“I see a smile on your face, finally calm enough to face the situation?” David said with a smile mirroring my own.

“Yeah, I think so. What's going on exactly?”

“We are not entirely sure. Me and the other developers woke up about 7 days ago in this world. The world was stationary, so the number of days is a guesstimate on our part. Unity was screaming errors at us and it took about that time to get the world to a coherent state. In the same vein as you being Zena, we woke up as our characters…”

“You look like yourself and not Davinium… Wait… aren’t your characters canonically gods?”

“Yes… We are the gods of this world and as such we can appear as we see fit, and I thought you needed a friendly face when you woke up. Sure wished I had one instead of unity screaming at me.”

“Who is this Unity, and why do they scream at the gods?”

“Unity is the god of physics and handles the moment to moment state change of the world. Also known as the game engine.”

“That's Weird, to think that an unconscious tool has ascended to godhood.”

“Luckily it did not gain consciousness during the process and is as unfeeling as when it ran on our computers.”

“So there are 13 gods instead of the canonical 12?”

“No, there are 14. You have to include RNGesus. There might have been practically nothing random in the game, but that hasn't stopped players from praying to him.”

That last tidbit had me chuckling, though it came out as a short giggle. “Yeah, I have prayed to him a few times. So what now? I’m a princess and you’re a god. Where do we go from here?”

“Well, for starters, It seems that all canonical characters have been pulled into this. You were the first one, but there are a few others that have entered the canon. Most of them are one the far side of the world, but Jools is close enough that you can meet up today or tomorrow. I think you should do that and help each other with the current situation.”

“That sounds like a good idea, but aren’t you helping me now?”

“I am, but ultimately as a god, my situation is significantly different. Like, I’ll still be your friend and help however I can, but I had no issue with memories doubling up and multitasking is trivially easy. I see so much at once, and the perspective shift has been so huge that I have trouble understanding your situation.”

“What do you mean? How big of a difference can it be? You were a mortal before, so explaining it should be possible.”

“I would love to explain it, but the correct words simply do not exist and if they did, there are some concepts that I am now aware of that mortals simply cannot comprehend. I mean us gods can discuss it amongst ourselves, but to do so we have to use telepathy as english is simply insufficient. It took us a day to figure that one out. A very frustrating day…” With that he simply let out a deep sigh.

“I see, It hasn’t been easy for you either…” I said while leaning over and giving him a side hug. 

I put back the mirror in my inventory and we sat there in silence just watching the waterfall in the morning sun. 

Suddenly he rises up from the rock and pulls me into a proper hug which I return. Afterwards he looks apologetically at me and says “Sorry, but I have to go and manage the world. If you ever want to talk, just offer a prayer to Davinium the god of community and commerce and I will try to appear before you to talk, though if you are not alone I will probably use telepathy to speak with you. Also before I leave, if you head that way until you reach the road and then turn right and follow the road to the right you will get to Ulmsville. Book a room at the galavanting hare inn. They have the best beds in the town. Lara gave directions to the same place to Jools. So talk to you later.”

He smiles and then disappears like a fading multicolored smoke. He never pointed in any direction, but somehow conveyed exactly the way I needed to go. I simply sat back down on the rock and stared at the waterfall and feeling the mana coursing through my body. Deciding I should use some of the mana, I fired a mana bullet into the water, feeling the process and putting only a small amount of mana into it. It created a satisfying splash as if someone threw a fist sized rock into the water. This is different than it was as a game. Mana bullets were always a fixed size, but now I feel that I can put more into it. Zenas memories confirms that this was always the case, but she simply always ‘chose’ that size in the name of efficiency. That’s a bit weird given that I have made a lot of choices to increase power at the cost of efficiency. Reason for that is that Zena has so much more mana than other top tier characters. Nearly twice as much as the next ranking mage. This is the only reason Zena is viable in tournaments, though no victories yet. 

Deciding to test the difference, I fire off another bullet with twice the mana and get a splash that’s about twice as big. Though it is more like the fist sized rock moved twice as fast rather than the rock being twice the size. Some might complain that a rock moving twice as fast would have four times the energy, but whatever, it moved the square root of two times faster. Anyway it’s just the feeling it gives.

Spending some time testing the various spells leaving crates and destruction everywhere, who am I kidding, the only offensive spells Zena knows is mana bullet and some poison infliction spells, so the time is spent testing and getting used to moving about with magic. Mana shield, another basic spell available to all mana based characters, seems to have gotten better since I now can put more mana into it. In the game it was pretty useless as it only stopped a little bit of damage and you could not really have more than one at the time so it could not be spammed like mana bullets.

As the sun reached the zenith, I started the journey to Ulmsville.

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