I awoke to the feeling that I was floating, that I was gently bobbing along on the surface of a pool. It reminded me of the old waterbed I used to have back in the day, before I discovered how prone the damn thing had been to leaking, and what a pain it had been to clean up.
When I opened my eyes, I found that I was floating in a pool, which was about fifteen feet across and two feet deep. Instead of water, the pool seemed to be filled with liquid mercury, a thick silvery liquid which ran off me in rivulets as I stood up, leaving nothing behind. I stepped out of the pool, already completely dry.
The pool was in the middle of a room that was only three times wider than the pool itself. The walls are rough stone with crystal veins running all through it. The crystal veins glow with a soft light, enough to illuminate the entire room
I took my time examining my surroundings, though I was careful to avoid looking too closely at my own body. At the moment, this room was what I was interested in. I had never seen anything like this place before. And even though I had absolutely no idea of where I was at, I still knew about this place, or at least, about places like this.
“A respawn pool,” I said in a whisper.
I took a moment to close my eyes and collect my thoughts. I remembered the players. I remembered Margaret’s death and then my own. Then, I remembered the message that followed, the words that had appeared directly into my consciousness. ‘WOULD YOU LIKE TO RESPAWN?’. Of course, I had answered yes, even if only in my mind. That seemed to have been enough.
This was not the first time that I’d heard of someone dying and then coming back. Of being respawned and given another chance at life. In fact, this was how players came to be. Well, not all players, I mentally corrected myself. All respawned were players, but not all players were respawned.
“And I am definitely respawned,” I thought aloud. “I died and everything.”
I paused at that, suddenly remembering Margaret and her final moments. I felt a surge of mixed rage and grief, both struggling to dominate my shaken emotional state. Margaret been a great woman and hadn’t deserved to end like that. She should have gone out in bed, surrounded by her kids, her grandkids, and even her great grandkids. She should have gone out with a cat curled up beside her, purring loudly into her ear, just like how she’d once told me she wanted to go.
“But that isn’t going to happen now,” I whispered. Not unless Margaret had respawned the way I had, and had also been given another chance at life. However, respawning was rare, so I knew that the odds were extremely unlikely. “All because those assholes wanted her necklace.”
Margaret’s necklace had been an artifact, a magical item that had been created by the Labyrinth, just like that scepter had been. I’d recognized her jewelry for what it was the moment I’d seen it, though I still had no idea of what kind of magic it might have contained nor of where her husband could have possibly found it. In the end, I suppose it didn’t really matter anymore. Margaret was gone and so was the necklace.
I spent another minute thinking about Margaret and grieving her loss. We hadn’t been anything more than friends, just two lonely people trying to keep each other company, but I was still going to miss her. But for now, I knew that I couldn’t afford to dwell on the past. Instead, I had to focus on my current situation.
With that, I finally looked down at my body. It was not my body, or at least, not my old body. For one thing, it was far too young, and for another, it was female. I’d been reborn as chick.
Then I noticed the pool that I’d come out of, the respawn pool. The silvery liquid had settled down and stabilized, without having so much as a single ripple. The entire surface now resembled a giant mirror, one that I could see my own reflection in. I moved closer to the pool for a better look.
I stood there for several minutes, silently staring down at my reflection and taking it all in. I was not only younger, I was a LOT younger. It looked like I’d lost over fifty years since the girl in the mirror appeared to be in her early twenties. I shouldn’t have been surprised by that, but I was.
People who were respawned almost always came back looking like they were in their late teens or early twenties. There were exceptions, of course, but I didn’t seem to be one of them. I appeared to be about the expected age.
The rest of my appearance was also quite different from before, in nearly every way possible. I should have expected that too. It was well known that people who were respawned always came back looking like different people entirely. Being respawned was less like coming back from the dead and more like being instantly reincarnated. Or as we used to say back in the Wardens, it was like rolling a new character at random in some game. You never quite knew what you were going to get or who you were going to become.
In my case, I was now a woman of around twenty or so, with long legs and the lithe and athletic build of a dancer. My new breasts were probably around C cups, large enough to be noticeable but not enough to immediately draw attention, for which I was thankful. I couldn’t imagine how annoying it would be to have everyone constantly staring at my boobs.
While I looked myself over in the mirror pool, I slowly ran my hands over my body, feeling my soft and smooth skin, which was quite different from what I was used to. Feeling myself like this made it feel more real and less like some kind of fever dream. And as I did this, I couldn’t help but notice that I had a deep natural tan over my entire body.
My hair was dark, nearly black though not quite, with little hints of auburn running through it. This hair, which went down just a little past my shoulders, framed a face which was pretty, possibly even beautiful in a girl-next-door type of way, but which would never be considered model material. The nose was just a little too large for that.
And then, there were my eyes. I had to crouch down to get a better look at them in the mirror pool. My eyes were a brilliant green with specks of gold that were just a bit too bright to be natural. These eyes were definitely my most notable and standout feature.
All in all, I thought that I was on the pretty side of plain, with a few exotic features to make me look more interesting. I couldn’t quite determine which nationality or ethnicity would best describe my new appearance, but that was common among the respawned.
“I am one of the respawned now,” I said with the reality of that was still sinking in. “I am a player.”
I’d spent a large part of my life studying players. Researching them. Fighting them and coming up with contingency plans for how to deal with them when they went rogue. And, I had worked with players on many occasions. However, I had never seriously thought that I might actually become one of them myself.
If I really was a player now, then there was something else I had to examine, something even more important than my new body. With that, I took a deep breath and said, “Status,” while trying to flip a mental switch that I’d heard about numerous times but had never experienced myself. At least, not until that moment.
Suddenly, words and numbers appeared in the air in front of me, as though I was looking directly at a computer monitor. However, I could somehow feel that this information was being projected directly into my mind, bypassing my eyes entirely…just like with the message I’d seen after my death.
CLASS: INVOKER
LEVEL: 1
FREE STAT POINTS: 3
FOCUS: 8
PERCEPTION: 7
PRESENCE: 5
STRENGTH: 6
VITALITY: 7
DEXTERITY: 6
AGILITY: 7
TALENTS AND AFFINITIES:
-PRIMAL MAGIC
ABILITIES:
I carefully looked over my status screen, taking in every detail. I’d heard about status screens before, on countless occasions, but I’d never actually seen one, nor had I ever expected to. Only players had access to these status screens, which showed their statistics and abilities as though they were characters in some game. In fact, that was where the term ‘player’ had initially come from.
My starting stats all looked decent, with nothing below a five. On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the absolute peak of human ability, that meant everything I had was average or above.
However, there was one detail that immediately caught my eye. The class I’d been given was Invoker. I was an invoker.
“Well, crap.”
If I’d been allowed to choose my own class, then out of all the classes I knew about, invoker probably would have been at the bottom of the list. Most players considered it to be a broken class, and not in a good way.
I reached out to touch my status screen, but my hand went right through the letters. This was a reminder that I was really only seeing this in my mind. So, I tried again, this time without moving. Instead, I focused on my status screen and mentally touched my class name of ‘INVOKER’. Suddenly, a smaller window popped up in front of me.
INVOKER – A CLASS WITH THE INNANTE ABILITY TO SENSE AND CHANNEL THE POWER OF THE PRIMALS
That was it. No more information. No details. I mentally closed out the popup.
I’d talked to an invoker once, a drunk man who’d spent the entire time complaining about his class and how useless it was compared to every other class. That conversation was where I’d gained most of my knowledge about invokers, along with my low opinion of the class.
Players could grow stronger and more powerful over time, gaining new magics and abilities. However, invokers were a little different. They didn’t gain new powers of their own. Instead, they channeled…or invoked…the magic of more powerful beings, beings called primals. While other classes grew more powerful on their own, invokers had to beg, borrow, or steal their power.
Back when I’d been with the Wardens, we hadn’t known much about the primals, other than that they existed inside the Labyrinth…and wherever it had come from. Primals were beings of pure magic, more spirit than physical. Being an invoker meant that I would have to find some of these beings and then make deals with them. That wouldn’t be easy because negotiation had never been my strong suit.
“I should have been a stalker,” I grumbled bitterly. Sneaking around, stealing things, and attacking from the shadows. That kind of thing had always been more my style. “Well, as Mom used to say, there’s no point crying over spilled milk.”
With that, I turned my attention back to my status screen and the statistics that were displayed there. Most importantly, I was focused on the three free stat points that I had. I could add those to any of my existing stats to become stronger, faster, or more resilient. The question then, was where should I put them? What would work best for an invoker, and what would work best for me if I couldn’t actually rely on invoker magic?
Most players didn’t like to talk about their stats and abilities, but they tended to be a bit more open about how things worked in general. Because of that, I had a pretty good idea of how each of the stats actually worked.
From what we could tell, the numbers shown on the status screen were just a general overview, a simplified display that was easy for players to understand. But behind that, I’d always suspected there were hidden statistics, sub-stats that made up the ones we did see, and a bunch of background calculations that most players didn’t really need to know.
What I could see were various statistics and the number of points that were currently assigned to them. A score between four and six was considered average, while seven through nine were the ratings between fit and professional athletes. Once you reached a score of ten, you were in the area of absolute peak ability, the Olympic gold medalist level.
What I didn’t know was if these ratings were objective, or if they were based off the individual. Did a ten represent the absolute peak of human ability, or just the absolute peak of that specific individual’s potential? Was a petite woman with a score of nine in strength really as strong as a large man with the same number of stat points? There had been a lot of debate on that and I didn’t know if anyone had ever gotten a definitive answer.
I currently had three points available to assign, each one representing somewhere around a ten percent increase in ability. That meant, I had a couple stats I could currently push into Olympic gold medalist range, and one that I could move beyond that and into the superhuman levels that players were known for.
Focus seemed to be a combined rating for intelligence, willpower, and other mental attributes, such as the ability to concentrate or multitask. This was the stat that influenced how well a player could actually control their magic, which made it one of the most valuable stats for spellcaster types.
Perception covered senses and awareness of the environment. Presence was for how well you could project your will, which seemed the least useful to me until I remembered that this one might actually be valuable for someone who needed to negotiate with primals
“I’ll mark presence as a maybe,” I muttered reluctantly, noting that it was currently my lowest stat.
The rest of my stats were mostly physical in nature and were self-explanatory. All of those would be useful, though I suspected that vitality would be the most important for an invoker. Channeling magic put stress on the body, so the more vitality I had, the more energy I’d be able to use at once.
I considered my options for a few minutes before deciding to hold off for now. I wanted a little more information on my class and how it worked before I invested my limited points.
Then, just as I was about to close out of my status screen, I noticed a faint blinking in the top corner, almost as if there was an alarm indicator going off. I cautiously clicked on it, not sure what was going to happen. A new message popped up in front of me.
YOU HAVE BEEN WITNESSED BY AVEXIS, GODDESS OF SPITE AND PETTY REVENGE. AVEXIS APPROVES OF YOUR ACTIONS AND GRANTS YOU A BOON OF HER POWER.
NEW ABILITY ACQUIRED: INVOCATION OF SPITE
I stared at the message in surprise and confusion, reading it again several times to make sure that I wasn’t missing something. I was still a bit confused.
I’d been under the impression that most invokers had a hard time finding patrons, and that they usually had to invest a bit of time and effort before they gained their first ability. I didn’t think that I’d ever heard of an invoker getting an ability right off the bat.
“And what actions?” I asked aloud. I’d only just respawned and hadn’t had time to do anything. “What could earn the approval of a goddess of spite and petty revenge?”
About the only things I could think of, at least, from recently, was that I’d killed the man who murdered Margaret, and then I’d stabbed that other player in the eye just as he was about to kill me. Those actions had been spiteful, but they’d happened before my death…and before I’d been respawned as an invoker. And as far as I knew, there were no primals on Earth, and no way one of them could have been watching.
“Maybe it was for petty revenge,” I mused with a shake of my head. “For messing with Jacob.”
I closed the message popup and immediately noticed that my status page had changed. It looked like it had updated with my new ability.
CLASS: INVOKER
LEVEL: 1
FREE STAT POINTS: 3
FOCUS: 8
PERCEPTION: 7
PRESENCE: 5
STRENGTH: 6
VITALITY: 7
DEXTERITY: 6
AGILITY: 7
TALENTS AND AFFINITIES:
-PRIMAL MAGIC
--DIVINE TYPE
ABILITIES:
- INVOCATION OF SPITE
I tried clicking on my new ability ‘Invocation of Spite’, but unlike with my class, there was no popup with additional information. I tried checking the talents and affinities but got the same lack of results.
“So, I have an ability but no idea of what it is or how to use it,” I mused aloud while closing out my status page.
Well, that wasn’t quite true. I realized that I did know what it did and how to use it, though I couldn’t quite say exactly how I knew that. It was as though the information and been plugged directly into my mind, the same way that the status page and messages were.
Now that I’d checked out my new body, at least enough to know what I now looked like, and I had looked over my stats and abilities, it was time to get out of this place. Of course, that would be easier said than done.