Sam did not know exactly what to do. She vaguely believed random things she'd seen on TV. She vaguely knew that TV is a goddamn liar and will get you and your family killed. She hoped she might be able to help people.
She was staring at a woman who was dying. [UNNAMED WOMAN]'s health bar continued to drop.
"WHAT THE FUCK?!"
Suddenly the dying woman might as well have been labeled like the greeter to Fantasy Village One in a Nintendo RPG. "Welcome to Dying Meadows, Adventurer.", says [UNNAMED WOMAN]. Sam started something that might well have resembled CPR. She tilted the woman's head back, pinched her nose, and breathed in her mouth a few times. Then she started heel-stomping the woman's chest like she was the villain in an anti-abortion film trying to shove Jesus himself back up into Mary's esophagus.
Sam heard... Sam felt things break. Turns out, it's not uncommon for ribs to break during CPR. Sam got kind of lucky to not learn that it's also not uncommon for people giving CPR to get a gift of fresh, dying-person vomit delivered mouth to mouth. Sam was very unlucky to learn that CPR has a success rate of 5 to 10 percent with trained professionals.
Her name was Karen. She wasn't a Karen. She was divorced with no kids. She had two cats. She just went to work every day at an auto parts store. She knew how to change wiper blades and batteries. She wasn't the first person to die because of The Event. She wouldn't be the last.
Sam stared at the black health bar in shock. Even in her stunned state, she rocked backward when it was replaced by "LOOTABLE CORPSE: KAREN MCCUMFREY".
Whimpering slightly, she pulled herself back forward, rubbing her palms on her pants to remove the bits of rock and debris. Carefully, she put her hand on Karen's face to close her eyes, only to jerk it backward as an inventory screen popped up, showing all of Karen's items, including her clothes. There was a LOOT ALL button at the bottom.
Sam pulled away from the body, standing up and looking around, really looking around, for the first time since she'd even gotten in the car. She was standing in the middle of an overpass; they'd been about to turn left onto the interstate. It was... shockingly quiet.
There were no cars running, no planes flying, no radios playing. All she could hear were human voices, swallowed by the surprising scale and emptiness of six lane highways. There were a few horns here and there, but they were dying out as people realized that everyone was in the same situation.
She walked, coughing roughly, to the railing overlooking the interstate. It was a spur leading directly into the heart of the city, and she could see miles of stalled and crashed cars. Some, like Karen's, were on fire. Looking away from the road, she saw larger plumes of smoke coming from another part of the city, somewhere there weren't any tall buildings.
"Airport."
He was a round-faced fellow, leathery with something that was too bushy to be called five o'clock shadow and too thin to be called a hedgehog. His voice sounded like an old screen door trying to close against fifty years of rust on the spring coupled with a phlegmy cough that sounded worse than Sam's and, worse, it looked like he'd earned it across four (face) three (teeth) two decades he'd had a pack a day habit.
He spat a wad of something Sam gagged and tried to believe she'd never seen onto the road below, earing a cry of outrage.
"The old airport's thataway. Used to be the airport for the city, but the city decided to put on its big boy pants and built a new airport up the highway. Th'old airport's still there, but it only does local shit or rich guy shit. Y'know, crop-dusting, cop radar bullshit, or a rich guy taking a twin engine down to Atlanta. Them fires out that way are probably small planes what crashed, y'know?" He nodded a bit, snorked a hunk of foulness and spat it onto the highway below.
"Dude. Could you not do that? Or do it somewhere else? Gross." Sam struggled with her gag reflex, then hacked up another five thousand lungs, thanks to SMOKER'S LUNG: 37 MINUTES.
"Whatever, bitch, thought you looked interested. Suck a dick." And leatherface walked away, pulling out a pack of cigarettes.
Sam rolled here eyes turned away from the highway below her and did everything she could to forget about that guy while remembering what he'd said. She walked away from the railing toward the middle of the road, looking between the stopped cars to examine the people. If you'd asked her what she was looking for, whe would have stared in blank confusion. She was just looking. Sometimes a situation just asks you to look at it.
As she passed the first dashed white line she saw people helping each other. A silver-haired granny pulled a case of water ... a silver-haired granny directed a man one-third her age to pull a case of water bottles out the back of her van and start passing them around. In the other direction, young man earnestly bit his lip and examined minor wounds.
The second dashed line didn't go so well. A kind man; a young, robust Santa; a round, beardless, friendly face sat on top a healthy dad bod, offered warm smiles and a gentle pat on the shoulder to a woman with several young children. His non-patting hand was in her purse.
PERCEPTION +1
The next day, arguing with herself in the shower (water services never stopped, not relying on electricity), Sam constructed a number of thoroughly rational and ethically unimpeachable arguments for her response. She had lemmas. Dilemmas. Trilemmas. She even briefly toyed with a tetralemma before discarding it as too unwieldy. She developed a dialectict that would have made Hume weep, and Marx bite through the brim of his hat in outright philosophical commie horniness.
Philosophy happens after we do shit, if we're lucky. Otherwise, it gives us Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum (but I repeat myself).
In the moment, Sam didn't put quill to parchment. Sam put Chuck Taylors to pavement and put everything she had into getting to the thief as quickly as possible. What she would do when she got there was a problem for when she got there. Honestly, future people should be ashamed they hadn't alreayd solved the problems we caused. Like, dude, you had all the information. Pull it together.
Sam came in like a wrecking ball, screaming, gagging, hacking. She tripped and fell on her face as the thief, his would-be thieved, and her children stared at her in varying degrees of befuddlement, shock, and alarm. Sam, meanwhile, felt the injuries as her palms, forearms, and elbows hit the pavement. Her health bar ticked down a notch in her HUD.
She had a HUD? Jesus.
"You ASSHOLE." Pulling her herself to her knees, she glared at [NAME UNKNWON]. There was a flash of blinding pink-purple light that rocked her head backward. When her vision cleared, she saw the would-be thief collapsing gravitationally to the pavement with half his face missing. His would-be victim and her children were screaming hysterically, insofar as anoyone would be freaked the fuck out seeing a random [STORE] employee blow half a man's head off with her eye lasers.
YOU HAVE LEARNED MAGIC MISSILE
MAGIC MISSILE : LEVEL 1
Thursday, March 21, 2024
Earth : New Game Plus - Chapter 2
Sam woke up slowly, coughing. It wasn't really cold, just kind of chilly. Not warm. She pulled her eyes open and saw a woman lying on the street. She was a little older? Like, not middle aged, but not young? She had those wrinkles, but not that parchment look. And her hair wasn't gray. She looked familiar. Not because of the drool.
Wait, street?
Cold?
Sam struggled upright, wincing at the pain in her chest. She and the mystery woman were lying on the street, in the shade of a parked car. Not a parking lot, the street. That was a sidewalk. Those were surprisingly large dashed white lines dividing the lanes, those were really shiny double yellows. That was a lot of voices.
Why the hell did that woman look so familiar? Who the hell were all those yelling people?
What the hell with the words? And what was up with the flashing lights?
Somehow the words were like the scotoma she got before a migraine. Subtle enough she didn't notice it until it was big enough to drown a building, bad enough to blind half her vision. The words were there, but she couldn't focus on them. There were little flashes of light around the edges of her vision. She struggled to pull herself upright on the hood of the car.
YOU HAVE UNLOCKED THE MECHANIC JOB. WOULD YOU LIKE TO TAKE THE MECHANIC JOB? YES/NO
What the hell? "No! I don't want..." The words disappeared. There was a brief pop-up.
JOB STORED
Trying to move out from behind the car, Sam doubled over in a fit of coughing. She could barely hold herself up on the hood of the car. She felt like she was going to puke her lungs out with the coughing. It turned from coughs to hacking and gagging. Then there was someone there, holding her up and guiding her back to the ground.
"Easy, there." It was an older, masculine voice. A kinder Tommy Lee Jones. Every innhouse, outhouse, farmhouse, henhouse, and bathhouse was warm in his fatherly aura. The same hair pulled back from the receeding hairline above the that great big nose, but with a gentle smile. "You inhaled half a burning tire and who knows what else. Holy shit, good for you, getting her out of there, but we need to make sure you're okay, too."
Sam couldn't really see much. Pretty sure that's a ... color? Bow suspender button. I'm on the ground.
. . .
Sam woke up feeling a lot more awake. Sitting up really fast, her elbow hurt where it dug into the pavement. Shouting because how she was waking up in the middle of the street would be very appropriate, and she didn't do that, though she did note she had a light coat draped over her. She started pulling herself to her feet, feeling at her clothes, ready to get the fuck out of there. Then she saw the woman. Her face was absurdly familiar. Light blonde hair. Wrinkles. Not old, but older. Sam's noise was making the woman stir.
Her eyes opened and betrayed a confusion that made Sam ache.
"What?"
Nothing more was coming. She was even slower to try and get up than Sam had been however long ago with the help of random whatshisname.
A status alert popped up.
SMOKER'S LUNG (17 MIN)
With that, Sam commenced choking out a lung. As her eyes bugged out and she clung to the hood of whoever the hell's volkswagen, she didn't have much choice but to focus on the woman's face. It was the woman Sam had pulled out of the overturned, burning pickup truck. The one that had given Sam SMOKER'S LUNG (16 MIN). More important, she saw the bar above the woman's head. It was a little more than half full yellow, with the remainder black. As Sam watched, the bar's yellow portion decreased and turned orange.
Sam's jaw dropped in confusion.
"What? A he. A health bar?"
Coughing and looking around, Sam realized everyone now sported a convenient notification of their relative proximity with death. Looking over her own head, she saw nothing. Another coughing fit staggered her and slumped her on the hood of the VW. It was a station wagon. Good choice.
Closing her eyes and splaying her hands on the hood of the sensible sedan, Sam steadied herself. That's when she saw the HUD.
"Jesus Hopscotching Christ, I'm going insane."
She must have hit her head. The smoke was laced with LSD. She was never autistic, just insane. Something. Because now she had a fucking health bar, a mini-map, a compass, and a chat box?!
No. Absolutely not. No. Nope. No way. This is not a thing to think about. I'm not Samus Aran. I'm not Link. Shit Jesus fuck no.
Sam focused on the only thing she could think of that mattered. The woman, once again unconscous, had fallen on her side and her health bar was in the red. Sam pulled her away from the car to lay her on her back and started yelling for help. Would it be nice to think that, in all that confusion, anyone noticed?
Wait, street?
Cold?
Sam struggled upright, wincing at the pain in her chest. She and the mystery woman were lying on the street, in the shade of a parked car. Not a parking lot, the street. That was a sidewalk. Those were surprisingly large dashed white lines dividing the lanes, those were really shiny double yellows. That was a lot of voices.
Why the hell did that woman look so familiar? Who the hell were all those yelling people?
What the hell with the words? And what was up with the flashing lights?
Somehow the words were like the scotoma she got before a migraine. Subtle enough she didn't notice it until it was big enough to drown a building, bad enough to blind half her vision. The words were there, but she couldn't focus on them. There were little flashes of light around the edges of her vision. She struggled to pull herself upright on the hood of the car.
YOU HAVE UNLOCKED THE MECHANIC JOB. WOULD YOU LIKE TO TAKE THE MECHANIC JOB? YES/NO
What the hell? "No! I don't want..." The words disappeared. There was a brief pop-up.
JOB STORED
Trying to move out from behind the car, Sam doubled over in a fit of coughing. She could barely hold herself up on the hood of the car. She felt like she was going to puke her lungs out with the coughing. It turned from coughs to hacking and gagging. Then there was someone there, holding her up and guiding her back to the ground.
"Easy, there." It was an older, masculine voice. A kinder Tommy Lee Jones. Every innhouse, outhouse, farmhouse, henhouse, and bathhouse was warm in his fatherly aura. The same hair pulled back from the receeding hairline above the that great big nose, but with a gentle smile. "You inhaled half a burning tire and who knows what else. Holy shit, good for you, getting her out of there, but we need to make sure you're okay, too."
Sam couldn't really see much. Pretty sure that's a ... color? Bow suspender button. I'm on the ground.
. . .
Sam woke up feeling a lot more awake. Sitting up really fast, her elbow hurt where it dug into the pavement. Shouting because how she was waking up in the middle of the street would be very appropriate, and she didn't do that, though she did note she had a light coat draped over her. She started pulling herself to her feet, feeling at her clothes, ready to get the fuck out of there. Then she saw the woman. Her face was absurdly familiar. Light blonde hair. Wrinkles. Not old, but older. Sam's noise was making the woman stir.
Her eyes opened and betrayed a confusion that made Sam ache.
"What?"
Nothing more was coming. She was even slower to try and get up than Sam had been however long ago with the help of random whatshisname.
A status alert popped up.
SMOKER'S LUNG (17 MIN)
With that, Sam commenced choking out a lung. As her eyes bugged out and she clung to the hood of whoever the hell's volkswagen, she didn't have much choice but to focus on the woman's face. It was the woman Sam had pulled out of the overturned, burning pickup truck. The one that had given Sam SMOKER'S LUNG (16 MIN). More important, she saw the bar above the woman's head. It was a little more than half full yellow, with the remainder black. As Sam watched, the bar's yellow portion decreased and turned orange.
Sam's jaw dropped in confusion.
"What? A he. A health bar?"
Coughing and looking around, Sam realized everyone now sported a convenient notification of their relative proximity with death. Looking over her own head, she saw nothing. Another coughing fit staggered her and slumped her on the hood of the VW. It was a station wagon. Good choice.
Closing her eyes and splaying her hands on the hood of the sensible sedan, Sam steadied herself. That's when she saw the HUD.
"Jesus Hopscotching Christ, I'm going insane."
She must have hit her head. The smoke was laced with LSD. She was never autistic, just insane. Something. Because now she had a fucking health bar, a mini-map, a compass, and a chat box?!
No. Absolutely not. No. Nope. No way. This is not a thing to think about. I'm not Samus Aran. I'm not Link. Shit Jesus fuck no.
Sam focused on the only thing she could think of that mattered. The woman, once again unconscous, had fallen on her side and her health bar was in the red. Sam pulled her away from the car to lay her on her back and started yelling for help. Would it be nice to think that, in all that confusion, anyone noticed?
Tuesday, March 12, 2024
Earth : New Game Plus - Chapter 1
A harsh wall of sound forced Samantha out of bed. It was the fourth time it had happened this morning and she fucking hated it.
She kept her alarm clock set between stations because radio stations suck. They're stupid and they suck and the DJs suck and the music is only okay and incredibly repetitive and Jesus Christ the commercials and her alarm clock tended to slip between stations anyway and non-existent god help her if it landed on a Christian radio station. The XGXHXBBGBXHBB of the not-stations was better than all of that. Mornings suck.
Know what would be better? Sleeping until you woke up.
Still, she hit OFF instead of SNOOZE and mumbled her way into the bathroom to get ready to earn another day's worth of not dying.
There was a mirror. She didn't bother. Shower. Shower then food. Shower then food then work.
Shower happened. She washed the important bits, then dried the bits. She dragged a brush through her hair. Stupid goddamn hair. Girls have to have hair. The mirror showed her the linen cabinet behind her where she kept her dog grooming kit. She could just shave it all off. No more shampooing and combing and drying and "Are you sick?" when she didn't put in enough effort. But, no, she worked in sales. Samantha the sales girl at [REDACTED] couldn't move cameras and DVDs with no hair. Goddammit.
The least makeup she could get away with. Khakis. Blue polo. The most comfortable shoes she was allowed to wear. She got the lunch meat and cheese out of the fridge, slammed some bread in the toaster, and started breakfast. Then she pulled up the app for a ride. The driver showed up as she finished her sandwich, grabbed a diet cherry soda out of the fridge, and prepared to face another day of the opposite of Groos's definition of freedom: pointless busywork.
----
The Event happened while Samantha scrolled through her feed in the back of her rideshare. It disrupted all electrical and electronic systems, hitting the car with a double whammy. Fortunately, they weren't on the highway, yet. The car locked up, like most of the cars around them, slamming Sam and her driver into their seat belts. Others weren't so lucky. Some cars, and especially big pickups, just kept moving at speed. Without their power-steering or brakes, a lot of people got hurt.
The cacophany was immediate. With nothing else to do and no understanding of the situation, many leaned on their horns. Others tried their phones. Some, far more than you'd think, got out of their cars, made sure they were okay, then started checking on their fellow travelers.
The top of Sam's left breast got bruised by the seatbelt when her driver's car slammed to a stop and her sparking cellphone flew out of her hands onto the floormat. She bit her tongue as her head slammed forward and she started coughing and gagging as the sudden flex caused her throat to close. Her driver swore and held his right wrist.
Then there was silence as everyone got a notification.
RACE CHOSEN - DEFAULT - HUMAN
STATS ASSIGNED - DEFAULT
SKILLS ASSIGNED - DEFAULT
CLASS - LEVEL TOO LOW
The words hovered in front of Sam's eyes no matter where she looked, and faded after 21.6 seconds. Sam didn't time it. She just... knew.
Picking her phone up off the floor of the car, she didn't bother asking her driver any questions. With his swearing and stabbing at his own phone, he was as lost as she was. Looking around, Sam found herself caught in a logjam of stalled and crashed cars. She was at a loss for what to do.
Then she saw the smoke.
One of her neighbors had been trying to change lanes and the truck had gone up and over the rear corner of a sedan. What would have been a flip on the highway had, at low speeds, turned into a grinding slice as two oddly shaped pieces of metal tore themselves apart. The truck's fuel line got sliced before sparks lit the fuel and the truck slowly tipped over onto a car in the next lane over. Sam could hear screams through the shattered windshield of the pinned car.
Sam put one hand to her chest and the other to her mouth. She shook her head as the words faded. She struggled with her seatbelt and got out of the car. An appreciable fraction of her fellow commuters were crowding the road, getting in her way. She had to get to the people in the car.
"Move! ¡Movíos! Fucking fuck!"
INTIMIDATE +1
The crowd cleared up as she shoved her way through. As she got close, the burning fuel, plastic, rubber, ... the burning car started to hit her. She tried to shield her face with the crook of her elbow as she got closer to the tangle of car and truck. The car had only had the driver in it, who had opened the door and scrambled clear, screaming. The pickup's driver was still inside, weakly pawing at her seatbelt as the smoke choked her.
Sam jumped on the hood of the car, then the roof, then pulled herself on the canted sided of the truck's cab. Of course the door was locked. She slid back down to the sedan, then the street and took stock.
"Anyone! Anyone! Hey!" She yelled as loud as she could to get the crowd's attention. "I need a tire iron! A baseball bat! Anything I can smash a window in with! Now!" The crowd stared. "NOW!" A few people started moving.
In a minute, some guy handed her a tire iron. She grabbed the L-shaped prybar and jumped back up on the sedan. Instead of attacking the cracked glass at the bottom of the truck's cab, where the driver had lost consciousness, she started slamming at the windshield at the passenger's end of the cab. The crowd started muttering, then yelling, as she cracked through the outer layer of glass, but when she took the sharp end of the tire iron and stabbed through the inner layer, enough people understood that the crowd quieted down. Smoke poured out of the hole Sam had made.
INTELLIGENCE +1
IMPROVISED TOOL USE +1
She shook her head, trying pointlessly to clear the words, and stabbed the tire iron through the hole, then gave it a proper highschool swirly to widen the hole. Then she jammed the prybar end of the jack into the edge of the skyward edge of the windshield and started levering it out. One of her fellow travelers grasped what she was doing and shouted an explanation to the others. Within minutes a few more tire irons were in the hands of volunteers standing on top of the car fire, prying the cab open to save the woman inside.
CHARISMA +1
Sam stumbled from the truck to the sedan, then collapsed on the pavement afterthe glass finally tore free. She coughed until she thought she might hack up a long.
CONSTITUION +1
TEMPORARY CONDITION : SMOKER'S LUNG (1 HOUR)
A few people dragged Sam and the pickup's driver clear of the fire, urging people to get far in case the gas tanks exploded. Others started spreading out, looking for more trapped people. Someone offered Sam a bottle of lukewarm water. She gratefully rinsed, spat, then took a swallow. Her anonymous benefactor moved on to the barely sensible driver of the truck, gently lifting her head and giving her sips.
CHARISMA +1
YOU HAVE LEARNED : SKILL : MOTIVATION
Sam had no clue what the fuck was happening.
Judging by the sirens and plumes of smoke, neither did anyone else.
YOU HAVE UNLOCKED THE MECHANIC JOB. WOULD YOU LIKE TO TAKE THE MECHANIC JOB? YES/NO
Sam was glad there were other people around to pull her away from the burning cars, because she had no idea what the hell was going on and she really wanted to go back to bed. Yeah. That's a good idea.
Her chest hurt.
YOU HAVE PASSED OUT
She kept her alarm clock set between stations because radio stations suck. They're stupid and they suck and the DJs suck and the music is only okay and incredibly repetitive and Jesus Christ the commercials and her alarm clock tended to slip between stations anyway and non-existent god help her if it landed on a Christian radio station. The XGXHXBBGBXHBB of the not-stations was better than all of that. Mornings suck.
Know what would be better? Sleeping until you woke up.
Still, she hit OFF instead of SNOOZE and mumbled her way into the bathroom to get ready to earn another day's worth of not dying.
There was a mirror. She didn't bother. Shower. Shower then food. Shower then food then work.
Shower happened. She washed the important bits, then dried the bits. She dragged a brush through her hair. Stupid goddamn hair. Girls have to have hair. The mirror showed her the linen cabinet behind her where she kept her dog grooming kit. She could just shave it all off. No more shampooing and combing and drying and "Are you sick?" when she didn't put in enough effort. But, no, she worked in sales. Samantha the sales girl at [REDACTED] couldn't move cameras and DVDs with no hair. Goddammit.
The least makeup she could get away with. Khakis. Blue polo. The most comfortable shoes she was allowed to wear. She got the lunch meat and cheese out of the fridge, slammed some bread in the toaster, and started breakfast. Then she pulled up the app for a ride. The driver showed up as she finished her sandwich, grabbed a diet cherry soda out of the fridge, and prepared to face another day of the opposite of Groos's definition of freedom: pointless busywork.
----
The Event happened while Samantha scrolled through her feed in the back of her rideshare. It disrupted all electrical and electronic systems, hitting the car with a double whammy. Fortunately, they weren't on the highway, yet. The car locked up, like most of the cars around them, slamming Sam and her driver into their seat belts. Others weren't so lucky. Some cars, and especially big pickups, just kept moving at speed. Without their power-steering or brakes, a lot of people got hurt.
The cacophany was immediate. With nothing else to do and no understanding of the situation, many leaned on their horns. Others tried their phones. Some, far more than you'd think, got out of their cars, made sure they were okay, then started checking on their fellow travelers.
The top of Sam's left breast got bruised by the seatbelt when her driver's car slammed to a stop and her sparking cellphone flew out of her hands onto the floormat. She bit her tongue as her head slammed forward and she started coughing and gagging as the sudden flex caused her throat to close. Her driver swore and held his right wrist.
Then there was silence as everyone got a notification.
RACE CHOSEN - DEFAULT - HUMAN
STATS ASSIGNED - DEFAULT
SKILLS ASSIGNED - DEFAULT
CLASS - LEVEL TOO LOW
The words hovered in front of Sam's eyes no matter where she looked, and faded after 21.6 seconds. Sam didn't time it. She just... knew.
Picking her phone up off the floor of the car, she didn't bother asking her driver any questions. With his swearing and stabbing at his own phone, he was as lost as she was. Looking around, Sam found herself caught in a logjam of stalled and crashed cars. She was at a loss for what to do.
Then she saw the smoke.
One of her neighbors had been trying to change lanes and the truck had gone up and over the rear corner of a sedan. What would have been a flip on the highway had, at low speeds, turned into a grinding slice as two oddly shaped pieces of metal tore themselves apart. The truck's fuel line got sliced before sparks lit the fuel and the truck slowly tipped over onto a car in the next lane over. Sam could hear screams through the shattered windshield of the pinned car.
Sam put one hand to her chest and the other to her mouth. She shook her head as the words faded. She struggled with her seatbelt and got out of the car. An appreciable fraction of her fellow commuters were crowding the road, getting in her way. She had to get to the people in the car.
"Move! ¡Movíos! Fucking fuck!"
INTIMIDATE +1
The crowd cleared up as she shoved her way through. As she got close, the burning fuel, plastic, rubber, ... the burning car started to hit her. She tried to shield her face with the crook of her elbow as she got closer to the tangle of car and truck. The car had only had the driver in it, who had opened the door and scrambled clear, screaming. The pickup's driver was still inside, weakly pawing at her seatbelt as the smoke choked her.
Sam jumped on the hood of the car, then the roof, then pulled herself on the canted sided of the truck's cab. Of course the door was locked. She slid back down to the sedan, then the street and took stock.
"Anyone! Anyone! Hey!" She yelled as loud as she could to get the crowd's attention. "I need a tire iron! A baseball bat! Anything I can smash a window in with! Now!" The crowd stared. "NOW!" A few people started moving.
In a minute, some guy handed her a tire iron. She grabbed the L-shaped prybar and jumped back up on the sedan. Instead of attacking the cracked glass at the bottom of the truck's cab, where the driver had lost consciousness, she started slamming at the windshield at the passenger's end of the cab. The crowd started muttering, then yelling, as she cracked through the outer layer of glass, but when she took the sharp end of the tire iron and stabbed through the inner layer, enough people understood that the crowd quieted down. Smoke poured out of the hole Sam had made.
INTELLIGENCE +1
IMPROVISED TOOL USE +1
She shook her head, trying pointlessly to clear the words, and stabbed the tire iron through the hole, then gave it a proper highschool swirly to widen the hole. Then she jammed the prybar end of the jack into the edge of the skyward edge of the windshield and started levering it out. One of her fellow travelers grasped what she was doing and shouted an explanation to the others. Within minutes a few more tire irons were in the hands of volunteers standing on top of the car fire, prying the cab open to save the woman inside.
CHARISMA +1
Sam stumbled from the truck to the sedan, then collapsed on the pavement afterthe glass finally tore free. She coughed until she thought she might hack up a long.
CONSTITUION +1
TEMPORARY CONDITION : SMOKER'S LUNG (1 HOUR)
A few people dragged Sam and the pickup's driver clear of the fire, urging people to get far in case the gas tanks exploded. Others started spreading out, looking for more trapped people. Someone offered Sam a bottle of lukewarm water. She gratefully rinsed, spat, then took a swallow. Her anonymous benefactor moved on to the barely sensible driver of the truck, gently lifting her head and giving her sips.
CHARISMA +1
YOU HAVE LEARNED : SKILL : MOTIVATION
Sam had no clue what the fuck was happening.
Judging by the sirens and plumes of smoke, neither did anyone else.
YOU HAVE UNLOCKED THE MECHANIC JOB. WOULD YOU LIKE TO TAKE THE MECHANIC JOB? YES/NO
Sam was glad there were other people around to pull her away from the burning cars, because she had no idea what the hell was going on and she really wanted to go back to bed. Yeah. That's a good idea.
Her chest hurt.
YOU HAVE PASSED OUT
Earth : New Game Plus - Prologue
Some years later, when everything had settled down, the nerds who were good at that sort of thing managed to get the computers working again and reconnected with the surviving satellites. The data above and the data below confirmed that the Event swept from, roughly, galactic west to galactic east. The change in physics shut down most electric and electronic systems, at least temporarily, and the exceptional clocks on the satellites (necessitated by pre-Event physics) meant that the equipment that survived and could be re-awakened afterward provided an excellent timetable. Whatever the Event was, it moved through the solar system at the speed of light and it changed all of our lives.
Did it change our lives for the better or the worse? That depends on which side of the coin you were on before it happened. Also, it depends on whether you survived.
Did it change our lives for the better or the worse? That depends on which side of the coin you were on before it happened. Also, it depends on whether you survived.
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