Last Command of the Witheld Arc 1: Rebirth

Sarah Avery Vasilias, Great House Scion, Reborn Lvl 1

Tutorial Realm

The man standing in front of Sarah looked utterly strange to her. He was short: four feet tall at the tallest, but he had a wiry, athletic build. His walnut-brown skin was leathery and stretched taught over his muscles. He was covered in bizarre tattoos of strange creatures and chains of symbols or pictographic writing. The short man’s chest was entirely bare, he wore a long, purple, armored kilt with dark armored boots, and his wild black hair was gathered in a spiky tail. He had a beaklike nose and sharp eyes. Those eyes flicked to her, and his hard line of a mouth quirked in a slight smile.

Sarah suddenly felt self-conscious of her nakedness. She felt herself blushing and almost felt shame rise in her and cause her to cover up. Then she felt that same heat burning through her veins and the fight rise up in her that always did when she felt the bite of shame. Instead of covering herself, she stood taller balling her hands into fists. She stared down at the short little man, her eyes hardening. The short man’s eyes widened slightly, then he nodded, and he kept his eyes looking at her face.

“You are not what I expected,” he said. His voice was gravelly and strangely accented. “But the Witheld have offered the Gift to all people, and you are not the strangest I have taught.”

“You’re… a teacher?” Sarah asked, curiosity breaking through her instinctive hostility. He didn’t seem to be ogling her and that helped.

“I am. My name is Gammon. And you have been uniquely gifted with a racial ability that is rarely ever found in humans: your Never Unarmed ability. You are only the third human I have ever taught, and I have been teaching for three thousand years.” He started to pace around Sarah, considering her. “You are newly Reborn, yes?”

Sarah hesitated before she nodded. “Uh sure, yeah. My name’s Sarah. Sarah Avery. I’m from Earth.”

He continued his slow circuit and inspection of her. “I’ve never heard of…what did you call it? Earth? Is that where you’re from? Why is it named ‘dirt’? Perhaps this is a limitation of the translation routine… Forgive me, but you do not seem like a warrior. You have the musculature and the look of a dancer or a gymnast. Not a fighter.”

Sarah quirked an eyebrow. She couldn’t help a self-conscious glance at her body before she looked back up, angry all over again, but she wasn’t sure if she was angry at Gammon or herself.

“I am a gymnast,” she said acidly. “Two-time NCAA champion at UNH. I had to stop when I injured my left knee. But I keep up with my strength exercises. Why? Do you have to be some kind of warrior to learn whatever it is you teach?” She tilted her chin at him pugnaciously, “You think I can’t learn it?”

He chuckled. “You may not have fighting experience, but you certainly have the attitude of a warrior.” He finished his final circle of her and came back in front of her to face her. “I think you can learn what I have to teach. You are, after all, Reborn.”

“Okay great, so you’re a teacher in a tutorial,” Sarah looked at the vast blank emptiness around them. “Can we get out of here?”

Gammon nodded meditatively, still looking her over. He said, “Now…You obviously have fine anima control if you have the Ten-Star Vortex pathways. That is a rare and intensely difficult set of tensa pathways to burn and notorious for maiming those who fail to achieve the proper control. Hmm… Impressive! You have no deviations at all. Excellent. That will make this next part easier. Center yourself and configure your anima in the Second Form.”

“What—” but before Sarah could form the question, she knew. She had never heard the word anima before but now she knew it as it moved within her. Her anima was a metaphysical extension of her will and yet it was also somehow something more, an actual organ that was granted by the strange process of Rebirth. She closed her eyes, not needing Gammon’s instruction.

Center yourself, he had said. The Synthskill’s knowledge told her that the act of Centering was a years-long endeavor. It was a preparation of the mind and her inner self to accept and grow. She’d thought she was open-minded before, but a properly Centered inner self was open to all in a way that was frankly a little frightening. She directed her tensa flow within her to her head, feeling the energy within gather in her head. She let it gather and then pushed it out, letting it slip out of her mental grasp as gently as she could. She did not fumble or hesitate. The knowledge flowed through her like she’d practiced it a thousand times.

“What you’re feeling right now is a combination of a SynthSkill settling and the Tutorial environment,” Gammon said, his voice patient. “You, as a new Reborn of a Great House—don’t think I could not recognize the tensa path of a Scion of a Great House! —you will have a great deal of privileges. Only those sealed to a Great House are offered Enhanced System interfaces. Great Houses always provide the very best SynthSkills and System access possible, but even the highest quality SynthSkills will have some degree of cognitive drift outside of the Tutorial Realm.”

Sarah considered what Gammon told her. If she were with Griffin, she knew he’d be peppering Gammon with questions, constantly trying to dig and analyze. Griffin always loved to pick problems apart and divide them into smaller problems. Sarah just thought about what Gammon said, her Centered mind turning it over and over. Great Houses… that means politics. Privilege and power—and apparently, I have it. That’s why I was given a literal time-out to learn the ropes: I’m getting the silver spoon treatment. SynthSkills must be that cloud download the text boxes were talking about. She didn’t voice any of her thoughts. Griffin always thought she wasn’t listening, but she was. She liked to think before she opened her mouth though, even if it looked like she wasn’t paying attention.

Her anima was currently in a passive, First Form Gathering Array, feeding her ambient tensa. It wasn’t the Ten Star Vortex gathering technique she’d learned after burning her tensa pathways but a much gentler, much more sedate gathering technique, made to drip-feed tensa in non-combat situations.

She felt the arcane energy pulsing along her pathways, coiled and contained within her. The Second Form was the first anima projection Form. She instinctively knew how to arrange her anima in the Second Form, and she began to do it. But despite her knowledge, her anima refused to obey her. No matter what she did, she could not command her anima to do anything more than move her tensa around her body.

“Gammon,” she said, “I… I can’t do the Second Form.” She gritted her teeth, her eyes still closed. “I can feel it… but every time I try to push my anima out beyond my body, it just breaks apart.”

Gammon nodded his head. “I saw that. Your SynthSkill is not enough on its own to shape your anima.” He tapped his chin thoughtfully, “I’ve never seen anyone have so much trouble manipulating their anima outside of their body and yet have such relatively precise control of it within your body. Have you ever manipulated your anima before?”

“No, I’ve never even heard of an anima before today. I—” she swallowed. “August said my world was going to be destroyed.” With the tensa flowing through her, she could say it and accept it. The feeling was still so new and incredible that her mind was somehow able to wrap around the fact. “I’ve never heard of any of this.”

Gammon’s eyebrows raised in surprise. “It has been a long time since someone from another world has arrived at Nolm. Not so long that you are the first Far Neighbor I have taught. Now, please relax. I am causing the Tutorial Realm to build itself to accommodate your specific training requirements.”

The blackness around Sarah faded away, replaced like fog with yet another landscape. How many worlds are there? Sarah thought with a feeling of vertigo. She was standing in a vast plain, but the grass wasn’t green. It was long pale reddish pink, dotted with occasional burnt umber and cerulean blue flowers. The plain was not completely flat but rolled in gentle hills and folds in all directions.

Sarah stared all around her in wonder, and behind her, she saw what looked like a strip mall. She blinked in surprise. There were five storefronts in the mall and a small parking lot with no cars parked in it. Behind the strip mall, growing straight up into the air was an enormous and twisting vine. She followed the huge vine’s progress directly up and felt her mouth fall open at the sight of the island that the vine grew up to. It was an enormous rocky island floating a kilometer up, with dense greenery growing all over it. She couldn’t see much detail because it was also mostly obscured in heavy clouds.

Gammon was next to her suddenly. He nudged her arm and pointed over to a small house by the strip mall that she hadn’t noticed before. It was a ramshackle structure that was two stories tall and painted a forest green. There was a small balcony on the second story and a little front porch where there were a couple of chairs and a little table. “That’s my home. Come. I’ll take you to your room.”

“My…room?” Sarah looked over at him, then looked down at herself. She was still naked and covered in dirt and blood. “I thought this was a tutorial. I thought I was going to take five minutes and learn my power and then—well I don’t know what then.”

Gammon shrugged and started walking down to the house, moving quickly despite his short stride. “You can take a shower and get into some clothes down there. When I became a Teacher, I sacrificed… well, quite a lot.” He paused, looking over his shoulder, “Come on. We’re going to be here a while. One of the things my sacrifice gained me was the ability to control the Tutorial Realm.”

Sarah followed Gammon through the long red grass toward his small home. She kept on feeling like this was all a dream, and then she’d step on a sharp rock or nearly twist her ankle in a hidden hole in the surprisingly uneven ground and be reminded that nothing so mundane happened in her dreams. Somehow, she’d been teleported from Earth, presumably before it was destroyed, and she’d ended up on that forsaken ledge where the bird had attacked her. Now she was… here. The Tutorial Realm. At least it was warm here and there was a gentle breeze blowing through the weird pink grass.

It was a quick walk down to the little house and Gammon walked up the front porch and opened the reddish door with a little key fob. Sarah followed Gammon into the house a little nervously. She felt more than a little vulnerable, but she didn’t hesitate as she crossed the threshold into the house.

It smelled odd here. Like strange grain or oil or something. It was slightly fruity. There was a crowded living area with a huge brown leather couch in the middle of the place. It was facing a big, zoo-sized aquarium with strange shrimp and fish swimming around in it. There were shelves on the walls with all kinds of peculiar knickknacks on them from odd statues to knives and weird bits of circuitry.

Gammon pointed toward a little doorway that led out of the living room. “If you go through there, you’ll find a spare bedroom at the end of the hall with a shower and whatever kind of facilities you require—the Tutorial Realm is fairly adaptable that way.” He walked through the living area and into another room, opposite the doorway he’d pointed at. Sarah heard him rummaging around in there and he called over his shoulder, “I’m going to grab a cold one while you wash up and find something to wear. Once you’re ready, come on down here and we’ll get started.”