Atlantis Reforged 340 Book 1 Prologue (Rewrite)

“Why her?” The System Administrator asked.

Teigh, God of Illusion and Glamour, had been granted a boon. The System was given the people of Earth a do-over. It had reached an agreement with [Time] and [Paradox] to reinitialize System Integration. A remedy to redress the errors that a System Virus had introduced.

Teigh had been allowed to select one person. A person that was related to his original body, the body that had held the soul that was the springboard for his ascension into a God himself.

“Asteria meets my requirements,” Teigh explained. “The threads of Karma that tie us together are the strongest of those I might choose. 

“Her experiences during the first System integration demonstrate a will to survive. The System forced her into an untenable position. The weakest race, the weakest class, and bound her in chains that made leveling all but impossible.

“She never gave up. 

“She could have ended her own life, or provoked her slavers into killing her, but she didn’t. She bore the chains that System chained her under, and managed to maintain the drive to live.

“I want to see who and what she becomes when given a unique opportunity. Who will the woman that endured slavery for forty years, become if she is given the chance at a new race, new class, and new starting point.

“She will be able to claim my entire heritage as a Bloodline Progenitor. I will watch. It will be interesting to see what a Sidhe/Atlantis Hybrid can become. One with her drive to survive.”

***

Asteria looked around herself in confusion. One moment she was preparing to survive ten strokes of the lash. As a Mousekin slave, she had failed to meet her weekly quota for the third time in a row and had been shackled and tied to the whipping post for her failure.

She had bitten down on the leather strap she had been offered, hoping to survive the punishment that was to come when everything had changed. The world seemed to warp, the lines that separated reality and nightmare gone, and she felt herself enter experiencing a world created by Salvador Dali.

Asteria’s confusion cleared as she finally recognized where she was. Her bedroom from before the integration. A glance in the mirror above her dresser confirmed that she was her younger self. A shy teenage girl looked back at her. A girl with features that pointed towards bi-racial heritage. Celtic and Grecian bloodlines were easily recognizable. She had been gifted with the flawless olive-toned skin of her Mediterranean father, as well as fiery gold hair that contained the reddish undertones of her Welsh mother.

Her eyes were vibrant green, with long dark lashes she inherited from her father. Her lips were full, her teeth brilliantly white, and a small smattering of freckles was barely noticeable across the bridge of her small nose, freckles she shared with her mother and brother.

She wasn’t considered movie star beautiful, but there was an exotic tone to her facial features that might allow her to blossom from pretty to beautiful once she matured into adulthood.

Asteria was still trying to understand what was going on. Why was she holding her backpack? Why was she dressed in a school uniform, the uniform a requirement for the private institution she attended, that institution having been forgotten decades ago?

She was reaching for her cell phone when the message appeared. A message that she had seen before. One that had forced her to live a nightmare existence as a slave.

[System Integration Beginning…

[Assimilation Portals Established…

Asteria felt the world shift, this change different than the fleeting moment she had experienced as her circumstances changed and she went from a Slave about to be beaten to death, and that moment in her life before the System had ruined everything. It was the feeling she endured when plunging down from the top of a roller-coaster. Her stomach rebelled, and perspiration trickled down her back.

The change was instant, even if it didn’t feel like it. And Asteria was once again standing in front of a portal. Asteria stared at the floating blue rift in space in frustration. She didn’t know how she had gotten here, but she remembered what had happened the first time she had been confronted with this Portal.

Too afraid to examine it, too afraid to enter, she had dived under the covers of her bed, trying to hide and ignore what was going on. But the System would not be ignored, and after an hour, her choice had been removed, and the Portal she should have entered had faded. The System had scanned her actions since integration and assigned her the race of Mousekin. A scared, timid species that best fit the actions of a young girl hiding under her covers, hoping everything would just go away.

Asteria walked through the Portal, finding herself in a classroom filled with thirty other individuals. The classroom she had entered was eerily silent. Asteria watched as flickering of light as individuals appeared in and out of existence as they completed a form using the computer placed at each desk.

There was a [System Administrator] seated at the professor's desk, information that Asteria had discovered post-integration in her past experience. Those that had entered the portal had shared their experiences. Those experiences and stories were enough information to determine where she was and what came next.

The giant, [Welcome to System Integration 2.0], stenciled across the blackboard, was the only difference between this room and the event and the one she had been regaled with when people found out she had refused to enter the portal.

[Welcome to System Integration 2.0.]

A second chance.

Or was it a third?

It was if she counted her life before System Integration 1.0.

A chance at a new life and a new start after the horrendous cluster fuck that had passed for a System integration in her previous one. The last time the System had decided on a race and profession based on her actions.

The problem was that the race and class selection was the weakest choice available. They were an evolution dead-end. She’d had no choice but to accept Mousekin as her race and Miner as her class. Years later, one of the other people who had refused to enter the System Assimilation Portal figured out that race and class selection had been set based on what you were doing at the time of integration.

Because of her location, and activity at the time of assimilation, the System had ‘gifted’ her a race that would allow her to live. She had been hiding under a blanket, and the System had translated that action. She had been given claws, teeth, and a tail, physical advantages that should have made it easier to attack and protect herself.

Her sense of smell and digging skills allowed her to find and harvest mushrooms and ores.

Ninety percent of the newly integrated people hadn’t lived past the first week, even for those that had stepped through the portal and chosen the race, class, profession, and starting attributes that gave them a chance. Too many people pretended this was a game and created race/class combos weak to defense.

Those under fifteen never returned. Asteria had always assumed the System just erased them, killing them because it wasn’t worth the resources needed to protect and nurture children that had no chance at survival.

Asteria had been sixteen when the first System integration happened. She had lived but had always wondered if it might not have been better if the System cut-off age for integration had been eighteen. She might have been better erased from existence.

But whatever had happened to bring her back in time, Asteria decided she was going to make the most of the situation. She had knowledge of the future, of what race/class combinations had been the most successful. She knew that people that had gone for mage builds had been ridiculed as glass cannons. That ridicule had lasted for the few years it had taken for those that had survived the early days to level up and add stats into attributes that shored up the weaknesses they had labored under.

They had treated the System Integration as an RPG game, and for most of them, it was Game Over. Those who had survived and managed to level and fix their starting attribute spread had become the rulers of a new world.

A world that found Asteria enslaved and forced to mine for mana crystals and rare ores. Asteria would use this second chance and create a new character, carve out a new life that would thrive in this new world order.