[Be Gone] Ch 1 – Game this Bloody Curse!
Added 2025-03-29 01:25:52 +0000 UTCThis bloody demilich’s Curse was trying to eat my brain.
Be Gone. Wasn’t that just a weird and powerful Curse. It was trying to work on so many levels, and even with the fact I had killed the bastard and Burned Away its soul, AND after it rammed into a Moment of Perfect Clarity Concentration Save against Will of 60ish AFTER the -20 modifier of Technically No Save Is Allowed Wut? You Gotsa Scarab of Protection?, the remainder was still this damn strong.
Eternal-class Necromancer Death Titan Demilich Death Curses were definitely not something to look down on.
The primary effect was that the Curse had hurled me out somewhere very, very far away. The planar stuff around me was tearing and ripping, and the tenor of the laws of magic was changing and shifting as I was moving sideways across Creation. I could feel the pantheonic influence of the Aruan Pantheon ebbing, meaning I was moving into some other Divine area of influence.
Getting hurled right out of the domain of the Powers I venerated and served. Be Gone...
The secondary thing was that it was trying to wipe me away.
It had glommed onto the fact that Aelryinth was a Template overlay created by magic on top of the person I used to be. That Template was retaining all my Karma, knowledge, skills, and what forth, and if that Template was wiped, even if the person I used to be stayed alive, then Aelryinth would be gone.
Nasty and insidious, and because it was a Curse, very powerful.
Naturally, I wasn’t going to let it get its way, and did what anyone in the techno-age would do. I started copying away ahead of it and repasting myself into the areas it was clearing.
All of my thoughtstreams were focused on this job. I was using my Concentration to continually grind away at the power of the Curse, and to at once recall all my memories and then replicate them into the empty areas of my once-normal person past, which in effect transplanted my Aelryinth memories from the game directly into my gamer memories and supplanted the play time, since I had literally years of game time there to make use of.
That being done, I simply guided the non-sentient Curse along the path of least resistance, and the memories I had already backed up were wiped away, leaving me room to come in right behind them and fill in the empty space with more memories from just ahead of it.
However, being the hyperintelligent and opportunistic sot that I was, I wasn’t going to not take advantage of this.
When I had gained my Levels in the game, they had been haphazard, and most of them had taken place after I reached Nine. Because I had only reached Ten in game at the very end, that still saved me a lot of Karma... but I had literally hundreds of combined Levels, Feats learned, and Masteries taken at Nine, with the requisite costs in Karma.
This Curse had a LOT of juice behind it. I didn’t know how long it was going to take to run its course, and I was going to be in extreme danger while it happened. I couldn’t Cast while this was going on at all, which meant I was in extreme danger.
But there was another way to weaken it substantially.
Everything it was eating had been established and made real and a part of me with Karma, even after I’d satisfied the great big heaping Karmic costs of Rank M. So, in essence, the Curse was attacking my Karma, trying to de-Level and wipe me.
So, if I started severing my Karma, whole chunks of the Curse would be expended chasing after it.
All I had to do was apply my Karma more efficiently, instead of organically.
I had Karma invested in more than five dozen different Classes, both mainline and Advanced, with literally hundreds of Class Levels. Most of those Levels were gained at Nine. If instead I recopied them on a foundation of getting all those Skills, Feats, Masteries, Levels, and whatnot at the earliest possible Levels... I could easily throw away two-thirds of my Karma and gut the Hell out of this Curse in so doing.
Nobody could possibly endure taking all those Classes at low Levels and not getting the juicy fruit hanging just ahead... but this Curse was basically enabling me to do just that, in reverse fashion.
Because of this Curse, I could currently see the entire Template of Aelryinth installed into and over top of my old life. Once I could see that, I could make adjustments that I simply wouldn’t be able to do on my own. So, this was basically a once in a lifetime opportunity to rewrite myself, and save my ass in so doing.
So, that’s what I did. Catastrophe, opportunity...
Like putting down lines of type, I grabbed my lowest Levels, and laid them down one after another. I even traded my Div Spec for Universal Wizard, removing my specialization... and thus opening me up for Star Magery. My expertise in Divinations wouldn’t go away, and I’d already removed my reliance on the 1/day all-day Divination effect using Heavenbound. I’d still be using a lot of Divinations, as I had all the relevant Masteries, but I was no longer going to be a Div Spec.
I was going to be the Starmaster Archtheurge of the Seven Traditions! Mwahahaha! From really sucky lemons, damn lethal lemonade!
I chortled to myself as I grabbed every Feat I had purchased by Time and Karma instead of Levels that I could take as a One or lower Levels, and artificially laid them down for almost no Karma, relatively speaking, operating off the new Foundation I was assembling. It did not match my memories of how I had gained them, but it was no different than optimizing a character from scratch after laboriously going through and finding out how the system actually worked, and not being beholden to the needs of immediate demands on competency that actually living through something demanded.
I was going to be exiting this place soon enough, and I had no time to interact with the real world. I was buzzing along at 90+ Concentration, enough to literally blow out the brains of a normal man, and I was consuming a terrifying amount of mental energy.
Yeah, Aelryinth-me had absolutely no amount of time to waste on real life right now, trying to save myself like I was. Taking a mass Assay, dividing everything up, cherry-picking what to copy, pasting it into open space, letting the Curse expand into those areas and expend itself wiping redundant information, then cutting the pure Karma free as the Curse tried to wipe it, and as it separated from me, the Curse withered, its purpose fulfilled.
AHG!
But man, did that HURT. A soul expanded and filled with Karma as it Leveled... slicing off Karma was slicing off a section of my soul!
That was NOT painless. Oh, no, not at all. The two thoughtstreams in charge of doing the cutting were fricking screaming at the agony as I Efficiently reallocated great big heaping wads of Karma for the Curse to converge on and try to cancel out... and then I sliced them free.
AHG!!
But, I had a thoughtstream that could mostly certainly hopefully handle physical activity, one that wasn’t being affected by the Curse at all.
The only problem is that he wouldn’t be able to Cast. But that was cool, as he’d never been able to Cast, so he’d have to come up with some other way of doing things.
That guy I’d used to be could handle it, because I was him, and I had handled it.
AHG!!!
The end of my journey was coming up soon enough, the force of the Curse’s shove to Be Gone beyond the reach of my gods was almost there. I withdrew some edges to the Template that was made of me, and Aelryinth-me focused myself completely upon beating this damn Curse, and taking full advantage of the opportunity it was giving me.
ARGH!!!
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Even now, my Heavenbound Pact was reassuring me and leaving me immune to fear, currently the terror of having Aelryinth being wiped away and the horror of having a soul-eating Death Curse rampaging around inside my head.
That was good, because I was maybe a Three on my own. Well, I was probably higher. If I could Nog my Core Stats, then I could add Karma to my original Levels... but I’d only been an Expert/3, if those Stats from long ago were correct.
I was James Earl Cuprin, Jr.; I could remember the name I was given at birth now, and I would never forget it again.
Ten years to do that. I doubted any of my fellow Power of Ten gamers could claim the same yet.
I could see the black nihility of the Curse rampaging around the back of my head and soul, the oblivion it represented trying to devour the living Template add-on that was Aelryinth, the one that had allowed me to become Powered and help save the world.
The game character I’d become was now totally and utterly engaged in saving himself by copy/pasting to evade this Curse, watching my Pact grind it down with endless Wrath as the Curse tried to resist, and cutting loose huge chunks of it as streamlined my build and excess Karma was cut away with horrendous pain.
The jolts as chunks were cut free were terrible, but they didn’t affect me. I wasn’t Aelryinth, and that was who the Curse was aimed at. I was perfectly safe, and the Karma being shaved off Ael wasn’t hurting me in the slightest.
I couldn’t even Assay myself, however. I had no Matrix, I didn’t even have a basic Core for spells.
I had no Matrix...
Wait, I have no Matrix?!
“Purity Mastery/1!” I blurted out despite myself. In disaster, there is indeed opportunity...
Karma never Applied from a very big, very recent kill and act of self-sacrifice rolled over, and something gelled. My eyes bulged as my own soul felt a huge rush of incoming... stuff. For some reason, the sensation was different from Ael.
It actually worked? The minimum damage of my Wrath, the Saves against it, and Spell Penetration of my Wrath are all +1?!
YAY! I better not get that Matrix back up until I hit Purity/5!!! I’m talking to you, Aelryinth...
Wait, that meant I could take Class Levels, just like anyone else! That meant all the non-magic Aelryinth had wrapped up in his Template was actually being drilled right into me, right? That would also utterly remove all that stuff from the Curse’s bounds, allowing Ael to focus his efforts...
Something jerked sideways in my gaming memories as Aelryinth caught the thought, and his copy/repasting took on a different tenor as he began to move everything he could OUTSIDE his Template entirely.
Way back when, when I’d been gaming so damn much, I had gained these Levels, or most of them, online, with a Visor and Gloves on, muttering commands and making hand-signs and motions to do stuff. Those memories formed the starting points of the basic Primos Class Levels that now began to expand, virtual motions once interpreted by the Template and made real were now moved out of the Template and to me forcibly, working backwards from the two additional Levels in each of my Secondary Classes I’d gained after the game had become reality.
It was a damn weird feeling, as knowledge that fit together perfectly as Aelryinth was applied basically in reverse to me; advanced knowledge and all those fights and conflicts and practice-practice-practice applying backwards, muscle memory resynching into place from complex back to simple. I grit my teeth as my head ached and my mind expanded to keep up painfully with what had been elementary for my Template to do, what with his Intellect post-40 and already extending off into the akasha.
Mine should be... 18 for the Nogging, which had applied to my base Stats; the Aelryinth Template on top of it; +2 for starting choice, +2 for age, +5 for Inherents traded off Windgraf Koshtal with one Elemental Command Ring per set of five Wishes. 27? Just shy of another thoughtstream, but still superhuman.
Huh, even the Mark couldn’t be reassigned at this point? Something to fix in the future, but all the extra thoughtstreams and Level-based mental gains were part of the Aelryinth Template at this point, and this would be a VERY bad time to reassign them. He needed all the modifiers he could get.
Tumbling through the astral void at breakneck speed, I could only wait as the copy/pasting continued, my base soul grew as Karma poured in, and knowledge shifted from the Template side of my soul to the Original side, removing it from the purview of the Death Curse entirely...
