It's a beautiful morning. Sable strolls contentedly through the park. There are still bits of black in her steely-gray hair, and she's enjoying the sunrise as she walks to her favorite coffee shop for a pastry.
She reaches the far side of the park, waits for the light, and starts crossing the street.
And then a truck runs the light. Wow, is she really going to outlive her wives by nearly a decade only to get hit by a tru—
This death, it turns out, resulted in her soul getting displaced a little further then usual, to a certain man with a certain set of beverages.
She dusts herself off, looks herself over, nods, and starts walking over. "There better be a second cup there, son," she says to him, a wry smile on her face.
A moment later, she's crossed the distance and sits down across from him.
There's a slight wistful smile on his face as he gestures down at the teaset sweepingly.
"I'm not too fond of cups, but I can certainly give you a mug."
"Perfect."
She picks up a dark violet mug, sets it in front of herself, and elegantly pours herself a mug of tea. Holding it up to her face, she inhales deeply.
"Ahhhhh," she sighs in satisfaction, "a fresh Earl Grey is exactly what an old woman needs after she's been hit by a truck and transplanted into a liminal space with strange man who owes her an explanation."
She takes a sip, eyeing him over the mug.
"Don't you, son."
"I'm afraid it's not my system, but yes. You are more then due an explanation."
He sips his own tea for a moment.
"A certain world under my jurisdiction is going to be receiving a demon lord rather soon, and faces a number of problems besides. You've been selected to be incarnated into the world, with a blessing of talent and a specific 'cheat' ability of your choosing, within the budget of power I have available to deal with the situation."
Sable hums consideringly and nods. "If I say 'inkform', can you read the whole implementation from my mind and context, or shall I explain the concept?"
"Implementing the ability that precisely can make cost prohibitive, but the idea behind your words and the shape of your soul and magics will naturally direct the ability in a certain direction tied into your expectations."
"You know your tools better than I do, son. Start with that flavor and aim for the best bang for your buck on the intersection of my soul's narrative resonance and my predicted satisfaction with the power and you'll probably hit something decent."
She takes another sip of tea and smirks at him. "If you can't trust a tea-sipping man who's trying to use your rebirth to nudge a broken world in a better direction while probably giving you far too little information, who can you trust, right son?"
There's a brief acknowledging nod.
"There's not much time, but if there's anything you'd like to ask, you can, now."
"Most concisely informative briefing you can, leaning on context and shorthand I know? Top things I wouldn't expect from my first impressions of the place?"
Siiiiiip.
"The magic is less strictly like it appears then you'd expect, you should ask the people you meet about the social mores around romance, and that you shouldn't expect that you can get around wards as simply as you'd hope."
She nods approvingly. "Maybe you're smarter than you look, son. There any narrative weight influencing who I meet first?"
Sip. This is pretty good tea, for a possible god who probably cheats. She's gonna make the most of it while he explains. Sip.
"The system tends to be careful about finding an appropriate place for the Hero to start their journey, aside any such other arrangements."
The world starts fading out a little, turning whiter and whiter.
"No, and yes, I'm afraid..."
The words come out of your lips just the world fades far far away, til suddenly you arrive atop a softly rolling hill, in a vast grassland.
You can feel an extra... flexibility under your skin, a certain fluidity and cycle of power running through your veins, that feels just like you dreamed.
Well then. No point in continuing to look like a tired old woman. She focuses carefully, her skin tightening, cheeks plumping, curves perking. Her hair brightens and colors, becoming luscious violet curls hanging in a gentle bob around her face. Her eyes brighten to a vivid violet.
After a moment, she stretches, savoring how limber she feels, how her joints don't click and pop anymore, and then takes a good look around.
It's a forest - full of dew-coated grass and tall trees vaguely reminiscent of oaks filling the space. It's not too dense to walk comfortably through, for the most part. It's probably midday, by the little of the sun she can see through the canopy.
The shifting isn't quite as smooth as she'd hope - there's a certain... bluriness, as her eyes melt and reform, and a few moments of sudden freeness and a gentle gloppy drippiness as the details of her shape reform.
There's a queriable felt-sense of a gentle something-or-other inside her, a sense of something vast and faint outside her cut of the same cloth, and a few ones sort of loosely connected? It's unobtrusive but it's still... notable.
Her clothes are conveniently shifting with her - though there's an extra push to get it to quite... work.
There's a gentle hum of birdsong in the distance, and what's... probably a game trail off to her left that she could follow.
Honestly, the gloopiness is kind of ａｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃ, now that she thinks about it. She still wants to get faster and smoother, but that means she's really got something like proper inkform. She pokes a gentle query at the inner something, and starts hiking along the game trail, looking around curiously.
It sort of... bubbles, a wordless inkiness coating her metaphorical finger.
There's some... rather suspiciously large looking scratches on some of the roots.
Those scratches look troublesome. She doesn't even have a weapon yet. This is the only path she's got, however, and she needs to find her way out of this forest. She keeps following it for now, and tries a better set of questions for the inner inky thing, as well as the other unidentified things. What are these? What capabilities do they have? Do they have some reservoirs that can fill and empty?
They're.... something? They bobble about, and they're hard to disentangle from each other.
One of them is a vague feeling of volume and mass and a placid pool in one, a feeling almost like the fading prismatic rays of a sunset just behind the horizon in one, and then an empty ledger close to the others trailing off into nothing with a few indescribable specks hanging on alongside, and a gust and blur of wind further away, all swirling in her core.
It's pretty obvious that the first and last one have some concept of 'reserve'.
She probes further, while still keeping a watch on her surroundings as she follows the path (are there signs of habitation? a river to follow toward town? hostile creatures?).
Is the pool some kind of reserve of her ink, what's not in use and what she can use to heal herself maybe? Is it where she gets the mass and volume to make bigger or denser shapes comes from? What happens if she makes her hair longer, does that do anything to the inkwell? Can she give herself extra-sturdy and sharp claws?
What about the ledger, does that track... debts? Connections to people? To places? Can she leave a droplet of ink on a tree here? Does she retain a connection to it if she does? Does it show up in the ledger?
What about the prismatic glow, can she push that into things? Can it be more in some parts of her than others? Does it do anything or feel like anything when she tries to push it into parts of herself?
And that windy gusty thing, what's that? It doesn't feel like part of her inky senses, so is it something to do with local magic?
Following the path, the forest thins out a little, and there's a start of more obvious footsteps from smaller game then whatever left those claw marks. There's the occasional rustle, but it's hard to see anything much.
There's a rough feeling of inky weight to that part, and you're pretty sure there's a little dip in it when you move to mark a tree with your ink - which works fine. There's a tiny moment of - catching? when the little dot hits the bark, before it settles into a faint tickle in the back of your head as part of the prismatic glow that feels oh so much sharper then the rest.
The ledger feels connected to the catching feeling, somehow, but it's empty after it too.
The glow sort of just... fizzles and sparks when you try to push it into things. It can definitely be more in some places then others - the way you set out feels vaguely glowier then the rest of the directions, but there's layers to it that feel too muffled and distant to make out too clearly.
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