[center][img]https://see.fontimg.com/api/renderfont4/RRdW/eyJyIjoiZnMiLCJoIjo4NywidyI6MTUwMCwiZnMiOjU4LCJmZ2MiOiIjOTI5NEZGIiwiYmdjIjoiIzM2MjM2QiIsInQiOjF9/UGV0cmE/grime.png[/img][h3]??? — Dilapidated Shack[/h3][@Zeroth][@ERode][@PKMNB0Y][hr][/center]As soon as Petra was placed back onto solid ground, her body automatically reformed itself back into its designated shape. Petra couldn’t help but find the fact that her new body acted without her direct input to be somewhat disconcerting, but she tried not to be bothered by it anyway – if she really thought about it, it wasn’t all that different from the way a human body would right itself while standing or walking, even if it was a fair bit less subtle. If anything, it was probably good to see confirmation the ‘instincts’ she’d crafted for her body would continue working even after she stopped focusing on them. 

With the imminent risk of falling apart behind her, and her companions seeming to have acknowledged her as a human – or rather, a former human – Petra turned her attention to the people she shared the space with. She was pretty sure there were two of them by now, though she supposed it was possible that there were others nearby that simply hadn’t spoken or moved yet. 

Petra wasn’t shy per se, but she was the type to struggle with getting to know people, rarely bothering to interact with people outside of uni or her close friend group. She had no clue how some people were so easily able to form opinions about others; in her experience seemingly nice people could turn out to be shitty once you got to know them, and she knew well enough about fundamental attribution error to realise that judging people on a bad interaction was silly… 

Well, she could say all that, but at the same time she certainly didn’t like being picked up so casually, so fallacious or not, her initial opinion of the person that’d done so wasn’t exactly great. As for the one that’d put her back down, she gave them a slightly better judgement – they had suggested that she might be lying, but that was a technically true statement, so whatever. Petra mentally labelled the pair, ‘Up’ and ‘Down’ respectively. Now she just needed to find four more companions to dub Top, Bottom, Charm and Strange, and she’d have a full set…

Personal musings aside, Petra focused on listening to her companions talk. Rather frustratingly, what passed for her current method of hearing wasn’t very good, and Petra found herself unable to parse a lot of what was said, having to painstakingly piece the gaps in what she could make out through context. 

From what she was able to gather, Down seemed to be talking about survival strategies, something Petra hadn’t even considered since waking up in her new body. In hindsight, Petra realised that was an incredibly stupid oversight on her part, both in terms of the fact that she’d just been in a plane accident and had no idea where she was, and because she hadn’t yet tried to figure out what she’d need to do to survive in her new body specifically. Beyond survival, Down observed Petra’s difficulties speaking and suggested she try ‘farting’ to communicate; somewhat crude wording aside, that was actually a decent idea – at least assuming she could actually draw safely gas into her body and expel it without popping or something, that might be a more effective means of communicating than repeatedly slapping herself. Petra’s opinion of Down went up a notch. 

There was some more conversation that Petra struggled to make much out of beyond, the worlds “plane”, “world”, and something about “America”. Was he trying to confirm that they were all involved in the accident? She really couldn’t tell with how little she’d been able to hear.

[i]Fuck it[/i], losing her sight or hearing would have been bad enough on its own, but losing both at the same time wasn’t something she was prepared or willing to live with. Risks be damned, the moment she got the time, Petra would look for a way to use the strange new power that let her mess with her biology to improve her hearing. It wasn’t like she hadn’t already used it to perform DIY neurosurgery on herself. 

Desperate as she was, however, autosurgury something Petra was willing to rush into, so for the time being, Petra settled for cobbling together a ‘hearing program’, slowly extending a pseudopod into the air, before painstakingly trying to force it to mould itself into a shape like a jackrabbits' ear. Just a few seconds of trying and failing to create a shape even remotely convex was all it took for it to become abundantly clear to Petra that doing so was well and truly beyond her current skill level, and she had to settle for simply flattening the pseudopod out as much as she could without collapsing it. Not long after, Petra sported several new, vaguely leaf shaped, ridges atop her body, that while misshapen enough to give a preschooler’s drawings a run for their money, at least let her 'hear' a little better.

[quote]"As f-far as we can tell...we're somewhere that isn't home. I found this, earlier: Status!" 
"... Can you see this? Or open your own?"[/quote]
[i]Status?[/i] Petra couldn’t see what the guy was talking about, but that wasn’t exactly a surprise since she couldn’t see at all. Tentatively, Petra spoke the word Down had exclaimed – or slapped the word out, rather – and was surprised when a text box appeared within her otherwise empty ‘field of view’. 

Despite video games not really being her thing, Petra wasn’t quite so uncultured as not to recognise the gaminess of the status sheet in front of her. Some part of her felt incredulous at the numbers listed on her screen, the idea that a person's capabilities could be abstracted into just a few numbers not sitting right with her. And what the hell was the Luck stat? People could get lucky, sure, but there was a difference between circumstances lining up to make something subjectively good happen and some kind of ontological luckiness trait; if something like that existed, science would have discovered it a long time ago.

Actually, if she thought about it for a moment, Stats were almost certainly something other than straight representations of her physical and ‘metaphysical’ capacity. Luck aside, she couldn’t think of any reasonable way someone would describe her current body as being exactly as dexterous as it was strong or agile. Petra added Stats to the list of things she’d need to figure out, along with levels, and pretty much everything else on her status sheet for that matter. 

Thankfully, while Petra felt less than confident with her own knowledge of gaming culture, at least one of her companions seemed to be well versed in the subject. She still wasn’t sure about how much she wanted to believe things ran off video game logic here – the idea of magic, dragons, elves, and whatever other fantasy tropes possibly existing, was discordant with her understanding of the underlying mechanisms of how the universe worked – but, that said, she’d already seen and even performed several things that very much seemed to be supernatual, so she’d have to throw out at least some of her presuppositions regardless. 

Speaking of, Down mentioned something about getting a specail ability being normal for the genre? Sure enough, scanning through her status sheet Petra quickly found a section for Skills, empty save for the lone entry of [Biomancy]. Expanding the Skill and reading its description made it immediately clear that this was the ‘magic’ she’d been performing before. That was yet another thing she’d have to do a deep dive into later – but more importantly for the time being, while it was far from conclusive evidence, it certainly lent a degree of credibility to the idea that this world ran on genre tropes and game logic. 

If Down’s predictions about dragons, and adventurer guilds, and demon lords, also turn out to be correct, she’d need to seriously evaluate some of her fundamental beliefs about the way the world worked. Either way, for now, he seemed to be her best bet, both for surviving this mess and for testing just what kind of logic this world ran off, so she’d definitely be following him if she could. 

Before that though, there was one other thing on her status sheet that had caught her interest – or at least caught it more than everything else – “Contacts”. Did that mean like contacts on a phone? Would she be able to talk through it? Expanding the Contacts list, Petra found it to be just as empty as the 0 next to it had implied, but that was probably fine, she just needed to find a way to add them. Willing it with all her might just as she had with her magic, Petra waited a second as absolutely nothing happened… [i]Damn it![/i]

[color=9294FF]“Ad̵d… con̴t̸act… ̸a̶dd… D̸ow̸n̵, U̷p̶… ad̸d…”[/color]