Luca DR

28 – Past Strikes (2/2)

The forest! One of the gems Eurus had given him as a gift when Albert was summoned here was a healing incantation called Prayer of the Forest. It was there, in his pocket! He just needed to reach it.

The forest lurched. The pain followed. Albert was suddenly clutching his chest in pain and at the apex of a parabola that brought him above the tree line. Then the pain spread. At least two broken ribs, and it was hard to breathe properly. He felt light in his head, but had the presence of ...

28 – Past Strikes (1/2)

There was a thin veil of energy protecting the thick spear of stone, as well as the other impaling implements, from the effect of the Hazegem’s anti-entropic field. This was a tried-and-true method for transporting inanimate items backwards through time without seeing them disappear in the flurry of reversed activity that followed the activation of the gem, when used to perform a long jump. Indeed, without fail, the method worked. What went wrong was not this part of the process.

Albe...

27 – Time-reversed preparations (2/2)

He had all but given up on his hopes to make it work. But there he sat, visualizing the elven village with its large square, the fountain and the jovial atmosphere of the night before when the world around him lurched. It’s quite difficult to describe what Albert saw when the teleportation happened, but he felt the world lurch and shift while he remained still, and then all of a sudden he found himself in the very same square that he was picturing in his mind. There was no sense of having t...

27 – Time-reversed preparations (1/2)

Albert walked under the shade of the tall fir trees with the utmost care not to make the slightest of sounds. In the distance, thanks to his enhanced senses, he could first sense and then see the golem standing perfectly still near a large rock outcropping. It was drooping slightly, with its head tilted down and its arms to the side, as if powered down. Yet, even with its curved stance, it was taller than the moss-covered great stone near it, tall enough to perhaps even be able to see above t...

26 – Death Valley

By the time morning came, Albert was tired but still functioning. Meditating was not like sleeping but it wasn’t very tiring either, but it wasn’t like he could ever hope to sleep after having been transported to an elven village in a fantasy world.

The day was off to a great start though: what greeted him when he opened the door literally made his heart melt. A little hair of golden locks, crowning a small round face with a big smile and two huge blue eyes. The little kid waved hel...

25 – High Fantasy (2/2)

There was a small pouch in the man’s other hand. Correction: in the elf’s other hand. And inside the pouch were small stones, shiny and luminous, red, green and blue. Albert did not know what they were, but he pocketed them to later Appraise them. For now he simply let the elf, who introduced himself as Eurus, lead him to the town square, where a long table had been set up near the fountain, full to the brim with all sorts of delicacies and foods of nature. Fruit, vegetables, and rare mea...

25 – High Fantasy (1/2)

The night was very productive. Working on spells with someone else meant having a second set of eyes on the task, and another creative mind at Albert’s disposal that could come up with all sorts of ideas and improvements that he did not think about. As such, among a couple garbage bins set on fire and then rewound back in time, the fireball spell grew by leaps and bounds. Another cool thing that they discovered, and it was the reason why Marc not only agreed to set things on fire but also d...

24 – The curse of knowing (2/2)

What followed was a thorough grilling about what happened, with Marc prying every little secret from Albert’s reluctant lips. The plan had always been to rewind this particular part of the conversation, as it was leading into not very nice topics, but he found that talking about it with someone beside his grandpa was finally allowing him to let out all his feelings and emotions he was keeping bottled up inside him. And, the more he talked, the less envious Marc became of his abilities. The ...

24 – The curse of knowing (1/2)

Albert thought about how to approach the subject of magic. In the end, he decided, why not have some fun with it?

“Hey,” He said, right when Marc was about to hit play and start the third movie. “Wanna see a magic trick?”

Marc frowned. “Magic trick? What do you mea— shit.”

The fireball appeared in the air above Albert’s hand at the snap of his fingers, lighting the dark room orange. It slowly rotated on its axis like a miniature planet, hovering in the air wi...

23 – The Punishment of Tantalus (2/2)

“What the fuck is this?” Samantha exclaimed, losing her cool for just a fraction of a second. “Is this PsyOps?”

“Affirmative ma’am.”

They were in the middle of one of the many nameless fields surrounding the Tryte exclusion zone. They had all been abandoned by the farmers who worked there, some of them went away when the weather got too bad, while others had to be convinced to leave with more persuasive means. PsyOps still laid sprawled on the ground, in the middle o...

23 – The Punishment of Tantalus (1/2)

Albert was pondering about the secrets of space and time when the doorbell rang. His mother was out, he was home alone.

Marc’s face greeted him when he opened the door.

“Yo, what are you doing here?” Albert asked.

Marc was not pleased. “What, forgot about today’s session? I didn’t see you at campus, figured I might come here personally.”

He produced something from a pocket. An USB stick. Right, now Albert remembered what kind of session Marc was going on ...

22 – The Torment of Tantalus (2/2)

The video window appeared in the space between Albert and the wall, hovering in the air like usual. There were, like there always were, tiny differences with how it looked compared to last time. He wondered—

“Finally, another skill video. Welcome back, Albert.” The alter-ego said in the video, cutting his thoughts short. “By now you must have noticed that the system is not a forever-stable construct. It changes and reacts to your environment and your actions. And, most important...

22 – The Torment of Tantalus (1/2)

When Albert finally opened his eyes, an unknown amount of time had passed, and he was suddenly thrust in the familiarity of own room. In his own house. He knew he was there before the image of the familiar walls and posters even reached his brain, the abilities gained with [Perception] beginning to spill over to his everyday life even when he did not use the skill. His mother was sitting at the foot of his bed, and his grandpa was talking to her animatedly. Something about cold and fainting a...

21 – I missed the fireworks

[Orson ‘PsyOps’ Smiths. Dangerous individual with Psionic powers, capable of manipulating mind and matter from a distance. Avoid at all costs.]

Albert’s eyes struggled to focus on the understatement of the century, the letters appearing in the right orientation even though he was still lying with his face against the frozen dirt. There was a shadow moving towards him, the shadow of a person as it was barely visible through the curtain of hail of the blizzard. Whoe...

20 – A Tryte problem (2/2)

He was back in the car again, time passing almost unnoticed, completely drenched in icy water. The heat of the car had barely been enough to dry him a little bit, moving him past the discomfort of having wet clothes into the not-noticing they were wet because they were warm enough to just stick and not be also cold, when he had to go check the third pylon. He hopped off and was back on the car in a matter of minutes, this time foregoing any caution and awareness of his environment. It didn’...

20 – A Tryte problem (1/2)

Albert - Tryte Outskirts

The clouds loomed. As he got closer and closer to the village, Albert could see the full extent of the weather anomaly with his own eyes. It unlike anything he had ever seen before, going even beyond the superstorms he saw in some odd documentary late at night. And this, he thought, was only the tip of the iceberg. The beginning of the apocalypse, of the event the coming of the system was asking him (indirectly for now) to fix.

It was not a comforting thou...

19 – The calm before the storm (2/2)

Albert Grassman. Before the blast.

Have you ever watched the world go by in bullet time? Albert did, in the car, knowing that by the time he got to Tryte he would be stock-full of mana again. The fact was, he thought, that he could spend 21 minutes every hour in Bullet Time, meaning that – factoring the 5-times dilation – he could have something like a little less than 21 extra minutes to live every hour. There were roughly five hours separating him from a nuclear explosion, and the...

19 – The calm before the storm (1/2)

Samantha Cromwell. Before the blast.

The plan was foolproof. Use the containment field, retrofitted with the contents of the Cache buried under the Quadrangle, to contain the nuclear blast inside the Exclusion Zone. A nuclear blast that, while already on its own strong enough to wipe the whole state off the map bit, with the containment field would guarantee that whatever was coming from the portal would stay on the other end of it forever. Enclosed within the radioactive perimeter, all...

18 – Nuclear option (2/2)

Tuesday morning came and went. It was not the notable part of the day for sure. What was, instead, was the inexplicable flash of light that immediately followed the spotting of a streak in the sky. It was so bizarre in fact, seeing a second dawn in the middle of the day, that it warranted a rewind of time just for the occasion. Albert immediately grasped the Hazegem that rested, as it always did, secure in his pocket to be carried anywhere he went and channeled mana into it.

Rewind ...