Half-Measures: A Half-Giant's Adventures in the Ancient World (TTRPG/Pre-Cataclysm Marvel)

[asmodyne]

This story is dedicated to the countless hours of tabletop, playing 2e, then 3e, 3.5 and Pathfinder. Plenty of that time with friends around the table in campaigns, but a whole lot of hours just spent theory crafting, too.

You are all loved and missed.

It's also dedicated to the countless hours of joy pulp fantasy novels, comic books, and more recently LitRPGs have given me.

To those authors who were an inspiration, living or dead, I thank you.

Let's begin.

—

Gather 'round, children, as I tell you a tale of ages long past - of empire and ruin, of magics and ancient evils, and of desperation and daring. Gather 'round as I tell you the incredible story of one mother's love and obsession.

Our story begins at the center of the world, that place of myth and legend, of wonders fantastic and monsters dire. I speak, of course, of that Great Isle at the center of all things. I speak of Atlantis.

In the waning days of Atlantis, when one of its last great empires and cities was desperately holding on to its strength, there was an incredibly powerful sorceress. Her name and fame are great, and we may speak of her at another time, but for the time being the most important fact is that she had a son. In most circumstances this would be a momentous occasion, a time of great joy, but you see this was during the sunset of the empire, and the great families were desperate to hold on to their slowly dwindling power.

While there had been ebbs and flows of the magic and civilization of the nations of Atlantis over the years since it became the land at the center of all things, it was also true that the Isle was gradually decreasing in strength. One could see this even from how it had descended from its once lofty place in the heavens, holding back the forces of the heavens, to its current place as merely another continent in the great ocean.

In order to hold on to their slowly dwindling magic, the great families had incredibly high standards for their progeny - standards that even the most stringent of city states in our time would find extreme. If a child had not shown sign of their ancient magics by the time of their first year, or sooner in some cases, they would be cast into the sea.

It was into this time, and into one of these families that our mother gave birth to her child. As a great sorceress herself, she knew quickly that her son would not be showing that instinctive sign of their ancient magics, and by six months into his life, her fears were confirmed. In light of this, she gathered her belongings, made her excuses to her friends and family, and fled the Isle for the continent, ready to begin her search for a solution.

As I said earlier, the mother was a great and powerful sorceress, and so she enchanted her son into a deep and magical sleep, only waking him for brief periods of time as she searched across the lands for a cure. She knew that should he grow too much, his soul would grow used to the lack of magic, and she would no longer be able to save him. And so, as she traveled the world, delving into secret places and dealing with all manner of magics and beings, her son slept.

Centuries went by as she traveled on, trail after trail proving false, as she tried various rituals and magics upon her son, who was ever foremost in her mind, until she finally stumbled upon an ancient, hidden secret. Deep underground, nestled within the bones of the world, was a wellspring of unimaginable power. Should she manage to draw from it, it was possible that this would be the solution that she needed.

So she gathered her son and her belongings and made the long journey deep into the wilderness to find an entrance into the earth that would allow her to find her quarry. Eventually she was successful, and she performed one final ritual, immersing her child in the magics of the spring.

Sadly, she soon realized that while the process may prove fruitful, it would be hundreds of years before she would know - any sooner and her son would not survive the process. It was centuries of time spent waiting with her son, preparing for his awakening, and foraying out into the world for resources before our mother had to admit that her time was coming to an end, and she would not be there to see her son wake up from his enchanted sleep.

Not wishing for her bones to be what greeted her son on his awakening, she decided to spare him this pain, and, after hiding the spring with great magics, departed the cave for the last time.

Her ultimate fate is not the story I will be telling today, for it is a sad tale. Instead, our story continues as the son wakes up, many centuries later…

 

[asmodyne]

My first memories of my second life were muddled and disjointed. As a baby, my senses were hazy, and while I can perfectly recall the events, my hearing wasn't good enough to actually pick up the words. I know there was joy, then quickly concern, and sadness. Something was wrong, and I quickly determined that there was something wrong with me, specifically. I wouldn't find out what until much, much later, though I certainly felt fine at the time.

All I can recall is that we left the place we had been very quickly, and my mother seemed very sad. I can vaguely recall the salty smell of the sea, and then travel. Lots of travel, though I would often just find myself falling asleep and waking up in a completely different place, with my mother and different people examining me, and sometimes performing strange procedures. Everything looked very… classical, I think would be the most charitable way to put it. Lots of stone and glass, bright colors and loud noises. Nothing I could recognize as modern, which made me wonder if I was in the past, or in another world of some sort. I would eventually determine that it was both.

This pattern of behaviour - new people, new places, new procedures and experiments - seemed to go on for what felt like years and also no time at all. I began to suspect that my mother was somehow putting me to sleep and only waking me when necessary. As my senses improved, I eventually determined that that was precisely what was happening. Furthermore, my mother, and many of the people she brought me to, appeared to have magic.

That certainly seemed to confirm my hypothesis that this was either the past or a new world - magic didn't seem to exist on my first world, but we had enough tales and legends about it that I couldn't discount it having existed in the past. Besides, I didn't recognize any of the languages my mother and the people she met with were speaking, so either we were far enough in the past that none of the languages I had encountered in the many decades of my first life had been introduced yet, or we were not in a world where those languages existed. Unfortunately, it was still too early for me to start speaking, and between the many languages my mother used in communicating with people, and the fact that many of those conversations were, while most likely about me but not actually with me, it would be some time until I could actually ask those questions.

I think my mother was beginning to get desperate, as she began looking more harried, and the experiments were becoming… more invasive. It wasn't surgery exactly, for which I was grateful, as I wouldn't have liked my chances, but there was an aspect of ritual to things that began to get more esoteric, and the level of discomfort I experienced with things grew. I soon found myself feeling uncomfortable in my own skin, like my bones were too big for my body. This seemed to excite my mother briefly, before her disappointment returned and we were off to the next location.

At some point, I had become inured to the changes - at one point, my eyes itched something fierce, and through one of the longest periods of wakefulness I recall, months of recovery where I couldn't help but bawl and wail like - well, like the babe that I was, really. My mother just held and rocked and spoke to me softly. It was here that I began to learn two things - the language my mother spoke, and that she really, truly loved me.

After that experience things slowed down for some time. I think that my recovery period made my mother a bit cautious about pushing things too soon. I started to grow, and what I can only guess had to be another year passed before the next "procedure". This one burned like the dickens, like razor blades running through my veins, and that feeling of discomfort in my own skin returned.

I soon started to develop strange, glowing markings on my skin—lines and curves that vaguely reminded me of certain early runic or cuneiform characters. My mother was quite excited about this and began to teach me to read—although apparently, the lines on my body weren't used or weren't used anymore, it wasn't quite clear.

It was another half-year or so before she pushed for another procedure, and after that one, I started to notice that some people and objects or structures seemed to radiate light, almost like a heat mirage. Mother seemed particularly thrilled by that, though a follow-up examination seemed to bring her down once more as she still wasn't finding the result she was looking for. When I asked her, she told me not to worry, but I couldn't help but be concerned.

Eventually, it seemed we had exhausted almost all of our options. One day, around my third or fourth year of consciousness, my mother told me that we were going on a new trip, far away, and potentially for a long time. She packed our things, the entire contents of the house and all of her equipment somehow shrinking down into her bag once more, and we left.

We traveled for a few weeks. I was mostly carried during the day in a wrap on her chest or back. Eventually, we found ourselves outside a yawning cave mouth. We camped out under the stars that night, some sort of glowing wards around us protecting us from the elements and wild beasts. I remember looking at the stars as my mother told me she loved me as I fell asleep.

That was my last conscious thought before I slept for over a thousand years.

 

[asmodyne]

My sleep was a terrible, fitful, painful experience. There was a persistent itch just on the other side of pain, combined with a burning that seemed to go through more than just my body. It was difficult to describe.

It also seemed to go on forever. I remember dreaming of my mother's voice – it was a frequent occurrence at first but soon periods of silence seemed to stretch longer and longer between visits.

I think I knew something was happening when I could vaguely feel her approach, and her voice sounded sadder, bleaker than before. Even if the words didn't break through the haze of my sleep, it still felt like a goodbye. I was immensely saddened by this, partially because her visits were the only distraction from my rampant discomfort, but mainly because it meant either I was leaving, or she was. Since I wasn't in a position to go anywhere at this point, that meant either I was dying, or…

I tried not to think about the number of times I had been put into stasis, and how while that might mean that I was going to live long enough to see if this last procedure would finally fix whatever was so broken about me that meant my mother had had to leave behind her home and everything she knew to try to address it, it didn't necessarily mean that she would live to see it, too.

Unfortunately, I wasn't in a position to say or do anything to stop her from leaving, nor was I sure that she should. Maybe she had finally decided that she simply couldn't wait anymore, and decided to go live her life. I couldn't actually fault her for that, either. I had no idea how long we had traveled for, nor how long I had already been here, but I could guess that it was significantly more than my three or four years of experience.

Eventually, after what felt like eons, I found myself slowly coming to awareness once more. I could immediately tell that something was certainly different, as I opened my eyes to a raging torrent of colors and sensations completely alien to my previous understanding. Forget about the vague auras around people and things I had felt before, I was now bombarded by these colors and fields, like everything was a floodlight pointed directly at my face. The pool I found myself suspended over was the worst of it, painfully bright and loud. I found myself curling up and whimpering as I hovered - HOVERED - over the pool of light, then slowly felt myself drifting over to the edge. I could feel something pulling at me with a sense that wasn't quite proprioception but was close.

Once I landed I curled up once more, just trying to block out the new sights and sensations. It was significantly too much. I'm not sure how many hours it took me to settle down and filter the input to a more manageable level, but eventually I was able to raise my head and squint around. I was in some sort of cavern, but while the distant ceiling looked like the sort of rough unfinished stone one would expect, the walls to a significant height had been shaped into perfectly smooth stone. On one wall was a large carved circle, at the top of which was currently an animated, somewhat stylized depiction of a sun, while at the bottom of the circle was a similarly stylized moon. Apparently we had a magical clock-wall, somehow. If this was a cavern, that would make sense - trying to keep track of time and circadian rhythms would be quite challenging underground.

Eventually, I couldn't keep distracting myself, and turned to face what looked like a scroll floating in the air a few feet from where I had been set down beside the pool. I felt like I had a pretty good idea of what this was, and didn't really want to read my mother's goodbye letter.

On the other hand, on multiple levels, I had to know.

I reached out with a hand that I was now noticing was much larger than it had been before, as were my arms and really my everything - I was no longer a "slightly large for his age" three year old, apparently. I now looked tall enough to be somewhere between ten and thirteen. Before I could distract myself further, I grabbed the scroll and opened it.

______________

My Son,

It has now been 500 years since I set you in stasis before our descent to our final destination together, and your current place of rest. By now, I had expected the mana baptism to be complete, but my spells tell me you are not yet finished with your rebirth. Sadly, I fear my time is coming to an end.

When I first held you in my arms in my childhood home on Atlantis, that blessed isle that I miss so much, I knew that there was nothing I would not do to see you live safe and happy. Of course, both of those require power. When you did not show the proper signs as all noble children of Atlantis must, I knew I could not let the fate of all unfortunate children of my home befall you.

I do not regret the centuries of strife and study while searching for a solution, as you are my child and my love for you is unending and eternal. While I dearly miss my home, a home without you, my greatest gift, would be naught but a torturous prison. I have often dreamed of returning with you there, to show you the magnificent fountains and spires of the world's greatest empire.

When I learned of this hidden font of magic, buried deep under the Earth, I knew this was our final hope. I have made a home for us here deep within Gaea's bones, and I had hoped to share it with you. It is my greatest regret that I will not be there to celebrate your victory over the misfortune of your birth and celebrate with you as you revel in the magic that has always been your birthright.

You must grow strong, my son, and live a wondrous life. Make sure that all know your name, Agathon, and that you were this Selene's greatest glory.

_____________

I tried to hold my tears as I finished the letter. My mother spent over 800 years trying to give me a better life. What could I possibly do to return that kind of love and devotion?

I began to roll back up the scroll before I noticed that there was a hurried addition at the bottom of the scroll.

I have left you a number of resources - food in stasis, some basic texts, and a few servant constructs to make the time you take to recover more comfortable. I have tied the magicks of this cavern to the mana of the pool, which will keep them strong, giving you protection as you grow. When you are strong enough, you will be able to end them or alter them as you wish.

 

[asmodyne]

Dammit, Mom! "Welcome back to wakefulness son, just a couple of things!"

First off, it had been a thousand years since I went to sleep, so I was suddenly struck by the fact that the odds of my Mother or anyone of her acquaintances I had met over the past few years (actually a lot more than a few) still being around was… well, magic is a thing, so it's not impossible, but the odds are… low. I went ahead and put the thought of my being a child alone in a time I knew nothing about in a big ol' compartmentalization box and put it on a shelf for when I was ready and able to deal with it. At the moment I was too busy panicking.

Panicking about what, exactly? That second thing - namely, Mom had locked me into this cavern-lab-place deep in the bowels of the earth behind some hefty wards, which had been feeding off this pool of concentrated mana for a THOUSAND YEARS HOW THE HECK WAS I SUPPOSED TO-

Deep breaths. Everything was fine. Well, not fine, but fixable. Maybe. I just needed to stay calm and assess the situation. There was no chance of just waiting for the wards to wear out, so I would have to unravel the wards to leave. Which was a problem because… I had no idea how to do that. Mom had written that this whole procedure - really, every procedure since birth - was supposed to unlock my access to my magic, but I didn't know what to do with any magic I might have! Well, aside from being able to see magic I didn't understand, and all of these glowing lines on my body… they were even more pronounced than before, so those were two things I could sort-of do, but really they were two more things I needed to figure out.

Apparently there was food, but I would likely have to ration it and be careful, since I didn't know if once one of those stasis boxes was opened, the countdown would begin. I did not have infinite time to figure out my situation, unless I found another food source or somehow stopped needing to eat altogether, which… did not seem likely, but again, magic remained a thing, so who knew? It wouldn't prevent me from going mad from isolation, though, so getting out at some point was still critical.

There was so much more to unpack from Mom's letter. Apparently Atlantis was a thing, and we were from there. But apparently Atlantis also kinda sucked, since we fled because I didn't have magic? So maybe they were magic supremacists or something. Hopefully some of the texts Mom had left would have more information about that as well, and not just whatever theory I'd need to unlock these wards.

The more I pondered things, the more I wondered how clearly Mom was thinking at the end - sure, I could read, but only at a rudimentary level. I was, or had been, three for crying out loud! The fact that I could speak in full sentences and count to 10 was already impressive! I could only desperately pray that there was something like a dictionary in what she left, because this was going to be… challenging. I was essentially a three year old in a preteen body. I mean, sure, I had an entire other lifetime's memories to fall back on, but how much of that was going to be useful remained to be seen. I certainly didn't have any experience unraveling wards or analyzing magic or surviving in caves or ancient Atlantean civilization or whatever. I realized that she likely felt that she had no other options, but… this would be a lot for a regular kid to handle.

I sighed and packed all of that up into another incredibly healthy compartmentalization box and put it on the to-deal-with-later shelf. It seemed like all I could do for the moment was take stock of my situation, so that's what I began to do. I went through all of the chambers inside the - heck it's a lair, my magical Mom had herself a secret underground lair, okay! There was a library with a long table in the middle along with walls lined with shelves of slates, scrolls and crystals that were, based on context, probably also somehow books? There was also a kitchen and pantry with food in what I presumed were stasis boxes from the way they were glowing to my magic sight. On top of that, the kitchen was staffed with these wispy constructs that my mother seemed to prefer from what my memories were telling me. I had recollections of a similar spell from a tabletop game I had played in my first life, which was neat. They were convenient and I would certainly have to see how long they would last - hopefully they were powered like the wards were.

I also found what looked like a training hall or gymnasium, with training equipment littered around the room. I initially mistook the few figures lining the walls for training dummies, but as they seemed to follow me with their heads as I walked around the room and also glowed to my magic-vision, I concluded that they were more like training golems than anything. No weapons, though, so that could be a problem. I wonder if Mom was a magic purist?

Finally, there were the expected bedroom and bathing facilities. I noticed that there were two bedrooms here, with one of them clearly having been designed with me in mind. It seemed that my mother had planned on us living here for a while after the procedure, probably to make sure I was trained up to whatever standard Atlantean society held. I wondered how she thought our lives would have gone after I awoke, what we would have done. I guess I would never know.

Still, I would certainly be taking care of the training aspect, at least.

Now that I had a better understanding of my residence, it was time to return to that vague connection I could feel since I woke up. Between the new details in my magic vision, the almost tingling sense of what I could only assume was my magic coming from my body, and this new sense that seemed to be going both out somewhere into the ether and also deep within somehow, there was a lot to focus on. That meant that I would be spending some time doing something I was familiar with though not necessarily a fan of in my first life. Something that I felt would soon become a rather constant presence in my new life.

Meditation. Lots and lots of meditation.

I walked back to the mana pool room and sat down next to it. The ephemeral sounds of the mana rushing and coursing through the air was rather fitting background noise for what I was attempting to do. I got to work.

Initially, I couldn't focus for more than a few minutes at a time, and eventually got up to open up the first of the stasis boxes and have a meal. The unseen servants quickly took over the actual preparation, and I left them to it, but I did thank them as I finished and returned to the pool for another session. Regardless of whether they were conscious enough to understand and appreciate it or not, I was going to be polite!

I didn't succeed at any kind of deeper connection after a few more hours of meditation, so I gave up and decided that I would try again the next day. Before I decided to have dinner, however, I decided to take another look at the library. It was possible, even likely, that there was more information in there that could help me with my current situation. Eventually I did find a few works on meditation, both on specific types - meditating on your magical energy, on your life energy, or the mind - but also meditation on your "core" and "the voice of the ancestors". I tried to take the material on the last two with me, but as soon as I crossed the threshold, the scrolls disappeared from my hands. When I turned I found them sitting on the shelf once more.

Apparently my mother was a stickler for the rules, one of them being "don't take books out of the library".

Well played, Mom.

 

[asmodyne]

My life was soon composed of, as I had expected, a lot of reading and meditation, with meals and rest breaks interspersed in there as appropriate. There was something to everything I was reading that had me just on the edge of a discovery, I knew it. Happily, after a few days of increasingly successful sessions of navel contemplation and comparing my results to some texts in the library, I discovered what I was feeling.

That connection "out" I was sensing was apparently what the texts called the "voice of the ancestors". Or, as it was better known to me: the Akasha. The collective unconscious of mankind, where everything that had ever been done or dreamt resided. Some folks also speculated that the Akasha was actually atemporal, so it would also include everything mankind would ever dream or do, as well. What it was telling me now, though, was that I had a potential solution to my lack of information and teachers.

That being said, discovering what the connection was didn't mean I had suddenly solved all of my problems, though. Maintaining a connection was quite difficult, and I was only successful periodically. It was also exhausting in a way that I hadn't anticipated. It required a certain state of mind, and it wasn't something I could maintain long term, and I would have to take breaks between attempts. It didn't necessarily feel like I was being drained of anything, per se, and certainly didn't seem to be magical in any way, but it was still effort and needed stepping away from occasionally.

That was another thing I had figured out. At least a part of my new senses was some kind of magic sense, paired with my newly ramped up ability to see magical auras. I could vaguely sense the connections between the wards that surrounded my home, the servants and constructs that resided there with me, and the pool of mana that I owed so much to. During one of my meditation sessions, I could also feel a connection between that pool and something so vast and deep that my pulse instinctively quickened and I pulled my senses away sharply. I didn't know that magical thalassophobia was a thing, but apparently I had it. Or maybe I had just a modicum of common sense.

Regardless, it did seem to indicate that I had access to some other form of energy, since my connection to the Akasha didn't seem to be using my magic. It was also nice to have confirmation that I did in fact have magic, even if I didn't know how to use it at the moment. Based on the fact that it was being activated during meditation and connecting with something like the collective unconscious, I deduced that it was probably some form of mental energy.

This reminded me once more of my old tabletop games and had me chuckling to myself, but I was somewhat serious. That analogy seemed to work pretty well, and I started to schedule my days around like so: once I woke up, I'd immediately go to the pool and meditate, expending all of my focus in an attempt to strengthen my connection to the Akasha, trying to figure out just what the heck was going on with my body, then I would eat, study, eat, study, then meditate again before finishing up with dinner and then bed.

Not exactly the most exciting of schedules, but despite my newfound youth, I still had the mindset of a reasonably successful adult. I could hunker down and put my nose to the grindstone if I needed to, and I certainly needed to at the moment. It looked like I had a few years worth of food, based on the size of things, which was actually pretty impressive, but I wasn't sure a few years would be enough to get me out of here. I wasn't sure of much of anything at the moment, really. Hence, meditation.

So that was what the next few weeks evolved into. Studying - which involved a lot of reading one of the scroll or slates or what have you, checking a dictionary, then looking for other works that might further explain things, before returning to the original scroll with a slightly better understanding - and meditation, which involved fixing a specific thought or problem in my mind as my meditation began, trying to reach out to my connection, trying to stay focused, coming up with an idea, then wondering if I had just made that up, or if it had been an Akashic inspiration, and if that actually mattered. It was just when I was getting pretty discouraged about whether what I was doing was actually useful at all that I finally cracked the second meditation format, namely, reaching within instead of without.

This time, instead of connecting up and out into the "voice of the ancestors", I was trying to connect with my "core self, to see the truth of [my] being in body, mind, and soul". Apparently, this was supposed to be able to show me who I was, where I had come from, and where I could go. Which wasn't really novel, as that is generally the type of thing that meditation was supposed to do - really, meditating for inner awareness or inspiration for solving problems wasn't completely alien to my understanding, this just seemed to be a bit more literal than it was in my first life.

That certainly seemed to be true once more, as I began to get brief glimpses into what I could only assume was my "inner being". My "self" seemed to be a mishmash of layered identities - at the core, I was human, the child of my mother, with the blood of Atlantis in my veins. But the rituals and procedures that had been performed on me had changed me drastically, unlocking something ancient in my heritage, then going even further. My mind and magic were much stronger than they should be, and my body was also irrevocably altered.

I also noticed that I could sense that there were multiple paths open to me - a sense of where I could go, and what I could be. I didn't have any details, it was all very nebulous at this point, but there was something definite there.

I knew all of this to be true, if not the exact details of how, what, or why. That would require a lot more research and, you guessed it, meditation.

 

[asmodyne]

After a number of days spent reading and meditating, both out into my currently tenuous connection to the Akasha and inside into the various aspects of myself, I had generally figured out what had happened - both why I was the way I was, and what my mother had been attempting.

According to the histories, Atlantis had a long history of magicals - really, the most ancient history had Atlantis as this giant floating island continent above the clouds, where the Titan Atlas held the firmament from the Earth. It seemed less of a literal "holding up the sky" and more a "defending the atmosphere from things outside of it" scenario. Atlas was the border guard for planet Earth from things outside of it, for a very long time. His progeny were the primordial giants, beings of innate power and storms up past the clouds, and they helped him in this task.

After a significant period of time, either directly due to fighting (it wasn't mentioned but I assume the Titanomachy had happened at some point, maybe, and Atlas got assigned a very ironic punishment, also Zeus and Poseidon likely weren't huge fans of others having powerful Storm/Lightning powers) or due to fading levels of magic over eons, the might of these ancient giants began to wane, and the "Isle of Axis" that once floated around the planet guarding the Earth became more of a floating island in the clouds, then floating over the ocean, and slowly this gradual decline of both power and literal position of the island continued on over the generations until we got to the current state. Atlantis is now just another island continent with slightly taller and better human genetics, and some sort of innate magical bloodline, although even that seemed to wax and wane over the centuries. Honestly, there are stories of wondrous cities of what looks like either crazy Hi-Tech or Magitech, and then what might as well be hunter-gatherer tribes. It's all very confusing.

Regardless, the slow inexorable dwindling of magic made the current ruling families incredibly protective of their sorcery, leading to carefully planned marriage alliances and "family planning" *cough* eugenics *cough*, as those who didn't exhibit "the right signs" were… disposed of. It was also apparently a huge mark of shame on the parents, which encouraged folks to toe the line, I imagine. So here I arrive, and apparently I don't automatically show the right magical signs or something, leading to panic and my mother's subsequent flight from Atlantis and centuries-long quest to "fix" my magic, somehow.

The process for that, it seems, included a lot of rituals to try to "awaken" my blood, which I guess meant going dumpster-diving in my DNA for whatever atavistic triggers would unlock my magical blood. In order to better make sense of it all, I was going to use a framework I was more comfortable with— tabletop gaming. In the vernacular of the dice-rolling, pencil and paper games I spent so many years of my first life playing, she spent a ton of resources doing rituals, therefore stacking a few templates on top of me, starting with shifting my race from "Atlantean Human" to "Atlantean Half-Giant". Sadly, it seems the Half-Giant side had somehow landed on latent psionic gifts, not magical ones, so when that didn't awaken my "magical blood", yet another DNA-dive session had found me getting the "Primordial" template stacked onto the Giant side of things. This was likely where the runes on my skin came into play. Of course that still wasn't enough, so another ritual had tried to awaken my magical "Spark" specifically, which just seemed to give me my magical vision and aura sense. Then there was this final and most lengthy procedure down here, which had accomplished a few things.

First, it had apparently cranked the latent magical and psionic aspects of my blood dramatically. Second, keeping me in stasis had messed with my temporal stability - my biological and chronological ages were seriously out of whack, though I didn't see any impact of that yet. Finally, it opened up a more direct connection to the Akasha and allowed me to interface with my development, like I was doing now.

So that all explained what had been done to me. But it took significantly longer to figure out why it was necessary in the first place. Ultimately, I concluded that it came down to choice. In the terminology of that tabletop game, Atlanteans had a long history of a specific type of bloodline sorcery - some sort of callback to their primordial ancestors, those magical storm-casting defenders of Earth. Babies would instinctively reach out to that path (or "class") shortly after birth, and everyone had at least one "level" of it before they grew up and decided what they actually wanted to do with their lives. The only ones who wouldn't would be those who couldn't qualify - that is, their required "stats" were below the average, even after the boost from the Atlantean bloodline (which seemed to just make everything generally… better). It was a horrible situation - can you imagine a kid with the equivalent of an 18 Intelligence or Wisdom score, but that was "disposed of" because they had Charisma as a dump stat? Not the brightest move on the part of the Atlanteans, it takes more than a pretty face to run an empire, but then again that decision making isn't very surprising, both from the fact that they were in this situation in the first place, and what scraps I could recall from my first life. Didn't they end up sinking a continent or something?

Granted, this seemed to be a completely different world so maybe that wasn't the case here. I guess I would have to find out when I eventually freed myself.

To be fair, my Charisma was quite low initially. I would never have been an incredibly powerful sorcerer, even had things worked out properly. That was moot, however, since it seems that because my soul and instincts were already quite… seasoned… from my first life, I didn't automatically latch on to the first path available to me like everyone else. I had always been a bit more cautious than others, holding back, calculating the odds, weighing the pros and cons, and it seemed that even instinctively that had been the case here as well. Unfortunately, instead of waiting until I was old enough to understand what was going on so I could take that step, cultural pressure had my mother off the island and undertaking this mad quest to lock in that Sorcerer level before I said my first word. Unfortunately, the order in which she went about the various rituals ended up preventing her from seeing her success.

If she had done the "Spark Ignition Ceremony" first, that would have forced a primary path of Sorcery on me with that Atlantean bloodline as my only option. Sadly, she had me go swimming in the deep end of my gene pool first, and all of a sudden I not only had new paths available to me, based on both my half-giant and primordial heritage, but I also had a new sorcerous bloodline available, too, which meant that the signs would be all confusing. So instead of that single ritual after which we could have gone back to Atlantis, with me a little more unstable but with a boost to my magical blood, we found ourselves in this situation. Or rather, I found myself in this situation - alone in an underground lair, with nothing but unseen servants and training constructs for company.

 

[asmodyne]

Now that I had a pretty good idea of how I ended up in this situation it was time to figure out where I wanted to go from here. After copious amounts of introspective meditation, I had concluded that each of the various rituals I had been subjected to had essentially forced another path open to me. According to some hints in the library, and a lot of confirmation from the Akasha, typically people would only have one or two primary paths available to them, and everything else would come later, once those had solidified.

After everything that had happened, I had five: one free path still available from my human heritage, and then several other paths opened by the various heritages and templates I had been subjected to. To keep track of things, I made a list. To be fair, it was a little hard to visualize some of them, but I tried to summarize them.

• Atlantean Human: Free
• Half-Giant: Some sort of psionic warrior
• Primordial: it felt like this one weaponized their magical bloodline and ancestral links
• Spark Ignition Ceremony: this one was the one that forced open my sorcerous gifts
• Mana Rite: this opened up another psionic class, though there was some flexibility here

It was much easier to see once it had been written down. As could be seen, there was quite a mix of influences available, and the spectrum had me start to think heavily about what I wanted. I had made a promise to myself and to the memory of my mother that I would grow in strength, and I owed it to us both to do my best at that. From what I was able to glean during my meditation, whatever I decided for these five paths would become my primary foundation for the foreseeable future - only once I had fully explored the paths to mastery would I have the flexibility to choose another primary path.

Until then, no other paths could surpass my experience in these five. Going back to gaming terms - and it was rather curious how that was becoming a more and more convenient thought mode as time went on - any other "class" would either half to be two thirds or half as many levels as these, depending on the requirements and complexities of the class. So if I wanted a solid foundation, it had to be in these classes. That meant my free class was incredibly important.

There were a few key factors to consider. First of all, my class paths were only one avenue of increase. They represented the strength of my soul and the breadth of my experience - all of the techniques and skills I would develop - but they were parallel to the growth of my body. There were racial "classes" as well that grew in similar ways. These represented the evolution of my physical form - essentially, the expression of my DNA and manifestations of the Akasha on my physical self.

As far as I could tell, barring intervention from deities or otherworldly powers, there were six primary aspects that could make up your power. Your body and your physical prowess - so physique and skill, in other words - were two, and the other four were the esoteric forces of the world - what was known as life force (what I would term Ki), magic, psionics, and the soul. I wanted to make sure that I covered all of my bases with my choices.

I really wanted to have as broad a foundation as possible. I had magic and psionics handled already. That meant that my free path needed to handle both ki and soul if I wanted to really cover my bases, or my slightly more flexible psionic path would have to pick up the slack. Whatever I chose for that free path should also be a moderately physical path in order to supplement the psionic warrior and weaponized magical one.

That helped to narrow down my choices, but actually choosing and figuring out how to step down these paths was going to take a lot more time and meditation.

So much meditation.

I decided that my first step would be to formalize the conceptualization of my status, progress, and paths. I needed to see where I was currently in as much detail as possible. I decided to fully lean into the tabletop gaming paradigm as I spent a significant amount of time trying to link my present state through introspective meditation with how that compared to others based on what I could access from the Akasha. I wanted to be able to visualize this in an easy to consume format, ideally a page or two at a glance.

In other words, I wanted a character sheet, dangit!

So I began to go to work. It soon became clear that while I could certainly use my experience to frame how I perceived the world, the world didn't actually work the way my old games had - which was completely fair. To begin with, this parallel racial/class aspect to things - that wasn't something I had ever played with.

Another difference was the way multiple classes (and to a degree those racial heritages as well) worked ran counter to my expectations. In a lot of places, classes didn't "stack" bonuses. Multiple classes of the same or lower level could certainly fill in gaps for each other, but not everything would overlap. In simplest gaming terms, if two classes both offered a +2 to the same "save" at level 1, you would have a +2 to that save, not a +4. However, if two classes offered a +2 to different saves, you would get +2 to both saves. This meant that multiple classes were great for developing a strong foundation, but focusing on a single class would likely lead you to greater heights of power more quickly. It was a question of breadth versus depth, and I had to juggle the fact that I would likely need depth in order to tackle the wards, with the desire to establish as firm a foundation as possible before facing the dangers of the world.

Finally, and most importantly, attaining a new level in a class didn't automatically give you a bunch of new strengths and abilities. What it did do was raise the ceiling or increase the limits of what was possible to achieve, and sort of guide you on the way there. There was a certain amount of rubber-banding that took place between your current level and your limit in a skill, so someone with great potential but a lack of achievement in a specific skill or attribute would not only find that their limit was greater than others, but also that it was easier to grow in that skill or attribute than others. That being said, there were limits to how high in a class you could grow - each class had one or more key attributes associated with them, and if you didn't have a high enough score in at least one of those attributes (generally, the "level" +10) you couldn't proceed any higher with that class! This was why my lower Charisma value would have meant I had little chance of succeeding as a Sorcerer before all of the rituals I had undergone.

This ultimately meant that "leveling" was a slow gradual process of training towards your limits, breaking through those limits either through heavier training or effort, and then further training to solidify and maximize your gains. It became increasingly difficult to break through those limits without challenge and adversity, as well, so you could only remain cloistered or sheltered in the early stages - eventually, you would have to venture out and push yourself far past your comfort zone in order to see further improvements.

Well, I already knew I couldn't stay here forever, even if I figured out my supply problem, but now I knew that there was a hard limit on how much I could grow here, too. I would have to take that into account when deciding on breadth vs depth as well.

 

[asmodyne]

After that lengthy period of wrestling the two disparate endpoints of my meditation together, I finally came up with a view that could approximate one of my old character sheets:

Agathon, Atlantean Half-Giant (1*)

---

Age:

• Biological: 8
• Chronological: 1343

Health: *
Stamina: *

Saves:

• Fort 0
• Ref 0
• Will 2

Attack Bonus: 0

Strength: 8/14
Dexterity: 10/14
Constitution: 10/16
Intelligence: 18/22
Wisdom: 14/16
Charisma: 18/22

Flaws

• Primal Instinct
• Free-Spirited
• Loner

Traits

• Stoic
• Mathematical Prodigy
• Trope Savvy

Feats

• Hidden Talent

Skills

• Concentration
• Lore (Akasha)
• Meditation

Qualities:

• +4 to Lore (Applied Arcana) checks
• +2 to Lore (Theoretical Arcana) checks
• +4 to Lore (Applied Psionics) checks
• +2 to Lore (Theoretical Psionics) checks
• Low-Light Vision (40 ft)
• Powerful Build: Treated as a size larger under certain conditions.
• Magical Knack: +1 to Caster Level
• Naturally Psionic:
  • Add Hidden Talent to Feats
  • Add 2 to Power Pool
• Unlock Power Resistance
  • Add Manifester Level to Power Resistance

Abilities:

• Psionics:
  • Stomp 1/Day
  • Defensive Precognition 3/Day
  • Force Screen 1/Day
• Arcane:
  • Levitate at will
  • Arcane Sight permanent
  • Magic Aura permanent

Languages

• Atlantean
• Giant

---

There it was. The sum total of my experiences so far in this life. The result of my mother's experiments and rituals. I was significantly advanced in some ways, but the sheer output of time (1335 years in stasis overall!!!) and the existing resources my mother must have paid out to get me here… there were clearly some things I already had a head start in, like some innate and permanent abilities, but I needed to get started on actually solidifying my paths forward.

Based on these statistics, I was slightly weaker than, but just as dexterous and sturdy as, an average human adult male. At 8. And I was already around a meter and a half, which had some hefty implications for my adult self. Thankfully the caverns had large natural ceilings so I shouldn't need to worry about bumping my head. When I began training physically, that would have quickly become quite irritating. I also had a lot of room to grow in my stats!

Speaking of growth, there was an interesting feedback loop when it came to training your attributes. Training the skills and proficiencies empowered by an attribute - Athletics and Strength, Lore skills and Intelligence for example - was naturally an excellent way to train that attribute. So you would refine your skills to their limits and that would naturally push you to the limit of the attribute itself as you trained, which would then expand further the limit of your skills. This meant that my work on Meditation and Concentration had already been improving my "Wisdom" attribute.

I was using more familiar terminology, but your mental attributes ultimately boiled down to three aspects:

• The force and power of your thoughts - your ability to process and retain information, the speed of your thoughts, how much you could keep track of simultaneously
• The force of your will - how well you were able to control your impulses, maintain focus, and resist external factors
• The force of your personality - how much your presence could command, how well you could present yourself and your beliefs among others, and ultimately how well you could assert yourself over your environment

Or, in short, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. There was an interesting mirroring of attributes across the mental/physical divide : Strength and Charisma, Dexterity and Intelligence, and Constitution and Willpower. The ability to assert yourself, the ability to react, and the ability to endure.

That thought stuck with me as I began to push for my first classes. Racial Advances were interesting because they were the best, or most common, example of the fascinating interaction between the physical and metaphysical in this world. Advancing a level could have a real, immediate effect on your physical form - this wasn't just new knowledge, this was some energetic aspect of the universe going in and flipping various epigenetic triggers in your DNA, changing how your body built itself. Some of the texts I was reading referred to it as a "life spiral", but it sounded like a DNA Helix to me, so that was still how I conceptualized it in my mind.

The other interesting aspect of my current sheet were the sections on flaws and traits. It seems that everything I had experienced so far was going to have a long term impact on my personality and decision making - some with severe consequences. Primal Instinct made me ill-suited to wielding weapons, and Free-Spirited meant that armor and anything weighing me down would be pretty detrimental, so I should likely focus on unarmed and unarmored combat, so that meant knights and sword-slinging samurai were probably out of the running. Loner meant I wouldn't be running around as a beast master either, and familiar summoning or anything like that would also be out of the picture. Shame, as the training dummies probably weren't terribly talkative.

I put aside any other thoughts and focused on taking my first step on the road to the future. In my mind, I reached out and pressed towards the path that represented my Half-Giant heritage. There was a thrum of energy resonating in the air and in my body, and I directed the coalescing thoughts into my "Character Sheet" thought form.

---

Half-Giant 1

Health: */10

Saves:

• Fort +2
• Ref 0
• Will 0

Racial Attack Bonus: +1

Feats: Pick 1

Skills: Pick 6

• Acrobatics
• Athletics
• Concentration
• Craft
• Deception
• Diplomacy
• Insight
• Intimidation
• Lore (Applied Psionics)
• Lore (Theoretical Psionics)
• Lore (Survival)
• Meditation
• Perception
• Profession

Qualities:

• Stomp 1/HD
• Low-Light Vision Advancement
• Divided Ancestry : Open Human and Giant Racial Heritage Paths

---

I felt the changes solidify as certain aspects of knowledge and intuitive understanding settled in, things that my ancestors along this gene-line had learned and sublimated as key aspects of the culture. I had a general understanding of how to move my body to hit something in an effective way - nothing specific, more just a sense of "don't put your thumb inside your fist, dummy". My vision sharpened further, as details became clear even further out in the area, dark corners suddenly seeming less so. My health was more clearly defined - I had a better understanding of the physical limits of my body, how easy I was to injure and how far I could keep pushing myself before I passed out from blood loss or trauma. I was particularly excited about the final aspect of the quality improvements - it looked like the path to access more of my Atlantean and Giant heritage wouldn't be as challenging as I had feared.

I would need to settle on some decisions around the skills I would like to access, but decided to settle on my first "class" path before I did so.

I had done a lot of thinking and meditating on the Akasha to decide what I wanted to do with my free path. Ultimately, it came down to the realities of my situation in the caverns. I needed a path that I could advance with minimal external interaction, as all I had in this place were books, training dummies, and the unseen servants. My flaws meant it should also be something largely independent - I couldn't rely on gear to supplement me.

I also wanted to play to my strengths. Based on my plans, both of my magical classes would be relying on my Charisma, and my other classes would be using either Intelligence or Wisdom as their key factors. Ideally, this class would also rely on one or the other. I would be working on training up my physical body, but… I was 8. I was partially hampered by needing actual years to grow before I could get to the highest levels of ability.

It would also be useful if the path had knowledge of and skills that could be applied to the care and maintenance of the body. I needed to juggle both properly rationing my food while making sure that I achieved optimal nutrition for my growth, or that I could supplement it somehow - either through magic or one of the other esoteric forces. On top of that, as I'd considered earlier, knowledge of the soul and ki energies were needed, but like I said, I had been doing a lot of searching in the Akasha, and had therefore come up with a cunning plan...

 

[asmodyne]

One of the interesting things about having access to the atemporal, potentially multiversal Akasha was that pretty much any potential variant on a path had been attempted somewhere, by someone. A wizard with sword training? It had been done. Wanted a sorcerer that raged like a berserker? Done. How about a thief that telekinetically picked pockets from across the room? It had been done multiple times! What about a special type of caster that synchronized their soul with a giant stone simulacrum of themselves and used it to fight in gladiatorial combat? That had also, in fact, been done.

So when I went scouring the Akashic record during multiple sessions looking for the path of a martial scholar, one with understanding of the body, ki and the soul, focused on both meditation and empirical understanding of the body and its profound forces?

It had been done.

The Scholars of the Unified Mind were a sect of martial artists that dedicated themselves to understanding how the body shaped the soul, and how the soul shaped the body, and theorized that one's ki and chakra - apparently 'the light of soul made manifest' - worked in tandem to form our body from matter. They trained their body rigorously and studied medicine, anatomy and biology relentlessly in order to understand the limits of the human form and break through them. Through a series of specific meditations, practices, and techniques, they were able to unlock various chakra points on the body and use their souls' energy through those points to varying effects, with the ultimate goal naturally being perfection of self and immortality. Ki essentially acted as a carrier wave and buffer to protect the soul as it navigated physically through the body and was expressed externally. It was an incredibly cerebral form of martial arts, and involved a lot of understanding of the physics of combat as it applied to the human body in order to try to perform at peak efficiency.

Fascinating stuff.

I settled down for my second meditation session for the day, and pushed forwards on this new path. Once again I felt a thrum of energy as my body and the Akasha synchronized, this time as a new instinctual understanding of my body and ways to manipulate it flooded into me, and I pushed the output into my "Sheet".

Monk 1

---

Stamina: */10

Martial Attack Bonus: +1

Saves:

• Fort +2
• Ref +2
• Will 0

Feats 3

• Improved Unarmed Strike
• Versatile Unarmed Strike
• Pick 1

Skills: Pick 4

• Acrobatics
• Athletics
• Covert
• Craft (Any)
• Insight
• Intimidation
• Lore (Anatomy)
• Lore (Medicine)
• Lore (Biology)
• Lore (Applied Mathematics)
• Lore (Applied Ki)
• Lore (Theoretical Ki)
• Lore (Applied Chakra)
• Lore (Theoretical Chakra)
• Perception
• Perform
• Profession (Any)

Qualities:

• Calculated Defense: Add Intelligence Bonus to AC
• Martial Artist: Add Class Level to Martial Level
• Martial Defense: Add (Martial Level/4) to AC while unimpeded by armor.
• Flurry of Blows: Make One Additional Attack when making a Full-Attack Action
• Martial Fist: Reinforce your body with Ki in order to treat it as a lethal weapon.
  • Ki Pool Unlocked
    • Add (Martial Level/2) to Ki Pool
    • Add Wisdom Bonus to Ki Pool
  • Add Improved Unarmed Strike to Feats
  • Add Versatile Unarmed Strike to Feats.
• Human Racial Akashic Resonance: Add (Martial Level/4) to ki pool.
• Chakra Awakened
  • Add Monk Class Level to Shaper Level
  • Unlock Chakra Pool
    • Add (Shaper Level/2) to Chakra Pool
    • Add Constitution Bonus to Chakra Pool
• Sahasrara Chakra: Shape to your crown chakra for +2 to Concentration, Meditation and Lore Checks per point, max (Shaper Level/4)

---

The knowledge poured in - ways to train my body, to refine my combat skills, to unlock my ki and soul essence (or chakra, it seems) - and begin circulating them through my body for various benefits, as well as a new set of skills to potentially unlock.

There was also the introduction of a new concept - Martial and Shaper Levels. It seemed that these referred to the ability to manipulate Ki and Chakra, respectively. It made me wonder what the impact of other classes would have on that, and whether my larger plan would work.

As mentioned, overlap in classes was supposed to largely be detrimental - I was probably going to see lots of what my previous life would have seen as bonuses slip through my fingers: health or stamina, attack bonuses, and saves that wouldn't stack as I might wish. That wasn't fine per se, but I had accepted it. On the other hand, there was some overlap that I could benefit from - skills I already had the potential to access, but wouldn't have fit into the limited amount a specific class could focus on were often available in others, for example. We would see if stacking values for things like Martial Level would be another potential benefit.

The monks also had some techniques to boost my fortitude that I could combine with my Half-Giant physique. That was another exception: a racial bonus and a class bonus for a given level could stack, representing the combination of physique and skill, but those two were the limit, barring specific qualities.

That was expected based on the way this world worked - overlap rarely stacked. It was an exception when it did, and the trick to true growth was trying to find and benefit from those exceptions - well, either that or just bull your way to higher levels on a single path and rely on that to beat out those with broader foundations who hadn't unlocked the "higher mysteries".

Some things didn't overlap but supported each other, like Health and Stamina. Health was primarily based on the physical body, while Stamina was based on technique. One came from your racial levels, the other from class levels. Obviously exceptions existed - techniques that would boost your physical Health, intrinsic aspects of the body that could support your Stamina - but the division between the two was a generally accepted rule.

I had exhausted my advancements for the day, at least as far as class or racial levels were concerned. I would begin again tomorrow, unlocking more of my heritage and another class path, and until I was finished with unlocking my primary paths and racial heritage, I was going to hold off from deciding what further skills or feats to choose. I had until I started training in earnest to solidify my initial choices, so I would take my time. Who knew what would be unlocked by the other paths available to me at this point?

For now, I decided to turn in. After unlocking the mysteries of both my genetics and my future, I was a little sleepy.

—

The next morning started with another bout of meditation. This time, I would be pushing for another racial heritage. I got into position and pushed against that particular path. That quickly becoming familiar thrum of energy rang through me and I shunted it to my sheet.

Human 1

---

Health: ––

Attack Bonus: ––

Feats: Pick 1

Saves:

• Fort –
• Ref 0
• Will +2

Skills: Pick Any 4

• Unlock any 10 skills.

Qualities:

• Adaptive Learning: A skill unlocked can be grown from all race and class levels. Skill bonuses from different sources stack.

---

The benefits this time were a little confusing. The bonus to Will made some sense - apparently the indomitability of the human spirit was actually genetic! - but I was a bit confused by the quality I had gained. It took me a while to process it into something that made sense. First off, I could choose any additional 10 skills to unlock, though lore, craft, performance and profession skills all had to be unlocked individually - that wasn't a huge surprise. What was a surprise was the fact that apparently skill growth was initially more complicated than I thought?

Apparently it was unexpected to be able to apply learnings concerning a skill from one class to its applications in another. That just seemed so strange and awkward to me. Maybe it was my spirit resonating with my humanity, both from my origins in this life as well as from my full first life, but I couldn't imagine being so… rigid when it came to applying things I had learned. Regardless, I was glad that I wouldn't have to deal with that headache thanks to this quality. The free 10 skills was a boon - it should be able to fill any gaps after I finished opening the rest of my paths in a few days.

I decided to eat breakfast before I attempted my first physical training session. Hopefully that wouldn't be too painful - it would be a lot of trial and error to begin with, as I had no teachers, just books and generations of ancestors in the Akashic record.

 

[asmodyne]

The debacle that was the next morning's training session would never be mentioned again. Basic calisthenics were… largely fine, but stumbling through the forms, stopping when things felt off and trying to make sure I made every movement properly based purely on memory and instinct was… less than ideal. I gave it up as a bad job for lunch and retreated to the library to regroup.

Finally, dinner had been consumed and it was time for evening meditation, which meant pushing my second path. This was the one that came from my Half-Giant ancestry… well, that was the jumping off point, at least.

Once again I had gone plumbing through the Akasha for something that would meet my needs. I wanted a style that focused on unarmed martial combat combined with psionic manifestation, and some understanding of ki would be helpful as well. Once again, if you kept digging enough, it was there to be found. There were actually a few options available, but some of them sacrificed things I wanted to keep, or didn't combine as well with my existing martial training, but I finally settled on a particular path.

The Warriors of the Unchained Mind had a long line of combining precognitive abilities with hand to hand combat. They focused on an ascetic lifestyle, eschewing the use of physical weapons and armor in order to hone their psionic gifts. In other words, it was kind of perfect for me.

I pushed forward.

Psychic Warrior 1

Stamina: –

Martial Attack Bonus: –

Saves:

• Fort –
• Ref –
• Will –

Skills: –

• Acrobatics
• Athletics
• Craft
• Lore (Applied Psionics)
• Lore (Theoretical Psionics)
• Meditation
• Perception
• Profession

Power Points: 1
Powers Known: 1
Max Power Level: 1

Qualities:

• Add Class Level to Manifester Level
• Add Wisdom Bonus to Power Pool
• Add Wisdom Bonus to Power DC
• Half-Giant Racial Akashic Resonance: Manifester Level multiplied by 1.5 when manifesting innate powers.
• Ascetic Path:
  • Add Offensive Precognition to innate powers.
  • Add Lore (Theoretical Ki) to the unlocked skill list.
  • Clairvoyant Armor: Add Wisdom Bonus to AC.
  • Martial Artist: Add Class Level to Martial Level

The constant humming in the back of my mind that I had associated with my latent psionic gifts seemed to crystalize ever so slightly. I could feel a faint humming in the air around my body, like a zone of will ready to react and attempt to protect me from danger.

As expected, this new class saw no improvements in stamina, attack bonus, or saves. I was seeing the lack of stacking I had expected. I didn't see any new skills added from the class, either. The overlap mechanic was really rearing its ugly head this time.

There were several gains as far as Qualities were concerned, though. Alongside the Martial Level and Shaper Level established the previous day, I now also had a Manifester Level. So Ki abilities were tied to the Martial, Chakra abilities tied to the Shaper, and Psionic abilities to the Manifester. I would need to add these to my Character Sheet visualizations, which was going to be a pain. I wouldn't begin complaining about more meditation though, or I would never stop.

I also had two powers to add to my known power list, though one of them had been chosen automatically. I had innate access to Defensive Precognition, and I was now adding the offensive version on to my list. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do about the other power yet. I would hold off for a few days until I had a handle on everything I needed to train in and make my decision from there.

For now, dinner and then bed. Tomorrow morning was going to be a doozy.

—

Wake up, bathe, dress in the limited clothing options available, which were essentially just a sheet of fabric and a loincloth, and go back to the pool for meditation.

This morning was my last heritage path, and the one I could confess I was a little nervous about. Half-Giants and Humans, even Atlantean humans - rather, especially Atlantean humans - are reasonably close together, and while there were some significant differences from my experience in my first life, they were largely just a matter of scope. I was still human, just… bigger, and better. But the heritage I was trying to unlock this morning was something significantly more… ancient. More primal. I could only hope there wouldn't be any significant issues.

Eventually I was able to calm myself and focus enough to begin the process once more. I found that final path, and I pushed. That now familiar thrum pulsed through me, resonating through my bones. I shuddered as a sort of crawling sensation spread across my skin, like someone was pulling it taught and then letting it go. I pulled up the sheet.

Giant 1

Health: —

Attack Bonus: —

Saves:

• Fort —
• Ref —
• Will —

Feats: 1

Skills: 2

• Athletics
• Craft
• Perception

Qualities:

• Add +1 to Strength
• Add +1 to Constitution
• Giant Skin: Add Constitution Bonus to AC as Natural Armor

I let out a breath I had been holding in. That was… kind of anticlimactic. I mean, yes, bonuses to attributes were a big deal in general, and Natural Armor (that must have been that skin crawling sensation I felt) that scales with an attribute could be quite impressive in the long term. Honestly, this wasn't a huge deal in the short term. I would just have to wait and see.

I paused momentarily at that thought. I realized I felt significantly calmer than I had before. Time didn't seem as pressing as it had before. Yes, there were things that I needed to do, but they would come in time. Rushing things at this point could only be detrimental. I wondered how much of the earlier anxiety has been a result of me mainlining aspects of humanity's Akashic record - the inexorable march of progress and innovation certainly encouraged a sense of "get things done and don't stop moving". It was what had led to the rise of industry and the information age in my first life.

Giants, on the other hand, were… more gradual about things. When you had centuries to figure things out, I suppose taking your time and deciding on the best approach made sense. It made me wonder where I would end up, age and development wise, as I continued down this path. Thirty was well into the mature years for a Human, was just about right for a Half-Giant, but for a full-on Giant… well that really depended on the type. On top of that, the genetics I was triggering were things that hadn't been seen in millennia, and certainly not with my specific mix in play. It was suggested by some scholars that the storm giants, cloud giants, and even the eldritch giants might all trace their ancestry back to the primordial giants of Atlantis to a degree. I was curious what that would mean for me as I progressed.