Broken Soul Part 2

Myst walked over to the silver chest the boss had been guarding and poked it with his pitchfork, wanting to make sure it wasn't a mimic. 'Okay, now you're just being paranoid, but better paranoid than dead,' he reminded himself as he walked around to the side of the chest then reached down and poked it with his finger, ready to pull it back if something tried to kill him. He stared at the information window that appeared in front of him. 'Silver Chest:157, this indestructible boss chest requires the matching key to open.'

'I better not have to kill a couple of hundred bosses,' he complained as he reached down and picked up the key the boss had dropped. He sighed in relief when he noticed that '#157' was engraved on the head of the key. 'That makes things a bit easier.'

Myst opened the chest with the key and looked inside, curious what he'd get from a boss and if he could steal the chest. 'One glowing crystal title shaped like a domino, a set of boots, a book, two ancient looking scrolls and a carved staff with a chicken head.'

He reached into the chest and pulled the book out. “How to Serve Man? Yeah, because that's not ominous," he muttered, then opened the book, causing a couple of hundred hours of cooking, butchering and skinning experience to get downloaded into his head along with a spell for processing a corpse, so he'd never have to actually use the butchering and skinning experiences again.

"That's unpleasant," Myst grumbled as he put the book back in the chest. "At least the spell deals with the nitty gritty," he muttered as he picked up one of the scrolls and looked at the floating window that appeared over it. 'Scroll of Knowledge: this scroll grants one cultivation technique that is guaranteed to be useful to the creature that reads it, taking into consideration their traits and talents. Opening the scroll locks the technique. Yeah, probably better than combing through the sect's library, considering I can't read the local language.'

He opened the scroll before he could talk himself out of saving it and shivered when he 'remembered' picking up a suspicious technique from a drunken master in a shady tavern that he'd never been in and probably didn't exist. 'Purified Pool of Sludge: Grade: Failure. This horrifying failed technique is the result of a drunken master trying to come up with a technique to purify an area without resorting to expensive components. Unfortunately, due to several mistakes, the technique results in corrupted or destroyed spiritual roots in exchange for purifying the surroundings and increasing your pool of energy.'

'Considering I don't have spiritual roots, it's probably fine,' Myst mused, hoping the technique wasn't going to screw him over. He used the scroll, knowing it was practically worthless to anyone else.

Myst smiled when he suddenly 'remembered' how to use the technique and realized that it should work on just about anything corrupted, including cursed items and corrupted spirit beasts. 'Let's see what the other scroll gives me for combat techniques.'

He used the second scroll and stared at the resulting tooltip in disbelief, wondering if a god was fucking with him. 'Conjure Vampiric Chickens of Doom? Allows the user to conjure chickens that will charge at their enemies and explode, resulting in a blast of magic that drains a large amount of health and energy out of anything caught in the ten foot blast radius and gives five percent of the health and energy to the user, warning, the blast can hurt the user if he's too close. Yeah, that's a fucked up spell.'

He quickly used the scroll, excited about destroying an army of chickens and having a spell that could heal him. He picked up the soft black leather boots and looked at the floating window. 'Increases movement rate by twenty percent. That should help with outrunning the monsters,' he thought as he quickly put the boots on, knowing that he was going to have to find some pants and armor before he got serious about hunting monsters.

Myst grabbed the expertly carved and polished dark wooden staff with a carved rooster head on the top from the chest and scowled when the staff activated, summoning a translucent blue rooster with glowing red eyes. 'Shit!' he thought when he checked the description floating over the staff and realized the staff was cursed. 'Cursed Staff of the Corrupted Rooster Cult. This cursed staff summons a rooster spirit to attack your enemies while in your possession, unfortunately the indestructible spirit is homicidal and attacks anything that moves, especially if it would inconvenience the owner. The spirit also has an annoying habit of crowing at sunrise, which magically wakes up everyone that hears it. Unfortunately, the staff is indestructible and the curse prevents the owner from getting rid of it unless they manage to sell it and the curse works to prevent it being sold. The staff also has the ability to give sapient targets the ability to summon spiritual chickens that give their owners corrupted ki when they do damage, causing all sorts of problems for people that are trying to avoid corruption.'

Myst glared at the staff when he dropped it and found it back in his hand before it even hit the ground. 'So much for leaving you on a counter or something if I have to sneak somewhere, hopefully I can break that particular curse with the purifying technique or get enough gear that it doesn't matter.'

Myst checked the description floating over the glowing tile. 'This upgrade tile can upgrade a minor talent, improving it in some small way, nice! Hopefully the boss respawns.' He picked the tile up and focused on using it, not sure what else to do with it. He relaxed a touch when he got a window with two options. 'Dubbed Translation or Bountiful Alchemy? I can deal with people's lips not syncing up with what they say.' He reached up and carefully selected Bountiful Alchemy, causing the tile to vanish and the percentage to duplicate material to increase to eight percent rather than three.

'Huh, that's actually a solid increase, I was half expecting one percent,' Myst mused as he touched the chest and 'handed' it to his other half.

Myst smiled when he saw the chest appear in his room then quickly started putting the spirit stones and weird items that he'd looted into the chest. 'At least it's larger on the inside, now I just need to figure out how to kill a bunch of monsters without dying.'

Ron knocked on Myst's door. "Do you have time for a bit of a chat or are you trying to unlock the secrets of the universe?"

"I can multitask," Myst replied as he finished putting the most obvious items in the chest then closed and locked it. He pulled the key out and stuck it in his pocket then stood up and opened the door, while his other half worked on picking up all of the rest of the loot from the chickens.

"Cool, so a couple of us figured we should try to figure out how to help each other survive, I figured you might have some suggestions because you're old," Ron replied with a grin.

"Stupid whippersnappers," Myst joked as he walked out of the closet-sized room and over to where seven of the people that had been summoned were gathered around a table. "Did anyone else get stuck without spirit roots?"

"Just you and Taylor," Selena said as she gestured towards a teenage girl with long, dark curly hair and glasses.

"Story of my life," Taylor admitted. "I'm just hoping I can leverage my ability to read and write any language for room and board since the locals seem to be assholes."

"They're not that bad, you should see my music teacher," Akari argued, used to dealing with insane perfectionists since her grandmother was Japanese.

Myst glanced at the attractive dark haired teenager with green eyes that was wearing jeans and a white t-shirt with an unfamiliar cat girl in a school girl outfit and a bunch of Japanese characters on it then looked at the tired looking teenage girl with frizzy hair and enough freckles that they were blending together on her face. "Perfectionist or sadist?"

"Yes," Akari replied with a shrug. "She's also friends with my grandmother so I can't tell her to go fuck herself."

"Not a fan of music?" the frizzy haired girl asked, then covered her mouth with her arm as she yawned.

"I love music, I even love playing the violin, I just think my teacher is pretentious and she doesn't have any flare left," Akari complained.

"Makes sense," the frizzle haired teenager turned her head to focus on Myst. "I'm Amy in case you missed iit."

"Myst," Myst replied, a touch distracted by the loot his avatar was picking up and by his thoughts on how to survive a nightmare he'd never expected to have to deal with.

"What else did you get?" Selena asked Taylor, fairly sure that everyone had picked up at least two abilities from the summoning ritual.

Taylor gave the girl with an insane music teacher a glance then focused on the girl with a father that scared the locals. "I can create fist sized spirit beasts but I can't actually cultivate which means I'm basically stuck making pets since I don't have enough ki to make anything more powerful," she explained, not seeing a point in mentioning her other ability to merge captured spirit beasts since it cost more ki than she had.

"That sounds useful, we might be able to find a ki battery," Selena suggested, wishing she had access to her family vault or even the junk room they used for projects since they had plenty of magical batteries.

"This isn't a game!" a fat man in his late thirties complained from the other side of the room, not sure why everyone was pretending that magic was real.

"I'm aware," Selena replied as she turned to look at the man that hadn't cared enough to walk over and join them, mostly because they were a bunch of kids. "But my family has a bunch of items that hold magic, the cultists might have something that stores ki."

"Magic doesn't exist!" the man snapped.

"Spirit stones!" Gwen blurted out excitedly, thinking about some of the books that she'd read about cultivators.

"That's assuming they exist," a dark haired geeky looking teenager told her.

Myst kept part of his attention on the fat idiot wearing what might pass for business casual as he glanced between the geeky looking teenager and the familiar looking blonde haired teenage girl wearing a black and green plaid skirt and a black shirt with black stockings, wondering why they seemed familiar despite the fact that he was fairly sure he'd never seen them before. "Seems reasonable."

"Why aren't you freaking out?" the fat man demanded as he turned and glared at Myst. "You're old enough to know that magic doesn't exist!"

"Let me guess, you think it's a stage or something and we're all actors?" Myst asked, wondering if the man was going to snap and get violent or have a heart attack from the stress.

"Yes!" the man blurted out, glaring at the group.

"I went from sitting at my computer to standing in a room with a bunch of cultists and I saw someone move faster than I could see. I would have heard the doors open in my house, they creak which means that it's unlikely someone drugged me with something I've never heard of that can cause missing time without 'waking' up groggy as hell. We don't have VR tech good enough to fake the little details in the room or the shiver I felt when Selena's father showed up. I doubt aliens would kidnap people and pretend to be cultists in a medieval world which leaves magic or strange abilities that might as well be magic," Myst argued, trying to get the man to see reason before he lost his shit and snapped, if only because he didn't want one of the kids getting hurt.

"You're insane!" the fat man snapped as he stalked into the room that he'd been assigned, hoping that everything was a bad dream and that things would make sense when he woke up.

"I give the guy two days before he snaps and gets himself killed," Ron said thoughtfully.

"That's being generous," Akari argued as she turned to look at Myst. "I don't suppose you have a plan to survive because my only combat ability involves doing a stupid dance and redirecting threats like a hunter in Warcraft and I doubt that's going to be enough to get us home."

"That depends," Myst replied as he looked at Selena, "do you have a way to make sure the cultists aren't listening to us?" he asked, figuring she'd have the best chance to have something useful considering her father had enough power to find her and kill one of the cultists.

"My room…" Selena trailed off when there was a flash of light from the room they'd assigned her and a previously invisible person caught fire for a second before turning to ash. "That's annoying."

"What the fuck?!" Akari blurted, wondering where the hell the person had come from or how they'd caught fire.

"Mom might have gone a bit overboard with her wards," Selena admitted as she walked over and pulled a dagger, a coin purse and a black leather belt out of the pile of ash. "You seven have permission to enter as long as you aren't vampires, traitors, or demons that wish me harm."

"That's terrifying," Taylor admitted.

"Mom can be a bit intense," Selena replied as she walked into her room, wanting to make sure they could plan without the cultists overhearing them.

Myst felt slightly better about walking into the girl's room once the blond teenager walked in without being vaporized. 'That explains why her parents weren't particularly worried about her staying here or at least part of it.'

Selena waited until everyone was through the door then closed the door, pulled out a piece of enchanted glass from her emergency kit and looked through it, making sure no one was hiding. "Okay, we should be safe to talk."

"What the hell was that?" Amy asked, feeling like all of the rules had suddenly changed on her.

"The wards are part of my emergency kit. I've got stakes, ward cards that I can place on walls to make a safe place, a glass I can look through for invisible or hidden bad guys, about a hundred pounds of tuna and enough bread and mayonnaise for a month of sandwiches along with a case of water bottles, a water filter and several changes of clothes," Selena said proudly.

Akari stared at the girl that was still just wearing an oversized t-shirt. "Weren't you sleeping in your room?"

Selena gestured at her wrist, causing a tattoo of a suitcase to appear for a couple of seconds. "It pays to be prepared."

"I don't suppose you have any firearms?" Akari asked hopefully.

"Mom vetoed my plan to cram my kit full of enough guns and ammo to win World War Three," Selena complained, slightly annoyed that her mother hated guns even if she had a valid reason.

"What does that leave us with?" the geek asked as he glanced around the room that was nicer than the much smaller room they'd assigned him.

"Screwed," Taylor offered, not sure how they were supposed to deal with a bunch of superpowered ninjas.

"Cards on the table," Myst said as his other half handed him a ki stone, causing the glowing red stone to appear in his right hand, "I might have neglected to mention one of my powers."

"You have a power that lets you make ki stones?" Ron asked excitedly.

"Close enough for the moment," Myst replied as he tossed the ki stone to Taylor. "You should probably do some testing to see if you can make something useful."

"Thanks," Taylor replied as she opened her power's interface and tried to figure out what type of spirit beast she could make.

"How many of those can you make?" Selena asked thoughtfully.

"That depends, does anyone not know what a smartphone is?" Myst asked as he studied the expressions on the rest of the teenager's faces, wanting to make sure they weren't confused since none of the cultists had looked like they were familiar with technology.

"Some type of cell phone, right?" Taylor asked, not recognizing the brand but able to make a guess.

"Like a Starkphone?" the geek asked thoughtfully.

Myst turned to stare at the kid. "Stark?"

"Tony Stark, multi billionaire, genius inventor and all that…" he trailed off when he realized that Akari and Myst were staring at him. "What?"

"What springs to mind if I say, The Avengers?" Myst asked, wondering how far down the rabbit hole he'd gotten dropped.

"It's a team of superheroes, why?" Gwen asked.

"Because the Avengers are a fictional team of heroes in my world," Myst replied, studying their faces.

"Same," Akari piped up.

"Fictional?" Peter asked with a raised eyebrow, clearly not believing them since you'd have to have been living under a rock for the last couple of years not to know about The Avengers.

Taylor shrugged. "They sound familiar."

"Was that Marvel or DC?" Amy asked, thinking about the old comics from before capes had been a thing.

"Marvel," Selena offered. "Peter, Gwen, Peter Parker?"

"Yes?" Peter asked, not sure what the hell was going on or how she knew his last name since he hadn't mentioned it since they'd been summoned.

"Does that mean you're Gwen Stacy?" she asked excitedly, wondering if she could get their autograph.

"Yes," Gwen replied, curious how she'd figured it out. "How?"

"I have a bunch of your comics," Selena admitted, barely avoiding squealing like the fan girl she was.

"Comics?" Peter asked warily.

Myst shook his head. "Before we go down that rabbit hole, let's get back to the point of the meeting, how to survive."

Peter glared at Myst. "You can't just drop the fact that you know our names because of comic books then switch topics."

"I can try," Myst replied, not even bothering to hide his amusement.

"Spill, what's my hero name?" Gwen asked excitedly.

"Ghost Spider," Selena replied with a grin then turned to look at Peter. "If you ever have a chance to drink a vial filled with chemicals designed to turn you into a lizardman to regenerate or because you want to prove that you're a hero, don't."

Peter frowned as he considered her warning. "That sounds like a suspiciously specific warning."

"That's enough, there's a decent chance that he'll never need that particular warning," Myst pointed out. "Though if we are warning people about stupid behavior, make sure anyone you know that is going to radically alter their biology gives you a couple of dozen blood samples first so you can use their unaltered DNA as a roadmap to put them back together."

"Makes sense," Peter agreed, not seeing the problem with that suggestion since it made sense to have a baseline for tests.

"You'd be surprised," Myst muttered, hoping they were from a saner version of Marvel than most of the comics. "Back to the main point, surviving. I'd appreciate it if you didn't mention my ability where the cultists can overhear but my other power involves my avatar or duplicate fighting monsters that drop loot in a pocket world."

"Sweet!" Ron blurted. "Can you get me a ray gun?!"

'Not a chance, even if I find one,' Myst thought as he shook his head, still not sure why the dorky looking kid seemed familiar. "I doubt it, the place is a reflection of this world."

"Which means spirit stones and techniques, right?" Selena asked.

"I also got a cursed staff," Myst replied with a shrug. "I'll save the next cultivation scroll for Taylor, it should give her something she can use."

"Seriously?" Taylor asked, surprised that he'd help.

"I've already grabbed a cultivation technique that should let me increase my mana pool, provided I can find locations that have corrupt ki or enough cursed items, there's no point in wasting the scrolls when we have people that can use them," Myst explained, not seeing a problem with sharing since he could probably find more scrolls.

"I'm not complaining, I'm just surprised," Taylor admitted, not used to people helping her.

"If we work together, we have a better chance to escape," Myst pointed out.

"And learn things in the process," Akari added, looking forward to picking up some interesting techniques.

"Have you found any weapons you don't need?" Selena asked Myst. "My power involves conjuring spiritual weapons. I can permanently increase the power of my weapons by sacrificing weapons."

"Sure," Myst replied with a grin as he had his other half hand him a pitchfork. He handed Selena the pitchfork. "Go for it."

"Thanks," Selena replied as she conjured a translucent purple shortsword and focused on absorbing the pitchfork, not quite sure how to use her new power.

"What does the cursed staff do?" Amy asked Myst.

"It's cursed so I can't drop it, it also conjures an indestructible spirit beast in the form of a chicken and gives me the ability to curse someone with the ability to conjure a spirit pet that can drain ki and feed it back to people in the form of corrupted ki," Myst explained.

"Corrupted ki?" Selena asked warily.

"Is that as bad as it sounds?" Akari asked.

"Probably," Myst admitted as his avatar used the staff to give himself the ability to summon a spirit beast, which gave him the ability. "My ability that turns ki into mana should protect me but I doubt the rest of you would enjoy it."

"My trait just says I lack spiritual roots, it doesn't say anything about converting ki into mana, that's annoying," Taylor complained.

"Speaking of abilities, I get tougher when I get hurt," Amy admitted reluctantly, thinking about Crawler and glad that her new ability didn't seem to come with mutations.

"This is potentially awkward but how do you feel about having sex with girls?" Akari asked Amy.

Amy turned to look at Akari. "Why?"

"Because having sex with someone permanently gives me a fifth of their stat gains and a third of their energy gains for a week," Akari admitted.

"Give me a chance to get to know you," Amy replied, figuring that having a relationship with someone might take her mind off Vicky.

"Someone or something?" Ron asked thoughtfully.

"Technically anything living, why?" Akari asked, not sure she wanted to know what was going through his head.

Ron gestured toward Taylor. "She mentioned being able to create pets, they level, right?"

"Hmm," Akari mused, wondering if it would be worth it.

"Seriously?" Taylor sputtered, wondering if the other girl had lost her mind.

"I'm a band girl, this wouldn't be the weirdest thing I've heard of," Akari replied, thinking about some of the girls at band camp.

Gwen shook her head. "There's no way that's actually reasonable."

"Unless we have a way to improve the spirit beasts, like with alchemy," Ron suggested, trying to stay focused and not ask for details about her camp experiences.

"No clue," Taylor admitted. "A lot of the options have question marks and are grayed out, I'll probably have to run into spirit beasts with the abilities or learn techniques or something."

"Do you have any other abilities?" Selena asked, trying to change the subject.

"I can merge spirit beasts to increase their power and pay ki to increase the chances that the merge will have certain traits and lose other traits," Taylor offered, not actually sure how that ability worked.

"Let me know if you can make a pet cat or tiger," Akari told Taylor.

"I'll let you know," Taylor assured her, fairly sure she'd be making a lot of spirit beasts, assuming Myst could find more spirit stones.

"What powers did you get?" Selena asked Peter and Gwen.

Gwen looked at Peter then shrugged. "I got the ability to get a dubbed version of people's conversation and to speak any language, temporarily enchant objects so that I can see and hear through them for up to a week if I concentrate and Technopathy, which is basically useless but will be fantastic when we make it home."

"I got the same language ability along with the ability to identify alchemy or chemical products or ingredients, a version of Hydrokinesis that works on fluids, not just water and all of my ki gains, temporary or permanent are doubled," Peter admitted, rather happy about the ability to identify chemical compounds just by looking at them.

"That sounds like you should work with Myst to make sure we have kick ass potions and elixirs available and to check anything we get from the locals," Selena frowned as she thought about some of the warnings her mother had given her about alchemy over the years. "I don't trust them and I don't trust their understanding of alchemy."

"I can see descriptions of items in the other world but I'd love a second opinion on everything or at least a couple of examples of everything I can find," Myst told Peter as he handed himself several spirit stones, causing them to appear in his hands. "This should get you started." He handed the stones to Taylor and read the description on the scroll that dropped off the mannequin. "What the hell?"

"Sorry?" Taylor offered, not sure what she'd done wrong.

"What's the matter?" Selena asked as she glanced around, wanting to make sure her wards were still secured.

"Sorry, an animated mannequin dropped a purification technique in the mirror world that involves farting the impurities out," Myst admitted as he handed himself the scroll, not seeing a point in using it since it required spirit roots.

"Dibs?" Ron asked hopefully, knowing that most of the purifications he'd heard of were annoying to say the least.

Myst glanced at the rest of the people then handed him the scroll, feeling like he was making a mistake but not sure what else to do with the technique. "Try not to use this around us."

"No worries," Ron replied as he broke the seal and learned the technique, causing the scroll to crumble to dust.

Peter coughed and stepped away from Ron as the dust vanished, bumping into Amy. "Sorry, I have asthma, dust makes it worse."

'What did I just see?' Amy asked herself, wanting another look at his biology since something had been strange about it. "Do you want me to take a look? I can probably fix it, I'm a healer."

"That would be fantastic," Peter replied, excited at the idea of getting rid of his asthma.

Myst glanced between the healer with too many freckles and the girl with long curly hair named Taylor, 'Right, I'm an idiot, if Peter and Gwen can be from Marvel, why not Panacea and Skitter.'

Amy reached out and touched Peter's hand and checked his biology, wanting to get a better idea of what she'd felt when he'd touched her hand. "You're like a minor brute, you'd be stronger than you should be with exercise."

"It's a thing in Marvel and Dc, even their normal people survive things the rest of us shouldn't," Myst offered.

"It probably has something to do with metahumans, weird aliens, and or gods in their bloodlines," Akari explained cheerfully.

"Makes sense," Selena replied with a shrug. "Can you give everyone a tune up while Taylor starts making pets?"

"Yes," Amy replied, feeling strangely excited by the idea of seeing something new.