The Ordinary Life of Tom Nobody

After the conversation had pretty much petered out, Sarge told us all to check our stats.

CONGRATULATIONS! You have learned the SKILL EDGED WEAPONS

CONGRATULATIONS! You have learned the ABILITY SWORDS 1%

CONGRATULATIONS! You have learned the SKILL UNARMED

CONGRATULATIONS! +1 DEXTERITY

CONGRATULATIONS! You have learned the ABILTY KNIVES 1%

CONGRATULATIONS! +1 CONSTITUTION

CONGRATULATIONS! +1 CONSTITUTION

Huh, all that and only 3 stat point increases. At least it was enough to learn the ABILITIES, I guess. I hadn’t been able to spare anyone else any of my attention, but I kind of expected that I might have been the only one to gain UNARMED and KNIFE SKILLs, so there was that.

As I closed out my CHARACTER and SKILLS SHEETs, the kid came over and sat next to me on one of the logs that served as chairs around the fire. I could tell he still felt bad about nearly cutting my leg off but didn’t know what to say.

“Don’t worry about it, Kid,” I said, speaking first, “shit happens in a fight.”

“I should be better than this, I’ve taken actual classes,” he looked up at me and then quickly down. “And I’m not a kid. You look like you’re younger than me, anyway.”

“Yeah, looks can be deceiving. I’m—I was—60-years old before I woke up in the woods this morning. God! Has it been less than a day? It feels like years.” I shook my head.

The kid looked like he wanted to say a lot more about stabbing me. I could see the struggle playing out across his face. You deal with liars and thieves for a living, and you almost get to where you can read minds.

“Name’s Rob,” he said, holding out his hand. I looked at it for a minute, and then reached over and shook it, thankful that he’d taken the time to clean the blood off. Clean my blood off.

“Tom,” I said. “You said you used to play swords in Central Park, I guess you’re a New Yorker, then?” I winced internally at being Captain Obvious, but I’d always sucked at small talk and introductions.

“Yeah, I grew up in West Virginia, but I got a scholarship to Cornell and never went back.” He looked around at our group, and the trees, and back over where the various salvageable parts of the dead rats were stacked, and continued, “Computer science, probably not going to do me a lot of good, now.”

“Maybe, maybe not. They got us learning swords, but Sgt. Asshole mentioned something about plasma rifles, so maybe they’ll have some computers for you to work with, who knows?”

He thought about that for a minute, and it seemed to cheer him up. “You’re right, maybe this will be more like Whiteout, a nuclear winter game instead of a medieval one.

“How’d you manage to get them to turn you into a teenager, again, anyway?”

“I don’t know. When we got to the part on my CHARACTER SHEET where it said I was 16, SCHEMA told me the system had decided it was my mental age.” I laughed. “I think SCHEMA was messing with me, but I’ll take it, as long as I don’t have to go back to high school. Gave me an extra point in LUCK, too.”

“How did you figure all that out, anyway, about the STAT bumps if you got it to explain everything? Which, thanks, by the way, I did get my extra STATs, though I thought you were pulling a fast one on me when it took away one of my STRENGTH points, but I kept going and got it back with my GENDER bump.”

“I don’t know, I just woke up, and nothing was familiar to me, unlike it was for you. I’ve never been much for video games, so I had no clue what was going on. I’ve always been big on asking questions when you don’t know something, and after I saw what happened with the Human thing, it just seemed to confirm that going over each thing in my MENU was the right thing to do.”

“I think you’re probably right,” Rob said, “I didn’t get enough time to go through much, yet, but as soon as we get through with the TUTORIAL, I’ll be sure to check everything out a lot more carefully.”

“Don’t forget to look at the RECORD tab in your JOURNAL,” I said, “You know about that, right? That it keeps a written and video record of everything you do?”

“You’re joking!” he said, his eyebrows climbing up towards his hairline.

“No, seriously, check it out.”

I could tell that he was taking my advice as his eyes got that look like he was gazing off into the distance and his hands started touching places in the air in front of him.

“Oh wow! Man! This is totally cool!”

“If you say so, more like no more privacy in my mind, but what can we do about it?” Then I stood up, ”you go ahead and play around with it, looks like Asshole over there is getting ready to move us out, so I’m going to head off to the woods again andsee a man about a dog.”

I got up without waiting for him to respond and started walking towards the woods.

“Don’t take too long,” Sarge called after me, “The other group’s moving on to the CRAFTING area, and that’s our signal to learn to shoot things.”

I waved a hand over my shoulder without turning around and kept on walking into the woods.

When I got back, I joined Sarge and the group where they’d gathered around where we’d left the rest of the rat meat in eight neat piles stacked up on what skins weren’t too hacked up.

“Okay, each of you take one pile of rat chunks and skins and put it in your inventory. You’ll need them later when you get to the CRAFTING stations.” He said when I reached the group.

I reached down and touched a pile of raw rat meat and thought “store” and it all disappeared. I followed that with the skins. I opened my INVENTORY page and saw that they weren't there, but then I almost did the facepalm and checked my CRAFTING INVENTORY, and there they were the meat and skins had all sorted into only two squares. The one with the meat in it had a number 20 in one corner and the one with the skins said 10. There were a lot fewer whole(ish) skins that we’d been able to get, but we’d been able to save most of the meat. Rat meat might sound disgusting, and it did tend to be stringier than beef, chicken, or pork, but when you’re hungry, it can taste pretty damn good.

I looked over to the other end of the field, and saw that the group that had been training under the Squid guy were all walking towards one of the trails that lead from the clearing, and that another group of, what I thought were probably new trainees were moving in from different trails on the side where I’d come in. Squid guy wasn’t leaving with his former trainees, I guess he was going to be running with the new guys. They all looked around like they were lost. I can’t believe that was us just a few hours ago.

Sarge directed us to move about halfway in, where the 50-yard line would be on a football field, and when we got there, there was a table set up that I hadn’t even noticed before. On it were various examples of ranged weapons. I identified bows, both short and long, crossbows, and poles about as long as the batons we’d trained on that had longish cups attached to a sort of hinge arrangement at one end with short spears or maybe javelins next to them. Those baton/cup things are probably for throwing the spears. I forget what they call them. There were even leather slings and high-tech slingshots.

Also on the table were more modern weapons, rifles and pistols of various types, some looking far more advanced than anything I’d ever seen, and I’d seen a lot.

I stood in a parking garage with my crew arranged in strategic positions around me; enough of them were visible to send the message that we were not to be fucked with, but a few were not, in case the other guys didn’t get it. Billy and Snort were with me, hands in the pockets of their overcoats gripping pistols, but appearing nonchalant. Three completely unmemorable men and one slightly more memorable woman were with us: The buyers.

We were all huddled around the trunk of a 70s Lincoln which only purpose was to provide said roomy trunk. The woman pulled her giant purse around in front of her and angled the opening so that I could see the stacks of bills arranged inside. I may not have been a real math whiz in school, but I’d been to graduate school in hard knocks and I’d gotten top scores on estimating dollar amount based on the volume of the container. It looked legit.

So far.

I nodded, then bent over one of the long crates that necessitated such a roomy trunk, clicked the latches and threw up the lid with a bit of theatrics. Never hurt to add some smoke and mirrors; impressed the dull and made the sharp ones underestimate you. Inside the crate, packed in a bed of black foam rubber, nestled a rocket launcher, fresh off the boat that morning. A warhead was positioned partly in the tube of the launcher, also for dramatic effect.

One of the men nodded and gestured towards the woman, who moved forward, one hand reaching up to slip the purse straps from her shoulder. I nudged Billy, who’d been oogling her breasts instead of keeping his head in the game. Almost certainly the reason they’d put her in a low-cut blouse on such a cold day. Too bad that shit didn’t work on me.

The kid and me, we’d have words if we managed to get out of this one without any trouble, something I was beginning to doubt. He jumped, and I could see the red flush of his embarrassment start to creep up from where his thick neck stuck out of the collar of his coat and turn his face that shade of pink that had earned him the addition of “the kid” to his name. He took a step forward fouling any shot I could take on nodding man should things all go pear shaped. Oh yeah, the talk might include some fists. I used the blocked line of sight to casually slip my hand back into the pocket where my new Glock waited and got ready for the worst.

Luckily though, while things did choose that moment to go south, Billy’s position also fouled the shot that Nod Man took at me.

Billy the kid wouldn’t be learning any more lessons.

I stumbled a bit as the memory hit me unexpectedly but managed to recover without anyone being the wiser. So, I’m an arms dealer, the realization hit me, but not hard. Enough memories had slipped in without me even taking notice that I’d already suspected I was no Mother Teresa, so while my stomach dropped a little at the realization of just how crooked I’d been, it wasn’t the shock that it would have been earlier in the day. Besides, I’d long ago realized that humans were experts at forgiving our own faults. The trick was not to come up with all the ways we used to justify our sins. No good ever came from lying to yourself.

I gave myself a mental shake and got my head back in the game. Billy might not have learned that lesson until it was too late, but I’d taken to heart years ago that learning from your own mistakes was only part of the picture; you had to learn from other people’s mistakes, or you’d run out of time and life before you learned enough from your own. Sarge gestured towards the weapons laid out on the table and told us to choose something to train with.

I passed over the bows and slings, likewise the pistols and rifles. I figured I could always come back to the bows, if I wanted to learn them, and I already had plenty of experience with pistols and rifles. My eyes were drawn to the incongruous items at the far end of the table. I moved around to the other side to avoid the crush as the others moved in, and went straight to what had caught my eye.

There at the end was a long wooden staff. It was fashioned of some dark wood that I didn’t recognize, but what had pulled me to this end of the table was the writing on it. I reached out and ran my fingertips lightly down the length of the shaft and felt how the words were carved into the grain of the wood. They seemed to move, like one of those optical illusions where the shapes make the eye see movement, but the surprising thing was that I could actually feel the movement, like some kind of smooth braille. It was fascinating. I slid my fingers around it, too thick for them to touch on the other side.

“The wood is called Ironwood, or some people call it Dragonwood,” I jumped and whirled around, the staff still in my right hand, my left coming up instinctively to steady it diagonally across my torso in guard position. There was an old woman standing next to me; one I was sure had not been there until I touched the staff.

She was shorter than I was, and slightly hunched. It was that hunch that had given me the impression of age. Now that I looked more closely, I wasn't so sure. She was not so much clothed as enveloped in a flowing gray hooded cloak made of some fine, silk-like material that made you want to let it slide through your fingers. The hood was thrown back and lay neatly across her shoulders and back, and she gazed at me with bright green eyes that had no sclera, only a widening pool of a black pupil. She was one of those whose age could not be told by her face, unlined and porcelain white, fine, symmetrical features framed by straight, jet-black locks that fell to her collar bone in the front, she could have been any age, from 16 to 60.

“I engraved it, myself. I’m gratified that you can appreciate the workmanship.” She said, with a smile that seemed to acknowledge everything from my fascination with the staff, to my assessment of her appearance. Two tiny points of bone white barely touched the startling red of her full lips when she smiled. DANGER! My instincts shouted, and I took a quick step back, still holding the staff like a shield between us.

She laughed, then, and the quality of it fascinated me as much as that of the elf woman’s, but my intuition told me that it was the fascination of a mouse with a cobra, and I squared my stance just as Sarge’s meaty hand clapped me on the shoulder, his fingers digging in slightly, not to bruise, but to contain my second jump of surprise and keep me from whirling around and striking out at him with the staff in my alarm.

“I see you’ve met Stellanna, our arcanist,” he said, the joviality in his tone jangled my nerves in juxtaposition to the threat of which my bones warned. “Stel is here to unlock your MANA pools, for those of you whose pools can be,” her eyes shifted from me to him and her features froze at his familiarization, only the slightest thinning of her lips telling of her displeasure.

Liars and thieves, it was like a shout, to me. As if from a great distance, I heard a notification chime[i] followed closely by another.[ii]

Sarge affected not to notice, but his grip lessened ever so slightly, and I knew without being told that this was the mongoose to her cobra.

“So, everyone line up behind Tom and we’ll get that out of the way. Stel,” he gave the diminutive the slightest accentuation, “if you would do the honors, starting with Tom, here?” They faced off then, communicating some message that I couldn’t decipher, but knew wasn’t as full of bonhomie as Sarge pretended, but it was she who blinked first, literally. Her thick, dark lashes crawled like so many spider legs down over her luminous green eyes, and when she opened them, she was looking at me; my adrenaline gave a little spike, but I stood my ground.

Yay, me!

“Certainly,” she replied, not deigning to return any insult. I knew that this was no acknowledgement of any superiority on Sarge’s part, but that she had foregone further conflict for her own reasons, which did nothing to calm my nerves.

“Now, young Tom, who is not young at all,” she said, that one sentence telling me she knew more about me than I was comfortable with, “I can sense your … caution of my person, which speaks of wisdom on your part,” that last with just the barest flick of those eyes in Sarge’s direction.

“I will have to place my hands on each side of your face in order to open the path to your pool. I give you my oath that no harm will come to you through my touch.”

[SCHEMA]: Stellana of House Clintogne has given her oath of non-aggression. Oaths so given, once recognized by the SCHEMA system are binding. Breaking a SCHEMA system-recognized oath will result in dire consequences, which may result in measures up to and including the death of the oath-breaker and the surrendering to the aggrieved of all their property, including magical items and grimoires.

It was my turn to slow blink as I absorbed SCHEMA’s unexpected message. I had almost begun to think they had turned their attention away, I had become so used to their absence since leaving the forest.

Stellana allowed me to see a carefree smile as acknowledgement that she knew I’d received the message, and it widened a tiny bit as I gave myself a mental shake and decided to give SCHEMA—and her—the benefit of the doubt.

Then, as she had said, she raised her hands smoothly, but with a slow deliberateness that conveyed no threat, to each side of my face. The long and wide sleeves of her robe falling artfully to her elbows revealing the rest of her skin to be as pale as that of her face. When I didn’t back away, she placed just her fingertips to each temple, the barest brush of a touch. Her eyes closed, and she took a deep breath through her mouth and let it slowly out through her nose.

At first, there was only that feather of a touch, but then I felt something. Even now that the sensation has become as familiar as the feeling of my own breath, I can’t describe it in any way that will do it true justice. The nearest I can come is that it was like a breath of cool air that moved through her fingertips and under my skin without ever touching the surface. This breeze flowed into my temples and pooled briefly right at the base of my head, just where it met my spine.

There was something like a pop! But without sound, and then it split in two streams, one moving down my back where followed more popping sensations, the first made my heart jump, the next was like a punch right in the solar plexus that made me expel the contents of my lungs in one explosive breath. That stream continued downwards, another at the base of my spine, and another that felt like a distant earthquake, but moving from my feet into the ground, rather than the reverse.

At that, the other stream moved through my head from back to front, and when that pop came, all the color bled from the world and I could only see in shades of gray. It continued up and the last sensation was no longer a little pop, but an explosion that set off a great ringing gong of a sound that reverberated through my whole body before coming to rest somewhere in my breast, where it seemed to settle and pool just before I lost consciousness.

[i] CONGRATULATIONS! You have gained the ABILITY PERCEPTION 1%

[ii] CONGRATULATIONS! Successful check against MENTAL DOMINATION +1 WILLPOWER