LTSV - Harbingers of Change - 7 (Patreon)

Well, of course Cece got tapped as a ‘First Generation Hunter.’

Mira hardly knew why she was surprised to see Cece involved in this whole mess. The heroine in the book (in pretty much all their lives) was a sweet, nonviolent girl, but she was not without a temper. Cece’s hands were rated E for ‘everybody’ in every life where the occasion called for it and Mira was willing to bet that Cecelia was no different.

Still, this genre change was weird and Mira didn’t like not knowing what the original script was supposed to have been. It was pretty clear, now, the ‘Maid and the Magnates’ would not be very useful as a guide in this life, aside from a partial Dramatis Personae. Avenon was a wonderful culture, but they didn’t have a science-fiction genre. The closest they got was a fanciful sort of magitech with a very specific shojou-anime aesthetic that did not map onto her current circumstances at all. It was closer to Steampunk than Sci-fi.

Had the Gods just given her the best guide they could within the limits of the entertainment culture in Avenon? It sure seemed that way. A Gate Hunter Fantasy in fiction was the product of a very particular set of cultural collisions that just hadn’t happened in Avenon. It would even be understandable, if Mira wasn’t the one suffering because of their gap in imagination!

Mira had been through genre shifts before, but this was an extreme example even in the record of her long memory.

She hit the ‘Yes’ option to see how much she could interact with the System window. There was a slight resistance, just enough haptic feedback to let her know there was a thing there, but she felt like she could push through it if she wanted to. It wasn’t that substantial.

A text message popped up. It appeared that the System wasn’t supporting video yet. This was going to be Magical IRC, apparently.

[CN: Miss Bellamy, this is Cecelia Newman. I work for your parents. I know you aren’t home often, but I was the one you met at the party last night. I saw your name on the announcement thing that just went through. Are you alright? Are you in a safe place?]

[SB: Yes, I recognized you. I’m alright and I’m safe, inasmuch as there is a safe place here.]

[CN: Can you see a landmark of any kind nearby? I’ll come get you.]

Mira cocked her eyebrow at the chat window.

[SB: What class were you assigned? Can you protect yourself?]

[CN: I’m a Priestess. They didn’t say a Priestess of what, but I can heal, bless, and cast barriers right now. My other skills are all locked for now. What class did you get?]

[SB: I can cast spells. I have a few different elemental ranged attacks. It might be better if I went to you or if we met at the same landmark.]

[CN: OK, I can keep things off us and you can kill them.]

[CN: I can see a busted-up cellphone tower near me with some dead trees at the base.]

[SB: Hold for a moment as I check.]

Mira eased out of her box truck shelter and went back towards the ruined street where she’d been deposited. She vaguely recalled seeing something like a radio tower off to the north, maybe a block or so away. Yes. There it was.

[SB: I see it. I’ll be heading in that direction.]

[CN: I’ll meet you there!]

Mira hated moving on the open street, but the wrecked cityscape surrounding her was choked with abandoned vehicles and broken buildings. Plus, trying to find a network of alleyways would be difficult to manage in the timeframe she was looking at.

As she walked, another popup appeared.

[The Tutorial Period will be ending shortly. Please prepare for combat.]

“Sonuva…” Mira snarled and broke into a light trot, trying to balance speed with moving quietly. The System was implying that they had a period of protection in order to orient themselves and, hopefully, to form groups. She knew who she wanted on her team, although it was a little odd to have that as an option. She and Cece’s incarnations were always set at odds with each other from the beginning.

This whole mess felt off, but would probably make sense as she went along and learned the new parameters of the game.

The ruined cellphone tower was indeed surrounded by dead trees, all fenced in by a sagging chain link fence. The tower had snapped in half and the trees looked a little bit like twisted screaming bodies. The only way the setting could look more like an ambush site was if she’d suddenly found a bunch of chest-high walls and a medpack.

Mira entered with her hands up and ready to cast.

She inspected the trees and was relieved to find that they weren’t actually monsters.

[Petrified Screamwood Tree: Fire, Acid, and Lightning Resistant. Screamwood trees have a very short growth cycle. They germinate, grow, flower, seed, die, and then petrify over the course of a few days and have been known to appear already in their fully petrified state in new Dungeons. Screamwood is an exceptional material for dark-aligned staves and bows. Value: Petrified Screamwood branches - 10 GP for a 1 foot section, Petrified Screamwood Lumber - 100 GP per trunk]

Good to know, but not very useful at the moment. She was not in a position to harvest lumber. She needed to find Cece.

The skin between her shoulders itched a few seconds before a tall figure stepped out from the tree cover, with a sword at the ready. “Who’s there?” the man called out.

He looked to be in his early twenties; a white guy with sandy blonde hair in a low fade that had been tousled with gel on top. He was wearing a denim jacket over a thin summer weight gray hoodie and dark jeans with a pair of chunky black Nikes. Mira recognized him on sight.

It was Peleon.

‘You motherfucker, where have you been?’ Mira thought with acid that she tried to keep off her face.

“I’m meeting a friend here,” Mira said, keeping her hands up in a gesture that was meant to look peaceful, but had the potential to be anything but.

Cece popped out from the direction that Peleon had come from. She was wearing a loose boat-necked white top with narrow black horizontal stripes that was tucked into the front of her skinny light-wash jeans, which had the knees torn out and the ankles cuffed up into high waters. She had on a pair of no-name slip on sneakers and a light brown pleather backpack. Her chestnut colored hair was up in a wispy messy bun and was wearing a pair of big chunky tortoiseshell glasses.

“Miss Samira!” she sighed in relief. “Andrei, that’s the friend I was looking for!”

Huh. He was an ‘Andrei’ again. She’d been expecting a name like Chad or Brad or Connor. To be fair, Mira always thought that Peleon’s incarnations looked like fuckboys, even before she learned that was a term, but this one seemed to have it even worse than usual.

Still, they didn’t usually repeat names. She’d waved it off when Cecily's next incarnation turned out to be ‘Cecelia’, but that was back when she thought the Magnates from the book were the rest of her cast.

“Cecelia,” Mira greeted her, giving her a once-over. It was hard to forget they weren’t sisters in this life. She had to concentrate to not adjust Cece’s clothes and brush the hair out of her face. Why was it so messy? “You hadn’t mentioned bringing a friend.”

“I ran into him on my way to the tower,” Cece explained, stepping in closer. “He and some other boys landed close together and were scouting the area. Andrei came with me to meet you in case things got scary. The trees are freaking me out, a little.”

“They’re supposedly harmless,” Mira explained. “I inspected them on my way in. They’re dead and petrified.”

“All Inspect gave me was that they were ‘Screamwood Trees’,” Andrei interjected, joining them while still looking around with deep suspicion. In his defense, the trees were creepy as hell.

“I got an upgraded version of Inspect when I discovered the skill,” Mira explained. “The System is spoiling for us to harvest this stuff. It keeps telling me what it’s good for and how much it sells for. The branches alone are 10 GP each.”

“No shit?” Andrei asked, sounding like he meant it, as he looked around them with new eyes. He approached a tree and his sword started to glow. He sliced easily through the trunk of a Screamwood Tree and felled it. They were fortunately not large trees, more ornamentally sized than anything that could tower overhead. He held his hand over the fallen tree and said, “Disassemble.”

The tree glowed System blue and burst into a neat row of trimmed branches and a cleaned trunk.

“Nice,” he murmured and pointed at the trunk. “Store.”

The Screamwood trunk dissolved into blue light, presumably having been transported into Andrei’s inventory. He did the same with the branch bundles.

“They stack!” he reported, mostly to himself. “The branches only took up one inventory slot.”

He started towards another tree, but then another man showed up; a bulky guy with the look of a gym rat who was really into power lifting. He was Hispanic with deep brown eyes, sculpted features, dark hair in a high-and-tight, and a short balbo beard. He was wearing a track suit over a white tee and was carrying a tower shield on his back. Mira clocked the slight hesitation in his approach and knew they’d just found Bryn/Lasol. It looked like he was a Tank again in this life.

“Hey, Andrei?” the man sort of circled around them in his approach, like he wasn’t sure how close to get. “Did you find some more survivors? The others are grouping up and Alan said you’d headed off this way so I came to get you.”

“Yeah, man,” Andrei jerked his chin in Bryn/Lasol’s direction. “This is Bryn. He and I were together when the System grabbed us and we were dropped into the Dungeon together. Bran, this is Cecelia and Samira. Cecelia’s got Heals. I don’t know what Samira has, but it doesn’t look like she was issued a weapon.”

“‘You can call me Mira,” Mira interjected and made it a point to smile at Bryn. They’d never been close the way she eventually became with Randall, Alan, and Will, but they had been professional with each other as he rose through the ranks of Knighthood. She’d approved of his post-Andrei career and hoped that maybe this Bryn would get the same chance. “I have offensive spells.”

“Sweet!” Andrei made a little fist pump. “Come on and meet the others.”