“God, put me out of my misery.” I croaked, my throat was drier than sand.
Dragging myself to the bathroom and turning knobs, the hot water couldn’t come out soon enough.
It took a hot minute to notice I was still wearing clothes. I briefly considered just burning everything, but reason won out once the bathroom had gotten steamed all the way through. The heat pulled the fatigue out of my very soul, and I just lathered myself in the water I was mostly sure was approximating boiling temperatures.
When I stepped out, I realized I’d been doing all that in the dark, not a speck of light to be seen, everything steeped in grays and blacks.
Ignoring this, I focused on what mattered: hydration and nutrition. Only after I’d finished off the last of my food stash and drank my bodyweight in water did my brain fully free itself to think.
I checked the data-pad Quinn had fixed up, and confirming it’d been two days since I’d returned, my datapad immediately began to ding, then ding, then ding even faster. The screen became a blur as a flood of notifications turned the screen into a blur.
“Eighty four hundred unread messages!?”
Had Quinn forgotten to set up spam filters? No, no, they hadn’t forgotten. As soon as the tablet stopped buzzing away, I confirmed almost all of them came from… the Caveman streamer account? Since when was THAT been set up here? I knew they’d made a profile for me, but apparently it hadn’t been linked to the device until now.
I hastily read-over the notifications, lots and lots of friendship requests and other streamers requesting I promote their channels during my own stream. Too many messages to read, I just muted the app for now and turned my attention to the ones that mattered.
Kaly had congratulated me on my survival, but her last message caught my attention.
“All is well - O.”
“O?”
That… was odd. Maybe she was trying to say something? Given the context of our last exchange, I had to assume it meant she didn’t trust our conversation was secret. Or maybe that she had proof that it wasn’t? Whatever the case, I chose to lean into keeping everything squeaky. Empty. Pleasantries and vague attempts at broadly speaking about the most inane stuff I could think of.
As if the AI watcher was back in my skull.
Next in line was the Sewer Saints, having bombarded my inbox full of congratulatory messages. Checking the timeline, some of them had even sent promises of vengeance against “the Shadow” if I happened to not make it back. It was… a bit overwhelming, to be honest. My social life back in FC02 wasn’t exactly thriving, but even with what few friendships I had struck, they’d never been so over-the-top enthusiastic about… well, anything.
Then again, I guess not dying when being hunted down by a meguca is a pretty big deal.
Even the system agreed.
It tooted and beeped the little notification around as if a trophy it wanted to frame and hang from the walls. Though more than anything, it seemed eager to bring emphasis on the two rewards specifically.
I took a minute to send to the Saints a notification I was up and alive, properly, and turned my attention to the “slip” skill, mentally poking at it to bring up the details.
“Not very descriptive.” I muttered, hopping on to my feet as I tried to unravel the mysteries of the skill. “Step through… something, I guess?” My gaze lingered on the door leading to the bathroom, the metaphorical light going off. Then I confirmed I was sitting on top of a comfortable 30 AP, enough for two tests, tops. “...worth a shot.”
Approaching the door, and focusing on the impression the system was trying to create of the skill, I activated it, feeling icy coldness as the world around me vanished into nothing. All senses cut off, my body floating for a split-second.
Then I face-planted into the door right as reality reasserted itself.
I glared at the door, then looked at the system prompt that was doing more of the ringing sound.
It… was laughing, or at least trying to imitate the sound through the notification thing ringing over and over.
Eyes narrowed, I looked at the door again. My gut told me that the skill had made me unable to interact with anything at all for a sliver of a second, just barely a blink. And that my timing had been off because of the tiny window of opportunity.
“One more try.” I growled, this time pouncing at the door and triggering the ability right as I was about to hit.
Then I face-planted against the interior bathroom wall.
The laughing got harder.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
I stared at the door, it was, in fact, intact.
“Success!” I proclaimed, pretending like my ego had not been bruised (as well as probably my nose), and readily ignoring the mocking chirps from the system.
All in all, slip seemed to be the kind of ability that could be extremely powerful when timed right. And… well, by the same token it could very easily backfire too, the cost wasn’t exactly ignorable, probably to be expected for skills in D trait? I’d definitely want to keep an eye out for an opportunity to practice and get the timing down.
Another thing to add to the list.
“Oh right, what about my stats?”
“Huh, neat.”
I was a bit surprised that I’d nearly gotten a whole “level” of progress out of what had happened, but then again, I did kind of spend a whole day slogging through monsters first. It was nice to feel like all that effort had not just helped me survive, but also had pushed my progression forward.
Poking at the “level-up” prompts, a rush swept through me, and with it, I was left feeling a lot better.
As if on cue, my data-pad dinged a notification from Isia.
*Isia: Can we meet?
My stomach rumbled, and a devilish idea popped up.
*Axel: Sure. Brunch at the dollar-store?
*Isia: ...
*Isia: About that…
“Heeeeeyaaa Axel, got-”
“Food first,” I spoke quickly as soon as I closed the car’s door, shaking off some of the rain as I settled in. Isia pointed me at a bag at the back, and I immediately began my raid, noticing her selection had been leaning on volume over all other considerations. “Huh.” The first victim was a not-legally-cheese taco. “Ok, you may proceed,” I said in an overly exaggerated tone, between bites as the car started up. “What seems to be the problem?”
Isia didn’t look all too cheerful. “We are fucked. We, as in the gang.” She grimaced. “The bookie hasn’t handed over the money.”
“Vesper know yet?”
“Am I still breathing?” Isia laughed nervously, voice accelerating as she spoke. “I just stuffed the first payment-due notification into spam this morning. But that just means we’re three days away from total cut-off. That’s when Vesper will find out and hunt me and hang my head on a wall as a warning!”
“Ok, first off, breathe.” I muttered between mouthfuls of cherry-flavored sandwiches. I briefly wondered whether the stomach trait also made it so I’d remain healthy regardless of what I ate… hm… “You got the user agreement files? I need to get a refresher on those first before we plan the next move.”
“The next move is obviously to hunt down the asshole and chop their balls off!”
I chose to interpret Isia’s declaration as a metaphorical one rather than literal as I focused on reading through the documentation. Aside from the flood of skeevy and abusive user-agreement terms, I couldn’t really find anything that might be more directly of use. In fact, there was one particular piece of useful information that was missing.
“Wait, the wager was fully digital, right?”
“Duh!” She replied. “What did you think? There’d be some gonk in the Paw’s willing to handle a bet that large? Of course not! Now the asshole’s ghosting me hard.”
“So… who’s the bookie?”
“JackGab.” She spoke the name venomously. “I made bets through him before, but this is the first time he skipped out on me like this. That fucker’s… UGH! I’d strangle him if I could!”
“I think we should contact the Paws.” I muttered, rubbing my chin in thought. “From the looks of it, this… JackGab has some semblance of legitimacy. To be able to take gambling money for an event run by the Paws, he would’ve needed to get an agreement going with them.”
Isia hesitated. “But why? And wouldn’t talk to them risk Vesper finding out?”
“The contract’s suspiciously clean of personal information.” I poked the tablet emphatically. “Information we could use to find them, or figure out who might be backing them. Either one would be a good lead to start off of.”
She stared at me blankly for a long moment, blinking slowly. “They teach that to you in corpo-school?”
“...yes?” I answered hesitantly. “The best strategy to minimize disadvantages during a negotiation is to know who’s really in charge, and-” I sighed, shoulders slumping. “Look, I just wanted to be the guy with the gun mowing down monsters, it’s just that to get there I had to cram a lot of things I never thought I’d need to put to use. But here we are.”
So many damn study-hours, all for the sake of being qualified enough to have a shot at a decent chance at getting into the City Guard. And all that was required of people to kill monsters here was to just find the thing and record the kill. There was a definite sense of injustice out of it all.
Isia eyed me weirdly, turning to the steering wheel as she appeared to fiddle with the autopilot settings. “Corpo villages are so fucking weird.” I heard her mutter under her breath.
I bristled. “Oh, look at me,” I said with an overly-high pitch. “I’m a big-city girl that doesn’t read the terms of service! I gave all my money to a stranger!”
“That is a very bad impression, mister ‘I need to tie my shoelaces according to corporate regulation’.”
“I’m wearing Velcro shoes! There are no shoelaces!” I kept to myself that the reason why I’d preferred velcro was because the guidelines on shoelace shoes were a massive pain to keep consistent throughout a day’s worth of working. But I’d long since come to love velcro shoes, it just saved so much time!
She made a face at them, nose curling as if she’d just smelt something foul. “Ew.”
“Ew? EW!? I’ll have you know, velcro is the epitome of functionality.” I proclaimed, loudly. “It allows for variable-”
“It’s butt ugly is what it is.” She cut me off, and shooed away at my foot. “And it’s really not your style.”
I looked down at my plain brown sneakers… they didn’t fit? I frowned, crossing my arms dejectedly as I tried to consider what I was wearing. “I… guess I’ve only really bothered with practicality.” I muttered. The only times I actually cared about what I wore was whether because I needed safety gear, or because there was something important I had to dress up for. However… “It’s still better than walking-shock-hazard clothes.”
“HEY!”
IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT
]