Before they headed to rest, Adam and Megan were finally alone after their exhausting first day at the camp.
Adam offered to hit the shower together, which she didn't think much of, but he was still able to surprise her.
"We have water and the method to heat it," he said, disassembling the blazer welder from his workbench as he followed her upstairs in the command center building.
"How come?" she asked, wide-eyed, with surprise painted all over her face.
"The Refinery Rig produces a lot of byproduct water, to the point where we have eight large containers just filled with water, one of which is installed above this building."
"That's so damn cool!" Megan couldn't stop marveling at the amount of work the Wartopians achieved in mere days, even though the upper floor was still incomplete.
"And we use blazer beams to heat the water. See this welder? I simply take off that crystal part and flip it, and instead of welding, it emits wide-range blazer beams that microwave water... I think," he said, showing off his new toy.
"Sci-fi stuff is cool, I admit it," she said as she looked around the second floor.
"What sci-fi? I made every part of this by hand," Adam said, and showed her to the bathroom.
"And when do I get my own blazer?" she asked as she checked the place inside.
"When Elena says so. She'll make you assemble them," Adam said with a tease.
"Hey, I'm the BIT Bio-robotics postgraduate here, not the guy who picked up electronics, philosophy, and world history, and somehow graduated," she retorted playfully as she started taking off her clothes before stepping into the tub.
Adam watched with a smile, capturing every detail of her unclothed body, not that he hadn't seen it hundreds of times before. He also undressed and went in with her.
"Well, tell that to my level 9 Artifice skill," he said and went under the shower.
Megan frowned, paused, and turned to him.
"Motherfucker!" she said, looking at him with wide eyes, unable to believe him.
"What's wrong?" Adam looked back at her, covering his sensitive spots for his own safety, knowing how rough she could be when he was naked.
"The Artifice is quite common, but the highest I've seen any skill could reach was level 7," she explained before pointing the shower head at herself.
"Alright... I am a good techie, everybody knows that," Adam said with a shrug before making sure that he was clean enough to clog the drain to fill the tub with water.
As the two sat together, they spoke of other things, lit up candles, and each took one end of the tub.
"So, Artifice? You know more of it than I do?" Adam asked, returning to the topic of skills.
"I do. We researched skills for a month; then Professor Hendrick exchanged some knowledge with his Alien friends, and he shared their summary with me," Megan said, revealing something grand to Adam.
"Alright." He leaned forward, ready to listen.
"So those Alfari, some sort of alien elves or something—you've met them," she started.
"Yeah, they look the part." Adam nodded.
"Well, lucky you! They told the professor that they, too, have something like the System, but they look at it differently. Since their world was overtaken by monsters and they escaped into the Rifts, they learned the ways of the System in the world of the Rift."
"Fuck!" Adam exclaimed, then asked, "Is that like Hyperspace in Wartopia?"
"No, it sounded totally different." Megan shook her head. "Rifts are portals that lead to... well... even the professor couldn't understand it right. So let's call them... Dimensions? Pocket Realities?"
Megan seemed unsure, so Adam assisted:
"Let's stick with Geek terms: Dungeons."
"Okay. Dungeons, then." She found the word more familiar to her. "Well, they say the System has its Ways that appear to them through some rituals and tell them of their powers and abilities."
"Like bone casting and water divination?" he asked.
"No idea; I didn't have time to ask for details about aliens." She shrugged, but still thought for a while. "Well, they have their own way; we have our system, classes, and skills."
"I like ours better." Adam shrugged.
"Their system divides them into three major ways: the Champion, the Hunter, and the Mystic," she said.
"Oh! Like our Classes: the Warrior, the Thief, and the Sorcerer," Adam pointed.
"Yep, and their stats are identical to ours: Might, Trick, and Spirit. Naturally, each corresponds with one of the Classes. But they also said that there are links between skills and stats, like every skill benefits from a certain stat."
"Okay. I see where this is going." Adam nodded to himself. "This goes along with most of the RPGs that we know."
"I know. The professor and I had that same thought." She agreed, pushing her feet at him, which he understood meant she wanted them rubbed, and he did so instinctively as she continued. "Then there are skills. They say they know of 19 skills in total, which is strange, since the same skill can have more than one name depending on the application."
"So how do we know which is which?" he asked.
"We don't, if you think about it. My money is that some of these skills evolve and overlap somehow. "Either way, each of the three stats has four skills related to it. Might have Athletics, Melee weapons, Toughness, and Warfare. Athletics is personal strength, Toughness is endurance, Warfare has something to do with strategies."
"Melee weapons, though…" Adam remarked with a frown. "I always thought it was weird to have a Firearms-specific skill."
"Yes, me too," she said, enjoying the massage he was applying to her feet. "But Firearms is part of the Ranged weapon skill under the Trick stats, along with Artifice, Handling, and Stealth."
"Hmm... So the skills can go broad, but they do specialize, like in Firearms, right?" he asked.
"Yep."
"So why isn't my Artifice skill specialized? Shouldn't it have been Electronics by now, or something?" Adam asked, no longer confident in his abilities as before.
"I think it is because you do much more than simply electronics, Addie. You're good with your hands," she said with a wink.
"Oh yeah?" He smiled, reading the subtle lewd meaning in her words.
Megan ignored his hands that were sliding up her thighs for a while, though a smile cracked on her face as she held his hands away.
"Yeah. Electronics, minis, drawing, coloring, using small tools." She counted the things he was good at.
"And that other thing." He added.
She bit her lower lip playfully, as if he was stating the obvious, but seeing as she seemed to be trying to gloss over it, he jumped over her and started tickling her all over. The two tussled in the water for a while, and she ended up overpowering him.
They romanced for some time and ended up on the same side of the tub before spiraling back to the conversation about skills.
"So a skill can be comprehensive, depending on more than just one action. Handling is like driving, riding bikes, horses, and such. This will make leveling up a skill that encompasses more than one harder than it should be," Adam concluded.
"More or less, I guess." She agreed, but it was a speculation. "Professor Hendrick thinks that since the Artifice skills appeared frequently among every awakener so far, it could be related to the fact that we used a lot of electronics back in the day."
Adam thought for a while and couldn't help but agree.
"What about the Spirit stat skills?" Adam asked. "I have Charisma, Psyche, Sanity, and Senses."
"Damn! That's the whole damn rooster." Megan was taken aback. "So that's why you are a Sorcerer. Not just because you hadn't had sex for six months."
"Probably." Adam agreed before laughing.
"Well, I assume you figured those out by now," she said.
"Yes, Charisma is for looks; your boy here didn't get himself this kind of catch out of nothing," he said while hugging her closely. "Psyche is intelligence in an RPG sense, along with Rune power output. Sanity is endurance. The two of them are like Athletics and Toughness for the Might stat. Finally, Senses are about passive and supernatural perception."
"Such a good boy!" Megan was pleased that Adam figured all that out on his own. "But if you think about it, Charisma is always important for summoners in an RPG sense: Warlocks, Paladins, and all that."
"Now that you mention it, I really had a high Charisma level when I started," Adam added.
"Makes sense. You are the only Sorcerer I know," she said, putting two and two together.
"Wait! What?" Adam turned to her, a bit perplexed. "The only Sorcerer?"
"Yes, I haven't told the Professor that you are a Sorcerer, though. In the shelter, only Candice and I were Thieves; the rest were Warriors. The aliens told the Professor that there are a few Sorcerers compared to Thieves, and fewer Thieves compared to Warriors."
"So I am the rare class."
"Don't get all cocky!"
"I ain't, just saying."
She gave him the side look ( ¬_¬) as he wasn't wiping the smug look (¬ᴗ ¬ ) off his face.
"What about the Chef skill?" he remembered another topic, regarding a skill that didn't follow the previous pattern.
[A.n: Changed Cook to Chef]
"We covered twelve skills; then there are seven left. The aliens call them the Lesser Ways. Seven skills that serve as a caste system in their society. From the lowest, there are the Servant, the Grower, the Brewer, the Merchant, the Mason, the Healer, and the Sage. You're Chef skill is probably derived from the Brewer skill."
"I see. But hierarchy, huh?" Adam asked, feeling something distasteful.
"Just like our world. Hard workers at the bottom, the middle class is narrow, and the top gets rarer and rarer," she said with a bit of disdain for a world that was long gone.
"Easy there, Karly Marx. The Colonel hears you saying that, he'd have you repent in a Titans' jersey for an entire weekend," Adam smirked.
"Oh, yeah. Go Titans!" Megan laughed and turned to him. "Remind me of that first time I took you to see Dad, how you said it?"
"Oh!" Adam remembered a memory from six years ago. "Go Titans... and Jeeeeeeesus Christ!"
Megan laughed until tears came out, coughed a few times, and spoke after she calmed down.
"He almost liked you that day," she said, and made a tiny gesture with her hand. "Almost! You just had to sweat like a little bitch when he told you to come blast some pigeons."
"I'm pretty sure he hated me for the bong he found in your car," Adam retorted.
"That..."
"And I never knew there was a thing called clay pigeons. I never harmed a soul when I was 19."
As the banter continued, Adam and Megan started to drift to other topics, having the night for themselves.
✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧
A few thousand miles to the south, a middle-aged man stood in the night, clean-shaven, grim-faced, short-haired, braving the sea air all by himself. As he looked to the east, a mighty vessel floated firmly over the rough waves.
"Colonel Dorsett, Sir,"
Behind him, a younger man in a black suit approached him with a respectful pose, but did not give a military salute befitting the middle-aged man's rank.
"Agent Thomson," the Colonel turned to the man, his hands behind his back, not exchanging any formal greeting beyond names. "Does the President have any need of me?"
"Negative, Sir. Rather, he told me to relay news to you from Massachusetts." The Secret Service Agent took a step forward and presented his handheld tablet with satellite images. "Our contact from the California Federation sent us news from their operation center. An energy signature that belongs to a Rift, designated with code name 0X033MA, has disappeared from satellite readings."
"That's... Brighthaven." The Colonel frowned as he saw the map, as a couple of before-and-after images were shown to him with timestamps.
"The President thinks that someone over there has figured out a method to close Rifts, but we have no one in Brighthaven," the Agent said.
"So he wants to go himself?" The Colonel's frown only grew as he faced Agent Thomson with clear annoyance. "Tell the President the base is his responsibility as the Commander-in-Chief. He can give such an order, but I wouldn't be able to keep the men in control if we were to lose morale while traveling with the whole of Yorktown on my back."
"I understand, sir." The Agent nodded, but couldn't help but look past the Colonel, his heavy mood speaking for his silence.
"What is it, Garry?" Colonel Dorsett asked the secret agent, sensing that his state of mind was dire.
"It's..." Agent Thomson shook his head, then let out a sigh he had been holding the whole day. "Those people in California, sir. They could've just joined us with the Texas National Guard. Instead... we're in this situation where we're barely getting by."
"They rebelled against the Constitution of the United States of America, refused to follow our President in the nation's hour of great need, and elected their own president," Colonel Dorsett said dismissively. "No good would come of them, and since they have more military personnel than we do, I doubt they'll come around."
"But President Wilde is a Designated Survivor and a Senator from California. If we could meet up with their President..." The Agent tried to plead with the Colonel.
"We'll end up shot." Colonel Dorsett cut him off. "Your contacts confirmed it; they never announced that there was a living President to even raise morale among the refugees. All they do is parade their Barbie President all day long."
The Secret Service Agent tilted his head once, somewhat agreeing.
"Barbara Roberts is indeed popular," he said.
"But there is someone behind her. I know it." The Colonel scowled, his frown like that of an animal picking up on a hostile scent. "We'll need a few weeks before we get moving, Agent Thomson. If there is anyone who would want to be in Brighthaven, it is me."
The Agent nodded, no longer able to argue with the headstrong Colonel, the de facto leader of the last legal bastion for the US constitutional power, Yorktown. He said he'd relay his words to the President and went off.
The Colonel turned to face his vessel in the sea, trying to maintain a positive mentality.
He touched the top pocket of his military uniform to feel the object inside, then dipped his fingers inside and fished it out.
In the faint light of the nearby fire barrel, the Colonel opened the picture of eleven individuals all cuddled together to fit in the frame. All smiling, all happy.
He touched every face in the picture with his thumb, save for his own and one other. He smiled, and despite it being one of the pictures he didn't want to keep back in the day, he tucked it back in his pocket.
A lone man bearing the corpse of fallen hope.
✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧
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