19Fate Revelation Online: Mind Games
Author's Notes: Kudos to those who figure out who my compatriots are. Yes, they agreed to appear in this.
Chapter Quote: Common sense is not so common. - Voltaire
Chapter Three: Bright Ideas
Death Game: Day 32
Of course I figured out the translation spell two days before I ran into the only other Americans in SAO. They'd been gaming buds for years in the Real World who'd managed to pirate the game and set up a proxy that tricked the NervGear into letting them on the Japanese servers. They'd thought the [Death Game] was a joke at first - a prank from the developers for stealing the game.
If only.
And now I was partying with them (in the traditional MMO sense, not the frat sense) instead of tinkering with Thaumaturgy while ensconced inside a Safe Zone. Unfortunately, I needed to be out here if I was going to even begin to use Thaumaturgy. Fucking fetch quests.
I consoled myself with the knowledge that at least I didn't have to worry about my translation spell messing up the intricate social niceties that were required in a Japanese conversation.
"So then I saw something crawling across the road, looking half-dead," said Nephren. He was about as tall as me, though with a substantially larger frame that he'd covered with a hodgepodge of heavy armor. He was also the more talkative of the two, and carried a spiked mace that he tended to wave about for emphasis.
"I pulled over," Nephren continued. "It looked like a small dog - but it was a possum. Somebody must have hit it with their truck; you could see the poor thing's spine sticking out. It was still sort of flailing around, and I felt really bad for the little guy. So I went to put it out of its misery. I got out my maglight and just - WHACK." He mimed the swing with his mace for emphasis. "But possums are tough, so I had to just stand there on the side of the road beating the thing to death. Blood and bits of fur are going everywhere, and it's screaming like 'REEEE' and 'HSSSS' and shit, and I'm just wailing away at the back of its head trying to be a nice guy and do the right thing. Took like ten minutes; freaking ridiculous. I'd have shot it - you know, cleaner end and all - but I was worried about ricochets off the asphalt," he finished.
Yes, there was certainly no need for intricate social niceties with my current group. It was honestly sort of reassuring, having somebody like that with me on my first trip outside the Safe Zone. The bizarre part was that somehow, the story ended up being funny instead of macabre. 'That's probably the most entertaining part about hanging out with Nuga - Nephren,' I thought, mentally catching myself. He'd changed his name an hour ago, so I still caught myself thinking of him by his old tag.
"What about rabies?" I asked. "You had to get some of the thing's blood on you."
Nephren shook his head. "It's actually pretty rare for possums to have rabies. They get a bad rap for that but it's really the coons you have to watch for."
I eyed him suspiciously for a moment, expecting some sort of outrageously racist "coon" joke, but none followed. Huh.
My other newfound compatriot, Lambeard, was a quieter sort. He was even taller than me and about as broad as Nephren, which meant he absolutely dwarfed the Japanese players. He also had a thick beard where the rest of us were clean shaven. He could look at the cow monsters on the First Floor eye to eye, and the enormous two-handed warhammer he hefted around was certainly intimidating, even if it lacked the spikes of Nephren's mace.
By contrast, I'd brought a spear. The choice weapon of unskilled peasants since time immemorial, it let me put a comforting amount of distance between myself and anything that might try and rip me into pixels. It was also relatively easy to use the [Linear] attack with, which was nice, because I'd really only spent like an hour using the System Assist to learn how to fight. I'd been too busy learning to use Malrunar to get the game's auto-translate feature working (which was a really clever way to fluff that, honestly) to bother with the fighting aspects. I'd decided what I wanted to do in the game anyway, and it didn't involve flailing about with sharp bits of metal.
I was going to be a Wizard. An Enchanter, to be precise. I'd been an Enchanter/Tinkerer in WoW (literally the most gold-consuming profession combination possible), and magical enchantments for gear had been in enormously high demand. It hadn't been profitable, but I wasn't as concerned with turning in a profit in the Death Game.
I just wanted to do something that felt constructive. And there was more to combat medicine than running around slapping tourniquets on people. The first principle was my favorite: fire superiority.
In the words of a genius tactician from the Netherlands, "They can't kill me if they're dead."
Unfortunately I'd run into a tiny snag with my plan to achieve Unlimited Power™: the Element Identification quest, which identified what spells a player could cast, had flagged Ether and an unknown for me. I had some sort of Rare Element.
Argo's Guide, which I'd been studying ever since I mastered the translation spell, hadn't had much info on Rare Elements. Even worse, all the existing info wasn't good. Not only would I probably have difficulty using most spells (if I could use them at all), but identifying a Rare Element was an entirely different quest that required gathering drops from outside the Safe Zone.
It was the most blatant bit of gameplay padding I'd run into in SAO. Why the hell was there an additional quest for the Rare Element, instead of just making them part of the regular Element Identification quest? What kind of sadist pads out the length of a Death Game?
"I think the buffs are starting to wear off," Lambeard said.
I checked the runes I'd traced onto the...what do you call the striking part of a hammer? Right, the head. I checked the runes on the head of the hammer. Honestly, this was kind of annoying - any other game would just give you a buff icon, with some sort of timer to indicate when it would wear off - but at least the visible indications were obvious. The Tyrunar, engraved thrice onto the hammer, had become smudged over the past two hours of combat.
Thankfully, the uses of Tyrunar, the most common combat amplification rune, were available via Argo's Guide.
I closed my eyes and flicked the switch in my mind, the familiar burn of magic thrumming through my Circuit. The pain had lessened with practice, although it was still distinctly uncomfortable.
"On thy hilt," I muttered, tracing the rune onto the base of the hammer. Then again onto the grip. "On thy guard." And finally onto the head of the hammer itself. "On thy chapes." Chapes were actually part of a scabbard, but Argo's Guide said the striking end of the weapon was the best place for the third rune to be placed. The verbal mnemonic still helped me cast the spell.
The runes glowed with faint light before dimming, now looking like nothing more than inked designs. I repeated the process with Nephren's maul and my spear, pausing to wipe sweat from my forehead once I'd finished. For some reason, Tyrunar took more out of me than the Malrunar I used for translation. I hadn't been able to use Tyrunar at all - even though it was supposed to be the easiest rune - until I started using the incantation. The Aria, as the game fluffed it. Truth be told I wasn't really sure what an aria was - the only time I'd heard the word before was in the title for a Castlevania game, but I don't think that was what they meant.
Neither of my party members had asked me about the chant. Lots of people had little focusing tricks for Thaumaturgy - the System Assist for it was particularly buggy and needed all the help it could get. Nephren and Lambeard were also still up in the air about whether or not they were going to use the Thaumaturgy system. Nephren thought that hurling fireballs would be neat, but nobody had quite figured out how yet. Lambeard still hadn't found an instructor he liked - he'd done Circuit Activation, but none of the systems he'd seen (I.e. Runes and sympathy) appealed to him.
Oh well. There would probably be some sort of feat advantage to staying as a non-Caster. Hopefully it was better than the useless shite Fighters got in 3rd Edition.
"Looks like the camp's respawned," Nephren commented. "Let's go!" Before I could even get a look at them, he charged into the nearest group of cowmen.
Of course, there were downsides to questing with an unflappable redneck…
Nephren hit the first of the cowmen (they really looked too stupid to be proper "minotaurs") with an overhead blow with the maul, like he was trying to hammer a nail into the ground. The cowman bellowed in pain as its HP went into the yellow and it gained the [Staggered] condition. It's two companions stepped forward, and each launched a simple [Horizontal] at Nephren with their maces. The burly southerner managed to recover from the stall animation of his [Vertical] and catch the first on his maul, but the second hit him solidly in the ribs. His armor absorbed a decent chunk of the blow, but I could see a slice of his HP vanish.
Lambeard rushed past him with a mostly incoherent warcry and hit the [Staggered] cowman with an upwards [Diagonal] that looked a lot like a golf swing. With the bonus damage for attacking a [Helpless] target, it was more than enough to shatter the mob into pixels, EXP, and Col. Which irritated me; Staggered only impeded your actions without truly preventing them. It shouldn't give the [Helpless] condition.
Whining about mechanics wouldn't kill the mobs though. I took a more cautious approach, and thrust a [Linear] at the head of the cowman that had gotten the hit in on Nephren. But there was more to the game than caution, and the blow went wide when the mob recovered from its post-attack idle animation.
It turned to face me and I adjusted my grip on the spear, holding it up defensively.
But then Lambeard came up from the left with a swing for the fences, the upwards [Diagonal] connecting solidly with the monster's chest. It howled and turned to face the new threat, readying its battle axe for a [Horizontal].
I sidestepped out of its vision and went for a [Horizontal] at the back of its neck. This time the blow connected, and I felt a meaty sort of resistance as the tip of the spear sunk into flesh. Huh, so there was no bone analogue; that should have hit the spine.
The monster ignored me and launched its attack against Lambeard, who face-tanked it in exchange for securing the [Last Attack] with another [Diagonal].
We turned to see Nephren at half HP, surrounded by the last three cowmen - typical - and charged in to help. He'd apparently been holding his own, as two of mobs shattered into pixels with a single blow each.
With three of us against the last the low-level enemies, the rest of the fight was quick work. I'd noticed something weird about the aggro system in the game - the mobs kept shifting aggro whenever somebody got close enough, regardless of how much damage had been dealt by other players previously. It was like the aggro system was proximity based, instead of threat based. Weird, but it meant they spent more time spinning around trying to face their newest attacker than actually attacking, so I was cool with it.
"You know, this game is really weird," Nephren commented as he slung the mace over his shoulder.
"Yeah, there's no logout. I noticed," said Lambeard, rolling his eyes.
"No, from like a design point of view," said Nephren. "Like, Full Dive tech is suposed to be the ultimate in immersion, but there are all of these superficial video game elements that just break the suspension of disbelief."
"Such as?" I asked, still trying to get my breathing to settle. More from nerves than any actual physical exertion - the fight had been brief, and my Stamina bar was nearly full. I didn't really think the design logic of SAO mattered, but the hardcore nerd part of me couldn't resist the urge to poke holes in the logic of a Triple A gaming title.
Aside from the obvious one, which Lambeard had already covered.
"Well, all the pixels on monster death and the HUD and stuff. Like, what the shit, the whole point of putting me in the game is so that I don't need that crap. And you," he said, turning to me, "Keep trying to stab things in vital points, which is a good instinct, but it doesn't change the amount of damage you do here."
I scratched the back of my head in embarrassment. "Yeah, yeah. Aim small, miss small. I keep forgetting."
"And it's not just that," Nephren continued, more or less ignoring my answer. "They just don't have the blood splatter from hitting something with a blunt instrument, or the bones breaking - the enemies are still just wireframes. The game's too...clean. It's kind of creepy, really."
"Yes, that's the creepy part of this whole thing," Lambeard snarked. "Not the part where you want to be covered in gore."
Nephren shrugged. "Hey, man. What's the point of making a Death Game with Teen-rated content?"
"You don't want too much realism," I pointed out. "Imagine having to actually lug all this armor and shit around."
"You know, normally you could just mod all that stuff in if you wanted it. Run a private server on Hardcore Mode," Nephren answered, frowning. "Which is what I guess is actually happening, more or less. But anyway, instead of us getting to mod the game and run it however we want, we get no mods and half-assed design logic. This stuff is why console gaming is shit."
I actually laughed. The last complaint I'd expected was the PC Master Race stuff.
"You should file a report with a GM complaining about how hard it is to RP seriously," Lambeard said, struggling to keep a straight face.
I rolled my eyes. "Maybe file a bug report about the Log Out feature while you're at it."
Nephren nodded seriously. "Sure, sure, I'll just hop on the forums this evening."
We lapsed into a comfortable sort of silence while we sorted through the loot from the cowman camp.
"Well, anyway, that's the last cow horn I needed," I said, ending the moment. "We can start heading back now."
"Cool. I've got some sales I need to wrap up with some of the armorers in town," said Nephren.
Lambeard groaned theatrically. "Are you going to game the [Auction House] all day? Like you always do?"
Nephren shrugged. "Hey, just because you don't enjoy making extra money doesn't mean the rest of us can't do it."
I nodded along vaguely. SAO didn't, as far as I knew, have an Auction House, and Nephren hadn't struck me as the type to enjoy the merchant aspect of the game. But hey, to each their own.
"Hear me; I speak for the shades!" the NPC cried out.
I winced. "Of course I can hear you; you're like two feet away," I grumbled. Choices for the Unique Element Identification were limited, and dealing with this NPC made me regret that dearly. He was a short, wiry little man, with deeply tanned skin. His head was wrapped in black bandages that only revealed sharp teeth and bone-white eyes. The bandages extended haphazardly along his right arm, torso, and legs. Shards of bark, painted with runes I didn't recognize, were tucked into the bandages at random. In each hand he carried a wand, tipped with the withered hand of some small creature.
All in all, he was thoroughly creepy and far too loud.
"I brought you the items you needed to Identify my Element," I said, successfully prompting the dialogue box to turn in the quest items.
"Ah, very good!" He clapped his hands together, the wands clacking as they connected. Then he began to chant, "Au mosu atikanu…" as he extended his arms, the tips of the wands wavering. The room began to feel darker, as if cast in shadow. I turned and looked behind me, trying to see if the door to the shop had closed - but no, it simply looked as if the sun had given up on penetrating the oppressing atmosphere of the shaman's den.
When I looked back, the swarthy little man had transferred both wands to one hand, and the other was outstretched towards me. A small pile of polished knucklebones gleamed in the darkness.
Sighing, I reached out and took them. Wordlessly, the shaman pointed to the floor. I closed my eyes and flipped the switch in my mind, directing the burning sensation to pool in my hand. When the heat grew strong enough to make my fingers twitch against my will, I threw the bones on the floor.
"The bones are thrown!"
I'm not sure if I said it or he did.
The bones rattled as they hit the packed dirt floor, and it felt like they took much longer than they should to settle in place. The NPC traced over them with the wands, muttering to himself. Finally, he nodded. "I accept your guidance," he said, clearly speaking to the bones and not me.
He turned up, white eyes meeting mine. "The truth you have sought to find: your Element is Mind."
I scratched the tip of my nose. Curious. "What exactly does that mean? Like, am I better at influencing other people's minds, or mental effects, or is that supposed to mean non-material things in general?"
"I am the messenger of those gone by," he responded.
Then, nothing.
"Um...seriously, what does the Mind element cover?" I asked again.
"Hear me; I speak for the shades!" the shaman said again.
God dammit. Of course the NPC didn't have a dialogue path to explain anything about how Thaumaturgy would work for me; that would make the game easy, or logical, or - horror of horrors - possibly fair. I scowled and stalked out of the shaman's hut. Of course it couldn't be that easy.
[Guild] [1347] [Takehito] This sucks so much.
[Guild] [1347] [Takehito] We can't go out and quest because we'll die, but staying in the Safe Zone means doing the same mindless quests just to make enough Col to not starve.
[Guild] [1348] [Yamato] You know the rest of the Players hate us, too. Just because we're not playing along with that madman's "Clear the Game" shit, they think we're lazy.
[Guild] [1348] [Ryusei] It's the worst from the [Paladins]. Bunch of uptight, arrogant assholes.
[Guild] [1348] [Sakura] Well, at least they cleared the first Boss and moved on to the Second Floor. I haven't seen any of them today.
[Guild] [1349] [Ryusei] Typical. Abandoning the rest of us to twiddle our thumbs on the First Floor until Kayaba ends the charade.
Hadn't he been bitching about how much he hated the [Paladins] thirty seconds ago? The hypocrisy was painful. I rolled my eyes at my guildchat. 'Fuck this,' I thought.
/GuildQuit
A confirmation box appeared, asking if I was sure. I tapped [Yes] three times before it went away.
The [ALF] tag underneath my name vanished, and I sighed in relief. I'd heard of the Guild a week ago through Takehito, who frequented Mika's tavern, where I was currently enjoying some sort of Cherry Coke/Baja Blast fusion in solitude. Takehito had pitched it as a Guild oriented around shoring up the rear line; a community of players who helped each other out without going outside the Safe Zones. Going outside the Safe Zones was pretty much exactly what I wanted to avoid at the moment, so it had sounded straight up my alley.
I should have known better than to hook up with a newbie guild pitched to me buy a random asshole on the street. That shit never worked.
The Guild "helping each other out" had mostly consisted of bitching and moaning. The ALF did offer enough of a basic welfare stipend to survive on the First Floor, but the constant chat spam had been very annoying. The only good thing to come out of my week in the ALF was a (probably heavily skewed) understanding of the movers and shakers of SAO.
The most famous was [The Sixth Ranger]. I didn't know his real name, but he sounded more like a campside legend than a Player Character. He spent an entire month racing around the First Floor, saving hundreds of players from monsters they couldn't fight, and then beat the Floor Boss "single handedly" by some of the rumors. I highly doubted that - there had been an entire raid for the first Boss - but still, that particular story was persistent. Of course, his critics said he was a glory hogging kill stealer, and that sounded more like your typical MMO player to me.
Then there was Diabel, who'd organized the raid to kill the Floor Boss. He'd probably end up leading a guild if the functionality was ever patched in. In a more normal setting, I probably would have joined it - heaven knows I had the experience. You don't play WoW for eighty hours a week for four years without learning exactly how raiding guild culture worked. Diabel was even a [Rune User], like me. And as the most visible organizer of players trying to [Clear the Game], he naturally drew the ire of almost everyone who wasn't attempting the same. Personally, I thought it made sense to at least play along with Kayaba's delusions of grandeur.
Aside from those two, no one stood at the level of "true celebrity." I'd heard of Von Ilya, who was rumored to be [The Sixth Ranger]'s sister and a Front Liner, but not anything else. Of particular interest to me was a player who went by LHMC. He'd discovered the [Cure] spell, and shared the spell with the rest of the player base for free. He'd been more or less in charge of organizing the dedicated healers for the first raid.
The [Cure] spell worked for me about as well as my real-life medical abilities did, which was to say poorly. Medical administration, not medical.
Finally there was Argo, the best source for information in the game. She'd have been completely irrelevant normally - but without a Wiki, I hadn't hesitated to pony up for a copy of Argo's Guide once I had the money. There was a hefty discount on purchasing updated copies, but mine was barely a day old.
And a good thing I hadn't bought an earlier edition, because there had been a [Content Patch] after the First Boss. The in-game description had been laughably useless, but for now Argo's Guide had the only thing I needed to know.
With the most recent patch, Spell Research has been incorporated as a mechanic. Players are able to design their own spells, and upon successful completion receive a substantial [Experience] reward. It is unclear whether Cardinal is creating new spells based on player ideas or whether players are "discovering" spells already programmed into the system. Calculations into quantifying the [Experience] reward for Spell Research are ongoing. There is a 100 Col reward for more information on this aspect of gameplay.
I leaned back into my chair and took another sip of my not-soda. Mika's tavern was a relaxing environment, not heavily traveled by players. I'd decided I didn't really like the mix of European rustic wood and traditional Japanese paper screens, but they did a good job of making the place feel more private. It was as good a place as any to think this through. I dismissed [Argo's Guide] with a wave of my hand.
So, custom spell generation. If it was anything like the rest of Thaumaturgy, then it was an entirely mental exercise and not a game of "move the sliders to adjust how hard the Fireball hits" like in Elder Scrolls. Brunhilda had said the Three Basic Magecraft were [Reinforcement], [Alteration], and [Projection]. Currently, only [Reinforcement] was available in the game.
So that left me with...what? My Elements were Ether and Mind, so...mental reinforcement? Yeah, right, the game could actually make you smarter. I'd believe that around the time Kayaba picked up a sword and started leading the Front Liners in person. Maybe it could do something along the lines of HUD improvements - years of mods had spoiled me, and this stock-standard interface was woefully disappointing.
As far as the other Element, I still didn't understand what the hell Ether really was. I'd tentatively guessed that it was somewhere in the "Force" category of spells while also encompassing "pure magic" effects like Magic Missile. I didn't think the Thaumaturgy system currently supported Magic Missile, but if it did, Ether would be the element for it.
Back to Mind. Reinforcement was, in game terms, the ability to increase a quality of an item. The triple-stacked Tyrrunar reinforced the efficacy of weapons by increasing the relevant stats, i.e. durability, sharpness, and damage. What were the stats of the mind? The real stats, not the Descartes bullshit from my foray into undergraduate philosophy.
Well. Point of fact - the mind was the brain. The brain did other things that didn't really fall under the category of "Mind" but that was getting into rhetorical details.
I doubted the Cardinal system was complex enough for me to do something like, "Reinforce the sensitivity of insulin receptors." That was too technical; the in-game character models were just wireframes without any substance to them. So I probably couldn't affect an internal body process - the bodies in SAO didn't have internal processes.
Maybe something more abstract?
What about…reinforcing an emotion? The game could clearly simulate dopamine release; my experience with the in-game alcohol was more than enough confirmation of that.
And wasn't that creepy, now that I thought about it? The NervGear could basically control your brain. It was most obvious during the Thaumaturgy System Assist, but it also had to happen during other parts of gameplay…
Mmm. Terrifying implications.
Aaaand, just like the other thousand terrifying thoughts I'd had about the nature of SAO, there was nothing I could do about it. Away the thought went, to the corner where I buried things I didn't like thinking about. I was good at that.
Right, back to using Thaumaturgy to create artificial happiness. Because really, Magical Heroin was really what this game needed to be less fucked up.
But now it was just an interesting logic puzzle for me. I knew seven runes - Victory, Clarity, Creation, Passage, Health, Communication, and Mind. Brunhilda had described them differently, but those were the [Concepts] that I had mentally appended to each of them. It was far from a perfect way of thinking about the Runes, but it was a generally accurate way of predicting what effects they would have.
I had a relatively small sample size (three Runic spells) to test my theories, but they held up so far.
[Runic Reinforcement - Physical] took three Victory runes. The placement of the runes varied based on what, exactly, was being Reinforced. In theory you could Reinforce a person, but that was useless unless you did it in yourself. SAO's Thaumaturgy was apparently one of those "edgy" homebrews that didn't differentiate between [Beneficial] and [Harmful] effects, so a player's innate [Magic Resistance] would quickly erode any outside buff (or debuff) placed on them the moment they activated their Circuit.
[Runic Translation] was simply a Mind and Communication rune below each ear. I'd found that I could passively understand what others were saying without the Mind rune, but couldn't speak Japanese any better than normal.
Finally, [Runic Regeneration]. That spell was interesting, but also completely inferior to [Cure]. One placed a Health rune on the wound and another on any living object - player, NPC, tree, whatever. The fluff said that the wound was being transferred to the other living object, but that didn't actually happen. Probably some sort of game balance stuff, so you didn't put the other rune on an enemy and have it kill itself.
Obviously I would need Mind for the spell. I could try triple-stacking it like Victory. Mmm. That seemed like the simplest course.
I opened my inventory and scrolled down to the appropriate Runes, then materialized them in my hand. For something like physical reinforcement, which I'd done a hundred times, I could just draw the runes in the air. But for something new, the physical runes helped. I wasn't sure if it was a placebo effect or if it aided the System Assist or what, but it definitely made things easier.
Eventually I settled for putting two on my shoulders and one on top of my head. I closed my eyes, trying to stay very, very still. It wouldn't do to have the damn things fall off in the middle of the spell. And thank God that Mika wasn't smart enough to ask questions about eccentric player behavior.
With a practiced effort, I flipped a switch in my mind. A familiar warmth blossomed in my chest, and I directed the energy into the runes surrounding my head.
The pain was immediate and all-consuming.
Every muscle in my digital body locked up before I could open my mouth to scream in agony.
I tried to close the Circuit, mentally flailing for the cutoff switch. The image blurred, flashed red from the mind-altering pain that felt like it would split my head open any moment. I felt my teeth grind against each other, hard enough that something would have broken in the real world.
Magecraft beyond your ability was punished heavily.
I flipped the switch again, cutting off the flow of energy to the runes. The heat in my chest faded.
The pain in my head grew four-fold. If Cardinal were capable of replicating shock, I would have already blacked out.
I could feel the energy in my head, drifting chaotically through my skull and trailing agony with it. I needed to get rid of it, but the runes bound the prana to my mind. I needed something to do with it, to think ofsomething to Reinforce, before it settled into one place in my brain.
Reinforcing something beyond its capacity would destroy it.
I tried to think of something, anything through the pain. Just anything but the pain, I needed every part of my brain except for the pain!
The prana immediately settled into a diffuse blanket enveloping my head. I felt it seep into me, felt the pain vanish into the background while ten million other things rushed to the forefront of my consciousness.
I saw my first grade playground. Watched my first fight through my own eyes in Infinite-P HD, every bit of playground mulch crystal clear. I was ambushing a bully, Chris, from behind as he came out of the jungle gym. Slammed his head into the ground, watched blood burst from his nose. Did it again, then walked away before he'd recovered enough to try and figure out who did it.
I could feel the exact increase in temperature as my drink slowly approached room temperature, despite it being two feet away inside a ceramic mug. I was distracted from the thought by my own supreme awareness of the awkward placement of my tongue in my mouth, the exact feel of air as it passed through my nostrils while I manually inhaled and exhaled.
Outside the tavern, I could identify the number of PC passerby based solely on the sounds of their footsteps in relation to the tone of their conversation. Could tell that the heavily armored one was nervous, and that his companion was not, even as my translation spell fizzled out of existence.
At the very edge of my hearing was the erratic, rapid beep...beep/i]...[i]beep of a heart rate monitor. Someone was having a heart attack.
I became aware of a thousand things at once, all clamoring for my attention. I lost myself in the white noise of my own senses, unable to filter ten million billion nerves that all had something important to tell me.
I couldn't tell if a second or a day passed when the excess prana in my head finally burned off.
My muscles unlocked, and my eyes opened. My HUD was cluttered with dozens of different warning and congratulations boxes. I looked around unsteadily, my eyes stuttering as I tried to make sense of the notifications.
Then they rolled back up in my head and I collapsed to the floor.
Hello darkness, my old friend -
