B3-01 - Convalescence (Patreon)

A storm rumbled outside; rain sluiced down from the heavens and bent the long grass outside. It dripped along the window pane, leaving behind long watery smears that distorted the distant lights of the city. A flash of light cracked across the sky, silhouetting the tall swaying pines in the the distance and sending a rumble that rattled the window panes and shook the burning oil lamp beside the figure.

Maya Sullivan looked at the rain and set her hand against the glass, it was cold and as she pulled her hand away, she saw her hand print upon it. She shivered slightly and looked down at the sheet of paper that sat before her. The lamp light flickered and the words before her swayed in the light.

Journaling was something she never had a compulsion to do. There were no diaries for her brothers to raid, where she told her darkest secrets for her parents to stumble across. It was equal parts of not having a life worth recording and not wanting to leave written evidence of what she had done. If it was worth remembering, it would be.

The pen scratched across the sheet of paper. She wrote for a minute and then stopped. She looked down at the sheet of paper before her and crumbled it.

Maya took a long breath and rubbed her hand across her head. The stubble was a strange feeling she still hadn’t gotten used to. Nana stated she could use a little system tech magic and regrow her hair, but Maya was once again hesitant to begin the process. She wondered if it was the same thing that had prevented her from getting her hand fixed. Definitely not the same, one had been a limb, this was just hair. Maya sighed and scratched her head once more. It was the second time she had her brain messed with by Nan and the AI hadn’t even bothered to buy her a drink.

For the last three standard days Maya had been convalescing. She had been ordered by Nan to not do anything strenuous, which meant not returning to the RSH and raiding the hopefully intact hiveship she had stolen. Normally, she would have made a quip and then done just exactly that, but it didn’t take Maya long to realize not all was well with her brain. She had immediately passed out when she tried opening the doorway back into the RSH.

That meant she had to close the doorway to the space station and when she passed out, everyone was sort of trapped within the Cage for a day. Nan had lectured her about using her newfound abilities, the skills she had gained in the fight against the hiveship were what caused all her problems. Continuing to play around with abilities and skills she knew nothing about was something Nan had put her robotic foot down on.

Maya had obeyed, it was one thing to fight a hiveship and nearly die. It was an entirely different thing to try and open a dimensional threshold and nearly die. She wasn’t about to go out trying to open a door, if she was gonna go out it’d be with sparklers and a bomb big enough to cause the System some annoyance.

With her mortality reaffirmed, Maya had decided to take Nan’s advice. She had created her small rustic room and sequestered herself within it.

It was on of the only few times in many months that Maya had the time to just do nothing. There were no deal to be made, there were no rogue AIs that needed killing, there was no crazy happenings like the mana purge or the weird chaos lightning storm. All there was to do was to lay in bed.

She couldn’t even do heavy thinking, there were the engineering problems that the Astronauts were figuring out. A smart bunch they were and already they had begun learning how to tinker with system tech. Roci and Scotty were their tutors in that regard, but Maya had wanted to play too, but Nan’s orders were order she could not get around.

So she sat in bed and played with her status screen.

Level up! (Level 100)

It had been a shock when she first saw it. It was what she had been aiming for since she had Seared herself. It was the goal that meant she would be able to start manipulating essence mana and thereby become one of the most powerful SIL in the multiverse.

Sitting bald headed and aching from many wounds, Maya did not feel all that powerful. She looked at her status page and began opening some of the messages she had chose to ignore.

Centennium Prime

You are the first of your species to reach level 100.

+ Knowledge Token

+ Pathways Vol I, II, & III

Centennium

You have reached level 100.

+ 5 Luck

+ 5 Fortitude

+ 5 Foundation

Domination

You have defeated and dominated a being of higher levels and Tier than you. Impressive and terrifying.

+ Presence I

+ Flaws I

Touched by Mana

You have survived contact with condensed, liquid mana. Many rarely do.

+ 10 Luck

Blood and Mana

The most ancient forms of power were of blood and mana, you have used Intention and Will to bind technology to yourself. A good idea or a terrible one? Only time will tell.

+ Will I

+ 10 Fortitude

Immense Power

You have access to Tesseracts, one of the greatest sources of power in the Integrated Multiverse.

+ Tesseracts and You Vol. I, II, & III

+ 5 Fortitude

The Stars are Yours

You are the first of your species to build a livable space station.

+ Interstellar Traveler Guide I & II

+ 5 Mental Strength

Unified

There are technologies have been lost to time. Union technology has been rediscovered by you.

+ Union Tech Fundamentals Vol. I, II, III, IV, & V

+ 10 Foundation

Space Based I

Your corporation has expanded beyond your home planet and taken to the stars.

+ 4 Mental Dexterity

+ 1 Lostamira Personal Shuttle - mid-grade, Tier 1

Rogue Antagonist I

Can’t we all just get along? No? Death and destruction has been wrought by your hands against rogue AIs.

+ 4 Physical Strength

+ 1 Hatimongo Rogue Slayer Officer Sword - mid-grade, Tier 1

Anti-rogue AI Enchantment: only can be used by SIL

Hatimongo Eversharp Enchantment: Always sharp, never dull.

Rogue’s Doom Pulse Enchantment: A mana pulse disruption field is created to stun a rogue AI. Channeling mana will triple the mana pulse.

Waste Not, Want Not I

Some would call it trash, but others would call it resources.

+ 4 Mental Perception

+ 1 Recycler’s Token

The Edge of Death I

There’s a fine line between life and death and you seem to enjoy standing upon that edge.

+ 4 Physical Recovery

+ 1 Life Potion, high-grade, Tier 1

High-Grade Achieved

Congratulations upon the leveling to high-grade (levels 75-100).

+ 5 Foundation

+ 5 Fortitude

+ 5 Luck

[Technomancer] Level 5

You have chosen the path of the technomancer and some technology will do your bidding.

+ 4 Mental Willpower

[Intellectual Property Thief] Level 5

Some SIL hold IP sacred, others see it as a shortcut.

+ 2 Mental Channel

[Technology Adaption] Level 5

Adapt a piece of tech for a purpose it was not intended for.

+ 2 Mental Stamina

[Tech Modder] Level 6

Take a piece of tech and modify it to your own needs.

+ 2 Mental Dexterity

[Rogue Tech Mechanic] Level 4

Your rogue AI on the fritz? Pick up a wrench and find the shade of a tree.

+ 1 Mental Endurance

[Rogue Tech Technician] Level 2

With the right tools and knowledge, you can repair rogue AIs.

+ 2 Mental Dexterity

[Reverse Engineer] Level 4

Some SIL create, some SIL build, some SIL take another SIL’s Creation and figure out how to build it.

+ 2 Mental Perception

You have reached Level 100! You have 10 Pending Occupational Bonuses to Apply.

Intention III

Dimensional Inventory IV

Dimensional Awareness VII

Dimensional Threshold V

It was a long and impressive list, Maya had to admit. There were more notifications, but the bulk of them were level increases in various occupational abilities; none, from what she saw, were significant changes. No, level 10’s anywhere.

The last time she had checked her status page and levels had been in the first fight at the mana lake with Bell. She had defeated a lot of rogue AIs in and around the BR before she finally took the fight to the hiveship, but Maya still hadn’t figured out the math behind it.

She had used her [Raid Leader] ability to put Tender and Bell into the raid squad, where they could all share experience gains based on levels. Tender had been level 50 and Bell had been somewhere around the same area also. Before she had defeated the three Tier 2 rogue AIs in the Cage, she had been only level 62.

It was the end of the fight, where the Blob and the last Executioner had been destroyed that bothered Maya. She hadn’t gotten any death notifications from the System, yet somehow she had been awarded some experience points that had pushed her into the level 100 range. Bell and Tender had got nothing after the defeat of the first Executioner ant, even when she ‘removed’ the hiveship mind.

Something was amiss and Maya couldn’t pin point it. She had tried going through the data and the logs from the battle, but the numbers were not as she was expecting. Somewhere she had gained experience points, but she didn’t know from what or whom.

She brought up her status page once more and stared at it. There was a lot of points to distribute and once she accepted the level gain, she would no longer be on easy street. As a Tier 2 SIL with low levels, she had been blessed with only needing half of the experience points to gain a level. It was still a lot of experience points, but far less than a normal SIL would need.

Now that she was a low-grade, Tier 2 SIL, she wasn’t getting that little bonus anymore. The real struggle would begin now as levels would come slower and slower. The future looked somewhat grim, as she had no mana channels to work with. A fundamental feature of any SIL were their mana channels, which allowed non-combat SIL to use mana to improve their occupational abilities, like a [Smith] or an [Engineer].

If one used mana while they were doing an occupation, they would gain experience from it, the same as one would if they were battling a mana mutation. It wasn’t as fast or intense as fighting monsters, but it was a safe and steady method of gaining levels. In addition for every ten levels one gained in an occupational ability and every ten levels one gained in personal levels, they would gain an occupational bonus. That bonus would be applied to their occupational ability, thereby making it better, gaining boosts in experience gains and the quality of their craft.

Maya had seared her mana channels away.  Technically, being pulled into a dimensional instability as Integration was occurring in her universe and Earth being upgraded to a Tier 2 planet to become a Point of Contact for the System, had scrambled up her insides. She had been pumped full of transformative essence mana right out of the System’s spigot. Then she had been dumped into a dimensional plane where essence mana did not exist, so the essence mana that had been pumped into her began killing her own mana channels and began replacing it with channels that would allow her to use essence mana.

As she had been low level, the usage of such essence mana channels would have killed her. She hadn’t known at the time, but in the battle against Shen she had finally called upon the essence mana to aid her, which had Seared her and would have led to her death if the System hadn’t intervened.

Maya shook her head, it had been a wild and crazy four months. So much had happened, but she knew that was only the surface. There was so much other thing she needed to do now. There was Earth that still needed help, she had eventually look for her family, she had to return to the rainbow sky hellscape (RSH) and begin salvaging the hiveship, and she had to deal with the craziness that was already going on in the RSH. Chuckles the Dragon had said that things would get interesting as Maintenance in the RSH continued.

The big rogue AIs, the ones with plenty of mana to throw around, would become desperate. They would begin fighting and killing one another, trying to survive however long Maintenance lasted. As Maya was stuck in the RSH for the next five hundred standard years, she would eventually have to deal with those rogue AIs.

She was not looking forward to that.

There was a knock on the door to the room. Maya paused in her writing. It was a simple door, wooden slats hung by heavy cast iron hinges and with a copper knob.

“They’re arriving,” a voice said softly.

Maya looked down at what she had written and then nodded. She picked up the papers and a moment later they dissolved into the air. From the desk a tablet rose up and Maya picked that up. She headed to the door, not bothering to open it, but instead making the room disappear around her.

Roci stood waiting for Maya.

“Are you ready?” Roci asked.

Maya rolled her neck and cracked her knuckles.  “Born ready, kiddo.”

/AN: so begins a new 'book'. Hope you enjoy it, I think this will finally be more 'merchant' orientated, as now Maya has resolved her issues of survival and power, which were always the key concerns.