(2.1) Unintended Consequences

Steam clouds from the heat of a shower obscure the bathroom. The thick layer of condensation covering a wide dirty mirror gets wiped away by a moist, fluffy towel. A tired-looking young woman with dark hair, covered by a pretty pale blue towel and holding the moisture-cleaning culprit, stands there.

She leans against the sink, staring at her reflection. She frowns, dissatisfied with her looks. Though she knows her friends would readily scold her for letting those negative opinions of herself affect her so much.

"What a weird nightmare. Magic, monsters, and a weird world with RPG-like rules? No thanks." She undoes her towel and grabs her belly while checking herself out from several angles. "My body was exactly what I'm trying to get to, though. Would've been nice to have that be real. Minus the young part."

Her head rings, probably from the water, but it feels as though it'll turn into a headache soon. Although, the noise it brings isn't too troublesome. Just annoying. It won't go away even after she tries repeatedly cleaning out her ears or using a dryer. Troublesome as it is, she still has other things to worry about.

Shaking her head, she exits the bathroom to get dressed. Her room is dark and messy, with clothes scattered across the floor and various rocks lining the tops of her furniture. The bedding is askew, the comforter bundled together on one side of her bed while the rest is cleared away for a messily stacked deck of cards. A single card faces up and towards her from the pile, lit by the little sunlight streaming in from the drawn curtains.

She eyes it curiously as she puts on a light, colourful outfit. It was a bit of a change from the norm, but it was hot and humid, so her usual dark layers did not look as appealing as usual. She takes a closer look at the sunlit card, trying to ignore the increasingly louder buzz of noise as she leans in.

'Judgement' reads the card.

Sizzling from the kitchen catches her attention before she can contemplate the placement.

"I forgot I left the stove on!" She rushes out of her room, stopping only to give the altar of a moon goddess a quick bow of respect, and hurriedly turns off the fire.

The food is a mess, bubbling out, spilling onto the stove's surface, and dribbling down the front. The lid is hot to the touch, but she's fast enough to pull it off and to the side before it burns her too much.

"Guess I'm eating cereal again…" she says, wiping away the mess as much as possible. However, her plans are foiled when she opens the fridge to find she's out of milk. "Wow, today's my lucky day, huh? I should have gone to get milk earlier!"

She smacks her forehead and groans. Completely frustrated with how quickly her day turned around. "Good thing there's a gas station down the street. It's on the way to my place anyway."

She's suddenly on the city street, dressed in her work uniform and carrying a backpack in one hand. "I should have enough money on my card for groceries… maybe."

The hustle and bustle of the evening fills her ears. People just getting off work, tourists, and panhandlers dart around, but she's more than used to this. She makes a game of it as she easily navigates the crowd of people.

"Aki."

A familiar name echoed as if a gentle summer night's breeze rang together several wind chimes. Quiet and almost imperceptible. Perhaps she'd imagined it from how faint it was. However, it was a long enough distraction for someone on the street, a man dressed in office attire, to bump into her. At least, he should have bumped into her if not knocked her over entirely. Instead, he passed straight through her.

Panic and surprise fill her. She turns to look for him, wondering if she just saw things wrong. Instead, she finds the streets empty.

No one was behind her. The storefronts are lit. So are the street lamps, the ad boards, the gazebo lights across the street in the shopping area's mini-park, and even the headlights of a display car that can barely be seen through the windows of the shopping centre. However, there are no people, no cars, and no buses.

Nothing to show that there is any life nearby.

Only she and her short, blonde-haired reflection remain the only semblance of life in a massive city. "Blonde?"

She goes to face herself in the window of a dimly lit store and feels her breath catch. Blonde-haired, black-eyed, and dressed in a thick green cloak stands her dream self. Aki.

"We're really messed up, huh? If only we could be in this dream forever, but…" her reflection waves longingly at the city streets. "Even my memory of this world is fuzzy. The faces of people, the names of things, and even where I live are probably wrong. Just my imagination."

"Wait a minute. You're- I mean. A dream?" Aki asks the reflection. "Your memories? You're my dream version, not the other way around, right? What the - skies?"

That didn't feel right. Why did she say skies instead of something else? She pinches her nose, trying to get a grasp on the situation. Her hair and eyes now matched what she'd become so familiar with in the past two years. She's shorter, and her muscles are once more defined, just like she'd come to know.

Back to normal.

The city, meanwhile, starts to blur. Buildings shift in appearance as if they don't know what they're supposed to look like. The black roads shift into interlaced stones, and the sidewalk fades away. The metal, horseless carriage in the distance vanishes. The flat boards displaying self-lit moving images also blur into nothingness.

"Wait, what were they called?"

The lights in the area glow brighter. Moving as though they're alive, they fly closer to Aki. Vibrating with excitement, the lights merge together into what looks like a giant maw and engulf her.

She shuts her eyes, but the light shines just as brightly through her closed eyelids. So bright it's almost as if she's in damp darkness.

"Are you okay, Aki?"

"You'd think one would have trouble sleeping in these conditions but look at them! Sleeping like a babe."

Two feminine voices argue quietly around Aki. Exhaustion clings to their tones so she doesn't need to see them for her to know how terrible they're doing.

Aki opens her eyes and sits up on the cold stone floor. The manacles on her wrists are heavy and the leather collar is tight, but by this point, she'd grown so used to them that they were only a small bother atop everything else. She massages her temple, trying to make the thrum of white noise disappear to little avail. "How are the plans? Did we get anything new?"

She looks up at the shadowed figures of her two allies. One with green-hued brown skin and wilted, dead leaves struggling to grow from her body, while the other has cracked clumps of dark feathers contrasting the sun-tanned flesh beneath. Both wear dirty sackcloths and have manacles around their limbs. An enchanted leather collar hugs their necks, an ugly accessory to match their binds.

Loud knocking fills the air as if only a few metres away. Aki frowns at the sound. The cells are made of metal and sit within a stone cavern. Aside from the wood handles on tools, there's nothing solid enough for that kind of sound nearby.

"The only plan, dear Aki," says a third voice. From the shadows steps a tall woman with pointed ears draped by a thick green cloak. She also wears the same bonds as the rest though she feels far more drained than expected. A weight of calm sadness fills Aki. "You have little choice but to live. So wake up, please. Survive."

Darkness engulfs Aki's vision with the end of the third woman's final words. Her senses fade in and out until she feels the weight of something warm covering her. The sound of the wind and the coarseness of a sack beneath her head. Louder still, the knocking comes, making Aki sit up. A cold sweat clings to her, making her arms feel sticky as she wipes the sleep from her eyes.

[Gift Activated: Precognition]

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Aki  Title: Witch

LE: 55  HP: 200

MP: 250

SP: 50

[Adjusted to Darkness: 10% increase in vision when in dim light or pure dark]

More: ⟲

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"A dream… right. This is my world, my reality now." Her lip quivers, and her eyes burn, but she restrains herself. One year. One year of fighting monsters, surviving, fighting. Wandering from place to place. "There's no going back, is there?"

She distracts her mind by turning to her gift's activation. In all the time she's been on Tsarjar, precognition has been the most unreliable and scattered use of her three gifts.

In this world, everyone is born with one to three gifts and otherworlders like herself are no exception to this rule, even though otherworlders aren't always born.

In those odd moments of peace in her cell, she would open Soul Sight and read her quantified existence for hours on end with an occasional lecture from her cellmates.

Her gifts varied in rarity according to her allies but precognition in particular was both rare and somehow vaguely useless as much as it is vaguely useful. So, what was it that set off the gift?

The room she's in is large and spacious. A series of empty bunk beds line either side of the space. Small dressers sit next to each of them, and a larger dresser sits beneath the only window. She recalls finishing the fight and returning to the inn to this room.

A sleeping space she was meant to be sharing with many of the villagers. However, after the chief's angry protests for one reason and another towards her, they all decided to go somewhere else. Likely to avoid appearing as though they support her.

Dim light streams in from the foggy glass and shines at her feet. From her corner bed, Aki has a direct sightline outside.

Snow blankets the bottom half of her view while grey clouds cover the top half. It's oddly bright for its low visibility, but otherwise, dawn has yet to break over the village.

Her bed creaks from the shifting weight as she stands. At the same time, a shushing sound outside the room was followed by the noticeable halt of creaking wood.

Aki pauses, straining her ears as she listens. Wood squeaks, and another quiet hush comes from beyond the door. Are people trying to be considerate? A thought she held until she heard the sound of sharp metal being dragged slowly against leather. She crouches down, using her bed as cover; she quickly and quietly throws on her cloak and shoes and grabs her bags. A simple haversack with an extra pouch attached by a sturdy rope to the strap and a hip pouch that doubles as a belt.

"Something tells me they aren't going to give me breakfast in bed."

Aki slowly crawls towards the window. Every step she takes is punctuated by creaking wood, regardless of how quiet she is. The wood feels oddly dry and brittle underfoot, making her stealth near impossible. At least, it would have been until she realised the ones outside were getting louder as they approached the door.

"If I can't be quiet, I can at least match you." Timing her movements with the creaks from outside, Aki crosses the remaining distance to the window. She stands then, creating a much louder squeak than anticipated upon standing. "Did they hear?"

There is no sound outside the room so Aki assumes they haven't realised she'd awoken yet. She breathes a quiet sigh of relief and turns to the wooden window blinds. She pauses, noticing how off they look.

Aki had only been in the room briefly the night before, but she was sure the wood hadn't looked nearly as dried out as they do now. In fact, she was sure the wood had been neatly polished and rather nice for such an out-of-the-way town. The walls and dressers nearest the window were just as dried out.

Now that she was paying attention, most of the wooden furniture she could see all looked like they'd been left to bake under the desert sun. Even the blankets she had slept in looked dry and scratchy, which explains why she felt so uncomfortable trying to sleep.

"Ow." Aki groans quietly. Her hand had been impaled by a big splinter from one of the blinds and left a sizable hole after she removed it.

Meanwhile, the poor stealthiness of the people behind the closed door had stopped and were now trying to turn the door handle quietly.

As soon as she hears the first squeak of wood, Aki abandons the need for quiet and throws open the window. Freezing wind and snow stings her face as the cold shocks her to complete wakefulness. Behind her, the door bursts open and several village men holding improvised weapons come filing in.

"Skies, I was right?" Aki exclaims. A small projectile flies past her head at high speed. Not wanting to linger in the same place as people that definitely mean her harm, Aki jumps onto the roof and sinks into the snow. It reaches past her knees, the cold temporarily stunning her.

"On the roof! Don't let the con artist escape!"

"Not today, Water Manipulation!" The snow shifts slightly around her legs, granting her less resistance as she struggles to run through the snow.

Still, the little leeway she manages to get is enough.

The quicker and smaller men jump out after her, but the snow is too thick and their combined weight too much. One of them tries to lunge forward, resulting in that part of the roof caving in, swallowing all but one of them.

"Curses be! What more will you take from us!" shouts one of the remaining men from inside the inn. "The chief wants her in shackles, men! Don't let her get away with these crimes! Your illusions won't trick us this time!"

"Illusions?" Aki hobble-runs carefully along the snow-covered roofs. Lucky for her, the village hadn't torn down most of the old buildings that once defined it as a crossroads city. As empty as most were, they served as a perfect method of traversing the village. "I don't remember casting any illusion spells recently."

"There! She's there over the old cobbler's place!" A boyish voice shouts from below.

As if in answer to the call, the roof door from the building she's on swings open, and two men with modified pitchforks take a stab at her.

"Woah! Are you trying to kill me?? I thought your chief wanted me alive?" Aki sidesteps one of the jabs and pulls the second older man's pitchfork toward the edge. Unfortunately, his momentum and poor form propelled him off the roof and onto the hard stone street below.

A cry of pain and surprise pierces the windy air.

Both Aki and the remaining younger man stop and go to look over the edge, worry on each of their faces. To the man's favour, he landed on a pile of snow covering an outdoor table. However, he wasn't as fortunate with his pitchfork's landing as it happened to partially embed itself in his lower left leg.

"I'm so sorry. I didn't mean for that to happen. I can go and heal him right now." Aki waves her arms profusely around herself.

"Not only are you a swindler, but bloodthirsty too?!" rages the young man. He attempts to swing at her several more times with reckless abandon. "Have you no decency? Nalv's really are animals!"

"Hey, woah! You're the ones that started it!" Aki shouts back. His stabs and jabs are wildly unpredictable, but somehow she manages to keep herself out of the way.

She hears more of the angry villagers running into the cobbler's shop and rushing up to the roof. Aki can't afford to linger any longer, but she has nothing to fight back with.

The man stabs at her head now, his face is red with frustration, and he's starting to shout nonsense about her dodging. Insults aside, it makes him predictable enough for Aki to grab his pitchfork when he tries to stab her head for the fifth time in a row.

"It's not a river stone, but this'll do. Bubble!" A large frost-covered bubble forms at the end where the man holds the pitchfork. Before the spell finishes forming, he lets go and hops back in fear.

"Thanks for the spell conduit!" Aki nods gratefully and jumps to the next roof as more armed men enter the scene.

Not willing to give them any slack, Aki aims the pitchfork at the space between them. Her eyes glow a vibrant silver as she imagines what she needs. "Minor Illusion."

A wall of fire erupts between them, blocking her from sight and preventing their pursuit. The light of the fire is sure to draw the attention of the other villagers and at least reduce the number of people she'll need to deal with.