11

Willpower:

25

Psychic:

29

Perception:

12

Charisma:

10

Luck:

1

He moaned in sync with Vasuki as they both basked in the ecstasy that was pouring through his mind. He had dumped fifteen points into both psychic and willpower and he could feel his mind straightening out and firming up. To Theon the sensation was best described as instead of drinking a cup of coffee in the morning, it was a cup of ecstasy, combined with the clarity of countless hours of meditation.

The last point he had placed into luck, and he wasn’t sure if it had any physical effects or not, but if it did he couldn’t tell. Dropping thirty-one points was probably something he wouldn’t experience again anytime soon, so he basked in it. He didn’t even notice the streaming lights pouring into his head, or the faint glow that shimmered around him.

Once he was done moaning loudly, his face started burning red as he saw both the Summers and Baltana watching him. Ben was laughing, and Kate looked embarrassed while the Drow seemed curious.

“Sorry, just finished distributing my points,” Theon said bashfully as he blinked his eyelids, clearing the tears of joy from his eyes.

Kate tsked before asking, “So will you give us the quest? Or teach us?”

“Sure,” Theon said as he held out his hand away from everyone. He’d gotten the psychic ability pyrokinesis and he’d wondered what it would do compared to his pyromancy.

He couldn’t be sure if it was mixing with pyromancy or if it was the results of his stat boost, since he hadn’t tried it before. What he could be sure of, was that pyrokinesis was extremely dangerous. The massive bonfire that gushed forth was like putty under his mind. It obeyed his slightest command utterly, he shaped it in the form of a person, a towering pillar that stretched into the sky, and condensed it into a ball, then put it out all within a few seconds.

In that few seconds he had only lost ten or so mana, and he wasn’t trying to make a massive fire either. He explained to both Kate and Ben about what he was doing and had them try and copy him. Baltana watched intensely as he went down his list of psychic abilities, or at least the relevant ones. He explained to the Summers what he was doing and gave a short description of the ability.

He didn’t expect them to be able to learn any of the abilities, so he was pleasantly surprised when Kate conjured a tiny marble, and when Ben said he could see Auras. They theorized about how Ben’s previous job as a psychologist had forced him to be good at reading people and somehow, this transferred to these abilities. Kate had been a school teacher before she became a stay at home wife where she spent her time doing creative projects for fun. Theon also learned that neither had a child, apparently it was a touchy subject, so Theon left it.

He instead suggested Ben try telepathy and empathy, the ability to speak with someone or read their emotions respectively. And for Kate to try psychometry the ability to discover information from touching objects.

They spent the morning doing this, even Baltana tried to copy them unsuccessfully. She just didn’t seem to have enough of a grasp at what they were trying to convey, so Theon told Kate and Ben to try and teach her to speak and read when they had free time. Theon could have done it himself, but he honestly didn’t want to, and Kate used to be a teacher, so he figured she was far more qualified.

The sun continued to rise into the sky as Vasuki and Theon spoke in his mind about true names, souls, Galactic Credits, magic, and The Elder One. Despite his worry, Vasuki was planning a trip to Palisade, his greed apparently the only thing greater than his fear.