RE: Trailer Trash Special pt 2 (Patreon)

( RE: Trailer Trash Special pt 1 )

   Well... I also want to see what I look like, Tabitha admitted to herself with a wince. It’s not superfluous or vain in this situation. I actually have no idea who I really just QUANTUM LEAPED into. Memories are suspect, I want to—no, I NEED to see this and really confirm it for myself.

   If her circumstances were to be believed—and despite the twists and turns her life had taken she found herself a little incredulous—she was in someone else’s body, in someone else’s world. A fantasy world by every indication, with monsters and magic, where personal attributes were measured and expressed by some intangible systemic entity. As game stats. Although Tabitha had never been a real gamer, she’d lived through 2045 and it was impossible for her to be unaware of the Elder Scrolls Eight memes that permeated every crevice of the net. Large game releases had long since eclipsed television and film as hyped-up cultural events.

   “Status,” Tabitha said aloud.

   Nothing happened.

   “Info,” Tabitha tried all the popular voice commands she remembered. “User commands. Menu. Help. Emergency logout. Inventory. Item box. Settings?”

   The ridgeline she was hiking along began to taper off to the sheer drop of a cliff on one side, so she decided to double back down into the ravine. There was no moving water in sight, and this part of the gulch didn’t look particularly familiar, but the trail the goblins had left through the forest when dragging Tabi towards their den was impossible to miss. Even if the grass and leaves weren’t completely trampled into a trodden mess of goblin footprints, the grotesque little creatures had blundered a visible path through the ferns and brush in a bunched-up little party rather than dispersing to weave separately through the trees. It was remarkably unsubtle, and Tabitha knew from the common sense of her otherworld memory that it meant the goblins had all been young; likely all level one.

   “Alexa, Siri, Waifu, X-box, Cortana: c’mon, fetch me a tutorial, guys,” Tabitha muttered to herself. “Alphapage: delete that post. Don’t ever let me post that again. Binge: play next episode. Netflix: chill.”

   Predictably, none of the windows were summoned back into existence. Even more dismaying, Tabi didn’t know much about them at all. The messages came spontaneously and then they were gone, and the poor orphan girl Tabi had last seen one several years ago. When she was eleven summers old, she’d advanced from level one to level two. Tabi knew some letters and one or two words, but looking into her self required a level of mental focus she didn’t quite have the discipline for.

   SELF, huh? Tabitha mused. That’s how they refer to… checking your own stats or whatever, here? So, I just…

┌

  Lvl 16 Tabitha Moore

  HP   59/280

  STR 30 INT 64

  DEX 44 WIS 35

  CON 26 CHA 40

                                               ┘

   It was a very strange feeling, like the polar opposite of letting her concentration relax and let her mind sink down into sleep. It was more than just thinking it, she had to push her mind towards Self to sense the system scores at all. When Tabitha finally pulled it off, it was only a simplified set of statistics. She somehow intuited that with more practice, experience, and likely intelligence points, it would be easier and easier to bring up. If she stopped walking, sat down and closed her eyes for a bit she felt sure she could press her mind all the way through to expand a profile page on her that was much less abbreviated.

   In a vague way, the Tabi girl had known that something like meditation was a common practice among the culture of their fantasy world, that people journeyed deeper and deeper into the mysteries of ‘self’ for increasingly thorough and elaborate explanations of various skills, titles, or even how the system determined value attributes. It was naturally all incredibly interesting to Tabitha Moore, enough to frustrate her in realizing that this was absolutely not the time nor place to delve deeper into the mystery mechanics. Definitely not while alone here in the dangerous wilderness.

   Instead, Tabitha allowed herself to stop by one of the larger remaining pools of water trapped along the drying creekbed to take a look at her appearance.

   The face that stared back at her wasn’t one either Tabi Mure or Tabitha Moore knew. Tabi had remembered herself as a waif almost skeletal with malnutrition; frail limbs, the flesh around her eyes pulled tight and sunken into their sockets, cheeks that were thin and gaunt. Her constitution and charisma values added together had amounted to a paltry eleven back then, and Tabi knew that the sum of CON and CHA was generally regarded (by the gossiping girls and wives throughout the town of Mure at least) as a measure of appearance or attractiveness.

   Eleven was not an attractive rating.

   After a transmigration, her skill sets reconfiguring, a series of titles being granted, and fourteen levels, however, her attractiveness had leapt into the stratosphere of sixty-six. She know looked great, much better than average, her face had filled out and no longer resembled a dying street urchin on her last gasps. There were plenty of similarities to Tabitha Moore’s previous appearance, and she thought that if their likenesses been compared side-by-side one might guess the two were related.

   So… I look kind of intense? Tabitha turned her head this way and that to gauge how she looked. Fierce? Something about the eyes makes me look confident and a little… dangerous? Maybe because my ‘appearance’ attributes are so lopsided. With my charisma up way higher than my constitution for… whatever reason?

   There were way too many unanswered questions and way too much extraneous information to process right now, and her Tabi memories weren’t as useful as she would have liked. The peasant girl had been fairly ignorant of anything not relevant to her immediate survival or securing her next meal, really. Her ‘mind’ score from likewise adding her INT and WIS together had been a respectable twenty, so she couldn’t have been called stupid for an orphaned young woman… but Tabitha was packing ninety-nine mind now. Her future prospects were about to change in a dramatic way.

   “Strength and constitution together are considered body, strength and dexterity make up your physical ability score…” Tabitha murmured to herself as she scooped a palmful of water out of the puddle to carefully clean and wipe some of the muck out of her larger gashes.

   Tabi had been confused by the innumerable different stat values—it seemed like many of the base stats commonly paired together to form various different expressions of attributes. Inspecting your self was a little different for everyone based on their comprehension and capability, and only those well-off enough for more than a basic family education knew how everything was actually laid out. With her ninety-nine mind, Tabitha was now puzzling out different combinations of values and matching them up to different conversations that Tabi had overheard but not completely understood in the past.

   This is so stupidly weird complex that it loops back around to being simple in a crazy way? Tabitha flinched and swore as her fingertips probed the deep cuts on her arm. Health points climbed back up a little already, so I guess this isn’t as bad as it looks. Hopefully. And hit points are constitution multiplied by… something, with some hidden soul value added in. From what Tabi remembers. Actually, at some point I can probably work out the exact soul number with alge̶b̵͙͐ř̵͚a̷͇̓—

   “Ow!” Tabitha swore, letting bloody water trickle down her arm as she clutched at the sudden headache.

   After a few moments, it faded away, not unlike one she’d get from a brain freeze.

  “Did you just—” Tabitha glanced around suspiciously, then looked up towards the sky. “Did you just fucking zap me for thinking about ạ̷̧̛̓l̷̡̛͔g̵̰̦̃ę̴̳̰̳͉̦͉͋̈b̷̳̖̜̙̼͛͌r̷̛̪̉͊̒͌̋ȃ̶͖̱͖͓̲͓̦̆̈́͝?̴̢̾̄!̴͎͠"̵͎̅

   “Ow ow ow ow okay, okay!” Tabitha yelled, jolting up to her feet as she grabbed the sides of her head. “I don’t really like thinking about mathe̸m̴at—I never liked arithmetic anyways, geez.”

   That’s—that’s INSANE, though! Tabitha’s mind whirled at the implications. So, what, higher knowledge is a big NO-NO or something? Who decides that? Is there a pantheon of deities or something calling the shots here? Does the SPIRIT OF MAGIC just not want people relying on mundane advancements to get out of this medieval stasis whatever’s going on with the world? That reeks of, I don’t know, some INTENTION or PURPOSE administrating the weird system and self thing, doesn’t it?

   After a few more intentional tests—and more than a few unintentional, because it was hard to force yourself to stop thinking about a distracting concept—Tabitha earned herself a splitting migraine, and her mood was plummeting. Wiping her wet hands angrily across her ragged clothing, she stomped away from the puddle, kicking a nearby stone across the ravine as hard as she could. With a furious scowl she returned to following the trail the goblins had stamped through the brush when abducting her earlier, picking up the pace and striding through the forest with purpose.

   “This is bullshit,” Tabitha muttered. “Bullshit!”

   A horned hare darted away from her through the ferns at her sudden exclamation, and the Tabi in her lamented—a horned hare was something within her ability to subdue, and bringing its fur and horn back to Mure would have been much, much better than returning empty-handed.

   “Didn’t even want to be here in the first place,” Tabitha growled, lowering her voice. “Your lore here is boring drudgery compared to any good fantasy setting. If this was a Tolkien world, my every step would feel like it had some fucking meaning. Your world sucks. Your system even sucks—back in my old reality, video game designers probably have like, thousands of systems better than this. And they worked them all out without magic! Yep, without magic.”

   “Just math and money.”

   She was grudgingly forced to admit that the scenery was pretty amazing. The terrain of this place was wild with ridges and slopes littered with the enormous shapes of gigantic boulders, each green with patchy swathes of lichen. Every vista of the forest seemed to feature picturesque vistas of natural beauty, and looking in any direction conjured memories of those Ghibli anime movies Tabitha had adored in her original timeline. Admiring them on a screen couldn’t compare to walking through it all herself though, and after immersing herself in the wonder of it all for a while her anger and headache began to fade away.

   The heartache remained, but with thirty-five wisdom Tabitha was just barely managing to keep her thoughts from the family and friends she’d left behind. By the time she chanced upon Tabi’s lost knife, simply laying there amid the crushed grasses of the goblin trail, Tabitha had schooled her emotions into the back of her mind and simply stared at the ten-inches of sharpened iron without expression for a few moments. She let out a slow breath and retrieved it, returning it to the leather sheath on her belt, and continued onward.

   Just how far away did that fucking goblin party carry me? Tabitha frowned. This is... quite a hike. Though, I guess they’d have to be ranging in from pretty far outside of Mure, or someone would have put up an extermination order for them.

   Tabitha paused midstep.

   Actually… shouldn’t I go back for the two goblins that I killed? She couldn’t help but groan to herself and make a face. Now that I have my knife, I can collect proof of the kills. I don’t want to go back, fuck no I don’t, but… I’m also going to need coin for food, or… fuck, FUCK!

   Furious again, Tabitha turned around and began to march back the way she’d come.

/// Okay, it took me a post to get a better handle on the LitRPG / realism, but now I can definitely see why LitRPG authors have so much fun writing it. Real RE:TT section tomorrow, and then the final RE:TT special sometime this weekend. Might be interrupting that with an AH post, not sure yet.