by Ryan Rimmel
“Could a rank one demon cause pain to me?” I asked.
The demon paused for a long moment, “Yes, if you were bound. However, it would be only a very limited form of pain, like a mild itch,” he finally replied.
“Which means that as you are a rank one demon, I can basically ignore you,” I asked.
The demon paused, finally accessing his own menus or whatever he did. He then began struggling for a long 30 seconds before finally stopping, defeated. “What do you want?”
“So many things, you little turd,” I replied gravely. “First off, what can I call you, because it's sure as hell is not going to be master.”
“I cannot give you my true name. You may call me Sir,” he responded.
“So Shart it is,” I stated, “Shart, what did you do to me?”
“What’s a shart?” he asked, struggling harder to remove himself from the tree, still quite unsuccessfully.
“You are a Shart, and you bound yourself to me. Explain that, and I might think about considering removing you from the tree,” I replied, sitting down and getting comfortable.
Shart continued squirming for a good two more minutes before finally sighing audibly, “I bound you like a familiar so that you would DO MY BIDDING AND RELEASE ME!”
“So, what does that entail?” I asked politely, as I found a particularly comfortable spot of moss.
“It binds our souls together so that I, as the more powerful of the two of us, can force you to do my bidding.”
“And now that you are rank one?” I asked.
The demon, to his credit, actually managed to sound arrogant up to this point. However, at the solid reminder of his new status, he cracked.
“This whole thing is a terrible mistake. I’m not even supposed to here today.” Shart wept for a few long minutes before he finally, FINALLY gave up on trying to break his head free from the tree. He hung motionless for a few more seconds as if finally coming to terms with his fate. “So now that I’m rank one, I’m not going to be able to command you to do anything, am I?”
“Very doubtful,” I responded, “but I may release you from the tree fort of solitude, if you are polite and answer a few of my questions.”
Shart sat quietly for a long moment before nodding. Well probably nodding, since his neck wasn’t really developed enough for that. He mainly kind of bobbed. Supporting your whole body by your neck looked painful.
“So, where are we?” I asked, “I’m guessing this isn’t the same world I started on.”
“You are mostly correct,” stated Shart, “We are in one of the Eternal Realms. You are on Ordinal, one of the first realms to be exact.”
“How many Eternal Realms are there?” I asked. I had the feeling this could get long winded and the last thing I wanted was a detailed description of the history of the universe.
“Many,” responded Shart, “But most are newer, more refined than this older realm. My associate and I were hoping to renovate it somewhat until the. . . accident.”
“Where you got blasted down here and lost all your powers?” I asked.
“Yes,” replied Shart slowly, “anyway, Ordinal has some unique properties and many powerful souls that could have been harvested. However, there were difficulties that led to us ultimately having to import fresh souls from other realms…”
“Wait, Earth is another Realm?” I asked.
“I’m going to say yes, but only because your puny mind would not be able to comprehend the magnitude of it all,” replied Shart smartly.
“Fine, didn’t really care anyway. Any way to get me back to Earth?”
“No,” stated Shart, “Your earthly body was shattered and we caught your soul exiting it. If we were to restore you on Earth, you would come out as a babe. Your past memories would be wiped. Those are the default settings on that planet.”
I nodded. I had already figured getting back to my previous existence was a long shot. His explanation was pretty straight forward and it meshed with what I knew of Earth. Mainly, that people didn’t come back from the dead. Especially considering my conception was not immaculate.
So, I wasn’t just dead. I was DEAD dead and there was no going back. I would have slumped down, if I wasn’t already sitting. Instead, I just sat quietly for a long minute. I had a wife, and a family. The marriage wasn’t always great, but we’d been happy. The kids weren’t always great, no kids are, but they were good. As a family, we loved each other. We just clicked, with all our various quarks and all. If I hadn’t had such a great insurance policy, I’d see no silver lining. There would be enough for the kids to go to college and my wife to survive. I sat for what seemed like ages, remembering them. At last, I stored away my memories in a mental box to be looked at again later. For now, I had other issues.
When I finally spoke again, I asked, “Okay, why can I see myself in this amount of detail?”
“Explain,” ordered the demon.
“I have, for lack of a better term, a character sheet that shows me all of my abilities, stats, and skills. There was a tab for powers and the like.”
“Oh, I forgot they don’t have those on Earth,” replied the demon, thinking, “You’ve played video games before, right? It’s pretty much the same thing. Just think about it and you can access that information.”
“I didn’t expect it to be that easy,” I replied, “if Earth is part of the Eternal Realms, why didn’t it have that option?” Character sheets would be really handy, I thought.
“First off, Earth wishes it was part of the Eternal Realms. In this case, we didn’t really have the
“So, having character sheets is normal and Earth is weird?” I asked.
“Yes, on Earth you don’t even have health bars; I don’t know how you survive,” replied Shart.
“So, I got a level up in Warrior,” I stated, “what does that mean?”
“You had access to Godling and you picked Warrior?” Shart gasped, “that’s stupid! You had access to all of the classes, and you picked Warrior? That’s a primary class man. They suck.”
“Well, I didn’t choose warrior. I just got a level in warrior after I … defeated you.”
“You got lucky,” stated the Demon, “That tree trunk was very large, but you need to be level 60 before you get through the Demon Door to be reborn. With a basic bitch warrior that’s going to take years. I’m going to be stuck here forever.”
You have been offered a Quest: Take Shart to the Demon Door; this will allow the Elder Demon to reclaim his powers, reward unknown.
“And I just got a quest prompt,” I said, “to return you to Demon Door.”
“I need you to take that,” replied the Demon.
“That’s probably not going to happen,” I said, pushing the quest away without accepting or declining it.
“If you don’t accept the quest,” stated Shart, “I’ll be stuck here forever.”
“I could leave you in the tree, then,” I offered.
“Please no. All I can see is that rock and I already hate it,” replied the demon, his struggles beginning for a few moments before finally stopping, “Fuck you, rock.”
“I don’t see any real benefit to bringing you along, though.”
“Well, you are bound to me so if I get too far from you it’s going to be uncomfortable for both of us. Don’t worry, I can turn invisible and immaterial so I can hide very well. Only someone with true sight can find me, and you won’t be running into anyone like that for a while,” continued the demon as he pleaded with me.
“I don’t really see that as being necessary.”
“You are a basic bitch warrior. I could also give you a boon, so you might live a bit longer,” he replied.
“Explain.”
“I’m at Rank one now, the weakest power of demon, so I can only grant you my least impressive boons. If I find a source of raw magic, it will get more powerful. However, right
now, I can grant you demonic regeneration. This will cause you to heal 10 times faster than normal. You will be able to quest more and level faster and get me home quicker.”
“And when are you planning on betraying me?”
“When we get to the door. I’ll try to get in first, and if successful, no matter how powerful you are, I’ll be much stronger,” replied the demon earnestly.
“Why would you tell me that?” I asked, a clear note of incredulity in my voice.
“I’m blue,” he replied and I instantly knew it was a lie; he was red. I could see he was red. but beyond that, through the bond we now shared, I knew he was lying. I knew it as surely as I knew my name was Jim.
“You can’t lie to me,” I stated as fact.
“Would make life so much easier,” replied Shart, “After we get to the Demon Door, I can send you back to your family.”
I knew he was lying.
Chapter 2: Still in the Field
I had to find a replacement for the Almighty Stick of Demon Smiting, which had flown from my hands after I smashed Shart with it. Fortunately, there were several stands of trees nearby. That made it easy, after walking just far enough away to start to feel the tug of the demonic bond, to find a tree branch of the same approximate size and composition. It was both long and hard, just the way my wife liked it, and I returned.
“This is going to hurt,” I informed him as I adjusted myself down into a batter’s stance.
“Well, I think that if you were to use the root over there as leverage,” started Shart. He was right; that probably would have worked. I used an alternative method of striking him about the head until he finally, on the sixth swing, broke free.
He landed with a groan, “why did you do that.”
“I said it was going to hurt; I didn’t say it had to,” I replied.
The demon groaned and got up, attempting and failing to fly. He landed with a plop and I glanced down at him, adjusting my new staff in case it suddenly needed to become another Almighty Stick.
“I don’t have enough power to fly,” stated Shart who immediately vanished. But I could still see him, somehow. His skin had become transparent but the outline was clearly visible to me. I just stared directly at him while he settled himself and scraped wood off of his horns by brushing them against a rock.
“Which way should we go,” I asked.
“Oh, I think that way,” he pointed in a vague direction. Lacking any sort of better route, I started walking for only a short while before I became aware that the demon was getting farther away from me. I was aware of this because of the throbbing pain that was only getting worse.
I turned around and noticed that he was not the fastest little mover in the world. He might have been okay if his little wings had been functional, but on the ground, he waddled like a one year old and couldn’t make any time at all. Being immaterial was even worse, because he had to be material enough to not slide through the ground. This meant that all the wind and grass he as bumping into was bouncing him everywhere. The little baby demon didn’t know how to walk.
“Can I ride on your shoulder?” he asked, after he spent entirely too long trying to catch up.
I agreed, because I eventually wanted to get someplace. Shart scaled me like a miniature King Kong, and we were on our way again. While we were walking, I brought up my character sheet. I had to go to level 60, and I needed to see what that meant. I also had those two stat bumps to think about and endurance was sounding pretty good right now. Walking through uncut virgin forest was tiring.
Name: Jim
Hit Points: 30
Stamina: 30
Mana: 20
Class: Warrior 1
Strength: Average
Dexterity: Average
Endurance: Average
Willpower: Average
Spirit: Average
Charisma: Average
You have 2 stat bumps available.
Skills:
None
Demon Lore (5SP) Unskilled
Light Armor (100SP) amateur
Medium Armor (150SP) amateur
Shields (100 SP) amateur
Martial Weapons (10 SP) amateur
Simple Weapons (10 SP) amateur
Awaiting Rank Up!
You have one bonus skill selection at rank amateur
Well, the stat bumps were easy enough. I dumped one into Endurance, to ease the tiredness from walking, and one into Strength. Experience in my old D&D days taught me that Strength was a warrior’s primary attribute. Nothing seemed to happen until I mentally clicked a prompt to confirm. At that point my entire body shuttered.
I’d worked out when I was younger. I’d actually had a physical labor job where I’d gotten pretty muscular at a few points in my life. This was entirely different. My body went from doughy average dad bod to toned college kid in the blink of an eye. My endurance was harder to see, but I could immediately tell it had gotten much greater as well. My body had a leaner quality about it. The walk had been tiring, if not exhausting so far, but suddenly I felt like I’d been doing light labor instead of this grueling hike. My perspective shifted as well; I think I got taller.
That was cool. I could also sense that my hit points went up. Physical stats increased hit points and endurance at varying ratios. My point of endurance increased my HP and Stamina while my strength just increased my hit points. In short, I had gotten much tougher just be deciding I needed to be tougher.
Next, I glanced at my skills tab. This caused an enormous, detail rich, skill tree to appear. Light armor had a variety of sub skills but apparently, I needed to have the base skill up to a certain level to use them. I could see a skill called Hardened Light Armor but it required at least Initiate Light Armor to use, and level 0. That was the Unbound rearing up again. It appeared that Unbound just defeated level requirements, not skill rank requirements. Of course, it probably meant I could get access to them at a much lower level than someone else.
All of the skills were laid out on a huge skill board in front of me when I zoomed out. There were literally thousands of skills, and most of them were entirely undefined. The skill tiles were there, but I couldn’t tell if it was some super advanced skill or the most basic of skills. I had the feeling that randomly guessing was far more likely to earn me a skill like sewing rather than something more powerful. But a handful of the tiles, particularly tiles close to other skills that I did know, were more visible. I could see some of the skills past Light Armor, or Simple weapon, but I didn’t qualify for them.
Looking at the entire board, I decided to go with the simple approach and looked at skills I had that were not of a rank of amateur. Given that my traveling companion was a demon, I decided it was probably in my best interests to get more well acquainted with him, so I selected Demon Lore.
Demon Lore Amateur: You know a Succubus from an Incarna, you now all basic stats about demons equal or less than your rank. Level this ability up to learn more about additional demons.
Glancing at Shart, he had a hit point, Stamina and Mana counter over his bald, cantaloupe shaped head. This informed me that even at Rank 1, he had over 400 hit points. However, his Mana and Stamina were both very low. Whether or not they could increase, I didn’t know. What I did know was that right now he would take forever to kill, assuming I even could. He glared at me when I thought about that, so I moved on to the next skill set and started reviewing all of them.
Simple Weapons granted me general proficiency in all simple weapons. There were some specializations there for clubs, axes, and other reasonably straightforward weapons. I saw a skill for pitchforks and chuckled. One thing I noticed was that the sub skills seemed to add together the benefits of the core skill and the sub skill.
My Staff skill was already at 2 SP of 50 just from walking around with it. I could also look at my staff and know that it did 2-5 points of damage on a successful strike, which was handy. I wondered how much damage my initial stick had done, but then I recalled the com
bat log and determined that I had caused a critical hit for exactly 5 points of damage. I couldn’t see the higher skill ranks, but I hypothesized that the costs would get higher at higher levels. It seemed like every new rank was a pretty big, obvious deal. If there was something that was a minor benefit, it was a sub skill. However, each SP improved the skill, so someone with Amateur Simple Weapons 10SP was at a significant disadvantage against someone with the same skill and 100SP.
I wondered what other skills looked like and then remembered my Amateur Demon Lore skill. It didn’t have any sub skills, but it did have a cost, 2001/1,000,000 SP. I stopped.
“It takes one million skill points to get to the next rank of Demon Lore?” I asked.
“To Novice,” replied the Demon, “Yes, it’s a higher level skill. You shouldn’t even have it, but you are Unbound, so you don’t have a level requirement. I’m a rank one demon. If you use it on a rank 40 demon, you’ll find you get many thousands of points. At my full strength, I would have nearly leveled the skill if you glanced at me… and survived.”
So, each skill had different skill point requirements. I could learn any skill that was only level restricted, but I had to be exposed to the skill first. Furthermore, I gained Skill Points from just doing mundane things. There was probably a skill for just about everything. That meant that just randomly selecting skill boosts had a very high chance of not being anything useful.
I glanced at the Warrior tab in my character sheet, which just felt odd to say, and all I saw was the token for Warrior. If I focused on it, it felt like the statue in the cavern, letting me know what powers it had granted me. I could vaguely see three oddly shaped tiles after it, so when I got to level 2, I would have another choice.