“Ow, ow ow ow ow…” I whimpered as the soft female voice spoke inside my head. By this point, I was convinced the voice had to be in my head because as my body spasmed from the electricity going through me and my ears rang, the voice spoke crystal clear to me. I felt another wave of electricity coursing through my body as the first caused my muscles to contort in a way that forced my claw to shove deeper into the lock I’d been trying to pick, triggering another round of paralysis and the female voice to speak once more.
“Slave Collar tampering sensor activated: Detected unauthorized attempt at removing collar. Paralysis Status Condition has been applied for 120 cycles. You have taken 10 points of Lightning damage from: Slave Collar. You have 232 cycles of Paralysis remaining.”
I wheezed, the sensation so much worse than last time as my vision began to dim. I felt a third burst of energy surge throughout my body, though this time the pain was so intense my brain couldn’t even register the words that the voice spoke. A fourth wave washed over me as my vision went dark, all I could think about was this was it… This was how I was going to die…
—
I let out a loud gasp and sat upright as a bucket of ice cold water was dumped onto me. “Hey!” I yelled, blinking freezing liquid from my eyes as I looked for the source of what had just drenched me. My eyes landed on a rather smug looking furball that was just sitting there, licking her right paw as if nothing had just happened, an empty bucket floating next to her head before suddenly vanishing.
“About time you woke up,” Amy – the ever-annoying ball of fluff – said as she continued to clean herself as if I hadn’t just been electrocuted to near death. Despite the smug look she had, I noticed there was an unmistakable tone of annoyance and frustration to her words. “Oh calm down,” she said, making me realize there was a third emotion there too, this one masked by the others. “I wasn’t going to let you die,” she said, putting her paw down and walking over to me. As she nuzzled her stupid little head against my arm, I realized that it was fear.
Despite that realization, I still quickly pulled my arm away from her, letting out a weak sounding huff of annoyance as I did. “Stop that,” I grumbled before trying – and failing – to stand up, my legs still feeling like they were very much made out of jelly.
“Your legs might still be a little weak,” Amy purred, looking up at me as she did. If she was bothered by the fact that I’d abruptly pulled myself away from her, she didn’t show it. “You’ve only been unparalyzed for a little over a minute.” She sighed before flicking her tail as if annoyed. “You’re lucky I managed to get your claw out when I did. You’d managed to set the anti-tampering sensor off four times due to your stupid little stunt.” Her voice then softened somewhat, the fear she’d felt toward me becoming apparent again for a single moment. “Please don’t do that again,” she said.
“Well I wouldn’t have done it if someone had given me a heads up about it,” I said, trying my best to not get angry and failing. I rubbed the bridge of my nose, trying to calm myself down.
“Well, I’d have given you a heads up if I’d realized you were going to do something stupid like remove a SLAVE COLLAR from your neck while you were a SLAVE,” she replied, the emphasis she put on the words ‘Slave Collar’ and ‘Slave’ making me pause what I was doing. Before I could say anything, though, Amy sighed and shook her head. “I’m sorry, you’re right. It was my fault; you didn’t know any better. How could you, given that you’re not from ;Algion natively?”
“Algion?” I asked, tilting my head and frowning at her.
Amy nodded before quickly adding, “;Algion, actually. There’s a semi-colon at the front that indicates the Server’s tier, but you wouldn’t know that by speaking its name.”
“Oookaayy…”
“Anyway, yes, ;Algion. I guess to answer your earlier question, we’re on a Server called ;Algion.”
“What’s a Server?” I asked before Amy had even had a chance to finish speaking.
She rolled her eyes at me before sighing once more. “A Server is essentially another name for a planet, except that’s the official System designation for them.” I opened my mouth to ask another question but received a death glare from Amy that was so intense, I felt myself clench up. “There will be time for you to ask all your questions, but now is not it. For now, we’ll focus on the essentials while we walk. But first, come here.” Amy walked back over to the cat-girl and placed a paw on the back of her right hand. “Come get this ring.”
I blinked before awkwardly standing up, my legs shaking a bit as I did. I slowly made my way over to her, before awkwardly collapsing down to one knee in front of the cat-girl’s corpse. “Why are we grave robbing?”
“Does this look like a graveyard to you?” Amy asked with a dry tone. “Besides, you’ll thank me for this later.”
I frowned at her words but turned my attention to the girl’s hand, noticing a ring with a green gemstone in the center of it. “It’s pretty,” I said, taking it from her finger and bringing it up to my face to examine it more closely, “but I’m not exactly sure how this’ll help me get back home.”
“It won’t,” Amy said, looking up at me as I stared at the ring. “Help you get back home, I mean. You should give up on that idea now before it consumes you.” She added, continuing before I had a chance to interject. “That’s no normal ring. Can you feel the energy from it?” She paused before adding, “You might actually not be able to, given your Affinity right now is sitting at 0. Just take my word for it, okay?”
“Uh,” I blinked, looking down at the cat and then back at the ring. “So, what… I just put it on my finger, then?” I asked, sliding the ring down my middle finger, mirroring the way that the cat-girl had worn it, only instead of on her right hand I put it on my left. Immediately a female voice sounded in my head.
“You have obtained a Ring of Storage (Emerald)! You now have access to Personal Space! Your Ring of Storage’s previous owner has been slain; you now have access to all their belongings!”
“That’s neat,” I said, before quickly adding “Shame about what happened to her, though.”
“Don’t worry about that. Here, one second.” Amy said.
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
Sure enough, a second later I heard the female voice again. “Thanks to your ally NAOMI_LYNN_REYES, your Ring of Storage (Emerald) has been bonded to you. It cannot be removed by anyone without your direct permission, so long as you remain alive.”
“What?” I asked, completely confused by what I’d just heard.
“Would it be more helpful if those notifications were displayed instead?” Amy asked, her eyes going unfocused as she appeared to be looking at something from afar again. “Alright, there, that should do it.”
“What?” I repeated like an idiot, only to gasp as a semi-transparent blue window – the same color as Amy, actually – appeared in front of me that caused me to fall back onto my butt. I stared in disbelief as black text began to appear on it.
You have obtained a Ring of Storage (Emerald)! You now have access to Personal Space! Your Ring of Storage’s previous owner has been slain; you now have access to all their belongings!
Thanks to your ally NAOMI_LYNN_REYES, your Ring of Storage (Emerald) has been bonded to you. It cannot be removed by anyone without your direct permission, so long as you remain alive.
I re-read the notification twice more before blinking and staring down at Amy who was just staring up at me expectantly. “It’s the same thing that the voice said?” I stated.
“Yes, but now you won’t hear the voice anymore and the notifications will just queue up in your interface. It’s much more user friendly for Users who aren’t familiar with how The System works.” I blinked at that, my face obviously conveying that I was confused as she simply shook her head. “I’ll explain more later. There should be a little ‘x’ icon in the top right hand corner of the notification that appeared. Just think about clicking on it and it’ll go away.”
Sure enough, as I returned my focus to the pop-up I noticed there was a little ‘x’ icon. Upon closer inspection, it actually reminded me of a computer window because there were two other icons next to the ‘x’, which I assumed were to set the notification to full screen and minimize it respectively.
“You’d be correct,” Amy said, causing me to frown at her. “Right, right. You asked that I stop doing that,” she said with a slight smirk.
I thought about clicking the ‘x’ and couldn’t help but gasp as the pop-up vanished. “Huh, so it’s like a video game?” I asked, noticing now that my vision had an abundance of little icons in the bottom right hand corner that hadn’t been there before. “What’re these?”
“I enabled your UI, which had been disabled to keep you from freaking out when you woke up here until I could join you. Now that I’m here and can walk you through it all, I thought it was as good a time as any to turn it back on.”
“Okay…” I said with a frown. There were over a dozen icons, though some of them I noticed were currently grayed out. I looked up from my UI as Amy had called it, only to notice that she’d started walking again. “Hey, wait up!” I called after her as I scrambled to my feet to chase after her. To my annoyance, she did not wait up.
She remained silent until I’d caught up to her. As I did, a yellow box appeared at the bottom of my vision, surrounding a yellow triangle icon with an exclamation mark in it that I hadn’t noticed was flashing, likely to get my attention. “Open that,” she said, so I thought about clicking on it and was immediately bombarded with an abundance of pop-up menus.
“What the–” I began, nearly tripping over my own feet as we walked due to the sheer information overload.
“These are your notification logs,” Amy said as if I hadn’t almost just tripped on my own two feet. “Here you can see all your recent notifications, with the most recent ones appearing first. If you’ve dismissed any notifications, they don’t show up by default, but I can change that for you, if you’d like?”
“No, I think this is already more than enough,” I said, reading over the notifications. I couldn’t help but shiver as a tingle went over my body, but I shrugged it off as a lingering side effect from having been paralyzed. There was the notification about the Ring of Storage, along with four identical notifications about me getting shocked by the Slave Collar. I was about to dismiss them all when something caught my eye.
Thanks to your ally
“Hey, I think this one notification is broken; it says my ally’s name is Error?”
“Huh, so it does,” Amy said as she continued to walk, not seeming to be the least bit concerned by it.
I waited to see if she’d say anything more, but she never did. Eventually I just shrugged and dismissed the notification. “Ah well, I’m sure it’s nothing major if you’re not worried about it.”
With all my notifications dismissed, I noticed that the icon I’d clicked on to generate all of them was no longer flashing. “Okay so that one was for notifications… What’re the rest of these?”
“Above the notifications icon you’ll see the one for your Personal Space. I’ll go over that one in more detail later, as it’s one of the more important ones.” I nodded at that, noting the icon that looked like a pair of sparkling stars. “Above that, you should see a clock icon that’s grayed out; that’s your debuffs menu. When you get muted again – and I’m positive it’ll be sooner, rather than later – you’ll see it appear there, as well as your notifications log.”
I huffed out an annoyed “jerk,” before letting her continue.
“I’m sure you can figure out what the next one is,” Amy said, to which I nodded.
“The blood drop?” I asked, considering it for a second as Amy nodded. “I don’t know… Something combat related?” I glanced at the icons above it, a pair of swords and a magic wand. “If I was a girl still I’d have something else to consider,” I half joked, though Amy remained silent. Finally I asked, “is there magic here on ;Algion?”
“There is, yes. You didn’t think that I was a normal cat, did you?”
“I mean…” I started, only to trail off as Amy stopped abruptly and stared deadpan at me. Taking a deep breath, she turned and started off again, apparently deciding it wasn’t worth acknowledging my partial admission. I glanced up ahead as she started walking again and noticed that we were almost at the end of the town. “Are we leaving the town?”
“Yes, didn’t I tell you we were getting you out of here?”
“Well yeah, but you also said we were going to talk through our next steps when we got out of the house you found me in, and we’ve still yet to do that.”
“No,” Amy said, the tone of her voice making it seem like she was talking to a child. “I said we could talk outside while I figured out our next steps, which I did; I just didn’t tell you.” I narrowed my eyes and stopped walking, crossing my arms over my chest as I stared at the source of my growing frustration. She continued walking for nearly a full minute before finally seeming to notice that I’d stopped. She sighed, which surprised me, given I could still hear her perfectly despite the distance between us and how small she was. I realized that she was speaking in my head, just like that other voice had been. “Look, what do you want from me?”
“I want to know what is going on here, for starters,” I said, my voice tinted with the edges of anger that apparently wasn’t my own. “So far you’ve done nothing but belittle and talk to me like I’m some kind of child.”
“You might as well be one–” Amy began, only for me to cut her off.
“Shut up!” I yelled, clenching my fists tightly as I did. “I’m not going to let a little furball like you treat me like I’m stupid! I might not know anything about where I am or how I got here, but I do know I don’t have to put up with you and your crap!” I spat, mentally slamming my finger on the second most icon from the top, a globe that clearly represented a world map.
I watched as a minimap appeared in the top right corner of my vision and I quickly consulted it. It looked like we were leaving a small town known as Ivywood and were heading north. It looked as if there was another city or town called Rosevale to the north of us, and I imagined that was where Amy was taking us.
Without waiting for her to even reply to me, I started walking again, walking right past her without stopping as I glared at my map.
03/02 - 0900, 1200, 1500, 1800
03/03 - 0900, 1200, 1500
03/04 - 0900, 1200, 1500
03/05 - 0900, 1200
03/06 - 0900, 1200
Discord Server, too!