Eventually, the game trail met up with a larger path. This one seemed to get more use and was clearly more worn by larger creatures.  I noticed there was a large puddle off of the path a bit, so I walked over to it to see what I looked like.  My head was vaguely humanoid.  It was covered in the same armor-type material with what looked like a hinged jaw; like a cross between a human skull and a rock.  I didn’t seem to have any sort of nose or distinguishing features, or even ears.  My eyes looked like black jewels with a bright blue pinprick of light at the center.  It wasn’t really what I was expecting, but I didn’t know what to expect in the first place.

My body looked pretty plain, truthfully. No cool armor or fins or anything, though I did have some neat accent lights that made me feel like I was a program in Tron.  It seemed like just the barest of basic design to accommodate human-like joints, like an action figure buck that I might have designed in my old life.  That would be a starter file with all my engineering in place that I could build on top of later for different figure designs.  I noticed that I had toes, four of them. ...and I could move them like my fingers.  That felt weird, but I guess it matched with how many fingers I had now.  I was going to be AWESOME at climbing trees now.  I couldn’t help but think of a certain robot leader from the show Beast Wars now.

I jerked out of my self-study to the sound of a woman screaming.  She sounded mad.  There was the sound like a crack of thunder and I heard her again cry out in pain.  I rushed in the direction of the cries through the brush and trees until I came upon a huge bear with hedgehog-like spines all over it; the creature was the size of an SUV from my old world.  Each of the spines was surging with electricity like a Tesla coil.  The thing had its back to me and was gearing up to attack a young woman that was stumbling to get back up.  She was dressed in what looked like fantasy cosplay and couldn’t be much more than 16 or so.  Was she a human? She was slender with dark skin and freckles, short choppy black hair with a red streak, and huge pointed ears... I guess that means “elf”?

I picked up a rock and threw it at the bear.  It froze for a second before slowly turning in my direction.  The attack clearly did zero damage to it.  The girl looked at me, confused, then back at the bear.  She muttered something and a stream of water erupted from her sword.  I tried calling out to stop her, but I was too late.  As soon as the stream made contact with the bear, the electricity build-up followed the water right back to the source and jolted her hard; her whole body went rigid as she was being electrocuted.  I raced past the bear and knocked the sword out of her hand.  Her body relaxed and she dropped to the ground, unconscious.

The bear roared at me and built up another charge.  I set Sparky next to the girl and tried my best to get between her and the bear.  The bear tensed and, with a crack of thunder, a bolt of lightning discharged from its back and right into me.  Instinctively, I had brought my arms up to shield myself, but as the charge dissipated, I had taken zero damage. Ha! Maxxed out all magic resistance stats! Thanks, Beam!  The bear looked confused and frustrated and tried building up another charge.

“Alright. That’s enough of that. [Console].”

I found the [BuildCharge()] function running and put a [BreakPoint] in the mana cycle loop to pause it.  The Thunder Bear, that’s what it was called, looked surprised and had no idea what was happening to it.  I tried to modify the code, but it looked like I couldn’t do that to another creature unless it let me.  Which was probably why I had been able to help Sparky, since he had clearly been in trouble. Suddenly, I felt touched that Sparky chose to trust me in that situation. Still, being able to throw a pause on something else’s magic functions was pretty OP.

I was so engrossed in looking through the bear’s [Console] and thinking about its magic, that I completely forgot about the “bear” part.  It charged at me and swiped a huge claw that sent me flying.  This wasn’t magic that my Max Resistance could protect me from.  This was a good, old fashioned, meaty swat, and next thing I knew I was hitting a tree.  I hadn’t thought to look at my own [Console] to know what my stats were or how much health I had. That was a mistake, but I wasn’t dead yet, so thumbs up, all four of them.  The bear lumbered at me as I ducked behind the tree I’d smashed into.  It crashed into the tree and nearly sent it into splinters.

Quickly, I dismissed the screens for the bear and brought up my own.  I was currently at [33/100] health, so taking another one of those swats wouldn’t be a good idea. Scrolling past the stats and into skills, I spotted a race skill called [RockMortar()]. It looked like something offensive, so I activated it while avoiding the thrashing bear.  To my surprise and delight, my left hand split apart and my forearm transformed into some sort of cannon.  Now we’re talkin’!  I rolled out into the view of the bear and took aim and tried to fire.  Nothing happened.  I glared incredulously at my hand cannon and took off running.  The bear was right behind me and faster than I was! I grabbed a branch from a tree as I ran past and sharply changed directions; the bear wasn’t so agile and plowed past me.  I scrambled up the tree as best I could with one hand and one useless tube.  Those hand feet were coming in handy already!  Right below me, the bear had started smashing against the tree trunk to shake me loose.

I had bought a few seconds, so I brought my data screen back up and took another look at the skill as well as the [Console]logs.  It appeared that I was trying to fire an empty gun.  Oh duh, “mortar.” So it looked like I needed to load it with something in order to shoot something.  I supposed rocks, based on the skill title.  Obviously, there were no rocks in the tree.  I took a look at the [Source] for [RockMortar()] and found that the ammo type was hardcoded as “rock.” Well, that was easy enough to fix. I added an [ammoType] parameter with a default of rock to the function, so now it’d shoot anything that went in.  When I committed the changes, the entry in the skill list renamed itself [RockMortar(ammoType)]. I’d probably have to rename that at some point.

I grabbed a pinecone from a nearby branch and stuffed it into the barrel of my mortar and felt something click and grab the pinecone inside my arm.  Trying to load it, I nearly fell out of the tree when the bear knocked into it again.  This time I aimed down at the bear and thought about firing the cannon, and the pinecone shot out with a considerable amount of velocity.  Pinecones aren’t really known for their durability, so the thing shattered on the bear, but it still looked like it hurt it.  I grabbed a couple more and kept firing them off at the bear.  The bear was actually looking annoyed.  Then it pulled back and moved away from the tree.  I tried to see where it was headed, and it looked like the girl was back up.

I jumped down from the tree and yelled at the bear, but it was ignoring me now.  The girl looked shaky, but she was going to try again with her water magic.  Maybe that was the only magic she had? Either way, it wasn’t a bright idea.  Now that I was back on the ground, I scooped up some rocks that looked like they’d fit into my arm and loaded them up.  I’d put two of them in at once, thinking I might get a shotgun effect, and fired at the bear.  This time a single rock shot into the bear like a bullet, and it roared in pain.  I could sense that I still had the other rock still inside my arm; this was great! It meant that I could load up on ammo rather than having to load per shot.  I kept running around to stay behind the bear, scooping up more rocks as I went and shoving them into my arm.

I kept firing off the rock bullets, hitting the bear. It was noticeably getting weaker now and bleeding pretty badly, but I couldn’t seem to get a kill-shot in.  Like some sort of anime hero, the girl launched herself over the bear, coming down in a downward strike with her sword.  The attack took the bear’s head off, and she landed, huffing and breathing heavily.  She then got up and flicked the blood off her sword before putting it away, looking very smug and proud of herself.

“Where’s your master?” she asked me, her expression turning cold.

“My what now?” I asked, stiffening a bit.

“Your master. Where’s your master, are they nearby? I must thank them for their assistance.”

“You should thank me. I’m the one that assisted you,” I said indignantly.

“No one thanks the sword of the person that wields it,” she scoffed.

“Okay, crazy lady," I said, shaking my head, "It’s been fun. Come on, Sparky!”

Sparky dashed out from his hiding spot and climbed up to my shoulder.  I gave her a little salute and turned to walk off.

“Wait! Are you Unclaimed Property?” she asked, excitedly.

She had a giddy expression on her face, like she’d just found the crown jewels lying in her backyard.  I froze in my tracks and turned to look at her.

“What did you call me?” I snarled.

“You’re an Automata. If you have no master then you’re Unclaimed Property. I will claim you,” she said definitively, as if there was no more obvious outcome.

I turned to fully glare at her and walked right up to her.  I had no idea if I was actually glaring or what facial expressions I was actually capable of, but I thought “glare” really hard.

“The HELL you will,” I said with what was hopefully gritted teeth, looking up at her from inches away.

Wait. looking up? I was shorter than this little teenage girl? Not the effect I had hoped for, but it still seemed to work. She jumped back as if I’d slapped her and looked shocked.

“You? You can’t talk to me like that! You’re an Automata!” she stammered.

“Idiot,” I spat and turned on my heel and started walking away.

She ran in front of me and put her arms out to stop me.

“Look, I’m sorry.  You’re the first Automata I’ve actually met, but anybody that finds a cool sword in the woods would expect to pick it up and keep it, right?” Her expression of innocence  made it seem as though this was the only logical conclusion.

“And your first thought upon meeting me is to treat me like some finders-keepers thing and enslave me. Nice. Have a great life, kid.” I tried to move past her, but she blocked me again.

“Shea.” 

“What?”

“My name. It’s Shea, not kid.”

“I’m very happy for you, enjoy your bear.”

“Okay, I’m sorry. I thought all Automata were just magic tools or puppets.  The ones in the shops don’t move or seem alive until you buy them, and the ones I see walking with the rich people act like perfect servants.” She seemed a little shaken, like her view of the world was fundamentally altered, and she didn't know what to think anymore.

I sighed and looked up at the sky. “Thanks for letting me know this was a slave race, Beam.”

Shea followed my gaze up and asked, “who’s Beam?”

I sighed again and blinked for a long second. At least it felt like I blinked; I don’t think I actually have eyelids.

“You know what, don’t worry about it. Not important.”

“Um... I told you my name. What do I call you?”

I thought about it for a second or two, then answered, “you can call me Prime.”  Please forgive me, Optimus.

“Prime. You got it, nice to meet you!” When she spoke, her whole body seemed to smile. It was hard to stay mad at this kid, and I’ve always sucked at holding grudges. As if just noticing Sparky, she squealed, “he’s so cute! I’ve never seen a pet Fire Squirrel before.”

“Sparky isn’t my pet.  I helped him out with a problem he was having with his magic, and now he’s decided to hang out with me.”

“...helped out with his magic. You are very interesting, Mister Prime,” she said, staring at me intently.

Mister? I didn't have any Mister parts, but sure, why not?

“Hmmph. So what’s up with the bear? Seems like a pretty tough customer for you.”

“Oh, that." She sighed. "I had a subjugation quest from the Adventurer’s Guild to bring it down.  Though I admit it was probably too high a quest for me.  The Thunder Bear is a rank C but I’m only a E. I’ve got water magic, so I thought that I’d be able to take it down easily.” She shrugged. 

“I imagine that’s only true if you have a high level of water magic and can disrupt its electricity without getting zapped yourself,” I said speculatively.

“Yeah. Lesson learned,” she said with a lop-sided grin.

“So what do you do with it now?” I asked, gesturing at the corpse.

“I need to collect its mana crystal and bring it into the guild.  It’s a shame I can’t bring the corpse in, as I could sell the materials, but there’s no way I can carry that thing.”

She drew her sword and shoved it into the chest of the bear before plunging her arm into the wound and pulling out a large crystal that glowed with magical energy.  I was surprised to see this young girl so easily and thoughtlessly bury her arm up to the shoulder in gore.  She set the crystal down on the ground away from the corpse and began a low chant while holding out her clean hand.  As she chanted, water droplets formed in the air around her hand and coalesced into a wobbly ball of water in her palm.

I opened up [Console] to [Inspect] her magic as she performed it.  I was really curious about how magic worked in this world and how I could interact with it.  There were no console errors or warnings; everything ran smoothly.  Looking at the runtime logs, I could see in real-time the functions that were processing her magic.  It appeared that her chant was a collection of keywords that triggered several small functions.  One to gather moisture from the air, one to contract the moisture into droplets, one to cycle through generated droplets and collect them into a ball, and another to keep the collected ball from collapsing.  It was pretty interesting to see happening but seemed rather inefficient.  Once she’d gathered enough water together, her chant ended with a new word that triggered a loop with eventListener to keep the ball together.

Shea took the ball of water and used it to clean her bloody arm and clothes and then crouched down to clean the mana crystal.  As I watched her, she started to look self-conscious and looked back up at me.

“Um... What is it? Why are you staring at me?” she asked, before releasing the now disgusting bloody blob of water and dirt onto the ground.

“Ah. Sorry." I stammered as I realized how intently I was staring.  "I was interested in how you were doing your magic and was watching the magic functions you were triggering with your chant keywords.”

“You can see the magic functions? I had to study the functions for a long time before I could use the chant keywords and then chain them together.” She seemed puzzled but intrigued.

People can’t normally do that?  Maybe it was because I was a machine, or maybe this [Console] ability is unique?  I guess I can’t hide that now.  If I could fix Sparky’s code, maybe I could rewrite some of hers, I knew I shouldn’t but curiosity overwhelmed me and I had to find out.

“If you don’t mind, I think I can improve your casting efficiency.  I seem to have some [Programmer] functions and abilities.”

“Are you a great Sage??”  She was definitely interested now, "I’ve never heard of such a thing before!”

Crap, I guess this is a unique ability.  Again, thanks Beam, but this is better than being someone’s slave.

“I don’t know about being a sage or anything, but I’m sure I can write a quick function for you that can condense all those chant keywords down to a single command.”

“YES, PLEASE!”

She looked so excited for the chance to improve her magic that I was a little worried that she might explode.

“Sure, not a problem.”

It was an easy enough thing to do; in her source file, I added a new function that just ran through all of her chant keywords once, then another function to call the first one in a loop until the water mass reached a certain threshold.

“Okay, all done. Try using [waterGlob()]. It’ll generate a glob of water the size of your fist.  If you need other sizes, you’ll need to go back to the chanting or I can modify it to accept size parameters.”

Shea looked sideways at me, then looked at her hand.  “waterGlob.”  Like before, the droplets gathered and formed into the ball of water in her hand, but this time she didn’t need to keep chanting and it gathered much faster, since the function could run the subroutines asynchronously.

“Whoa!” she screamed. “Whoa! Really, whoa!!”

Shea then started running around the area shouting waterGlob and generating multiple globs of water until she got woozy and fell over.  When she fell over, the globs collapsed and drenched her.  It looked like she had kept casting the spell and maintaining the globes until she ran too low on her mana to keep them going.  She sat up, soaked to the bone and looking sleepy, but happy.

“Yeeerrr... pretty amashing mishter prime...”

I had to laugh; this kid was growing on me.  I took a look at the giant bear corpse. It would be a shame to leave it here to rot if it could be sold or processed for materials.  In my old world, I couldn’t stand when hunters would kill animals for a trophy and leave the rest of the animal dumped in the woods. This felt like the same thing.

“Hmm... [Inventory]”, I said, as I extended my hand to the bear carcass.

Like some sort of digital effect, the bear broke up into small cubes that floated into the air and vanished.  Soon there was nothing left, and I felt a sensation of an item being added to some internal inventory.

“Well, that’s handy.”

“You have Inventory?? OhMyGoshThat’sAmazing!!”

“Is it really that good?”

Damn.  I thought for sure that [Inventory] would be more common.

“That’s a REALLY fantastic skill to have.  Whoever built you made you really top of the line!”

“Is that so?” I mused; if not for my robot face, I would have had a very smug look indeed.