The Universe is full of surprises. You may think you know what's in the bag, but you don't. You never do. When you think you have everything figured out, that's when you look out for the curve ball, the unexpected.
The shoe that's been hanging above you for years, waiting to drop. And then everything you thought you knew is turned upsy daisy, the cardboard box you called your life rattled around and now all the pieces are in different places.
Now there are new pieces you didn't have before, now the picture is bigger than you realised. Reality has changed the rules on you in the middle of the game, and you never had a rule book to begin with.
Welcome to the Game of Life, where there is no winning and only losing less.
First it had been Triggering. I'd known it would happen or at least, I'd very much expected it. I was from an 'illustrious' family of parahumans; it was basically a given that I'd gain powers. It didn't stop it from shaking up my life, from seeing things in entirely different ways.
I almost wished I could go back to wearing my spectacles, but that was the way things were.
People are usually happier when they're children anyway the difference is just that much starker. I'd lived with it, learned to grapple with it. I thought I had it figured out, the ins, the outs, the odds and ends.
And then I woke up one day, and went to go check myself in the mirror, much like I'm doing now.
What greets is me is a pale face framed with locks of dyed green hair, somewhere between 'pretty' and 'handsome', lips quirked into something that might've been the beginnings of a smile. Almost-sort-of smiling was my default expression, unfortunately. A quirk of my face or just how I was raised? Who knows.
But unlike the first time I saw it, the floating box above my head is no surprise at all now.
The Gamer
LV 18 Sebastien Vasil (Siren/Lullaby/Leon Villeneuve)
HP: 254/254
MP: 209/209
Rather strange for a power, wasn't it? Well, as a 'secondary' power. I had, originally, believed that I had second triggered - but then, I had simply woken up with this strange new power. At first, I wondered if that perhaps meant I had triggered in my sleep. But that seemed so… pitiful. Powers were like a participation trophy for being there in the worst day of your life. A consolation prize for going through it and emerging out the other end… if you were lucky. Getting powers in my sleep was so… boring? It felt like cheating.
Ironic, given how my powers seemed to work. I let my gaze linger on the 'The Gamer' tagline I'd been saddled with, letting out a small chuff of annoyance.
Well, either way it didn't quite matter. I was stuck with it, and all its ups and downs. Well, ups. If I was perfectly honest with myself (and I rarely was), it didn't really have much of a downside, apart from its tendency to be a little too on the nose with its descriptions, and even then I didn't really care. It was useful, in a lot of ways.
A few mental flicks and presto, the 'Status' menu. perhaps one of the best uses I could find for the power currently - who didn't love to measure themselves using concrete defined numbers?
Job: The Gamer
Name: Sebastien Vasil
Level: 18
XP: 15420/30000
Age: 17
HP: 254/254
MP: 209/209
STRENGTH: 8
AGILITY: 12
VITALITY: 7
INTELLIGENCE: 12
WISDOM: 13
CHARISMA: 18
LUCK: 3
Cash: $953.50
Ah, Luck. Always my weakest since… well, forever probably. You probably had to be pretty unlucky getting powers to begin with. Or perhaps you had to be some degree of lucky. Hm. Maybe you had to be luckier than the average person, but also not lucky enough to actually be lucky? Or the other way around. I'd never given it much thought. As far as I could tell, Luck was… predefined. I could raise the other stats through various activities, but I had yet to find anything that raised Luck. Perhaps I had to gamble with actual risks, instead of just playing at it with dice and cards or coin flips. Thoughts for later.
I flipped through the menus, settling into the 'Abilities'.
Siren Song Lv. MAX - Manipulate the emotions of those who hear your song. Effectiveness increased by Charisma.
Siren Heart Lv. MAX - Hear the inner song of people's hearts. Effectiveness increased by Wisdom.
Ah, my wonderful power… my original one. Put like this, it sounded so much more impressive than it was. It wasn't to say it wasn't dangerous per se - I could, like my power's apparent (and my own, really) namesake, draw people into their deaths, whether it was by luring them into danger or just pushing them to suicide. It's just they had to be within earshot. If they couldn't hear my 'Siren Song', they were unaffected.
Which meant I was defeated by earplugs for crying out loud. (Heh. Crying out loud.)
A nice, good pair of earplugs and I was rendered about as useful as a relatively fit young man. Being a relatively fit young man was not an advantage when your opponents were much more athletic and actually-trained-in-combat officers. Or superpowered.
I wasn't jealous of my siblings, and I certainly wasn't in envy of anything my Father had, but at least most of them could still defend themselves against a man who just plugged his ears and started shouting 'Lala lala lala lala' at the top of his lungs. Well. Admittedly, if someone did that, they'd have to resort to kicking me or something and I could probably handle that.
Not that my new powers were of much help so far. Just look at what wonderful abilities it had granted me!
Gamers Body (Passive) Lv. MAX - Allows the user to live as though they were in a video game. Recover all HP and MP by sleeping in your bed.
Gamer's Mind (Passive) Lv. MAX - Grants immunity to mental status effects, emotional and mental trauma, and severely dangerous emotional states.
See, what did 'live as though they were in a video game' mean? Sure, this was an RPG but what kind? Would time freeze if I got into a fight and let me take it in turns? Would I get a grid view? If 'Gamer's Mind' grants 'immunity to emotional trauma', if someone were to, I dunno, destroy something I loved, would I just shrug my shoulders and get over it? What was a 'severely dangerous emotional state'? If I was suicidally depressed would it just make me… not? What if I was really super happy? Angry? I didn't like the idea of it playing with my emotions even if it was meant to protect me. Dad had played with my emotions and… broke them. Maybe I wasn't broken anymore. Maybe I still was. Maybe this power broke me in a different way. Or maybe I was overthinking it all, I didn't have a fucking clue.
The problem, really, was that there wasn't a 'Help' menu. Or a user manual. I knew how to use Siren Song the moment I got it - I justunderstood. The only thing I really knew how to do was create new 'Abilities' and 'Skills'. Well. It's not like I actually created them, it was more like I… registered them into the system.
I spent five minutes wondering if a guy was checking me out and poof, I had 'Observe' which was… so far still not very useful. Washing the dishes had unlocked the marginally more useful Dishwashing which a year of ordinary chores had raised to level twenty three, alongside such wondrous talents as Cooking and Cleaning. Regular househusband material here. The most useful of my many skills was 'Gunplay (Pistols)' at a respective level fourteen. I got that by going to a firing range every weekend practicing, just in case… just in case.
Really spoke to the kind of life I led that the closest thing I had to a hobby was preparing myself for a potential life or death situation.
I got Quest pop ups all the time though, and that sounds like it should be a great way to get XP except for the fun fact that pretty much all of my Quests were for really mundane bullshit like 'You're out of milk, go buy some more: 100XP reward'. At that rate, it was going to take me another whole year to level up and levelling up was pretty much the only way I was ever going to figure out how this power actually worked.
Of course, if this was truly video game logic, than that meant the greater the difficulty or risk of a task, the more experience I'd get right? So I just needed to get off my ass and do something wild and wacky to level up and see what potential my power had.
Except whilst all that potential sure sounded super awesome and great, you know what else is super awesome and great? Not being dead, which is what I currently aim to remain as, and a key part of this 'Not Dying' strategy was not going out and doing wild and wacky things.
If I had to choose between not risking my life on the regular and being able to arm wrestle Alexandria… I was going to choose the former. I liked normal. It was good.
Although… I tugged a sweatshirt on, and stepped out of the apartment, descending via elevator to the ground. Five steps out of the block and I was on the street, watching people mill about. Normal people. I checked with Observe just to be sure. Johnathan there was only level six despite being forty years old and running his own business. Edna was a retired teacher at an impressive level fifteen, age seventy six… with an inoperable brain tumour, thanks for that Observe.
They were all sonormal. Normal people leading normal lives. Like me. I was a normal person now, wasn't I? I had a factory job, rented an apartment. I hadn't so much as jaywalked since… since I got this power. The new one, not the old one. I'd done a lot of criminal activity using Siren Song before all this. This is what I wanted, wasn't it? To be normal.
I ran a hand through my hair and tangled my fingers in the dark green locks.
This is what I had always wanted… so why was I so… bored?
New Quest!
Boredom Breaker
'Is it too early for a midlife crisis?'
Details: You're bored with the life you thought you always wanted. So make a new one.
Success: 5000XP
Failure: None
Click to shrink...
… okay, that was kind of on the nose. Although 5000XP… that was pretty good. A sizeable chunk compared to… to the stuff I'd been doing earlier. There wasn't even a time limit or a failure condition. I guess if I failed I'd just… die, like this. Which would be a failure in itself. Dying, that is.
Alright so… new life. What were my options? I could become a proper Villain again… but what would I even go for? Money? I didn't want money. Not really. Power? Well, getting more experience and levelling up was a route to power so becoming a Villain just to do Quests related to Villainy was kind of… what was the word? Like making the journey the reward. Not necessarily bad but y'know.
I could be a Hero but then I'd have to fight Villains. I mean, as a Villain you were allowed to just run away, but as a Hero? Pretty frowned upon. And okay, I could maybe handle a few Villains but I was pretty sure Heroes were supposed to do more than that. Like… rescue people. Or fight Endbringers. I couldn't do either of those things. Not that there was a lot of the latter going around.
Hero, Villain… Rogue? What was I going to be, a pop star? I was enough of a pretty boy I guess but I'm pretty sure there were laws against Mastering people through records (even if the Mastering amounted to just 'Have fun!'). Also, that was just kind of my normal life with more power usage, wasn't it? And fame, but eh.
What did I want out of life… what goals did I have to aspire to? Ugh. I took a cigarette from my pack and lit it up. I didn't smoke as much once I got the new powers, but apparently I could just sleep off the negative effects? So. Why not I guess.
-1HP!
All I'd ever wanted to do when I was younger was run away from Daddy Dearest and his manipulative bullshit. I thought being away from that would make me happy. And it kind of did, but I was… lonely. I didn't have friends or real connections to people. I slept with strangers but that was more of a distraction and fun thing then a meaningful thing. I mean, I didn't… like most of my family, but there was a bond there kind of.
Was that what I was missing? Bonds? People I could talk with and relate to? Well I could hardly relate to all these normal people around me. The only people I could relate with… were...
New Quest!
Keeping up the Vasils
'They never call, they never write, they don't even add you on Facebook.'
Details: Reunite with one of the Heartbroken
Time limit: 4 Weeks
Success: 5000XP, Increased Reputation with Heartbroken, Decreased Reputation with Heartbreaker, ???
Failure: Decreased Reputation with Heartbroken, Increased Reputation with Heartbreaker
Click to shrink...
Fuck me sideways with a goose.