by Prax Venter
“She led you here? She...”
Harrak ripped the pipe out of his mouth and walked a few steps forward.
“It can’t be her, Lex!”
The blonde woman flinched as he continued to hurl his words at her back. “She’s gone! We have enough problems without some madman stirring up old ones!” Harrak’s face was wild with rage as he gestured at Jack. Lex didn’t move, yet she seemed to grow smaller, her gaze locked down at the floor. Harrak’s smoldering eyes snapped to Jack’s, making him very uncomfortable. He was essentially naked under a cloth blanket, and if this bearded lunatic was going to start getting aggressive, Jack had only his fists.
“Okay, Hero,” Harrak began, the word dripping with sarcasm, “care to explain your Class? Or that damned empty sword belt in your Main Hand equipment slot?”
Harrak stepped into the firelight, and Jack could see him a lot better. He was older than Jack had thought, but he was also a lot bigger. Especially in the arm area. His arms were large, but his hands were huge. One of them was clenched tightly, and the other was pointing at Jack.
“Hey, I’ll answer anything you want!” Jack said. “But I’m no hero. I just want to figure out what is going on here.”
“You have a Hero Class!” Harrak yelled the words slowly. The man looked down at his daughter. “While ‘Irrelevant’ is becoming more self-explanatory the more he speaks.” He looked back at Jack with a sneer. “A decorative item in your weapon slot is beyond ridiculous. It’s suspicious is what it is.”
“Weapon slot?” Jack mumbled, confused. “This scabbard?” He pulled out the length of leather from under the blanket, careful not to flash his genitals at Lex. Jack noticed she was looking at him again.
He was lost for a moment when their eyes locked. Perhaps it was the soft fireplace lighting or the intensity of the insane situation he found himself in, but he just now saw how stunning she was. Her sad, golden eyes drew him in, and Jack decided then and there that he didn’t like seeing her unhappy.
“How can you not know?” she asked, pleading. They all waited for Jack to explain himself.
He became more uncomfortable as the silence grew. He had no idea how to respond. Harrak had had enough and turned to leave, but paused when he got to the door.
“Decide if he is a curse to us or not, but I am done here. I do not trust anything that comes out before ever going in.” And then he was out in the rain, the wooden door clattering shut behind him.
The storm outside was howling, but the silence in the cabin was deafening. Lex was looking at the floor between her elbows resting on her knees. Strands of her golden hair were loosely hanging down with a bit of her ears peeking out. They were pointed and longer than would be considered normal. They looked perfect. He couldn’t take his eyes off of her. After the silence became too much to bear, she pushed her arms off her legs and stood in one fluid motion, heading for the door.
“Wait!” Jack called. She stopped and looked back at him. The light was gone out of her eyes, and she looked like a completely different person. “I really want to answer your questions, and I still have so many of my own. Please don’t leave me here.” Jack thought he was slipping into madness and needed to have another person around right now.
He saw Lex drop some of the tension she was holding and let out a sigh. She considered his words, her eyes lingering on him, then seemed to come to a decision. The golden-eyed woman walked away from the door, but not towards the bedside stool. She went to a wooden set of drawers on one of the walls and touched it. She seemed to be blankly staring into space for a moment and then came back towards Jack. She was wearing a cloak over something bulky, like a bulletproof vest. Below the bottom of the cloak, he could see that she wore black leather boots.
Jack started to wonder if he had gone back in time. He had been in a buried, ancient, futuristic structure and touched something that sent him through some crazy, mind-altering journey. Maybe he got sent to the past?
Lex stood next to his bed and held out her empty hand. “Here, put these on.”
Jack had a fraction of a second to be confused before a black panel grew to fill half of his vision. He flinched, uselessly waving his hands in front of his face. It even remained if he blinked his eyes. He thought he was having a stroke.
Words and images appeared on the flat surface floating before him. It looked like a black-lacquered panel made of wood with ornate filigree embellishments interlaced over its surface. The words ‘Trade Offered - Lex’ were written at the top, carved directly into the wood, and the letters were painted with pure white paint. The panel was divided into two sections; on one side was ‘Offered by Lex’ and on the other was, ‘Offered by Jack’.
On Lex’s side were painted images of two objects, a shirt and a pair of pants. Jack’s side was empty. Two beveled buttons were jutting out of the panel at the bottom labeled ‘Accept’ and ‘Decline’, made from cut gemstones.
Jack knew what this was. A lot of the confusing things these people were saying were starting to make sense. Jack smiled and reached out to touch the Trade Interface in front of him, but it was like trying to touch a movie theater screen from the fifth row. Behind the menu, Jack could see that Lex was concerned by his actions.
She noticed him look at her. “Are you going to accept? You can stay naked for all I care.”
“I’ve never seen anything like this! How do I-?” He reached out and tried to touch ‘Accept’. The button flashed, and all the colors on the panel inverted for a second- then the whole menu faded away. Lex walked away from him and over to a chair on the other side of a wooden table. She crossed her arms and sat looking at him, expectantly.
“So, this is a game? Some kind of virtual world?” Jack asked, searching the blankets around him for the clothes from the trade.
As an experienced player of pen and paper role-playing games, he was easily seduced by a few digital ones when he was younger. That was before he decided to get away from everything he knew to explore caves in strange lands for real.
“This is no game,” she said, squinting her eyes. “And if you talk like this, it will be you leaving, very shortly afterward.” She paused to make sure Jack understood. “When I saw you appear, I was filled with hope. There isn’t supposed to be anyone new, much less someone with a Hero Class. Even if yours is bizarre. Even if your brains are jelly and you don’t know how the world works. This Town is so far gone that you are an impossibility. We asked for help that we knew was never going to come and then here you are…”
Jack stopped searching for the items and looked up into her shadowed eyes. “But you can barely seem to help yourself,” she finished, shaking her head slowly.
“Hey! I am a pretty fast learner, and I am highly motivated to figure out what the hell is going on. The things you think I should know- just humor me. How do I find those items you gave me and put them on?”
“Fine. Open your Inventory and move them into your Equipment Slots.”
“How do I actually do that? Open my Inventory,” he repeated.
“I don’t know! Explain how you actually move your arms!”
Jack looked down and wondered briefly if all he had to do was think about- and there it was.
Another black lacquer panel filled his vision. The Inventory panel was mostly an empty grid, but in the upper left corner were miniature versions of a pair of pants and a shirt.
He looked around the menu, taking in all the detail. It was beautifully crafted. Jack’s eye was pulled to some other stats in the upper right corner.
Coins: 0
Free Slots: -2,147,483,648 / 16
That last one was odd but, Jack quickly shook off the confusion. He was determined to dress himself. Reaching out with his hand, he found the floating interface menu reacted quickly to his slightest intentions. He thought he’d like to see his Equipment slots and the instant he did, images and information on the black panel shifted to display his Character menu as well.
There were a lot of details t
o process here. In the center, he recognized the familiar layout of empty boxes clustered around a representation of himself.
“Equipment slots…” Jack whispered to himself.
The character displayed on this panel was like looking at a 3D recording of him waiting in line at the bank. The tiny version of Jack stood naked except for the leather belt and empty scabbard hanging from his left hip.
He wondered if his body in this virtual world was identical to his own. It more or less looked like him: short jet-black hair, fit build, junk in the right places. His work had made his skin tight and his muscles toned.
After giving this smaller representation of this new virtual body a once over, he was more or less happy with what was there. He wondered what was happening to his real body and how to get back to it.
Jack’s eyes bounced around to other parts of the menu. The Equipment Slots were all labeled and empty- except one. The one labeled ‘Main Hand’ was currently filled with a miniature replica of the belt and scabbard around his waist. Jack remembered what Harrak had said about having it equipped there. He’d have to come back to that later.
He looked over to the other side of the menu where his inventory was. He focused his attention on the image of the pants and was only slightly surprised when a smaller, black, wooden panel emerged on top.
Common Cloth Pants - [Legs | Value: 1]
He indicated that he wanted to move them to his ‘Legs’ Equipment Slot and they instantly faded from his Inventory and reappeared in the intended, empty box. The smaller representation of himself standing in the middle of his Character Screen, looking bored, suddenly had a pair of white cloth pants on under his belt. Jack wanted the menus out of his face for a moment, and they faded from view quickly. A smile spread across his face as his brain rewarded him with a spark of a natural high for discovering how easy it was to control the menus.
Peeking under the sheets, Jack saw that he indeed had the white pants covering his lower half. He hadn’t even really felt them slip themselves on while he was sitting up in the bed, but there they were. They were a little rough, but they got the job done. He opened both menus again and focused on the shirt Lex had given him.
Common Cloth Shirt - [Chest | Value: 1]
Jack moved the item over to his free ‘Chest’ Slot, and then it was on him.
“This is amazing...” he mumbled under his breath.
He dismissed his inventory information and focused on his Character menu. The first thing to catch his attention was the text carved into the top, ‘Jack - Hero Class: Irrelevant’.
“Irrelevant?” he asked as he looked over to Lex. The look in her eye implied she had been watching him the whole time. The blonde woman took a deep breath before she spoke.
“My father knows much about the Heroes of our world because he’s worked with a countless many. He is- was... a great leader. I trust in his wisdom when he says he has never heard of a Class like yours. It doesn’t sound like a good one, does it? You asked me to play along and teach you how to use your Menus, and sitting here, watching you learn to equip items makes me believe that you truly are in need of help. But I need to know if you have the possibility of being any help to us. I don’t suppose you know what your combat role is, do you?” she asked, a dark eyebrow raised.
Jack pulled the cloth sheet off him, spun and put his feet on the floor. The stones were warm on his skin from the fire. He didn’t know what “being any help” meant and had a bad feeling about it being directly related to a “combat role”. If this really was some hyper-advanced, virtual video game… was there ‘re-spawning’ if he got killed? Jack was going to add that to his growing list of questions when he remembered the way both Lex and her father responded about someone being gone when he mentioned the singing that led him through the ship. He decided to put that one off for a while. Yet, if he wanted to get out of here, he needed to know more about... everything. And if this were a game, it would probably be wise to learn the rules.
Even as he insisted to himself that he wanted to get back home and out of whatever this was, there was a small part of him that wanted to help Lex in any way he could.
“How do I find out what my combat role is?”
“Open your Path Menu like you did your Inventory. There you will find your Class Path- more than one if you’re lucky, and underneath each one of those you’ll see a specific skill or ability. Take a look, and let’s hear what an Irrelevant can do,” she said, her lips pulled into a tight smile.
He gave her a nod and thought about wanting to see his Path Menu. A black panel appeared before him with new information.
His Class was displayed at the top. Below that, a lot of text was carved into the panel, and it was pretty much as she described.
PATH: Dimensional Blade [1]
► Double Strike - [Activated | 5 Mana | Main Hand Damage x2]
~ Your blade becomes a blur, attacking the target twice in a single moment.
PATH: Data Mining [1]
► Mining Laser - [Channeled | 2 Mana/Second | Main Hand Damage/Second]
~ skill.repeating(rewrite_v1.58) include(error.correction(target, !total, local_user));{unif
Jack was pretty much getting the idea until he got to the Data Mining Path. He was very much in a virtual game that had combat skills. And that game seemed to be malfunctioning. He was no computer programmer, but he knew enough to know code looked something like this. He became aware of the faintest gnawing sensation in the back of his mind, and the strong urge to wake up from this dream rose up from within him.
Jack’s mind raced and quickly settled on a solution. He tried to pull up a ‘Log Out’ menu. When that didn’t work, he tried to think of different variations, ‘Exit’, ‘Quit’, ‘System Menu’-
“What do you see!” Lex insisted, snapping Jack out of his panic.
He took a moment to clear his head. There was no immediate danger- that he could tell, sitting here with Lex in this stone cabin. He told himself that he needed to stop freaking out about everything.
“Um, the first section is Dimensional Blade. There is a number one next to it-”
“Everyone starts at tier one.” She dismissed the concept with a wave of her hand and sat forward. “Dimensional Blade, okay. That sounds better. Normal... but, I haven’t heard of it. Does its first skill deal damage?”
“Yeah!” Jack smiled. “The skill under it says I can do something called Double Strike.” As soon as he thought of the skill, Jack suddenly felt the room spin and put a hand to his head. A tiny panel popped up in the corner of his vision that had bright red text carved across it.
Ability cannot be used now: Wrong weapon type equipped.
“Did you just try and use your skill on me?” Lex asked, leaning back.
“No. I didn’t try to,” he said, dismissing the alert message in case she might somehow see it floating right next to her. Jack was thankful that the discordant feeling passed quickly.
“You are something very unusual, Jack,” Lex said, appraising him. After a moment she leaned forward again. “Watching you learn all the things people are born knowing sure is... Interesting. I haven’t seen anything interesting in a long time. Also, Dimensional Blade must be a damage-centric Path. You might be useful after all. Now, carefully tell me the details of the skill, please.”
“Well, it’s Activated. It costs five Mana, and it deals Main Hand damage times two. So, that means I do double damage with this, right?”
“It means that you need to take a look at that oddity you currently have equipped in your Main Hand Equipment Slot. If that floppy leather thing dangling from your hip has a damage value, I would question my own sanity. I honestly don’t know what to expect.”
Jack called up his Character screen again. It was filled with information he needed to understand. The scabbard was why he had brought up the menu though, so he focused on what was equipped in his Main Hand slot.
ARV Alternis - [Decorative Belt | Value: 0/10]
| Dmg: MI
SSINGVA |
He looked up at Lex and looked back down at the item. Whatever this thing was, it didn’t seem to do any damage. Guessing that he couldn’t use any of his abilities with it on, Jack decided to tuck the strange object safely away in his inventory. He called up his Inventory, and the panel rearranged itself to accommodate both menus. As he had done with the clothes, he willed the scabbard to move from the equipment slot to his Inventory.
It didn’t budge. A smaller panel appeared, hovering above his menus.
You cannot remove this item. Please increase complexity s%(null) for more options.
“Lex?” he asked, looking up at her, and he could tell she was growing impatient.
“What does it say, Jack?”
“How do I increase complexity?”
“I don’t know what that means- like most of what you say…” She rubbed a finger into her temple before continuing. “It doesn’t do damage, does it.” It wasn’t a question.
“No, not really. I don’t think it does. And…”
He looked back down to the Character menu still open. He tried as hard as he could, but Jack could not will the item into his inventory. “It doesn’t look like I can take it off.”
“What do you mean, are you saying you can’t unequip it?” She bent forward, put her elbow on her knee and rested her forehead on her hand. “Why am I still surprised?”
After a moment, Lex straightened and looked at him again. Jack was beginning to feel a slight tingle in his gut every time she cast her large golden eyes in his direction. “You said the Blade skill was the first one. You have a split Path?” she asked, hopeful again.
“Yeah,” he said, opening his skills menu. “The other Path is called Data Mining.” He wasn’t even going to mention the description. He wanted to focus on the positive. She didn’t look impressed.
“What Mining? It’s not a resource gathering skill, is it?”
“I don’t think it is. It says I can channel it for two Mana per s- hey, how much Mana do I have anyway?”
“Sounds like a spell, maybe,” Lex said. “You have 20 Mana. Check your Character menu, again.”