GSA2 1&2 (Patreon)

Chapter 1: Old Habits

Chris Acker whistled as his machete popped in his hand, transferring that exact sensation of cutting through a vertebra through his wrist and into his arm.

The mob’s head rolled off, into the street. The stump shifted its roll and wobbled in front of one of the men in a similar kneeling posture, held there by the supernaturally strong hands of Chris’s demons.

The man alternated between sobbing and babbling pitifully.

You have gained a level!

You are now level fifty-seven!

“Finally,” Chris muttered, standing up and working the tension out of the back of his neck. He’d been hunched over, hacking off heads a good half hour, and he was starting to cramp up.

Still, much faster than hunting monsters.

For whatever reason, monsters gave jack shit for xp, at least relative to humans and those other aliens. A man could spend months risking his life fighting monsters people would have only dreamed about before The System, and they’d get maybe four levels.

Rule of thumb: If it can speak, it’s worth more XP.

Chris had figured that out during the Tutorial, when he’d bashed Tony over the head with a rock after the bastard had stolen his weapons. He’d gotten two levels. Two whole levels.

Once the Tutorial was over and Earth had been added to Pharos,  everything had kind of fallen to shit for a hot minute before the locals showed up with their government, pointing to their flag and how much bigger it was. In the end, most people accepted tyranny for a hot meal.

Not Chris.

Chris had it figured out

People were just bags of XP living in close proximity to each other. All you have to do is take advantage of that, and kill enough people, before eventually no one has the power to stop you.

Risk vs. reward.

Sure, when he first got started luring men into dark alleys, they might have been able to stop him, but now?

He glanced at the blood-bound demons that held the few remaining mobs still. They loomed over his prisoners, easily twisting their arms back like a man tormenting an eight year old boy.

Now, nobody was going to stop him. It was simply too late for that. Killing people was the most viable way to increase a man’s level, and levels were the quickest way to gain more power to kill. One fed the other.

It was an exponential, runaway equation. After Chris finished with this town, he would skip a few towns over, then maybe backtrack a little bit, so the powers that be didn’t find a pattern in the disappearing towns.

Once he was confident, he could move up to a small city.

Chris’s eyes glazed over as he pictured the amount of power he could accumulate from an entire city.

“Please, please,” The next guy in line whispered to himself, tears and snot falling like rain.

“Nope,” Chris muttered, bringing down the machete again.

Pop.

The head flew off, knocking up against the previous one. Chris glanced along the line, doing a quick mental tally.

Only a dozen or so adults left, Chris thought, tapping the blade against the corpse’s ribs to get a little of the spatter off. Then I’m outta here.

Chris didn’t know what children were worth, XP wise, and frankly he didn’t want to know.

Anybody that would consider killing kids is a sick fuck, Chris thought, maneuvering behind the next weeping mob, a grey haired old woman with saggy tits.

I wonder what she’s worth. Chris thought, lining up the machete with the nape of her neck.

“You know what I hate about people like you?”

A voice caught his attention. It was deep, but soft and feminine, causing him to look up, frowning.

There, sitting on the town’s well, was a melas woman reading a paperback book and smoking. She had an open pack of Camels sitting beside her, and the book had a dark cover with Steven King’s name featured prominently on the front.

Melas had orange skin and pitch black nails and hair. They were larger than humans on average, and tended to be muscular as well. The more aggressive ones grew horns.

This woman had horns.

She’s here to stop me, Chris thought, a spike of anxiety going through his guts.

“Kill her!” Chris shouted, pointing at the alien. His demons could give him the time he needed to retreat if she turned out to be –

The melas woman flickered between turning pages, and Chris felt as though he was being torn apart as each and every one of his bound demons slumped to the ground, bisected. Their blood splattered against the adobe buildings as Chris sank to his knees, clutching his chest as his heart registered each and every death.

“I hate people that are smart enough to realize that killing other people is the fastest way to raise your level, but stupid enough to think they were the first person to think of it.”

She held apart a thumb and forefinger, still not looking at him. “Right on that fine line between clever and intelligent. That’s where people cause problems.”

How can I get out of this? Chris thought frantically as the ache in his heart began to calm down, his adrenaline numbing the pain and kicking his brain into high gear.

Calm down. Think. I just got my new Class ability last week

Chris’s C ranked class, Ranger, didn’t mesh well with his Myst core, but the class itself was good at surviving, and that was exactly what he needed to do right now.

His class had given him the Decoy Ability at level fifty. All he needed to do was break line of sight.

Chris glanced at the alley behind him, then back to the melas sitting on the well, seemingly lost in her book.

In order to break line of sight, he needed a distraction.

Chris took a deep breath and funneled the Myst out of the flaming pit in the center of his soul. He reached in and grabbed the hand of the biggest badass he could find, tearing the creature through the barrier between worlds and into existence.

Directly between the two of them.

“Who dares summon –“

Decoy

Chris leapt straight back, leaving a live-action decoy of himself standing right where he had been, picture perfect down to the thick blonde hair and cocky grin, and directly behind the newly summoned hellspawn.

Predictably, Chris felt the jabbing sensation in his heart when the demon was slaughtered, but he was already turning the corner of the alley.

At this rate she wouldn’t even know where he’d –

“Hurk!” Chris’s  breathing ended in a pained grunt as something snatched him by the collar.

Desperate, Chris swung the machete behind him wildly, aiming to catch the alien with the blade and let him go.

Instead something caught his arm. Chris didn’t have any time to think before his arm snapped the wrong way, wrenching a scream out of his lungs.

Something kicked his knees out, and dragged his other arm behind him, breaking that in the process too.

“Come on then,” the melas’ rich voice spoke from directly behind him. “Let’s get this over with.”

Steely fingers clamped around Chris’s skull, and he tried to fight them off, but he did little more than flop his arms and scrape dirt up with his boots as the alien dragged him to the center of town.

“Here we go. Try not to be a little bitch. This is for posterity.”

“Wha-“ Chris couldn’t quite follow the creature’s meaning, glancing up at her in confusion as she pulled a little sphere on a tripod and set it on the edge of the well, finagling with it like a cameraman trying to get the best angle.

Suddenly a picture of her appeared on the wall of every building, directly in front of the cowering citizens of the town. Those who hadn’t take the opportunity to fuck off yet, anyway.

Directly in front of him, deformed by the shoddy craftsmanship of the well, Chris could make out his own face, eyes widening.

“Ah, there we go,” she said, straightening in front of what was presumably a magical camera.

“Greetings citizens, this is Imperial enforcer Vresh Tekalis, dispatched to the west reaches of the empire upon reports of a Reaper.

“Reaping is defined as the systematic murder of sapient individuals in order to gain levels at an accelerated pace. It is an intolerable cancer on our society, a direct violation of the Sacarus Accord, and the punishment is death.”

Chris watched his own eyes go wide.

“I, Vresh Tekalis have found this human guilty of reaping and will now carry out his sentence.” The orange-skinned woman brandished Chris’s machete.

“Please, please!” Chris babbled, eyes watering as his heart began pounding, drowning out the woman’s response.

Chris felt the rough, notched blade rest against his neck, dull from the hundreds of people he’d executed that very afternoon.

Then he felt her start sawing.

Chris Acker watched himself get decapitated.

***Vresh Tekalis****

Vresh grimaced as she worked. She deliberately sawed the man’s head off his twitching body. Slowly. Not because she enjoyed it, but because it had to be horrific. The video had been shared to every man and woman above the age of majority, and it was meant to be seen as a stiff reminder:

Yes, we are watching.

Yes, we will find you.

Gross, Vresh thought, tossing the head aside, and continuing with her rote lines.

“The sentence has been carried out,” Vresh said, swallowing the urge to puke. She couldn’t be seen to be unwilling to perform her duties, despite how little joy she took in them. Appearances mattered. “Ending transmission.”

She reached out to tap the button on the top of the spherical camera, but the blood on her fingers caused it to slip, sending the camera toppling backwards into the well.

“Eep!”

She lunged forward and nearly caught it, but the little sphere slipped out of its tripod and fell downward, spinning as it receded down the well.

“Fooey!”

I’m gonna have to buy another one out of pocket, she thought sourly. That made this her third lost Empire-wide transmitter. Those things didn’t grow on trees, and her quartermaster was sure to give her a merciless reaming.

***Jebediah Trapper***

“She seems cute,” Jeb said, moments after the video feed hit the water and abruptly cut off. The image of the horned woman’s pouty face flickering in front of the camera as it receded down the well lingering with him.

“in a… just killed a guy kind of way?”  Smartass asked, raising a tiny brow.

“Kind of?” Jeb said, waggling his fingers.The contrast between the woman who’d literally sawed a man’s head off and the girl fumbling and giving a frustrated ‘fooey’ was highly amusing to him.

Smartass opened her mouth to say something, but was cut off by Jeb’s stomach, growling ominously in displeasure.

“Breakfast?” Jeb asked, pushing himself to his foot, leaning against the alleyway’s walls to stabilize himself. Jeb stifled a yawn as he slipped on his pegleg with a bleary grumble before using it to nudge his trash camouflage over his valuables.

People usually weren’t interested in digging through trash. If they were, it was usually because life wasn’t exactly going their way. That kind of applied to Jeb too, come to think of it.

“We could be living in an inn,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “With foot trunks…and baths.”

“Like I said, I’m more comfortable outside,” Jeb said, glancing up at the sky and shoving The Spike out of mind. Jeb had spent the first two weeks after the tutorial staring at the ceiling of inns and abandoned buildings before he’d found himself moving his bed closer and closer to the window.

Just to get fresh air, he’d told himself. Then he told himself it was so he had an escape route in case he was attacked. It was as though he was fleeing the room in stop motion.

It was when Jeb was contemplating sleeping with his head out the window that he realized his PTSD was subtly rearing its ugly head, steering his decisions through an uneasy fear that had no name.

Other than The Spike.

Jeb had to do something about it.

Well, there wasn’t exactly an internet to look for a therapist in Kalfath and Jeb didn’t think his shrink would ever get back to him for a second session.

The first time Jeb had tried to muscle through the fear, he’d tried to off himself, so Jeb changed tactics and dealt with the problem by avoiding it entirely: He slept outside in the alley.

“Hey! What’s the first rule of wizard club?” Smartass said, hands akimbo, flying directly in front of his face.

“Is it…don’t talk about wizard club?” Jeb asked.

“Good. When phrased as a question, it isn’t a lie. You’re sooo close to a hundred days without telling a single untruth. You almost screwed yourself over with that ‘comfortable’ statement, I felt it. Lucky for you you actually are more comfortable outside, barely. For some awful reason.”

The first rule of Wizard Club, and the only advice that Smartass had given him thus far was ‘Never Lie.’ It seemed arbitrary and strange, but Jeb trusted that the fairy wanted that candy bad enough to give him good advice.

It was actually pretty difficult, though. Lies rolled off people like snowflakes, and Jeb had spent the first week astonished at how often he lied.

White lies in public, like ‘good to see you,’ ‘it was fun,’ ‘I appreciate it,’ these reflexive, polite statements were all lies.

Lies by exaggeration: ‘He kicked the shit out of me.’ ‘That chili lit my asshole on fire.’ ‘You fart-knocker.” they all counted too.

Etc, etc.

The only lies allowed were misleading truths and lies by omission. Technically not lies at all.

Try to go a day without uttering a single untruth. It’s harder than it sounds.

“So what happens when I go a hundred days without telling a lie?” Jeb asked, hobbling out to the street corner, scratching his beard. The scraggly thing was starting to get respectably uncomfortable.

“Then, my enormous disciple, we begin the second stage of your wizard training.” The fairy said solemnly. “Human wizards were rare for many reasons, primarily because telling the truth seems to be beyond your capability, as a species.”

“Your commentary on my species has been noted,” Jeb muttered as he emerged from the alleyway and angled toward his favorite spot for begging, the corner of a street where a modest amount of traffic passed by every day. Just enough to earn a day’s wages but not so much that he would attract the attention of the local fuzz.

The city wasn’t kind to humans, or beggars, and human beggars were right out.

“Morning Jeb,” A keegan in a snazzy uniform of black with razor-straight gold trim oozed into view, regarding Jeb with that skull-grin they all shared. It was much easier to read a keegan’s expression by looking at their eyebrows.

Think of the devil, Jeb grimaced.

“Morning, officer Zlesk.” Jeb said, keeping his tone as neutral as possible.

“You remembered my name! I’m flattered.” Zlesk said, his expression amused.

I certainly hope so, Jeb thought. He‘d rather have the authorities be flattered than insulted, all other things being equal. Less pain in his ass that way.

“Seemed like a good idea,” Jeb said.

“Right,” Zlesk said, his stance shifting as he peered down at Jeb. “Where you headed this morning?”

“Gonna beg on the corner of Lorne and Kole,” Jeb said, motioning to the wide street just a ways down the road, where a lot of traffic meant decent pickings, begging-wise.

Not having a Class or Level was rough. Jeb was now living in a kind of a communist fantasy world, where everyone got the job they were good at, and did it superhumanly well.

In short, unless the task was killing for profit, there was really nothing else that he could be expected to do better than an eighteen year old pissant with a Busboy Class.

Jeb was on average, dumber, weaker, and slower than a normal citizen. The only thing he had going for him was experience and moral flexibility.

Still, Jeb would rather not become a mugger or bandit and make others miserable simply to survive, so…begging filled the occupational gap that kept him breathing.

“Corner of Lorne and Kole, huh?” Zlesk asked, running his chin. “That place gets pretty crowded between noon and three. You planning on holding up traffic?”

“No such plans, sir.” Jeb said, his peg leg clacking against the cobbled stone as the alien police officer stalked him through the street, prodding for some kind of actionable offence.

“You know, I’ve actually been mildly disappointed with you humans. First species to make it through the Impossible tutorial. Bam! I thought every single one of you was going to be some kind of natural born survivor, fierce apex predators smeared with dirt and blood, waiting to be unleashed.”

“We can’t all be natural born survivors,” Jeb said, suppressing a chuckle as he pictured himself as Zlesk’s Rambo human.

“Alas, you’re right. Humans are, in general, fat, lazy little keegan clones only motivated by fear and greed.”

Don’t forget love, sex, and stupid. Jeb thought silently.

“But as weak and stupid as humans are on average, damn near every single one wound up getting by somehow. I guess human’s strength is their ability to get on.”

The conversation fell silent for a moment.

“Except for you.”

Jeb clenched his teeth. Even though he knew the guy was dead wrong about him, it still hurt to be shit on like this.

“You wanna hear some of my thoughts on life?” Zlesk asked.

Not really.

“…” Jeb couldn’t afford to lie or speak the truth, so he stayed quiet.

“I believe that where we are today is just the result of a long chain of effort leading us to our current situation. I’m an officer because I worked hard to become one. Spent five years training to be where I am today.”

“You, though?” He asked, looking Jeb up and down. “What long chain of stupidity and failure brought you here, I wonder?”

Jeb finally broke a smile. “Honestly? I worked hard for an outrageous amount of success that captured the attention of the entire world. All to beg on the street corner of your charming city.”

Zlesk stared at Jeb silently for a moment, fingering the beat-stick on his waist. A moment later the keegan burst into a gale of laughter.

“That’s a good one, Jeb,” the officer said, chuckling for a moment.

Suddenly the keegan stooped down from his seven-foot height and grabbed Jeb by the back of the neck, his fingers like iron rods clamped around the base of his spine.

“Don’t let me catch you begging between noon and three, alright? Or I’ll have to fine you for obstructing traffic. You and I both got better things to do than take a trip down to the office.”

Jeb shuddered, remembering the cracking beam in the cell’s ceiling that had kept him awake at night, staring at it for hours at a time.

No thank you. Jeb wasn’t interested in sleeping in PTSD central again, not even for three hot and a cot.

“Got it.” Jeb said.  Zlesk released his neck and moved on, apparently losing interest.

Jeb got himself situated on the street corner, straightened his smelly rags, took off his pegleg and put the stump out in front of him, rubbed some street grease on it to make it look bruised, sitting the missing limb center stage.

Begging is a performance art.

Jeb set his beat up hat in front of himself, and sat back, watching the day flow by. Time seemed to speed up as Jeb zoned out, people zipping past him, doing their dailies. Every now and then a tiny copper coin about the size of a man’s thumb would clink into the hat.

Jeb’s eyes widened when he spotted a silver glint in the sun before hitting the hat, and he gave the keegan woman an appreciative nod and a ‘thank you, ma’am.’ A silver was like throwing a fifty into a pot full of ones.

Maybe later tonight I’ll take a bath and visit the bar. See if there’re any human women there interested in a hobo.

Jeb chuckled to himself  as he imagined the inevitable question after a night of flirting:

Your place or mine? She would whisper sultrily into his ear.

God, could you imagine if I brought her back to my place?

There’s the trash pile I stack up to block sight from the main road. It gets removed every Wednesday, so we should have some...privacy tonight. Over there’s the blankets I use as a mattress. Don’t mind the smell, some of the trash leaked on it before I noticed.

Hey, where are you going!?

Jeb was still chuckling to himself when a richly dressed keegan and a much shorter one approached from down the street. The taller one was male, and the shorter one was immature, hard to determine their gender based on physical cues, but the clothes looked decidedly feminine, for a keegan, that was.

“Ew, what’s that?” The shorter female asked, pointing at Jeb, drawing him out of his amusing reverie, covering their skull-face nose.

“Oh, that? That’s a human,” The taller male said, eyeing Jeb and his hatful of coinage.

“It stinks.”

“Yes well, that’s more of a condition of being a beggar than being a human. He really only has himself to blame. Look at the difference between us and remember: We’re the ones that are broke. Because of the gods-damned Stitching, he’s got nine thousand more bulbs than we do.”

What an asshole.

Jeb’s brows rose as the taller keegan, presumably the father, pulled out a gold coin and leaned in toward the hat.

A gold bulb was the rough approximate of a thousand dollar bill. A single one could keep him fed and clothed for three months. Jeb actually salivated as he watched the gold coin descend toward his hat.

This right here is some premium alms.

The keegan flicked the gold coin back and forth in his fingers, flickering it in the sunshine, capturing Jeb’s attention as he leaned forward and plucked the silver coin out of Jeb’s hat.

Just that quick, the keegan man straightened and walked away.

Jeb’s jaw dropped.

Did I just get robbed!?

Visions of a shower, shave, a bowl of hot food, and a slim chance of getting a date for the evening flickered past his eyes and into the gutter.

“Hey!” Jeb shouted, trying to stand, but the pegleg wasn’t on, so he wound up hopping in place for a moment, shoving the wood onto his stump and dumping the meager copper coinage into his pocket, then clomping after them as swiftly as he could, catching up to the father/daughter pair in a matter of moments.

“…be a lesson to you, child, nothing distracts a man more than the promise of wealth. Blind them with gold and you can take their –“

“Hey!” Jeb shouted, his vision tinged red. “Give me back my money.” Jeb dearly wanted to call him a prick, or an asshole, but that would be a lie.

So much of his vocabulary had been neutered by the first rule of wizard club.

“What are you talking about, beggar?” The keegan asked, raising a brow. “I do not have anything of yours.”

“Oh, were you experiencing a fugue state when you stole my goddamn silver coin!? Give me my money!” Jeb grabbed the man’s shirt in a moment of mindless anger and immediately regretted it.

The wealthy man had obviously invested some points in Body, because he peeled Jeb’s hand away from his shirt like brittle styrofoam.

Jeb sucked in a breath through his teeth as the bones in his palm and wrist grated against each other ominously, bending ever so slightly in the keegan’s iron grip. Jeb wanted to groan in pain, but he’d be damned if he let the bastard see him sweat.

“Know your place, human.” The keegan said, staring directly into Jeb’s eyes.

“I’m not the thief here,” Jeb growled back.

“That money was too good for you.”

“You’re full of sh-“ Jeb winced as Smartass pinched him in the neck. “You’re lying.”

The rich bastard didn’t say anything, simply giving Jeb’s hand one last warning squeeze before shoving him back.

“What’s going on here!?” Jeb heard Zlesk’s voice approaching from the side and his skin went cold.

Goddamn motherfucking shit ass timing!

“Sera, here is another lesson, child.” The keegan said, glancing at the younger one standing nest to him.

“Officer, I’m glad you’re here. This man tried to rob me.”

“That’s Bull-“ another pinch on Jeb’s neck. “That’s a lie. He stole from my hat.”

“Garland Green stole from your hat?” Zlesk asked, brow arched. “Sure.”

The keegan officer grabbed Jeb by the back of the neck. “Sorry for the trouble Mr. Green. I’ll get this scum out of your hair.”

“Um,” The young keegan standing beside the older one spoke up, drawing their attention to her.

“Yes, miss?” Officer Zlesk asked, about to lead Jeb away by the neck.

“Um he –“ The young keegan glanced up at her father’s thunderous expression and swallowed audibly. “Nothing.”

“Son of a bi-“ Smartass pinched him real hard, shocking him out of his lie. The man probably wasn’t the literal son of a bitch, and saying so would almost certainly invalidate a little over three months of carefully considered speech.

These rules are so goddamn annoying!

Officer Zleck dragged him bodily to lockup, giving Jeb a few bruises from the beat-stick along the way when his pace didn’t satisfy the alien bureaucrat.

After a few humiliating minutes of being led through the streets like an unruly child, the officer threw him in an iron cage with thick bars designed to resist someone with far more Body than Jeb.

“Congratulations,” Zlesk said as he locked the cage. “You could be the first human to be publicly executed for robbery in Kalfath.”

Chapter 2: Lesson One

Jeb was lying on his back on the cold stone bunk, watching the ceiling beam for signs of movement two days later when Smartass popped out of the woodwork, holding some kind of miniature kazoo.

Wonk! The thing unfurled and honked as she blew into it. Jeb could only assume that was what the fairy had been doing the last couple days.

“Congratulations! You have gone a hundred days without speaking an untruth!”

Jeb might have ignored her if it weren’t for the extreme boredom and the creeping dread of being locked inside a room and threatened with death.

“Oh, what did I win?” Jeb asked, sitting up. Anything to distract him from The Spike coming through the ceiling in his thoughts.

“A lesson from the most magically-gifted species in existence! You may now grovel and consider your good fortune.” Smartass said, polishing her nails on the scrap of silk wrapped around her torso with studied haughtiness. “Go ahead, I’ll wait.”

“I don’t feel lucky,” Jeb said, motioning to the cell around him.

“Nonsense. You’re probably the luckiest human on the planet right now, if luck actually existed.”

“Go ahead, lay it on me,” Jeb said, leaning back against the wall.

“Alright. Let’s start with dimensions. You’re aware of four. The three dimensions of space, and time. But did you know…there is a fifth dimension?”

Smartass tapped her fingers together, smiling ominously.

“Yeah,” Jeb said with a shrug. “Quantum physicists say there could be as many as ten. What of it?”

“Gah!” Smartass grunted, her epic reveal ruined. “Alright, fine. The fifth dimension is known as Fate, and it’s intrinsically linked to Time.”

“So, is everything predetermined, or what?”

“Not at all,” Smartass said, struggling to find the words to describe it. “Every living being capable of making choices carries around a little ball of something called Impact with them in the Fifth dimension. This little ball is the expression of how much change that creature could potentially exert over the future.”

Jeb blinked. “I’m not sure I follow.”

Smartass sighed and rolled her eyes condescendingly. “Say you have two men identical in every way, except one had more money than the other. The one with more money has a larger ball of Impact than the poorer one. The same is true with physical strength, status, magical power…Anything. Any measurable advantage that you have toward impacting the course of future events is reflected in the size of your Impact.”

“Okay, I think I get it,” Jeb said, nodding.

“Now, the System was designed by a wizard in Pharos a fuck-off long time ago, as a way to regulate Impact and how it works. To manipulate a dimension that we can only perceive through environmental cues and guesswork.”

Jeb frowned.

“As a hypothetical, What do you think would happen if we flipped the order? What if, without changing anything else, you were to increase the size of someone’s ball of Impact in the fifth dimension?”

Jeb considered it for a moment. If Impact was the measure of how much a person or thing could affect the future, then having more of it would mean they could affect the future more…

“They’d get more powerful?”

“Bam! Got it on the first try!” Smartass blew her little party-kazoo again.

Wonk!

“So this ancient wizard thought to himself, ‘I wonder if I could forcibly move Impact from one creature to another. That’s the System. When you kill something, their Impact unravels and dissipates into the environment of the fifth dimension in a fraction of a second. Some of it might stick to you, but probably not.”

“With the System, though,” Smartass said, hovering inches from his face. “The System exists in the fifth dimension as well, and when someone with it installed kills something, the System takes the impact that would have been unraveled and lost to the environment and adds it to the User in a convenient, structured way.”

“And that, my friend, takes the forms of levels, Classes, and Abilities.”

“…I don’t have the System, though,” Jeb said. What good was telling him all this? It was neat, and interesting to think of, but ultimately useless to him. He’d been blacklisted from the System.

Smartass threw her head back and groaned. “Stick with me, okay?”

“Sure.”

“This next piece of knowledge I’m about to lay on you is much rarer and more valuable and absolutely taboo to spread to outsiders.”

“Okay.”

Smartass flew up into his face. “I need you to swear.”

“Swear what?”

“Swear that you won’t spread this knowledge by any means.”

Jeb eyed the Fairy for a moment before raising his right hand. “I swear I will not spread the knowledge Smartass is about to impart on me by any means.”

Click.

Jeb felt something shift inside him, locking into place.

“What the hell was that?”

“Good. Means it’s working.” Smartass said with a grin as she fluttered in quick barrel rolls of excitement.

“What just happened?”

“Something that very few people know is that individuals have different qualities to their Impact.”

“Yeah, but what just happened?” Jeb asked again.

“I’m getting to it. The Fate dimension has its own rules, and something akin to the laws of gravity, whereby certain balls of Impact can attract and consume others.”

“You’re not gonna tell me you just ate my Impact and I’m a trusting idiot, are you?” Jeb asked.

“No, shut up.” Smartass scowled at him. “Every thinking, deciding creature has the ability to naturally alter the quality of their impact. You just got the ball rolling by not speaking any lies for a hundred days. The longer you can maintain that, the better off you’ll be. After flushing all the untruths out of your system, your Impact is now sticky, capable of stealing chunks of impact and adding it to your own.”

“Like washing off a rubber sticky hand,” Jeb said, nodding.

Smartass stared at him for a moment.

“…Sure.”

“Here’s something I don’t get. If any form of power is reflected in your Impact, why not just steal money, lie and sleaze your way to the top?”

“Well, you could, but that kind of Impact, money, status and possessions, are easy to strip away. Real power can’t be taken away from you. Our kind of power, anyway. Fairy power.”

“Explain.”

“Now that you are ‘sticky’ in the fifth dimension, people will start to rub off on you. No, not like that, shut up. I mean a little extra Impact will stick to you with every exchange of power and become absorbed by yours, adding to your intangibles.”

…..

The fuck is she going on about?

“Explain?”

“Deals! I’m talking about deals!” Smartass said with a sigh. “I swear, M&M lord, you’re the dumbest human I’ve ever taught this.”

“Also the only one, I imagine?” Jeb asked.

“Correct,” Smartass said, smiling.

“Impact is defined as a measure of potential influence on the future, understand?”

“Yeah. I got that part.”

“So what happens to a person if they enter into a disadvantageous bargain that benefits them little and costs them dearly? Say, trimming their lawn in return for all the money they possess?”

“Well, I imagine their Impact would shrink,” Jeb said.

“Not shrink, exactly,” Smartass said. “Shaved away. Taken by the one who benefitted from the bargain, the one who walked away with their money.”

“Take the money away from him, and the extra Impact is gone, though,” Jeb said with a shrug. “I’m not seeing where this is going, exactly.”

Smartass rolled her eyes. “When a fairy makes a deal like that, a little bit of extra impact sticks to them, increasing their intangible power, regardless of what happens to the money.”

“So fairies grow a little more powerful from each raw deal they successfully pull off?”

“Yes! Now you’re getting it!”

“And this behavior isn’t limited to fairies. Humans can do it too. You simply have to never lie, and tempt people into deals that are against their own interest. Two behaviors that are diametrically opposed…”

Jeb frowned.

“Is that why you’re a quarter inch taller since we’ve met? Have you been siphoning my Impact away?” Jeb asked.

Smartass’s eyes darted off to the side.

“Well, I don’t need your help, so I guess-“

“Just the tiniest bit!” Smartass admitted, her eyes wild. “Your Fate is so tasty! And it’s only the amount of effort it takes you to find a single pound of sugar each month. That’s not so bad, right? It’s like donating blood once a month! That’s practically a steal by usual familiar rates!”

“How do you gain Impact from me giving you candy?” Jeb asked, frowning.

“You have to spend your time, effort and sometimes money on it, energy that could be used elsewhere to affect the course of the future. Being saddled with that debt is, on the surface, a negative drain on your Impact.”

“But not a big one?” Jeb asked, eyeing the Fairy.

She shook her head wildly. “Tiny.”

“Fine, the deal continues.”

“Whoo!” Smartass fist-pumped.

“So you gain more power from screwing people over on deals. How? What does that look like?”

“Well, you’ve already seen the stats the System uses. Body, Myst, and Nerve. They are representative of the three kinds of deals you can make with another creature, and each fall into one of those categories.”

“How so?” Jeb asked, folding his hands over his stomach as he watched Smartass pace back and forth.

“Well, any deal involving a transfer of tangible goods will give you Body. It is by far the most common deal.”

“Okay.”

“If you were to trade for information or social power, you would be in the Nerve category.”

“So if I took someone’s…blueprints for a machine, or traded a service for their seat on a council or something? that would give me Nerve.”

“Yes. Well…Mostly.”

“What do you mean by mostly?” Jeb asked.

“It’s far more art than science,” Smartass said. “Every successful deal will give you a complex mixture of thousands of different tiny improvements throughout your body. The three categories of Body, Myst and Nerve are a simplification created by the System. It could be a little of this, a little of that, it could improve one aspect of your body more than another, there’s really no way to tell.

“But on average…”

“Yes, on average that’s what the deals will do, raise your Body, Myst and Nerve.”

“What about Myst? How do I raise that?”

“If you can convince people to pay you with things that are key to their emotions and identity, such as their appearance, objects that hold great sentimental value, their relationships, or their memories.”

“You got Myst when you took Jessica’s hair, didn’t you?”

Smartass giggled, nodding, and Jeb frowned in thought.

“What if a man’s seat on a council was key to his self-image?” Often, that was the case.

“That’s why this is an art. You would get a mixture of Nerve and Myst, should you convince him to part with it.”

“So let me get this straight.” Jeb said, raising his hands.

“Okay.”

“Your method Is outlandishly slower than just killing things and taking their Impact via the System,” Jeb said, ticking off his finger. A person couldn’t go around making bad deals at the same speed someone could go around killing monsters. Not even close. People wouldn’t enter a bad deal unless they were desperate, and you couldn’t even lie to them about it, either.

“it’s got arbitrary rules that forces you to adhere to a weird, fae model of behavior,” Jeb said, ticking off another finger.

“And there’s no way to accurately control what kind of power you get when you do successfully manage to enforce one of these bad deals.” Jeb ticked another finger.

“Which people will actively try to get out of paying, obviously.” Jeb ticked the last finger on his hand.

“All true.” Smartass said, kicking her feet off the edge of Jeb’s stone cot.

“What’s the upside here?” Jeb asked.

“First,” Smartass said, copying him by holding up a finger. “You don’t have a choice. You’ve been blacklisted from the System.”

“And second, and perhaps more importantly,” She said, ticking off her middle finger at him. “No one, under any circumstances, can take the power you gain in this way from you without your permission, short of killing you. Not even the gods.”

Jeb’s held his breath, considering the ramifications.

“Sold.” Fuck those guys.

“You know, this is all assuming you survive the year,” Smartass said, kicking her heels again. “You’re not exactly on track for that, given the current circumstances.”

“Blow me.”

“Excuse me?” A Keegan deputy asked as he stepped inside the holding cells. “Is my translator working properly or did you just ask me to perform oral sex on you? What on Pharos is oral sex?”

Open mouth, insert foot. Gotta make something up.

“It’s an-“ Jeb choked off a reflexive lie. Smartass gave him a thumb’s up.

“I wasn’t talking to you, deputy, and I apologize for any misunderstanding. I meant no disrespect, and I have the exact amount of respect for you that the situation dictates.”

And not an iota more.

The skull-faced alien scanned the empty room, eyebrows raised.

“Oookay.” He said with a shrug and a headshake. “Humans.”

The deputy unlocked Jeb’s cell and motioned for him to come out.

“You‘re free to go, you can pick up your shit at Zlesk’s desk.”

Jeb was tempted to ask for a cane or something, but he didn’t want to say a word that might irritate someone who was likely already a bit miffed.

Instead, Jeb leaned on the side of the wall as he hopped his way down to the main lobby, where he saw Zlesk processing paperwork before retiring for the night. The bureaucratic bastard glanced up and waved Jeb over, digging around in his desk for something.

“Jeb, it’s your lucky day, Mr. Green is too busy to press charges against you, so the matter’s been dropped. The man owns half the city, so he could’ve had you killed, were he inclined. Count your blessings.” Zlesk said, pulling out Jeb’s pegleg and setting it down on his desk.

“Here’s your prosthetic, your coppers, and your..sharpened spoon,” He said, pushing them forward as Jeb gratefully sat down.

“You’ll just have to fill out this paperwork,” Zlesk continued, pulling out a set of papers and straightening them before setting them in front of Jeb and offering him a battered fountain pen.

Jeb’s stomach twisted as he saw the wriggling nonsense lines stamped across the paper.

“I can’t read that.” Jeb said.

“What do you mean, you can’t read that?” Zlesk asked.

“Just what I said. I can’t read it.”

Zlesk rolled his eyes. “Please, anyone who learned to read their native tongue can read anything written by a sapient. The system translates your bloated monkey hoots into civilized Keegan. Or are you telling me you’ve never learned to read?”

Jeb opened his mouth to tell Zlesk that he’d been blacklisted from the System, but realized that line of inquiry would inevitably lead to why…If Zlesk didn’t outright call him a lier. There was no good solution.

Lie without lying.

“There’s a language center in the human brain that, when damaged, can make it impossible to read.” Jeb said.

“And you’re saying you’ve taken damage to those parts of the brain?”

“I’ve taken some hits there,” Jeb said, slumping his shoulders. He’d bonked his head on the left side a few times with the microwave. Unlikely to cause brain damage, but the statement itself was true.

“Huh,” Zlesk said, taking the paper away from Jeb and beginning to grill Jeb hard, scribbling on the sheet.

“Name?”

“Jeb Trapper.”

“Class?”

“Don’t have one.”

“level?”

“I made it to level six before the tutorial ended.”

“Occupation before Earth was assimilated?”

“Age?”

“Age in Pharos years?”

“Difficulty of your tutorial?”

“It was easy once I figured out the trick.” Jeb said, leaning back in the chair.

At the end of the questions, Zlesk straightened in his chair, handing the papers back. “Alright, Here you go, Sign your name if you can, put your thumb print on it if you can’t”

“I still can sign my name. That’s a strong connection.” Jeb said, signing his name on the bottom of the line before handing it back.

“Huh,” Zlesk grunted, glancing between the paper and Jeb.

“What?”

“I guess you can’t read,” Zlesk said.

“What?”

“You just signed an admission of guilt for several high crimes that are punishable by death. Either you can’t read or you’ve got the best Balqua face I’ve ever seen.”

“WHAT!?” Jeb shouted, hopping to his foot.

“Calm down, calm down, don’t get your panties in a twist, I just had to be sure you weren’t messing with me.” Zlesk slowly pulled out a lighter and lit the paper on fire before tossing it into the metal garbage can beside his desk.

None of the other officers seemed to be surprised at Zlesk’s antics, the flaming trash bin earning no more than a curious glance.

“Now I gotta fill out the whole damn incident report,” Zlesk groaned, pulling out another set of papers.

“Oh, and the young girl dropped by earlier today, said you dropped this bulb during the incident.” Zlesk took a gold coin out of his breast pocket and set it down on the table with a clack.

The two of them shared a glance, and Jeb knew that was the closest thing that he was going to get to an admission that Jeb was the one in the right.

“I was gonna say to the Abyss with it and keep it, but I’d feel bad robbing a retard.”

Jeb felt his eyes tearing up, a tiny flame of hope for keeganity fluttering in his heart. The girl had done right by him, and Zlesk...Zlesk had chosen not to screw him over...in a backhanded kind of way.

“You’re not as evil as I thought you were,” Jeb said, wiping the tears away.

“Ugh, just for that, I’m adding that you’ve got priors as a sex offender.” The keegan said, scribbling on the paper.

“Are we…bantering?”

The Keegan raised an eyebrow and flipped the incident report to face Jeb, roughly half the boxes filled out with squiggly indecipherable lines.

“You tell me.”

Jeb broke into a cold sweat.

***Later***

“So I might be a registered sex offender on an alien planet.” Jeb chuckled, nursing his beer at the bar of the only place in town that served humans. It was a bit run-down, and the clientele were mostly scarred bruisers who could twist Jeb into a pretzel, but it was the only place to get a drink, so here he was.

“You’re not registered as a sex offender.” The grizzled man sitting next to him said, the first words he’d spoken since Jeb sat down and started pouring his heart out to the unflinching bartender.

Closest thing to a therapist in these parts, anyway.

“Why, were you there?” Jeb asked, scowling as he reoriented on the skinny old guy.

“A man who would fuck you over on a whim would have kept the bulb.” The old man said, glancing at Jeb sideways.

Jeb nodded. “Fair point. Hey, why do they call gold coins ‘bulbs’?”

“Why do we call dollars ‘bucks’?”

“I don’t fucking know.”

“There you go. So what are you planning on doing with your newfound windfall?”

“I thought I’d help others with it.” Jeb said, spinning the cup in his hands.

“Oh?” The skinny old man’s brows raised and he turned to fully face Jeb. He crossed his palms and idly tugged on his wedding ring.

“By supporting the local economy. Buy myself a shower, a change of clothes, and a night with a girl with negotiable virtue.”

The old man blinked and heaved a sigh.

“That’s it?” he asked. “All you want is a change of clothes and company? You don’t want to start a business, or get a ticket out of here? Move to an all human village and try to make something of yourself?”

“Pfft.” Jeb waved the man’s nagging off. “In all likelihood, umm…” Jeb snapped his fingers and motioned to the other guy, looking for his name.

“Nixus.”

“In all likelihood, Nixus,” Jeb said, the alcohol forcing him to lean heavily on his elbow to stay straight. “In all likelihood, I’m not gonna live long enough to worry about any of that. I’m a gimp. Worrying about the future is more appropriate for people under the age of thirty with two good legs. My way, the gold goes back into circulation, I get one good day. Everybody benefits.”

“If you only act for selfish motives, I can’t reward you.”

Jeb peered at the guy next to him. “The fuck does that mean?”

“Karma.” The old man said. “I believe good people who do good things because they are right, deserve to be recognized. I also think that people who go above and beyond, deserve to be honored for it. People like you.”

Jeb peered at the old man, his danger senses tingling, sobering him up in a matter of seconds.

“Who the hell are you?”

“Nixus.”

“Who the hell is Nixus?”

“God of reward,” the bartender said, idly cleaning a glass.

When Jeb glanced back, the old man was gone, his stool was empty, and his glass was missing.

All that remained was the wedding ring.

It was thicker than Jeb had thought, almost looking like a coin with a hole punched out of it. The outside had fascinating geometric shapes, and the inside had roiling Myst that whirled around a central point like a hurricane.

Welp, that’s weird and magical. Jeb thought, scooping it up into his palm before anyone could see it.

“Hey, did you see a skinny old dude sitting here?” Jeb asked, thumbing next to him.

The bartender gave him a flat stare.

“Are you giving me that look because the answer’s no, or because the answer’s yes?”

“You been talking to yourself all night, buddy,” The Melas bartender said, throwing his cloth over his shoulder.

Jeb glanced at the empty spot next to him.

“That’s what I thought.”

Jeb glanced to his right, where Smartass was floating in a cup of beer, her arms thrown over the edge like a guy in a hot-tub.

She gave a respectable belch, her head lolling on her neck shortly before she slipped under the surface of the foamy brew, a few tiny bubbles all that marked her passing.

Damnit, Jeb thought, plunging his hand into the brew to pull the sopping wet fairy out of the beer, spilling a decent amount of her drink in the process.

The bartender did not look amused.

“Did you catch any of that?” Jeb asked Smartass as he retreated from the bar, leaving a silver coin behind. The fairy was sprawled out on his palm, absolutely shitfaced.

“Any of what?” The tiny fairy lifted her head off Jeb’s palm and glanced around. “Where are we?”

“I think one of the gods who voted for me to live felt bad about giving me the shaft and paid me a visit to even the score.”

“Did she say who she was?” Smartass asked, sitting up.

“Nixus.”

“Oh yeah,” Smartass said, lifting a finger, “that makes sense, because – HURK!”

Smartass rolled over and puked on his thumb.

Unlike what they might show you on kid’s cartoons, fairy vomit was not filled with glitter and rainbows.

It was filled with beer and bile.

“Goddamnit, Smartass,” Jeb said, switching hands and wiping off his palm. “Learn to pace yourself.”

“No…natural tolerance.” Smartass muttered between dry heaves.

“Then don’t drink!” Jeb said, just before bumping shoulders with a Melas brute on the way out the door.

Between holding Smartass and his bum leg, Jeb almost lost his balance and took a dive into the street, but he was able to catch himself just before faceplanting. The Melas didn’t even spare Jeb a glance as he sauntered into the bar.

The orange-skinned, horned fellow was wearing a patched leather jacket covered in dirt and stains, his hair and horns were decorated with tiny bones that gave Jeb an almost mad-max feel. He was obviously high level, and making an issue would be…ill advised.

Not fucking with him, Jeb thought,  stumbling away.

He had more important things to do…Like putting his finger in a magic hole and seeing what happened.

Jeb tottered his way to his alley and was about to go in when he paused, realizing that the only thing between him and prying eyes was a pile of trash about four feet high that would be taken out…

Shit, what day is it?

Jeb glanced around the corner and spotted the R.O.U.S.’s snuffling through his blankets, forced to forage more now that the week’s trash had been taken away. the bigass rats looked up as Jeb peeked over, studying him for a moment before dismissing him entirely, far more preoccupied with gnawing open the can of beans he’d been saving for a rainy day.

“Well, shit. Maybe I can get a room.”

Jeb slipped Smartass’s limp body into his new vest and clomped his way to the nearest inn, seventeen silver coins burning a hole in his pocket.

It only took few minutes and two silver coins before Jeb was seated on his bed at the Starlight Inn, breathing in the scent of raw wood and stucco.

And trying not to mind the crack in the ceiling.

No. Not gonna think about death and roofs falling on us. We are going to focus on the fact that someone or something gave us a weird magic…thing, as a little present.

Jeb discounted the idea that the strange object could be overtly bad. If a powerful being wanted to kill him, there wasn’t much Jeb could do about it. Same with maiming, curses, etc.

Jeb sat and stared at the ring with the swirling hurricane of Myst in the center. He had to assume it was most likely a good thing, because anything else wouldn’t make sense.

Hesitantly, Jeb poked his least favorite finger through the hole. Just the tip at first, but when nothing happened, he got up the gumption to put his whole left pinky through it.

Nothing happened. He couldn’t even feel the Myst interacting with him. Jeb’s finger didn’t interrupt the swirl of Myst, and vice versa.

Hmm….

“Activate,” Jeb said, clenching his fist and pointing at the wall.

“Go!”

“Shoot!”

“Pew, pew, pew!”

Jeb took the ring off, set it on the table and reached into his Myst core. I hope I don’t have to pay for a new table. Or get sucked into the blender dimension.

Jeb’s Myst core was barely a flicker of the size it had been when he was in the tutorial. A sad little candle compared to the massive star it had been right before the end.

Jeb pictured his straw siphoning out the faint Myst that hung around the edges of his tiny star, drawing it out in a thread.

The Myst was dull, and slow to react, but Jeb managed to prod it into motion, creating an ultrafine thread of Myst connected to him.

He carefully spooled it out and poked the ring’s outer metal.

The ring shifted slightly.

He poked the Myst hurricane spinning in the center of the ring.

Nothing. The Myst swirling in the center rebuffed his efforts, pushing Jeb’s own Myst away like a fart in a windstorm.

“Well, that’s probably not gonna work.” He said, crossing his arms and glaring at the ring, trying to will it into working.

Reveal your secrets to me!

“He could have left a manual.” Jeb muttered.

“Technically true,” Smartass groaned from Jeb’s pocket.

“Maybe if I shake it really hard…”

Jeb spent the next hour or so fiddling with the magic ring to no avail, until he got bored and jammed the uncomfortable ring back onto his finger. It’ll do something…sooner or later.

Jeb flopped onto his back , making sure not to squish Smartass, and stared at the ceiling.

There’s that crack again.

This ceiling is the same color as the barracks.

No, the barracks was beige. This is taupe.

Is that crack getting bigger?

Is The Spike about to come through the ceiling and crush me?

Has it already?

Jeb took a deep breath and ran his thumb over the scar on his palm, evidence that the past was in the past. He carefully recounted the events leading up to today, and while they were outlandish, they didn’t have the disjointed skipping about of dying neurons trying to make sense of oxygen deprivation.

They were too cohesive. The narrative was too fluid. It had to be real.

I am alive.

Jeb closed his eyes, taking deep breaths as he began trying to relax in the deathtrap of an inn. Counting breaths, counting sheep, counting Smartass’s toes. Counting anything he could to relax and keep his mind off-

Nope, not gonna think about it.

Jeb walled those thoughts off, blockading them before they could even reach those well-trodden roads, letting them wither away in his brain.

His chest began itching.

That’s just my nerves. There’s nothing wrong with my chest.

To prove it wasn’t anything to worry about, Jeb went to scratch the itch. Just scratching an itch. Nothing out of the ordinary here. All fine.

Jeb reached up and tried to scratch his sternum, but something blocked his hand, sending a thrill of panic through him. Is there something on my chest right now? Something in it!?

When he brought his fingers back to his face, they were drenched in blood.

“FUCK!”

Jeb jerked out of sleep, heartbeat pounding in his temples as he sat up. He spotted a pair of feet tumbling away from him in the dark as Smartass was launched off his chest like a stone from a catapult, flailing all the way down to the inn’s wooden floor.

“Ow,” Smartass groaned face first into the rough-hewn wood.

Jeb struggled to get his jackhammer of a heartbeat under control as he tried to defuse the panic whirling around inside him.

It was just Smartass sleeping on my chest again. I’m fine.

Practically against his will, Jeb’s body got out of bed and began pacing, trying to ride out the adrenaline eating away at his nerves like acid.

Long, slow breaths. It’s not real.

Jeb stopped counting when he reached thirty seven breaths and his heart finally settled to near-normal.

Maybe I can get back to sleep again. He glanced at the window.

The sun was coming up.

Damnit. It was never this bad in the tutorial.

Jeb’s jaw dropped.

“Smartass, I think I need someone to try to kill me so I don’t kill myself.”

Smartass levered herself up, peering at him in the dim light.

“That makes no sense. But you’re telling the truth.”