Quick Change Volume 1: Slyborn
C.T. O'Leary
Copyright © 2020 C.T. O'Leary
All rights reserved
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Cover design by: Jon Dunham & Matt Davies
For my lovely wife Staci, and our dog Leo
Thanks for all the love and support
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Acknowledgement
About The Author
Chapter 1
Seth Andersen was royally screwed. He was trying to remain optimistic, trying to keep his breathing down and keep an easy smile on his face as he entered the boardroom filled with imposing older men and women in suits, but he was screwed.
His sneakers squeaked slightly on the marbled floor as he took up his position near the projector screen, and the man nearest him on his right pulled a subtle face at the fact that sneakers had even entered this sacred, dusty boardroom. Only suit people were supposed to enter this room!
Seth’s fingers fumbled with the HDMI cord as he looked for a port to plug it in to his laptop, but the modern laptop maker had decided to leave HDMI ports off in favor of more of their proprietary ports. Classic.
Luckily, a converter happened to be sitting on the boardroom table, so Seth mumbled a few sorrys and squeaked his way over and back, prize in hand. The converter went into one of the proprietary ports, and the HDMI slotted right into the converter on the third try. Seth looked at the dark projector screen, and after a few incredibly tense moments, there was light.
Seth began his presentation. “Ladies and gentlemen of the board, my name is Seth Andersen, and I lead our user experience team here. Some of you may remember my presentation last October, proposing the new checkout experience on our website. The proposal was approved on the condition that I present the results to you all here today.”
“Unfortunately…” This was it. The moment he’d been dreading for the past four months was finally upon him. His radical redesign of the checkout process of nileshopping.com, his employer’s largest e-commerce site, had been his main focus for the last quarter of the previous year. After pushing very hard to convince the company to let him implement the new process, he’d finally gained the approval of the board of directors, and the new design was implemented by their developer team.
Seth was glued to the analytics data for the first weekend after the changes went live. There appeared to be a dip in revenue, but there was always a slight resistance to change in software. The customers had to embrace his new design. It was so easy and minimal, there was hardly any effort to paying for your order at all!
After one month with the new design, deep into the holiday territory where sales numbers should have been skyrocketing, the seed of dread had solidified in Seth’s gut as sales remained stagnant. In the mornings as he drove into work, out at the bar with his friends, and even on a single short vacation, Seth’s mind wouldn’t let him go more than five minutes before reminding him how royally screwed he was.
A deep, silky voice startled Seth out of his reverie, “Unfortunately?” Seth jerked his head up and realized he’d gone silent. Geoff Treso, founder and CEO of Seth’s employer, and one of the richest men on the planet, gazed at him with a pleasant smile that didn’t ascend to his eyes. His left eyebrow was quirked at an angle, as if to say, “How much more of my time are you going to waste, kid?” Geoff’s head was shaved completely bald. He was a relatively trim man, accentuated by his designer suit that likely cost more than Seth’s sports car.
Seth spluttered, “Yes, unfortunately, I don’t have the best news to share today.” He paused and swallowed, and the noise sounded so loud in the silent room that it was almost comical. No one moved or interjected, so Seth continued. “Since the new checkout layout has been in place, completed orders have fallen slightly when compared to last year.”
He paused again and scanned the room. All eyes were on him. No one spoke up, and no one moved a muscle. Seth clicked the right arrow on his laptop, and the slideshow on the projector advanced to the next screen. A graph sat centered in the slide, showing a twenty-four percent reduction in completed orders as compared to the previous year. Overall, revenue had stayed much the same as the previous year, but that broke the company’s streak of drastically increasing revenue yearly for nearly a decade.
When Seth’s analytics engineer had really dug into the data, it turned out that many more people had added things to their virtual cart than the previous year, but there’d been a sizable increase in people leaving the site right before they entered their credit card information.
Geoff spoke up again, shattering the silence of the boardroom, “I see. We’re talking lost millions here. The investors will have a heyday with this. We’ll probably have some layoffs. If, and I really mean if, we allow you to try and rectify this situation, what’s your plan?”
Seth was shocked that there was any discussion of him continuing to run the user experience on the website. He carefully thought over what he was going to say before answering, “I think the most important thing we can do today is revert the checkout experience to the old version that our customers were used to. I also think we should be doing some focus groups over the designs between the two different checkouts, and trying to figure out what pieces of the old one are performing so much better. At the very least, this experiment has given us some very helpful lessons on what not to do.”
Geoff nodded silently, and the rest of the members around the table seemed to shrink back, attempting to escape his gaze. After a slightly uncomfortable amount of silence, he said, “Alright, thank you for the suggestions. Take the rest of the day off. I’m going to let the CMO make the call on whether or not you’ll be employed here any longer.” With that, his gaze swept to the woman sitting two places down the table on his right, “Alright, Marie, what was next on the list for this meeting? I vaguely remember something about making a donation to that charity that grants wishes for sick kids?”
That was the last thing Seth heard as he practically sprinted from the room, nearly forgetting to grab his laptop. As the heavy wooden door fell closed behind him, a strange sensation overcame him. While the last comment from the CEO had been a little worrying, the dreaded meeting was at least concluded. He felt like he would be sleeping soundly for the first time in a week as soon as he got home.
He took the elevator down to his floor and headed for his office. As he passed the cubes of the designers and programmers that made up his team, he could tell that they were all trying not to look at him, though he caught a couple of side-eyes as they pretended to work.
Seth entered his office, dropped his laptop into his backpack, and walked back out, hitting the light, and locking the door behind him. He walked back past the same employees, still trying not to make eye contact, and headed to the elevator. The elevator was empty, and it hummed as it descended to the first floor.
Seth exited the lobby, heading for the parking lot. The more time that elapsed after the meeting, the lighter he felt. He was at the point where he didn’t care much if he didn’t keep working for the company. Obviously, it wasn’t going to be the artistic, progressive place he envisioned himself in. Either way, having it on his resume would make him much more eligible for practically any company in the United States.
He turned the key in the ignition of his car and a slight worry wormed its way into his head. How would he pay his car payment if the job didn’t work out? To put it lightly, the car had been a pretty extravagant purchase for him to celebrate his promotion to a management position. He could probably pay his rent and the car payment for two or three months without any income, but after that, he’d likely have to sell it if he hadn’t found work.
He was getting too far ahead, he reminded himself. He wasn’t technically jobless yet, and the CMO had actually been the one urging him to push to modernize the website, so perhaps he’d be shielded a bit from the wrath of Geoff.
Seth continued musing about his future as he accelerated up the entrance ramp, the torque his engine put out shoving him backwards into the leather seats. He’d just reached his preferred cruising speed, about fifteen miles per hour faster than the speed limit, when he felt a shudder. He immediately let off the gas, and the car began to lose speed. Whatever the shudder was, it didn’t feel healthy at all for the new car, but there hadn’t been any sound to accompany the feeling at all.
Seth popped his right blinker on and headed for the shoulder, trying to decide if he actually wanted to stop on the side of the interstate and stare uncomprehendingly at the machinery under the hood. He glanced into his rearview and noticed several other cars were also heading for the shoulder, and traffic as a whole was beginning to slow down.
Immediately, his mind went to earthquake, and he decelerated harder, not wanting to be moving if the asphalt began to buckle. Seth had just reached a complete stop, turning on his hazard lights, when he felt another shudder, this one much more violent. It almost felt like his organs were stretching and rearranging, and a strong nausea washed over him. Dark lines whirled around his vision, and he wondered if he were passing out.
Suddenly, the strange nausea ramped up and was excruciating. Seth gagged, his stomach trying to empty itself to make the horrible feelings go away. The world lurched, and the nausea vanished instantly. Seth found himself in a totally alien environment. He was surrounded by complete darkness, with only a small circle of illumination around him, reaching perhaps two feet in every direction.
The most disturbing part of the transition was that fact that he’d gone from sitting in the car to standing vertically with no in-between. That lack of transition was much more bothersome than simply teleporting somewhere else. Seth’s stomach clenched again as his lunch tried once more to claw its way out of his gut, but he ground his teeth and resisted the urge.
Instead of vomiting, a pitiful squeal/groan hybrid escaped his lips, and he felt himself shake as adrenaline dumped into his system. His mind continued to frantically try and make sense of the featureless environment surrounding him.
He turned in place, confirming that there seemed to be a wall of absolute darkness beginning within a few feet of him on all sides. Seth’s fingernails bit into the meat of his palms as he took a single step in a random direction. The step conveyed the sense of walking on some massive treadmill because he felt like he was moving but nothing about the scenery changed. Even the ring of light stayed perfectly centered on his body, like some celestial spotlight shone down from straight above.
Seth held perfectly still for a few more moments, and when nothing changed. he whispered aloud, “OK, dude, keep it cool, you can figure this out. Just keep poking until you get more information.” He thought he heard indistinct whispering coming from everywhere at once, and almost freaked out before realizing it was just an echo of his own voice.
He took a deep breath in another futile attempt to calm his raging heartbeat, and then tapped his right toes on the ground. A sharp rap resounded, almost like he’d tapped on some kind of hardwood, and echoed for far longer than he thought it should have.
Seth’s mind kept whirling and started jumping to the worst kind of conclusions. Had he died? Perhaps the earthquake had dropped him into some bottomless pit, and this was the afterlife. Or had he had a brain aneurysm? He’d heard that those could kill someone almost instantly.
Before his mind could advance too much farther down that train of thought, a literal pop-up window materialized out of nowhere, right in front of his face. He shouted an inarticulate yelp and stumbled backwards a few steps, but the window didn’t seem to get any farther away, just like the ring of light surrounding him on the ground.
He focused on the writing on the pop-up window, it read simply, “Choose your class.” He wasn’t sure what to make of it. He tried waving his hand through the ghostly window, but to his surprise, his hand actually went behind the window, almost as if it was projected directly on his eyeballs.
Seth’s first instinct was to poke himself in the eyeball. It, unsurprisingly, turned out to be the wrong move, and he shouted a curse and clamped his hand over the now aching eye. He let the pain die down, and then began to focus on the content of the window again. There was nothing else written except for the three-word message. No classes listed for him to choose from.
He wondered what kind of classes he was supposed to choose. Was he going to be attending some kind of school of the afterlife? Perhaps he could enroll in Haunting: 101.
Despite the powerful feeling of panic that continued to thunder through his body, Seth couldn’t help but to fall back into his pattern of critiquing the user experience of this terrible system. A system prompt with no way to close or advance was a terrible idea. How was the user supposed to even know what to do at this point?
After a few more frustrating moments trying to wave the window out of his vision, Seth grew frustrated enough to shout, “How do I choose a class when I don’t even know what the classes are?!”
As soon as the last words left his mouth, the window text changed momentarily to Determining available classes by starting region, then faded away. Six circles similar to the ringing his feet faded into view, arrayed in a semicircle in front of him.
In each of the new circles of light, a Seth clone faded into existence. Each clone wore some assortment of medieval looking clothing or armor, and held some kind of weapon. The clone’s faces were devoid of any hint of expression, and their eyes were distant, focused on nothing. Seth gingerly stepped toward the one on the far right, wearing shining metal armor, and when it didn’t react, he waved his hand in front of the clone’s eyes.
Seth expected the him-clone to turn into a zombie and nibble his fingers off or something, but the entire group of six clones remained stubbornly inanimate, not even breathing or blinking. Seth took a deep breath to calm himself and decided to think of the clones as kind of wax sculptures. He inspected the closest one in more detail.
The wax sculpture wore gleaming silver armor with gold trimming along its edges, a sword belt on its hip, and a massive tower shield strapped to its back, jutting up over its shoulders and behind his head. Pauldrons, both shaped like the head of an eagle, poked out from its shoulders. As Seth scrutinized the first clone’s face, a new pop-up window sprang to life above its head. Seth scanned it, trying to make sense of his situation.
; Class: Knight
Role: Melee Fighter - Tank
Knights strive to protect those weaker than themselves, absorbing massive amounts of damage.
Seth’s mouth dropped open as his jaw went slack. Was he trapped in some kind of video game? He’d played a lot of video games when he was younger, and even dreamt of making them for a living for a while. During college though, Seth had found his passion in User Experience courses, learning how people use systems, and how to make an easy to use system himself.
After he’d graduated with his degree, he’d been working and pulling extremely long hours trying to make his career take him where he wanted to go, and games hadn’t really been a part of that.
Seth figured it was better to forge ahead rather than succumbing to the existential crisis roiling barely under the thinly stretched surface of his psyche. He walked down the line of wax figure clones to learn about other options.
A Seth-clone wearing some kind of chain armor, with some plating and some leather, and a single, massive two-handed sword poking above his shoulders stood next in line. Another window appeared with more information.
Class: Warrior
Role: Melee Fighter - Close Range Damage
Warriors love to be in the heart of a battle, and specialize in close combat.
Next came a hooded variant, with thick padded black leather armor and two daggers pinned to either side of his waist. Seth could see the copy of his face under the hood, but the details were very difficult to make out beneath the unnatural looking shadows that clung to the clone’s face. He scanned the prompt that appeared above this spooky version of himself.
Class: Rogue
Role: Melee Fighter - Close Range Damage
Rogues cling to the shadows, striking only when their enemies least expect it.
After the rogue came another copy of himself wearing leather armor, however the armor was brown, and the pants were green. This option had a hood, but it lay on his shoulders. Strapped to his back were a short wooden recurve bow and a quiver with several arrows sticking out.
Quick Change Volume 1: Slyborn Page 1