Ammy's stomach ejected her dinner when she sputtered awake from the nightmare where she watched herself die in third person like a kill-cam. She heard her bones shatter, her head splatter. She still trembled from the feeling of being a lump of sludge on the wastelands... Did I just die?
She choked and forced the sickly air through her lungs as fear in the form of a frozen fist gripped her heart. First she was having a decent day, she did her shift, got nice tips and went to Jammo's to play some songs with old Todd. She was going to try her luck approaching a man for once to get what she hadn't had in years. Fuck!
A thin ringing sound, like she'd just had her ears blown up, set off panic in her guts. She stood up and cursed herself because she'd taken no stock of her surroundings. The land around her, all of it, jagged, tattered, drained and abused of life, not a single living tree in sight. They were all black barked with branches thin as needles that reached for a sunlight which would never grace them with photosynthesis. If there was water underground - she coughed drily, the air was a rake to her throat - it was full of litter and waste. She started walking.
And Ammy's got herself into trouble's house again, and guess what? No handsome Harry, no slim Jim, no dick.
Forward, ahead of her for miles were craggy rocks-
Summon complete!
System catch up...
Here we go again...
System Name: Nullshade
Info:
Nullshade Spell successfully integrated with Carbyne.
User name: Amelia Bailey Blunt
New name: Carbyne.
You are Carbyne.
The land around her, as far as she could observe, was akin to a desert without the sand, a complete and utter waste deprived of life and likely with depraved things in the wilds. In books, it's always these places you go to die or become a one-woman army saint of war. But Isekai stories always dropped their protagonists in nice- I am ridiculous for accepting this. Hey, Nullshade System!
Awaiting commands...
What are my powers? She made sure to keep herself aware, checked around her and picked up her pace a bit to maintain some distance between whatever was around.
ERROR.
ERROR.
Current abilities: mass manipulation
ERROR.
Attempting recovery. . .
FAILED. RUNNING SAFEMODE.
INITIATING RECOVERY . . .
Carbyne, please try to stay alive while automated system recovers. Current available information due to critical teleportation spell failure:
Current abilities:
Mass manipulation of self and objects user is touching.
Renewal or as subject is familiar: Respawn.
DANGER AT SIX O'CLOCK, FLEE.
Amelia set off at a jog toward a set of crags and mesas at least two miles away. The air had grown so foul again that it was like chewing on a spoiled cigarette, if that were a thing. Her head spun from being yanked out of her life into a fantasy world where a dragon as large as a town had tried to eat her, she'd fallen to her death and gotten up again with her body feeling just fine. The text before had said something about transfiguration, and she looked down at her hands. Too calm for someone who just died, but after you die does anything matter? Mum and dad are too busy wishing they could beat her senseless if she came home, they wouldn't care about her death... she was sorry to her colleagues and Todd. If she could go home to a normal life, would she?
In a place where nobody knows your face, like the girls and guys who talk about going on holiday to bang and never show up at that place again... 'tax-free', as they say... she shook the thoughts from her mind. She wasn't sure if there was another human alive in this place, if she was in some kind of I Am Legend, all she'd have is her fingers to jack.
Before long, she reached the crags and decided to climb one with her bare fingers. It was a steady process; the grooves were convenient enough for her to slip finger and shoe into so she could peek over the top, then she reached for another crag out of confidence. When she was on both her shoes on top of the thing, she nearly kicked herself for not noticing that there was a jumpable path to a large mesa with nothing but other rocks on it. That would serve, unless something came flying at her, she'd have time to leg it across and find her way down before it got to her. Thank God I keep athletic. She nearly went for the first jump but remembered something important, lighten my boobs. And they felt lighter, she made the first jump, then the second and the third. About five more and she decided it was time to be a loon.
Muscle mass increase by half. And went for a big jump across three, but had to increase the density in her arms to clutch to the mesa as she went over, she returned her legs to normal and clambered up.
Hey Nullshade, what else can I do with my body? Can I grow a dick and wank too when I'm bored?
STOP! STOP! STOP! STOP! She felt an odd sensation of growth in her pelvic area that went away twice as fast.
Once she was sure she wasn't growing a chode she raised her eyes to see what kind of shit hole she landed in and if it was any worse than Friday night in Bradford city centre... a bleak fog that shrouded the ground, made her draw a breath of slightly cleaner air. Ammy wondered how she didn't notice it while she waded through it, and she wanted to ask Nullshade for a comb and a shower to get the shit off her. If it were an issue as simple as pollution, a nuclear-powered super fan the size of a stadium would be able to shove that thing away so she could get to her quest of cleaning and dying to dragons.
The sky was another dark mix of issues altogether; clouds seemed to be clumped together like a black mass of witches around a crystal ball. Black and silver clouds that seemed to belong to some sort of demonic volcano with silent lightning warped around it like they were trying to snuff out the life of a star that they had captured. Amelia went to swallow the sense of dread, but her mouth was dry as the wastes around her. Instead, she imagined a cigarette she'd never be able to get her dainty little fingers on, remembered the taste of burned chemicals and tobacco, the sweetness of gin and Juniper berries.
"Oh, Ammy-Mel, what have you done with your life?" she mused soliloquy and shivered in the hot, acrid winds.