Valeria Chen awoke to a throbbing ache in her jaw and a profound sense of wrongness.
It was neither the familiar bone-deep weariness of a long watch nor the nauseous disorientation of seasickness she'd conquered that particular demon years ago during her schooner racing days in Hong Kong.
This was different.
The very air she breathed felt thick, like trying to suck oxygen from honey, and the gentle sway of the Aeternus beneath her felt… heavier, the ship's movements imbued with an unfamiliar inertia.
She sat up in her narrow bunk, her head swimming. The dim light filtering through the porthole seemed colder, harsher than the usual Atlantic dawn.
She ran a tongue over her teeth, wincing as it found a tender spot. Something was loose. With a hesitant finger, she probed the area.
A molar, one she'd had a filling in years ago after a particularly ill-advised encounter with a piece of hardtack, wobbled precariously. Frowning, she gave it a gentle tug. It came away with an unnerving lack of resistance, a small, white pebble in her palm.
She stared at it, a knot of confusion tightening in her chest. It wasn't just the ease with which it had come out; the tooth itself was wrong. It was small, perfectly white, almost like a baby tooth.
Her baby tooth? Impossible.
She was thirty-nine or had been, when she'd closed her eyes against the unnatural storm. She brought her hand to her mouth, feeling the gap. Then she felt her other teeth. They felt… smaller. Smoother. Like pearls.
Panic, sharp and cold, lanced through her. She scrambled from her bunk, her limbs feeling strangely light and yet clumsy, as if she were relearning how to use them.
The gravity. That was it.
It felt stronger, pulling her down with a more insistent, crushing force. Each step towards the small, cracked mirror above her washbasin was an effort, her muscles straining against an invisible weight.
When she finally looked at her reflection, the blood drained from her face, leaving her staring, ghost-like, at a stranger. The woman in the mirror was her, undeniably Valeria Chen, but it was a Valeria she hadn't seen in almost two decades.
The faint crow's feet that had begun to etch themselves around her eyes from squinting at distant stars and sun-drenched horizons were gone.
The slight worry line between her brows, a permanent fixture from her PhD astrophysics days, had vanished.
Her dark hair, usually streaked with a few errant strands of grey from stress and long nights, was a uniform, glossy black. She looked… young.
Impossibly, terrifyingly young. Perhaps twenty-four, the age she'd been when she'd impulsively abandoned her doctorate to chase the freedom of the open sea.
She touched her cheek, the skin smooth and unfamiliar. Then, her gaze fell back to the tooth in her palm. Her own, now baby-white.
The core image from the System prompt, if she was to believe the Captain's initial, shell-shocked briefing that had crackled over the ship's internal comms moments after his own awakening. A System. A forced de-aging. Alien stars. It was too much.
A chime, soft and internal, resonated in her mind, followed by scrolling text, just as Mallory had described.
***
Designated Age: 24 Standard Years.>
***
Her breath hitched. Designated Role. This wasn't some shared hallucination brought on by the storm. This was real. She stumbled out of her cabin, the corridor outside already buzzing with confused, alarmed voices.
Crew members, faces she'd known for years, now looked like youthful, bewildered versions of themselves. Old Man Hemlock, the sixty-year-old cook whose gruff exterior hid a heart of gold, now looked barely thirty, his grizzled beard a soft brown.
Young Pip, the cabin boy who couldn't have been more than sixteen, looked even younger, perhaps twelve, his eyes wide with a mixture of fear and a strange, almost childlike wonder.
On deck, the scene was one of controlled chaos. Captain Mallory, looking impossibly vital and radiating an aura of command that even his de-aged form couldn't diminish, was already barking orders, trying to instill some semblance of order. But the crew… they were a collection of strangers in familiar skins.
"Valeria! On the quarterdeck!" Mallory's voice cut through the din. She hurried, or tried to. The increased gravity made every movement a conscious effort.
As she passed a group of deckhands struggling with a sheet of canvas, she saw it tear. Not a rip from strain, but a brittle, almost crystalline fracture, as if the very fabric had become fragile under the new atmospheric pressure or some other alien influence.
"The sails are like glass, Captain!" a voice cried out, full of dismay.
Valeria reached the quarterdeck, her gaze sweeping over the alien constellations that painted the sky.
As the ship's navigator, the stars were her language, her map, her constant. These… these were gibberish. Beautiful, terrifying, unreadable gibberish. Her heart ached with a profound sense of loss, the loss of her most fundamental tools.
"Report, Chen," Mallory said, his eyes, now a startlingly clear grey, fixed on hers. "Your assessment?"
"The stars are wrong, Captain," she said, her voice trembling slightly. "Completely alien. I have no reference points. Our charts are useless."
She held up the small, white tooth. "And… we're all younger. Significantly. The gravity… it feels at least one and a half times Earth normal, maybe more. It's putting a strain on everything, including the ship's materials."
Mallory nodded grimly. "The System has seen fit to give us a second youth, whether we wanted it or not. And it seems to be assigning new roles."
As if on cue, more chimes echoed across the deck, not just in Valeria's mind, but seemingly in everyone's. A wave of murmurs, exclamations, and outright curses swept through the crew as they received their new assignments.
Valeria's own notification scrolled into view:
***
Specialization: Astrometrics, Rift Cartography (Latent).>
***
Rift Cartography? What in the void was that?
Then she heard Gabriel Kovács, the massive Hungarian bosun, let out a bewildered roar. "Weapons Master? Me? I'm a rigger, not a damn soldier!" Kovács, or "Hammer" as he was known for his strength and ability to fix anything on deck, was a man of peace, despite his intimidating build.
His pre-rift life as a rigging foreman on tall-ship replicas and his MMA hobby were about discipline and skill, not bloodshed. Now, his System-designated job was Bosun Rig & Weapons.
He looked down at his hands, which seemed to almost crackle with a faint, unseen energy. His likability came from his gentle giant persona, his quiet competence, and his surprising fear of deep water, a vulnerability that made him more human.
To see him thrust into a role that seemed to contradict his nature was jarring.
Across the deck, Sister Amaris Doyle, the ship's medic and unofficial chaplain, gasped. Amaris, whose Irish warmth and field medic experience with Médecins Sans Frontières had made her the heart of the crew's well-being, was staring at her own notification.
***
Specialization: Bio-Restoration, Faith Channeling (Latent).>
***
Miracle Surgeon, as the prompt had hinted. Her compassion was her defining trait, her faith a quiet strength. Now, that faith was about to be tested by a System that quantified miracles as XP boosts.
"Miracle Surgeon?" Amaris whispered, her face pale. "What does that even mean?" She flexed her fingers, a soft golden light briefly enveloping them before vanishing. Her eyes widened.
Others were reacting with similar mixtures of shock and confusion. Riku Tanaka, the young merchant-marine trainee, was practically vibrating with excitement, his earlier fear replaced by a manic grin.
***
Specialization: Coil-Cannon Precision, Combat Reflexes.>
***
He looked like a kid who'd just been handed the keys to the ultimate video game.
Idris al-Arif, the smooth-talking Tunisian quartermaster, raised a perfectly sculpted eyebrow at his notification:
***
Specialization: Resource Acquisition, Xeno-Barter.>
***
He even managed a wry smile. "Well, at least some things remain consistent. Still, the man who finds what's needed, it seems." His charm and ability to connect with anyone, to remember the little things, made him a natural networker, a vital cog in the crew's social machinery.
Helga Rössler, the stoic German engineer apprentice, was staring intently at the hatch leading down to the engine room or what used to be the engine room.
Her System job: Engineer Clean-Core Chief.
The prompt had mentioned a nuclear heart. Helga, with her quiet intensity and surprising passion for metal guitar, seemed to be the only one not entirely surprised by the technological leap.
The Okoye twins, Milo and Miri, the lively Nigerian salvage divers, were already comparing notes, their usual banter tinged with an undercurrent of awe. Cutter Coxswains. It fit their pre-rift skills, yet hinted at something more.
Even Dr. Jonah Kealoha, the gentle Hawaiian cetologist, had a new, almost fantastical role: Monsterologist. His quiet empathy and scientific curiosity would now be turned towards the leviathans of this new, terrifying ocean.
And Marisol "Mari" de la Cruz, the creative Filipino textile engineer, was now Sailmaker & Morph-Skin Custodian. The 'morph-skin' part was new and intriguing, hinting at the living aspects of the transformed Aeternus.
Captain Mallory watched them all, his youthful face set in grim lines. "It seems our old lives, our old skills, are merely a foundation for what this… The system expects of us now. We are no longer just sailors. We are a strike team, a unit forged for survival in a world that defies everything we knew."
Valeria looked at her crewmates, these familiar faces now imbued with strange new potentials, strange new burdens.
They were indeed a deck of strangers, not just to each other in their de-aged forms, but to themselves, their identities forcibly rewritten. The Aeternus herself was a stranger, her sails brittle, her heart nuclear, her hull a lie of oak over steel.
She clutched the small, white tooth in her hand. A memento of a life shed, a world lost. The ache in her jaw was a dull throb, a reminder of the violent transition.
But beneath the fear and disorientation, a flicker of her old self, the astrophysics dropout who'd yearned for the unknown, began to stir.
The stars were alien, yes. But they were still stars. And she was a navigator. Her new title, Chief Navigator, with its hint of 'Rift Cartography,' suggested a challenge beyond anything she could have imagined.
Perhaps, just perhaps, in this nightmare made glorious, there was still a course to be charted. If they could survive the crushing gravity of this new reality, both literal and metaphorical.