[Be Gone] Ch 7 – The Message Continues

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The Human Racial Class!

The fourth point was going to revolutionize Leveling among non-combatants! No required NPC Classes, Human Class, or Stat requirements to gain Levels!

Wow. Just, wow. Broad, low power of the best sort. And gained from gods-damned CULTIVATORS, of all things!

I hissed at the memories of the Daoists back on Terra-Luna. The sheer feeling of betrayal and horror at that rot growing within our numbers, and the millions of people who had died when those Cultivators realized that not only weren’t we going to roll over and let them eat us, we were going to Kill Them All.

Daoists! And the Buddhists were every bit as bad!

I had no eyes to close, but I had to look away from the Visual File and breathe to clear my anger. Everything about those days was a mask of outrage at the treachery that had sprung from within our people.

Cultivators. And she’d had slaughtered millions of them already!

GOOD, in all the Damn Ways!

Five, the djinn Kochtal, our primary Windlock Patron, had an elder brother who was likely totally forgotten by his kin, trapped under the Shroud, lost for possibly decades, who knew how the timelines matched up now...

Sure, I could inform his family. Odds were even that he’d get out from the Shroud before I could do so, but the implications that even a Wish-granting extraplanar couldn’t leave the Shroud matched all our experiences...

Point Six... Her Dimensional Coordinates. A target for a planar jump, when I was able to do so. Potentially a place usable as a focus for a more permanent connection. Both a way back home, and setting up for the future. Long-term expansion.

Thinking ahead. The curse of too many brains, always plotting and planning and playing things out, scenario after scenario...

Point Seven: Traits? Traits! Well, well, something to spend Feat Slots on. I could do that Right Now, if I was of a mind to. I wasn’t sure of all my options, but the ones Traveler had sure looked appropriate to me, albeit I wasn’t going to get anything requiring elvish blood...

Archmage was a Class? Not just a Ranking Title? Well, well, what the Merry Silver Dancing Queen... and it has a Divine counterpart in Hierophant?

There was no mention of something similar for Soul, Pact, Craft, Druidic, or Heartsong Magic, but if there was, well, this was a very nice set of Advanced Classes and some optional stuff to go along with it. If there was more, she’d let us know...

More Spell Powah. Yez. This was good. This was Important. Aelryinth would be paying attention to this.

Point Eight: Oh, what da Hell. Men could take Amazon Pacts? I mean, sure, there was nothing stopping it but the goddess Patrons, but... there was definitely a segment of men who wouldn’t mind becoming beautiful warrior women. Hell, they might even have the right mindset already...

Point Nine: They had a Sama Rantha and a Briggs there. They had the Template memories of our Sama and Briggs, plus a strange and very powerful Rantha Hag Racial Class tied to the Hag Curse.

I could only stare at that and wonder what all that was about. I mean, sure, both were Forsaken; the most powerful Forsaken from the game, to be honest. If you were going to replicate two Templates from the game, it would probably have to be a Null or a Source, and they were the two most powerful...

Oh. Oh...

Mr. Archmage, sir, you are such a bloody fucking genius...

That had been the entire point of the Game from his standpoint. Making some virtuous, hideously focused, overpowered, max-skilled, gamer-driven Good people whose Templates could be dropped here, there, and everywhere across Creation.

And somehow, for some reason, it ended up tied to the Hag Curse. I didn’t know how the fuck that had happened, but having someone like Sama popping up anywhere there were Hags was going to be VERY bad news for all the Hags involved...

That Racial Class they had received was totally fricking broken, however. Gawdamn...

Point Ten: Duskstopped and Dawnstopped Spells at the same time were possible via Versatile Channeling on one person...

I slapped my forehead. So fucking obvious-! Nobody used Duskstopped because it required negative energy usage, and using negative energy was literally a Bad Thing to Do. Introducing more death energy to the world was bad however you looked at it.

And everyone knew you only got one Dawnstopped Spell a day, and just presumed Duskstopped was under the same limitation. Dammit...!

Dur, us clever Caster-types, us is. Not miss obvious power grab in front of face, us never do.

Set the negative energy on vivus and use it to power the effect. So obvious, no downsides, two all-day spells to encourage broken power...

Point Eleven: A new full Class. Sword Mage of some kind, basically a Bard variant with a different list and an Arcane Pool, which conflated with ki and...

An Infinite Casting Loop.

Infinite Casting Loop!

I stared at it in disbelief. A way to get Casting power back during the day, potentially an unlimited number of times. You simply had to... kill things. Under the Shroud, she could do it with a spell, but I might have to actually use a Weapon.

Was there ever a better reason to learn how to use a Weapon than this? I couldn’t think of one. I knew that Mortus Dius was going to be cracking a lot more heads than it used to, even with me able to use Perpetual Spell. Unlimited use of all the OTHER spells was certainly something not to miss. Endless uses of Arcane Fusion to really Bring the Thunder...

Point Twelve: Craft Theurgy, using... Alchemical Bombs as a Spell Component for extra damage.

My cheek twitched. A +8d6 Kicker to a spell, for one of my many daily Bomb uses. If only it dovetailed with ki...

Mulcaster was going to go freaking apeshit, as was the whole Crafting Community. They did love their Bombs, after all...

Point Thirteen... Witchcraft? Witchbonded Rings at level One constituted a spellbook, AND gave you a Domain?

And it only cost one Feat?!?!

My skimming of the other Magic Item Domains from Witchcraft was idle, as I could only take one, and it would definitely be Ring.

Feat Efficiency was priceless! And at ONE! It was a Nine Feat to get Eidetic Memory and be able to leave your Spellbooks behind. Level ONE, no spellbook! And a whole set of Domain Spells bonus on top!

Ahg!

Well, I knew a Feat Aelryinth would be taking when he refounded our Matrix...

Mithar, this going to other worlds stuff really did uncover some gems. Just went to show you what a hellacious base of knowledge could do for you. If you don’t even know it’s possible, you don’t even try to do it... or maybe you can’t, because it’s too late, and so you never find out...

Point Fourteen made my face goggle again. Hats of Difference? Seriously? Dredging all that up? But it was seriously a good thing for extraplanars trapped under the Shroud and unable to Level under its suppression...

The addendum that she had been tied to the Shroud and was probably going to be brought away with it when it collapsed on that world was a gut-puncher. On the one hand, there was no doubt she was on the Road to the Eternal with a Karmic Buffet of that size, given how large we expected the Shroud to be at this point.

But bound to it until every world was freed, or maybe if she became Eternal... maybe. That would suck.

Bringing down the Shroud had to be done by mortals. Doing it fast enough to keep up with its growth was a completely separate problem.

We were going to have to muster armies of undead-killers from at least dozens, possibly hundreds or thousands of worlds, to do that correctly, and we wouldn’t have any Divine support in doing so.

No gods helping her out. Only us.

I grit my teeth. We’d definitely be helping her out. I’d glue Tiberius to her side if I had to. He thought he was doomed, trying to start up a grand Crusade against the Shroud? He could stop whenever he stopped thinking about damned worlds and wanted to retire. Traveler wouldn’t have the luxury...

            She made mention of how the Shrouded souls were making her take Ur-Priest and Blighter Levels, and how she was doing so without being corrupted, and that was how it ended.

            I considered my reply to her. I could have Magnus fetch a Sending off the Eidetic Wall and send it out, so that was not an issue. At the same time, I had to Send the same Message to the other six of them, and hope it made it to them in time.

            Such an idiot I was. I thought they were just raw Karma going to dissipate in astral space and take the Curse with them. Nope, they were so much Karma they’d jumped right into being independent souls of their own.

            So dumb I r.

            Having little else to do, I started composing my reply. I naturally had jack-all to tell her of anything, and there was no need to tell her my eyes had tried to eat my brain. She had enough problems on her own side to worry about.

            When I was done, I Sent it off, aware that the vortex that had brought me in would also serve handily to Send the magic back out.

            The Sending went out and off, Raised to VII, heading for all seven of the soul shards. At least they’d know I knew about them now, and I wasn’t a complete idiot. If I could, I’d try to backtrack along my path and hook up with them however things turned out.

            If that wasn’t possible, they knew who I was and how to get ahold of me and where Terra-Luna was dimensionally.

            Then I took a page from Aelryinth and went back to organizing my own memories, not that they were completely freed up from the suppression of his Template. Aelryinth had been born whole hog with a 30+ Intellect and post-20 in his other Stats. I, on the other hand, came up from being a baby.

            It was with some trepidation and interest that I went back to the earliest moments I could recall, deep in Meditation, and began to relieve them all with the clarity and viewpoint of an adult.

            If nothing else, the wonder of hearing so many old songs for the first time again was going to be a treat. I would see my father, my mother, my family...

            “How is my little boy today?” came out of the depths of my mind, and I shuddered as a voice that had died in passing, just one more casualty of the Fall, echoed in my ears once again.

            Mom!...

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