Phoenix felt groggy as if she had slept for far too long. This made her panic, thinking that she had slept through her first round of treatment for the morning. She pushed herself up to try and check the time.

  The first thing she noticed was that she was not in her bed. The hard-packed dirt beneath her made that very clear. No, she appeared to be in the center of some sort of scorched symbol in the earth with wisps of smoke rising from it.

  The second thing she noticed was that she was able to move more freely on her own accord. The pain had stopped completely, and she felt better and stronger than she remembered ever feeling before. Then her memories of the night returned, or had it been a dream?

  The fact that she was obviously not in her hospital room was the biggest indicator that it had not been a dream or a hallucination but that she really had seen magic. Did the Night Witch truly heal her and then somehow manage to teleport her somewhere?

  The smell of her new surroundings assaulted her nose with unfamiliar odors. It wasn’t clean with the stinging scent of chemicals and medicines. It was deeper and made her nose crinkle. She vaguely recognized the scent of dirt, but was this what smoke smelled like? It made her whole body tingle, and despite the danger the scent usually indicated, she thought she actually liked it.

  As she finished sitting up, she looked down to assess herself. Her first thought was horror at the discovery that she was completely naked. Quickly wrapping her arms around herself, she reactively bent forward to try and get her long hair to help cover her exposed body, often using it to hide from prying doctors.

  The second thought was that she must have seen her body incorrectly. This must be some cruel dream threatening to dangle her most desired wish before her eyes, only to be snatched away when she awoke. There was no possible way that her body could have changed that drastically.

  When her hair didn’t act as a curtain to shield her, she reached up with a hand and found that she was completely hairless. This sent another wave of horror coursing through her.

  This was definitely some twisted nightmare that taunted her with fixed biology in exchange for the only part of herself that she liked. In her renewed panic, she scrambled away from the center of the small runic circle. She stumbled as she tried to remember how to walk; the physical therapy had only helped so much as she got older.

  After tripping across the smoldering ground, she managed to retreat into the nearby brush of a forest, which hadn’t been anywhere near the hospital.

  What in the abyss is going on? she wondered to herself as she hid behind a tree, still trying to cover her nakedness.

  She almost screamed in surprise when a rge book appeared, floating in the air in front of her. It glowed slightly, with its open pages facing her. It seemed to be offering itself for her to read, so she did.

  At the top was scrawled in a pretty script, “Phoenix’s Guide Book,” and below that was a message taking up the center of a soft cream page of parchment.

  New Quest: Choose Your Path

  You have arrived in a new reality! Choices need to be quickly made.

  Objective: Choose your new path in this world within the next five minutes.

  Path 1: Battle against the approaching Casters and any who might seize control of your fate.

  Path 2: Flee the approaching Casters and take control of your fate.

  Path 3: Abstain from acting and allow your fate to take control of you.

  Path 4: Capitute to the approaching Casters and relinquish control of your fate to others.

  Reward: Common dress.

  Phoenix stared at the obviously magical book for a few moments, reading it over and over before asking aloud, “Guide Book?”

  She was startled by the sound of her voice being much higher pitched than it normally was but was distracted by new text appearing below the quest prompt.

  Natural Talent: Guide Book

  You can conjure a book that guides you and informs you about parts of the world that have been touched by your aura.

  Phoenix’s eyes went wide. This seemed simir to the JRPGs and MMOs she pyed during her alone time, except less video game tutorial pop-ups and more… well, magic spell book.

  As she reread the quest, she found herself slightly annoyed by the name of the ability and mumbled, “More like Book of Choices. There’s nothing in the quest actually guiding me on what to do.”

  Despite her anxiety over the situation, she couldn’t help the smile creeping across her face. Did she really get sent to a magical world? Then she asked aloud in confusion, “Wait… How did I get this ability? What’s a ‘Natural Talent’? This isn’t a nightmare? What happened to me?”

  As she had hoped, more information appeared on the next page.

  Note: Natural Talents are the abilities people are born with.

  Name: Phoenix Fraser

  Species: Wayfarer

  Caste: Mundane

  Attributes

  Strength: Mundane

  Agility: Mundane

  Fortitude: Mundane

  Mind: Mundane

  Magic: Mundane

  Natural Talents

  Aetheric Transmigrator

  Beacon of Hope

  Collector

  Guide Book

  Waypoint

  Aspects

  No Aspects are currently bound.

  No Css is currently unlocked.

  Seeing her species listed as Wayfarer was only slightly disconcerting, but it made sense from a magical world perspective. Not only was she no longer human, it seemed, but she had been completely healed and given new abilities, which apparently included a magic book.

  She gnced down at her hands as though they might reveal exactly why she wasn’t considered human anymore, but her gaze continued further down her body. It was then that Phoenix realized that it wasn’t a mind trick; her body had been healed more thoroughly than she had ever dreamed possible. This wasn’t a cruel dream –her body had been transformed into what she had desired since realizing it was all wrong.

  Recognizing her body now matched her soul was the thing that ended up smming home the fact that she had actually been transported to another world and transformed in the process. She began to cry as she stared at the female biology she had always wished for and now belonged to her.

  She was finally whole. For the first time in her life, she physically felt like the woman she was always meant to be.

  The newly made Wayfarer sat there for a while, staring and just mentally sensing the changes as tears of joy and relief ran down her cheeks. She didn’t even care that she was naked. In that brief moment, she felt like she no longer had anything to hide –at least not from her own eyes.

  After a few calming breaths and wiping away the tears, she noticed her new magic book was floating in front of her once more with new words.

  Warning! Three minutes remaining on the quest: Choose Your Path.

  “Aw, crap,” Phoenix muttered as she gnced over the options again and recognized the corretion: Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Fawn. She looked back around the tree to try and take in the sight again.

  There was still smoke rising from the edges of the magic circle that she had appeared in, but the sounds of people she heard moving through the forest on the opposite side of her were more worrisome. She soon saw the people the book had referred to as “Casters.”

  Almost a dozen people wearing armor or what looked like wizard robes were soon going to swarm the area. Phoenix instantly knew that fighting was simply out of the question for her. Being barely better than a baby foal, she wasn’t about to take on a small squadron of armed fighters and mages.

  She also wasn’t really a fan of becoming some sort of b rat to be studied. She preferred to be the one doing the studying, and she figured options three and four would nd her under a microscope or whatever magical scanning devices they had in this world.

  That left fleeing –or more likely stumbling away– but she wasn’t certain of her odds out in the wilderness, alone and naked with only a magic book to guide her. While she had read a great deal in her abundant spare time, putting what she had read to the task wasn’t always easy… or so she had read. Maybe it wouldn’t be as hard as people made it seem in all those online videos people made for clicks.

  What struck her as odd when rereading her quest was all of the options talking about her fate. It made her realize that, at this moment, in this new world, that was the real choice she had to make. Who would control her fate? Who would be the master of her destiny?

  For her whole life, she hadn’t even gotten the chance to make that choice. She hadn’t been strong enough to fight for control, and she couldn’t just flee from her sickly body. Fawning usually ended up being the most beneficial way to get things she wanted, but even that had its limits.

  Her usual stress response would be to freeze, at least for a moment, in order to give her mind time to process and decide logically on the actual best course of action for herself, but she didn’t always get the time to fully research solutions before needing to make a decision. This seemed to be one of those times.

  Out of curiosity, she asked her new guide, “Which choice do you think I should take that would result in maximizing the chances of my fate being what I really want it to be?”

  Her attention was momentarily distracted as she heard the voices behind her from the burnt nding zone getting closer, “Can you believe this?! The research paper I’m going to be able to write on this arrival point is going to be the talk of the OOM!”

  “Better hope the AOA pricks don’t try to steal whoever nded here from us. They always try to protect these Wayfarers by making them Adventurers, which usually just gets them killed before we can get any good data out of them.”

  She hadn’t really expected an answer from her new ability, so she was slightly surprised when she turned back to see it had written her a single word.

  RUN.

  Phoenix ran.

  After about twenty minutes of awkwardly stumbling through the forest, getting scratches all over her exposed flesh and especially her feet, she colpsed against another tree that had a rge enough root jutting out at its base and was covered in enough moss to not be painful on her bare backside to sit on. The moss was a weird texture to actually feel. She had often wondered what it actually felt like through the pictures, and it was spongier than she had imagined.

  She took deep breaths as she tried to recover some stamina. Despite being perfectly healthy now, she was not accustomed to running through the underbrush. The heavy breaths brought a plethora of new sensations and scents. Her hands kept wandering, feeling everything from the moss to the bark and the velvety leaves. Everything was so new, and she wanted to memorize it all.

  As she rested and explored with her senses, her book appeared in front of her once more to provide updated information.

  Quest: Choose Your Path

  Objective Complete: Path 2 chosen.

  Objective Reward:

  [Simple Dress] has been added to your collection.

  Completion Reward:

  10 [Mana Bits] have been added to your collection.

  “Collection?” she prompted, “Is that another of my new talents? I think I remember something like that on the list.”

  Natural Talent: Collector

  You have a personal dimensional storage space.You automatically loot sin enemies that have been touched by your aura.Loot automatically goes into your collection.You can use material components for spells, rituals, or enchantments directly from your collection.

  Phoenix stared in shock at the ability. A storage and loot power rolled into one? This was definitely feeling more like a video game now. The title seemed appropriate for what it encompassed and how she normally leaned towards pying video games –wanting to collect every treasure and achievement. She was already liking her chances of survival much more as she asked, “How do I access my collection?”

  Note: You can mentally access items from your collection by thinking of the item you wish to withdraw and where you wish for it to appear within your aura’s area.

  “Wait, what kind of aura are we talking about here? Is this some kind of wuxia cultivation world?” She had only peripherally dabbled in the genre, so she wasn’t quite sure if the rules were simir, but she recalled most of them involving auras and meditation.

  Note: Your aura is currently inaccessible to sense or control until you unlock an appropriate ability and is currently limited to your physical body.

  “So, how do I loot things? Or make them appear?”

  Try your hand.

  “Is that snark? This better not be one of those snarky tutorials that all the books and games think are funny but are actually annoying when I’m in a new world with no idea what I’m doing!” Phoenix said in a miniature rant before she processed the words. Then she thought about holding the new Simple Dress that she should have just received –which she realized that she instinctively knew was there– along with her new Mana Bits, whatever those were.

  Just knowing something that she had never learned was the oddest sensation Phoenix had ever experienced, and she had experienced some truly odd sensations in her short life –mostly involving pain.

  The dress seemed to materialize in a silver shimmer in her hand, just as she had hoped, and she quickly slipped it on over her head. It was a long green homespun dress that matched her eyes, with long sleeves that offered her much more protection from the slight chill in the misty forest. She felt immensely better now that her skin wasn’t so bare.

  With another thought, she focused on holding one of the Mana Bits she had gotten. What appeared looked like a smooth river stone about the size of an American quarter but thicker in the middle, like a rge Skittle or M&M. However, unlike the colorful candy, it was a translucent grey like dusty gss.

  Phoenix wasn’t sure what these Bits were used for, so she returned it to her collection. She practiced the movement a few times to try and get comfortable with it, which was surprisingly easy to do.

  Cautiously, she reached out a hand towards the book. It seemed to intuitively respond to her desires as it moved towards her so that she could hold it in her p. The book was surprisingly solid but seemed weightless as she grasped it and gently turned the page back to gnce at her ability list again before turning back to the next empty page and asking, “What is Aetheric Transmigrator?”

  Natural Talent: Aetheric Transmigrator

  Increased resistance to negative Dimension effects. Dimension abilities have an increased effect.You are a Natural Transtor, allowing the understanding of nguages you are exposed to.You can directly use Aspects and Spirit Gems without the need for an Absorption Ritual.

  She was relieved that she wouldn’t have to worry about learning the local nguages, and she wondered if the natural transtion was something that all Wayfarers were granted to help them survive in a magical world.

  Then she wondered if these “Natural Talents” were all the same since they were something everyone was born with. Perhaps they were based on the species? That would make her less special and unique than she had originally thought. Those people earlier seemed to know what Wayfarers were, after all, and that she was one of them.

  Phoenix had never heard of Aspects or Spirit Gems before. However, she remembered seeing the former listed on her profile page simply stating that she didn’t have any.

  The Wayfarer heard a noise coming from the direction she had arrived from and quickly stood up, groaning at the pain in her feet, and began moving again. She may have completed the quest to choose a path, but she still needed to get as far away as possible from the people who wanted to imprison her just for existing. The thought made her grimace and wonder if this world really wasn’t that different from her old one after all.