Invader Jacob (Guardian Tales)

[Story] Prologue_5_New Day New Discoveries

Waking up with a jolt of excitement and anxiety, Jacob sits on his share of the bunk bed to grab his phone as quietly as he could. "7:00am huh, never thought I could wake up at this kind of hour without any alarms. I have grown." he mutters and chuckled quietly. The bed's springs creaked as he got up and stretched, it had been a while since he did anything at this kind of hour so he decided to do something different today.

Leaving the building with stretched muscles, he decided that it was time to finally peer into the new normal that he was forcefully thrusted into. His morning walk was stopped from time to time to observe and try to guess what materials did everyone use these days. 'I'm no architect but even I could appreciate the amount of time that this was poured unto.' Jacob thought as he looked at a peculiar building with low dimmed lights and walls that looked speaks cheap and durable. 'oorrr, did they just let AI do its thing?' he mulled as he began to move his legs to no particular direction whatsoever. 'Note to self, lay low and don't draw too much attention, you're moving up in the world in one way or another.'

Jacob would frequently ask himself the question 'Why has not anyone question my skin color or clearly fake mask?' when he finally notice accidental spots of body paint either gone or watered down somehow, and mask barely clinging to its owner's face. Well, today he thought it would be nigh time to finally revisit the internet and with the help with his new found friends and acquaintances, he was now able to peer and experience the new internet.

And what he found left him shell shocked

Internet speed felt like it came straight from a supercomputer, with websites and browsers loading immediately as he clicked or press enter on a keyboard, what a world. He also took note of how different yet familiar everything was for him from the format of multiple websites to the eye-catching graphics of website games , he felt that he was back in his comfort zone after like 2 months in this whole new world.

He needs to remember that his birthday was almost one or two weeks away, therefore he needs to do something special for himself, no need to bother anyone else when they could outright turn you in to the authorities when they catch a glimpse of his true human self. 'I doubt that they would actually do that but better be safe than sorry, them's the rules.'

Typing down valid questions such as the date, location, abridged history of Humanity until present day and the various events that made this whole spiel happen in the first place, to the more questionable and outright lewd areas of the net did he find some unexpected and nonetheless interesting biological lesson that he had been admittedly interested in and be applicable to the real world.

The body, shape and structure of each individual Invader is wholly the same but due to technological and borderline magical processes, it makes each Invader either unique from the others or fall in the same category as the others. Not satisfied with your bulky bod not living up to your expectation? Either go to the gym and hopefully be granted access to the more harsher gym equipment or skip all of that and ask a doctor a permanent body changing drug that, through multiple experiments, matched the progress of somehow who consistently used the gym for 5 damn years straight. Of course there are side-effects, from mild headaches to the serum rejecting the body in a bizarre way. Multiple papers are needed to be signed in order to get this though, which was good in his opinion.

Another was to practice the art of magic. From basic practices to the more specific and demanding exercises do some achieve the magic class. Typically, people do it for party tricks and to gloat of how much patience they have but for Jacob, something more.

Unfortunatly, when Jacob searched on the topic of jobs he was saddened by the realization that the robots took all of the more higher paying and fun looking jobs. So much so that the people who do apply for a job, it is considered as them having a hobby, something that they want to do rather than cooped up in comfort in their home and be served by their personal companions and/or robots.

Jacob sighed after that search. As he got up from his chair and stretched did he realize how do people afford or rent homes, or even how do they get building materials far away from harvestable planets. And so, he searched again.

.

.

.

After turning off the computer and finally walking away from the beast of the machine that it is, he felt...he isn't sure what he should feel. Search after search when he did realize on how similar Earth's history is to this one after finding the Wayback Machine. Each search led him to rabbit hole after rabbit hole to the point that he temporarily thought that it was judt a dream. But multiple cheek pulls did tell him that it is real. 

After finally looking at the bathroom mirror intently than ever before, his eyes widened at the hair sticking out at places it should not be even after being hidden as best as he could, his skin was visible due to the drying properties of the paint. He sighs in relief and frustration after finally searching about a hypothetical scneraio. In which an invader had previous physical attributes of that of a human, results showed that odd some cases were there and the effected were shown either sympathy, hostility, dehumanizing bullying (is that even applicable?), or help from the kind souls that stumble upon them. 

Its called the HFS or Human Facies Syndrome, in which a newborn is seen with miscolored skin and depending on how mild or extreme the condition is, they will grow to an Invader with a weird mark on their body or an Invader with a weird mix of fragile human skin and tough Invader skin. The immune system is fortunately the same but patients with a more severe case will have dietery restrictions due to the limitations of the human organs compared to the Invader biology.

Basically, Invader stuff is much more tougher, resistant, and better than humans do. 'Probably why they see themselves as higher beings when they encounter a human in Tetis' Jacob thought as he finally got dressed to go to 'work'. While the job may not be, well, a job with a salery, what it did still have is tips. And in accordance of what the internet had told him, the nicer and efficient you work the more the tip will be, some stories in Reddit of all places had told him that some tips were high as the price of a full years worth of rent in NYC, and that's alot. Buuuuut, considering that this was Reddit, he'll take it with a grain of salt.

Nightly wind greeted him as he left the homeless shelter. The lights were bright and the civilian faces even brighter, like seriously, is the lights that bad that each civilian must have a glow in a dark attachment to their face? Certainly weird but not as weird as him being not joining in. He ignored the few stares he got as he went to the convinient store location.

A/N: Feedback and the new update made me reconsider some of the upcoming stuff later in the story but for now, have a fun read with my mess as I struggle to use the new UI with my fellow guardians. Happy readin'! (pls point out any continuity errors, I seem to not catch them at times)