Chapter 3: Chapter 3: Exploration of Self and Surroundings

“What the fuck is this?”

Several quiet minutes of no person or people coming to find her had led Jadis to try and figure out how exactly she was supposed to select her primary class. With no advice or direction, she began by saying various words aloud, such as ‘class selection’ and ‘character sheet’. Eventually, she found that if she concentrated on the idea of seeing her status, a menu much like the last notification popped into her vision, overlaying the world around her.

The information on the menu was basically everything she would expect to see in one of the RPG games she had loaded on her computer but rarely had time to play anymore. Not all the attributes were immediately obvious to her as to their purpose, particularly those that seemed to be of a more magical nature. But overall, Jadis felt familiar enough with the status screen that she wasn’t worried about getting confused while figuring it all out.

The one thing she noted first though was that she apparently wasn’t human anymore. Whatever a Nephilim was, she hadn’t a clue, but that was what she was. She looked human enough, no pointy ears or tail, but maybe the race change explained why she was so abnormally pale and smooth? Probably had something to do with it.

The race thing wasn’t what threw her for a loop, though.

As Jadis stared at her status menu, she came to what she felt was the reasonable conclusion that focusing on her ‘None’ where her primary class was could possibly be how she’d be able to select one of the class options the notification had said was available to her.

Much to Jadis’ delight, her guess had been correct, and her options had popped up into her vision.

Much to Jadis’ dismay, the first option given was a complete joke.

“Really!? Pervert? I’ve been here like ten minutes and the world itself is calling me a pervert.”

Jadis shook her head at the injustice of it all, then balked as the realization hit her that the rude menu was actually pretty accurate. She had just arrived on Oros and had almost immediately started masturbating.

“Fuck, I really have spent most of my life doing vulgar things. Well, I’m not taking that class, so let’s see what’s next.”

Jadis continued to mumble to herself, dismissing the class option, and thought about seeing her next available option. The now familiar screen appeared before her mind’s eye.

“You have got to be kidding me.”

Jadis could not believe what she was seeing. How the hell were her class options all so uselessly focused on perversion? Okay, yes, she was currently almost completely naked and had been since she appeared on Oros, but that wasn’t by choice!

The masturbation had been by choice, but still! There had to be another, not utterly ridiculous option for her to choose.

Much to her relief, there was.

Double the power? Jadis had to admit that sounded pretty good to her. Sure, the class description made her sound like a narcissist, which she totally was not, but it was also probably right. More of her would absolutely be a good thing.

“Question is, how exactly does that work? Do I just, make illusions of myself? Pull duplicates from mirrors? Control reflections? Dammit, I really need to ask someone, 'cause these descriptions suck.”

Jadis mentally checked to see if any more options were available to her, but nothing else appeared. It seemed three options were all she got, at least for the moment. Except, her status menu had said she could get a primary, secondary, and tertiary class. Was she supposed to choose all at once? Would more options open up to her?

The class descriptions hinted that what she spent most of her time doing made a difference in what classes were made available to her. Since she’d not yet spent an hour on Oros, Jadis decided to bet on the idea that more options would make themselves known the longer she hung around and the more she did.

Instead of selecting what might not be a useful or suitable class immediately, Jadis chose to wait and until she could ask someone about the Mirror Knight class, maybe find out what other options she could unlock. For all she knew, Mirror Knight might be as utterly worthless as Dedicated Pervert seemed to be.

Done with her status inspection for the time being, Jadis started walking, following the burbling brook through the pine forest.

The forest was mostly quiet, except for the sound of a few distant birds chirping and the occasional creak of wood bending in a breeze. Now that she had been walking in the forest shadows for some time, Jadis was starting to feel a little chilly. She hadn’t ever spent so much time naked anywhere outside of a bathroom or bedroom. She was glad the weather here, wherever here was, was at least comfortable.

Aside from the pines, there really wasn’t much to see. The few clouds visible in the blue sky seemed completely ordinary. If Jadis looked behind her, she could see a snow-covered mountain peak in the distance, but it wasn’t anything she hadn’t seen before on nature hikes. If she had to guess at her location, Jadis would have thought D had plopped her down in some remote corner of Montana.

Eventually, the pine forest thinned out ahead of her and Jadis was able to make out a rocky cliff edge. Following the brook to the very edge of the cliff, Jadis was met with a stunning vista.

She stood atop a stone outcropping that had to be several hundred feet above a forested valley that stretched out for miles. There were white-capped mountains on either side of her, but the expanse ahead was broad and forested, with what looked like grasslands in the far distance, barely visible on the horizon. The lush green of the trees was completely uninterrupted by roads, powerlines, or even the hint of human habitation. A completely pristine natural landscape, free of modern man’s influences.

Jadis was in awe of the sight, captivated by the beauty, until the implications of what it meant that she couldn’t see any sign of civilization crossed her mind.

If there were no houses or roads, there were no people. If there aren’t any people, who the hell was supposed to meet her and give her some advice and aid? What about shelter? Food?

What about some goddamn clothes?

Starting to panic a bit, Jadis searched the view before her for any sign of a settlement, somewhere D’s promised temple could be found.

It wasn’t until several increasingly tense minutes of agitated searching had passed that Jadis finally spotted what looked like a stone structure poking out of the trees. The stone tower was easy to miss, despite being quite close to the base of the escarpment Jadis was standing on. The stone was the same as the cliff face, dark gray, and vines were wrapped around it, blending it in further with the scenery.

“That has got to be the temple,” Jadis grumbled as she searched the cliff for an easy way down. She wasn’t afraid of heights, but she was no mountain climber either. The prospect of climbing down the rock even less appealing with the water of the brook spilling over the edge, turning it slick.

“No big deal. Long way around the side, might take a few hours, but it’ll be a cinch and then I can get some clothes and food and start this new life for real with some damn guidance.”

Jadis followed the edge around and slowly made her way down into the valley, doing her best to not lose sight of where she had seen the stone tower. The way was slow going, with no path to follow. By the time she had gotten down to the valley floor, an hour had passed and Jadis was a sweaty mess. Her unnaturally smooth skin was slick with perspiration and she was panting hard from the exertion of half jogging, half climbing down the steep incline of the forest mountain.

Still, despite the sore feet, she felt better than she ever had in her old life after putting in some exercise.

“Damn, I fucking love this body!” Jadis grinned as she took a moment to flex one of her toned arms. “This is way easier when you’re already fit.”

Following along the base of the cliff, Jadis headed what she judged to be west, if the sun’s movement overhead was the same as back on Earth.

Pushing her way through a copse of closely growing trees, Jadis finally encountered her first real sign of human civilization.

In an overgrown clearing directly ahead of her was a small stone house with a thatched roof. The windows were wide open, the shadowy interior barely visible from where she stood. The arched stone doorframe was empty, no door to shut. As she observed the place, Jadis saw a couple of small brown birds fly out of one window.

“This… does not look occupied.”

Jadis approached the stone house, crossing the thicketed space between tree and structure in only a few careful steps. As she stood before the entrance to the apparently abandoned building, Jadis could only think one thing:

“Was this place built by dwarves?”

The top of the arched doorframe barely reached the middle of Jadis’ chest. She’d have to bend nearly halfway over just to enter the stone house.

D had said Oros was a fantasy world, hadn’t he? They hadn’t explicitly talked about it, but Jadis supposed that it made sense that there would be other races if this world was some kind of fantasy-based setting.

Shrugging at the lack of knowledge and options, Jadis stooped low and entered the dwelling.

Inside was no less abandoned-looking than the exterior. The building seemed to be a single room serving as kitchen, dining room, and bedroom. However, with her head in the literal rafters, Jadis could see that a small bedroom space had also been set up on a wooden platform that took up the back end of the building’s attic.

There was little to see in the empty home, either from up high or down low when she crouched down to get a better look. The dwarves that had lived here had abandoned the stone hut long ago, leaving behind only a few old pieces of molding furniture and some broken clay pottery bits on the floor. Jadis checked the corners, fully expecting to find the skeletal remains of some long-dead man.

There were no remains, human or otherwise, anywhere she could see, just the remnants of simple wooden furniture too rotted now to be used for anything other than kindling.

Seeing no point in hanging around the derelict dwelling any longer, Jadis squeezed her way back out the door and into the waning light of the forest. She immediately stretched and swung her arms about, having felt cramped and just a tad claustrophobic. She hoped the stone temple she’d spotted from up high hadn’t also been made with dwarven proportions in mind. And that there would be some actual people around.

Heading further west towards the temple tower, Jadis came across more dwarf-sized thatched roof houses, each of them just as dilapidated as the first, if not even more ruinous. Some had collapsed roofs or walls. One was completely knocked over, a young pine growing up from the pile of rubble. The further she went, the more structures appeared until eventually the tower she had first spotted loomed in front of her and the truth became undeniable to Jadis.

This was a dead village.

“D, where the fuck did you leave me…?”

All around Jadis were empty buildings, broken walls, and overgrown cobblestone roads. The only life in the place were the plants and birds fliting about the ruins. The stone temple looked no better than the rest of the small town. Vines were covering most of the walls and growing through the broken glass windows, the first sign of glass she’d seen so far, she noted. The large iron-banded oak doors hung open, one attached by a single tenuous hinge. The gloom visible from where she stood in front of the temple was oppressive and she hadn’t even stepped one foot in yet.

A chill swept up Jadis’ spine at the thought of what might be waiting for her inside the ruin.

“If there’s any kind of priest in there, I’m positive it’ll be the type who’ll tie me to an altar and sacrifice me in a blood ritual. Is that the kind of shit D’s into?” Jadis speculated, taking a look around the outside of the temple, checking for any sign that someone had been around recently.

She’d never established exactly what kind of god D was, had she? The whole ordeal of being a lost soul in the, well, what D called The Between, had been so terrifying. And then, getting swept up by D into his bizarre living room and having both death and reincarnation put in front of her, one after another… Jadis realized she hadn’t been thinking as clearly as she probably should have been. For all she knew, D was some kind of deranged death god. Sure, D had said his, er, second cousin, Sam, was the god of destruction that was trying to destroy Oros or whatever, but that didn’t mean D wasn’t just as bad. He could be a competing death god, couldn’t he?

Jadis rubbed her forehead, grimacing. What choice had she really had? D had been set to tear her soul to little pieces if she hadn’t agreed to be of some entertainment to him. Was she going to balk at serving him now, just because he might be some kind of evil god? How could she, especially now that he’d already fulfilled his end of the bargain and given her a new life, with an awesome new body to boot?

Besides, maybe he wasn’t evil. Maybe he was just negligent and hadn’t actually checked to see if any of his followers were still alive around here before slapping her down in the middle of a massive forest with only old dwarf ruins populating it?

When she thought about it that way, careless seemed like a far more accurate description of the laidback, lounging D than evil was.

She was stalling. Thinking about things she couldn’t change like D’s moral alignment was pointless and just an excuse to delay entering the creepy abandoned temple. She had to go in, see if there was anyone around that might be able to help her. And if there wasn’t anyone, priest or otherwise, able to offer their assistance?

Well, she’d take this life one step at a time.

Speaking of steps, Jadis took a deep breath, resolutely raised one foot and took a step towards the temple door.

“It’s just an old building. No spookier than the little ones you’ve already poked your head into. You’ve been on haunted Halloween hayrides scarier than this.”

Jadis mumbled half-hearted reassurances to herself as she entered the temple.

It took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust to the low light, but eventually Jadis was able to see exactly what she both feared and expected to find.

The temple interior was just as decrepit as the exterior. Broken and rotting pews filled the space in two long rows. A molding, decayed carpet, the color long washed out of it, ran down the middle. The aisle led up to a stone dais with a lectern facing the main area and an altar against the far wall, a large statue of a man with arms spread wide looming above the altar.

Predictably, everything was a size too small, the pews all meant for people of much smaller dimensions than Jadis. Slowly walking down the aisle, keeping her eyes and ears open for any sign of someone or something hiding in the shadows, she approached the dais. Taking one large step to get up onto the platform, Jadis took a quick look at the wooden stand in the center.

The lectern was, surprisingly, not empty. A single leatherbound book rested on the top. Carefully flipping it open, Jadis found it was somehow completely intact, no sign of decay or damage to the pages.

The text on the pages was completely foreign to Jadis, the strange lettering alien and unreadable. There were pictures, though, hand drawn illustrations that shone with a brilliant luster despite the low light in the temple. Jadis paused on one near the front, a portrait of a handsome, redhaired man with a clean shaven face and elegant posture. He stood with arms spread wide, an apparently welcoming gesture, yet the smirk on his face was almost taunting in a familiar way.

“That you, D?” Jadis said, running a finger over the illustration.

Blinking, she looked up at the stone statue. It wasn’t much taller than her so it was easy to examine its slightly worn features. The same smirk was evident.

“Well, at least now I know for sure this is your temple, huh?”

As Jadis mused aloud, a quiet tapping sound of something hard like wood against stone faintly clattered behind her, sending lightning up her spine and her heart to her throat. Slowly, Jadis turned her head to look back towards the front of the temple where she’d come from.

What she saw ripped a curse from her throat, unbidden and unstoppable.

“What the fuck is that!?”

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