Chapter 3: Trains and Introspection

Chapter 3: Trains and Introspection

Isaac hopped on his laptop and bought a ka-bar off amazon, to be delivered in a couple of days. At least that was what the website still promised, though the current situation would likely throw a serious wrench into that.

Of course, if there was one employer whose employees went in regardless of how terrible the overall situation and working conditions were, it was amazon.

Once he’d gotten that out of the way, he downloaded Tor Browser and installed it. Once Isaac had gotten truly involved in the mess surrounding powerful summons directly, a lot of the coordination had no longer needed to be hidden from various interested parties, instead running through the communication channels of the governments desperately trying to put a lid on the ever expanding problem.

But he had spent enough time in that particular part of the internet to at least know his way around a little. Using both the limited anonymity provided by the Tor browser and various other anti-tracking tools he planned to download somewhere other than his home Wi-Fi, he’d eventually release the paper he was writing.

For now, however, all he needed to do was type in the URL for a particular website from memory. He’d only met with the people controlling it a single time and that had been well after everything went to shit, but someone had mentioned the “innovative” idea of having a proper website during a night of heavy drinking.

Quickly, Isaac typed in a short message about having obtained a pair of powerful, [System] related items and wanting to sell them.

It took all of five minutes to get a response back. While it might have been an entire page long, it basically boiled down to “we’re interested, but you’d better not be screwing us”.

A couple of minutes later, he’d already booked his train ticket to Milan and was on the way to the station, with only a backpack for luggage.

Isaac ran down the stairs of his apartment building, quietly reflecting on how easy this would have been if he’d been willing to use his powers to their full extent. In the other timeline, during that short timeframe in between becoming truly powerful and the world going to shit, he’d had a habit of just walking outside his apartment and dropping through the floor using [Spectral Shift], one story at a time. But sadly, that kinds of shenanigans a mere eleven hours after Initialization would raise some serious eyebrows.

Sure, selling to the people he’d just contacted would do the same, but they wouldn’t be quick to spread any information about him.

He’d dressed in an incredibly eye drawing, neon green shirt, but he tried to avoid drawing looks as well as he could. The sheer incongruity of an eye-catching garb and avoiding actually catching gazes would help level his [Sneak] [Skill].

Once he’d reached the central station, he immediately entered the train to Milan and started trying to lose people’s gazes the moment he’d acquired them.

Fundamentally, [Skills] gained strength through one of three methods.

Continuous use did eventually level up a [Skill], but that would take for-ev-er.

One could also use it against significantly stronger enemies.

And lastly, one could train a [Skill] using one’s own knowledge and experience about what the [Skill] manipulated to make it stronger. Isaac did have over almost a decade’s worth of practice using [Sneak] to vanish from sight. Therefore, wearing something that would catch the eyes of his fellow passengers but avoiding their sight should increase his [Skill] levels quite a bit.

Mind you, there weren’t many people who’d used this particular method in the other timeline, at least not in a way that was documented, so there was’t any historical data to back up the theory.

Isaac leaned back in his train seat and sighed. It was only 6 in the evening, he’d only been awake for eleven hours, but he was so bloody tired. Spending that time fighting monsters and considering monstrous invasions might tend to take a lot out of you, but the Level up had taken care of most of his physical exhaustion.

It was his mind that was exhausted. Fighting that final battle, then ending up in bed without even a single second of sleep in between and doing all the things he’d done ... he was asleep mere moments after he’d sat down.

He wasn’t sure how long he rested, however, as he jerked awake the instant the train started moving. Constant fighting in the other timeline’s final years had led to him becoming an incredibly light sleeper, ready to defend himself at the slightest disturbance. A lot of other people who’d learned the same skill had also learned how to sleep through those normal and harmless noises, but he wasn’t quite at that level.

Isaac sighed, closed his eyes and tried to fall asleep again. He was just so tired. It felt like a moment’s inattention would cause his eyes to flutter shut and not open for a week.

This cycle of falling asleep, then waking back up as the train a particularly loud rumble repeated itself perhaps seven, eight times until he eventually grew sick of it. A glance at his watch revealed that it was currently a few minutes after midnight.

With a great sigh, Isaac heaved himself out of his seat and began to walk the length of the train to clear his head. He encountered a mere handful of other people, which felt weird. In his experience, at least half the seats were full. But this train was dead. People were scared, hunkering down in place and waiting for the other shoe to drop.

In fact, only a few trains had actually run in the first place, many of them having been cancelled due to a lack of personnel. It was only due to the actions of a handful of people who were either incredibly diligent workers, had ice water flowing through their veins, or were simply in denial about the state of the world.

People barely going into work for a week had nearly been enough to end society. Vital services had been kept going by a handful of people for the first couple of days, at which point a proper workforce sufficient to tide everything over using a combination of incentives and rather creative threats.

Eventually, Isaac found himself in the train’s restaurant/lounge car. Overpriced food and drinks whose quality in no way justified the cost, proper tables to sit down at, and a large TV screen on the wall. Currently, it showed a heart wrenching scene of a Ghost flitting along the street in some random city somewhere on the globe, leaving bodies lying behind it.

Someone had made the mistake of summoning an Ephemeral type creature, been unable to defeat it and now, it was killing indiscriminately. Even the weakest Ephemeral enemy was sadly unbeatable without a proper attack [Skill] or magic, which very few people had right now.

In the other timeline, Isaac hadn’t known this had happened. It had just been one of countless small tragedies that happened after the Initialization, reported on in the moment but ultimately forgotten, drowned in the flood of similar incidents.

Sadly, there was nothing he could have truly done to prevent this from happening. Even if Isaac had stood up in front of a camera the instant he got back and spilled the beans on everything, how many people would have listened? How many people would have even heard the message?

“Well, I like this.” the other man spread his arms in an all-encompassing gesture. “People think that trains are just a way to get from Point A to Point B and if you spend the entire ride with your nose buried in a book, they certainly are. But when you actually talk to people, it becomes so much more.”

He gestured towards the closest table.

“Just a few days ago, there was a group of old ladies there, and then a couple of criminology students joined them. They talked about a lot of things, but eventually, the students started to explain about their studies. And then, they pointed to each of the old ladies and told them how suited they were to certain types of crimes. Imagine that, some young twenty year old looking a wizened grandmother in the face and saying ‘and you, you would be a born conwoman’.”

“Imagine that.” Isaac chortled.

“I just love ... this. All of this. The people. Even if the world were to end tomorrow, I’d still be doing this. Going out doing what you love, what else is there, in the end? ... are you alright?”

“It’s ... it’s nothing. No, that was a lie.” Isaac sighed “I recently lost a couple of friends, just like that. But nothing you need to concern yourself with.”

“My condolences.” Fabio said. There really wasn’t much more to say.

“Like you said, going out doing what you love, going out on your own terms, what else is there at the end? And that’s what they managed to do. Doesn’t make it suck any less for everyone else, though.” Isaac replied after a short pause.

“Really? I suppose that’s as much as anyone gets.” Fabio said.

‘Too right, Fabio.’ Isaac thought. ‘Too right’

Kade and Mark might still be alive in this timeline, but that didn’t make their loss in the other timeline hurt any less. And even if he did meet them again, they wouldn’t be the same people he’d known in the past. They wouldn’t have had the same experiences, the same memories, the same ... everything. Even if he were inclined to carefully recreate their other lives, he’d only be able to create some bizarre mockery of the people he’d known.

What were they doing at the moment, anyway? Mark was almost certainly still chasing storms across the American Midwest, an experience that had left him so in tune with the weather that he’d even gained a powerful [Class] related to it.

Kade was still deployed somewhere in the Middle East unless Isaac was very far of the mark.

The Professor would be getting just about ready to begin experiments to try and make sense of this strange new world.

And as for everyone else? Isaac didn’t actually know where they were right now, they’d never talked about it. They’d all gotten involved in fighting the invasions and become people who fought monsters, different from whom they’d previously been. Their old lives, left behind, rarely talked about.

It was ironic, he thought. Of all the people he’d only met in the other timeline, it wasn’t one of his best friends he’d visited first, no long lost loved one, but a Mob Boss.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to bring up bad memories.” Fabio apologized, clearly having mistaken his silence for him being upset.

“It’s alright. Death is just another part of life, isn’t it? Ignoring it isn’t going to make it go away.” Isaac replied.

“That probably makes you more accepting of that than ...” Fabio trailed off, gazing wide eyed at the TV. Isaac turned and his jaw dropped.

On the screen, a little girl, perhaps nine, ten years old stood. It was a scene that would have looked perfectly ordinary ... if it hadn’t been for the tentacled thing in her arms. The cute, cat sized thing with tentacles and googly eyes.

“What on Earth?” Fabio asked.

‘An eldritch familiar, adjusted for the kind of [Class] a child would get ...’ Isaac thought. Children usually didn’t gain any [System] based powers until they were mature enough to handle them, but there were exceptions. And the [Classes] they got tended to be a little more childish than normal. A pet Eldritch abomination that somehow managed to be cute ... sure. Weird as all get out, though.

“That’s something straight out of Lovecraft.” Fabio muttered.

“If Lovecraft had also been the producer for My little Pony, sure.” Isaac commented, drawing a laugh.

“I suppose so. I guess that’s the world we live in, then.”

They continued to talk for a couple more hours until they reached the stop where Isaac had to get off and change trains.

Isaac sighed happily as he stepped out of the train car, taking a deep breath of the cool night air. Hours of such a staggeringly normal conversation had been such a treat after an entire day of nothing but fighting and writing.

He spent a few more hours waiting at the train station, then got onto the next train that would take him all the way to Milan. Most of that time was spent trying to sleep, even if said sleep was fitful.

Looking out of the window, Isaac could see the sun slowly rise, illuminating the city as it slowly came closer. One way or another, the events in this city would change the course of his future, for good or ill.