It was several weeks later that Nova and her family, accompanied by Ingrid Astia, who’d taken a leave from her work at the daycare, headed to the capital, like her father had implied they might.

Their ostensible goal was to meet with Ingrid’s son, Jamil Astia, who happened to be an old friend of Aaron’s.

Nova was quite eager to see the capital. It felt like she was finally getting to know a larger world than just Saltwell, the city where her family had taken residence. She had of course read a few books about Altera and Edea, and listened to conversations that had given her snippets of knowledge, but this was far from enough. It would have been fine if she’d had access to the internet – she could have taught herself anything she wanted – but most of the features of her bracer had been promptly sealed once Marian had realized the thing’s full capabilities.

The Storm family, along with Ingrid, were all currently riding inside a minibus Aaron had conjured up from somewhere, which left more place for everybody to stretch their legs than a smaller vehicle. The thing, however, didn’t run like a minibus. It ran like a freaking race car juiced up on concentrated nitro. They zipped across the highway, the landscape on both sides fading into blurry colored lines, yet felt nary a bump as they weaved through the obstacle course the other drivers formed on the road, as if the minibus was equipped with inertial dampeners of some kind.Continue reading

“Nova!”

When Nova heard a voice calling her, she looked up from her book, and her gaze swept toward the door. Her father was there, waving to her with a bright smile on his face.

Aaron was usually the one who came to fetch her, at the end of the day. Since his working schedule was rather loose – rather, he just didn’t have a schedule at all and worked or not as he wished – he could free as much time as he wanted to take care of his children. Sometimes, when he was too busy tinkering with his inventions, it was Asad who came. More rarely, it was Marian, when she returned from whatever mission had taken her away from the city.

Once, it had even been a young woman wearing military fatigues who had come for her. At the time, Nova had been suspicious, alert to the possibility of a kidnapping attempt, and had directly run away through the room’s back door. The young woman had caught her fairly quickly, though. Afterwards, the soldier had introduced herself as one of Marian’s subordinates. Nova wouldn’t have trusted that story, either, but Ingrid Astia had vouched for her identity, all the while trying very hard to restrain her amusement at the whole situation. Nova had been rather embarrassed by this little incident – though no one could tell, since ‘blushing’ was included under the label ‘facial expressions’ – but Aaron and Marian had both praised her for her reaction, after they learned of it.Continue reading

Education in Altera started at around 6 or 7 years old. Before that, a vast majority of children were placed in public, well-funded, well-staffed, well-equipped daycares. The amount of money invested into these facilities was rather impressive. Nova could see that this country cared about its children. Despite her distrust for monarchies, which at their core supported systematic discrimination based on which family one was born in, she couldn’t help but admit that this, at least, was a good sign for the health of this nation.

Incidentally, since her mother had returned to work, being picked up in front of their house by a black car with tinted and bulletproof windows driven by a bald man who looked like some kind of special forces soldier, Nova had also been sent to the same daycare as her older siblings before her.

As for Ryner and Lynn, both of them had already started with school itself, so they now spent a bit less time together. It was a shame, Nova felt. She was never bored with Lynn around – although perhaps she should say that, sometimes, she wished she’d been a bit more bored – and while Ryner wasn’t as exuberant or talkative, he was still very good company. He always took good care of his siblings, and he was never impatient with them, something indeed quite impressive, with someone like Lynn as a sister.

Nova could remember considering the option to keep her emotional distance from her family, when she’d just arrived to this world, in order to not feel any grief when she had to leave them to take part in her trials.Continue reading

One year had already passed in the new life Nova had gained, and that year had truly been filled to the brim.

It was still much too early for anything like martial arts training or the like, of course, but she had at least managed to get a good grasp of the language. In fact, this particular challenge had been accomplished in approximately two months.

A perfect memory was as great a boon as Nova had hoped when she’d invested a good portion of her points into it, when she’d rolled her character sheet.

After learning Alteran, she’d gone over her recollection of her first days since her birth to see what she had missed at the time. Since she accurately remembered every single sound every single person she’d ever met had made in her presence, she could simply use her newfound knowledge to decipher their words now.Continue reading

Eyes still red with tears, her mother brought her away from the MRI room and down a long corridor.

As they walked, she couldn’t restrain her surprise at the utter lack of people in here. Hospitals in her old world were usually more frequented than this. How did the owner stay afloat, with so few patients to cheat out of their money?

Well, no matter.

She closed her eyes and looked inwardly. Within her own mind, her memories of her old life had all been sharpened to perfection. Now, she remembered every second and every moment she had spent on the world called ‘Earth’ just as sharply and clearly and precisely as she did those she was spending on this new world. Yet, those old memories felt clearly different from her new ones, as if there was an intangible barrier between the two, as if she was looking at them through a film projector or something. She had no doubt that this life was a continuation of her old one, that she was the same person in both, but there was also no way for her to mistake which of the two she now belonged to. The gap between them was almost palpable, as if it was saying ‘this ends here; this starts there; the two are separate and shall not meet’.Continue reading

Nova was lying down, peacefully asleep, on the bed of a medical scanner – Aaron would probably know the specific medical name for it, but Marian couldn’t be bothered to remember. She called it a Gen-Scan, like everyone else, and was done with it.

What she knew, was that if there was something wrong with her little girl, this machine would tell them.

With modern medicine to help her along, Marian had already recovered from giving birth to Nova, last night. She was up and about in the morning without any sequelae, though she wasn’t back at her best, just yet.

Now they needed to be sure that Nova was just as fine.Continue reading

Marian watched as the doctor – one of her husband’s colleagues, a woman terribly overqualified for such a simple thing as delivering a child, but they didn’t want to take any risks – hefted the baby in her arms.

Marian’s breathing was ragged from exhaustion, and her mind was foggy from the pain medication her IV fed into her bloodstream, but her happiness at her daughter’s birth overrode even that. There had been some complications during the pregnancy, and for a time, she and Aaron had even feared they might lose the child.

Now, however, everything seemed to have ended on a good note. Marian could see her daughter, a small clump of unruly black hair already crowning her head, wave her arms and legs, as if trying to escape the grasp of the doctor who held her. Aaron was at Marian’s side, holding onto her hand, and smiling at her with that warm smile she loved so much, and she felt her whole body relax.

Soon, however, she noticed something was wrong.Continue reading

Min-maxing.

In video games, the practice of maximizing qualities perceived as beneficial while hampering all the others, even at risk of a woefully unbalanced result. For example, to remove a character’s ability to speak or express emotions in order to snatch a few more compensatory skill points to invest in combat abilities.

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Min-maxing, was what he bet on.

In front of his disembodied gaze floated a tall status window, the likes of which he’d seen countless times before in video games. And as countless times before, he was poring over it with wholehearted devotion.Continue reading