Lucy Whitby
Level 1 (select class)
XP: 0
Attributes:
INT: 25
WIS: 15
CHA: 33
STR: 13
DEX: 19
CON: 18
Resources:
HP: 0/0
SP: 0/0
MP: 0/0
Skills:
Gamer’s Mind (lvl 1)
Gamer’s Body (lvl 1)
Singing (lvl 5)
Cooking (lvl 3)
Sudoku (lvl 1)
(expand)
Quests:
-
Traits:
-
Titles:
-
[INVENTORY]
[STORE]
[CRAFTING]
[GACHA]
[SAVE]
[PARTY]
[GUILD]
Tip: Save your game whenever you don’t already have a save, or before important events!
Warning: You DO NOT currently have a saved game. [dismiss]
Warning: THE GAME runs on an operating system of REALITY. Your choices and actions will affect REAL PEOPLE. If someone dies in THE GAME, they die in real life [dismiss]
PLEASE DO NOT EXIT THIS SCREEN WITHOUT SELECTING A CLASS 

What.

Okay, the most likely scenario is that Lucy is currently in the hospital, high as balls on painkillers, and having a very vivid dream and/or hallucination that getting hit by a truck isekaid her instead of putting her in traction. 

That having been said it would be neat if she were on slightly more painkillers, because her chest, specifically, still fucking hurts.

Well. No reason not to play the weird dream game. Maybe if she’s lucky it will let her fly, she loves flying dreams.

She pokes (select class).

Available Classes:
Acolyte level 1:
+5 HP
+4 MP
+1 SP
Level 1 Ability: Divine Mimicry: Gain the ability to learn divine spells
Acrobat level 1:
+2 HP
+1 MP
+10 SP
Level 1 Ability: Combat Awareness: You will not fail to notice an assailant before they strike unless they are actively hiding from you.
Arcanist level 1:
+2 HP
+10 MP
+1 SP
Level 1 Ability: Arcane Mimicry: Gain the ability to learn arcane spells.
Athlete level 1:
+10 HP
+1 MP
+1 SP
Level 1 Ability: Basic Weapons Competence: You will not accidentally injure yourself by attempting to wield a weapon, no matter how improficient you are with it.

…Are assailants and wielding weapons things she’s going to have to deal with, now? Lucy is not a big fan of this concept. It’s not, like, shocking, a lot of video games have significant combat aspects, but it is not part of Lucy’s favorite balanced breakfast.

Maybe Lucy can dream logic her way out of any combat happening if she tries hard and believes in herself.

She has no idea what the difference is supposed to be between arcane and divine magic but “arcanist” offers more MP, which are in context probably Magic Points or Mana Points or something, so she picks Arcanist.

Lucy Whitby
Level 1 (Arcanist 1)
XP: 0
Attributes:
INT: 25
WIS: 15
CHA: 33
STR: 13
DEX: 19
CON: 18
Resources:
HP: 2/2
SP: 1/1
MP: 11/11
Spells:
Prestidigitation (1 MP)
Acid Splash (1 MP)
Light (1 MP)
Skills:
Gamer’s Mind (lvl 1)
Gamer’s Body (lvl 1)
Singing (lvl 5)
Cooking (lvl 3)
Sudoku (lvl 1)
(expand)
Quests:
-
Traits:
-
Titles:
-
[INVENTORY]
[STORE]
[CRAFTING]
[GACHA]
[SAVE]
[PARTY]
[GUILD]
Tip: To add someone to your party, go to [PARTY], select [INVITE], and select them from the list of available entities.
Warning: You DO NOT currently have a saved game. [dismiss]
Warning: THE GAME runs on an operating system of REALITY. Your choices and actions will affect REAL PEOPLE. If someone dies in THE GAME, they die in real life [dismiss] 

Okay, so, according to the available logic, she should probably save the game now. She taps on [SAVE].

You currently have no saved game. Would you like to SAVE?

Yes

No

Yes

The window expands to contain a smaller window, containing an image of mostly itself, overwritten with Lucy’s name and current character sheet and—

What is Arodus. It’s a month. How the fuck does she know that. Also it says she’s in “Kenabres,” which also sort of sounds familiar but she can’t place it.

The screen told her not to close it before she picked a class. Well, she has now not only picked a class, she has a save file. How does she do that.

”Screen close?”

OW OW OW Whatever it was that the game was doing to separate her consciousness from her environs was also doing something to dull the pain in her chest because OW. That or she’s in surgery for catastrophic truck damage and the surgeon happened to do something incredibly painful at the same time that her dream reached the part that involved having an actual setting. Because OW.

She’s—lying down on something. In the dream. Presumably in real life, too? But in the dream the thing she’s on is not completely stable, it’s moving in some way—maybe she isn’t in surgery yet, maybe she’s still on a gurney or stretcher or something. Do they give you painkillers before they get you into the OR? If she wasn’t on any painkillers at all probably the pain would be less localized. Probably when you get catastrophically hit by a truck this does not result in your ribs shattering but your limbs not getting broken at all.

There are people saying things. In a language that isn’t English, but that she somehow understands anyway. That would be an interestingly novel dream experience if she were in LESS PAIN.

All of a sudden there is Less Pain.

Yaaaaaaaaaay.

She cautiously levers herself into a sitting position and looks around.

Well, there’s the woman who just healed her.

Also, this extremely cranky guy.

Beyond them is a city square that is either very low-tech, or both in Europe and hosting a Ren Faire or SCA event or something similar. There is music, and people are dancing and eating and drinking and laughing and throwing darts at targets and…

Okay, well, first things first.

“Thank you,” she tells the woman who is probably her dream’s diegetic explanation for the hospital giving her more painkillers.

“You’re welcome. Though I fear I could not mend your wound in its entirety. It still lingers beneath the surface…I have never seen anything quite like it. I am rather busy today, with the festival, but if you would come to the temple of Iomedae tomorrow, I would like to examine you further.”

“Uh…sure.” Probably Iomedae is an obligatory Fantasy Setting Polytheism god. And Lucy can ask for directions to the temple, if the dream lasts that long, which it probably won’t. 

“That aside, who exactly do you claim to be?”

He’d ask “who are you” if he had any kind of truth spell up to maybe catch her out with, but unfortunately at the moment he does not, and it might conceivably help to remind Terendelev that the two are not the same thing.

“My name is Lucy Whitby and if you want to know how I got here, I would also love to know that. Actually I’m not remotely sure I am here, the last thing I remember is getting hit by a truck.”

“A ‘truck’ being…?”

“…A very heavy kind of…thing…for transporting cargo in…which was going fast enough to do serious damage.” Or kill her; in the hypothetical where this is real she totally got isekai’d via truck-kun murder. “So I’m probably blasted out of my head on opiates while, uh, awaiting healing…and hallucinating being here at all. In which case I suppose I apologize for not dreaming up a more congenial scene to be in.”

The woman is amused.

The man is emphatically not.

“You were brought into the city on a stretcher by supposed guards who I did not recognize and who managed to disappear not long after setting you down, and who claimed to have found you outside the city walls, having been set upon by demons. While I sincerely doubt that their story was accurate as a whole, it remains likely that demons were, in some form, involved.”

“That…sounds…bad…?”

Unimpressed stare. “What is the symbol on your chest?”

Lucy looks down.

Where the pain had been centered, there’s a purple mark on her chest—concentric partial-circles connected by squiggly lines with points coming off of them like a thornbush had a baby with a serif font.

It looks familiar, but—

“I don’t know.” If it has some specific meaning, the dream hasn’t seen fit to share that context with her conscious mind.

“Hmph.” He sounds deeply skeptical. 

“Prelate, I believe the one thing we may be certain of is that this young woman was gravely injured by the demons.”

He raises an eyebrow. And? Leaving aside the question of whether they can in fact be sure of that—Terendelev certainly got a better look at that wound than he did; if she’s certain it’s demonic in origin then he has no grounds to gain say her—“injured by demons” isn’t exactly a set that excludes the demons themselves, let alone their patsies.

Yes, well. Prelate Hulrun certainly does important work for the city; nobody whose word holds water would deny that. Also, when left unrestrained, he burns children at the stake. “I believe that focusing too much of your attention on her may prove unduly straining.” To whatever other security measures you could be overseeing. If she is a demonic plot—which she probably isn’t—it could well be a distraction.

He scowls harder, but nods. “If you’ll excuse me.” And then he stalks off.

“…I apologize for him.”

“I am missing…so much context.”

“Whatever else may be said of your situation, it seems truly disorienting. Today is a festival; I’m afraid I don’t have time to answer all your questions, but I hope you find someone who can.”

“We’ll see how that goes, I guess. If I don’t, can I ask you questions at the temple tomorrow?”

“I imagine so.”

Okay. Okay.

This is still almost certainly a dream, but there are a lot of traits her dreams usually have that this one…doesn’t. Qualitative things; events blurring into one another, her eyes focusing weirdly, being able to make things happen by thinking about them…nothing that happens in every single dream, or anything, but if they were present she could feel more viscerally confident that this was a dream.

As it is, it feels like this is actually happening to her. Which doesn’t mean it is, but it makes it less appealing to find somewhere to sit down with her head beneath her knees and wait to wake up from the anesthesia, and more appealing to explore the dream world around her.

The festival does look appealing, but somehow she finds herself studying the mineral patterns of the stonework of a nearby building instead. It’s just…

The thing is, she actually cannot recall ever seeing such consistent detail in a dream before. The arrangement of tiny crystals in the stone isn’t interesting enough to have come from her imagination, but it is exactly the same every time she looks at it. It doesn’t have any emotional significance, but it remains itself, no matter how intently she examines it. She doesn’t find herself wandering off to look at other detailed bits of stonework, or having an epiphany that the chunk of rock in front of her is important in some way, or making it rearrange itself by glaring at it hard enough.

She doesn’t think heavy duty painkillers are supposed to give you more coherent dreams.

It’s, it’s just…

It’s not that she’s unwilling to entertain the idea that this is real. She’s read too many books with characters that either insisted that what they were experiencing wasn’t real right up until something happened that finally snapped them out of it, or refused to believe it at all and categorically failed to accomplish anything except making everyone around them look better by comparison. She doesn’t have the total failure of genre-savvy it would take to not even consider that this might be real.

It’s just.

Out of all the possible things that could be real, why Truck-kun? Why not Santa, or the Tooth Fairy, or Jesus, or an honest politician?

She has nothing against the fantasy world she seems to have landed in—it appears to have some kind of demon problem, but Earth has malarial mosquitoes and neo-nazis, so let he who is without sin cast the first stone—but she got here by getting hit by a truck, not walking into a wardrobe, and that’s frankly offensive.

She’s glaring hard enough at this random stone wall that it takes her a couple of moments to realize that there are a whole lot more bugs in the area than there had been previously. That’s sort of good in the sense that sudden bug increases are the kind of thing that happens in dreams more than in real life, and sort of bad in the sense that they are not especially something she wants to dream about.

She idly swats one.

+1 XP

Wait, what? She can get XP from random bugs?

"BEHOLD, CRUSADER GODS. BEHOLD, IOMEDAE, YOU POOR IMPOSTER.“

Ah. Non-random bugs. Okay, not great. 

The woman who healed Lucy earlier turns into a gigantic dragon and yells at Bug Guy to fuck off. Bug Guy promptly decapitates her.

Hey! No! Lucy had a mild personal attachment to her! Foul!

This is officially not a good dream. The best thing Lucy can do now is wake up. Wake up. Wake up. Be an obedient dream and either wake up or—

—or unhappen it.

“Load save.”

Are you sure you want to load your previous saved game? This action is irreversible.

“Yes!” People are dying, and not just the dragon healer lady!

And she’s back in the weird void, and ow her chest hurts again.

Okay, first things first, apparently saved games are one use only because hers disappeared, so she needs to create a new one. She can do that.

And then…

Hoo boy this is gonna suck…

“Screen close.”

Ow! Yep! Hurts as much as she remembered!

But this time she’s braced for it. She hurls herself off the stretcher as soon as she’s out of the Screen Void—ow, okay, that might have been a mistake—rolling a few feet—ow ow ow, pressure on chest wound, bad—and attempts to spring to her feet but only managed to sort of shakily stagger upwards.

She remembers what the Prelate said about her stretcher-bearers being suspicious, and turns—too fast, ough, she staggers and almost falls over—to look at them before they can run off.

It hadn’t struck her as especially noteworthy, before, that she saw names and levels floating above people’s heads, because that seemed like a reasonable thing to happen in a dream, especially one with a litrpg conceit.

But if she’s going to treat this as being maybe real, then they probably matter. She’s level one, right now, and Hulrun Shappok was level thirty-three, and Terendelev was level forty-nine.

The two guys holding the stretcher she just clumsily rolled off if are Foulrot and Tripegarter, both level fifteen, and the halfling—or “halfling”—who had been yelling that she needed help was Suture, level five.

Hm. Looks like Mr. Shappok was correct about those guys being sketchy. But not much of a challenge, probably, for cranky guy and the literal dragon?

Which would be more reassuring if it weren’t for the horrible bug guy who oneshotted Terendelev.

“Hey, are you sure you should be standing?” Suture asks. “You’re hurt pretty badly—”

“DEMON!” Lucy yells, pointing at him.

Well, that’s not great.

Yelling “demon” in Kenabres is a lot like yelling “fire” inside a crowded movie theater. People immediately adjacent to her start panicking, people in armor carrying weapons head in their direction—

Okay yeah time for the demons to teleport out.

This does not reduce the amount of panic, to be clear.

“What exactly happened?” Prelate Hulrun asks, striding forwards, frowning deeply at the abandoned stretcher.

Lucy sways, pressing a hand to her still-bleeding chest wound.

“I got very badly hurt—worse than this, I think—and not near here—and I passed out, and when I woke up I was on that stretcher.” Deep breath. “I have some abilities that I don’t understand very well yet, but one of them is that I can see people’s names. And those guys’ names were Suture, Foulrot, and Tripegarter. I think the demons got their hands on me while I was unconscious—I don’t know why—I don’t think they expected me to see through their disguises.”

“Hmm.”

“You’re Hulrun Shappok, and he’s Graham Twirth, and that’s…” once she runs out of guards she starts naming random people in the crowd.

He holds up a hand to stop her. Knowing his name isn’t evidence of anything, but that is in fact enough names of random people to suggest that she has some kind of name-knowing power.

(Which doesn’t mean the rest of her story is true, obviously.)

“Um. And the weird abilities I don’t understand aren’t only the name thing. I—it’s not a vision exactly—something happened that was sort of like having a vision—there are more demons coming. I don’t know how many. A lot. And one of them was really big and powerful, and killed—would kill—counterfactually killed—Terendelev.”

Okay so obviously this is suspicious as fuck, right.

“How?” he asks skeptically.

“Uh, decapitation. With a scythe. She called him Deskari?”

…

“He looked like a horrible bug centaur and he had wings made of smaller bugs.”

Claiming not to know who Deskari is is one of the most obvious, ridiculous, exaggerated, “oh I’m definitely not a demon cultist, don’t worry” ploys he’s seen in the past week.

“Arrest her,” he tells his men.

“Hey!” The guys he has manacling her are much much lower level than him but they’re still each level five versus her level one. She doesn’t try to physically resist. “What did I do?”

“Collaboration with demons.”

“I. What? No.”

“You seriously expect anyone to believe you don’t know who Deskari is.”

SIGH.

“I don’t suppose you would humor me about that enough to tell me the publicly available summary of who that is.”

“No.”

“Fine. Load game.”

“What does that mea—”

Well.

Since she never got healed that time, this transition to the save screen actually results in a reduction in pain! Hooray.

She creates a new save and exits the screen.

Lurching up and half-off the stretcher, she seizes Suture. “Who’s Deskari.”

“—What?”

“I am extremely not from around here and I need basic context like who Deskari is.”

“I’m not sure this is a conversation best had in public?”

“Don’t care.”

“…Deskari is the demon lord of locusts, and the first demon lord to get seriously involved with the Worldwound.”

Lucy should not know what a demon lord is but apparently she does. She’s going to put that on a shelf in her head with “Arodus” and whatever language she’s currently speaking, to deal with later.

“What’s the Worldwound?”

“Giant bloody series of rifts to the Abyss where Sarkoris used to be.”

Well that’s bad.

“What other demon lords are involved with the Worldwound?”

“Plenty of ‘em opportunistically, but the major players are mostly just Deskari and Baphomet.” And sorta Nocticula but he has no reason to say so.

“Okay, and who is Baphomet, please.”

“Are you really sure you want to be having this conversation in public?”

Well she would rather be having it without the horrible chest wound but you can’t always get what you want. “Who. Is. Baphomet.”

“Baphomet is the demon lord of Minotaurs and treachery.”

“Okay. Great. Off the top of your head, anything else it would be weird and suspicious for me not to know?”

“Nothing as suspicious as asking that question in front of people!”

Sigh. “Load game.”

Okay. New save, again. And…

If she focuses, she can sort of feel the stretcher jostling underneath her; it’s muted, like the pain is muted, but: time does in fact pass while she’s like this.

Talking to only Hulrun and not Terendelev went badly. Terendelev shows up specifically in order to heal Lucy’s bleeding chest wound.

Lucy is getting REALLY TIRED of the horrible chest wound.

So. Maybe now is a good time to fuck around with the interface some. And maybe she can save the game again after her chest wound is healed. Although she shouldn’t jump to that immediately; the time until then might turn out to be important for accomplishing some task that is not “talking to Hulrun Shappok.”

“Exit save screen.”

Lucy Whitby
Level 1 (Arcanist 1)
XP: 0
Attributes:
INT: 25
WIS: 15
CHA: 33
STR: 13
DEX: 19
CON: 18
Resources:
HP: 2/2
SP: 1/1
MP: 11/11
Spells:
Prestidigitation (1 MP)
Acid Splash (1 MP)
Light (1 MP)
Skills:
Gamer’s Mind (lvl 1)
Gamer’s Body (lvl 1)
Singing (lvl 5)
Cooking (lvl 3)
Sudoku (lvl 1)
(expand)
Quests:
-
Traits:
-
Titles:
-
[INVENTORY]
[STORE]
[CRAFTING]
[GACHA]
[SAVE]
[PARTY]
[GUILD]
Tip: Items obtained from the GACHA are not eligible to be sold in the STORE.
Warning: THE GAME runs on an operating system of REALITY. Your choices and actions will affect REAL PEOPLE. If someone dies in THE GAME, they die in real life [dismiss] 

Okay, you know what? Gacha looks interesting! She selects [GACHA].

You have (1) GACHA spin remaining

Time to next spin 12:03:31

Lucy presses the big grey SPIN button.

You have received (1) Stick!
Good for poking suspicious objects

What.

Seriously?

Okay what if she loads her save AGAIN and after making her new save she comes back to the Gacha. Is her Gacha spin still used up?

You have (1) GACHA spin remaining

Okay good.

…If she can savescum her Gacha spin, maayybe she should…wait to do that until later…when she is not also trying to savescum warning Terendelev about Deskari.

She leaves the Gacha screen and taps on [PARTY] instead.

PARTY:
Lucy Whitby (lvl 1)
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
INVITE:
Suture (lvl 5)
Foulrot (lvl 15)
Tripegarter (lvl 15)
Seelah (lvl 7)
Graham Twirth (lvl 5)
Hulrun Shappok (lvl 33)
(expand)

Yeah, no. Well, she’s not specifically ruling out Seelah, whoever that is, but Graham was one of the people Hulrun had cuffing her that one time.

Possibly she could convince Hulrun she’s on the level by inviting him into her party, but…no? Fuck that guy? She’ll keep it in her back pocket for if she gets really desperate but it’s not going to be anything other than a last resort.

And then she feels the muted bump of the stretcher being laid on the ground, and maybe she should start paying attention to her surroundings now.

Prelate Hulrun is, as it happens, casting a healing spell on her. It’s not doing much, though, and he frowns and snaps for someone to fetch Terendelev.

Oh good, Terendelev.

…That first time, Lucy had been too out of it to realize that Hulrun had made an attempt to heal her before Terendelev had showed up. Okay, that’s a point in his favor. The only one, so far, but you can’t knowingly let your existing biases lead you to just dismiss new information.

And here is Terendelev! With better healing.

Yaaaaay. Thank—Iomedae, maybe? Man, if gods really exist, locally, she should investigate that. Maybe she should savescum asking people insanely basic theology questions.

Not right now, though.

“Demons,” she says, lurching upwards as soon as she feels well enough, and grabbing hold of Terendelev’s wrist beseechingly. “Lots of them—coming soon—Deskari is coming. Deskari himself is coming.”

That has both Terendelev and Hulrun’s attention on her immediately. “How do you know this?” the Prelate demands.

“The whole story would take too long—I was captured by demons—” probably, somehow, “—I don’t know how I got away—” not exactly false, it is in fact super weird for three demons to carry her to safety on a stretcher “—I mean I guess if there’s some obvious thing to, to divert resources from, to prepare for an attack, don’t do that in case I’m a planted diversion or something, but—”

Well, if she’s not a demonic plot she’s slightly less stupid than most civilians, at least.

“How sure are you that Deskari is going to show up personally?”

“Very.” If he doesn’t she’s going to load from save again and start trying to do science about under what conditions he does or does not show up. Or possibly conclude once again that she’s dreaming, but if she is then this isn’t happening anyway, so.

The two of them exchange from looks. “How soon?”

Hhhhhhhow long did Lucy spend glaring at rock, um.

“I—soon—I don’t know exactly how many minutes, but—”

“It could be a ploy intended to waste our buffs.”

“But if it isn’t…”

He nods.

The festival is a plausibly tempting target for demons, after all; Hulrun had been opposed to holding it, but he was overruled.

“My men will begin evacuating the square.”

Terendelev nods and begins casting her longer-duration buffs.

OH THANK POSSIBLY-IOMEDAE THEY’RE TAKING IT SERIOUSLY.

“Save game,” Lucy murmurs quietly.

You already have a saved game. Would you like to overwrite?

So she does in fact only get one save slot. Oh well.

“Yes.”

Game saved!

Okay…so…

If trying this doesn’t work out, she can totally just come back to this save and do something else. She doesn’t need to feel nervous about her choices because consequences don’t exist.

“Um, there’s another—thing—about my weird abilities, can I show you?” she asks Terendelev.

ABSOLUTELY NOT.

“Alright.”

They are very lucky to have a silver dragon on their side. This is objectively true and he needs to keep reminding himself of it. Even if she has the security mindset of a lantern archon.

[PARTY] INVITE: Terendelev 

You have been invited to join Lucy Whitby’s Party!
[ACCEPT][DECLINE]

What.

“What.”

“You know, I am also confused? But, uh, where I’m from, there’s a fictional genre involving interacting with the world through weird numerical systems, and, uh, I didn’t think that was a kind of magic people could actually do, but I…seem to have it, now?”

“…I’m not entirely sure how that explains this,” she gestures to the window in front of her, “although I’m guessing your name is Lucy Whitby?”

“Yeah—uh, are adventuring parties a thing, here?”

“…Yes.”

“That was a weird question to even have to ask, wasn’t it.”

“Yes.”

“Load save.”

…This time, when she opens her screen to invite Terendelev to her party, the tip it offers is that she can use the “Info” command to learn additional details about Game functions.

“Info, Party.”

?

INFO/PARTY
You can invite other people to engage with The Game by inviting them to your PARTY or GUILD. You may have nine PARTY members at any given time excluding yourself.
PARTY members may gain XP, levels, classes, MP, SP, HP, Skills, Attributes, Titles, Traits, and Achievements; all gains will be retained after leaving the PARTY. All PARTY members are immune to friendly fire from other PARTY members.
PARTY members may communicate over arbitrary distances using the PARTY MESSAGE (PM) system.
XP gained by any PARTY members are pooled and allocated to PARTY members according to the selected schema. XP is currently distributed: [EQUALLY TO ALL PARTY MEMBERS]

Hm…okay…

…If Terendelev manages to beat up Deskari, that would be soooooo much XP. This is objectively not the most important thing about the situation but it’s still true.

She’s going to have to reload her save anyway at this point, so she might as well ask:

“So, who is Iomedae, actually?”

Honestly not the weirdest thing about the situation right now.

“Iomedae is the Lawful Good goddess of triumph over evil, an ascended deity of the Starstone, and the patron of the crusades.”

“Crusades” is not the most promising word ever, but. “Crusades against the demons?”

“Yes.”

That’s prooooobably fine then, although she’s definitely going to have to look into it more later.

“Thanks. Load game.”

This time, when Terendelev is confused by the pop up window in front of her, Lucy specifies that “adventuring parties” are a thing her powers apparently numerically represent.

“What, exactly, does numerically representing an adventuring part do?”

“It gives you access to a subset of my powers and lets us communicate over long distances by text.”

“Hm. Very well.” She hits the “Accept” button and goes back to casting buffs.

This is deeply suspicious but unfortunately Hulrun’s ability to gainsay Terendelev is limited.

Hey, you know what’s way more definitely demonic than weird powers on a strange apparently-human?

To be clear, Terendelev would have preferred it if Lucy had been wrong or lying.

Terendelev does significantly better this time, with forewarning and buffs.

This time she lasts five while rounds, landing several hits of her own on Deskari before he kills her.

Fuck!

“Load save.”

“So, uh, my powers also give me prophetic visions, and Deskari keeps killing Terendelev.”

“Prophecy has been broken for a hundred years.”

“Keeps killing me? Am I being Raised in between?”

“No, I mean—it’s not one future, it’s several possible futures, and so far he’s killed you every time.”

Terendelev gives her a resigned smile and puts her hand on Lucy’s shoulder. “Deskari is a Demon Lord. If I can hold him off for a time, and limit the damage he can do while on this plane—that’s the best that can be hoped for.”

“Well, that and recovering your body afterwards.”

“That would be ideal, yes.”

“I see.” Hoo boy. 

If she had a second save slot, she could have one save before the demons showed up, and then use the second one on whatever the current iteration of Terendelev holding off Deskari the longest is. Instead she…does not have that.

“What’s the absolute best case scenario?”

“That you’re lying.” And the lie doesn’t royally fuck them over somehow, which is also pretty implausible.

“Besides that.” She is, after all, not in fact lying.

“Iomedae personally intervenes to destroy Deskari.” Hulrun was not actually educated in Lastwall.

Is that remotely likely? Lucy glances at Terendelev.

Terendelev shakes her head minutely.

“Okay. Hypothetically, if I had—the ability to repeat the attack over and over, return to this moment” or like a few moments ago but same difference “until it comes out—the best way possible—what should I hold out for.”

Terendelev sighs. “It’s a lovely thought, but trying to take that kind of responsibility onto your shoulders without the means to actually follow through has destroyed more than one young crusader.”

“No, it’s—it’s not hypothetical! I can literally do that!”

The both of them stare at her.

“No one can literally do that.”

“I don’t need you to believe me, but can you humor me enough to give the question a real answer?”

“…Deskari is driven off without completely destroying the city, my body is secured and not available to the demons, and the Wardstone hasn’t been destroyed.”

“What is the Wardstone.”

“The Wardstone is a magical artifact that, together with its brethren, keep the demons inside the barrier they form.”

“Okay, thanks.”

“You can’t be serious.”

Shrug. “She didn’t ask us to believe her, just to answer her odd question. It’s not as if I’ve revealed any secrets.”

“Still—”

“Load game.”

Okay, if one of her major objectives is “retrieve Terendelev’s corpse,” she needs to investigate her Inventory situation.

“Info, Inventory.”

INFO/INVENTORY
You may store items in your INVENTORY. In order to inventory an item, say “INVENTORY” while touching the object you wish to inventory. You may not inventory multiple objects simultaneously. You may not inventory items larger than you can carry. Items in INVENTORY are placed in temporal stasis. EXCEPTION: Items designed to keep time will continue to do so.

There is absolutely no way Lucy can lift a multi-ton dragon corpse.

“Is there any way to be able to lift a lot more weight really quickly?”

“The spell Ant Haul triples your carrying capacity.”

There is no way she can lift a third of a dragon’s corpse. “Nothing better than tripling?”

“No. Ant Haul stacks with Bull’s Strength, but Bull’s does a lot less than tripling.”

“Is there a way to turn your corpse into a lot of smaller pieces very quickly.”

Are you sure we can’t just arrest her.

Yes.

”Not especially, I’m afraid.”

“Okay. Uh, I, apparently, have the ability to extradimensionally store anything I can personally pick up. So, like, if there’s an obvious way to apply that to this situation that I’m not thinking of, that would be excellent.”

“…Well, Shrink Item would probably do it, if we happened to have someone who could cast it handy, or a scroll, and someone who could keep demons off the caster.” Terendelev has it but in this hypothetical she’s dead and there certainly isn’t time for her to scribe a scroll of it.

“I see.” Okay, can she savescum her Gacha until it gives her a scroll of Shrink Item…no, she might need something else more, she’s looking at this the wrong way. “Info, Store.”

INFO/STORE
The STORE is your one-stop-shop for items, attribute points, levels, unique classes, titles, traits, GACHA spins, and temporary bonuses. The STORE operates using a currency of GAMER COINS (GC). GC can be obtained from quest rewards, defeated enemies, GACHA spins, and by selling items to the STORE. The STORE’s selection refreshes daily.

Okay, cool. She navigates to the store.

The stuff in the store is displayed in little boxes, and she gets more details about a given item when she pokes the little box.

Also, critically, there’s a search bar.

She searches for “Shrink Item.”

Scroll of Shrink Item 750 GC
Read to shrink an item. Chance of failure based on skill.
Oil of Shrink Item 1500 GC
Apply to an item to shrink it.

…Lucy bends down and picks up a random rock. “Inventory.”

Now there is a rock in her Inventory! And the Store has the option to sell it. For 0.000001 GC.

Not a whole lot of point…

“Do either of you have anything on you valuable enough that it could be sold for enough to buy an oil of shrink item?” She doesn’t have the faintest idea how to read a scroll, which is apparently a skill.

“You cannot possibly imagine we would give it to you if we did.”

“You underestimate my imagination.” But fair, it would certainly take some convincing. Hmmm…

Hey, demon attack happening now.

Ooh, yeah, that’ll happen. “Load save.”

“So, Deskari is definitely going to kill you, right, on account of being a demon lord? And then—is the reason why retrieving your body after that is important because some kind of resurrection exists here?”

That is not only not the least suspicious thing to say, it isn’t the least suspicious way to say it. “Why do you ask?”

“Because I have weird powers and I’m trying to leverage them to get the best result possible.”

A Likely Story.

“Since she said the demon attack would happen very soon, it won’t be long before we know for certain whether she’s lying or not.”

Seriously??? “She could be telling the truth about the demon attack and lying about everything else.”

“If she’s an opportunistic high-circle necromancer, that would be bad, but as long as she’s not actively working for the demons it’s still a smaller problem than Deskari personally showing up.”

“We can’t assume that. A servant of Baphomet would jump at the chance to interfere with Deskari for personal power.”

“So don’t let her near my body.”

Well, Lucy already knew she wasn’t keeping this one. “Okay, fair, but resurrection existing yes or no.”

“…Yes.”

“And how does it work?”

Yeah no she’s just going to go back to casting buffs now.

She looks at Hulrun.

You’re lucky Terendelev thinks they have more urgent concerns than arresting you. Don’t push your luck.

Faaaaaaiiir.

She’s tempted to just load her save right now, but…

…She had been reluctant to entirely discount the imp of the perverse before all this. If her life has suddenly changed to litrpg, she can afford to discount genre conventions, and superstitions that might feed into them, even less.

So she’s going to let the attack happen, and see if the fact that she does not want to keep this save will be enough to let Terendelev survive after all.

And if course while she’s waiting she might as well investigate the Game system some more. Maybe she should check out her spells…

Deskari shows up again.

Terendelev lasts six rounds, this time.

Okay. That’s—kind of disappointing, that her attempt to provoke the Imp of the Perverse didn’t work, which may be why it didn’t. Or it may just be that working was entirely off the table!

It’d be sort of convenient if there were anyone around she could ask questions of, but it kind of seems like everyone is too busy trying really hard to kill demons and/or not die to pay attention to her.

“Deskari’s here! Deskari himself! Blimey! A few minutes ago we had a dragon, and now—!”

“Oh, hi, Suture.”

What. She was NOT supposed to know that name. Was Areelu lying to him for some reason?

Whatever, he’s supposed to be pretending to be a halfling. If she doesn’t in fact know it’s him and is just taking a shot in the dark, he could get in trouble for confirming it. “Who?”

“Whatever,” she flaps a hand dismissively. “You have time to answer my questions, don’t you?”

…Yeah this is definitely Lady Areelu’s kid. Not that he ever met her while she was alive, but the resemblance is striking.

“While demons are overrunning the square?”

“That’s not a no.”

“…What do you want to know?”

“Spells to resurrect the dead: how do they work?”

Huh, apparently the soul-splice damaged the host more than anticipated. “On what level…?”

“You may pretend for the sake of argument that I am aware it can be done and nothing else whatever.”

“…There’s a fifth-circle spell, a seventh-circle spell, and a ninth-circle spell. The fifth circle one can only be cast a few days after death, needs an intact corpse, and a diamond; the seventh-circle one can be cast decades after death, needs some portion of the remains, and a bigger diamond, and the ninth-circle one needs an even bigger diamond and doesn't need a body."

"How big diamonds are we talking here?"

"Uh, about yea big." He tries to show her with pinched fingers. He's seen Lady Areelu handle various sizes of diamond at various times but has no idea how to describe the size of a gemstone. 

"Great. Explain 'circle?' As relates to spells."

...There is no way he's going to be able to explain all the math Lady Areelu's kid would definitely prefer to know about this. Oh well, if Lady Areelu needed him to explain math she would have taught him math. "Uh, every spell has a circle, and every caster can cast so many spells of a given circle in a day. People talk about casters' power levels by the highest circle of spell they can cast."

"How high do they go?"

"Up to nine."

"Are Prestidigitation, Acid Splash, and Light all the same circle?" they all cost the same amount of mana...

"Those are all cantrips."

"Meaning..."

"Circle zero."

"Oh, so there's ten circles total?"

"Right."

"How common is each circle? In terms of, like, you said highest circle is how casters get measured, how common are various circles of caster."

"Uh--" he's not actually sure if the answer to that question is the same on this side of the Wound as in the Abyss, let alone if it's the same on the rest of Golarion as at the Wound. "Uh, first-circle's pretty common, I think. Second-circle's common-ish. Third circle gives you enough weight to throw a little around, lotsa places. And it gets rarer up to ninth circle, where they call you an archmage."

"And those are very rare, I take it."

"I don't know for sure there's as many as ten on the whole planet." Probably there is, there's lots of parts of the planet he knows nothing whatsoever about, but.

"That's very good to know...hm. Hey, how come you're being so helpful, anyway? I'm pretty sure you're a demon." Probably she should corroborate all this information with people who are not demons.

He has absolutely no idea what kind of information she could have that would leave her knowing his name was Suture but not why he would be helpful to her. "How'd you know my name?"

"--Wait, do you think I'm also--" surely he wouldn't think that she was a demon, since he was involved in carrying her in--although he could think she was a human on the demons' side, maybe, if that was a thing--actually as long as he's being helpful-- "Nevermind. Where was it you brought me in from?"

"Outside the walls," he says, and then decides to scarper and report all this to Lady Areelu rather than hang around answering or not-answering the kinds of questions he does not in fact know if Lady Areelu would prefer him to answer.

Well that's annoying. 

Okay...is there anything else useful she can do before she loads her save...

...Come to think of it, if there's anything valuable lying around that she could steal to sell for the oil of shrink item, now would definitely be a better time to investigate that than while being observed by Hulrun and also Terendelev. 

She's not seeing anything from, like, her immediate position, but that's to be expected. Okay.

"Inventory," she says of the table she was hiding behind, and then dashes for some other form of cover in the hopes of not immediately dying. 

While she is doing this, someone takes a potshot at Deskari that actually hits. Deskari gets big mad and hits the ground with his massive scythe about it.

“Load save!” Lucy yeeps as she falls into the rift.

“Weird question: if you had the ability to repeat the demon attack and the few minutes leading up to it a large but not infinite number of times, what would be most important to learn and/or try before you kept one?”

“That is a weird question.”

“Explaining how would take too long but let us suppose for the sake of argument that a true answer would be useful to my weird abilities.”

“…Well, it would depend on what happens during those few minutes, and the attack.”

“So far I’ve mostly been trying to, uh, craft contingencies, for recovering your body if,” when, “Deskari kills you.”

She gives a sigh of grim resignation. “If you could, in fact, manage that, that would be very useful. Fiducia Rathimus, at the Temple of Abadar, is likely to have a scroll of Raise Dead, if he and his temple survive the attack more or less intact.”

Ooh, that sounds plot-relevant Even if she can act without consequence in throwaway timelines it’s still really important to remember that she’s dealing with real people and not video game NPCs.

”That sounds—more expensive than I expect to be able to pay for.” Maybe she can leverage this into asking how to obtain Valuable Objects.

“If you in fact have my body, I expect you to be able to convince him that I’ve authorized you to draw from my personal account for the specific purpose.” Terendelev doesn’t have the kind of money with the Church of Abadar to significantly affect Crusade funding, but she does expect to be able to pay to have herself Raised the once.

“Okay, got it.” Not super helpful for the shrink item situation, but still good to know.

“If she has your body,” somehow; it wouldn’t exactly fit into most bags of holding, “she should turn it over to the Church of Iomedae immediately.”

“That might not be possible, under the proposed circumstances.”

“As soon as it is possible, then,” he says, but even that is a compromise he doesn’t look thrilled by.

Lucy really hopes she doesn’t have to interact with this guy much after she gets past the demon attack for real. He’s so deeply unpleasant.

She still needs to figure out the oil of shrink item thing. Or figure something else.

…Hmm. Her mind has continuity across saves. In Groundhog Day, the protagonist was able to learn to play the piano across loops. Could she learn to read spell scrolls? The scroll of shrink item was a lot less expensive than the oil.

For that matter, even if she can’t, if there’s a chance of succeeding without having any idea what she’s doing, she can savescum it.

Even if so, she’ll still need to acquire Stuff to sell; the scroll is cheaper, not cheap. Which means either convincing Hulrun or Terendelev to part with something, or stealing stuff after the attack starts.

Well, she can’t work on “steal stuff after the attack starts” until the attack starts.

“What would you say if I claimed to have a weird ability to turn valuable objects into other valuable objects of roughly equivalent value?”

“That you had made an infernal compact with Mammon.” Or, like, a devil under his purview, more likely, but whatever.

“…Is there any version of that claim that wouldn’t immediately make you arrest me.”

He gives her a flat look. 

Well, this iteration is also a wash. Not that that’s surprising. Man, this guy is so hard to work around.

Eventually the demons attack again.

As expected. Now, to see what stealable objects there are…

“Blimey!” Suture has showed up again.

Lucy is really getting concerned by this guy’s interest in her. Like, it’s conceivable that he’s not a demon and just has a weird name and friends with weird names for some unrelated reason, but Lucy does not super want to bet on that!

She turns to look at him and notices something. “Hey, is that a spell scroll?”

“…Yes?”

“Inventory,” she says, reaching out and tapping it.

Her inventory now has a Scroll of False Life in it.

Great! She pulls it out and attempts to read it.

…

Oh no. It’s fucking gibberish.

Well, that’s not entirely fair. “Gibberish” would imply that the scroll largely consisted of what she could identify as text, which…is not the case. Regardless, she has no idea what to do to make this thing do magic.

“How do I…operate this?”

He’s not even gonna ask what she did in order to steal it. “Give it back, and I’ll read it for you.”

“No, no, I don’t need the spell cast, I need to learn how to read scrolls.”

“Now?”

“Yep.”

“Why???”

“Historical precedent suggests you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“You haven’t told me yet and I’m already not sure I believe you.”

“Can’t blame you! Will you teach me how to read this or not?”

“…I’m…not sure we have time…”

“That’s fine, just get started.”

…Okay. Sure. He will start to explain how to read a scroll. This might as well happen.

She’s very attentive! Definitely taking this seriously and not just fucking with him!

Look, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and it is a deeply extraordinary claim that Suture isn’t being fucked with right now.

He gets her as far as he reasonably can before he has to run off and shoot Deskari with a Midnight Bolt.

RAAGH DESKARI SMASH SLICE.

…Huh, someone getting in a lucky hit against Deskari makes sense; it happening twice the same way seems less like luck.

Well. She’s going to see if she can—and she doesn’t like looting dead bodies, but—if the tech level here is as low as it seems, then all these weapons and armor are handmade, and that’s expensive…

A dead crusader’s pilfered shield nets her twenty GC; the chain shirt she steals off of the same corpse gets her a hundred.

Well. Okay. That seems feasible for funding the scroll of Shrink Item.

As long as she can survive long enough to loot sevenish corpses.

Okay. Let’s see if she can do that.

She crawls along the ground, trying to avoid the patches of conflict as best she can, and…probably the demons all think the armed crusaders are higher priority? There are enough of them, still, that this seems plausible, and they all seem to be ignoring her.

They continue ignoring her even after she successfully inventories enough gear to sell for the 750 GC needed to buy the scroll of shrink item, and starts sneak-crawling towards Terendelev’s corpse, which is weirder, but she doesn’t have an alternate hypothesis right now.

Okay. Lucy buys the scroll she needs, and opens it. She…doesn’t fully understand it, by any means…but she thinks she understands it well enough to get it to do something?

The something that it does is blow up in her face. 

YOU HAVE BEEN KILLED
[Proceed to Afterlife] [Load Previous Save]

Good to know that there’s an afterlife here, she supposes! She is definitely going to do more investigation into that before she even considers going there, though.

Not to mention the problems in Kenabres that she’s trying to solve.

She selects [Load Previous Save].

“I don’t suppose you have a scroll on you that I could practice attempting to cast from,” she says to Hulrun.

He’s not even going to dignify that with a stern look.

That’s not even harsh but fair, it’s just plain Original Flavor fair.

What…can she accomplish…in the few minutes before Attempting To Scroll practice can resume. Nothing physical, of course, unless it’s sufficiently high-value to move her save forward about…

Well, maybe now is a good time to savescum her Gacha? Or, no, she has more system documentation to investigate.

“Info, crafting,” she murmurs.

A few minutes later the demons show up again.

Oh, good It is honestly pretty fucked up that that’s her reaction at this point. If she starts crawling around looting corpses is Suture going to find her again?

He sure is!

”Blimey! Deskari himself!”

“Get out the scroll you’re carrying, and teach me to read it, starting from the assumption that you, specifically, had been teaching me how to read a scroll from nothing, and gotten interrupted here-ish.” She makes some illustrative hand gestures.

“—Sorry, what?”

“I’m time looping and you’re weirdly cooperative for, I’m assuming a demon, based on the name Suture.”

“What.”

“And yes, it is in fact important to learn to read a scroll Right Now.”

Actually what he’s going to do is run off, because if there’s some kind of time loop situation going on then Lady Areelu should probably know about it—

Okay yeah being that frank with the demon was a bad plan even if it’s not going to have specific consequences. Load save.

“Info.” She can read up on her system some more while she waits.

AARGH RAAR DEMON ATTACK.

And this time when Suture shows up, she repeats her spiel about his continuing to teach her to read a scroll, and appends it with, “yes, this is what I’m choosing to do right now; no I’m not going to explain why.”

“…Uh. I’m not sure I—”

“Does the answer change if I say I know your name’s Suture.”

“Okay, sure, why not.”

(Suture is less sure, this iteration, that this is Lady Areelu’s kid; instead he’s wondering if Lady Areelu herself actually swapped in for her or is Dominating her or something, and is testing him. He’s…not sure what the test is, if that’s the case, but whatever.)

Okay! Cool! And when Suture has to fuck off, Lucy will…find somewhere safe-ish to wait out “someone shoots at Deskari and Deskari breaks the ground about it” and then decides to practice casting from a scroll on the scroll she already has instead of crawling around risking getting stepped on first.

This time, instead of exploding in her face, she finds herself covered with a sort of yellow-green glow that seems to be dripping upwards off of her.

That’s…better? Probably? Even if it doesn’t actually indicate progress it at least leaves her able to complete her originally intended trajectory of looting her own side’s dead until she has the other scroll and then trying it.

She will do that.

…This time, she can sort of feel the magic trying to go haywire, and sort of reign it in before it does anything.

And that…leaves her with an unexpended scroll. So she can try again.

This time she doesn’t quite manage to keep the haywire magic from going off, and she starts shrinking. Which she’s pretty sure isn’t how Shrink Item works, but drippy glowiness isn’t how False Life works, so.

…Going forward, she has three options. One, she can keep practicing with scrolls until she can reliably use one. Two, she can try to loot enough stuff off of corpses to buy the oil after all. Or three, she can think of something else.

…Lucy has a TERRIBLE idea.

It’s an idea that falls under 2 and not 3, to be clear, but still terrible.

She might as well try it, though, since she’s going to make all of this not have happened anyway.

Yep, she can sell the corpses.

She’s going to hell for this Probably she shouldn’t even joke about that until she knows more about the afterlife situation.

She manages to get most of the difference in price between the scroll and the oil before a stray crossbow bolt takes her out.

Okay.

Theoretically, she could keep this one.

Not for sure and certain—Deskari could get lucky and murder Terendelev early, Lucy could get unlucky and catch a stray crossbow bolt or fall into a ravine.

But she has a workable plan, and she wants to keep an iteration of events based on her choosing, not based on when she runs out of time to make new saves in.

So. Consequences are officially back on. Not irrevocably so, if something she says that sounds innocent to her turns out to be an insult to someone’s dead mother she still has enough time to start over about that, but it is officially time to stop saying ominous bullshit just because she has no reason not to.