//------------------------------// // Chapter 1: Ability // Story: Equestria's Inventor // by Yormsky //------------------------------// Chapter 1: Ability [Character Creation Initializing] [Evaluating Responses] [Applying Algorithms] [...] [...] [...] [Finalizing Creation] [...] [Randomizing Unique Ability] [...] [Character Creation Complete!] [Status] [Level: 21*] [Name: Victor Hex] [Race: Human] [Class: Inventor*] [Stats] [Constitution: 3] [Agility: 3] [Strength: 3] [Reflex: 4] [Understanding: 3] [Intelligence: 5] [Magical Potency: N/A] [Magical Control: N/A] [Abilities] [Whispers of the Mechanical God (Level 1) - Unique*] [Automation (Level 1) - Unique*] At some point, I realized I was standing in the middle of nowhere. I could remember making a character sheet that somewhat resembled the screen that followed my line of sight even as I gained the awareness to look around. Somehow, in the blink of an eye, I’d gone from sitting in my room, playing around with the prototype character creation system for Bob’s game, to suddenly being whisked away to a random mountain range? It was eerily discomforting to process how not jarred I ended up being by the sudden change in setting. Turning my attention away from the mountains around me and back to the holographic screen that continued still to hover about a foot away from my face, I tried to touch it. Apparently, my finger worked somewhat like a cursor as dragging it up and down the screen made its contents scroll in tandem. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes to think for a moment. Honestly, I felt like freaking out as a hundred thoughts bordering on paranoia regarding my inexplicable circumstances suddenly rushed in like a raging tsunami. Where the hell was I? How did I get here? Why was I brought here? I can’t even begin to think of where I should look to find someone, or something, to beg to take me back to my home… I better start moving soon. I need to find a safe source of water while I still have the energy to look around and defend myself. Who knows what kind of wildlife there is out here? Am I going to have to struggle to survive? What the hell am I going to do?! I’ve never even gone on a camping trip with a group. What the hell did I do to suddenly get cast out to the deep end without a lifeline?! I took another deep breath and sighed. I didn’t have a mirror or any reflective surface I could look to check, but I was pretty sure I was wearing the most resigned expressions I’d ever put on so far in my life. Whatever… No amount of wondering, bitching, or complaining would get me anywhere closer to getting some answers and before I could even think about seeking some of those, what I really needed to do right now was begin preparing myself for what was possibly a long-term survival mission. Water, food, and shelter would have to come before I could even think about seeking out the closest source of civilization, to say nothing else about pondering over why I’d been struck with such an impossible situation. But first, I considered the holographic screen one more time. There were stars next to the Level, Class and Abilities of my character that shined almost like they were meant to be pressed… [Level: 21] [Details: 18 Base Levels, one for each year leading up to full adulthood. This has been maxed out for your Race as a Human. 3 Additional Levels have been gained from acquiring useful competencies and skills throughout your life.] [Class: Inventor] [Details: Chosen from your responses and the randomized Unique Abilities you were given. Take the following as your generated life background: You come from a wealthy family. Born and raised with nothing but perfection and success in mind, you turned out more than a little antisocial. But that’s just fine since you’ve never cared for other people in the first place.  From an early age, you’ve always exceeded expectations. You were gifted with great intelligence for studying and applying the skills you read about to practical applications. You were raised to be a politician, but your heart lies in the field of research, development, and creation. As a result, all you want in life is to succeed. Not to follow in your parent’s footsteps, but to continue getting better and better at your craft. So powerful is that desire that a Divinity has noticed you. The source of your being has been blessed with arcane knowledge and abilities that defy the laws of physics. Alas, nothing can be given or taken freely for the divine and, consequently, you’ve been displaced; physically and immediately.] [Whispers of the Mechanical God] [Details: Establishes a metaphysical space of knowledge that stores everything you’ve ever experienced in your life. Effortlessly, you can recall anything you’ve ever experienced with your senses and, more impressively, data from all the information you possess can be compounded in real time to assess everything about the world as you perceive it.] [Automation] [Details: Every physical process you’ve manually completed can be performed instantaneously at the cost of the stamina, energy, or resources, you would have expended otherwise.] “What?” I was so baffled by the nonsense I’d just read that I didn’t even know how to react. Intuitively, my hand went for the top right corner of the screen and before I could stop myself I managed to make contact and close it. “...” For a long moment, I just stood there unsure if I was better off without the screen before I forced myself into action. Without the screen as a distraction, I really started to survey my surroundings and immediately, my bombarded with subconscious observations. Location: Mountainous, forested, at a decent elevation at least several hundred meters from the base of the mountain I currently stand on, yet not too chilly or windy; I can’t be that far up from sea level. By the position of the sun, I must be in the northern hemisphere of the planet. Rough estimates of the height and distance between peaks of the mountains appear to be a match for the Blue Ridge Mountains. “Blue Ridge Mountains? That’s like thousands of miles away from where I live in Florida!” I frowned. Wait. How did I just know all of that off the top of my head? I’m not some geography buff; I barely even know my way around the city I’ve lived in for all of my life! …I’d say I wouldn’t even be able to list all the capital cities of each of the fifty United States, but at the thought, I found I actually could. Strange, but convenient… and eerily in line with that “Whispers of the Mechanical God” Ability my character supposedly had. I could leverage this against the bullshit situation I hadn’t signed up for! Thus I began to move. I took a few steps before my thoughts cleared and with the goal of finding water in mind, I came up with dozens of facts, tips, and tricks I’d read about in books or found through watching random videos which led me to find a stream not an hour later. On the way to the stream, I picked up tracks I couldn’t immediately identify which I then began to trace in search of food. Unfortunately, after nearly another hour, the tracks suddenly stopped without any further lead for me to pick up on. So, I went back to the stream and stared at the water for a while. Drinking directly from the source would be risky; entirely too risky unless I had absolutely no other option. But I couldn’t purify the water unless I had a container and even though I knew how to make some from watching videos on primitive technology, I didn’t have any tools to help me. With a sigh, I took my eyes off the stream and started looking around for a flat stone near the edge. When I found a stone that looked good enough, I picked up another stone and used it to chip away at the flat stone until I had something resembling a rough edge. At some point, I stopped to check if the edge was sharp enough to my liking against the hairs along my forearm. When the edge I’d made failed spectacularly against the benchmark I’d set, I shook my head in exasperation for the work that would be ahead of me and went on to continue striking away at the stone but was was stopped by a new screen. [Automate the process: Sharpening (Primitive)?] I didn’t think about the screen for long and quickly accepted the proposed automation. A moment later, I was left with a considerably sharper stone knife, a more worn-out rock in the other hand, and stricken with an unusual bout of fatigue and soreness running down the arm that held the worn rock. “So that’s how that works, huh?” I mumbled as I waited on the ground for the fatigue to pass. “Automation” was an amazingly convenient ability to have. Just now, it had saved me at least half an hour in time I would have otherwise spent mindlessly going through the motions of sharpening my terrible knife. After I’d recovered enough to keep working, I looked around the many trees near the stream for a suitable piece of birch. When I found a thick birch tree, I tried to slice into the bark to strip off a layer and found myself surprised by how easy it was even with my terribly unsharp knife. Well, I guess it was unsharp by modern standards; against the tree and maybe even against raw flesh, it would probably tear easily enough. When I stripped away a couple of square meters of birch bark, I returned to the edge of the stream and started working on making a basket. I cut a long strip of birch and automated that process to end up with a set of extremely uniform, if slightly jagged, strips. Then with the strips and some larger pieces of birch bark, a decently large container. I returned to the trees to fish out some fallen branches and any pieces of wood that looked good enough to be either a starter or firewood. I went back to the stream, filled up my surprisingly waterproof birch basket, and then started a fire. Huh. It was amazing how quickly everything could come together when you could effortlessly remember every piece of relevant information that might have helped start a fire. I could remember everything from every piece of media I’d consumed, both fiction and nonfiction. There were even a couple of lines from some book on a post-graduate level book I once looked at in my mother’s office regarding thermal-kinetic physics that helped. Returning my focus to the world outside my thoughts, I realized it was rather cumbersome and uncomfortable to hold up the basket of water over the small fire I’d made. If I didn’t die after boiling and drinking the remarkably clear water I’d scooped up from the stream, I’d add making some sort of contraption to hold the basket for me in the future.