Of all the many things Vella had expected on entry into the Planar Tower, waking with a cock hadn't been one.

Now, everyone knew that when it came to the Planar Tower, anything was on the table. All kinds of absurdities. A Beginner's Guide to Delving, which she'd pored over endlessly in preparation for today, had made that clear. No two Cascades were the same, T. Banasiewicz insisted; nor, even, were physical laws guaranteed to be constant. So the fact she'd grown a cock wasn't actually something unbelievable. Stranger things had happened; she’d both heard and read of them.

So her thoughts on the matter came down to …

Just, why?

And why was it so big?

It had seemed reasonably sized at first -- around six inches long -- but had grown way more than she’d expected. Maybe that was normal, or maybe it wasn't. She wouldn't know, seeing how she’d, you know, never had a cock before.

Looking down at twelve inches of a veiny body part that didn't belong there was disorienting, to say the least. But she had a redeeming hope to fall back on:

Changes in the Planar Tower only affected you so long as you were in the Planar Tower.

So while she was stuck with it for the short term, it shouldn’t be permanent.

According to conventional knowledge.

And she knew how accurate that could be.

Best not to dwell.

How were you supposed to make these things calm down, anyways? It was very … distracting, the way it was throbbing in anticipation. Anticipation for indulgence Vella definitely wasn't going to give it, despite the way heat was pulsing through her stomach, almost nauseating in intensity. 

Was this how all guys felt?

Just think about other stuff.

It shouldn’t be that hard. Much as she’d been caught off guard, and bizarre as this thing’s appearance between her legs was, she had more important things to worry about. She had, after all, just woken in the Planar Tower.

A place with survival rates in the single percentages.

A place only glory-seekers and the very, very desperate ended up.

And she wasn't the first of the two.

T. Banasiewicz had laid out a simple strategy for first time delvers. One she’d in fact already deviated from, seeing how the first step boiled down to: don't allow yourself to get distracted before you’ve ensured safety.

So, oops.

She felt she could be forgiven, given the circumstances.

Step one, T. Banasiewicz style: guarantee immediate safety.

Now, her surroundings didn't appear particularly threatening, but she knew appearances could deceive, and in the Planar Tower, even more than usual.

It was a bedroom, that much was obvious from the outset. Bed, dresser, desk, half-opened closet. Clear enough. But it wasn't her bedroom, certainly; there was no poster of Suspect Heart on the wall, the band’s four girls scantily clad enough Dad had taken offense the first time he'd seen it. No art supplies were littered across the desk, and no sloppy pile of unfolded clothes sat on the cheap green recliner she'd gotten from a yard sale when she was thirteen.

Instead, it looked straight out of a period piece. Frilly and decaying bed covers, ornately curved (and likewise decaying) oak furniture, and more rusted iron and pointy bits than looked appropriate for somewhere you were supposed to sleep.

She'd woken naked, her carefully gathered supplies nowhere to be seen -- including A Beginner's Guide to Delving. But that wasn't surprising; T. Banasiewicz had told her to expect more than even odds on that. Maybe not the naked part -- he'd specified supplies going missing, and he had a habit of saying explicitly what he meant -- but she'd at least been prepared to start the adventure empty-handed.

She picked her way across the room, nerves on edge, to make sure things were as safe as they appeared. Nothing jumped out and tried to eat her face, which was pretty awesome.

So, that done, she sat back on the moth-eaten sheets she'd woken on and moved to step two:

Set up your interface, learn your class and skills.

She'd already given the sleek black pane of glass embedded into her wrist the briefest of inspections -- because how could she have not? -- but had yet to turn it on. Now, finally, she tapped the glass pane, and it blinked to life.

 

(Welcome, <Vella Valentine>.)

 

A shiver snaked its way down her spine at how the device knew her name, but if she wanted to survive the Planar Tower, she better accustom herself to the bizarre and the supernatural. And fast.

She tapped to continue.

The device resolved to the home screen, with three buttons to click on.

 

( Class )

( Inventory )

( Party )

 

She was only concerned with the first, right now.

 

( Vella Valentine )

( Priestess )

( Lv. 1 )

 

There was more to see, but Vella startled.

Priestess?

T. Banasiewicz had made it clear the class assigned to you was random, and that anything could happen (the unifying theme of the Planar Tower, if there was one) but he also said odds were high she’d receive a class she felt comfortable in. Someone who got in fights at school constantly might receive the bruiser class, and someone who spent their time sneaking around would be more likely to receive a rogue class. Book-smart students might become mages, and so on. Not always – but high odds. 

So, priestess?

Vella had never remotely been religious. She acted in accordance with the Nine Virtues, of course, but only because she was a good person, or tried to be, not as some act of worship to higher beings. In truth, she didn't even believe in the gods. Any of them, Greater Pantheon or not. 

But she pushed away the surprise – it was, at least, easier to digest than the first realization of the day. (At the reminder, she tried not think about the thing squished between her legs; it had calmed, finally, and she’d rather not rouse it).

 

( Vella Valentine )

( Priestess )

( Lv. 1 )

( Skills:  {Patroness: Eros}, {A Mighty Sword}, {Empowering Gaze}, {Spellcaster} )

 

Which, uh, answered one question. Her patron goddess was Eros.

Who the hell was that?

Like she said, not religious. The name didn’t ring a bell. Which meant a goddess of the Lower Pantheon, since she, like everyone, at least knew the names of all nine deities of the Greater.

She knew she could get more information by tapping the skill, so she did.

 

{Patroness: Eros}: User is blessed by Eros, goddess of sex. User is granted bonus spellpower when aroused and divergent progression opportunities.

 

Uh.

What?

She stared at the device blankly for a solid ten seconds, convinced she must have misread. But the text obstinately remained as it was.

You’ve got to be kidding her.

… it explained the thing between her legs, didn’t it?

What the hell.

What did her other skills do, then? She was almost afraid to check.

 

{A Mighty Sword}: To facilitate progression, user is provided the appropriate tool.

 

Uh.

Right.

So she’d … be expected to use it, at some point?

Yeah, not a chance in hell that was happening.

She moved to the next skill, fighting the flush that had crept up her neck.

 

{Empowering Gaze}: Expend mana  to greatly empower target of fantasy’s primary stat.

 

Ah. Something half normal. Emphasis on the ‘half’, but half-normal was better than not at all.

An ability that improved a teammate. To be expected for a priestess, which A Beginner’s Guide called  a ‘support class’ – a class best suited to working in a party. She definitely would’ve preferred one that could thrive solo, but when it came to the Planar Tower, she had no choice but to take what she could get.

So … ‘spellcaster’.

 

{Spellcaster}: Unlocks magic.

 

She’d known what it would be before reading, the skill being one of the most common in existence and thus noted explicitly in the Guide, but it was good to confirm.

So.

That was everything immediately pressing. She knew her class and skills, her arsenal for tackling whatever might lay outside that bedroom door. And ‘tackle’ it would be – say what you want about the Planar Tower, nobody had ever called it tame.

But, before leaving, she did have one more thing to learn:

How to cast spells.

According to T. Banasiewicz, it shouldn’t be a difficult task. Should, in fact, be mostly intuitive, practice not required. But best to be as prepared as possible, seeing how she seemed to be one of the fortunate delvers to have spawned in a location of relative safety.

A location of apparent safety, she corrected, eying the room. But nothing jumped out to contradict her.

 

---

 

T. Banasiewicz had spent long, tedious pages extolling the virtues of a secret skill available to every delver of the Planar Tower. It was, he claimed, far and away the most useful ability in any given person’s arsenal:

The {Run Away} skill.

It had been a funny enough joke the first time he’d used it, but had quickly grown tiresome. But the repetition had been for good reason. Progression through the Planar Tower could come slowly, painfully so, but there was only one way for it to halt entirely:

Death.

Something running away could be amazingly effective at preventing. Which really did, in a way, make it the most important ability in a beginner delver’s kit.

So, after growing comfortable with basic spellcasting, which really had been as easy as T. Banasiewicz suggested it would be, Vella finally crept through the creaky wooden bedroom door and into a dark, gothic hallway.

She was more than prepared to heed his words; {Run Away} stood primed and at the ready.

She’d fashioned a heavy metal candlestick as an impromptu melee weapon, should it come to that. It shouldn’t. Her primary weapon would be her spellcasting, seeing how she’d been assigned a class who had the {Spellcaster} skill. No great boons would be coming to her physical abilities as she leveled up, and so while plain brute force might work for now, because the enemies shouldn’t be much more powerful than mundane laws would suggest, that fact wouldn’t hold as she progressed.

She still wore nothing at all, having found no clothes inside the bedroom. She could have maybe fashioned something from the moth-eaten bedsheets, but forgoing modesty honestly seemed the smarter way forward. Stumbling over tangled bedsheets and getting herself killed just because she was embarrassed of exposing herself seemed like a stupendously dumb way to go. Especially when there might not even be something sentient in this once-grand-now-decaying structure to expose herself to. 

If Vella died, it better be in a blaze of glory, not impaling herself because of a wardrobe malfunction.

If not for the seriousness of her situation, she might have marveled at her new abilities – at suddenly having access to magic, and the strangeness of everything going on. But there was a reason that even with such fantastic skills offered, less than one-in-twenty-five residents of the Serenity ever ventured into the Planar Tower. Regardless that the abilities earned were permanent and carried over between dimensions. 

Simply: they valued their lives.

Which Vella did too, but she hadn’t had a choice in entering. Because what else had she been supposed to do? Let Dad rot in debtor’s prison?

Obviously not.

She could barely make out the details of the hallway outside, and the scant light that did trickle in had no apparent source. No windows, lanterns, or even lit candles, but a soft white glow, like moonlight but not, permeated the air, just enough to see the edges of furniture and the dull red and gold of the once-elegant carpet draped across the floor. 

She crept forward, headed for the main hall, candlestick held at the ready and a whisper of a spell sitting in the back of her mind.

Any moment, she knew, something would –

A door burst open, an explosion of noise in the thus-silent castle.