NOVEL WEB 1: CHOOSE
“C’mon dude,” I pleaded, staring up at the ceiling of the room I grew up in. “I’m real stuck with this college cover letter. It’s so… boring to write. Can you at least send me yours from when you applied to Castleton? I need help.”
My older brother, Marc, just sighed, “It’s easy, Kai. You just talk shit about how cool you are.”
“But I’m not that cool,” I replied, my face heating slightly. I trusted my brother. He wouldn’t tell anyone I was being a sook and he certainly wouldn’t judge me for it.
My brother sighed loudly into the phone. “You are though, Kai. You could probably build a rocket if you had a junkyard to work with. You’re like… a young MacGyver. Plus, you’re really nice. Everyone loves you. Maybe you could even get some testimonials from important people around town who know you.”
“I… okay,” I said, sitting up to look around my room. My thoughts were blurring with possible ideas and people I could contact, so much so that I wasn’t going to be able to say anything resembling a coherent sentence until I followed all the little thought threads to their conclusions. My dirty clothes caught my eye where they lay behind the door, having been thrown in the general direction of the hamper only to miss. I should probably pick them up or mum would be upset when she got home from work.
“I take it by the sudden silence that I’ve finally jogged your brain into working?” Marc laughed, snapping me out of my high-speed chase with the train of thought in my head.
Grinning, I stood and walked over to pluck a tee off the ground. “Yeah, man. Thanks fam.”
“No problem Kai. I know how you work, after all.” My brother was the best, and that wasn’t just because he was a cool dude. He also just… understood me and didn’t try to change me or mould me into anything other than who I was.
“Are mum and dad home?” he asked, but by the tone of his voice he knew the answer already.
I picked up another item of clothing and dropped it into the hamper. “Nah. I think they’re lowkey in love with their jobs and they only have a house and family ‘cos it looks good.”
“Highkey more like,” he laughed, but it was a sombre sound. We’d grown up comfortable money-wise and we both knew it, but parental love was something we were drip-fed at best. My brother was only a year and a half older than me and we had a lot in common, including the camaraderie of two boys who really should have had more supervision growing up. If I was the one who made the crazy contraptions, then he was the one who used them to create untold levels of chaos.
I was just thinking of the time that I put together a crossbow that fired dildos when the ground began to shudder violently. “Fuck! Earthquake again?!”
“Same here!” My brother yelled over the phone as my science fair trophy attempted to brain me by falling off its dusty top shelf on my bookcase.
Wait, what… if it was bad over in Norfolk as well, then this was huge. “But…” I gasped, rushing to take cover in the doorway. “But you’re over the appalachians!”
There was no response, and the ground heaved like it was going to tear open and throw a mountain up to replace my whole city of Theprin. Terrified, I checked my phone and saw the call was dropped. Oh god, that wasn’t good. That was really really not good.
As quickly as the earthquake began, it ended. All over the nice little suburban house I called home, things were still rattling, but the vibrations were gone. A crash from downstairs told me that the kitchen was going to be a nightmare of broken whiteware and food. The smell of alcohol told me that mum’s precious wine display was now all over the floor. God, it was strong.
To escape the smell of fifteen different types of liquor mixing in the dining room carpet, I rushed out of my room and down the stairs, taking them two at a time. Where should I go? Front or back yard? Back, I think. Maybe?
Indecision crippled me for just long enough that I was at least standing stable when the cold spike of iron was driven into my brain seemingly from below. I collapsed to one knee, crying out with pain and trying to comprehend what was happening to me. The pain spread to my body, where billions of fishing hooks sank themselves into my body and pulled outwards.
I screamed, falling back until I was prone and staring up at the ceiling… and then the pain stopped.
Floating above me, three… impressions hung in the air. I could tell that they didn’t actually exist right away, but for some reason my mind was conjuring them. The hallucination was so real I had to reach out and pass a hand through one, just to be sure it was a figment of my imagination.
Choose.
The foreign thought imposed meaning to the three floating, swirling masses of… colour? It was hard to tell. Each was made of all sensations. One felt like crushed, wet plant matter held between forefinger and thumb, with the smell of acrid chemicals boiling in the background. Another was beautiful, fingers dancing over strings, or tapping hide drums… along with the sound of cheering, laughter, and victory. The third contained the scent of linseed oil, cast iron, and the tension of a weapon built to kill at the pull of a trigger.
Choose.
Choose what?! Choose, fucking, what? Tell me what was going on, damn it! Tell me what this meant!
Choose.
The taste of vile liquid trailed down my throat, although I was drinking nothing. The haunting, urgent melody of a piper preparing warriors for war resonated in the hallway, despite a lack of musician anywhere at hand. And finally, the anxiety inducing last cut of a whittling knife as it carved wood to shape, without tools or timber to work.
Choose.
I had to… I had to choose between… what? Making medicine, being some sort of fantasy bard, or my usual tinkering ways? Wait. H-hold on. Alchemist, Bard, and Tinker.
The spark of understanding lit behind my eyes with enough strength to sear holes in the eggshell-white ceiling of the entry hallway to my home. Alchemist, Bard, and Tinker. There was only one option. I was and will always be a Tinker at heart.
Raising a hand, I pushed it and my thoughts through the impression of the Tinker, and a wave of calm certainty washed over me. This time, I was surprised by three very real dark metal orbs that fell onto my chest. Sitting up, I caught them before they fell to the ground and inspected the matte surfaces of the strange objects. Wh-what the… these weren’t some crazy hallucination, these were real, these were…
Was I getting superpowers?
Except, when I picked up one of the orbs to get a closer look, eight new impressions imposed themselves on my thoughts like a rioting rainbow full of confusing imagery and colour. Thankfully, I didn’t have to tease out the meaning of each one like last time. It felt like I was already beginning to automatically translate whatever this system was telling me, if only vaguely.
The first was strength and force and everything like that, all rolled into one. The second was speed, but only of the physical kind. The third was… a pinpoint— precision! It was how well one could move themselves according to their will. The fourth was iron, meat, and mass… toughness for sure. The fifth was the spark of mental connections, or intelligence. The sixth was… speed again, but of thought. Wit, might be the best term for it? The seventh was easy, because it was perception, or maybe senses? Whatever it was, it honed everything from a person’s sense of touch to their eyesight down to a fine point.
When I came to place my mind’s eye on the last impression, I grew confused. It was… power? It was something to do with the energy of the mind and… ah, hell, it may as well be called mana. That was honestly what it felt like.
Warm to the touch, the metal ball in my hand yearned to be given to one of the eight attributes, but how could I tell what was a good choice to make? I was a Tinker, according to my weird psychotic break anyway, which meant, uh… okay, intelligence for sure.
Hefting the weight in my hand, I reached out and presented it to the mental projection I’d designated as intelligence and waited for something to happen. I waited for perhaps half a second before a stomach-turning bout of dizzy euphoria sizzled over the surface of my brain like a thousand dancing ants soaked in LSD.
The clarity of my thoughts was… sharper, once the sensation faded. It was enough to give me some insight into where the other two metallic attribute points should go. One more into intelligence—the fuzzy brain euphoria was more muted this time—and one into precision, so I could better do the small, fiddly work of a Tinker.
Perfect. That made— oh, goodness. My fingers felt so… sharp and tingly! It was like— and the strange sensations in my hands fizzled. Ah, it was the ants again, only for my hand-eye coordination this time.
Now I just had to figure out if this was all real, or if I was killed by the earthquake and this was all my brain’s confused dying spasms. Honestly, it was probably that. I mean, really, some sort of scuffed system was suddenly injected into my brain and body? Yeah, only in anime.
Thoughts of my own death were washed away when the whole back of the house detonated. I was thrown towards the front door, flipping backwards feet over ass until I came to rest with the top of my head gently brushing the bottom of the door. Prone, staring at the ceiling, again.
It was just like me to get myself thrown on my ass. Thank fuck high school wasn’t like the movies from back in the nineties where all the jocks were bullies who threw the wimpy kids around. In fact, if you made one or two of them laugh back in middle school, they’d basically adopt you and punch the lights out of anyone who tried to bully you.
That was what happened to me. I was waiting outside the classroom for the teacher to let me and the rest of my classmates into the homeroom and the guy next to me heard me mutter something about the goth girl who was actually hissing at anyone who tried to stand next to her. I called her a hag, which unfortunately for the girl, stuck as a nickname. I only told everyone a few weeks later that it meant Hot Angry Goth. Which, I mean, it was entirely true. She was hot, she was angry, and she dressed in all black, with eyeliner that was extra as fuck. Of course, her attractiveness had waned slightly in my eyes when she turned that mean streak of hers on me.
Plus, like, who unironically hisses at people? That’s just cringe.
Anyway, the guy beside me decided I was funny and dragged me into a friendship that had lasted the rest of my life up until now. Alec was basically the golden retriever of my friend group. He just kept bringing random introverts in from the cold like they were lost kittens.
A scream of rage and pain rent the air in two like a cleaver going through flesh and bone. Wincing, I scrambled to my feet and rushed almost automatically towards the sound. Wait… towards the massive explosion that happened in my backyard. Because, you know, backyards did that sometimes.
Actually they legit did sometimes, thanks to gender reveal parties. Hopefully the back of my house was ruined because my parents were getting a surprise baby girl?