The stat categories were different, but the description for those cleared them up in a jiffy.
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Skill:
Every move you make with a weapon or your body is controlled by Skill. The sureness of your steps, the aim of your gun, and the deftness of your knife-hand are all enhanced at once by this stat. It also indirectly influences the damage you deal with your weapons, both by passively increasing their effectiveness and by helping you select and strike more vulnerable targets.</td></tr></tbody></table>
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Toughness:
When you take a hit, toughness works to mitigate it. At a simple level, more toughness allows you to survive more damage with the same amount of health points. As time goes on and you acquire resistance or regeneration proficiencies, they will draw their power from toughness.
The amount of points in tough dictates your baseline health regeneration and hit points, both by itself and by empowering skills that augment its effect. At a given level any skill that either prevents or heals injuries will function better with a higher toughness stat to rely on.</td></tr></tbody></table>
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Quicken:
There’s what you can do, and then there’s how fast you can do it. Quick is a speed stat that enhances any movement you make. It does not affect accuracy or power in most cases. It is additive to Skill in most respects, making it possible to shoot faster and dodge quicker blows. It may interact with some movement and footwork skills and certain very specific combat skills in the future.</td></tr></tbody></table>
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Psyche:
As a Starlight Mercenary, many of your skills can be augmented by mystic force. Psyche helps this process in at least two ways by determining the refill rate of your MP bar and by augmenting any skill that empties it.
Psyche also functions as the baseline of your mental and spiritual defenses. As your psyche levels climb, curses and mental attacks that would have once put you down will slide off like water from an aquatic fowl’s feathers. As with Tough, Psyche can power a number of proficiencies that increase these defensive effects even further.</td></tr></tbody></table>
Nick had heard of classes with as few as one stats, but his impression of the general class system was that both too few and too many stats tended to bode poorly for progress in a particular class title. Too few, and you were likely in a class like Tailor or Rager, and either condemned to a lifetime wrangling buttons or dying in a blaze of glory in a fight a more rational class would have won. To many, and you found yourself with too little strength in any one category to ever be overpowering in any way.
Four stats seemed to be just about right, but the shift from swordsman’s simple, clearly related stats to these was a lot to take in. It wasn’t really possible to understand the stats without the skills, anyway.
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Gunslinger
You have Skill-dependent proficiency with both revolver and repeating rifle-style blaster pistols specific to your class, and a lesser, more improvisation-level understanding of other single-shot weapons. These weapons will be available for acquisition shortly, and are capable of firing an unlimited amount of times without ammunition or magic enhancement.
When enhanced by your magical power, individual shots can either be strengthened, transformed into trick shots capable of moments atypical of normal handgun or rifle fire, or both. The amount each shot can be manipulated in these ways is limited by the amount of magical power you supply to each, which is in turn capped by Gunfighter’s level.
Your gun can also be loaded with consumable ammunition to create other effects. See Tinker and your weapons’ descriptions for more details.</td></tr></tbody></table>
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Knife-fighter (Starlight Mercenary Variation)
You have increased battlefield competency with any single-edged, metal-bladed fighting knives. LIke Gunslinger, Knife-fighter relies on your skill stat to determine how well you handle the knife, how well you exploit weakness and gaps in defense, and how much damage you deal above and beyond what conventional physics would predict.
Although knife-fighter is a skill that appears in a variety of classes, the version you possess is altered to interact with Starlight Mercenary’s Tinker, and will continue to differentiate itself from the standard version as both it and your class progress.</td></tr></tbody></table>
Bound Captain was calling his name from the traits section, but Tinker had so many mentions in the other skills he felt he had to address it first, especially with the time that McCann said he had allotted for all this introduction rapidly running out.<table><tbody><tr><td>
Tinker
Your class is special, and requires specialized arms to function properly. Tinker is the skill that makes this possible by granting you the skill required to make, modify, and enhance the weapons you require.
With Tinker, you will create soul-bound, class defining firearms and to update them with new materials and mechanisms as you advance in your class. You will pound mundane and legendary metals into finished blades, then mount them in wood and bone to create fighting knives that know no equal.
Tinker can be used to pack ammunition with everything ranging from venom to the dying heart of a star, although most things like the latter are gated behind a proficiency most never reach. Not every material is suitable for ammunition, but all of those that are grant significant buffs over and above what your firearms can already do.
Unlike most proficiencies, Tinker is not bound to a particular stat. Instead, your level in this proficiency determines the type of materials and complexity of upgrades you can currently work with. In turn, the primary means of increasing this proficiency’s level is integrating the highest-quality materials you can into your guns, ammo, and knives.</td></tr></tbody></table>
Nick''s eyes darted up to the dome, which was still opaque. He thought he understood the gist of the class well enough so far. It was a pathed class, one that seemed to lean towards ranged weapons while still allowing for some flexibility at melee range. That suited him just fine. His time as a swordsman had given him both tennis elbow and an understanding that fighting from a single predetermined range absolutely, positively sucked.
Having the option of hanging back and firing a ranged weapon at things until they forced him into melee seemed much better, especially if he had system-provided options to deal with problems once they were up close and personal.
he didn’t understand anything but least specific parts of Tinker. He had no idea how he’d get one of the class-bound guns the system mentioned, or any clue where to get metal for a knife besides cannibalizing the bargain-basement sword strapped to his back. Getting what was going on there in anything like a complete sense would hopefully come with time and actually putting the proficiency to work.
The Actolian Heritage Class descriptor was still unexplained, but he at least had a gist of what kind of culture the system was adapting things from. If he was reading between the lines correctly, they were some kind of frontier outlaw. Every proficiency he saw dripped with hints of someone riding into town on a dark horse and getting into gun trouble before he rode out again.
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Which was kind of cool, at least in Nick''s eyes. If he had to choose between this and the melee footsoldier class he had abandoned, he’d take this approximately ten out of every ten times. And that was before he finally got to Bound Captain. It had been calling his name since he had opened his status screen, and he was finally able to read the description. Unfortunately, another notification opened before he could.
Nick scanned the message with the blank, abuse-adjusted eyes of a longtime retail employee before taking a deep, depressed breath.
“Well, that sucks.”<table><tbody><tr><td>
Astramart Employer Communication
Contract Violation Detected. As per your signed agreement, your employment as an Astramart is contingent on a minimum class level of 3. Your employment with Astramart is hereby terminated. Please make a purchase or else prepare for immediate expulsion from Astramart premises.</td></tr></tbody></table>
Nick''s hand dropped to where his wallet would be if he had one. This new universe ran on credits, a system-enforced fiat currency that operated out of a status screen all its own. He didn’t have to check that to know that he didn’t have enough in his virtual wallet to buy so much as a bag of chips in this place. A simple beverage here cost more than a year of his wages.
As if sensing his hesitance, the dome chose that moment to blink back to transparency as the robot staff that actually ran the place began to lurch towards him. He prepared to start running. The dome would stop him soon enough, but getting some distance on the robots would at least buy him a few seconds of life before they catapulted him out into the cold vacuum of space.
“Wait.”
A robotic, feminine voice sounded from nowhere. Nick could not tell where it was coming from.
“I have detected a threat to your person in the local environment. Would you like to flee?”
Nick may not have understood what was going on, but some questions just weren’t that hard to answer.
“Yes, please.”
“Acknowledged. Please wait a moment.”
With another hiss, the box in front of Nick began to crack at previously invisible seams, spreading and growing in an impossible way as each new emerging segment morphed in shape and color. Luckily, the tons of moving metal that were suddenly in motion seemed intent on avoiding him. An approaching robot wasn’t as lucky and caught a rapidly expanding wing to the face that blasted it clear to the other side of the dome.
“Expansion complete.”
Nick watched in stunned awe as a small hatch opened in the brand new, jet black ship in front of him.
“Enter quickly, please." The woman''s voice was firmer and more impatient now. "I have no tools with which to protect you when landed.”
Nick sprinted up the extended hatch-ramp into the ship. The door snapped closed behind him, and he stumbled towards the only chair he could see as the craft’s engines whirred to life somewhere behind him. He barely had his butt in the seat before the ship lifted off the ground, putting six or seven yards of air between it and the pursuing mob of robots on the ground.
“No apparent points of exit are available.” The ship’s voice was calm as it informed him the dome was sealed shut. Through the front viewport, Nick had just the right angle to see one of the more distant robots level an arm towards the ship and fire a bolt of energy at them. The ship rocked unhealthily in the air as it made impact. “We are currently under fire. Would you like me to pursue more creative exit strategies?”
“Yes. Do.” Nick looked around for a seatbelt and found nothing. “Wait. What do you mean by creative?”
“This.” The engines suddenly roared as the ship shot straight towards the dome. “Please brace yourself, captain.”
Contrary to his expectations, Nick was not pulped into jelly a second later. Instead, every joint on the ship started to creak as it struggled against the force dome, inching forward against its resistance until something snapped and the ship shot forward into space.
“Hey, ship?”
“Yes, captain?”
“Were you planning on the dome breaking down entirely like that?” Nick stared out the viewport as the maintenance robots struggled in vain to swim back toward the Astramart through the vacuum of space. “Just curious.”
“No,” The ship paused for a moment, “Although it was enjoyable. Creative exits are fun, I think. Did you enjoy it?”
The question caught Nick off guard. Things like having fun hadn’t been part of his relevant experiences for months. Even so, some questions just came stock with easy answers.
“Yes. Hell yes.” Nick patted the wall of the ship affectionately. “Let’s be creative more often, ship.”
“Why are you calling me ship?”
The voice sounded pleased with Nick''s approval, but eager to correct the misunderstanding. It didn''t like being called <i>ship, </i>which made sense. Nick hadn''t liked being referred to as <i>human. </i>That had happened a few times.
“You have a name? Great. What is it?”
“I am an Actolian Retaliator Class extraction shuttle designated as The Anvil. A quick scan of my records seems to indicate that most of my previous owners called me Annie.”
---
“Annie? I thought Brody called you Anna.”
“He might have. My records do confirm that Brody was my last captain, if little else. In any case, I prefer Annie in this incarnation.”
“Wait. You''re the same ship? You are my ship?”
Nick wheeled around to get a better look at Annie’s interior. The floor plan of the ship was about the size of a cargo van back on Earth, though the ceiling was thankfully a bit higher than a van’s would be. The impossibly expensive looking shine of Brody’s ship was gone, as were any number of fancy head-spinning bells and whistles Nick had taken in while getting blasted with the old man. Still, there was something about the overall stripped-down utility that remained that reminded him of what it once had been.
“You have the directionality wrong.” Annie somehow managed to sound mildly offended and pleased at the same time. “Please review your Bound Captain skill. It should shed some light on things.”
As the ship rocketed through space in no direction in particular, Nick opened his status screen once more.<table><tbody><tr><td>
Bound Captain
Many races in history have lost their home worlds. Of them all, only the Antolians were known to have done so willingly. From the first moments they acquired means to escape the grasp of their planet’s gravity, the call of space proved strong enough that no planet’s soil would ever again satisfy them.
Within startlingly few generations, the stars became their home. They built great ship docks in orbit around young stars, harvesting their energy to build ships ranked among the finest the galaxy had ever known. They took what work they could find, braving dangers of all sorts and accepting only such pay as would allow them the freedom to improve their spacecraft and roam further and further into the unknown.
Then, like many races before them, they angered forces greater than they expected, stood firm where they should have retreated, and were wiped from the face of history. At the last breath of their people, the remaining survivors banded together to create an indelible record of what they had once been. Half that record is your class. The other half is composed of The Anvil.
As The Anvil’s bound captain, your role is to act as the hands and feet of a living piece of history, furthering the legend of the Antolians through every mission you complete together.
As a class-bound ship, The Anvil will grow more powerful as you do. Every level you gain will add something of what was lost when the last Antolian fell, integrating lost technologies and capabilities into the ship’s structure until it once again stands as a testament to the greatness of the Antolians’ achievements.
Unlike a conventional ship, The Anvil requires no fuel to travel and can to some extent maintain its own functions. These capabilities are limited, however, and will benefit from supplements of the normal supplies and maintenance other ships require. Upgrades to The Anvil outside of its normal class-connected growth are possible, and will sometimes be offered among your bounty rewards.</td></tr></tbody></table>
“You see? I am not yours.” Nick could almost have sworn he heard a self-satisfied nod as Annie once again confirmed she was not an owned thing. “You are mine.”
“I see. I don’t suppose I have any problems with that, considering that without you I’d just be out there.” Space looked like a cold place, and Nick wasn’t going to spend a lot of time arguing the intricacies of his relationship with the ship keeping him out of it. “So how does this work? You order me to go places, and I go?”
“No, no. You are the captain. You decide where we go, and what we do. I’ll assist you in any way I can, up to and including the destruction of both of us.” Annie paused. “I just wanted to be clear what I am. And what I am not.”
Nick took a mental note then and there that whatever else Annie might be, she was not his slave. He was happy to find that despite his lack of choice in the matter, he liked it much better that way.
He was nearly ready to move on to the hundreds of questions he wanted to ask when the ship rocked violently again. Unbidden, a system screen appeared before his eyes.
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Emergency Bounty! (Compulsory)
Survive and escape
Through wanton destruction of property, you have managed to anger the automated defensive drones of a nearby Astramart. They are in close pursuit of your ship, and are attempting to recoup the financial losses you forced on their interstellar parent company by scrapping your ship and corpse for parts.
Completion Parameters: Through combat or evasion, survive the encounter and escape the sensor range of the nearby Astramart.
Rewards: Accumulation, Equipment Assortment
Failure Penalties: Death</td></tr></tbody></table>