Chapter 5: Chapter 5: Mysteries of the Menu

The dark settled around Jadis as both of her bodies huddled together under a rocky overhang situated at the base of the cliff overlooking the valley. The recess carved by some natural event of geology was nothing near what anyone would call a cave. It did provide a meager amount of shelter, though, letting Jadis put her backs to a presumably unassailable wall. She had further fortified her makeshift hidey-hole by dragging a few broken logs and branches to cover the front of the alcove.

Fort Knox the nook was not, but it was a place for Jadis to rest that to any casual observer on the outside looked like nothing more than a pile of pine debris scattered against a natural stone wall.

Jadis took a deep breath, one head with eyes closed, leaning against the back of the alcove while the other stared out of the gaps in the branches, watching for any sign of movement in the darkening forest.

Damn but if it wasn’t weird to have eyes open and closed at the same time. In a sense, it wasn’t any different from when she closed one eye and kept the other open. Whenever she thought about it, though, her head would hurt as the disparate sensations of one body too many assaulted her.

“Okay, order of business, I need to see what exactly changed when I took that weird-ass Mirror Knight class,” her leaning self said.

“I mean, other than the obvious,” her self on watch continued the thought.

She was getting a little better at voicing different sentences from only one or the other source the more she did it.

Willing the status menu into existence, she examined it for any changes.

Aside from the change in primary class to the expected Mirror Knight, Jadis noted her combined level rating was at one instead of zero.

“That makes sense, I guess. If you can have multiple classes, it keeps track of the total level. If I’ve got one class, though, then it’d be the same number as the one class.”

A flash of annoyance crossed Jadis’ face as she realized she’d been speaking from dual voices at the same time again. Continuing her thoughts, she made conscious effort to only speak from one of her selves.

“Looking at my other stats, the only thing that’s changed is my health. I’m, what, about a quarter dead?” She looked down at her arms and legs, both pairs, noting the bruises and lacerations, some of which were still oozing a little blood.

“Guess I could be a lot worse off, though.” Her on-watch self responded to her resting self’s pseudo-question. “But, that does make me wonder: is my health pool separate for each body or is it shared?”

From what Jadis could tell, her injuries were unique to the individual bodies. There were scratch marks on her one left arm that were not mirrored on her other body’s left arm. However, when she tried to will a different status menu into existence for her other self, nothing happened.

“One mind, one status,” she concluded. “…but does that mean if I get one head cut off, the other me dies, too?”

She stared at herself for a moment before shaking her head at the thought, not willing or able to experiment with the possibility.

“Lets just assume no matter what, I don’t want a lethal blow to either of my bodies.”

Jadis wiped one hand across her face, wishing she had access to a bath, some rubbing alcohol, and some medical gauze. Even a few band aids would be better than the big fat nothing she had at the moment.

Well, not nothing. She had her loincloth still, right? Looking down, Jadis noticed that both of her bodies had a loincloth.

“Wait, my class doubled my clothes? Hold on, would it have doubled everything I was holding, if I had anything to hold?”

The possibilities of what could be done by doubling herself and anything in her possession were starting to make Jadis’ head spin.

“Fuck, please tell me I can do this again. Please, D, tell me I did not just miss a massive opportunity to double my equipment or something.”

Jadis groaned, a plaintive whine escaping her lips at the thought of the missed opportunities should her current doubled nature be a one time, permanent effect rather than a skill that she could turn on and off.

Wait, did she have skills? Oros was operating on some kind of RPG-like magic system. She had a class, so it made sense for her to have class skills. Why couldn’t she see them?

Jadis was abruptly startled from her contemplation of hidden class skills by a flash of dark blue light.

The mass of bones that had been the skeletal creature’s torso was doing something magical again. She had brought the surprisingly solid collection of bones with her when she’d sought out a place to stay for the night. Smashing the thing to pieces with a rock was certainly on her list of things to do, but she wanted to see if she could glean any more information from the still living monster before she ended it.

Did it count as alive? Could she even actually kill it?

Jadis didn’t have a clue what was possible. Once she had seen a skeletal monstrosity walk towards her with less than honorable intent, Jadis had thrown all considerations for what was reasonably possible in her new world out the window. Magic did whatever the fuck magic wanted to do, after all.

Well, maybe magic had free license to bend reality over a table and make it its bitch, but that didn’t mean the people who used magic didn’t have rules to follow. Figuring out what those rules were was a top priority.

The occult glowing symbols faded from the air around the torso and Jadis watched for something to happen. Other than the same attempts at wriggling away from her the torso had been doing since she had smashed off its limbs, nothing happened.

“Well, can’t be sure, but that looked like the same pattern of symbols as last time. Guess there aren’t any bones around to gobble up, huh?” Jadis mused, flicking a finger against the disabled monster.

It was difficult to examine in the growing dark but looking closely at the torso was changing Jadis’ opinion of its general composition. What she had thought was just a bunch of bones mashed together like a wad of playdough was looking more and more like a shell. There was a spine and a ribcage, but it was all filled in with more bones. No gaps or spaces between the bones at all.

“What the hell, are these mouse bones or something?” Jadis exclaimed, peering closely at the details. Tiny femurs, tibias, ulnas, and so on were jammed into any spot in the outer shell where the shape of bones would have left space. The torso was a complete barrier, preventing anything on the outside from getting inside.

“Now I wonder what’s inside? Skeletal heart? A brain? Tiny gnome with a control panel?”

Jadis laughed a bit at her own joke, maybe starting to feel a bit silly from the exhaustion that was weighing her down. She needed to sleep. How exactly sleep was going to work with two heads, she wasn’t sure. No matter what, though, it was probably best if she resolved the bone monster situation before sleeping. She didn’t want to risk this creature figuring out a way to attack her again while she was unconscious and defenseless.

Picking up her trusty smashing implement, one Jadis held the torso in place while the other proceeded to slam the rock down. The bones were tough, but it only took a few tries before the skeletal shell was split open like the world’s worst coconut.

Taking a look inside, Jadis could see nothing but darkness. Leaning in close to get a better view, she recoiled in sudden shock and horror as a bright orange eye the size of a baseball surfaced from the black mass within.

Acting on instinct, Jadis slammed the rock down on the squirming eyeball, a loud splat echoing in the tiny cave.

“Oh fuck, I think I’m going to puke,” Jadis gagged. Dark purple and orange viscera were dripping from the hand that had struck, a smell like three-day-old squid mixed with vinegar emanating from the goo.

As she feebly tried to wipe the nasty gunk off her hand without getting more the foulness on her, she noticed that a transparent screen had popped into the corner of her vision. When she focused on it, the screen enlarged, displaying a notification.

And then, a moment after she had finished reading the first notification, a second one drew her attention.

The information Oros’ system notifications had just magically shoved into her mind was almost enough to distract her from the putrid stench of the dead monster.

“Okay, a lot to unpack there,” she said, getting to her feet. “First, though, I’m getting this crap as far from me as possible.”

Picking the cracked bone shell up, Jadis carried it out of her hiding spot and ditched it a few hundred feet away, one of her bodies staying at the entrance to her alcove while the other did the dumping.

She was amazed to find she could somehow walk with one body through the dark, quiet pine forest while the other stood in one spot. It was surreal, being able to see two completely different views at the same time, particularly when she watched herself walk away from herself and then return minutes later. Jadis wasn’t quite used to the look of her new body yet, which only added to the impression that she was watching a stranger. Except, even as she watched the stranger walk towards her, she was also watching a stranger stand by the hidden nook, waiting for her.

Once she was back inside the stone alcove, Jadis settled down, bodies leaning against the wall shoulder to shoulder. The stink still lingered on one hand, and she’d left her rock outside to lessen the smell, but with the dead demon thing far and away she felt she could actually think with some clarity.

“Level two, it said, right?”

She concentrated and pulled up her status menu again, noting the change in level. Additionally, her attributes now had a what she assumed to be her free point available, highlighted with a slight shimmer.

Jadis couldn’t help but frown a bit, staring at the single free attribute point. “Just one, huh? How much of a difference does a single point make, anyway?”

“Only way I’ll know is by putting the point to use,” her second self answered. “It’ll still be hard to judge without some way of measuring things. I mean, how do I test the difference between thirty and thirty-one strength?”

Looking at the different attributes, she could guess what each one represented, though the difference between fortitude and endurance seemed like something for English teachers to argue. One thing she saw that she doubted was a coincidence was the fact that her health pool was two hundred and her vitality was twenty.

“Those are probably linked. Is it as simple as a times ten ratio?”

Her left self shrugged as her right self shook her head in uncertainty. “No way to know when we don’t have anyone to ask. I bet D didn’t even check to see if anyone was still living in that death-trap village before he dropped me off here. Fucking slacker…”

Was that blasphemy, calling her patron deity a slacker? It was true, though, from what she’d seen of his personality. Still, with the possibility of D taking offense to her criticisms, she decided to tone back on calling the god out specifically. She did not want to think about the ways in which he could make her life more difficult than it already was.

“Okay, time for an experiment. Putting the free point into vitality to see what happens.”

It was a simple experiment, she admitted. Not much of a plan. But, with the data she had, it seemed the safest course.

Willing the attribute point to be applied to her vitality stat, she watched as the numbers shifted and her status menu changed.

“Ha! It is a times ten ratio,” Jadis crowed in delight to see her hypothesis confirmed. “Even better, it raised my current health, too!”

She checked her bodies, looking for signs of any change to her injuries. She didn’t feel especially better, but some of her cuts looks less severe, like they had been healing for a day or two, rather than hours fresh.

“Okay, okay, that’s a big step forward. Still have a lot of questions about attributes, but this is a start.” Lightly running a hand over one particularly bad bruise on her thigh, Jadis considered her next step. “Now, there has to be some explanation somewhere in the menu for having a clone. Maybe there are pages?”

Jadis focused on her status menu and tried to turn it over, like a page in a book. Nothing happened. Next, she tried concentrating on concepts like ‘page two’ or ‘expand’. Still nothing. Eventually, she resorted to thinking hard on different concepts, just as she had when she’d first figured out how to access her status page.

Eventually, one straightforward phrase clicked.

“Skills Menu.”

Jadis let out a small exuberant victory whoop from both her selves, arms wrapping around each other in a gleeful hug.

“One skill, Mirrored Body’, and nothing else, huh. There’s got to be more to the menu than this, though…” She had to admit, she was feeling excited. Living in a true fantasy world with leveling up mechanics was what she had wanted from D. She’d had a rocky start to Oros, but the more she was able to unpack the capabilities of her menu and stats, the more interested she was in exploring more.

Willing the title of the skill to explain itself was the simple trick to learning more.

“Oh.”

Jadis was glad for the confirmation on what she’d suspected about her new extra body, but also a bit let down, in a sense. Passive skill meant Mirrored Body was on all the time, she was sure, which was great in that she wasn’t spending any resources to activate it or keep it active, so far as she could tell. On the other hand, she truly had missed the opportunity to duplicate any tools or weapons she might have been able to find.

“Imagine if I’d been holding some sacred sword of holy damage or the like when I accepted the class,” Jadis mused leaning one head against the other form’s shoulder.

“I know, right?” She sighed in response. “Also, if this is on all the time, like, all day and night, does that mean I need double the food and water? Donkey balls on toast this is weird…”

“It really is,” she laughed, huddling in both bodies close as the night grew chillier. Jadis had nothing but herself, at least for the moment. She hoped she would be enough to get through to morning.

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