LSTV - Harbingers of Change 1 (Patreon)

Present Day

Mira stood, looking out across a wrecked inland cityscape that in no way matched the beach-side neighborhood where she had, not twenty minutes ago, been picking out house-made fruit infused water in a Harvest + Co.

Her memory of the actual event was choppy. She’d been in the ready-made area, looking to stock the empty kitchen in the penthouse that Adra had inherited from his host body. Neither of them could cook nor were they interested in learning, but they also couldn’t eat out at every meal so the basket dangling from her limp grasp was filled with cut fruit, cold cuts, crackers, protein bars, and the aforementioned fruit water. The Harvest + Co, meanwhile, was nowhere to be seen and there was no waterfront in sight.

Wherever this was, she wasn’t in the same city she’d started in.

The last thing she recalled was the feeling of static electricity rising in the air, her body hair standing on end, and then a great flash of blue-white light from below her feet as the ambient mana went from almost nil to over saturation in the time it took for her to blink, then she found herself here and alone.

Motes of soft blue light bloomed before her eyes and came together to form a hovering rectangle with words on it.

[Welcome to the Hunter Network System, Samira Bellamy! Congratulations on your Awakening.]

“Fuck!” she hissed as she realized what had happened.

She wasn’t in a Soap Opera universe at all. This was a Gate Hunter Fantasy!

She’d been thrown into a LitRPG!!

A Few Days Prior….

Samira Bellamy’s parents never did come to see her in the hospital, which tracked with the child’s memories of empty seats at her school recitals, track meets, graduations, and all other significant events. Mira wasn’t mad about it. They seemed like toxic, self-involved people and the longer she could put off having to interact with them, the better.

Adra had gone to Samira’s house to get her toiletries and a change of clothes ahead of her release from the hospital. According to him, her father was making noises about sending her to rehab again.

Samira’s memories told her that, even if they tried, the doctors would probably just let her off with a counseling session when she didn’t fail the drug tests, but if he was that determined to believe Samira had a drug habit, Mira wasn’t convinced her ‘father’ couldn’t find someone who was willing to cash his checks and go along with whatever narrative he made up. That must have been what Mason was up to when he tried to inject her before Adra commandeered his body. They hadn’t been able to figure out what was in the needle, but if Samira went to inpatient rehab then he would have been free to stalk Cecelia without worrying about pesky things like his upcoming wedding.

Mira seemed to recall that Samira’s wedding hadn’t happened until around mid-book. Mira had used her hospital stay to do a web search about certain milestone events from the story and she now had a rough idea of where they were in the book’s timeline. The good news was that it was early in the book, almost the beginning. The book opened with Cecelia’s family going public about her mother’s cancer diagnosis and Mira had been able to find a post about it on Cecelia’s Facebook that was only a few weeks old.

Fortunately, this was not the kind of book that killed off mothers, so Mira didn’t have to worry about trying to fix that. Dead mothers didn’t sell well in Avenon unless it was part of a serious thriller or a murder mystery, which ‘The Maid and the Magnates’ was not. Avenon’s readers liked their romances to have excitement, drama, and sword fights, but they hated when side characters died for no reason. The cancer was there to be defeated, not leave Cecelia emotionally vulnerable for a billionaire vulture to swoop in and catch her unguarded. So Mira could turn her attention towards other problems—problems like her new body.

Looking in the mirror as she dressed, Mira could see why it was easy for people to think this girl was on drugs. She was rail thin, her roots were showing, her manicure had grown out, and her complexion was blotchy with dark shadows under her eyes. Samira had had a BMI of about 15 by the time Mira arrived and her doctors were desperate to pack some weight on her. So far, she’d had no lingering physiological issues with eating normally or memories that suggested that her host had had an eating disorder. The only physical problem that Samira had left her with was a small stomach, so she had to eat smaller meals, more often for the time being.

Despite the way she looked, Mira thought her host’s problems were more environmental than psychological or medical. Samira’s body showed signs of intermittent self care and her clothes were all good. Adra had brought her a variation of an outfit that showed up often on Samira’s social media feed; a chunky asymmetrical ivory sweater, big sunglasses, skinny jeans, and cone-heeled tan suede booties that dipped in the front. It was only after she had it all on that she realized this was the uniform of a battered woman who was trying to hide it.

“Shit,” she muttered to herself as she looked at the way the sweater baffled her silhouette so it would be hard to tell if she was hunched over with pain. The sleeves covered her all the way down to the knuckle and the high collar hid her all the way up to the jaw. The giant glasses hid anything above the bridge of her nose, so as long as her assailant didn’t give her a fat lip then this outfit would disguise it all.

“What’s the matter, darli…” Adra cut his question off as he stuck his head into the room and saw what she was seeing. “Ah.”

They stood there and didn’t talk about the relationship between the bodies that they had inherited.

“Shall I get you something else?” he asked, after an uncomfortable while.

“No,” Mira sighed. “It’s also hiding how bad I look right now. I’ll need to visit a salon straight away if I want anyone to take me seriously.”

She’d managed to style her hair so that the new growth at her roots was minimized. Samira’s natural color was a dark brown that she had lightened into a lovely cherry cola color at some point. Most of the dimensional color was below her jaw. Likewise, Samira’s overgrown manicure wasn’t immediately obvious. She’d had her nails done on the short side with almond shapes that shaded from white at the tips to a natural pink that almost matched the color of her nail beds. They were grown out a bit, but hadn’t gotten so long that she was at risk for losing any of the extensions.

These decisions seemed too strategic to be accidental.

Following a hunch, Mira checked her phone. There was a banking app that matched the debit card in her purse and the app had a thumbprint lock so she didn’t have to try and remember the passcode.

“I thought so,” she grumbled once she found what she was looking for and showed Adra the screen when he came over to see. “Look, her card’s been turned off by someone.”

It took a little bit of rooting around, but she found a section in the transaction history that showed timestamps of when the main account holder (who was not Samira) froze and un-froze her debit card. The card was currently ‘off’, which would explain her host’s condition and why she’d made fashion choices that could survive a little neglect.

Mira compared the history to Samira’s chat history and could reliably find an angry text message from Samira’s father that matched the timestamps in the app, although sometimes he seemed to freeze it without warning because Mira found a few conversations where Samira contacted her father to ask what was wrong and heard nothing back for days. The current state of affairs seemed to be one of those times. Samira had asked several times what was wrong, but her father refused to answer her.

Financial abuse at home. Emotional and physical abuse in her relationship. How had this child held on to her sobriety? Mira felt bad for thinking she wasn’t likeable. Samira had been too busy surviving to worry about being liked.

“Adra, darling,” she sighed and looked his way. “Did your host have any money? I don’t think I’ll have access to my own assets for a while. It looks like my ‘father’ cuts my living expenses off and on to suit his mood.”

“He does,” Adra replied, much to her relief. “He’s got a trust fund and a cushy job with one of his uncles where he doesn’t do anything. Luckily, he doesn’t seem to have any gambling or substance addictions, just the situation with that woman. I’ll have a credit card made for you and you can use it for your daily needs. His finances could easily support a wife already and money is laughably easy for me to get in settings like this one.”

“Wonderful,” Mira sighed. That was one thing off her mind for the moment. She’d been extraordinarily lucky with Violet’s assets. That wouldn’t be the case in this life, but at least she had someone on her team. The conservatorship she was in meant that, even if she made her own money, control of it would automatically revert to her father. Anything she built up for herself would have to be hidden under Mason Detrich’s name for now—not that it seemed likely she’d be able to do it without some investment in her host.

Samira didn’t seem to have gone to college, nor did her memories show any evidence that it even came up in conversation with her parents. She’d been raised to be a bride and a wife for whoever her father chose. He had been actively opposed to her developing a career and it was only through luck and the attention of a truancy officer that Samira had been able to finish high school.

Mira was going to have to cobble some professional accreditations together for herself eventually, but she’d been a trophy wife before and knew how to carve a career out of charity work if she had to. She seemed to recall that was what Samira’s character did in the original novel and and she had even ended up up clashing with Cecelia for a position on the board of directors for some charitable organization that her family ran. This would happen after Cecelia found out her long lost biological billionaire father had endowed her with a fat trust fund at birth, of course, and not while she was still working as the Bellamy family’s maid.

‘The Maid and the Magnates’ was written in a culture where wealthy people weren’t expected to have real careers, but when the plot was translated into this setting then the cast ended up looking a little pathetic and in desperate need of occupation, which Mira supposed they all were or else they wouldn’t make so much trouble for one another.

Mira finished checking herself out of the VIP suite she’d been living in for the past few days. Her ‘father’ had made it clear that she was to come home the second she was released (once he finally deigned to answer his phone), but since he wasn’t willing to send someone to pick her up or do it himself, Mira was going to go see Adra’s new penthouse instead.

Mason allegedly owned a vehicle, but Adra would only mutter dark things when Mira asked and she wasn’t sure she wanted to know what its mentally ill former owner had done to it so they were taking Samira’s car back from the hospital; a light blue Aston Martin Volante. Mira was surprised to see that her host had such a nice car and that it hadn’t been taken away from her, but then again her clothes were all designer brands too so her family must at least care how they were perceived through her or they were undermining her credibility if she ever tried to ask for help. After all, no one who would buy their child Prada or an imported luxury car could possibly be neglecting them.

“Have you lived in a world like this before?” Mira asked when Adra took the driver’s seat without hesitation. She didn’t want to drive, but she was surprised that he could. The ambient mana levels in this world were minimal and she could hardly believe that he looked as perky as he did.

“I have,” he said. “I would say about a third of the worlds I have visited were like this one.”

He was looking good, which also came as a surprise because Mason Dietrich had been built more like an industrial refrigerator than a man and had dressed like he was following the formula from a ‘How to Dress Like a High-Value Male’ podcast. In Samira’s memories, Mason’s clothes wore him and not the other way around. Today, Adra was resplendent in a dark wool trench coat over a cream colored turtleneck, jeans, and white sneakers. The outfit looked effortless on him and that roused her suspicions.

Mira squinted at her husband. “Did your hairline move?” she asked, incredulously. Now that she was looking, she’d realized that his hair was thicker too and his shoulders might even be a touch wider.

Adra shot her a sideways look and grinned, as though he were delighted to have gotten caught. “I made a few renovations after moving in,” he confessed. “I can’t get away with too much at one time without making him unrecognizable. Do let me know if there are any other changes you’d like me to make.”

This vain thing! On the other hand…

“Can you separate the eyebrows, please?” she asked. “We can say you had them waxed.”

He laughed again and put the car into reverse as he pulled out of their parking spot. “Consider it done, my love.”

Mason Dietrich was described as looking like a primitive thug in the novel so Adra had a lot more work to do than what he’d already done if he wanted to elevate his current body past ‘middling ugly’, but, with his net worth, a well-timed ‘vacation’ would excuse any number of changes Adra decided to make.

It didn’t really matter to Mira, though. She’d always known that she didn’t experience attraction in the normal way and this was just further evidence. The irreplaceable occupant of that body was the only part of it that she cared about. Adra’s packaging was irrelevant—aside from that monobrow.

She leaned against his shoulder and let him rest a hand on her thigh as they pulled out of the parking garage. The afternoon sun stung her eyes and she dropped her sunglasses down from on top of her head to shield them from the glare coming off the tall glass-sided buildings of the medical complex.

A/N: Welcome to Book 2! This installment in the series will be LitRPG flavored and, as such, we will have some Status Windows and System messages taking up space in the chapters. NGL, that ate up some of my word count so I compensated by upping my target chapter length for any chapter with a lot of System involvement from 2,000 words to 2,500.

We have a whole new world, but the same cast with new faces and new lives. Some of them have learned from Book 1. Some of them haven’t. Aren’t you interested to learn which is which?

Not to mention, the rules for Mira’s existence are changing. For once, she won’t ACTUALLY know what to expect.

I hope you enjoy the ride as much as I am!