"Hello little one. You are a curious thing, aren’t you?” I ask, rhetorically, as I study the tiny creature. The tiny being has vibrant red hair and butterfly-like wings jutting from her back. She has surprisingly full curves and a dazzling smile as she hears me speak to her.

“Why yes, I am master! I came into being, created by your power, to be both an archival and an arcane assistant. I wouldn’t be much good at assisting if I wasn’t well and truly curious all myself.” The creature confesses, sagely. Her logic makes some sense, she wouldn’t be as good an assistant if she weren’t somewhat curious and desirous to do research of her own volition.

As I study her, I feel my body beginning to change. This is not a massive external transformation, like minutes ago when I became an orc, but something altogether more subtle and internal. I can feel my body changing, but I can’t see it with nothing more than my naked eyes. At this point I’ve been on the airship for a few minutes, and now I feel… strange. My self-proclaimed “Archival and arcane assistant” keeps talking, all the while.

“Your nature as a possessor of ‘perks’ and ‘items’, and as an ‘essence entity’ is one of the things which enhances me and grants me my boosted awareness.” The creature tells me, proudly. This causes me to pause and look her in the eyes as I think about what she has just said.

“Wait go back a second. I possess… ‘Perks’ and ‘Items’?” I ask, surprised by this revelation. She giggles and nods energetically at me.

“Yes master! I am an item. I’m the manifestation of an item you own named ‘Overly Familiar’. I am one of several items in your possession, just like this airship is! Though that one is a bit of a special case, as it is a fusion of two SEPARATE items that have taken on each of the individual item’s properties.” She tells me, speaking quite casually about something significant.

“As a living item possessed by you I am aware of your true nature. I am also utterly loyal to you, and incapable of treasonous thoughts. I am yours, and thus your secret is safe with me.” The fairy tells me, before giggling softly.

“You possess two potent fonts of power that confer boons to you. One of these fonts is the power of perks, abilities you gain by virtue of traveling from ‘Setting’ to ‘Setting’, and by adventuring. The other font of power you possess are your essences.” The being in front of me lectures, a smile on her face as she reveals this information. She seems quite happy as she tells me this stuff.

“You have three essences. They are, in no particular order, ‘The Essence of the Unnamed Darkness’, ‘The Essence of the Hentai Orc’, and ‘The Essence of the Ultimate Chad’.” The tiny woman tells me, and I shiver, involuntarily when she says the essence that seems to be named after me.

“They are all quite powerful, but of them the weakest appears to be the orc essence. It is not capable of growing in power by itself, aside from in terms of how nakedly physical powerful you can become, nor can it grant you new abilities once its powers have been applied to you, even if the power it grants is meaningfully significant. Your current form is that of a powerful, and handsome, orc, and your race is that of an alpha orc. As powerful as that is, your other essences have virtually unlimited potential. Provided you take time to allow them to grow and use the powers they offer you.” The fairy reveals, speaking as though all of this is obvious.

She falls quiet for a moment and studies me. As she does I notice subtle changes in her expression and in her body language. She is studying me quite intently, a smile on her face that does not look like any smile I’ve ever seen before. There’s something… off about it.

“You’re getting accustomed to your new powers, unconsciously, at a remarkable rate. I can feel your eldritch energies wafting off you. Are you scared?” She asks me, curiously. There is something intense about her question that makes me wonder how to answer it.

As the fairy finishes her question, I sense new and inhuman senses slowly making themselves known to me. I have a very distinctive sort of supernatural awareness of life around me, specifically I can vaguely feel the presence of minds all around me, even when they are in places I can’t see such as crew members of the ship who are below deck. Surface thoughts are audible to me, though only as whispers until I focus a little on them.

“Ah, are you hearing thoughts? How exciting to see your powers emerge in real time!” The fairy utters, her voice soft and filled with genuine excitement. I quickly elect to ignore the remark, but do decide to question my familiar.

“Why are we going to some orcish clan’s territory?” I ask, looking at my companion as I speak. This causes her eyes to twinkle with a mixture of joy and mischief.

“We’re on a rescue mission! Someone in the city we left, a distant port town, put out a city-wide request to rescue a high elf priestess The priestess was kidnapped sometime ago but someone must have seen her as a prisoner of the orcs we’re going after. ‘You’ wanted the bounty that came with rescuing her so now our airship is about halfway to the island chain known to be the territory of the clan.” The fairy tells me, apparently fine with my decision not to answer her question.

“Orcs, at least those of them raised by other orcs, tend to value strength above all else. The clan we’re going after is well-known for having an unusually strong chief. It seems that they’ve become more and more of a problem over the last few months, though this decision of theirs to either kidnap or purchase a prisoner as prominent as the prietess is… Well, it’s concerning.” She explains, casually. I fall silent for a moment as I think about her remarks, and I decide to ask a question purely out of curiosity. 

“I see… You know what perks and essences I possess, do you think I can tackle some orc clan?” I ask, glancing at her all the while. My question makes her laugh, the sound soft due to her size and stature.

“Honestly? I’m sure you’ll be fine. And that’s without looking at your essences. You have perks from three different settings, ‘Generic Fantasy RPG’, ‘Generic Lovecraftian Film’, and ‘World of Lewd Fantasy’. In each case you’re rocking many, many different perks. Together, even without your essences, they’d come together to make you terrifyingly formidable. When you add in the impact of your essences… Well, it’s basically a foregone conclusion.” She tells me, and I can sense the sincerity in her words. I chuckle and nod at her.

“Your essences are far stronger than your perks, by the way. Aside from the orc essence, your other two focus on control and power, with your ‘Ultimate Chad’ essence bestowing new powers upon you anytime you have sex with someone for the first time, and your ‘Unnamed Darkness’ essence… Actually, let me demonstrate what that one does.” She exclaims, causing me to pause in curiosity and watch, when the very second she finishes speaking she suddenly darts towards me and puts her tiny hands out in front of her.

When she gets really close to me her hands vanish but not her whole arms. She stops moving and I watch her as she seems to rummage around. I can see her moving and I watch her arms moving, quaking as though she’s trying to pull something out of… wherever her hands have gone. After a few moments she backs up from me and her hands seem to phase back into existence, carrying something new.

The fairy is carrying a handful of scrolls, ones that look like something out of an old kung-fu movie. I look at them curiously and I hear her giggle as she motions for me to offer her one of my hand. I do as she asks and I gasp when she puts one of the scrolls in my hand as darkness flows out of me and envelops the scroll for a second before the thing vanishes.

“What was that?!” I ask, as the fairy giggles again.

“That was the power of your soul. The power of darkness. Deep inside of you there’s a whole… well, a whole universe! This universe exists and contains things that you shunt into it, using your powers. You can create copies of things from inside of this universe and manifest them in any other universe you are a part of, though at first this ability can only create so many copies of things at a time and needs time to recharge between uses.” The fairy tells me.

“The universe is a bizarre thing, but it’s populated by you and those you either absorb or allow in in the first place. As ‘Darkness’ you possess total control over this universe, and as you grow in power so does it. You can absorb things in a range of ways but simple solid objects, at least those below your size, very easily. You can also absorb other things through more difficult or complex means.” She explains, her eyes glowing with a sinister brightness as she thinks about what she is saying.

She falls silent, but the smile doesn’t fade from her face. I chuckle and look at my hand. The limb looks normal, but now that I know that it possesses eldritch might it’s hard for me to look at it the same way that I might look at the hand of a stranger on the bus with me. My whole body contains eldritch power…

“I do not know precisely what you know of your powers, but I know a whole lot about them. You are an impressive, and terrifying, creature.” She warns me, smiling smugly at me as she tells me, but as she says that I realize something and look around silently.

This ship is staffed. “I” seem to have hired a crew of generic, though impressively pretty, women to staff the ship, several of whom are currently on deck with me. Fortunately for me none of the women noticed what the fairy and I did… Or at least, if they did notice none of them seem to care. My reaction is watched by the fairy, who laughs softly at my actions.

“Oh master, they don’t care about your powers. They are… well, they are ‘NPCs’. You see, the crew of this ship is PART of the ship.” The fairy tells me, a smile on her face as she explains, cryptically, her reasoning for the crew of the ship not caring about my powers.

“Some of your items are complex things that,“ My companion begins to tell me, only for me to be distracted when a new smell hits me. I feel my eyes glaze over as a strange, and intoxicating new scent fills my nostrils, and when I visibly sniff the air the fairy freezes mid-word.

I instinctively turn and look past the ship’s deck onto the empty air that surrounds us. It takes my non-olfactory senses a second to adjust but when they do I see a subtle ripple some distance away from the ship, quickly moving towards us. I can smell the scents of many people, a number that significantly outnumbers the people on the ship, approaching us at a very fast pace, though I can’t quite pierce whatever method of hiding their means of transport that they are employing.

Doing mental calculations is a bit hard for me, and I lose a second of reaction time as I try to estimate the distance between my ship and what my senses and instincts as a gamer and geek tell me must be a danger camouflaged by some sort of illusion, but I eventually realize the threat must be a bit less than a thousand feet away from my ship and crew.

“Hey, there’s something approaching the ship!” I shout, punctuating my exclamation with a pointed gesture in the direction of the camouflaged object. This causes the women on the deck to turn and look in the direction I am pointing, though I can tell from their body language none of them can quite see what I am seeing. Nonetheless, one of the women lifts the sword she is holding to her mouth and utters a command.

“All hands on deck, something cloaked is approaching the ship. I repeat, all hands on deck, something cloaked is approaching the ship.” She mutters, her voice quiet but still haltingly powerful. I can hear a sudden flurry of activity beneath the deck of the ship, and I can’t help but smirk. The distant, cloaked object continues to approach our ship and the expression on my face darkens as the source of the scent that tipped me off to the presence of the cloaked object begins to become clearer.

I am again smelling women. I can also smell men, but the men are foul smelling, smelling of blood and bloodlust, while the women on the object do not smell bad at all, but they do smell mistreated. I can smell their fatigue, their hunger, and their exhaustion

My mind begins to fill with a range of information about the women I’ve become able to detect, including the fact that one of them is a curious goblin who smells strongly of various, sometimes even supernatural, chemicals and of powerful adhesives used to, no doubt, keep her in one place. I can smell the fact that the objects have been applied to her hands and legs, and have left her immobile, which makes me want to chuckle.

“Opportunity…” I mutter, eager to have an opportunity to test my abilities. After all, if I possess new powers why shouldn’t I use them? On Earth I couldn’t afford to be brave but here… Well, here I plan to live life to the fullest.

“Master, do you want to fire the first blow?” My fairy companion asks, her soft voice a gentle whisper in my ear. I nod at her, and I can feel her smile, the smile the same as her intense, uncanny expression earlier. She darts out in front of me and to the edge of the ship.

“Well, in that case… Allow me to be the first one to show you what your power looks like.” The fairy shouts, gleefully, even as she raises one of her hands and points it in the direction of the ripple that is steadily approaching my airship.

The air around the fairy begins to subtly shimmer and after a few moments I feel a sudden increase in the temperature of the air. As all of this is happening I watch my companion’s body begin to glow as though she were a hunk of metal approaching its boiling point.

“Fire? I hope the other ship isn’t made of wood.” I say, as I begin to walk towards the edge of the ship’s deck.

“Not fire. Just. Pure. Magic.” My fairy calls out to me, correcting me even as she dramatically tilts her hand back, and I watch a lance formed from what I now assume must be pure magical power fill a massive amount of the previously empty space just past the fairy.

“Tell me where to aim, master!” The creature responsible for the magic I am seeing shouts. I am stunned for a moment, but I quickly regain my wits and respond to the creature, informing her as to where, generally, she needs to aim her weapon. She adjusts her aim and I hear her cackle manically as she readies herself.

The lance is a thick, ornate thing that must measure some fifteen feet across, and it hovers statically in the air for a moment before it suddenly darts forward. It quickly rips through hundreds of feet, and I am unsurprised when it hits something and a moment later my allies and I hear a loud noise like something getting torn apart, right as a crack seems to form in mid-air, and I can see parts of a vessel that looks a bit less ornate than the one I’m on suddenly appear.

“Pirates!” My fairy companion says, her eyes glowing a curious emerald green as she studies the distant fractured shield. It seems that we really were in danger. “Hey master, they ought to make good first targets for your powers.” The fairy adds, a second later. She must be able to see the distant threat by using magic on her eyes, because even I can only make out the barest details of the distant ship.

The pieces are all distorted and I can tell that what I must be seeing must be fractured reflections of another airship. It seems to have been… shielded, by some sort of illusionary technology or magic, or fusion of the two, and I reach my fairy companion right in time as some of the ship’s crew begins to flow onto the ship. I am about to compliment the fairy when I hear a voice call out to me, specifically.

“Master!” She says, her voice soft and melodious. “There you are. I see you’ve identified the threat, would you like to get on me and we fly towards it?” The voice continues, right as a figure appears right next to me, her sapphire eyes filled with delight.

She is a lithe creature with blue hair and equally blue eyes. Her body is curvy, and she has draconic features, like wings, a tail, and small horns, that allow me to identify her as some sort of dragon. She is dressed in a light outfit that seems to consist of fur-covered armor that she places, clearly somewhat unskillfully, over rough approximations of where they’d be on a human. I assume she must be something other than human, primarily based on her supernatural appearance, but her unusual armor is also weird.

“Zara, I hadn’t gotten around to telling master about you yet!” The fairy whose actions had revealed the distant ship says, annoyedly. This makes “Zara” laugh, and she offers me her hand.

“Well, if you haven’t introduced me… Let me do it.” She says, looking at me flirtatiously, even as she talks to my companion. There is a lustful twinkle in her eyes, and I am momentarily stunned by it, as she is a stunning, blue-themed, woman. I am surprised when she pulls me, effortlessly, and she climbs the railing of the ship’s deck, leaping on top of it with no problem.

“Come on master, let’s fly together!” She says, her eyes twinkling with emotion as she waits for me to respond to her. I glance downward and notice that her hand has become a reptilian thing, a mighty, scaled claw. I begin to piece together what she is, and I can’t help but smirk at her.

“You’re a dragon.” I say, astounded by this, and her eyes glow warmly, even as she nods at me.

“I’ll keep you safe, master. After all, what kind of dragon can’t keep her treasure protected?” She asks, and I shake my head in warm, fantastical disbelief.

“What a world we’re in…” I remark, even as I take a step towards the dragon and then leap beside her.

“Well… Wanna go see who we messed up?” I ask, causing the dragon to nod at me. I decide to take the initiative here, and after Zara nods at me I simply step off the railing, and I sense Zara move to keep up with me. I feel the air suddenly rushing up at me, as I fall, and I distantly hear the fairy on the deck of the ship shouting commands to the crew of my ship.

I feel Zara’s arm growing wider and more reptilian, and I turn myself in midair right in time to see scales beginning to spread across her face. She smiles, the expression now decidedly more threatening, as human teeth become smart, sharp, fangs. I feel some of the wind that was hitting me stop, as wings unfurl out of Zara’s back and block some of the breeze that was just hitting me.

“Alright master, I’ll place you on my back now. I’m so excited!” Zara tells me, her cheery tone still somewhat audible even in her new voice, which is deep but rather chirper as far as its actual word choice goes. It’s an amusing juxtaposition.