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Currently I have so many ideas for new stories and directions I want my old stories to go, but I don't have enough time to write them all down. Even a buck will help so please help me out with anything you can. That way I can spend some more time bringing a little more joy to both of our lives.
I lost the first game rather quickly as I hadn't played chess in three dimensions before but I refused to let that get to me as I doubled down for another game. This time the game lasted much longer and ended in a stalemate. My opponent and I didn't let that get to us and played a third game for a tie breaker, which I ended up winning in 15 moves. Once I won my opponent stood up, gave me a polite nod and gathered his remaining chips before walking away.
That was certainly a very composed way of being a sore loser, the equivalent of storming off after flipping the board. I just stared in surprise as he left, I hadn't realized we were done playing. But I didn't let it get to me and shrugged, while it was fun and I would have liked to play one or two more games there were plenty of other games to play. So I moved onto the next game, this one fit a little better with the whole casino theme, Poker, specifically Five Card Draw.
It only took me a couple minutes to clean up at the table and after 7 rounds I had tripled my chips. It was a little difficult to get a read on some of their tells as a couple of them were not human and one of them was even a robot.
But after a couple rounds I picked up their habits and deduced the algorithm the robot was using to play. After that I started to stack up more and more chips, but eventually I got bored before moving on to something that could keep me more engaged. That was pretty much the pattern for the foreseeable future, I would find a game, learn the rules if I didn't already know them, then play a couple practice rounds, before sweeping through the competition.
In any other casino I would have been accused of cheating before being thrown out or worse, and technically I did count cards but that's as far as I went. The rest was thanks to my enhanced brain. I wasn't sure how long I stayed in the casino, time here blended together, going from one game to the next, but eventually I ran out of games that didn't turn my stomach. Even with the past year learning all the skills I did I was still a little squeamish so I delayed participating in those ones for as long as I could.
But if I wanted to get the best prize I needed to play all the games, even the more brutal ones. So after pulling the lever on the slot machine one last time and collecting my fifth batch of winnings in a row I walked over to try russian roulette as my first step into the deep end. The next few minutes were full of tension for everyone but me, thanks to my enhanced brain I was able to track which slot the bullet was in after each spin.
And after five minutes I was the last one standing. I knew in my head that this wasn't real and everything but man that still sucked. Watching people get shot at "random" was not fun, so after the round was over I quickly moved onto the next game. For the rest of my time in this casino instead of playing the games until I got bored or until my opponents left in frustration I would only win once before leaving each game.
Live Chess had nothing on 3-D chess, a boxing match is child's play even with the brass knuckles instead of gloves if you can predict your opponent's moves. Fighting in the arena was even easier, a lion may be way more dangerous than a person but it was also way easier to predict. Pick your poison was the only one that gave me a little trouble but I watched a couple matches before I stepped in to play myself.
Five grapes were placed under five cups, the middle one always started out with the poison, then the shuffler would shift the cups around as quickly as he could. Of course with the blatant cheating allowed here he switched out three of the safe grapes for poisoned ones, but since my vision was not blocked I had no problem choosing the safe only option. And after eating the grape I picked and not dropping dead after 30 seconds passed I won.
Next I think I'll try hangman, where I was both the guesser and the man being hanged. Time continued to pass and I must have been playing for days by now, I wasn't sure because there were no clocks, just a couple of timers for certain games and most of those didn't even work correctly. I had started to become a little numb about all the violence, I think it was the realistic Pokemon battle I had to do that did me in.
Kind of ruined my childhood with that one, but I only had a couple of games left. I really didn't want to do either of them, their version of operation made me want to puke while the eating contest might actually force me to do so. I tried the operation one first as I would rather puke with an empty stomach, not one that has been stuffed full. The game basically had me perform an operation on a patient and keep them alive for as long as possible while you slowly took them apart piece by piece.
It was played with a group of 10 people, and to start the game a card would be drawn by the host. On the card there was a picture of the body part we had to remove, and everything was on the table, so some games took forever while others were really short. After all, removing a brain killed your patient 100% of the time, it just took a while if you removed the right pieces first. I wasn't the last one to join so I had to wait a few minutes for a couple more people to gather.
Eventually we had enough people that the game could begin. Unfortunately it was a long one. But I won in the end, my patient was missing half their organs and ¾ of their flesh, but I won and I wouldn't have to try again. Of course after exiting the room I immediately found the nearest trash can and started hurling. Nothing but bile came out as I hadn't eaten in a while but I still spent the next few minutes filling up the trash can anyway.
Once I got my stomach under control again I stopped leaning on the trashcan and stood back up before wiping my mouth. Before heading to the eating competition, and it wasn't hot dogs or hamburgers, I had participated in one of those a while ago. Instead we had rounds where we had to eat a live cockroach of a jelly donut filled with grease, stuff that would make you hurl due to quantity but by just how gross it was.
Half an hour later I was back leaning over the trash can and I was so done with this. I played every game in this madhouse at least once and built up quite a lot of chips. Now I could finally leave and not have to worry about not getting a good score. Walking up to the same counter I used when I first arrived I started to dump the chips I was carrying around in my bottomless pockets one handful at a time.
It was something I had noticed after my third game, I guess you were more likely to take a chance if you didn't know how many chips you had left. But I got quite the shock when I put my hands in my pocket and couldn't feel the bottom. It must have been a strange sight to see me standing there in the center of the casino with my arms disappearing into my pockets up to my shoulders. But it was all worth it when I saw the man behind the counter's eyes widen as the pile of chips just kept growing.
After about ten minutes and with most of the chips having fallen to the floor I placed my last handful onto the counter and felt the world around me start to dissolve. I sighed in relief, it was finally over, now I could go home and try to forget this ever happened. Not that my perfect memory would let me, but at least let me fantasize. Sitting up in bed I panted a few times before looking down at my hand to see what I had won.
I couldn't help gasp that escaped my mouth when I saw the devil fruit sitting in the palm of my hand. It looked like it may have been a cantaloupe once but now it had a squarish shape, and the color was only slightly off; it was more brown than green. There were also strange symbols scattered around it, they almost looked like veins the way they crawled along the surface.
Shaking my head I was a little disappointed that I couldn't tell what kind of fruit it was just by looking at it. Of course I knew that there were no weak devil fruits, only uncreative people but still, it would have been cool to see one of the more famous fruits like the gum gum or ope ope fruits. Even the flare flare would be cool to see, not one that I would eat personally, I would more likely sell that one eventually but still, it was Ace's and Sabo's fruit. Need I say more?
But now I had a choice to make, I could gamble and eat the fruit myself or I could store it away to sell in the future. On one side I could get a really awesome power but I could also get something like the stink stink fruit. Doomed to forever smell like an outhouse. But if I sold it I could be giving away a mythical zoan or an insanely powerful paramecia. There was just no way to know what I would get. I also wasn't really excited about getting a logia as while they did come with some cool powers they also came with extra weaknesses unique to each fruit.
After staring at the fruit in my hand for a full minute I finally decided that with great risk comes great reward. So I lifted the fruit to my mouth and took a bite, then I immediately almost spit it back out. God they weren't kidding about the taste. It was like chewing a pile of cigarette butts that had been sitting inside a busy outhouse the hottest week on record. And the texture wasn't much better, I felt like I was chewing a ball of hair that was somehow also made of sand and grease at the same time.
But I powered through it all before swallowing and when it slid down my throat I could tell the moment it stopped being physical and fused into my body. I have no idea what actually happened to it but between one moment and the next it was no longer traveling down my throat. Not feeling any different I took another bite and forced myself to once more push past the disgust and swallow, only this time it did not dissipate.
That meant I only had to take one bite to receive the powers of the fruit, that allowed me to throw the rest of the fruit into the trash while resisting the urge to set it on fire to avenge my taste buds. But it also meant that it most likely was not a zoan, which kind of sucked, I was looking forward to being a better animagus. Even without mythical or ancient zoans they were still better than regular animagus transformations.
Plus now I had to figure out what kind of devil fruit it was, so I closed my eyes and concentrated to try and feel anything different about myself. After a couple of minutes of mediation I opened my eyes again and signed in relief, I couldn't force my body to elementalize. So there was a good chance I didn't have a logia fruit, but at the same time it also meant I would have a hard time figuring out which paramecia I had gotten.
They could literally do anything from making food to controlling souls and how they worked depended completely on the person using them. I think the best way to figure out which fruit I got would be to go through all the fruits I remembered from my old life and see if I got lucky. If not, it could take a lot longer to figure out what my new powers were, as in months if not years, they could literally be anything.
But I started going through the powers anyway, one by one. I couldn't separate my body parts like Buggy, I couldn't control strings like Dolflamingo, and I couldn't animate inanimate objects like Big Mom. On and on it went as I tried out every fruit I could remember, I didn't really realize before this but there were way more paramecia fruits than any other type. I mean there were probably countless artificial zoans on Kidao's crew but those didn't really count.
But after going through about half of the list I accidentally stumbled into my fruit, the Buku Buku No Mi, or the book book fruit. I was standing in my living room holding onto a fantasy book thinking of taking a walk inside that world when I suddenly found myself in a giant chamber filled with gold. The change in scenery was so surprising that I lost my concentration and found myself back in my living room holding that same book.
My jaw dropped and sweat slid down the back of my neck, I recognized where I had appeared the instant it happened, Smaug's hoard. It was so real that I could hear the gold shifting behind me and the air becoming warm. It was actually a good thing I lost my concentration because if not I might have ended up as dragon shit. And I didn't want to find out the hard way just how real the world inside the book could be.
My fruit wasn't very well known in the series, it is used by one of Big mom's sons, Charlotte Mont-d'Or. But even if it wasn't well known I was ecstatic to receive it, as while the original user kind of wasted its potential I had a ton of ideas on how to use it better. The only move worth stealing from the original user was the World of Books but even then it could be improved. He kind of used his fruit as a hammer instead of a scalpel.
Anyway, now that I knew what my fruit was I could get started right away on trying to control it. Right now even entering the world of the Hobbit really took it out of me. I didn't feel like I was going to collapse or anything but judging from the growl my stomach just produced I needed food and a lot of it. So today I started with a large breakfast before moving onto my regular tasks only this time there was something extra to fit into my packed schedule, practicing my devil fruit abilities.
The first thing I experimented with was the difference between books I wrote and the ones I didn't. Thankfully I had already started on publishing books from my old world so I had something to work with. Good thing too, as it turns out the difference was quite large, books that I had written took much less energy to manipulate. Whether that was exploring the worlds inside them or simply using them as a blunt weapon.
I was hesitant to try any of my ideas, at least until I had a better idea on my limits. I was well aware of the side effects that come from overusing your fruit and I wanted no part of that. While I was practicing I also noticed that the difference between stories that I had plagiarized completely were no different than the ones that I made a few changes to. They were just some things that I personally didn't agree with, like Hermione ending up with Ron, stuff like that.
But apparently it didn't matter that the ideas themselves weren't mine, because I wrote it then it was mine. Whatever, it works out for me. This way I could copy stories and gain power instead of needing to come up with completely new stories on my own. My enhanced mind may have been more efficient but that didn't add anything to my creative abilities. And while I may have been known to spin a story or two, it would have been much harder if I needed to make new stories instead of fishing from the pool of authors from my old world.
But once I got that test out of the way I tried practicing with the abilities I knew about from the past user. Using books as floating platforms was pretty fun and it was an interesting way to achieve flight. But I was lacking a little in the control department and ended up on my ass more often than I'd like to admit. As for World of Books? Well that was still an energy intensive move and I was only able to try a few times before I needed to take a break. It looked like trying my ideas would take a little longer but I was confident I would get there. How hard could it be?
The current advanced chapters are:
Millennium Ch1
Haven Ch1
Who is a Zoo? Ch1
God of Games Ch6
Breathe Ch1
Another Wayne Ch1
Salvation Ch1
Guide Ch1
Growth Ch1
I Wanted a Real Gamer System Ch6-8
Ark Ch2-5
A Real Gamer System Ch3-5
Tinker Ch1
Further Ch2
Puzzle Maker Ch3
A Thousand Words Ch1-2
Free Range Ch1