In Loki's Honor

Wyxnos, God of Logic, was having a bad day. He waited for three decades after that fateful meeting with the rabbit reincarnator for this moment, and it was escaping his grasp. It was rare for the God of Logic to lose his temper, and it was the second time in a handful of decades.

"System, block the soul from reincarnating!" He shouted for the umpteenth time.

NEGATIVE. Primary Fairness Directive is active. Processing user perks. Selecting random race. Patch applied. Requesting administrator authorization to create an entry for the race: Baboon.

"No!" He said. He was glad he instituted that order to request administrator rights to block the creation of new racial entries. He had already blocked the three entries the reincarnator created from being activated again. No more sentient rabbits. Or earthworms. Or germs.

Processing user perks. Selecting random race. Patch applied. Requesting administrator authorization to create an entry for the race: Elephant.

They already went over several dozen types of animals. Insects, mollusks, crustaceans, even an irrational monster or two. He had to stop it before the System selected a race that had access to the higher functions of the System and would be troublesome for him. Like a Dragon, or - Fates forbid - a Demon.

"New directive. For users with a pre-generated Attribute array, do not allocate starting Attribute points."

ACKNOWLEDGED.

That would stop the explosive inflation of the anomaly's Attributes. He could do nothing for the ones gained through level-up, but sixty extra Attribute each time he reincarnated would imbalance the System in a few centuries. The anomaly would become too powerful too fast.

"New directive. When selecting a random race, restrict to only ranks III and IV humanoids," Wyxnos ordered. That would stop the anomaly from reincarnating as a demon as they were rank V. And the rank I or II humanoids like goblins and kobolds for rank I or Orcs for rank II could evolve, which was another issue. The final evolution for kobolds, for example, was Trueblood Dragons. They needed to raise their racial level to two hundred for that, though. Humans, dwarves, or even the high or light elves had no such issue.

ACKNOWLEDGED.

"Creation of racial entry for elephant denied. Proceed," He finally addressed the prompt.

Processing user perks. Selecting random race. Patch applied. The new race selected: Human. Reincarnating user...

Wyxnos shook his head. Now all he had to do was deal with Edtar's wrath because the anomaly stole a handful of her followers. In the anomaly's defense, he did reinstitute the worship of the goddess.

"Maybe I should pay the anomaly a visit again. They seemed amenable to parlay the last time," Wyxnos mused as he left to meet the Goddess of Hunt.

The revolving lantern is a lie. Or maybe, because none of my deaths was final, It never showed up for me. The memories of my first life, the one I spent as a human in New York hit me again. It was Loki's small gift to make me feel miserable for what I lost. Then all the other lives came one after the other, and I wept inside. I had a connection. Friends. All lost because an asshole thought he could grab it all through force.

The last thing before I felt the pull of a new life was the memory of my duel with the barbarian King. The pain of losing a leg. The sorrow of seeing my best friend Marion murdered. That pain and sorrow were replaced by another kind of pain.

And just as suddenly I was crying, with my lungs burning. I felt my body dangle and intense cold. Then something rash covered me and I heard voices. I couldn't understand these voices, it felt like they were speaking underwater. I breathed even though my lungs burned. Soon I felt a teat shoved into my mouth and my instincts kicked in. The taste was familiar but I couldn't put a finger on it. I wasted no time sucking on that teat as if my life depended on that. In a way, it did.

There was no fur this time and soon I felt something caressing my head. The voices took on a melodic tone, and after my basic instincts were sated, I thought I recognized that voice. Yes, I knew that voice. When the milk was about to end, I was shifted and another teat invaded my mouth, which I greedily sucked. I felt I had no teeth.

With my belly full, I soon faded into unconsciousness as my body went to sleep.

The next time I regained consciousness, I took inventory of my body. I opened my eyes and it was dark. I felt pressure in my belly and I put it out. Yeah, I made a huge mess. It itched and annoyed me. I tried to make a sound but the irritation was so big I started to cry. My prioceptive and proprioceptive senses told me I had two legs and... one arm. The left one. I tried to move my right limb but I felt only a faint response. There was a stump on my right side.

Someone came and picked me up. Whispering some nursery rhyme, she - the voice was feminine enough - cleaned me up. My butt was still irritated and I was wrapped in an itchy but clean cloth. I kept assessing my body. A tongue, and gums. Horseshoe-shaped gums. Ears on the side of my head, and the distinct lack of anything dangling next to my crotch. To test it, I allowed my bladder to empty and felt the cloth wrapping me. The warmth of my urine was not coming from my front but between my legs. Which had toes, not that I remembered to test. Speaking of which...

THUMBS UP! Or thumb, as I had no right arm.

I was finally a humanoid.

A week passed and my vision improved. Yes, babies had terrible eyesight. So, what did I discover? One, I was a girl. A human girl. And I really had just a stump for my right arm. The shoulder was atrophied and it tapered to a flesh cone with a round butt about less than a third of the distance to the elbow. I guess that's my random disability. I didn't recognize the language they were speaking. It sounded nothing like the Auvani language. The people I saw had a pale complexion, more European-looking than the tanned, olive-skinned savages I lived with. The previous me did.

I thought hard about it and decided that I should compartmentalize my lives. Otherwise, the carrousel of grief and sorrow would devour and destroy me. I tried to summon my Status but it didn't happen. I would need to wait for either puberty or some incident before I was initialized. Seeing my mother or the other women that helped her care for me give me looks of pity because I lacked my right arm was grief enough.

It was cold. Almost to the point of freezing, and if my diagnosis was correct, I was born in winter. The people had pale skin but signs of tanning when they rose their sleeves. It meant the sun didn't hit straight on like in the tropical zone. The Auvani didn't even have a word for snow. There wasn't much to do wrapped in my cocoon of wool fabrics. It was as warm as it was itchy.

A week became a month. My routine, if nobody knew what a newborn baby's routine entailed, was to suck a teat, poop a diaper, cry for any needs I had, and sleep. I was re-learning fine motor skills so I couldn't do anything. It was more training my body than remembering what to do. I never had to but I think it was similar to physical therapy after brain damage if you would allow me to draw a parallel.

I was focused on learning the language. The first thing I learned was that my mother was named Rosalinda, and I was named Lily. The house was made of wood, but they were rough planks and logs. They didn't have any iron. Utensils were made of either copper or bronze. People had writing and I once saw a clay tablet with glyphs drawn on it. So, I think that while I was out, the world moved on from prehistory to the bronze age. Hooray?

That meant it was a terrible time to be a female. The System should be the great equalizer, but in all honesty, women with swords could kill almost as much as a man even back on Earth. They didn't for two reasons. First, women were less aggressive than men, and their primary method of conflict resolution did not involve bleeding, and second, the men, once the notion of hereditary and inheritance settled, locked their women for fear of raising some heir that was not theirs. That was not a political but a historical perspective, as far as I remembered. Women were forced into chastity to make sure they would generate blood heirs.

Back to the current life. The women wore long dresses and scarves covering their hair. Only when they were in the safety of their bedroom alone did they let their hair loose. It also helped keep the hair clean, on the other hand. I seldomly saw a man. The only one was a man wearing clerical robes, with a holy symbol I didn't recognize. He examined me and my arm stump. Once he was done, the priest said something that made Rosalinda frown.

Yes, I was avoiding calling her my mom in my thoughts. I want some detachment. Call me cold but I wasn't in the mood to play along. I chose to be here as much as she chose to have me as her daughter. Which we didn't, just to be clear. It was only a month ago, to me, that I saw Marion dead. The loss of the Auvani was still close to heart even though I suspected a few decades, at least, separated us.

I had no father. He was either dead or unknown. Maybe my mom was the mistress of some other man, but I was betting on widow. She seemed too sad most of the time, and the women that came to help her had those airs of pity and haughty, self-serving charity. As if they were doing a huge favor by helping us and we should prostrate ourselves in appreciation of their kindness. That was not kindness, that was something else. True kindness expected no reward. No. These matrons had ironclad hearts as cold as the air outside our house.

Two months and I could move around a lot. I was hoping for some good Attributes, so I was working out. Yes, I was a very mobile baby. I would grab a finger and pull myself up. Roll around and try some one-armed pushups. With all my attention on my only arm, it was as dexterous as any. The only arm one had was the dominant arm, genetics or not. The brain made sure to establish the proper connections on its own.

Three months and I started babbling. I could grasp two dozen words in their language by now, so I was trying to call Rosalinda and ask for my toy. It was a wooden doll. I didn't care about the doll but I cared about speaking. I spent a couple lifetimes mute.

I was doing my best to get past that mute and almost sessile baby stage. Working out, babbling, paying attention to people's speech. The women attending me and mom weren't dumb, and there's one truth regarding humans, women in particular. They talk. A lot. In an age where entertainment was almost inexistent and the concept of "games" meant people dying to either each other or beasts and the concept of secrecy and staying out of someone else's business was still to be invented, the matrons thought their divine right to exact the payment for their faux kindness in gossip.

So, let me say it here before things spiral out of control. Becoming an exceptional baby was a HUGE mistake. A kind of huge that deserved capital letters.

A week later, the priest returned. This time, he wanted to see the prodigy with his own very eyes. I was cowed and intimidated by his grumpy demeanor and kept as quiet as a wallflower. He was severely annoyed at that, and he poked my forehead with his finger and uttered some words of power. I knew they were words of power because one, I remember Marion casting clerical spells, and two, they had this reverb effect. He finished casting and I felt nothing.

The priest, however, he burned.

Yes, burned.

Golden flames sprouted around the priest and he screamed, arms and head facing the sky. Roof. The women ran around like headless chickens, screaming and shouting. Soon they all fled the house, except for mom. The priest fell forward and the moment he touched me again, the flames went off. I knew what was happening, so let me explain. He used divine magic, to which I was immune. Worse yet, his divine power was siphoned to [REDACTED] which we all know was one of the villains portrayed in the original Avengers movie. Then whichever deity this priest worshipped got angry and smote him with divine fire. The priest touched me and the divine fire went down the same drain as the original spell.

What does an angry deity do when more of their power is sucked out? Why, Henry, of course, they smite harder.

Rosalinda covered me and pushed the priest charred corpse off of me. She rose me and hugged me closely. As if it was a theatrical cue, lightning rained from the sky. From the clear, blue, and almost freezing sky. A veritable shitstorm of charged electrons driven by a divine force. It struck our house. It struck the house next to this one. It struck the church, the outhouse, and Uncle Ben's Barn. I'm making that last one up. I knew nobody else by name save for Rosalinda.

Did it stop? No, Walter. It didn't stop. The lightning storm killed the gossips on the street. It killed the horse the priest rode on, and the fleas on his damn stupid dog. Oh, hey, a dog! A dead dog. Long story short, the lightning tantrum of Unnamed deity wiped out the whole village. Except for two people.

Rosalinda and yours truly, Lily. Me, I mean. That was my name in this life.

Don't be mistaken. Lightning did fall on us. Actually, I think all the lightning that fell elsewhere were misses. Strangely enough, the lightning-ignited fires as much as it put them out. The air smelled of ashes and ozone. My ears rang but I knew I should be deaf. Even that secondary effect of the divine wrath was siphoned into [REDACTED].

A strong wind blew, carrying ashes and smoke and soot away. Strangely enough, I didn't feel it. Another divine effect, then. A familiar face appeared in the blackened ground that once was a village. And given my peculiar existence, seeing a familiar face wasn't good. Then other unfamiliar faces showed up.

The one in front, wearing an impeccable business suit and well-trimmed hair was the one I recognized. It seemed that Wyxnos, God of Logic, decided to pay a visit and he brought friends. Awesome.