《A Lazy Programmer》 400 milliseconds How long is the blink of an eye? 400 milliseconds. It seems rapid and has even generated its own idiom, "in the blink of an eye", to describe a fast event. But 400 milliseconds is quite a long time. A hummingbird¡¯s wings can beat 28 times, a car can easily travel 41 feet, and sound can travel 450 feet in that amount of time. So the blink of an eye isn''t really all that fast. In some cases, one could say that the blink of an eye is an eternity. It certainly seemed that way to Marcus today.
He''d gone to work just like any other weekday; back to the trudge through necessary steps to do the few things he truly enjoyed. While he loved the challenges he got to solve and the pure creativity of writing software, most of his time was consumed with niggling little details that simply had to be taken care of but which provided no joy. Ah, yes, this bit of input had to be cleaned by removing carriage returns; this bit of code needed to be accessible from this other bit so a dependency had to be added; a few hundred emails were necessary for the main clients to decide whether to take route A or B. Work was largely just a daily grind with few moments of inspiration or design involved. He started withhis daily hot chocolate which was undoubtedly not helping his weight issue because he still refused to drink the foul sludge known to many as the nectar of the heavens, aka tar or even coffee, and gone straight to work. Unlike many of his colleagues, Marcus had grown up in a middle-class family so he was quite a bit more insular than even the normal programmer; he just wanted to get his work done to get paid. So, he didn''t linger around the kitchen and chat, or sit at the table in the dining area and read the newspaper, or even walk around greeting people unnecessarily. Instead, he simply went to his desk and checked up on the tests he¡¯d run overnight. His latest change-set failed only 17 tests ¡­ these were almost certainly random failures so he¡¯d re-run them on the cluster and be able to submit the changes before lunch. After setting up the next test run he started checking the emails he¡¯d received overnight from peers across the world: yes, Project A was still on-time; no, Pete wasn¡¯t quitting, he¡¯d just been sick from the flu; no, Marcus wasn¡¯t going to become a project manager; yes, he could help inspect some changes that were getting weird test results; etc. A typical start to his day. But just before lunch Marcus got the results back from the latest test-run and a new test had failed. The report just called the test ¡°Universe Inversion¡±. That seemed like an odd name for a compiler test. So, Marcus blinked.
Marcus blinked again. He closed his eyes completely. It wasn¡¯t often that one blinked and the scenery in front of them changed. The blink of an eye is so fast ¡­ but sometimes it isn¡¯t. What Marcus saw when his eyes opened after his first blink was impossible. Instead of his left monitor, Marcus¡¯ sight revealed a red-headed woman with an hourglass figure in a pink satin dress standing alone in a room with blue flowered ivy upon the walls. So, of course, he blinked a second time. Disbelief, nay impossibility, causes fairly predictable reactions. When his eyes opened again he saw the same woman in the same room, so he closed his eyes entirely to re-think what had just happened. Nope; I¡¯ve got nothing. This is totally impossible. What in the fuck just happened? Did I die? Maybe another plane crashed and instantly killed me in the office? Does the afterlife really have buxom women just waiting in random ivy-covered rooms to greet all the random schlubs who show up? Where are the angels, St. Peter, or the pearly gates? Fuck. Fuck me. Whatever this is; I guess my old life is now over. Ah, fuck. Guess I¡¯d better get it over with. Marcus opened his eyes slowly and embarked on ¡­ whatever ¡­ this new adventure would bring. Since the woman was an uncomfortable distance away for normal conversation, Marcus stood up from his office chair and walked over to her. As he was walking, he noted that she had green eyes and was just a few inches shorter than him. Her foot was tapping in the Greek sandals she was wearing. She looked to be about the same age as him: around 25 to 30 years old. ¡°Hello, I¡¯m Marcus.¡± ¡°Hello, I¡¯m Phoebe. I¡¯m here to help you to choose your skills as a Traveler and transition you from Earth to Marin. I¡¯m sure you have lots of questions, but unfortunately we don¡¯t have a lot of time. Here in the interstices between universes time flows oddly and you are needed sooner rather than later upon Marin: civilization is under attack and every minute here corresponds to ten years there right now. You¡¯ll only make your own life unpleasant if you take too much time trying to figure everything out. Are you going to be okay with the fast-track?¡± ¡°Uh ¡­ sure. Just answer me one question: will I be able to return to Earth?¡± ¡°No.¡± ¡°Fuck. Okay. Nothing else much matters. Let¡¯s get started.¡± ¡°Please think ¡®Status¡¯ and you should see a status screen much like in your Earth¡¯s role-playing games.¡± After he thought status, Marcus was presented with an abbreviated RPG status screen in blue. It hovered just in front of him like it had somehow been placed directly in his vision. When he turned his head to the left or right or rotated his eyes around the screen stayed centered and perfectly legible. It appeared to be about a foot in front of his nose.
Name - Level 1 Title -
Health 230 Mana 230 Stamina 230
Constitution 10 Intelligence 10 Endurance 10
Hp regen 0.639 Mp regen 0.639 Sta regen 0.639
Vitality 10 Wisdom 10 Metabolism 10
¡°There¡¯s not much there ...¡± ¡°These are just your base stats. When you regenerate health your Vitality and Constitution will go up increasing your health regen and total heal. When you regenerate mana your Wisdom and Intelligence will increase, and when you regenerate stamina your Metabolism and Endurance will increase. Formulas are available by thinking ¡®Mana information¡¯ or similar things.¡± ¡°Got it.¡± ¡°You¡¯ll need to be thinking whether you want to keep your name, Marcus, or change it while I explain the rest.¡± Phoebe took a quick breath then continued. ¡°Marin is a world of skills, unlike your Earth. When a sufficient number of people master a new skill, their collective knowledge is detected by the goddesses and we sort that knowledge into different skill levels.¡±The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. ¡°When a new person then increases their understanding of that skill area, they eventually reach a threshold in their knowledge and gain the next level of understanding in that skill. You could say that they ¡®leveled up¡¯ the skill. Whatever experience and knowledge they applied to learn the skill, they get a static set of knowledge that was sorted into the new skill level by the goddesses.¡± Marcus interrupted: ¡°So, learn and use skills and I¡¯ll be gifted knowledge from the collective group of people who¡¯ve used the skill in the past?¡± ¡°Yes, that¡¯s a succinct way of putting it. In order to gain levels for yourself and increase your health, mana, and stamina capacities you¡¯ll need to level up your skills. Before personal level 10, you¡¯ll need 3 skills at the new level to raise your personal level. After level 10, you¡¯ll need 5 skills at the new level to raise your personal level. This distinction is made because level 10 unlocks a huge bump in power unlike any other ¨C people below level 10 are in serious danger of dying, so we goddesses gave a little help to get that most-important power bump.¡± Phoebe squinted at Marcus and said ¡°So, the importance of which skills you decide to increase can not be overstated. I¡¯m going to let you choose your initial 10 skills shortly, after which I¡¯d like to transport you directly to Marin. If you¡¯ve chosen a name now, I¡¯ll enter it for you and you can start searching through the list of skills available for Travelers by thinking ¡®skills search¡¯. Once you¡¯re done selecting your skills and I¡¯ve transported you, you can come to one of my temples and I¡¯ll answer what questions I may.¡± Marcus thought for a few seconds then responded, ¡°I think I¡¯d like to be called Alexander Carpenter.¡±
Thinking skills search Alex saw a blue menu with an obvious search bar and tons of skills already listed below. It looked something like this:
Search
Two-handed bastard sword One handed fencing sword Two-handed hammer Magical wands Physical staves
Reading ¡®Xotl¡¯ language Sprinting Wall climbing Enchanting
Potions Calligraphy Swimming Engraving Fire spells
Jumping Cartography Runecraft Spell language Archery
I¡¯m going to a world with magic. Alex thought. There is no way I¡¯m going to rely upon a melee or physical process when I can defy the normal laws of physics. Swords, bows, axes, or even some Shaolin-monk style of martial arts simply aren¡¯t for me. I¡¯ll look for magic skills by searching for ¡®spell¡¯. Search: ¡®spell¡¯.
Search spell
Magical wands Reading ¡®Xotl¡¯ language Enchanting Potions
Calligraphy Engraving Fire spells Runecraft Spell language
¡®Himmen¡¯ language Chanting Identify Interface Herbalism
Language basics Writing tools Mathematics Cyphers Air spells
Spell language information.
Spell language All magic is formed using spell language. This skill allows one to learn what is known about the grammar, vocabulary, and other workings of spell language.
Okay, well that¡¯s pretty sparse but I definitely will be wanting to create my own spells so I¡¯ll take it. I¡¯m not sure why some of these others are on here, so I¡¯ll check one out: Reading information.
Reading Reading helps the speed and comprehension of the reader. The act of reading crosses linguistic boundaries and even allows extremely skilled mages to understand how spells work and tinker with them to create better magic.
Ah ¡­ I guess it makes sense that since there¡¯s a spell language that reading is connected with it. Probably the ¡®X¡¯ language skills just mention that the skill uses magic to help the person understand that language ¨C speaking of which: ¡°Phoebe, will I have a basic understanding of one of the local languages or do I need to invest in a skill to understand what people will be saying?¡±, Alex asked. ¡°Oh, you¡¯ll be given a basic understanding of the three most common languages which are Himmen, Phreneme, and Word. If you want to learn other languages quickly, you¡¯d better pick up Language Basics. The first level gives you a very small spoken vocabulary so that you can converse in any language, and the vocabulary and knowledge of written forms only increase as you practice in any language. Also, you¡¯d better take Identify so that you at least know the value of things. Everything else is really optional, but having something to make money with like Potions and Herbalism or Sword Crafting and Blacksmithing is a great idea. You typically need to use the products from one skill in a second before you make enough money in a day to keep yourself going.¡± ¡°Thanks, Phoebe. I¡¯ll probably take Potions and Herbalism and Language Basics.¡± After a few more minutes of searching and quickly reading each description, Alex ended up choosing the following ten skills:
Cartography This skill helps the user to map what he has seen or detected. Spells are immediately available to create a living version of your map and, if desired, display it in your interface.
Force spells This skill enables the user to apply force in whatever way is desired. Cutting blades of pure force, or the slow strength needed to move boulders. Scooping forces needed to dig tunnels or pressing forces needed to compact their walls. If you need to move something, this is your magic.
Healing spells Spells involved in rapid healing on the battlefield or long-term healing off the battlefield. Curse removal, limb re-growth, organ repair, scar removal, and waste routing are just some of the abilities granted by this skill.
Herbalism The first level of this skill enables a passive spell which gives off a very dim light from plants which you might be able to use for entry-level potions. As you gain in knowledge and experience, plants will become more noticeable and you¡¯ll even gain the capability to search for specific kinds of herbs.
Interface Spell access to the blue screen information as well as the capability to pin, move, resize, or otherwise adjust everything on the interface. If you have critical information you want available all the time, you need this skill.
Language Basics Spoken language vocabulary at lower levels with written language basics as you increase in skill. If you¡¯re a diplomat or planning on travel, this is the most useful skill for learning how to communicate anywhere on Marin.
Potions Preparing ingredients, mixing, and bottling magical effects into potions that can be more effective than spells created this skill. If you¡¯re short on mana, there¡¯s nothing quite like the backup provided by having a potion at hand.
Reading Reading helps the speed and comprehension of the reader. The act of reading crosses linguistic boundaries and even allows extremely skilled mages to understand how spells work and tinker with them to create better magic.
Spell language All magic is formed using spell language. This skill allows one to learn what is known about the grammar, vocabulary, and other workings of spell language.
Survivalist Is this plant edible? How do I dress this animal? If it rains, where will I most likely find shelter? Is it safe to enter the tree canopy here? All questions about how to survive in a given environment are answered in this skill area.
Phoebe said ¡°You¡¯re done! I¡¯m transferring you now. I¡¯m the Goddess of Change, so come find me once you¡¯re settled and I¡¯ll help out with a few questions!¡± Alex blinked ... Tree of life It wasn¡¯t often that one blinked and the scenery in front of them changed. The blink of an eye is so fast ¡­ but sometimes it isn¡¯t. What Alex saw when his eyes opened wasn¡¯t quite as unexpected as before ¨C but it was still unbelievable. He found himself in a glade. Just an open spot in a forest ¨C nothing unusual there ¨C but what the open spot contained was rather surreal. Sunlight beamed directly through the missing canopy and highlighted the white streaks of flowers opened before the slightly warm day. Normal flowers, these, with yellow stamens and irregular bright purple splotches. While the actual flower appeared like a lily, the rest of this particular plant had a long stem ¨C somewhere around 9 inches ¨C stiff and surrounded with spiraling thorns. They grew one by one straight out of the ground, but in patches, seeming to have multiple stems per root system. Maybe they grew from bulbs? But the purple-splotched white flowers were still pretty normal for a glade. Most open spaces in a forest would have some kind of undergrowth, if only grasses. What surprised Alex were the second kind of flower he could see. They were glowing. Not just with light coming from the flowers, but a sort of gas flowing up from them. Blue tulips emitting a blue wisp which floated about in the breeze and dissipated about 6 feet above the glade¡¯s floor. Alex was standing inside the edge of the glade itself, but couldn¡¯t smell anything from the tulips¡¯ apparent gas. Meanwhile, there were bees and dragonflies flitting between the lilies for the nutrients they needed. Floating about near the top edges of the flowing blue gasses were fairies: winged women with what appeared to be armor and weapons like swords, axes, and a great variety of bows. Some few patches of grass were visible among the swathes of these two flowers and these contained the same kinds of grasses visible beneath those flowers themselves: a simple green bladed grass, a shorter blue-green grass layer, and even a tall purple bladed grass. The trees surrounding the glade appeared to be pretty regular oak trees with acorns and wide leaves. Only a couple of maple trees were visible among the oaks. So. Magic or at least gaseous flowers. Fairies. And everything else appears to be somewhat Earth-like. Magic flowers ¡­ I hope they¡¯re not poisonous. Ouch! What the fuck? An intense sensation started inside Alex¡¯s head. It felt like an acorn had been teleported directly into the center of his brain. A headache unlike any other was definitely coming Alex¡¯s way. He opened his eyes quickly to see if he could find some kind of help or shelter to wait out the pain but nothing was visible. Wait, at the edge of the forest ¨C what is that? Ohmygod! Wolf! Immediately, Alex looked behind himself and searched for some escape. There was a tree only a few yards away which had a low-hanging branch. A solid oak with prospects for climbing higher. Alex ran towards it. Behind him he heard a yip, then a growling which increased in volume as the wolf gained ground. Just 5 more steps. 4. 3. Ohmygod! He could hear the wolf¡¯s footfalls now. Pounding like a horse¡¯s gallop behind him. Fuuuuuuuckkk! Jump! Leaping the last foot, Alex grabbed the lowest branch and pulled himself up. He got both feet on the branch and extended upwards to grab the next branch when he heard and felt the wolf hit the base of the tree. Quickly, he lifted his legs ¨C and not a moment too soon; the wolf¡¯s teeth scraped the base of his boot pushing Alex into a bit of a wobble as he completed the motion to attain the next branch. Heart in his throat, he quickly clambered up a few more branches making a complete revolution around the tree and attaining a height of 20 feet. The wolf, at the base of the tree, ceased growling for long enough to emit a few long howls. In the middle distance, a few more howls came back. Alex was safe for the moment but trapped up an oak tree. After 2 minutes a second wolf arrived. More made their way under the tree over the next 15 minutes until there were 12 or so wolves underneath Alex¡¯s perch. Well, shit. Alex thought. Save civilization; quickly, pick some skills; oh, and by the way here¡¯s a totally safe spawn point. Phoebe: what the fuck, man? The acorn headache began to sprout tendrils throughout the rest of his mind and Alex realized that the danger below wasn¡¯t all he contended with. Luckily for Alex, there was a second branch growing just a small bit to his right which he could slump upon. He was pretty sure that this headache was going to incapacitate him completely ¨C yet he didn¡¯t want to fall off his current perch to become the pack¡¯s dinner. The splitting pain continued to grow and Alex began to moan at the intensity. It went on and on. Later, Alex never knew exactly how long that first agony lasted because he didn¡¯t note the position of the sun in the sky upon his arrivalsincethings progressed too quickly. It was slightly after noon when his pain faded enough for him to reposition himself on his supporting branch and stop draping himself across the second branch. Looking down, he saw the wolves patiently bedded down waiting for him to try his next move. Well, since it looks like I¡¯ve got some time on my hands (ThanksPhoebe!!!), I might as well look at what my choices of skills actually allow me to do. status. Alex¡¯s base statistics showed up. The ten skills he picked were displayed directly beneath his base statistics, but there was also a tab at the top of the page of statistics. The original tab now had the name ¡°Skills and Stats¡± whereas the new tab was named ¡°Abilities¡±. abilities.
Mapping (toggle) Tracks the detected areas around the user and records information for later review on a map. Later levels record more detailed information about what is detected.
Map (active) A spell which creates tiny visual detectors in a sphere around the mage. Visual data is then processed and used by an active Mapping ability to record information about the mage¡¯s surroundings.
Blade (active) Create a blade of force to cut. Strength rapidly diminishes over distance from the mage.
Push (active) Create a wall of force which imparts energy to push objects away from the mage. Strength rapidly diminishes over distance from the mage.
Heal (active) Rapidly regenerate some health in the target. Touch required. Speeds up natural health regeneration, taking the energy from the target¡¯s reserves like fat/metabolism.
Detect herbs (toggle) A passive spell which highlights useful plants in the mage¡¯s interface.
Spell language dictionary (active) A dictionary which records your known vocabulary in the spell language. When you activate this spell, your interface shows the dictionary. There is a separate tab which is available for notes.
Detect water (active) The most basic need for survival is a source of water. This spell allows the user to search over a broad area for bodies of water.
Uhh. Well, there¡¯s not much there. For offense, it looks like all I have is the force blade while I¡¯ve got a lot of abilities that will allow easy orientation and utility. As for money-making ¡­ wait, what about Pot¨C Alex¡¯s mind opened a little bit more broadly and he remembered, somehow, how to make a simple healing potion, a simple mana potion, and a simple stamina potion. Despite knowing he¡¯d never done any of these things he knew exactly which herbs were needed for each, how to mash them to the correct consistency with a mortar and pestle, how much water to add, and the duration he needed to heat each mixture in a crucible before cooling and pouring the final product into a vial for storage. Maybe that¡¯s what the headache was about? So much new knowledge had to be placed somewhere and for it to feel as familiar to me as instinct, it had to have affected large portions of my brain. Hmm. I¡¯ll ask when I get to some kind of town. With only one skill which offers any chance of driving these wolves away, I¡¯d better get started practicing Blade. Alex felt another expanding of his mind as he felt how he could cast the spell by mentally reaching into the center of his chest, pulling a tiny strand of mana from the core of mana spinning around in a sphere, directing that to his hand, and saying the spell language out loud. He knew he could direct more mana into the spell to place more force into the blade, giving the blade more damage at the same range and an overall longer range before the effect faded completely. Aiming at a twig coming from the branch which supported his torso during his recent agony, Alex cast the spell using only the base cost of 3 mana. He felt the energy moving from his core, along his arm, and then spiraling out from his pointed finger to a glyph which appeared in the air before his finger. The glyph was shaped like a hexagon initially, but then parts of a second hexagon appeared above it and, in an anti-clockwise direction, other glyphs started appearing as his mana drained and he spoke the spell language. For every few syllables, a new hexagon appeared and spiraled out from the center of the spell forming just beyond his finger tip. About halfway through the incantation, Alex stopped speaking.This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author''s work. I¡¯m actually doing magic! Moreover, it¡¯s beautiful. Orange hexagons spiraling out of nothing to form a piece of art before my eyes. At that moment, Alex felt the spell waver. The hexagons distorted mid-air and sparks started to come off of them. He had just enough time to think Oh, fuck! before the spell¡¯s glyphs sparked apart and rushed up his hand, along his arm, up his torso, and into his head ¨C giving him his second headache in this wonderful world called Marin. Luckily, the spell backlash didn¡¯t last long. After 5 minutes, the pain had completely faded and he was feeling just fine. Round two. And no getting distracted this time ¨C that hurt. Alex completed the entire incantation on his second attempt and the glyphs gave the briefest of glimmers before disappearing. The twig that he¡¯d aimed at ¡­ well ¡­ it maybe bent a little? Alex was a little underwhelmed to say the least. His first magic spell backfired, then it did its best to slightly bend a twig. He sat there for a few minutes just staring at the twig, his mind completely blank. Coming back to himself, he snorted. ¡°I guess expecting the most basic spell at a tiny cost of 3 mana to cause effective destruction is far too much,¡± he said aloud. Grinning, he decided to target a twig a little closer than the original one ¨C about three feet away instead of the original¡¯s five or so. I¡¯ll also put some extra mana into this spell ¨C double the cost to see what kind of reaction I get. Pulling more mana from his core and allowing it to extend down his arm, through his finger, and out into the spell form, he started the incantation. Once the incantation was finished, he kept channeling power while he mentally recited the incantation again ¨C this was the best way he could imagine to get twice the mana placed into the spell. He just didn¡¯t know how he could measure mana yet. At the end of the mental recitation of the spell, he cut off the flow of mana and let the spell complete. The twig he¡¯d been aiming at broke over away from him. Examining it closer, Alex saw that the twig was cut more than half of the way through, but that the last portion of the twig wasn¡¯t cut. This blade is not terribly mana-efficient. Well, I guess I don¡¯t really know how much a point of mana usually accomplishes, but with only 230 mana in my pool, I surely will need to increase my capabilities if I want to be an effective mage. Speaking of mana ¨C I wonder if it¡¯s regenerated yet? status. He was surprised to see his mana at 223.4. His mana regeneration claimed it was 0.639 ¡­ but he was still missing some mana from the first attempt at casting unless he¡¯d wildly overestimated how much mana he¡¯d poured into the second casting. mana regeneration information.
Mana regeneration The number of mana regenerated every minute. Mana regeneration may be increased by drinking a mana potion or learning the ancient skill of meditation. Meditation benefits regeneration of health, mana, and stamina. While base regeneration takes between one and six hours, meditation can cut that time down to as little as fifteen minutes: learn to meditate!
Well, fuck. Meditation might be super-easy to learn once I get to some kind of town, but until then it looks like I¡¯m not only a glass cannon but one with only ¨C like ¨C 3 or 4 shots depending upon how the force blade scales. I also can¡¯t stay up in this tree for days waiting for the wolves to leave, so I¡¯m going to have to channel a shit-ton of mana into the next cast of Blade just to hope that I don¡¯t waste hours of time regenerating mana. That¡¯s probably going to cause me to waste quite a bit of time anyway because I¡¯m most likely going to over-estimate how much mana I need to cause the damage I need to do. Damned if I do and damned if I don¡¯t. Thanks for the great spawn, Phoebe! Since Blade¡¯s description explicitly tells me that its power rapidly diminishes over distance, I¡¯ll need to get as close as possible to the wolves as well. Before that, though, I need a way to accurately measure how much mana I¡¯m channeling into the skill. He opened up the status screen and began looking for some way to pin information on his interface. As soon as his eyes twitched to look for some element to use to drag his mana count around, his mind opened again and he received the memories he needed to pin a numeric or bar representation of his health, mana, and stamina pools on the interface. He also remembered that there was an option for displaying how much mana was being used by each spell he cast. This bar he pinned to the upper right of his vision while his basic pools were pinned to the upper left of his vision. With not much else to do and time ticking away towards late afternoon, Alex began clambering down the tree. He was very careful to hold onto the trunk and another branch to be sure he was always extremely stable on the way down. When he got to the third to last branch, he was only about 16 feet off the ground. With how big the wolves were (they appeared to be about three and a half feet at the shoulder), he had no doubt that they could almost reach his feet on the branch. While he wanted his spell to have maximum effect, he wasn¡¯t willing to risk getting any closer to the now growling beasts. Aiming at one which was mostly stationary and almost directly below him, he began to cast Blade. He really wanted to hurt the wolf and hopefully begin to scare the pack away, so he channeled 100 mana into the spell on top of the 3 needed to form the spell form in the first place. This was almost half his entire pool, so he desperately hoped that it would cause significant harm. If it didn¡¯t, he¡¯d be stuck up the tree for a long time waiting for regeneration and have no real option but to empty his entire mana pool in one attack. As the spell charged, the wolf he was aiming at moved around slightly and even went behind the tree¡¯s trunk from time to time. He kept channeling and targeted whichever wolf was closest to being directly under him, but still far enough away that he didn¡¯t fear that he might cut off his own feet. As he moved his finger, the entire spell form followed it through the air, never wavering from its perfectly shaped glyph form and never dragging behind or anticipating his movement. It was as if the form were directly connected to his finger. Finally, the spell had absorbed 103 mana ¨C leaving Alex at 130 after regeneration ¨C and he cut the flow, completing the spell. A blade of force left his hand and whipped towards his current target. The wolf¡¯s eyes dilated and it began to crouch in an attempt to escape, but the Blade was far too fast. Crunch went the wolf. The wolf was cut in half from the back of his neck, through his shoulder blades and down and backward through his torso behind the front legs. The sound of the bones being crushed by the force blade was bad enough but his body was also sent flying in two different directions by the impact ¨C organs and guts from the rear half of the beast splayed across the ground for 15 feet leading to the back and rear legs while the front half shot forwards and bounced off of several of its pack-mates. A deep furrow was dug into the earth next to the tree and a small explosion of dirt and rocks covered the closest pack members shortly after the blood. Many of the wolves whined and, with their tails between their legs, moved back away from their slaughtered member. The whole pack ended up retreating about 30 feet away from the tree into the center of the glade. There they growled up at Alex and began to clean the blood spatter and dust off of themselves, but they retreated no further. Meanwhile, Alex was dealing with his third massive headache. He¡¯d had an information-overdose, a spell-backfire, and now he was dealing with mana-deprivation. Overexerting your body when trying to run too far or lift too much weight caused your stamina to run low and your muscles to simply refuse to work as hard as previously. Overexerting your mind by trying to pump far more mana than you were used to controlling into a spell caused your blood vessels to contract then rapidly expand, forming a headache exactly like a migraine. Because of this immense and immediate pain upon releasing the spell, Alex was lucky enough to blink and miss the explosion of gore from the wolf¡¯s death. He didn¡¯t see the reaction of the pack of wolves and he didn¡¯t really process their whimpers as they retreated. He simply grimaced with his eyes shut and waited for the pain to dissipate. This has certainly been a shitty start to my new life. Alex thought after another 15 minutes or so had passed. And even after obliterating that wolf below, the pack only backed off enough so that Blade shouldn¡¯t be effective: they can probably dodge it at that distance and they¡¯ll certainly get tons of time to react since the chant and channeling take so long. Well ¡­ what do I do now?
As it happened, Phoebe really did have a good reason to put Alex in that glade. There was a huntress roaming the woods just to the south of the glade which he should surely have come upon if he¡¯d scouted about a bit and noticed the smoke coming from the nearby smithy. Given that the smithy¡¯s smoke was the only thing visible for miles in any direction, it wasn¡¯t too much to ask him to simply look and travel towards it. Unfortunately, in her haste to get Alex in place she totally forgot about the information overload headache he¡¯d receive from learning so many skills essentially instantaneously upon arrival in Marin and she¡¯d not been too careful in checking the area for foes. Nonetheless, the huntress had gone her way upon hearing the earlier pack cries and caught some game west of the area: a deer and three rabbits. She happened to be coming back through the area when Alex had fired his Blade and she heard the explosion of dirt and rock when it impacted the ground. She hung the deer and rabbits in a maple tree to allow herself freedom of movement in case she ran into the pack she¡¯d heard earlier and moved towards the area. Explosions don¡¯t happen naturally without some kind of fire, but I¡¯ve seen no smoke. There¡¯s definitely someone over here either in trouble, or causing trouble. No one should need that kind of force to deal with level 1-3 creatures. She thought as she crept towards a clearing in the forest. There¡¯s the wolf-pack I heard earlier. They¡¯re looking towards the other side of ¨C wow, that wolf is completely cut in half. It looks like the blow came from above and the crater¡¯s under that tree. Okay. That¡¯s a man. He¡¯s obviously low level or he¡¯d know how to kill the wolves with lesser force than what he used, but he¡¯s also suffering from a headache ¨C probably from investing too much mana into whatever spell he cast. I guess I¡¯ll have to deal with the wolves.
Alex heard a yelp and one of the wolves fell over. While he was trying to see what happened, he caught a glimpse of an arrow embedding itself into another wolf who also succumbed instantly. As the wolves turned to face this new threat several more arrows thumped unerringly into the hearts of the pack and the number of live wolves plummeted from 11 to 5. With a bark and growl, one of them rushed towards the trees where the arrows originated and the rest of the pack followed. Before they entered the fringe of the trees three more fell to their final rest. Alex heard two more thumps and assumed the last of the wolves fell. With his heart racing, he watched the edge of the forest and saw a figure emerge into the glade. She was a brunette with brown eyes and tanned skin dressed in leather armor and boots. She, like Phoebe, had a very nice hourglass figure. A chest that was slightly larger than it looked like her frame could withstand, a thin waist, and hips wider than her waist. While she walked out into the glade he couldn¡¯t tell her height exactly, but it looked like she might be slightly shorter than his 6 foot 4 inches. She kept a long dagger in each hand and moved into the clearing stabbing each wolf to ensure it wasn¡¯t just playing dead. While she finished with the wolves, Alex descended from the oak tree and walked into the open. ¡°Hello¡±, he said, ¡°My name is Alex.¡± ¡°Well-met, I am Erin¡±, the huntress replied. Alex noted that she¡¯d replied in a different language than he¡¯d used ¨C she¡¯d spoken Himmen whereas he¡¯d started the greetings using Word. He made the switch to the new language mentally and continued: ¡°Thank you for taking care of the wolves, I¡¯d just arrived from Phoebe this morning when one of them howled and I had no choice but to escape up the tree. After I got up there, I had a ridiculous headache which kept me inactive until just a while ago. Then I didn¡¯t know how much mana to channel, so I ended up blowing up one wolf and scaring the rest out here. I was just wondering what my next misadventure might be when you arrived.¡± ¡°Arrived from Phoebe? Where¡¯s that?¡± ¡°Ah, I meant the Goddess of Change, Phoebe. She took me from my world and deposited me here.¡± Erin blinked a few times but didn¡¯t go on a world-traversing journey: lucky her! She said ¡°¡­ So you¡¯re a Traveler? Someone from a different world?¡± ¡°I guess ¡­ I think I remember Phoebe saying that a couple of times. To be frank, she rushed through the process extremely quickly. I probably spent only about 10 minutes with her. I¡¯ve certainly changed worlds, but I guess it just didn¡¯t register that I should introduce myself as a Traveler.¡± Erin looked up at the position of the sun. ¡°We¡¯d better go. Scottstown is still a few miles away and dusk is upon us. If you¡¯re level one, you definitely don¡¯t want to be outside when that happens. The deer I caught isn¡¯t going to do us any favors with the local monsters after dark either.¡± ¡°Lead on,¡± Alex replied. He didn¡¯t have much of a choice but to trust her and, really, as the last few hours showed he hadno idea how he should be using his abilities to grow. It¡¯d be a miracle if he survived alone during the night. Long walks on the beach As he exited the glade, Alex looked back to the wolves and the destruction he¡¯d caused with Blade. The small crater he¡¯d dug was certainly an example of poor usage of force ¨C he¡¯d killed one wolf in exchange for hours worth of mana regeneration whereas Erin had killed eleven and didn¡¯t even appear to be breathing deeply. While there¡¯s probably a lot to be said for being higher level, it¡¯s still pretty glaring that I have to learn how to use my mana more efficiently if I want to retain a pool of mana even in emergencies. I always want to be able to use more magic so that I¡¯m never caught completely defenseless. He turned his head forward and continued following Erin. She had been speaking for a few seconds and it took him a bit to process what she¡¯d said: ¡°So, Phoebe rushed to get you here. I¡¯d guess that means that you¡¯re from a world where time flows more quickly than in Marin. We haven¡¯t had an abundance of Travelers for quite a while but the process is pretty well-known. What did she tell you about Marin?¡± A small game trail opened up while Erin was speaking and they turned down it to the right, heading slightly West. There were still an abundance of oak trees with only the occasional maple and very little undergrowth due to the tree canopy blocking the sunlight. Where the canopy was broken by the death of an older tree, very small patches of the white-and-purple lilies and blue tulips would be growing alongside the three kinds of grasses he¡¯d spotted in the glade. It was an old-growth forest with trees whose trunks were mostly wider than two men standing abreast. As Alex¡¯s mind caught up with Erin¡¯s message, he replied: ¡°Pretty much nothing. She said only that civilization was basically collapsing and something like she was sending me to try to help out. Oh! She also mentioned that practicing my skills would increase my level in them and allow me to grow personally as well ¨C 3 skills before level 10, and 5 thereafter are needed to attain the next level. ¡­ And that¡¯s basically all I know.¡± A few moments passed in silence while Erin processed those statements. They walked down an embankment into a dry stream, then back up the other side before she responded, ¡°Well ¡­ that is pretty much nothing. I¡¯m not sure that civilization is collapsing, but things have gotten harder for quite some time. In my mother¡¯s mother¡¯s mother¡¯s time, the roads were much safer and well-traveled; the dungeons¡¯ forces attacked far less frequently. I¡¯d guess there were probably more people alive then too because farming could be done on a much larger scale. But we¡¯re still doing ok. There¡¯s still enoughopportunity for people to grow and get stronger ¨C it¡¯s just a more dangerous world out there so people have to be far more careful. The dungeons¡¯ changes are responsible for most of the new danger, but they can still be handled with care. We¡¯ve just been learning how to deal with it.¡± ¡°There are more immediate concerns, though, that you should be aware of.¡± she continued ¡°The most important is that, whatever your customs on your previous world, sex here has become quite different than most Travelers expect. People won¡¯t change their expectations just because you¡¯re a Traveler, though, so you¡¯d better be aware of how things work here. First, some background:¡± ¡°Many generations ago ¨C at least 20 that we can count ¨C men ruled the world. Men and women, despite what some would like to believe, are different in more than just biological ways. One of those differences is that men tend to enjoy focusing on one thing to the exclusion of almost everything else, including even eating and drinking, whereas women tend to enjoy doing multiple things at the same time. This tendency to focus that men have allowed those whose focus was gaining power to attain and keep it.¡± ¡°But, like in all things, too much of something can cause problems for intelligent beings. Too much bread and you¡¯ll grow fat. Too muchrest and you¡¯ll grow lazy. Too much power and you begin to despise others. Many of the men of that age grew to despise women for not equaling them in power.¡± ¡°Slowly, the men changed the world until women were little more than objects to be traded back and forth. The vast majority of women were enslaved and rape, torture, and even murder of women became commonplace. Women called out to the goddesses and prayed diligently to be saved. These prayers and devotions gave the goddesses enough power to finally do something.¡± ¡°The goddesses gathered together and cast a great spell. They changed men. No longer would a man produce roughly equal numbers of girl and boy babies, but each man would produce far more women than men.¡± ¡°Those men in power panicked when they saw the trend and realized that in a few generations women would be far more powerful than them just due to their numbers. Wars tore across the world. Some tried to maintain the balance of numbers by killing massive numbers of women. To counter-attack assassinations targeted the most heinous offenders and, eventually, even the strongest men of the oldpowers fell." "Now, though men and women both hold power, most men simply don¡¯t have the time to focus on doing much more than keeping the population going. The goddesses were a little too effective with their spell and so the ratio of births of women to men has been raised from about even all the way to seven to one.¡± ¡­ Alex hesitantly replied ¡°So, you¡¯re telling me that most men today are too busy having sex to do much else?¡± Erin looked back and grinned. ¡°Basically. The goddesses also actually increased men¡¯s libido and even their bodies so that they could handle the greater need of their wives. Finally, they tied physical beauty directly to your base attributes so, while each person is born exactly as they are, as they grow in power their bodies change to be the most ideal version of themselves.¡± As they continued on the game trail, Alex pondered these revelations. Honestly, this sounds like some teenager¡¯s wet-dream instead of reality. Far more women than men surely means that most men have multiple wives and probably even have quite a bit of sex outside of marriage. Meanwhile, women would be extremely protective of their chosen mate so the men are likely highly-protected to the point where most of them simply stay in or around their house being waited upon and having lots of sex. And while this would be too exhausting for a normal human male, just coincidentally the goddesses responsible decided to ¡°enhance¡± men to be able to handle it. It¡¯s surreal is what it is. Not a bad plan, though. Most men wouldn¡¯t really progress beyond their teenage fantasies and would be virtual slaves to their own sex drives. That would certainly cut down on the number of men trying to gain power ¨C why bother when they¡¯re waited on hand and foot, protected, and willingly given all the sex they could desire? While he was ruminating, Erin turned off the game trail and approached a rope tied to the base of a tree. She lowered a deer and three rabbits down out of a tree. She¡¯d simply slung the rope over a branch high enough to keep the game away from local wildlife. Alex didn¡¯t know much about hunting, but he could see that the animals had been field dressed ¨C this removed their stomachs, intestines, and other organs which held acids and wastes which could contaminate the meat. It also accelerated the cooling process of the animal, preserving the meat for even longer. As a bonus, by removing those organs, the weight to be transported was significantly reduced. As Erin untied the animals from the rope, Alex volunteered to carry the rabbits. He wasn¡¯t sure how long he could carry the deer, but she was obviously expecting to carry it before she saved him anyway. Erin giggled at him and held out the twine which bound the rabbits together. For the first time since arriving on Marin, Alex considered his own clothing ¨C it had changed quite a bit from what he was wearing at work. Dress shoes, slacks, and a polo aren¡¯t terribly appropriate for clambering up a tree so he found himself thankful that Phoebe chose to place him on Marin with soft leather boots, heavy linen pants with a tie of some sortholding them up under his heavy linen shirt and belt. Brown linen pants and a tan linen shirt certainly matched most medieval fantasy literature or first-level RPG gear. Since the belt was tight enough around his waist, he looped the twine around the belt on his left side and tied a simple overhand knot to keep it attached to the belt with a second overhand knot to act as a stopper. The rabbits wouldn¡¯t go anywhere until he untied them. He noticed that the rabbits and the deer all appeared to be victims of her bow: each had a hole about where their hearts or lungs should have been. Alex waited until Erin lifted the deer, whose hooves had been tied together, onto her back and then asked ¡°So, lots of women and very few men. What should I expect when interacting?¡± Erin gave him a full smile then and he noticed that her teeth were white: not something he had expected from a low-tech society. Still, quite a nice smile. ¡°Let¡¯s go, and I¡¯ll explain on the way.¡± She started walking back along the game trail to the East. ¡°InScottstown, we¡¯re actually a couple of days¡¯ travel away from any other significant settlements so women can''t just travel to see mates. There¡¯s a village just one day south, but it¡¯s populated by women exclusively. They¡¯re dedicated to the Goddess of Harvest and so the followers leave the settlement for a while if they have a male child who is coming of age.¡± ¡°As for Scottstown, there areabout a thousand people. There are 65 kids below the age of 16, there¡¯s 60 men, and those men mostly have 7 to 10 wives with some women just occasionally seeing a man for baby-making. There¡¯s only about 40 women who don¡¯t have a match of some sort, and some of those aren¡¯t interested in sex ¨C like Granny who¡¯s 135 and tired.¡± ¡°Some of those women would only be interested in making a baby with you. Some would want to have you as a husband. Some would just want sex. They should tell you up-front what they want.¡± ¡°While you could choose not to have sex at all, it¡¯s going to get harder and harder for you the longer you live here.¡± she giggled ¡°Quite literally, as it turns out. That libido thing was done in such a way thatif you don¡¯t have a woman you¡¯ll eventually need relief every four hours or so. That makes it difficult to get anything else done.¡± Right, so not having sex is not really feasible for men here ¡­ this really is more and more like some weird fantasy.Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings. Alex replied ¡°So ¡­ I pretty much don¡¯t have to approach anyone, they¡¯ll just let me know what they want?¡± ¡°Certainly¡±, Erin said, ¡°Women know that, in this world, there¡¯s too much competition for a man to hope that one will chase you specifically. We have to be forward.¡± ¡°Hmm. I can see that. And if I did specifically want to get to know someone?¡± Erin¡¯s head turned and, blushing, she said ¡°Well, it¡¯d be a great honor for that lady. It¡¯s not impolite to ask if she¡¯s taken, but you¡¯d be expected by everyone to choose some kind of further relationship if she isn¡¯t. You don¡¯t get someone¡¯s hopes up and honor them like that just to drop them into despair.¡± Alex blinked ¡­ ¡°That makes a weird kind of sense. Okay, I¡¯m changing the subject now. Those blue flowers I keep seeing that seem to be leaking gas: what are they? Is the gas dangerous?¡± Erin turned back around and kept walking while explaining ¡°Ah, those are mana flowers. I¡¯m sure there¡¯s another name for them, but they¡¯re used in basically every potion to increase the mixture¡¯s longevity and they¡¯re very heavily used in mana potions. The ¡°gas¡± is just mana that¡¯s heavily attuned to the flower.¡± ¡°When something collects mana, it colors the mana with a little bit of its essence ¨C in the case of the mana flowers, the mana is literally colored blue but a literal color isn¡¯t always present. Mana is colorless and basically invisible when it¡¯s neutral, but the coloring that each collector adds to the mana makes it much easier for that collector to manipulate the mana and harder for the mana to dissolve back into the sea from which it was collected.¡± They passed the spot where they¡¯d joined the game trail originally and Erin and Alex continued to converse as they make tracks towards town. After about two miles, the game trail came close to an overgrown path. It looked almost large enough for a small car, like a Volkswagen Beetle, to traverse but not large enough for anything else. The lack of an overhead canopy allowed a kind of purple bush to grow up alongside the roadway and push out into the packed earth. These bushes formed a natural hedge on both sides of the path and, very occasionally, one would appear to be trying to grow in the middle of the path itself. Those bushes in the path were either very small, or beaten down. I bet that this road does see some regular cart traffic, but only very occasional foot traffic. Alex thought. He could now clearly see the smoke from the town¡¯s smithy as a black billow over the horizon to the East. It appeared to be coming from just over the horizon, but Alex knew that appearances could be deceiving with columns of smoke ¨C especially if you didn¡¯t know what was being burned. Nonetheless, he began thinking about what he¡¯d do when they got to town and suddenly realized he had a problem. ¡°Uhh. Erin, I¡¯ve got a question.¡± Alex started out uncertainly. Hearing the hesitation in Alex¡¯s tone, Erin stopped and looked back at him. She¡¯s slightly flushed. Probably from exertion from carrying the deer. ¡°Yes?¡± ¡°Though I plan to make money by gathering herbs and making potions, how can I deal with shelter tonight? Or a meal for that matter. Or, like, a container for water or some basic tools to collect herbs? I have no money for any of that and no time to collect or make anything today.¡± ¡°Oh¡± Erin huffed. ¡°Well, you don¡¯t need to worry about room and board for the first week. I¡¯ll cover it for you with Marta, who owns the West Inn, and you can pay me back after you get your turnips in.¡± ¡°After I what?¡± Alex asked. Erin blinked. Then she giggled for a few seconds. ¡°It¡¯s a saying, Alex. It means after you get the benefit from investing into a new skill. In this case, you¡¯ll be investing time and money into Potions and, eventually, you¡¯ll be able to make enough to support yourself. After that, you¡¯ll finally make enough to have some spare. You can pay me back when you''ve got spare funds, not before. A week is more time than I expect you¡¯ll need unless you end up choosing 12 wives immediately.¡± She gave him a look after that last phrase and paused before continuing ¡°And if you do that you¡¯ll never be able to leave Scottstown because some of those women will not risk you leaving town if you¡¯re their husband.¡± Alex gulped at that. I have no intention to be tied down to this tiny town when there is so much to see and do in this brand new world. I¡¯ll have to be sure to tell anyone who wants sex that I¡¯m not staying here forever. I don¡¯t want to hurt anyone when I leave. Erin turned and continued their journey. They walked for another few minutes in peace. Alex was thinking about the weird social situation and all the pressures that had been created by the goddesses¡¯ spell working. As he pondered, he stared into the middle distance at Erin¡¯s back. Not really paying attention to where they were walking and thinking about other things, his gaze wandered until it focused on her bottom. As his thoughts began to move in circles, his brain kind of switched off and he began to pay slightly more attention to his eyes. Erin has a nice butt. Not too big, but not too small. Her hips are swaying nicely too ¡­ this is nice. He was somewhat mesmerized by the motion and just kept staring for a while. Erin noticed the extended silence and glanced back, but blushed when she saw where he was looking and faced forward once more. The slight hitch in her step didn¡¯t affect Alex¡¯s gaze at all. Alex thought Hmm ¡­ I think that her hips are moving more than is really natural for a woman. He blinked once. She¡¯s definitely sashaying ¡­ but almost so little that it¡¯s unnoticeable. She¡¯s a natural at this and elegant in the extreme. Wait! Why am I staring at her butt? I don¡¯t even look at women¡¯s butts ¨C I¡¯m a chest guy! Alex blinked as he lifted his eyes to the deer on her back and then realized he had a small swagger himself because he¡¯d gained a bit of an inhibition to walking. Holy shit, I¡¯ve got a hard-on ¨C increased libido isn¡¯t even remotely descriptive enough. I¡¯ve only been here about 12 hours and I¡¯m already unconsciously staring at butts and getting harder than I¡¯ve been in weeks. I really don¡¯t have any choice at all. I¡¯m going to have to have sex to just retain my sanity. No solo adventures here. At least not any longer than a day. After another minute of contemplation, Alex realized that Erin hadn¡¯t told him the most relevant thing about male-female interactions ¨C was she interested in him? Well, I can¡¯t just ask her. I don¡¯t know if she¡¯d want to get married and tie me down here, and I don¡¯t know if she¡¯d be okay with just having sex without getting married. I guess I¡¯d better start there and ¡­ maybe ¡­ I can get a head start on this tent problem I¡¯ve got going on. He put a little speed on and caught up to Erin so that they could walk side by side and started trying to ease his way through the conversation as gently as possible. ¡°So, I¡¯m definitely not going to stay here forever, Erin.¡± ¡°Oh?¡± ¡°Yeah, I will want to see the world. Explore different places and check out other peoples. Most stories I¡¯ve read about places like Marin include different human-like races which can be friendly. I¡¯ve no idea about the politics of this world or if those races exist but if wondrous things are out there, I want to go and see them.¡± ¡°You¡¯ll need to be strong for that. Travel isn¡¯t as safe as it used to be; even if I¡¯m not sure that civilization is ending, I can still recognize that the wilds are getting far more deadly than they used to be. And there are elves, beast-kin, and dwarves among other races which are recognized as intelligent and civilized. Some intelligent races are rarely worth trying to work with, like the orcs. There have been some successful treaties with those races, but they¡¯re mostly of the ¡®Don¡¯t bother us and we won¡¯t bother you¡¯ sort.¡± ¡°That¡¯s good to know.¡± he paused for a few seconds before saying ¡°I¡¯m also not too interested in getting married before really getting to know someone, but I¡¯m starting to feel the effects of the goddesses¡¯ spell.¡± He glanced at her and noticed that she was definitely more pink than when he¡¯d moved up beside her but he had to continue even though he was furiously blushing himself if the heat he felt in his cheeks was any indication. ¡°And, so, I find you to be truly beautiful ¡­ uhh ¡­ so if you¡¯re not involved with someone and interested in sex just for ¡­ uhm relief from the spell ¡­ I think that I¡¯d very much enjoy your company.¡± Erin stopped and turned to him, blush high on her cheeks. She placed her left hand firmly on her hip while keeping the deer in place with her right and asked ¡°Are you asking just because of the inn?¡± ¡°¡­ the inn?¡± Alex asked. ¡°The money for your first weeks¡¯ stay.¡± Erin explained. Alex¡¯s eyes widened completely and he held both hands in front of himself ¡°No, no, no! I honestly think you¡¯re extremely attractive. I¡¯ll be paying back that money as soon as I can no matter what, but I am feeling the spell. A few minutes ago when my mind wandered off I returned to myself slowly and was mesmerized simply by the way your hips moved ¨C and I never looked at women¡¯s butts before.¡± ¡°Further, you¡¯ve been nice to me when you didn¡¯t have to and, though I don¡¯t know if our relationship will go anywhere, the spell is hitting me pretty hard already.¡± he waved to the rather obvious evidence of such just below his belt ¡°¡­ and I figured it would be better to take care of the issue with someone who I sort-of knew instead of a total stranger. And you really are hot.¡± ¡°Hot?¡± Erin questioned, while tilting her head to the side. Her cheeks had pinked even further with Alex¡¯s gesture, but now she was obviously confused. ¡°Ah, a saying of my own. It just means incredibly sexually attractive.¡± Erin giggled and then nearly lost her balance as the deer pulled against her back. She caught herself on her back foot, but her face had been so shocked that Alex started chuckling at the expression she¡¯d made. That set Erin off and soon they were both laughing pretty hard in the middle of the pathway. Erin giggled again, then she said ¡°I¡¯d be happy to just have sex with you for now. I¡¯m not looking to have a baby, but I won¡¯t be stopping one from forming either. Even if we did make a baby, I wouldn¡¯t tie you down to Scottstown. I think it¡¯s still best if we get you a room at West Inn because the room comes with three meals for the day ¨C you just ask and she¡¯ll prepare them for you if you don¡¯t plan on coming back to eat in the inn itself. Also, your own room will be convenient if you want to host a different lady in the future. Thank you for asking me.¡± ¡°You are welcome. You truly are beautiful, you know.¡± ¡°I¡¯m only level 12. Some of the women in town are over level 20. Wait until you see them.¡± ¡°Hmm. I think I¡¯ll stick with you until you tell me you¡¯re exhausted. I¡¯m not sure I¡¯m ready for the multiple women at once thing. Besides: while sexual appeal might be skin deep, beauty comes from the heart. Let¡¯s get to town and take care of these animals.¡± Alex turned and, moving closer to Erin, placed his hand over hers. She shifted her left hand up to stabilize the deer and moved her right down to take his left. Walking hand-in-hand, they covered the last mile to the village, but neither would get much rest that night. Gather 10 potatoes Alex woke early ¨C the sun wasn¡¯t yet peeking through the open window of his room at the inn. As he lay beside Erin, her chest and arm overlapping his with her left leg also wrapped over him, he thought about his first day on Marin. Ripped from work, I was too-rapidly flung through a quick skill selection. Given no direction other than ¡°save all civilization!!!¡± and tossed to the wolves: literally, as it happened. With Erin¡¯s arrival I lucked out ¨C I didn¡¯t have to stay up that tree until I could kill enough wolves to safely move around. Then I traveled with her to pick up her game and head into the village. The guards at the entrance ended up being the most attractive women I saw last night, so I¡¯d bet that they were high-level for this area and received the boost towards ¡°ideal form¡± that higher stats gives. They didn¡¯t stop us at the entrance, but they asked Erin if I was new and after quick introductions we moved on to catch the butcher.I forgot their names almost instantly, unfortunately. I¡¯m horrid with names. Apparently, here, the butcher receives a lot of business from the town¡¯s Dungeon Wardens. Erin is one. They check to be sure that the local dungeons aren¡¯t loosing too many monsters upon the world. If the dungeons are sending out too many monsters, it¡¯s an indication that the dungeon will soon send almost every monster it controls out to attack nearby settlements. Anyway, back to the butcher: she gave Erin a chit which she can use to retrieve the various parts from the animals today after the butcher gets done processing them or which Erin can use to get funds from selling them to her. The butcher could process the meat in the morning because she had some kind of a cold room ¨C I could see the chilled air coming out as her assistant moved through the door with Erin¡¯s game. After that, Erin took me back through the lanes of the town to the West Inn where I met the innkeeper, Marta, and Erin prepaid for the week. It wastwo small silver, five large copper, and four small copper coins. A meal usually cost 11 small copper coins and the room would cost 3 small copper so the week should cost252 small copper. The extra two copper coins were for a chance for Erin and me to visit the cleaning room ¨C where you could wash your body. She paid 2 large copper and 2 small copper for supper for the two of us that night. Ah yes, the currency is simple: * 10 small copper to 1 large copper * 10 large copper to 1 small silver * 10 small silver to 1 large silver * 10 large silver to 1 small gold and so on, with the hierarchy moving from copper through silver, gold, platinum, and elementium. Erin said that platinum is used for large transactions, but elementium is basically only ever spent by nobles paying fealty taxes. Oddly, the currency is supposedly tamper-proof. The magic that¡¯s used to create the coins is only known to a very select group of monks who train for decades before being able to use it and no one has ever come remotely close to being able to trick their wands. The wands are given out to each community larger than 200 people. Erin snorted a little in her sleep and squeezed his body with her arms. She moved her head a bit on his chest and then began breathing deeply once again. So, back to my night. Since we were both pretty sweaty from our respective encounters and then the walk along the dusty pathway, we went immediately to clean up. To my surprise, the inn didn¡¯t have separate bathing facilities for the different sexes. Erin went first, then I went inside and quickly used the lye soap and rags to scrub everything down. I dressed in my single tunic and trousers only after I beat a bit of the dust out of them ¨C next time I find myself with only one change of clothes, I¡¯ve got to remember to attempt to clean the clothes before I get clean myself. I quickly swiped a rag over the dust I¡¯d ended up getting on myself and called it good. Erin and I had a great soup for supper with some fresh vegetables on the side. Water or fruit juice were available without paying more so we both opted for the juice which replenished some immediate reserves due to its sugar content. The rice in the soup was great for our long-term energy and the protein, though I didn''t know what it was, was plentiful and just a bit gamy. I had two bowls of the soup and Erin, to my surprise, had four. After our meal, we retired to my room. It was on the first floor ¨C Marta lives above the inn with her daughters. Erin and I wasted no time getting to know each other ¨C though we were both a bit nervous because neither of us had practical experience. Yes, it¡¯s a bit odd for a person to get to our age without having had sex, but I wanted to find the right person when I lived on Earth. Here, I was nearly under a compulsion to have sex of some kind and I didn¡¯t really have to time to be sure that I was compatible with a lady before moving on. In the end, I don¡¯t regret it. We took it slow to start but after the initial pain, Erin was passionate and enthusiastic ¨C so was I. We treated each other well and made love for what felt like hours before my body was finally sated. Towards the end Erin needed me to do most of the work, but I understood that her muscles were going through significant changes whereas mine were not. Thankfully, Erin knew a spell to keep things quiet so that we didn¡¯t disturb the other guests. She had to cast it a few times, but she could feel when it was waning so we didn¡¯t make a ruckus. It was a great night. Alex reminisced for a few more minutes, but then Erin snorted again and woke up. She blinked a few times, then lifted her head to look at Alex. He, of course, began to have a male¡¯s typical morning enthusiasm when in bed with a sultry woman pressed up against himself. Erin noticed the change under her left thigh and, grinning, she continued their exertions from the night before. Afterward, the sun was beginning to shine through the window so they got up and got dressed for breakfast. The inn was serving bread, scrambled eggs with meat, peppers, and cheese, and a kind of hot sauce that was used to spice up the eggs. They called their stirred up omelet an ¡°Egg Mess¡±. The bread wasn¡¯t like the sweet and soft stuff you find in stores in California where had Alex lived or anywhere else in the USA. It was hard on the outside, almost like an eggshell, and chewy and rough on the inside. It was also bland to Alex¡¯s palette, but he didn¡¯t know enough about baking to have any ideas on improvements so he soldiered through and decided not to comment about the bread. Erin and Alex left the inn together and she took him by the herbalists¡¯ shop in town to borrow some gathering tools. ¡°Good day, Mother Edith.¡± greeted Erin upon entering the shop. The shop had a tiny lobby space just before a counter in ¡®U¡¯ shape which enclosed the lobby space. An older lady with snow-white hair and wrinkles on her wrinkles sat at a counter space to the left of the entrance and had been clipping the roots off some herbs when they entered. ¡°Good morn, little Erin,¡± replied Edith as she continued to clip her herbs. ¡°I¡¯ll be just a minute.¡± She hadn¡¯t even looked up, but Erin took it in stride and simply moved to stand in front of the counter. Alex followed and took a look around the shop. On Edith¡¯s work counter were a number of herbs in various bundles and stacks. Above the counter was clear, but the rest of the head-space in that half of the shop was taken up by drying racks hanging from the ceiling with masses of herbs clumped up. The smell was strong and earthy. It overwhelmed the sinuses in equal measure to the pleasure it provided. In the center of the shop, directly in front of the duo, was a wall with shelves from floor to ceiling populated exclusively with potion bottles. These were vials that were in different uniform sizes varying from the most popular size about the width and length of a thumb to the largest sizes of about the size of a child¡¯s juice tumbler or two adult shot glasses. Each vial and position on the shelves was marked with the name of the potion inside the vials. The potions varied across a wide variety of colors from green to blue to yellow to purple to red to pink and many more. Most of the potions were at least faintly glowing. On the right side of the shop, Alex saw another work counter with two young girls ¨C certainly not even 14 yet ¨C using mortar and pestle to grind up some herbs and prepare some potions. The vials were already in holders in front of the girls and the various ingredients were laid in a row in front of them. The rest of the space held various tubing and apparatus that looked like it belonged in a chemistry classroom or in the science room of a distillery. Hearing a creak from his left, Alex swiveled his head to see that Edith had gotten down from her stool and was approaching the front counter. She sat down on a stool before them before speaking. ¡°So, Erin, who¡¯s this now?¡± ¡°Mother Edith, meet Alex, a Traveler. Alex, Mother Edith, the town¡¯s herbalist and apothecary.¡± Edith smiled at Alex and took firm hold of the conversation: ¡°So, have you felt the goddesses¡¯ spell yet? Is that why I¡¯ve heard from three different women that Erin didn¡¯t return home this night but spent her first evening at the West Inn?¡± Blushing, Alex replied ¡°Erin and I have decided to help one another out for now. She¡¯s not only saved me from a standoff with wolves but helped with that spell you mentioned as well as lending me the money to stay at the inn for the week until I¡¯m able to stand on my own feet and pay her back.¡± Erin giggled a bit as he was explaining himself and said ¡°He¡¯s treated me well Mother Edith ¨C he even asked me first if I was available and willing to help out. We¡¯re here because he¡¯s taken Herbalism and Potions as a way to get by and I was hoping you might be willing to lend him some tools to get started planting his turnips in these skills.¡± Edith hmm¡¯d while looking at Alex and then between Alex and Erin. ¡°Alright girl, leave him to me,¡± she stated. Erin turned Alex¡¯s head with her hands and gave him a firm and quick kiss then whispered into his ear ¡°I¡¯ll see you tonight at the inn after supper. I¡¯ve got to Warden work for the day. Stop by the inn around lunch ¨C you won¡¯t be far enough away to make a packed lunch more valuable than the chilled air at Marta¡¯s.¡± With that, she breezed out the door and Alex turned back to Edith. She gathered some items from around the herbalists¡¯ side of the store and returned to the counter. Showing him 3 different herbs for a healing potion, 3 for a mana potion, and 3 for a stamina potion she instructed him to go just outside the town walls and circle around the town to dig up the herbs. All of the herbs were common ingredients for potions and so they were cultivated magically around the town. She handed him a trowel and a large wicker basket so that he had a way to remove the herbs and a way to store them before returning. ¡°Fill the basket up with at least enough herbs for 3 of each type of potion, then come back here to learn how to make the potions,¡± Edith instructed. ¡°It shouldn¡¯t take you all day to do it either, so I expect to see you back here before lunch. Be sure to harvest the mana flowers last. They leak mana constantly so it¡¯s best that they be as fresh as possible when you¡¯re making a potion.¡±You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author. ¡°Thank you for your guidance, Mother Edith¡± Alex replied before he left the store. He walked through the town back towards the west gate and exited through the stone walls before taking a short stroll along the northern side of the walls. It was only a short journey before he saw the beginnings of the flower fields. The fields were arranged up against the walls of the city in a space that was cleared of the surrounding forest. The open area was about two hundred yards wide. The flowers themselves were sprinkled around in patches and swathes, looking far more like the glade where he arrived on Marin yesterday than a planted and kept garden. Before harvesting these plants, I should check my skills again and find the one which helps me to identify useful plants. With so many nearby, perhaps I can power-level the Herbalism skill. status.
Name Alexander Carpenter Level 1 Title -
Health 230 Mana 230 Stamina 230
Constitution 10 Intelligence 10 Endurance 10
Hp regen 0.639 Mp regen 1.562 Sta regen 0.639
Vitality 10 Wisdom 11 Metabolism 10
Ah, shit. I forgot that I need to look at the abilities instead of the main status. I¡¯ll just ¨C my Wisdom increased! Why didn¡¯t I get a notification for that ¡­ After poking around for a few minutes, Alex realized that he had no way to know if his stats or skills increased in power. Apparently, his status and other systems were designed to be as minimally invasive as possible ¨C probably so that children didn¡¯t totally freak out when messages first flashed across their vision or so that you wouldn¡¯t receive a notification that your Wisdom increased when you were in the midst of parrying a death-stroke. I guess I just need to see if I can add this information to a log in my interfa ¨C Alex¡¯s mind opened again and he remembered some new skills. There was a simple scripting language that could be used to adjust the interface. He could easily tie change notifications to a new tab in his interface which he decided to call simply ¡®Change Log¡¯. While the first change to his Wisdom wouldn¡¯t be recorded since it had happened before he added the changelog, he should be able to look back at the log after his next skill or stat increase and see the information he¡¯d included in those messages. He decided to put the time, date, old value of the stat or skill and the new value of the stat or skill as well. I can¡¯t believe that there¡¯s time and date information in this interface. Erin judged time by the sun¡¯s position yesterday, so I expect that most don¡¯t know it is available. I¡¯ll have to see if I can help her to access it because if everyone had access to the precise time and date trade, engineering, and so much more could be done more precisely. Ack ¨C I¡¯ve wasted enough time, it¡¯s 8 am already, I¡¯d better get to picking flowers. He pinned the time and date to the top-left of his interface so that it would be completely invisible until he stared at that point for 3 seconds ¨C now he could see the time and date quickly while it wouldn¡¯t interfere with his vision. With those actions completed, he pulled up his abilities and toggled on the Detect Herbs ability and got to work harvesting the plants he needed. He worked for two hours, collecting enough herbs for 5 of each potion except for the mana flowers which were needed in all of the potions. After collecting the remaining herbs, he headed back to Mother Edith¡¯s store to complete the potions. She welcomed him back to the store, then immediately put him to work at the work-table where the two young girls had worked previously. He separated all the herbs into piles. The first potions he made were the mana potions because they required the most mana flowers ¨C the most time-sensitive ingredient. He cut out the portions of the herbs that he needed, mashed them to a fine consistency mush, scraped the mush into a small metal pan, added water to the pan, set a fire to boil most of the water out, carefully stirred the potion while it boiled, and then finally bottled the result in the smallest vial that Mother Edith used on her shelves. He was fortunate that Mother Edith was helping him directly because she kept him focused on doing each step when he had free time. He didn¡¯t waste much time preparing the potions and was thus done in just a little over two hours with all 15 potions. Mother Edith lined his potions up in front of him on the table and looked at them, then examined him. ¡°Well, child, how much do you think these are worth?¡± she asked him. Alex stared at her blankly. ¡°Fuck!¡± he exclaimed. Phoebe, the Goddess of Change, had recommended that he get Identify but he had completely neglected it. I have no idea how much they¡¯re worth or how I¡¯m going to be able to keep myself from being ripped off. Alex thought to himself before responding to Mother Edith: ¡°I¡¯m afraid I didn¡¯t take the Identify skill though Phoebe did tell me I should. I just completely forgot it.¡± He shook his head at his situation. ¡°Dearie, that¡¯s okay. Identify is one of the easiest skills to obtain.¡± Mother Edith began to point at the bottles in turn from his left to his right. ¡°This first health potion heals no more than 5 health per second and will last for 3 seconds. The second is 5 hp per second and 4 seconds. The third: 6 hp per second and 4 seconds.¡± She continued with the first three mana, then the first three stamina potions. ¡°So, that ought to have gotten you the first level of the Identify skill. It¡¯s something the Goddesses recognized as being universally necessary so opening the skill is a matter of minutes. Tell me what level your identify ability is now, please, little Alex.¡± changelog Alex thought. 12:36 pm ¨C Identify skill change from level ¨C to level 1 12:37 pm ¨C Identify skill change from level 1 to level 2 12:37 pm ¨C Identify skill change from level 2 to level 3 Hmm ¡­ it must be quite easy to progress through the early levels of this skill because of how useful it is as well as how much information one needs to make an informed decision about all kinds of things. I wonder if I can tell the qualities of the rest of the potions. Ah, the ability is just a toggle ¨C and it¡¯s on! "I''m level 3 in Identify," Alex mumbled. Alex confirmed that the potions Mother Edith had already identified showed the same things she¡¯d read off to him earlier, then he moved on to the rest of the potions he¡¯d produced. Each series of potions showed that he¡¯d progressively gotten better at making potions. Indeed, the mana potions were the worst of the lot by far simply because he had prepared them so poorly. ¡°So¡±, commented Alex, ¡°these are probably the worst possible potions. I can see that you have a full wall of potions, so I¡¯d expect that we probably wouldn¡¯t get much from selling these ¡­ either that or you sell a lot of potions.¡± Mother Edith giggled a bit. It was an odd sound coming from someone whose wrinkles had wrinkles, but it fit her grandmotherly vibe pretty well: she appeared to Alex to be sweet and kind. She replied to his speculation with ¡°Well, for those potions you¡¯d only get a few small coppers. What I¡¯ll suggest you do instead is sell them to me and I¡¯ll use them for practice for the two girls who are trying to learn some tricks here: they¡¯re about ready for the stage where we should talk about distilling potions down to make an originally weak concoction stronger by removing the conflicting impurities.¡± ¡°I¡¯ll buy each of your failed attempts at 3 small copper for today and tomorrow, but after that I¡¯ll expect you to have progressed to the point where you make 10 units per second brews lasting at least 30 seconds. A potion that you have to keep quaffing in the battle is less than useless ¨C you¡¯ve no time to actually hurt your enemy.¡± Alex didn¡¯t think about the offer at all. He knew his attempts were laughable ¨C and with the few coppers from today, he might be able to buy some more herbs from Mother Edith to progress his Potions ability even further. In fact ¡­ ¡°Mother Edith, I agree to that deal, but I¡¯d like to buy enough herbs to make as many potions as possible first thing in the morning. That way I can increase my experience in Potions far faster than just by using the herbs that I harvest. I¡¯d only want to take two small copper coins for a chance to wash tonight.¡± Mother Edith agreed to his request and shooed him out the door to get lunch. He ate quickly, not even truly tasting the meal. He also didn¡¯t notice how busy the inn was or the looks that he received from most of the guests: a new man was in town and word had already spread. He was examined by almost all the eligible ladies in town before the meal was over and he didn¡¯t have a clue: he was far too focused on tweaking his interface and changelog. He first added a ¡°level 0¡± default for stats or abilities that he hadn¡¯t learned yet. He also modified the script he¡¯d written to pull data from the abilities list to also pull data from the skills list ¨C he¡¯d forgotten to include them earlier. He added a large health, mana, and stamina bar across the top of the interface and made them semi-transparent. He made all three bars go from fully transparent when they were full to fully opaque when they were at or below twenty percent. Finally, he looked about for some way of telling when something was progressing ¨C he couldn¡¯t see an experience bar or anything of the like for any of his skills, abilities, or stats. After poking about for the better portion of ten minutes, he finally gave up and put the question aside for later. He spent the time from 1:30 pm when he finished his lunch and left the West Inn, until 5 pm gathering the herbs he needed to make quite a few new potions. He spent the remainder of the time until 7 pm in Mother Edith¡¯s shop focusing on trying to improve his Potion-making ability. Though Mother Edith didn¡¯t help him to keep moving, he¡¯d gotten the idea from her earlier comments and moved quickly through his work. In just a little under two hours, he ended up making 25 potions. This was far faster than his earlier work and the potions, all of which he was able to Identify, were all better than his best attempt from that morning. The best potion was still under Mother Edith¡¯s requirement at 7 stamina per second for 23 seconds. He handed over these failures to Mother Edith and walked to the West Inn. Erin was waiting for him when he arrived and so they got supper together. ¡°The Wardens guarding the slime dungeon which is due south of Scottstown ¨C there¡¯s a second dungeon filled with spiders south-east of town¨C saw a few red slimes outside of the dungeon,¡± Erin said as they were finishing up their meal. ¡°Those are typically confined to the second level of the dungeon or as leaders of packs of blue slimes and rarely come outside. With at least 3 different sightings outside the dungeon, there¡¯s going to be an attack sometime in the next month. Tomorrow, I¡¯ll be going with several other Wardens to check out the first floor. We¡¯ll be back after supper but we¡¯ll be totally safe. I¡¯ll see you a couple of hours after dusk, probably.¡± Alex replied with ¡°Well, I¡¯ll be staying up to see you. Let¡¯s get cleaned up, then I¡¯ve got something to show you in my room.¡± After they each cleaned up, they retired to Alex¡¯s room.Alex remembered to beat his clothes before getting himself clean this time. ¡°Have you heard of anyone using the interface to tell what time of day it is?¡± opened Alex. Erin blinked a few times, then scrunched her face up in thought. She sat there for a few minutes hmming and looking into the distance. When her eyes finally focused on Alex she said ¡°That sounds incredibly useful. People could meet at exactly the same time. Battles could be coordinated to start precisely on time. Trade could be made easier and even cartography and navigation could benefit. Is it possible?¡± ¡°I¡¯ve got the time on my interface, but I¡¯m not sure how easy it will be to spread it to others¡¯ interfaces. If you don¡¯t mind me looking at yours, I might be able to figure out how to get it done.¡± Erin blushed as she looked at him for a few seconds. He probably doesn¡¯t realize how personal that information is seen to be. Ah, well, I¡¯ll make that point with him later. status. She made a few motions with her hands as if she were grabbing the interface and spinning it around for him to view it. He spent only a few seconds looking at her interface before he found the scripting portion of the interface at exactly the same spot as his own. Coming around to sit beside her on the bed, he asked if she could see the same thing that he did ¨C and she could after he explained what she should look for. Then, rather than entering the text himself, he opened the script he¡¯d used to pin the time to his interface and shared his own interface with her. She blushed, again, but copied his script word for word even though she didn¡¯t understand it. After he confirmed that she¡¯d made no mistakes, he told her how to activate the script and she gasped, then giggled for a full minute looking at her new timekeeper. Erin dragged him down into the bed immediately and Alex was once again happy that she knew a sound-canceling spell. Level 2 Alex woke up before sunrise again. Laying in bed beside Erin, he reflected on the previous day: Well, I added a change log so I can at least see when abilities, skills, and stats have increased. I will probably want live notifications at some point, but at least this way I can look back and try to remember what happened when an increase occurred to figure out what I¡¯m doing right or wrong. Most of the day, however, was spent working on getting to the point where I can pay for my own food and board. I was only partially successful here ¨C and I didn¡¯t really ask Mother Edith how much the potions she mentioned would sell for, so I¡¯m not entirely sure that the profit will be enough to live off of even if I do get to that point today as she expects me to. Regardless, I did get a new skill ¨C Identify ¨C which has its own ability and which has been the only ability I¡¯ve leveled so far. I¡¯ve got to speed up my leveling. Oh, I did get that random increase in Wisdom before I added the changelog ¨C that most likely came from casting my Blades the day before since I didn¡¯t really do anything before noticing the increase yesterday. So, I need more planning. I¡¯ve been sort of just moving from thing to thing without really thinking ahead. Alex activated his spell language dictionary ability by thinking spell language dictionary and a wholly new interface opened in front of him. It was blue, like his status, but contained its own tabs. While the dictionary itself interested him he was trying to take some notes so he quickly switched to the second tab labeled ¡°Notes¡± and began entering goals. After a few minutes, his list looked like this: * make money from potions * experience bars for abilities, skills, and stats * second pair of clothes * spell language learning * leveling plan Hmm ¡­ Alex mused,The potions, clothes, and spell language learning are all longer term goals than simply coming up with a leveling plan and finding experience bars for the various parts of my status. I¡¯d also like to combine my status, abilities, and spell dictionary interfaces so that I just have one massive interface with lots of tabs or perhaps multiple windows available. The interaction is a bit dull with having to remember different commands to bring up the screens when the named tab system gives an easy and intuitive method for switching between different kinds of content. As he mused about how to combine the interfaces and how the tabs might pull in the information his mind remembered another trick ¡­ he could simply mirror any interface screen in a tab by naming the tab the same thing as the command he could use to open the screen in the first place. So, Alex opened up his status and added tabs for his abilities, the spell language dictionary, and notes. Chuckling internally, he switched back to his basic stats screen and began poking around the interface trying to find a record of his experience gained ¨C or some kind of progress bar. He kept at it for about 20 minutes before he gave up, defeated. Well, that was frustrating. Most of the time so far, I¡¯ve been lucky enough to simply need the information that¡¯s already collected in one of the skills I have so the system has simply given me the information when I wondered how to do something. I guess that this is something that most people don¡¯t wonder about at level 1. I just need someone to let me know how they measure progress, though if I were on Earth I¡¯d look for documentation or some kind of help system ¡­ Alex face-palmed and began blushing. Wow, I¡¯m retarded. Only two days have gone by and I¡¯m already forgetting what few things Phoebe taught me. Wisdom gains information ¡­ ¡­ Nothing happened. No new blue screen interface. No information appeared at all. Erm, let¡¯s try: wisdom progress information ¡­ wisdom leveling information ¡­ wisdom experience formula information ding
Wisdom experience formula floor(10*W*log(W))
Where W = wisdom
And if that worked, maybe this will: wisdom experience information
Wisdom experience 16 mana regenerated
Ahh, so by regenerating mana I gain experience towards gaining Wisdom increases. I need to be constantly draining my mana so that I can increase my Wisdom as quickly as possible ¨C I also need to do the same for my health and stamina since they¡¯ll likely increase my Vitality and Metabolism stats. I¡¯ll just check that: vitality and metabolism experience formula information.
Vitality experience formula floor(10*V*log(V))
Where V = vitality
Metabolism experience formula floor(10*M*log(M))
Where M = metabolism
Okay, so those are pretty clear. They scale like n*log(n), so they¡¯ll get harder to level as I gain levels, but not nearly so hard to level as some RPG games which scale exponentially. Leveling these stats should mostly be a case of ensuring that I¡¯m constantly regenerating instead of wasting time ¨C like all of yesterday. That said, I wonder how I¡¯ll level the other three base stats ¡­ constitution, intelligence, and endurance experience formula information.
Constitution experience formula 2
Intelligence experience formula 2
Endurance experience formula 2
Uh ¡­ constitution experience information
Constitution experience 0 of 2 natural Vitality levels gained
Hmm ¡­ it seems like these three will simply grow as I regenerate the health, mana, and stamina that I need for the other three stats. If that¡¯s true, then my first priority is to figure out how to constantly drain HP, MP, and SP so that I can level at the maximum possible rate. I¡¯ll partially verify that by checking out the equivalent for Wisdom: intelligence experience information.
Intelligence experience 1 of 2 natural Wisdom levels gained
Okay, so I¡¯ll assume I¡¯m correct until I can get some verification later. First I need to concoct a debuff spell that will constantly decrease my HP, MP, and SP by the amount that I regenerate for each of those so that I can stay near my maximum possible values, but still gain experience towards increasing my six base stats. Erin snorted and woke herself up. It wasn¡¯t clear whether the sound of the snort woke her or something else, but it was certainly convenient timing. After greeting each other and getting dressed, the pair went downstairs for breakfast. They chatted amicably throughout most of their meal about their previous day but as the meal wound down, Erin gave Alex some more information about her mission. ¡°We¡¯re going to check out the first floor of the slime dungeon for a reason. The more red slimes we fight there, the sooner the dungeon is likely to expel its forces towards the town. While we expect that the forces will come within the next month, that¡¯s too long for the Wardens to be on guard against an attack and too long to keep what adventurers we have on the town¡¯s payroll against the eventual fight.¡± ¡°We should be able to narrow it down to either within the next two weeks or after that. If it¡¯s within two weeks, we¡¯ll be sending out parties to check out the first level of the dungeon every two days. I¡¯ll have to go around every three or so trips on an expedition into the dungeon. If it¡¯s likely to be more than two weeks, we¡¯ll just check every Sunday to see if the timeline has moved up or not.¡± ¡°That said, what are your plans for the day?¡± Erin concluded. ¡°Well, thanks for the heads-up.¡± Alex commented, ¡°I think that I¡¯ll be working on potions for most of the day. I put basically all my efforts yesterday into getting more herbs for today so that I can increase my Potions skill without spending as much time gathering.¡± ¡°I¡¯ll eventually increase my Herbalism as well, but I¡¯m trying to level up and make plans for increasing my level as quickly as possible. I hate feeling vulnerable and Phoebe mentioned that below level 10 people are very vulnerable. Besides, being as strong as possible will allow me to do the things I want without nearly as much danger.¡± ¡°But before that, I¡¯m going to be poking around my skills and abilities so that I can try to figure out if I can measure the experience I have for each of them. Knowing how close I am to gaining a level is the first step in being able to prioritize how to level up.¡± ¡°Oh,¡± Erin interjected, ¡°As far as skills go the formula is pretty easy: you get one-third of the sum of your abilities¡¯ accumulated experience and the sum of whatever experience you get for using knowledge at your current level. So ¡­ for my Archery skill, for example, I get experience for doing damage to monsters. I have an active ability, Snipe, that has Archery as its governing skill. When I do damage to a monster at or below my level with Snipe, then Snipe gains experience. One-third of the total experience that Snipe has is added to my Archery skill.¡±Stolen story; please report. ¡°Now, if I see a wolf, for example, which is at my level and I sneak up close to it then activate my Snipe ability while targeting the wolf¡¯s eye ¨C if I successfully hit its eye, I will have applied my knowledge of the arrow¡¯s flight, the wolf¡¯s movement, and how the Snipe ability affects the arrow''s flight to gain a hit on a critical body part for the wolf. If it¡¯s the first time I¡¯ve done such a thing, I¡¯ll definitely gain a bit of a reward directly to my Archery skill for showing that I am learning about Archery and getting better at successfully making hard shots.¡± Alex replied, ¡°So for skills with no ability, you have to demonstrate that you¡¯re learning the knowledge that the skill gave you to level up. Yet with skills which govern some ability, you could just grind the skill up by using the ability enough that it forces a level up.¡± ¡°Yes, but leveling up by just using the experience from abilities isn¡¯t the best path. If you think about your skills and try to gain more abilities as well as leveling your current abilities in the skill, you¡¯ll be able to speed up your leveling:¡± ¡°Having 3 abilities for a governing skill means that each one only has to increase in level once for you to automatically gain a level in the governing skill. Having 6 abilities means that your governing skill can gain levels even faster than your individual abilities and you¡¯ll be able to focus on particular areas to improve while still gaining knowledge of the overall skill by occasionally using the extraneous abilities.¡± ¡°Meanwhile, having no abilities in a skill means you really have to apply yourself to reach some kind of threshold so that the system recognizes your efforts and gives you experience. Having no abilities means that you definitely need to think about the skill and experiment as much as possible so that you can discover some ability to ease your leveling. Getting three abilities for each skill should be a major goal for you if you plan to level up quickly.¡± ¡°Okay, thanks for the info.¡± replied Alex. ¡°It¡¯s already seven, so you should probably go on your expedition. I¡¯ll be waiting for your return tonight!¡± Erin said goodbye and headed out to scout the slime dungeon. Alex sat at the table for a bit longer exploring the experience formulas for skills and abilities. Regardless of the skill or ability, he found that the formula was based upon the same formula as Wisdom, Vitality, and Metabolism: floor(10*N*log(N)). The only difference from the stats¡¯ formula was that since skills started at level 1 instead of the 10 which the basic stats started from, the formula used M+9 in place of N above. So the full formula for each skill or ability was: floor(10*[M+9]*log(M+9)). At level 1, every skill or ability took 100 experience to gain a level. To get from 2 to 3, it took 114 experience and 129 to the next level. Using the simple scripting language he¡¯d remembered to manipulate the interface, Alex was able to modify the stats and abilities pages to include the experience for each stat or ability. There was plenty of room below the names of the stats or abilities to include their actual level as well as the experience bar, leaving the description of the ability to cover the right portion of the screens. He also added a short descriptor below the experience bar to explain what was being shown ¡­ so the Wisdom descriptor currently showed as ¡°16 / 114 (14%)¡± and the experience bar was 14% full. He also added a small script to help him figure out when he gained experience directly to a skill instead of through an ability. He did this by monitoring a skill¡¯s current experience as well as the current experience for all the abilities it governed. When the skill¡¯s experience increased, the script checked all the abilities that the skill governed and, if the total experience that the skill gained was more than one-third of the experience gained by all its governed skills, then something happened which increased the skill¡¯s experience other than an increase in ability experience. Alex marked these events by logging a change in the changelog: ¡°time ¨C Skill X gained special experience¡±. Okay, well I¡¯ve gotten some things done this morning already. I can mark off experience bars from my list ¨C and it¡¯s only eight thirty! I also have pretty much the best leveling plan I can come up with for basic statistics already: a constantly-running debuff spell that drains my HP, MP, and SP to allow natural regeneration to always be running. I¡¯ll aim to keep each stat at least one full natural regeneration cycle away from max so that I don¡¯t have to worry about the actual interval that regeneration uses. Hmm ¡­ the question now is if I should immediately go to work on potions or if I should try to quickly put together a spell to allow my regeneration to run at maximum. Alex ruminated on the question for a few minutes but finally thought I don¡¯t really want to waste the regeneration time, so I¡¯ll bang out a debuff spell first. If I don¡¯t make enough progress in potions, I¡¯ll still sell to Mother Edith what I make today so that I have some cash to buy some more ingredients for tomorrow and, hopefully, that will be enough that I don¡¯t have to go back to harvesting before I achieve the level of potions that Mother Edith can sell to customers. So, Alex spent quite a bit of time learning about the spell language. He first opened up his spell language dictionary and examined his Blade spell. After switching back and forth for a few minutes trying to translate the spell from the hexagon-based figures to English so that he could understand it, he messed about with the interface until he figured out how to have two screens up at once. He immediately split his interface up into three screens with the dictionary to the left, the spell in hexagon form on the right, and his English translation in a new tab of his dictionaries¡¯ notes section below both of the above screens. With this change, he was able to translate the spell far more quickly. He was lucky that the goddesses recognized the value of a search function: one was built into the spell language dictionary, so all he had to do was draw each glyph and he¡¯d immediately be taken to the entry for that glyph in the dictionary. As he translated the spell he grew more and more excited. It contained some of the hallmarks of a structured programming language. There were branching constructs (if blah is true then do blah else do blah) which allowed the mage to choose between two different actions based upon some kind of condition. There were looping constructs (while blah is true do blah). There were places to store information (store value in location). There were ways to compound commands (do all of blah and blah and blah ¡­). There were even obvious calculations being performed (value + value). If the spell language is effectively a programming language for physics, then I¡¯ll be able to do a lot very rapidly. All my learning and experience that I applied for years to my job will have real-life consequences here. I¡¯ll be able to make spells more mana-efficient, have better power-scaling, and experiments with different kinds of effects will be relatively painless! Ah ¡­ that is if there aren¡¯t any more ¡°gotcha''s¡± like when I didn¡¯t complete my first casting of a spell and I got blow-back ¡­ I wonder what happens when you make a syntax error in the spell language? Probably nothing good. Shit. Completing a new spell before I go to work on Potions is unrealistic. I don¡¯t know what I¡¯m doing, but I do know just enough to be dangerous to myself. With the pain I endured from my first experiment with spells, I¡¯m certainly not going to rush this. So thinking, Alex got up and went to Mother Edith¡¯s shop. He received the herbs he¡¯d effectively bought the day before and immediately went to work making new potions. Unfortunately, he seemed to have hit a barrier. He couldn¡¯t get above 8 units per second for 25 seconds. He stopped for a few minutes and watched the two girls making potions on the other side of his table. After watching for a while, he realized that the girls were always adding Striander, which was one of the herbs needed for all three of his basic potions, first. When Mother Edith had helped him to make his potions yesterday, she hadn¡¯t mentioned the order he should add them to the mortar and pestle while grinding the paste. Both girls were doing it, though, and they were doing it consistently. He decided to try it himself. After that decision, none of the potions he made were under 10 units per second for 27 seconds, but he still hadn¡¯t hit 10 units per second for 30 seconds. Extending his previous thought, he wondered if he should be adding the mana flower¡¯s leaves, which was also required for all three potions, second instead of third. Immediately after making that change, every potion he made was over Mother Edith¡¯s limit. He even had several which were better; his best was 12 health per second for 32 seconds. He asked Mother Edith about the order of the ingredients and why it helped the final product so much. Her response was enlightening: ¡°Little Alex, making potions is like any other creative process. There are better and worse ways of doing things. The Striander that you are using is the base and catalyst for all three potions. When you crush it first, it stabilizes the remaining ingredients when you¡¯re crushing them.¡± ¡°By having the base in the mortar when you crushed the other ingredients, you largely slowed the basic magic of those ingredients from escaping into the surrounding sea of mana. When you added the mana flower¡¯s leaves into the mortar second, you added yet another stabilizing element before adding the most unstable bits. The mana flower¡¯s leaves form a sort of barrier against mana flow, so adding the final ingredients last allowed your base to slow down the release of their magic while the barrier formed from the mana flower leaves kept what did escape from the base from going anywhere until it could be reabsorbed by the mixture.¡± ¡°Learning that the order of ingredients is important is the first major step to becoming a successful alchemist. Congratulations! From now on, you¡¯ll be able to slowly make enough money to live off of. I¡¯d recommend that you keep buying the ingredients from me directly and just make as many potions as you can until you get your Potions skill up to level 10. You¡¯ll not make as much as you would if you collected the ingredients yourself, but you¡¯ll still have enough to afford the West Inn and you¡¯ll be able to use more exotic herbs far faster than if you collect all those basic herbs yourself. Collecting those herbs will then level up your Herbalism skill far faster than the basic herbs would have.¡± Alex said ¡°Thanks for the advice! I¡¯ll certainly follow it since I want to level up as quickly as possible to level 10. I¡¯d really like a second pair of clothes, though, so that these can be washed. Do you think it¡¯d be okay to buy those today?¡± Mother Edith replied ¡°Ach, another pair of simple pants and shirt would cost you 5 small silver. I don¡¯t want you to be smelling, so I¡¯ll lend it to you. You can pay me back when you¡¯ve got it free but I¡¯d expect that to be before a month from now, okay?¡± Alex agreed and Mother Edith gave him the currency along with two small copper for his and Erin¡¯s trips to the cleaning room for the night. He went to get a late lunch ¨C his work on the potions had taken him until 2 pm. As he ate, he heard snippets of conversation from around the room ¡°¡­ dungeons¡¯ attacks are still really odd, my grandma always said that the dungeons used to spawn no more monsters than what they needed to defend themselves ¡­¡± ¡°¡­ wish that we¡¯d get back to the old days when it was safe to travel ¡­¡± ¡°¡­ hope the slime¡¯s attack isn¡¯t too coordinated this time. I know they¡¯re not the brightest, but masses of level 10 monsters are still a threat to most of the people here ¡­¡± and so on. Most of the women around him seemed to have heard about the Warden¡¯s report from yesterday and were worried about the attack, but the one talking about the change in the dungeons¡¯ actions intrigued him. He decided he¡¯d ask Erin for more details about it tonight if she wasn¡¯t too tired from her trip. He was coming to believe that nearly everyone in town paid for lunch from one of the two inns ¨C easily over a hundred people moved through the inn while he was there for only a single hour. After lunch he had no immediate plans besides going back to Mother Edith¡¯s and training his potions skill even further, so he went to his room quickly to examine his status and see how he was progressing. His Potions skill had gained a level. By examining the changelog, Alex figured out that he must have gained 100 experience for the skill when he finished his first potion with the ingredients in the proper order. The Identify skill had also gained a level, apparently shortly before his breakthrough in Potions he¡¯d finally used the active Identify ability enough to push the skill over the threshold. He¡¯d also gained another level in the Identify ability, but that wasn¡¯t nearly as exciting to Alex as almost having enough skills leveled to get an overall level increase. In fact, when he looked through his skills, he noticed that his spell language experience bar was nearly full ¨C 98% of the way full. I must have shown comprehension of the spell language by just translating the Blade spell. I bet if I translate one more spell, I¡¯ll level that up and reach my first personal level gain! So Alex spent 45 minutes translating Heal from the spell language to English. After he was done, he looked at his status and was excited to see that he¡¯d gained level two in the spell language skill and, thus, increased his personal level to 2! He did a quick victory dance and decided that he wanted to go see a mage to see if he could figure out a safe way to experiment so that he could design his debuff spells to increase his base stats. Only having a single point increase was unacceptable, but he hadn¡¯t remembered to cast a spell before heading to Mother Edith¡¯s this morning and so he hadn¡¯t even gotten the mana regeneration that he could have had for free throughout the morning and early afternoon. He went downstairs and asked Martawhere he could find someone who could talk to him about making spells. She blinked, nonplussed, and said: ¡°I¡¯m not so sure that anyone in Scottstown makes spells, but if someone does I¡¯d lay money that it¡¯s Victoria over at the Wardens¡¯ place. Just go east past the square, then head south on the first cross street. The Wardens¡¯ building is the large one with a stable, you can¡¯t miss it.¡± Alex thanked her for the help and made his way to the Dungeon Wardens¡¯ building. Upon entering he found a small room with several tables and chairs. Only a few ladies were present and they were split up into a group of four playing a card game and another group of five playing a dice game. He asked the first group if they could direct him to Victoria and got some weird looks, but one of them told him to check the basement down the stairs around the corner ¨C and she pointed towards the corner in question. After thanking her, Alex headed that way. Once he descended to the basement, he saw a red-headed woman with a thin, athletic frame inside an extremely clear glass room. The walls were glass as was a layer over the floor of the basement and the ceiling of the basement as well. There were lines etched into both sides of the glass forming lots and lots of hexagons of the spell language. He saw dozens, if not hundreds, of individual clusters of spell language. He didn¡¯t see a door to the room. The woman was facing away from him and looking down at a table full of paper ¨C the first paper he¡¯d actually seen since entering Marin. I¡¯m not so comfortable touching that large of a spell working, so I¡¯ll try calling out to her. Alex thought before he engaged in the most futile minutes of his life so far. No sound would get through to her. Finally, he gave up and gently knocked. ¡­ Nothing ¡­ ¡­ He knocked more firmly. He banged. Again, he looked around in despair and noticed a humongous hammer leaning against the wall near the stairwell. It had some pretty significant scarring on the face of one side and the entire half of the hammer from that face to the shaft was covered in ¡­ burn marks and ash? Nervous again, he barely hefted the hammer. He had to support it close to the head of the hammer well over halfway up the shaft. He waddled back to the Glass Vault of Insecurity and turned his entire body with his hips to the right. Turning back towards the vault, he led with the burnt end of the Hammer of HolyFuckHowHeavyCanItBe? and, just as the hammer reached the glass, he lost his grip on it dropping it and wrenching himself backward. If that lands on me, I¡¯m just going to die. was Alex¡¯s thought as he fell back on his left side and his right ankle popped from his body¡¯s thrust away from the floor and the descending Hammer of Hephaestus¡¯ Wrath. Finally, the woman in the Glass Vault of Insecurity deigned to notice his presence ¨C just in time to see him plonking on his ass and rolling heels over head to try to escape the vengeance of the Hammer of Hippocrates¡¯ Bane. Not only is that the heaviest hammer in existence, it¡¯s also a strong candidate for a tool of vengeance from the God of Smiths upon an unworthy challenger as well as potentially the strongest violator of the Hippocratic Oath. Alex thought as he recovered by staring at the ceiling in exhaustion. He heard a soft sigh of air and felt a pressure change and then ¡°I¡¯m sorry, were you trying to get my attention?¡±. Looking up he met Victoria¡¯s eyes for the first time. They were a soft green. He blushed from his encounter with the hammer and stood up before saying ¡°I¡¯d heard that you might be the only person in town who designs spells. I¡¯d like to make some spells of my own, but after suffering from an immense headache due to simply not completing the casting of a spell I had second thoughts about whether or not I could even survive making a single error in writing a spell. I was hoping that you might have some advice on how it¡¯s done safely.¡± Victoria blinked once, twice, three times ¡­ then she burst out laughing. Dictionaries are for dweebs Victoria¡¯s laughter finally slowed down and she, with a few tears squeezed past her eyelids, straightened back up and smiled at him. ¡°Go and get yourself a chair from upstairs. When we experiment with making spells we have to be in the Sapphire Room which only has one.¡± Alex grinned back at Victoria ¨C though he wasn¡¯t sure what she¡¯d found so funny, her laughter (like any) was contagious ¨C spun on one heel like he was back in band doing an about-face and marched over to and up the stairs. When he exited the staircase on the ground level, he turned right and walked into the common room. Going to the table with five women still dicing, he placed his hands on one of the chairs. The chairs were medieval things: no arm-rests, entirely of wood but recognizable as similar to a modern folding chair with a backrest. Since he¡¯d approached them, they¡¯d all looked up at him one-by-one and he now had their full attention when he asked, ¡°Do you mind if I borrow this chair?¡± One of the ladies from the card game ¨C actually that was the one who spoke to him earlier ¨C asked ¡°What do you need it for?¡± and Alex, turning, replied ¡°Victoria and I are going to be working on some new spells. I guess she thought it might take a while because she sent me for a chair.¡± Several of the women laughed, most groaned, and only a couple stood up and made their way over to the woman who¡¯d spoken. She started handing out piles of money ¨C some large silver coins as well as smaller denominations. They bet on something. Alex thought. And very few people thought that either Victoria or I would get to this point. He chuckled at them and took the chair to head downstairs. Even though he hadn¡¯t gotten a response to his question, the casual betting told him how relaxed the Wardens were. Normally, such a chair would be a small burden, but he¡¯d just finished his (losing) round with the Hammer of Gravity so his tired muscles complained more than they should as he struggled to look like the weight didn¡¯t bother him. A little insecurity goes a long way. His right foot stuck a bit to one of the last stairs and kicked forward when his growing force freed it. His shin struck and bounced off the back leg causing him to wince and he stumbled down the last stair doing a hop on his other leg to maintain his balance. Luckily, Victoria was already re-seated and the Hammer of MuscleStrain had been replaced out of the walkway so he didn¡¯t fall over it either. Recovering, he walked into the Sapphire Room and place his chair to Victoria¡¯s left where there was more space. ¡°Where did the front wall go?¡± questioned Alex, ¡°It was very solid before and there doesn¡¯t appear to be a door ¡­¡± ¡°Oh, one of the spells is activated. It¡¯ s still there but you can¡¯t touch it. Here ¨C¡± and Victoria waved her hand and the pressure of the room gave a very slight whump. Turning around, Alex saw that the wall had reappeared so he asked ¡°Uhm, you called it the Sapphire Room, but it looks like glass to me?¡± ¡°It is Sapphire. I made it by grinding up a bunch of sapphires that the dungeon east of Merryville gives out instead of other rewards. After making a powder, I separated out all the impurities and melted the purest form of sapphire I could get to a certain temperature and poured it into a mold of the right size. Then, when it cooled I polished each side with an earth spell, Sandblast, which gave it more strength. Finally, the lines of the spells were scooped out using very fine force blades.¡± Alex sat in his newly acquired chair and said, ¡°Okay, so why do spell research in a sapphire box in the basement?¡± Victoria looked at him and, with shining eyes, replied ¡°Because spells which have mistakes explode.¡± After a short pause, she continued, ¡°While I¡¯ve not killed myself yet, I did once make a crater just outside the walls and, in so doing, broke every bone in my right hand, wrist, and arm.¡± ¡°After that, the Wardens insisted that I experiment in a safer place. Safer for the town, that is. So I built the Sapphire Room. It¡¯s got all the protections of the Magic Study in Wirthglade and so everyone outside the room should be safe ¡­ shall we get started?¡± Alex laughed for a few seconds and nodded. ¡°So¡± Victoria led ¡°how much do you know that you think you¡¯re capable of writing new spells?¡± Shaking his head, Alex replied ¡°I¡¯m not arrogant about my magic knowledge. I know next to nothing about it ¨C which is the entire reason I¡¯m here. I¡¯ve used the basic information from the spell language dictionary to ¨C¡± ¡°The spell language is called Xigun¡± ¡°Ah, ok, I¡¯ve used the Xigun dictionary to translate the force spell, Blade, and the healing spell, Heal, to my native tongue. Reading the translation provided by the collective knowledge, I¡¯ve noticed direct connections to the work I¡¯ve trained for and done all my life.¡± ¡°I¡¯m well-practiced and quite adept at writing things very like spells, but I don¡¯t know the rules of the spell lan ¨C Xigun and I¡¯m not sure of the effects that are caused by spells and how to predict and use those. So, while I need what should be seen as the most basic knowledge about magic, spells, and the spell language¡¯s grammar I have an extremely good background for trying to manipulate things once we get to the point where I won¡¯t be bumbling about like a blind man in a room full of swords.¡± Victoria considered him for a few minutes. ¡°It should be impossible to do that. Nothing else works like Xigun.¡± Wincing, Alex said ¡°Well I¡¯m a Traveler. I just got here but in my previous world, Earth, I studied for eight years specifically to work on very complex things like Xigun. My work after that was on creating systems like Xigun myself so that they could be used to create tools that others needed. Hmm ¡­ I¡¯ll show you my status.Such a low level should be impossible if I¡¯m not a Traveler so you¡¯ll at least be able to confirm a part of my story.¡± Alex brought up his status and flipped it around to Victoria. His name is Alexander Carpenter. Her pupils dilated and her eyes widened as she flipped through the various tabs. She stopped on the translation of Blade and began to bounce her right leg. ¡°What¡¯s this?¡± ¡°A translation of Blade to my tongue from back home.¡± ¡°Can you write it in Himmen?¡± ¡°Yes, I can.¡± She cleared a space on the paper-laden table and passed a fresh sheet over to him along with a quill and ink pot. Alex blinked a few times and said ¡°Ah, we don¡¯t use quills on Earth. Do you have something like a charcoal pencil?¡± Victoria frowned for a few seconds then exclaimed, ¡°I have just the thing!¡± She pulled a green slate out from a drawer and placed a bit of chalk on it, smiling again. Alex picked up the chalk and translated the spell from the English of his notes to Himmen. When he was finished he had something like this: while ( *input? > 0 ) ( *wait? ( 10 ); ); *if ( *target? ) ( ~*makeBlade? (*target? , *self? ); ); ¡­ Victoria said ¡°What are these?¡± and pointed at the different asterisks ( * ). Alex responded, ¡°It¡¯s the glyph you get by drawing a hexagon and then connecting all the corners to the center of the hexagon.¡± It looks like a wagon wheel, but with a hexagon on the outside instead of a circle. He thought. ¡°It doesn¡¯t seem to have an obvious purpose, though I did note that it was before all the things I thought of as names or words.¡± ¡°That¡¯s the word glyph¡± Victoria explained ¡°It just indicates that the glyphs which follow it are a word instead of having the single-glyph meanings. There¡¯s always the space glyph after a sequence of a word. It¡¯s the empty glyph. None of the hexagon or spoke lines are active.¡± ¡°Okay, I¡¯ll just omit those characters from my translations in the future. They should be implied when you have a word which takes up more than one glyph in Xigun.¡± Victoria nodded and asked ¡°And these?¡± pointing at the parentheses that were scattered throughout. ¡°That¡¯s the glyph with only the top glyph line active and the glyph with the top and top-left glyph lines active. They seem to surround sequences of information in Xigun, so I made them simple brackets. All they do is serve to package things together so they should have a simple representation to reflect how common and simple they are.¡± ¡°These?¡± Victoria pointed at the semicolons ( ; ). ¡°Well, those are a bit more complex. You know that the original spell was a collection of glyphs arranged around each other. I didn¡¯t even consider the order that I should use to translate the glyphs because I¡¯d already cast my first spell. The first glyph is formed, then one is formed above it. The third glyph is formed on the upper left, then each successive glyph spirals around the first glyph counter-clockwise. Within the glyphs, each exterior line is drawn first then the spokes are drawn also in a counter-clockwise fashion.¡± ¡°So, I just naturally started to translate the spell using the direction that it formed when I cast the spell and I got that ¡­ but when you think about the spell itself, there has to be some kind of punctuation to separate different words or sentences in the spell. Otherwise, you¡¯d just have one massive sentence with the occasional space glyph, word glyph, or bracket glyph. The marks you asked about are the spell-language¡¯s way of ending a sentence. It¡¯s just the glyph which is right after the two parentheses glyphs ¨C it has the top, top-left, and bottom-left outer lines formed and nothing else.¡± ¡°And these?¡± Victoria pointed to the question marks ¡°They don¡¯t correspond to a glyph in Xigun.¡± ¡°Those are what English uses to indicate a question. I don¡¯t know any multi-glyph words in the language, so I had to guess from the content of the spell what they meant. Since I¡¯m not sure that those are correct, I added that mark.¡± ¡°This one?¡± Victoria pointed to the tilde ( ~ ) character. ¡°Honestly, I¡¯m not sure what that character means. It seems like it might be a way to use a spell fragment written elsewhere, but I¡¯m really guessing here. It¡¯s the glyph where six lines are active. Incidentally, I¡¯ve not seen either of the two glyphs with four and five lines active.¡±If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it. This is amazing! Victoria thought Just rewriting the glyphs helps me so much. I knew that spells contained this kind of structure, but when they¡¯re written as a spell they¡¯re just so condensed that it¡¯s impossible to see the structure of the spell and ¡­ because the glyphs are drawn with some of the lines on top of one another there¡¯s ambiguity unless you know the context of the spell or have cast it yourself. Is this line the bottom-left of one hexagon or the top-right of another? Is it active in both glyphs? By writing the spell in this format, there¡¯s no ambiguity and so things like checking for errors are going to be so much easier! It¡¯s an idea that¡¯s obvious once you¡¯ve seen it but impenetrable until you do. Something that would be called genius when first discovered, but which future generations would take for granted: ¡°Of course you do it that way! It¡¯s so simple!¡± His naivete about how easy spells were to write now makes sense. They are easy for him to write successfully. I bet he didn¡¯t have to deal with the explosions from an error either, so this kind of thing could be done over and over again until you got it right. I was lucky I found his innocence funny ¨C this will change the world of magic into one which is far, far more flexible than today. And I¡¯d never have found it without an outside influence. I bet even the Magic Study will be able to produce branches all over the place instead of staying in their tower just outside Wirthglade on the edge of the kingdom! That is if we can work out a way to ensure that the spells we do write don¡¯t blow back on us. Studying them is certainly going to be far easier, but without a way to check that they¡¯re not going to explode, we¡¯re still going to be limited. And yet she thought, sneaking a glance at Alex,I bet he can help with that too. Some Travelers have been barbarians, some brutes, and the rare Traveler has been a boon from the Goddesses who helped civilization move forward. Alexander is certainly in that last group. And he¡¯ll move magic forward! ¡°That character is the remote spell activator. You¡¯re right, you can set up spell fragments that you can call from active spells. It cuts down on the cost needed to infuse the spell initially and allows you to reuse complex parts of spells so that you don¡¯t have to check them repeatedly. It also vastly reduces the chance of blowing yourself up when writing a new spell and it shortens the cast-time of a spell. It¡¯s the single most important glyph in all of Xigun, yet it only has the sixth place in the listing of the spells.¡± She turned to Alex with joy on her face and a grin and said ¡°Though, I think that the most important advancement will certainly be the way that you translate spells. They take forever to study because there¡¯s inherent ambiguity in the way that they¡¯re written. Most students figure out that it¡¯s easier to study the spells by adding a bit of space between the glyphs, but they¡¯re still pretty impenetrable because of the spiral.¡± ¡°It seems obvious now that we should have unwound the spiral and written the spell in a line and then, eventually, we would have gotten to what you¡¯re doing here. Showing the structure of the spell in the way you write it is ingenious ¡­ but it¡¯s probably just normal where you¡¯re from, huh?¡± ¡°Ah, yes, it is.¡± Alex said ¡°I wouldn¡¯t feel bad if I were you, though. Besides just having everyone always tell you that this is the way to study spells, you¡¯ve also got the system reinforcing that idea by never giving you the knowledge to study spells more easily. Something like this should be included with the first level of the Xigun dictionary, but it is missing.¡± ¡°In some ways, we¡¯ll have to be really careful how we spread this information ¨C it could tear apart the current power structures and cause wars if mages were suddenly capable of far more flexibility and more efficient spells.¡± Victoria paused at that thought and sat there for a long time. Alex let her consider the consequences of the information getting around. After a few minutes, he coughed lightly to get her attention. As she refocused her eyes on him, she said, ¡°Yes, that would be wise.¡± As her foot bounced she looked off into the middle distance for a few more seconds then returned her gaze to Alex and said ¡°Alexander ¨C¡± ¡°Oh, call me Alex¡± he interjected. Grinning, she said ¡°Alex, there¡¯s another problem though. Even if we can write spells more easily, we still need some way of making sure we don¡¯t have an error or there will still be great danger with testing them out.¡± Nodding, Alex replied ¡°I have a few ideas for that, but I need some information about the explosions first. Do you know what determines the size or power of the blast? Are some mistakes more explosive than others? Do the explosions always center on the person casting the spell or where the spell is forming?¡± ¡°But I guess the most important question is this: is it possible to feed power to a spell from a distance?¡± Victoria blinked at that question. ¡°Of course you can feed a spell from a distance. There¡¯s a group of linkage spells specifically created to send power along to spells but you have to set up the spell form locally. They¡¯re wildly used during wars ¨C though there haven¡¯t been any of those for quite some time ¨C and they are occasionally used in mining to cause an explosion a safe distance away.¡± Victoria paused after saying that ¡­ then she face-palmed. After a second she started muttering ¡°¡­ of course there¡¯s a remote activation ¡­ used in mining ¡­ explosions a safe distance away ¡­ the whole of the Magic Study is stupid beyond belief. In thousands of years, no one thought to try out spells remotely!!! Goddesses save us from our own stupidity.¡± Alex uncomfortably gave her a small hug and consoled her ¡°The idea was always to succeed at making a new spell. Planning to fail would seem to be defeatist. It took my society many years to figure out that we needed this kind of thing as well.¡± Victoria looked up at him and gave a smirk. ¡°We¡¯re still stupid.¡± ¡°So am I. So, about the sizes of the explosions and whether they can be predicted?¡± Victoria sobered up and replied ¡°Well, the initial cost of the spell determines how big the explosion will be if you simply have Xigun which is improper. If the spell doesn¡¯t make any sense or is missing the punctuation, then you can calculate how big the explosion is going to be based on the number of active lines in the spell you¡¯ve activated. This is the total number of lines activated ¨C even those which are in spell fragments count towards the total.¡± ¡°If it¡¯s something else where the spell fails because what you¡¯re trying to do doesn¡¯t make sense in Marin or attempts to do something in an impossible manner ¡­ then the explosion is much, much more massive. There have only been a few of these, but they¡¯re so dangerous that any surviving records about the person presumed to have cast the spell are expunged. Not just her spell work, but her name, her genealogy, her appointments to any knighthoods, her children¡¯s connection to her, everything!¡± ¡°Having that kind of power available during a war, though it would require a fanatic to sacrifice themselves, is something that society has never been able to even consider allowing.¡± Okay, so bugs in large spells are ridiculously bad. Keep it simple, stupid ¨C to survive. Alex thought. He glanced at the time: it was just 4:30. He wanted to design a simple spell which should allow him to far more safely work on future spells ¡­ but he didn¡¯t have enough knowledge of the spell language yet to do it. I¡¯ll try to get the information I need to write the spell tonight, then we can test it here tomorrow. ¡°So ¡­ how do I define a spell fragment to be used in a more complex spell?¡± Alex asked. ¡°Oh, that¡¯s actually really easy¡± replied Victoria ¡°All you have to do is make sure you have a unique name, then you cast a spell which is basically just a definition of the spell fragment you¡¯ll want to use later.¡± She spent a few minutes with the quill she¡¯d gotten out for Alex earlier and wrote an outline on a piece of paper: *uniqueName ( ... ) { ¡­ } She pointed at the curly braces and said ¡°Those define the spell fragment. They¡¯re just the brackets you missed at positions 4 and 5 in Xigun. The brackets after the spell name are used to pass any information you need for the spell fragment to work.¡± It¡¯s just a function definition. Alex thought,Even though an improper use of the function blows back proportional to the number of active lines in the entire spell, it¡¯s great to have modularity. In fact ¡­ I bet I can speed up all my spell casts to something like ~spellName ( ¡­ ). That will give me the greatest flexibility with the fastest speed possible. With spells that I need to cast rapidly, I can even make sure that the spell name is short to cut down even more on the cast time. ¡°Okay,¡± Alex responded, ¡°Then I¡¯d like for you to teach me what each of the ¡­ uh ¡­ 4096 single glyphs mean if you can. I know that¡¯s a long bit of time so if you like, we can go to the West Inn and get supper while we work.¡± ¡°That sounds like fun!¡± Victoria responded. So, she activated the spell which removed the wall and they headed upstairs. As they passed the common room, the ladies playing cards all turned and looked at them. Alex didn¡¯t notice but their eyes were bugged out. Victoria giggled internally, thinking We¡¯re not even remotely interested in each other, but I bet there will be rumors all over the town tomorrow that I¡¯ve finally found someone. Hopefully, Alex isn¡¯t the type to want tons of ladies because this will slow many from approaching him: if he likes the crazy lady who blows things up, how sane could he be? They went to the inn and Victoria made sure that she paid for her own meal. Snagging a table in the corner they started to eat and Victoria spent the next four hours talking about the first 2048 single glyph meanings in Xigun. That¡¯s about eight per minute, but she was lucky because there were classes of meanings. For instance, the collection of glyphs with only the spokes active were just numbers in Xigun. 0 was when no spokes were active ¨C this was an exception to the rule about numbers and was a dual usage of the space glyph. The context was important when you needed to tell 0 apart from a space. 1 was when the spoke to the corner between the top and top-left was active. 2 was when only the spoke to the corner on the left was active. 3 was when both the above spokes were active. And so on. With a short description here, Victoria covered the first 64 integers and explained 64 glyphs in a matter of seconds. Other collections ran through easily described patterns of the basic glyph structure as well. At the end of their time, Alex had a great start to understanding the entire structure of Xigun. He also discovered that the first level of Xigun dictionary covered all of the remaining 2048 single glyphs. Thus he¡¯d learned the alphabet of Xigun in a single day as well as most of the structure for a programming language and some of the conventions that needed to be followed. He and Victoria said goodnight and she headed off to the Wardens¡¯ building. Apparently, she was given a small room there as a concession. As it turned out, she was actually level 25 ¨C the highest in all of Scottstown ¨C and though this by itself wouldn¡¯t guarantee her lodgingher insatiable drive to learn more about spells, Xigun, and magic caused her to signon to be a Wardenso she could occasionally try out new spells to decimate the local monsters and constantly experiment with writing new spells. When she inevitably cause a huge explosion, the city council forced her to get some kind of protections in place for her fiddling. That led to the basement of the Warden¡¯s building having the Sapphire Room and Victoria spending all her time hanging around the room. Since she¡¯d often forget to get lunch or supper, she ended up going to the West Inn at all hours of the night. Then someone had to be woken up to let her back into the Warden¡¯s building because she frequently forgot her physical key. So ¡­ they just gave her a room in the building and built a door which she could open with magic. She was one of the few people with a room in the Warden¡¯s building just because she was waking people up in the middle of the night. She somewhat hesitantly explained this to Alex when he seemed surprised that she slept in the building. He laughed with her afterward and said ¡°Well, it seems like they made the right choice! An unhappy nerd is dangerous after all!¡± This led to a conversation about what a nerd was and a new joy for Victoria: Alex¡¯s world had so many people like her that they had an entire word to describe them. Having a dedicated name that described some of her personality let her feel like she belonged ¨C even if the class of people she belonged to didn¡¯t exist on Marin. As she left to the Warden¡¯s, Alex moved from the table he was sitting at to a bench outside the door. When he asked Marin what they were for, she explained that mud was a pain to clean off the floors with the number of people she served so the porch had been built on the front of the inn and the benches added to give people a place to sit when it rained and have their feet cleaned of mud. One of the barmaids knew and was very proficient in a simple water spell which she could use to soak and brush the mud off entire groups of feet if people would all sit on one bench and lift their legs at the same time. Since it hadn¡¯t rained in the last three days, Alex hadn¡¯t seen that first-hand, but he had a couple of hours before Erin should arrive so he waited on the bench and constructed his first spell. Hello world As Alex sat on the bench outside the West Inn, he was excited to start on his first spell. My biggest struggle with magic right now is just that it¡¯s too dangerous to play around. I need some way to mitigate the errors I¡¯ll make. Programming on Earth was frustrating enough with syntax errors simply throwing tons of errors and quitting. Having spells explode is a whole different level of punishment! I really want to make my debuffs so that I can maximize my base stat gain, but I¡¯m not willing to die to speed up my improvement. This spell should allow me to shove the danger of errors off onto a spell, itself. It¡¯s not quite going to be an emulator, but it should allow me to at least move the danger away from myself. I will get an emulator set up eventually, but I¡¯ve got some more important priorities right now. I¡¯ll update my to-do list quickly before writing my first spell. * save 37 small copper (a single day¡¯s room, board, and sponge bath) * pay Erinbackfor Inn costs * pay back Mother Edith for clothes * buy clothes * make debuff spells Well, at least my goals are becoming far more specific. As I get to know more about the world and what I can do in it, I¡¯m able to describe what I want more precisely. Also, these goals are far less open-ended than what I had previously. Tomorrow, I need to quickly get a second pair of clothes, then spend all day making potions to see if I can get ahead of the money situation. But for now ¨C spell programming! Alex opened his interface, created two new tabs, and split the screen to fit both tabs on it at once. He made the left tab take up most of the space as it was where he planned to write his spell. The right tab was going to be used for planning the spell and tracking his progress. Alright, all I want is a very simple spell. It will take mana from an input source, a text stream from a second input source, a sound output for the spell incantation, a visual output for the glyphs, and a mana output to feed into the central glyph while the spell forms. I¡¯ll call this spell ¡°Parrot¡± for now. It¡¯s not an emulator at all. Emulators pretend that they are some other system and try to mimic its actions. It¡¯s not an interpreter either. Those are like emulators specifically built to treat a programming language as their system. I guess technically it could be called a compiler since it will be translating between the textual input into a pictorial and auditory output, but it¡¯s going to be the stupidest compiler ever. Compilers generally translate between different languages, but the translation is frequently very complex. Because it¡¯s so stupid I¡¯ll give it the new name. It¡¯s just a parrot which will take the spell text I feed it and create that spell in the world. So, I¡¯ll need the following: * dictionary between spell text and glyphs * dictionary between glyph lines and phonemes * function to output glyphs to the spell form * function to output phonemes as sound * function to map spell text through the dictionaries to their output functions I¡¯m going to keep my parrot as stupid as possible, so it¡¯ll pull a single glyph from the input spell text at a time, then convert that to the spell form and incantation before proceeding to the next single glyph. This means that my spell text will have to be essentially an assembler ¨C Damn it, that¡¯s what the parrot spell is, just a simple assembler. Those were created back in the really fucking old days when people were just starting to program stuff. The first assemblers just used a dictionary to translate between words which humans could read and the actual numbers that the computer used to represent different instructions. I guess since I never really used an assembler I just don¡¯t think about them that often. This is the simplest possible version. Each symbol in my spell text will represent exactly one value in the underlying spell language, so the spell will simply directly map between the spell text to the spell language. I¡¯m still calling it Parrot. All I¡¯m doing is throwing phrases at it and having it spit them out in a different language. ¡°Polly wants a cracker¡± becomes ¡°Polly veut un biscuit.¡± Onward! Though Xigun doesn¡¯t provide dictionaries by default, I can use the basic arrays they include to form a slow dictionary. Alex thought. An array is like a set of packing boxes or mailboxes. You can line them all up and stuff things in them. The nice thing about arrays is that you can access anything from any part of the array immediately. If you want to empty the 17th box, you don¡¯t have to look at boxes 1-16. Instead, you just walk up to the 17th box and take out whatever is inside. The problem with arrays in programming languages and Xigun is that they¡¯re very simple. You have to use the number of the box to put things into or take things out of the box. What I really want to do is look up a symbol in my spell text, then find the Xigun glyph that it corresponds to. I can¡¯t do that, unfortunately, because the boxes must use integers as their addresses. So, instead, I¡¯ll use the indexes naturally to correspond to the Xigun glyphs and I¡¯ll just store the programming symbols in the array¡¯s boxes. Then to map between the two, I¡¯ll search the array until I find the right symbol. When I get the right symbol, I¡¯ll have the index which represents the Xigun glyph. Since I want this to be extremely simple, I¡¯m not going to worry about performance. I¡¯ll just use a linear search to find the symbol that I need. In the long run, I¡¯ll have to fix that but it¡¯ll do for a first attempt. And hopefully I won¡¯t make any mistakes. Those headaches suck. So, Alex created an array of 4096 boxes. The first box represented the space glyph ¨C the one with no lines active. The second one represented the glyph with only the top line active. The third box represented the glyph with only the top-left line active. The fourth represented the glyph with both the top and the top-left lines active. Alex was usingbinary to correspond the boxes with glyphs. He let the top line represent the ones place, the top-left line represented the twos place, the bottom left line the fours place, and so on around the hexagon. Then he started with the line from the center to the corner between the top and top-left lines and went around counter-clockwise again. This mapping represented the order that the symbols seemed to naturally take. Several classes of glyphs confirmed his thoughts here including the 64 number glyphs. He allocated simple symbols to each of the boxes. He was lucky that the interface could represent Xigun directly because he didn¡¯t actually have a need for all of the symbols yet. Instead, he translated only the ones he thought of as most critical. That amounted to only about 500 symbols. For the rest of the symbols, he let them represent themselves. He would make sure that he never used Xigun in his spell texts and that would keep them from being accidentally output before he could figure out how he should use them and, thus, how he should represent them in his new spell text. Speaking of which I need a name for my spell text too. I¡¯m calling it ¡°Pigeon¡±. It¡¯s a stupid language that will perform some necessary tasks but be generally odious to accept. It matches those birds exactly. This process took him about two hours. He ended up with a single array which held the symbols he could use in Pigeon to create new spells using a subset of Xigun. It was most of the grunt work that he needed to get done, though. He crossed that item off the list and started with the next one. He created a simple array that had only 13 boxes. Xigun had a way to pronounce each glyph. When you cast a spell, you not only had to channel mana into the spell and create the spell form in the air with all the glyphs but you also had to read the damned thing out loud. If you wrote an incredibly complex spell to do awesome things you¡¯d have to read the entire text of the spell each time you wanted to cast it. Well, if you couldn¡¯t define spell fragments, that is. With those, you could package the entire spell behind a single name. Then when you wanted to cast the spell, you just had to say the name of the spell and all the values you wanted to pass to the spell. For spells you didn¡¯t need to configure, you could omit the values altogether and get super-fast casting times. Anyway, the point is that Xigun is extremely simple with respect to its pronunciation. You literally just say a special sound for each of the lines that are active in a glyph. The lines are pronounced, in order: ¡°Ha¡±, ¡°Hu¡±, ¡°Ho¡±, ¡°Ba¡±, ¡°Bu¡±, ¡°Bo¡±, ¡°Ma¡±, ¡°Mu¡±, ¡°Mo¡±, ¡°Ka¡±, ¡°Ku¡±, ¡°Ko¡±. So the word glyph ¨C the one with all lines active ¨C would be pronounced HaHuHoBaBuBoMaMuMoKaKuKo. This is a little ridiculous. There are ways to shorten this pronunciation. If all three of a given set of lines with the same starting letter are present you can simply replace the three syllables with a single syllable with an ¡®e¡¯. So the above could be shortened to HeBeMeKe. While the shortened versions would be easy enough to add, I want the absolutely simplest spell I can come up with in case I make a mistake. If I screw this up, I¡¯ll get a massive headache and I¡¯m not willing to increase that pain just to make the Parrot a little less dumb. The thirteenth box simply represents the space glyph. When there¡¯s nothing to say, the Parrot shouldn¡¯t break but simply make no sound. So, the first box of this array contained the Xigun glyph with only the Ha line present. The second contained the Xigun glyph with only the Hu line present and so on. It took Alex about two minutes to make this array. The next two items on the list could have taken an inordinate amount of time if Alex hadn¡¯t cheated. He¡¯d grilled Victoria after she¡¯d taught him the first half of the single glyphs until he got her to reveal spells which already did what he needed. The spell form writing function he stole from a simple spell some lazy student of the Magic Study had constructed. It simply copied a spell from from a piece of paper and created the spell form in the air. Apparently the student in question was ridiculed for a long time because she still had to provide the mana for the spell and pronounce the glyphs as they were being constructed. While she¡¯d eased her load a little ¨C she still had to work to cast each spell. Everyone thought it was useless. Luckily for Alex, that student was at the Study when Victoria studied there and so she¡¯d seen and memorized a copy of it. Why¡¯d she memorize a copy? Well, because she loved magic and this was novel even if it was useless.This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. It wasn¡¯t useless to Alex. He didn¡¯t have to worry about figuring out how to get the spiral correct or the hexagons drawn into the air. He didn¡¯t have to be concerned with how to feed the mana into the spell form. It was all taken care of by the spell that student had created. The sound output spell he was able to copy directly from one of the linkage spells Victoria mentioned. The final linkage spell accepted an input stream of Xigun and then pronounced them directly. He simply rewired the input. So, he finished the spell by writing the container to pull all the bits together: *Parrot ( *pigeonInput, *manaInput ) { *pigeonToXigun[4096] = ( ¡® ¡®, ¡®(¡®, ¡®)¡¯, ¡®{¡®, ¡®}¡¯, ¡­ ); *xigunPhonemes[13] = ( ¡­ ); while ( *pigeonInput ) { *pigeonSymbol = *pigeonInput; *xigunSymbol = ~*mapFrom ( *pigeonToXigun, *pigeonSymbol ); *phonemes = ~*getPhonemeSequence ( *xigunSymbol ); ~*addToSpellForm ( *xigunSymbol ); ~*pronounce ( *phonemes ); }; }; As for the names of the functions Alex had created, he simply assigned each letter of the English alphabet to a different Xigun symbol in order starting with A-Z then finishing with a-z. He had gotten the spell to check for unique spell names from Victoria and none of the ones he wanted had been taken. The mapFrom spell is poorly named. I¡¯ll get back to that later. Right now it just returns one Xigun symbol determined by which index the second input maps to in the array passed as the first input. It¡¯s a simple loop. If it fails to find a match, it returns the special glyph sequence ¡°space word space¡± which I know will break the syntax of the spell. Instead of an exploding parrot, we¡¯ll have a bird with a killer headache. Alex was exuberant. Theoretically he¡¯d just created the first tool Marin had ever seen to make spell-creation pain free. Well, as long as the ASPCA didn¡¯t get upset about his mistreatment of Parrots. His Parrot was special anyway. It read Pigeon and created magic spells in Xigun. All it needed was someone to feed it the correct words and a bunch of power in the form of mana. Though it was dumb as a brick, it could make magic accessible instead of violently explosive. He sat there for a bit as he waited on Erin to return. He¡¯d read over all the different portions of the spells that he¡¯d stolen from and he was confident he understood them. Unfortunately, there had been a lot of new information presented to him today so he was beginning to feel a bit worn. In just a few minutes, he fell asleep slumped upon the bench. At 11pm, there was a hubbub at the west gate into the city. Since West Inn was just inside the walls, it woke Alex from his fatigue-induced slumber. He looked over to the gate and saw Erin, the two ladies who¡¯d been on guard earlier, and four other women. Erin and her party were absolutely covered in slime that continued to drip off of their armor, clothes, arms, legs, and even their hair. Since he couldn¡¯t hear what was being said, Alex stood up and made his way to the gate. ¡°The first level had over a hundred slimes¡± one of Erin¡¯s party said. ¡°I lost count at one-twenty-two¡± another replied. ¡°Definitely an attack coming within the next two weeks¡± said the lady standing at the front. She looked like a fighter with chain mail armor, a sword strapped to her hip, and a shield on her left arm. ¡°Everyone go home and get some rest. I¡¯ll expect you no earlier than noon at the Wardens¡¯ to report in. We¡¯ll likely head back for another scouting mission in six days so keep leveling and make sure you¡¯re well rested the day before we leave again.¡± All the Wardens nodded and they each headed their own way. Alex gave Erin a huge hug which caused her to giggle. He¡¯d just gotten his only set of clothes very dirty. He walked her to the back entrance to the inn and they turned the corner inside to the washroom. He peeled her out of her armor and got out of his own clothes, then he washed her. After he got done washing her, he sent her over to his room to sleep. He rinsed her clothes and armor and even the daggers she¡¯d taken with her. He dried the armor and daggers using the cloths in the washroom and snuck across the hall to deposit them on the small table in his room. He went back to the washroom and rinsed his own clothes and then washed himself. Finally, he went to his room with all the clothes, which he hung out to dry across the single chair, the foot and head of the bed, and the bits of the table not covered in armor or weapons. I meant to talk to Erin about the change in the dungeons¡¯ behavior as well as all that I¡¯ve accomplished today. I also wanted to hear about her excursion. I guess I¡¯ll have to wait until tomorrow. She¡¯s exhausted. So am I. Goodnight, world. Alex woke the next morning after the sun was up. He and Erin took care of the Goddesses¡¯ spell rather enthusiastically and then headed out for a late breakfast. They started to eat at 8:30 am and Alex got to relate all that he¡¯d accomplished previous morning. Erin was ecstatic that he¡¯d gotten to level 2 and promised that they¡¯d celebrate with a special meal on Saturday. While Alex did mention that he was going to be working with Victoria on making some new spells, he didn¡¯t mention the revolutionary nature of his work. He trusted that Erin would know to keep this information quiet, but some things are simply too dangerous for anyone to know about. In turn, Erin related her news about the dungeon. ¡°It was far further along than anyone expected. It¡¯s been years since the dungeon accelerated the production of its forces.¡± ¡°What¡¯s that mean?¡± ¡°Well, it means that the slimes will start attacking Scottstown with shorter intervals of rest in between each attack. Also, it means that we¡¯ll start having to post patrols far more often through that portion of the forest. Though the overall time between attacks will shorten, each attack will vary in exactly how long it takes the dungeon to prepare. Since we can¡¯t afford to catch the attack on the walls with no preparation of our own, we¡¯ll have to be checking up on the dungeon¡¯s forces more frequently.¡± ¡°We had a hard time on our mission because we weren¡¯t prepared for the numbers of red slimes that were present. We should have taken another Warden and had larger numbers of potions ready to heal us. A ward stone would have been great as well. It¡¯s hard to rest when you¡¯re getting attacked every few minutes and the stone would have allowed us to become undetectable to the dungeon monsters until we¡¯d had a chance to catch our breaths. None of it would have been an issue without the massive number of higher-level red slimes, though.¡± ¡°At least dungeons have become predictable. Many years ago, before the spell the Goddesses cast, the dungeons used to be relatively tame. Only one or two a year would start sending forces against settlements and those dungeons would be eliminated to keep people safe. Sometime shortly after the spell was cast, a lot more dungeons started to send invasion forces. Back in those days the time between attacks was impossible to predict.¡± ¡°It became too hard for adventures and the Queens¡¯ forces to keep up with the invasions so each village or town near a dungeon was fortified. Small groups of guard forces were established to keep the people safe. Wardens, they were called.¡± ¡°Now, people are essentially safe if they don¡¯t travel too much. Since the time between dungeon attacks is variable the roads are harder to travel without a significant guard force. Most of the people who would serve as guards are either already Wardens or have chosen to become adventures. Both have other duties that keep them from escorting caravans.¡± ¡°Here in Scottstown, we¡¯ll have to prepare for an attack by the slimes. It¡¯s important that you get to level ten before they get here. People get hurt every time, but with the extra health from hitting the tenth level we haven¡¯t had anyone die in two generations. Please promise me that you¡¯ll work on potions exclusively until you get it to level ten!¡± Alex saw her fear for him in her face and so he promised ¡°I¡¯ll only work on potions during the day from now on after I first go to get fitted for a second set of clothes this morning.¡± ¡°Great!¡± Erin replied. A little of the fear lifted from her features and she managed a small grin before she continued, ¡°You should also know that having the time on our interface helped out the Wardens a great deal. I shared it with the whole party before we set out this morning and it allowed us to do things much more precisely.¡± ¡°Sarah, the party leader, could call out instructions for specific spells or abilities as soon as they became available. We also got to split up into two different teams and make our way through the first section of the level very easily. We knew exactly when we should appear at different sections of the level and could coordinate our actions against the largest groups of slimes so that we both attacked with the highest level of surprise and biggest burst of damage each time.¡± ¡°While we all had ideas for how to use it better, what we did use saved us a lot of trouble. We wouldn¡¯t have been able to get to the final rooms without it.¡± She smiled at him, leaned over and gave him a quick kiss, and whispered ¡°Thanks so much!¡± ¡°You¡¯ll probably be getting some requests from the Wardens to make some more gadgets we can put on our interfaces to help us out. We didn¡¯t even know that you could change things on the interface! Now, off to work with you!¡± They parted ways with Alex going to a clothier and Erin headed back to her house to get some more rest before her meeting after noon. Alex was fitted quickly and headed over to Mother Edith¡¯s shop. He quickly went through the ingredients he¡¯d purchased from yesterdays¡¯ potions sales and created a grand total of 50 potions in the three and a half hours before 1 pm. He was moving faster and faster and his potions were higher quality than they¡¯d ever been before. Mother Edith told him to come back that evening and she¡¯d furnish more herbs. She was keeping a balance sheet and she thought he could make 75 potions in five hours tonight. That would allow him to make enough money tomorrow, if he did potions all day, that he should be able to gain his first spare pay the next day. Looking at his changelog, Alex was pleased to see that he¡¯d pushed his potions skill up to level seven. He¡¯d gained 800 experience from producing a few exceptionally high quality potions throughout the morning. He¡¯d also gained an ability for potions!
Healthy ingredients (toggle) A passive spell which highlights the unhealthy portions of herbs so that potions may contain only the highest-quality ingredients.
He immediately toggled that on and looked around. Herbs which were in perfect health glowed a bit green whereas any infected or damaged portions of a plant were highlighted from yellow to red. He couldn¡¯t see highlights on most of the herbs in the store, but the ones he¡¯d used for his three potion recipes were brightly highlighted. He toggled the spell off, then ran to the West Inn to get a packed lunch. He could eat with Victoria and try to activate his new spell. He just couldn¡¯t wait till this evening, but he had to eat lunch so he wouldn¡¯t be breaking his promise to Erin if he multi-tasked. When he got to the Wardens¡¯ building he went straight down to the basement, but found it empty. As he turned to go up the stairs, Victoria came down them with a packed lunch of her own. ¡°Oh, Alex, did you need something?¡± She asked. ¡°I thought that we might eat lunch together while I showed you the spell I put together. I want to define it today and cast it before lunch is over, if there aren¡¯t any problems!¡± Alex gushed. Victoria smiled and hurried into the Sapphire Room saying ¡°What are you waiting on?¡± Alex immediately shared his pigeon text for Parrot and Victoria examined it as well as all the connected functions. She looked them over with a fine toothed comb, going along the spell forwards, then backwards, then pulling each part out and looking at it for any obvious errors. Just as they got close to finishing their meals, she pronounced it safe to cast. She had especially liked that Alex purposely returned poor grammar when something that should be impossible happened. Having a spell with a headache seemed infinitely preferable to having an explosion. Alex cast each of the spells to define the function spells in order. It took most of his mana at a total of 150 mana. He defined the Parrot spell which cost him another 50 mana. Victoria gave him a mana potion to drink so that he could cast the Parrot spell to try it out. He quickly checked the Pigeon he had for Blade and waited on his mana to regenerate to 100 before he started casting the spell. He fed 10 mana to cast the Pigeon spell. A puff of white smoke appeared in front of Alex on Victoria¡¯s desk and billowed about for a few seconds. Alex and Victoria both waved the smoke away while Alex continued to feed the spell mana so that it could eventually cast the Blade spell, but when the smoke cleared Alex blinked. Victoria gasped and asked ¡°What is that???¡± Collapsed on the desk was a three inch long parrot. It had a red breast, green sides and wings, a blue throat, a yellow face and a red crown. Its eye rolled to look at Alex accusingly as he continued to feed power to the spell. He stopped the power when he¡¯d reached 6 mana for the Blade spell and the parrot limply began to recite the spell. After about thirty seconds, the parrot finished the spell and a Blade wafted over some papers before another plume of smoke erupted and the parrot disappeared. Alex and Victoria stared at the desk where the parrot had laid, dumbfounded. Alex turned to Victoria and asked ¡°Why did a bird from Earth appear when I cast a spell I named after it?¡± Victoria blinked a few times then started laughing which started Alex laughing as well. ¡°You named the spell after a bird from your home? No wonder it appeared there. Magic is a bit of a tricky thing on Marin. It¡¯s got a sense of humor. When you cast a spell which includes a certain level of knowledge within the spell, the spell can be manifested by the system as a physical thing.¡± ¡°Since you gave that spell a name, it will always manifest as that bird from now on. Hopefully you¡¯ll be willing to give it a bit more power so that the poor thing can at least stand up instead of falling over the instant it appears!¡± Alex started laughing at the absurdity of it all and Victoria joined after a few seconds. Laughter is the best kind of contagious. Beware evildoers, Alex comes with his army of tiny, collapsed parrots! Hello world! Potions, plans, and preparations Alex and Victoria were both done eating and he¡¯d tried out his spell, so he quickly said his goodbyes and started on his way back to Mother Edith¡¯s to try to make those 75 potions she expected he could finish. He¡¯d reached level 7 in potions today, which was a huge jump from his previous level and he¡¯d gained the Healthy Ingredients ability as well. I hope I can reach 10 soon, Alex thought, While making potions can be informative, I¡¯d like to start fighting some monsters so that I can help when the attack from the slime dungeon comes along. Oh! There¡¯s the seamstress¡¯ shop, I forgot that my clothes should be adjusted today. I¡¯ll pop in and see if they¡¯re ready. It¡¯d be great to get out of these rags of dubious cleanliness! Seven minutes later, Alex exited the seamstress¡¯ shop wearing his new digs. And these clothes really were fancy compared to his noob level rags: the pants were dyed a deep brown and the shirt a dark green. He had a belt made of leather (instead of twine) which held up his pants and his shirt was actually made to be tucked in! With a higher quality linen, the clothes whispered across his skin instead of scratching it as they twisted about his frame. While he hadn¡¯t gotten enough of a loan from Mother Edith for new shoes, he looked quite a sight different in clothes which were minimally tailored to fit his frame. This feels great! I¡¯ll keep the old ones so that I have something to wear when the new ones are in the wash, but I¡¯ll need to save up enough for a few pairs of clothes as soon as possible. Having something that is fitted is a far different experience from having something which only somewhat fits. So, Alex arrived at Mother Edith¡¯s feeling refreshed and quite happy. Just a few steps inside the entrance, though, Alex froze and his mouth gaped open and closed like a fish¡¯s. Mother Edith was sitting on a stool behind the center counter and there were several people in line to get potions ¨C but nearly her entire stock was already gone. All the shelves with the smallest of potion vials were completely bare ¨C empty from the front all the way to the back. She had hundreds of vials there! And a good half the remaining larger ones are gone too! ¡°Alex, child, quit staring and get to work,¡± said Mother Edith, catching view of him in her peripheral vision. ¡°With an attack by the dungeon, everyone needs quick healing and with a thousand residents there¡¯s always a few who forgot to stock up earlier or need to replace spoiled potions. Then there¡¯s the main group of people who¡¯ll be fighting. They¡¯ll need dozens or more of the basic potions per person.¡± ¡°Everyone knows that the attack will be within two weeks and that these potions won¡¯t spoil before then. Yet everyone also knows that there¡¯s only going to be so many potions we can make and that the Wardens will begin commandeering potions the last few days before the attack so that they have extra for the wounded.¡± One of the two girls who worked there finished placing the current order on the bar and tapped Mother Edith¡¯s shoulder so she turned back to her customer and said to Alex in parting, ¡°So get to producing more!¡± Alex went right to work. First, he activated his Healthy Ingredients ability, then he sorted the herbs roughly into two piles for each ingredient. The first pile contained herbs which had no damage or sickness whatsoever. These were going to make the highest level potions, so he wanted to mix them as quickly as possible to use the freshness of the herbs to their maximum potential. He was pretty surprised by the quality of the herbs that he had. A very small pile had non-perfect ingredients in it. Nonetheless, he was happy not to have to think about this issue as he made the higher-quality potions. He mixed, mashed, ground, and boiled over and over again always keeping busy by making multiple potions at a time. After the first three potions, he¡¯d grabbed a second and even a third mortar and pestle but only one more magic burner. This allowed him the maximum throughput at his current speed and level of concentration. He always had two potions simmering down and varied between having one potion ready to boil and two as he ground and mixed the ingredients in the various mortars. As soon as he got done making a potion, it flew off the shelves. While almost all the customers wanted more than were available at this point, they were perfectly willing to take what they could get immediately. While it was unlikely that the Wardens¡¯ timeframe estimate of ¡°not this week¡± was wrong, you never really know when an invader is going to take it into their mind to jump the gun and attack. But, Alex kept count of the potions he¡¯d made. His goal was to make 55 health potions, 10 mana potions, and 10 stamina potions (at least) before the day was out. After four hours and some change, he¡¯d made 48 health potions, 8 mana potions, and 9 stamina potions and was finally left with the ingredients which had been separated out for being unhealthy. He snipped away the bad portions of these ingredients and portioned them out to finish up the last few potions. He was surprised that he¡¯d ended up with just enough healthy parts to actually complete the number that Mother Edith had assigned him. She¡¯s sneaky for a kindly grandmother. Or maybe that should be ¡°wise¡±? She must have noticed me checking out the herbs with the ability before I went for lunch and so figured out how much of these I would throw away. Still, getting almost exactly enough for the potions she requested is impressive. I¡¯ve only got a handful of herbs total across all the different kinds I needed. She¡¯s good. Very good. Alex checked the time and saw that it was 6:45 pm. He could probably stick around and finish a few more potions, but he needed a break. He¡¯d already tested out his first new spell today, with the attendant surprise, created 125 potions from scratch, and leveled up his potions several times. Alex checked his potions skill to see if there were any gains ¨C and there went any more ideas about how he should probably stick around and help to fill more of the potions¡¯ orders that Mother Edith had spent all day collecting. He¡¯d reached level 10! Hmm, so three levels this afternoon. I got to level four Healthy Ingredients so that¡¯s some boost, but I gained another 500 something experience from producing excellent potions. I¡¯ll check the changelog later. I¡¯ve got to go get supper and tell Erin! Alex cleaned up his three mortar and pestle pairs and the glass beakers he¡¯d used to heat the potions and quickly said his goodbyes to Mother Edith on his way out the door. He hurried over to the West Inn and entered, seeing one of the barmaids at the counter, he asked for his supper and then moved over to the table where Erin sat with a few other ladies. ¡°Hello, everyone, I¡¯m Alex,¡± he said, as he sat in the empty seat next to Erin. There was a brunette with brown eyes wearing comfortable looking linen clothes to the left of Erin who Erin introduced as Sam, the leader of the local Wardens; another woman with brown hair that curled around her head and green eyes who stared at him intently named Helen, apparently the tactician for the Wardens; and a third lady who appeared to be a classic gnome: short enough to have a special booster in her seat with long green ears arcing away from her pate and a manic energy visible in her bouncing right leg, fiddling fingers, and rapid smirk upon hearing her name, Esmeralda. ¡°With the introductions done,¡± said Sam, ¡°I¡¯d like to talk to you about improving our interfaces, Alex. Having the exact time on the interface got some of our people wondering what all could be done and we brainstormed for most of the day yesterday after Erin left to scout the dungeon. Coordinating attacks, having alerts for the cooldowns of the strongest of our spells, and even for things like reminders for what we phase of a plan we should be executing could all make our battles far more efficient.¡± ¡°In the past, we knew that people had these kinds of tight battlefield controls, but a lot of knowledge was lost when men took over and then the goddesses kicked them out of power. It seems that one of the things we were missing entirely was that interfaces could be improved.¡± ¡°Only Helen here got the Interface skill to unlock, apparently by poking around repeatedly until she uncovered the search bar in that new tab your system-time work unlocked. And she¡¯s not sure what to do with it either, even after poking around all day. In short, we¡¯ve got lots of ideas about simple things we¡¯d like to have done, but we¡¯re pretty sure we can¡¯t do them yet.¡± ¡°We¡¯d like to commission some work from you to get some of these things done.¡± Alex¡¯s food arrived and so everyone went on to finish their meals while he scarfed his down. He asked a few questions about their needs and goals and then fell silent as he progressed through his meal while the ladies chatted among themselves. After his questions were answered he started whipping up the scripts right then. They only wanted basic timers, with a simple alert system which could chain them together. Before he was finished eating, he had the bare bones of the script figured out, though he still had some plumbing to do to get the right data available in the right places as well as figure out the correct visual alerts. He, frankly, had no idea how he could do auditory alerts. He¡¯d searched through a bunch of function names that the scripting language supplied and found quite a few functions related to audio, but he couldn¡¯t figure out what kind of input he needed to supply to get the right kinds of sounds out from the system. Any way he tested the function, the script simply broke because he wasn¡¯t providing the right kind of input. ¡°Okay¡±, Alex said while putting down his fork, ¡°I¡¯ve got the basic idea down. I¡¯ll come by the Wardens¡¯ building tomorrow with my lunch and we can talk about some final details then. I know we haven¡¯t talked about money yet and while this isn¡¯t, frankly, worth very much money because of how simple it is, I¡¯m a bit low on funds right now because I¡¯ve simply not gotten my turnips in yet. So, I¡¯ll be happy with pretty much whatever you give, but enough to get another change of clothes, some very basic armor, or even just shoes would be a great start for me.¡± ¡°Sounds great!¡± exclaimed Esmeralda. They started chatting again about various things and then Alex remembered his excitement saying, ¡°Erin, I¡¯ve gotten to Potions level 10! Most of the experience was directly on the skill, though I did get about a level from getting level 4 with Healthy Ingredients.¡± Erin smiled and kissed him right then, earning some giggles and even a small cheer from Helen who joked, ¡°A tactical victory for both sides!¡± Erin encouraged him onward by saying, ¡°Showing that you¡¯ve already grasped the information of level 10 potions by crafting strong potions is an okay way to get by these first few levels, but remember to keep thinking about your skills. You should be able to get another couple of abilities pretty quickly! But for now, what second skill do you want to focus on getting to level 10?¡± Alex replied readily, ¡°I¡¯d like to try to get Identify up to 10, then follow that with Force Spells. I¡¯ve not got a whole lot of choice there if I want to level up quickly. Not all of my skills have abilities, while the ones which do have abilities all seem harder to level than these two. Cartography, for example, has two abilities, but both of them require a person to travel about and map things ¨C but I¡¯m not really safe to do that over a large area yet. And for Healing spells, while I do want to get some practice, if possible, I suspect I don¡¯t have enough mana regeneration to grind the levels out.¡± At that point, all the ladies jumped in with various suggestions and Esmeralda even brought out a chalkboard and chalk so that they could plan Alex¡¯s upcoming days out to help him get to level 10 before the slime attack. He¡¯d been in Marin four days, and in or about Scottstown for three days. The slimes should attack sometime in the next 13 days, but the Wardens thought they had at least a week left. So, for the next little while, Alex¡¯s rough schedule ended up looking like this:
Friday Saturday Sunday Monday Tuesday
Morning: Identify Afternoon: Rats Morning: Identify Afternoon: Pots Morning: Rats Afternoon: Pots Morning: Rats Afternoon: Rats Morning: Pots Afternoon: Rats
Wednesday ThursdayA case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation. Friday (slimes?) Saturday Sunday
Morning: Rats Afternoon: Rats Rats if needed, otherwise pots ? ? ?
He wouldn¡¯t have included nearly as much time working on potions, called pots for short, but the town would need a bunch of them and all the Wardens at the table agreed that this would be the best use of his time before the attack if it arrived on Friday of next week. Still, it looks remarkably boring until you put it into perspective. I¡¯m going to be hunting masses of level 1 rats in the dungeon to the north all day some days and half the day most days. Only the day after tomorrow doesn¡¯t have any hunting in it and that¡¯s to both give me a rest and push me over the top of getting to level 10 with the Identify skill if needed. There¡¯s a small party at supper on Saturday as a celebration for getting my first levels, and I¡¯ve got the evenings, after supper, to spend how I like every day. I¡¯ve got lots to do and, while I suspect I¡¯d note this as ¡°and then he spent 4 hours in the dungeon killing stuff¡± if I were a narrator, I suspect someone a little better would come up with small moments that I¡¯ll forget immediately and make a big deal of them, saying something like ¡°he¡¯d learned his first, and most important, lesson about battles ¨C survive!¡± So, Alex copied the chalkboard schedule noting that his future was still unclear past next Wednesday because no one knew for sure when the slimes would attack or where he might best be used. He and Erin stayed for a while chatting with the Wardens, but they left around 9 pm to take care of matters in the bedroom, then clean up with the lye soap and wash rags of the Inn¡¯s washroom. When they went back to bed, Alex said: ¡°Erin, I know we¡¯ve just met each other, but I was wondering if you had family here in town ¨C or what else is keeping you here.¡± ¡°Oh, my grandmother first moved here,¡± Erin said, ¡°Scottstown needed a weapon smith at the time because the slime dungeon hadn¡¯t quite gone feral and people were constantly getting the acidic goop all over themselves. That, of course, led to everyone needing constant repairs and occasionally a new weapon as they trained in the dungeon. Ah ¨C I should mention that the dungeon was one of few in the area which ran from levels 10 to 18, so it was really popular despite the immense costs of equipment repair.¡± ¡°You were covered in slime the other day and I cleaned your stuff, but it didn¡¯t seem acidic to me ¡­¡± ¡°It¡¯s only mildly acidic. It¡¯s not a huge problem for a single-day trip into the first level of the dungeon, but the dungeon has had up to 20 levels in the past. That kind of space takes time to clear correctly, so people would end up staying overnight in the dungeon frequently. And if they missed a spot when cleaning, or were too tired to clean up immediately, or simply didn¡¯t know any better, they would often leave the slime on for over a day. Wear adds up quickly.¡± ¡°Anyway, Grandma moved here and fell in love with an adventurer. They had Momma, but he left pretty quickly on some errand or the other and never returned. Momma learned from Grandma¡¯s mistake and didn¡¯t give her heart away. Instead, she took some time with the occasional passing man in a caravan until she conceived me. Then she was happy to have me in her life, so she stayed here and helped Grandma and raised me.¡± ¡°Grandma¡¯s only 51 now because she had Momma at 17. We all live on the north side of town, away from the insane dungeons, even though we had to switch houses back when the North and South gates were sealed to achieve that separation. That¡¯s why I won¡¯t be leaving town. I¡¯m happy here. I¡¯ve got people to protect, a couple of dungeons to watch over, and plenty to see and do. And as time moves on, I¡¯ll always have family around to share the burdens of life.¡± Alex thought about that for a bit and said, ¡°I¡¯m glad you¡¯ve found your place. It¡¯s good for people to learn how to be content. Family and true friends help in that endeavor quite a bit.¡± ¡°I grew up in a close family. Most all of them have died now. Accidents, bad luck, old age all claimed their parts. Only Mom was left when I ¡­ well, on Friday when Phoebe transferred me here. She¡¯ll be okay. She was in a place where they take care of dying people when I left. She had a couple of weeks more at most before she died.¡± ¡°Why not just heal her?¡± ¡°We don¡¯t have magic there. I¡¯m not sure that magic could have healed her anyway, it was a disease caused by her own body that was killing her. Besides that, though, she also had some mental problems. She didn¡¯t remember herself anymore, much less who I was. While it¡¯s sad that I didn¡¯t get to help her through her last few weeks, she wasn¡¯t really in that body anyway.¡± ¡°She¡¯ll be with the gods soon.¡± ¡°Thanks, Erin. Anyway, family was close, like I said. I know it¡¯s weird for people to think like this, but in our family we¡¯d have done anything for each other. If someone¡¯s fifth cousin needed their car towed home and a bed for a few nights, Dad would have gone and gotten them without a second thought. I¡¯d probably have been dragged along to help as well. Mom cooked for whoever was hungry and we had people over to the house after going to ¨C the temple ¨C every Sunday to pay our respects to our god.¡± ¡°My brother once got into a fight. It was his fault. He busted up some stuff in a bar and beat another guy pretty badly. Dad showed up to the jail and got the story from him. He talked to the officers. Then he got me and we went to the bar with a load of wood Dad had in the barn for some furniture he¡¯d planned to make for Mom. We built tables and chairs there at the bar from that wood he¡¯d set aside for Mom. Dad really took his time.¡± ¡°We were there creating stuff and replacing stuff John had broken every night for two weeks and on three different weekends. Finally, we¡¯d replaced everything they¡¯d broken but the bar itself. It was a work of art. Beautifully carved and hand worked. John had set it on fire by knocking over a lantern and it¡¯d caught flame really quickly. We only knew how it looked because the owner had an old pict ¨C ah, a painting of how it looked.¡± ¡°Dad told the owner he couldn¡¯t replace that right away, but that he¡¯d work on it and give it to him when it was done. We made a crappy bar out of spruce that would hold up for a year or two and headed home.¡± ¡°Dad¡¯s work paid off. We went to John¡¯s trial and the bar owner was there. John was known to be guilty but the bar owner said that for him, whatever Dad suggested as punishment was more than enough. Such a good man would know what his son needed and certainly work to make him a better person. The judge asked Dad what should be done and he asked that John be given a choice between an extremely long parole or joining the military to get some discipline beaten into his head.¡± ¡°John chose a special branch of our military and learned just how stupid he¡¯d been. He saw people do stupid stuff and learned. He came back completely changed and helped Dad by spending his whole break carving beautiful, tiny statues to be used in the new bar Dad was making.¡± ¡°Family means a lot to me because it meant a lot to Mom and Dad. We may not be headed for marriage, but I¡¯ve seen how you act and how others act towards you. You¡¯re a good person and I¡¯m proud to count you as a part of my family. If you need something, you let me know and I¡¯ll do my best, okay?¡± Erin looked at him for a while, then nodded. ¡°I¡¯ll invite Mom and Grandma to the party on Saturday as well as Victoria and a few others. I¡¯ll keep it small, but I¡¯d like you to meet them if you want.¡± ¡°Sounds good to me,¡± Alex replied. ¡°Alex ¡­ ¡± ¡°Yes?¡± ¡°What was your name on Earth?¡± ¡°Marcus.¡± ¡°Why¡¯d you change it?¡± ¡°Well, ''Carpenter'' I chose because my Dad was a great woodworker. I hope to learn half as much as he knew one day. But Dad didn¡¯t take the most expensive kinds of jobs: the ones where his best work would shine. Instead, he took on the jobs that everyday people needed but couldn¡¯t afford to pay as much as people tried to charge. Sure, Dad still made enough money to keep us doing well, but he was a carpenter because people needed floors, walls, and ceilings a lot more than they needed an exquisite cabinet that would last generations.¡± ¡°He chose his path to help out the most people he could. I honored that by taking his path as my name. ''Alexander'' I chose because Momma always joked that she¡¯d conquer the whole county with her food like an old leader named Alexander. She wanted to get people to help one another and be nice to each other and her Sunday meals were a time for her to reach out and figure out what people needed so that she could provide for them and set an example of by that behavior of how she expected them to act.¡± ¡°I always chose Alexander as my name when I played the games people on our world would make, so I¡¯m used to hearing Alex as my name. I¡¯m far more used to hearing it than Marcus, truth be told.¡± Erin nodded replying, ¡°That makes sense. I heard that most Travelers changed their names but I couldn¡¯t figure out why a person would do that. Mom gave me mine so I honor her by keeping it and making the best name I can out of it, but it sounds like you were leaving behind one life and moving into another so you chose to honor your parents by emulating their ideals. I can understand that.¡± They lay there for a few more minutes before Erin¡¯s soft snoring let Alex know that she was asleep. He knew that he¡¯d be fighting in his first encounter in a dungeon tomorrow, but he wasn¡¯t really ready for it yet. His debuff spells had never been completed so his base statistics were still extremely low. He wanted to grow those as soon as possible, so he decided to put together those spells tonight and check them out tomorrow morning a bit beyond the gate to avoid the townsfolk getting upset at his exploding parrots. So, he quickly put together a new spell. He used fragments of existing spells to piece together what he wanted. He took the targeting from the Force Blade spell to choose a remote place where a linkage spell would be created. He then called the Parrot spell feeding it the empty spell text that he¡¯d use to create his debuff spell and the output from the linkage as the parrot¡¯s mana input. That simple combination should allow him to create the spell at a respectable distance. The linkage spell could receive power from up to 50 feet away and he¡¯d figure out a way to get the parrot to the linkage and himself away from it. He called the spell Radio. So, with that finished, he turned to the actual debuff spell. Victoria had shared with him several spells which he¡¯d simply recorded but never cast. One was a mana drain spell which tried to pull mana from a target. There were also a health drain and stamina drain spell. The three spells were, surprisingly, very similar. Functionally, the only real differences were that the mana drain and stamina drain spells were channeled spells while the health drain was an instant-activation spell. Those bits could be ignored, though, because Alex was only concerned with how he could drain the various stats and where their energy would end up. So, Alex decided to do the health drain spell first. He set the target for the spell to be the caster, and set the spell to run as long as it was fed mana. This made it a channeled spell. Every thousandth of a second, the health drain spell would drain as much health from the caster as it could. If the input was empty, the spell would end. Otherwise, it¡¯d wait around for the next millisecond to try to perform another drain. A debuff like this couldn¡¯t just hang about in mid-air, but it had to be connected to the caster itself. So, the spell was anchored to the caster by being formed in the casters¡¯ own skin. When the input channel cut the flow of mana, the spell would sever its own connection and dissipate. All channeled spells needed this anchoring, so he simply pulled this bit of spell from the draining spell examples he had. With one small alteration, he named this spell DrainEnergyType. And the easy bits were now done. Next, he had to write the spell that should figure out how much mana to feed his health drain spell to allow his full natural healing to constantly be running but not hurt himself too much. He decided that he wanted to have a bit of a buffer so that he didn¡¯t have to worry about the timing of when regeneration happens, so he chose to aim to drain a little more than was strictly needed. Again, Victoria¡¯s spell knowledge came to the rescue. There were some spells that were intended to tie a person to a familiar which would require the person to set aside, permanently, a certain portion of their regeneration for the familiar to use. As the person grew, the familiar would continue to drain that same ratio of the person¡¯s overall regeneration. These spells accessed the casters¡¯ interface to read information from about their statistics and keep the channeled regeneration levels accurate. This was huge. Alex could actually read information about his stats in real time and change his spell based off of his current stats. It made this portion of his spell much easier to cobble together. He read off the caster¡¯s current and maximum HP and their HP regeneration. Then he multiplied the HP regeneration by 2 and subtracted that from the maximum HP as a cutoff for the spell: if the caster¡¯s HP ever dropped below this threshold, the spell would stop feeding mana completely and have to be re-cast if the caster wanted to start it running again. The higher end, he selected as the maximum HP minus the caster¡¯s HP regeneration. So, for Alex right now, his maximum HP was 230 and his HP regeneration was 0.639 HP/minute. So, if his HP ever dropped below 228.722 the spell would deactivate, but each time his HP jumped above 229.361 because of his natural HP regeneration, his spell would feed a bit of mana into the HP drain spell to drag it back down to that target value of 229.361. Since he had to feed some bit of mana to the drain spell each millisecond to keep it from dying, he would feed a minimum of 0.001 mana. He called this spell ThrottleHPDrain. So, now he had a somewhat self-regulating spell combination. ThrottleHPDrain would try to keep his health at exactly 229.361, but it¡¯d probably do a pretty poor job of it. Because of that, if he ever started to overshoot his threshold and kill himself, the spell would kill itself first as soon as it passed 228.722 HP. Meanwhile, it was unlikely that his HP regeneration would ever be wasted because every millisecond he¡¯d be trying to keep at least one full minute away from being at full HP. His biggest concern here was that he didn¡¯t know how the mana would translate to HP drain. If he fed 1 mana to his HP drain spell, would it take away 1 HP, 5 HP, or 0.5 HP? According to Victoria, the spell wasn¡¯t used much by casters because its effect on a remote target was very bad ¨C effectively something like 0.001 HP would be drained per mana invested. You could get much better effects by simply using more dangerous spells. He should be safe, though, because he was going to be able to test this out on his parrot first ¨C if the thing squawked and fell over dead he¡¯d be able to adjust before casting the spell himself. Rest in peace, Polly. So, his final concern was where to store the energy that he drained. He couldn¡¯t just leave it alone or it¡¯d feedback into the drain spell and he¡¯d have a loop which wouldn¡¯t stop till he died or found some way to break the spell. When he asked, Victoria had told him how the energy could be dissipated: monster cores would work for large amounts of mana, or Alex could choose some kind of physical energy and try to manifest that in the world. Alex asked if it would be ok for him to charge up a light core like the ones he¡¯d see providing dim illumination around town and Victoria provided him with several drained cores. These were monster cores with a spell illumination effect, apparently. He could drain the energy into these cores simply by setting the output of the drain effect as the core itself. They had names inscribed into them with magic which allowed them to serve as a target for magic spells. And, boy, do I have some ideas to play around with that concept! If I can really just name objects by using one spell, then target them using another I¡¯m going to have lots of fun soon! So, that was the whole mess of a combination needed to set up a self-regulating drain on his HP and funnel the energy he drained into a monster core. The MP drain and SP drain spells were identical except for the target to be drained. Those were simple one-word changes to the spell ¨C apparently, they were symbols in Xigun in the latter half of the list he had ¨C so he added them as an input to the drain spell. So, he¡¯d created the following spells tonight: * DrainEnergyType * DrainHP, DrainMP, DrainSP * ThrottleHPDrain, ThrottleMPDrain, ThrottleSPDrain * Radio The DrainHP class of spells were simple wrappers which called the DrainEnergyType spell passing in the single Xigun symbol to identify if the spell should be draining HP, MP, or SP. Then the Throttle class of spells could target their specific type of Drain spell with a unique name so that they had a good destination for the mana to be passed between them. He¡¯d get to try them all out tomorrow. Hopefully, Radio wouldn¡¯t fail him and blow him up. If that one spell worked, he¡¯d be able to test all future spells relatively safely, even if he deprived generations of pirates of their stereotypical companions. Goodnight to Polly; to Polly a good night. It might be your last. Turnip window shopping Alex stood just on the edge of the tree line north of Scottstown. He¡¯d gotten up early, so it was still pre-dawn. He cast Radio 50 feet away to fuel the Parrot and draw it away from him, then he cast Parrot passing in the Radio¡¯s mana output as the Parrot¡¯s mana input and the Pigeon for DrainHP followed by the Pigeon for ThrottleHPDrain. The effects were ¡­ less than spectacular. He could see, slightly glowing, a wisp which indicated Radio¡¯s terminal point just inside the treeline bobbing up and down. Then he completed the cast for Parrot and a beautiful red-breasted pygmy parrot appeared mid-air in front of his pointing hand and immediately flopped to the ground where its upper-facing eye stared balefully at Alex as it began to try to drag itself along the ground towards the wisp. Alex face-palmed. Well, now I¡¯ve got a ¡­ limpness ¡­ problem. Maybe an energy issue? A problem getting it up? Regardless, I¡¯m somewhat embarrassed. I knew after that session with Victoria that Polly needed a bit more energy but I didn¡¯t feed it to her spell when I cast it just now. It looks like it¡¯ll take her till next week before she makes it to the wisp ¨C but when she gets there, she¡¯s highly likely to explode. I¡¯m not carrying a limp parrot package of nitroglycerin 50 feet when it could drop at any time. However, I have no clue how to stop a spell before it¡¯s cast. Alex stood there, uncomfortably considering what to do as Polly continued to balefully glare at him and drag herself ever so slightly nearer to her goal. Her wings were now spread, dangling awkwardly behind her as her claws pulled her bottom-first towards the treeline. Okay, if I get outside of 50 feet, the connection to the Radio wisp will diffuse and that spell will disperse, according to my conversation with Victoria earlier. While I won¡¯t suffer any backlash from that spell, Polly will either explode, give me backlash for not tying in the input correctly, or ¡­ something else. The worst-case scenario is exploding, so I want to be far away from Polly before getting too far from the wisp. So, Alex walked away from his poor, pooped Parrot and in a line closer to his wisp, heading towards his left and the tree line. Once he got to the tree line, he was further from Polly than from the wisp. So, considering himself relatively safe he turned left and continued along the tree line. A short time later, he exited the radius around the Radio wisp where he could maintain his connection and it fizzled out, slowly losing its luminescence until it disappeared completely. A moment later, Alex heard a ¡°squawk¡± and, almost instantly, was bowled off his feet as the force of an explosion knocked him forwards. Getting up, he looked back towards where Polly had blown up and saw a wide crater in the soft earth of the field as well as a circle of flattened plants. He stood and made his way back, wondering at the energy that came from such a tiny spell cast. No fucking wonder that people consider spell-creation an insane person¡¯s habit. It¡¯s astounding that there have even been enough people successful enough to make a skill of the knowledge they had. I mean ¨C boom. No more mage, right? A few seconds later and one of the night guards came around the West side of the city. She asked, ¡°Everything okay over here? What caused the explosion?¡± to which Alex replied ¡°Ah ¡­ I¡¯m trying out a new spell. I had a mistake in it and ¡­ well, it blew up.¡± Her eyebrows rose up, which Alex could barely see due to the lack of light, but she replied ¡°Maybe take it a little bit further west? Over that hill is a small gully which should muffle some of the sounds so that you don¡¯t wake anyone up?¡± ¡°Yeah, sorry. I genuinely didn¡¯t know the blast would be that bad or I¡¯d have gone further. I¡¯ll head past the gully so that the embankment on the other side can turn back the sound but it won¡¯t escape down the dip closer to town.¡± Great, the guard thought, It turns out that spending time with Victoria did turn this one a little bit crazy. It¡¯s a good thing that we know. I¡¯ll be able to warn others off from the nut-job. Sex and children are one thing, getting blown up is another altogether. Poor Erin. Hopefully, he¡¯ll leave so that she¡¯ll survive. So, Alex headed out a few hundred yards over the small gully and past the rise on the other side where he found himself still inside a field and positioned himself a hundred feet away from the treeline. This time, I¡¯ll use two Radios chained together so that I can hopefully keep from being bowled over by the blast when Polly inevitably gets her cracker. Oh, god. That¡¯s the worst pun I¡¯ve ever made. Alex winced, then started casting. With one Radio set up 50 feet away, he then tried to place the next one 100 feet away, but the spell backfired and gave him a minor headache. Apparently, 50 feet is also the initial casting range, Alex thought as he walked to the first wisp and re-cast the second one. Now with two wisps, Alex jogged back to his original distance and considered Parrot. With Polly costing 10 mana just to create, I¡¯ll over-pump her and give her 50 additional mana. Surely that will be enough to give her the energy to at least hop over there instead of ¡­ limping her way over. So, Alex cast Parrot, passing in the input of the further wisp and the Pigeon of the health debuff pair of spells. Polly appeared directly in front of his hand and flapped madly, flying far faster than she should have been able to from a standstill, crossing the entire 100 feet in 4 seconds and blasting Alex with a puff of wind as she left. She settled down on the ground just below the wisp and began chanting the Xigun for the spells. Alex listened carefully and heard that she made it all the way through the DrainHP spell before he saw parts of her start to dissipate and, then, she exploded only partially through the ThrottleHPDrain spell. Alex felt the blast front pass him and the noise was much louder than previously, but that just meant that the town was probably not able to hear him anymore. Well, it seems like it¡¯s going to be a long morning, Alex thought, but at least I¡¯ve got a head start on where the bugs are ¨C the interaction between the two spells is probably at fault because the first spell completed without an explosion. Trial and error, here we come. Sorry, Polly.
What¡¯s that make? 21? Yeah, 21. ¡°Well, Polly,¡± Alex said to the dissipating remains of his 21st attempt to remotely cast his HP drain debuff, ¡°It seems like all the bugs are out because you¡¯re not exploding anymore but you still basically instantly die. I wonder: why?¡± He chugged another mana potion to keep his pool full as he considered. Alex face-palmed. Of course, the spell construct doesn¡¯t have any health. I can probably successfully cast the mana drain spell with Parrot, but not the other two. So, attempt number 22 began. The first few explosions, 12 of them, were due to a couple of bugs that Alex let slip through the cracks as he attempted to connect the disparate pieces of Pigeon he¡¯d tried to chain together. Luckily, his Spell Language rose to 5 off the backs of his increased understanding and a couple of levels in Spell Language Dictionary due to his increased knowledge about connecting inputs with storage locations using specific glyphs. These combined increases of knowledge allowed him to correct all the bugs and stop Parrot from exploding. The last 9 failures, though, were Polly just appearing, chanting the spell, and instantly starting to dissipate as different parts of her body would be consumed. The part that worried Alex was that each time the parrot would roll around and scratch at her head as she died ¨C he was pretty sure she was suffering from backlash from casting a spell incorrectly, but he couldn¡¯t figure out what was wrong until just now. So, reasonably confident that finally it¡¯d work, Alex cast Parrot passing it the updated Pigeon for the mana drain debuff and ensuring that he gave Polly a few extra points of mana to have a pool beyond what she required to be mobile; he¡¯d discovered 15 mana was enough for Polly to fly and chant at a reasonable speed, vastly lowering his cost to cast. This time, after arriving at the further wisp, Polly chanted both spells then just stood there. Eventually, she disappeared in a plume of smoke. Alex did a little victory dance for his first relatively successful cast of the paired new debuff spells. Now, at least, he knew he wouldn¡¯t get killed by a volatile puff of feathered cuteness. Well, at least he wouldn¡¯t be killed today by Polly. She certainly looked like she wanted vengeance the first few times he under-powered her spell. I¡¯ll have to set the casting cost of the spell to 15 so that no one gets eaten by their spell research. Heh. ¡°Yes, Miss Smith, Tommy really did get eaten by his spell research parrot and, as such, will not be turning in his homework ¨C or returning to class.¡± What an excuse! So, Alex cast the combined spells through Polly directly next to him and kept the mana input open so that he could examine the DrainMP spell form on Polly. Victoria told him that such forms should slightly glow when active, just like spell forms cast in mid-air. After Polly finished chanting the DrainMP spell form, it immediately disappeared. It was gone before she even finished the first syllable for the ThrottleMPDrain cast. Alex thought about this as he fed just 1 mana into the input for the spell so that Polly could finish the spell and not have spell backlash. ¡­ and he face-palmed again. The DrainMP spell doesn¡¯t receive any input while Polly casts the ThrottleMPDrain spell, so it dissipates immediately. I¡¯ll have to put a short delay in so that the spell doesn¡¯t check until enough time has passed to call the throttling spell. With that, Alex quickly made his final adjustment and had Polly cast the paired spells at 100 feet, then examined her by casting it a second time directly and found everything to appear to be working. Not only would the spell continue to drain as he fed her, but it deactivated appropriately too when he stopped providing mana through the input which had effectively acted as mana regeneration for Polly. So, he finished modifying the other two versions of the spell forms and defined all seven spells using Xigun¡¯s definition form, giving them the names he¡¯d already decided upon. Now, he could easily cast the 6 spells he needed to maximize growth of his base stats. So, he immediately cast the HP drain version. His HPfell immediately. He lost 10 HP and both spells faded out of existence. Well ¡­ apparently 1 MP = 10 HP when using a draining effect on yourself. Also, I definitely need to pass far smaller portions of MP to the Drain spells or I¡¯ll never get the granularity I want. So, Alex made the change to his spells so that it would try to pass 0.001 mana at a minimum per tick which he remembered was a single millisecond. He redefined the spells and, just in case, had Polly cast the mana drain both remotely and up close again before he went ahead. With his new spells, he found that his HP drained immediately (well, faster than he could process) down to almost exactly the threshold that he wanted, then hovered there constantly. He checked his MP drain to see how much the spell was using ¡­ and found that he was actually still regaining MP from his MP regen. So, he quickly took a potion for MP and got it up to maximum, then cast both the SP debuff and, once his MP regenerated, the MP debuff. The birds had started singing long ago and he realized that it was getting bright enough to be considered the end of twilight so he headed back into town to start identifying everything he could see.
He had a quick breakfast with Erin, where she talked some more about her past and Alex mainly listened. He liked getting to know her more deeply, though he knew that she¡¯d remain here when he adventured outside the city. Eventually, I¡¯ll have to find someone else to ¡­ hold off the goddesses¡¯ spell. Before I leave the city, but after I¡¯ve gotten a bit more of a handle on a sustainable lifestyle. I can just barely generate enough potions to be able to earn some cash ¨C wait, I haven¡¯t actually asked ¨C bah, I can do the math myself: 75 potions in 5 hours at 5 small copper each. That¡¯s 375 small copper for an afternoon¡¯s work if I can sell all the potions. That¡¯s a whole week of rent paid at the inn if I gather all the herbs myself. There would even be some extra left over afterward. I¡¯m definitely going to have to talk to Mother Edith about how much the herbs cost and see if I can start getting paid tomorrow.A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation. I should pay Erin back for the Inn before ¡­ 3 more days? ¡­ something like that. Anyway, the day after tomorrow I can pay off most of it if the herbs don¡¯t cost too much. As for the 5 small silver from Mother Edith for my second pair of clothes, that will take me just two of those sessions, if the overhead isn¡¯t too bad. So ¡­ if overhead isn¡¯t too bad, then I¡¯ve gotten a fair start to supporting myself for the future financially. Well, at least for room and board. With that, I¡¯ve got to get a good start on defending myself from monsters, and a bunch more spells, then I¡¯ll feel like I can head off in relative safety. So, he spoke with Erin about the cost of various things and found that generally speaking, real property cost the most money. Food was ridiculously cheap because people could set up a farm and grow their own food literally overnight if prices rose too high. Similarly, almost everything that was renewable was relatively cheap. The economy was based more around second-tier, or above, production. Sure, anyone could work for a while and grow a literal field of turnips in a week or so ¨C but then they¡¯d also have to learn a cooking skill to be able to make decent food from the turnips. And that second level added just enough inconvenience that processed items formed the foundation for the economy. His shirt and pants, which on Earth might cost just as much as 2 meals, cost around 45 meals here on Marin. A good weapon without any enchantments might cost 10-12 large gold ¡­ which was a shit-ton of meals, but not nearly so many pairs of clothes as a weapon would be worth on Earth. Land, when it could be bought, would go for many large elementium. On the other hand, prices for these kinds of things varied widely from what you¡¯d find on Earth. That good weapon was about the same cost as a horse-drawn cart would fetch. You could also buy a pretty good set of cookware for camping ¨C a deep pan, a bowl and plate, a spoon and small knife, as well as an enchanted heat stone for the same 10 large gold. Prices just weren¡¯t what an earthling would expect. But it made sense on Marin because the only value here, really, was the time required to produce a good. If it took a person a shorter amount of time to learn the skill and level it up to the point where they could produce an item than it took them to earn the money to buy the item, they could just bypass a merchant entirely. So, Alex was glad, finally, that Phoebe placed him near Scottstown. Here he could buy food for ridiculously cheap prices because the woman who farmed was so high level that she provided all the plants for the town single-handedly and the Wardens killed enough game while scouting to maintain an excess there as well. Sighing, Alex got up to start the day. While their conversation had been fun and enlightening, he had work to do.
Alex had visited two weapon-smiths, three armorers, a scribe who made paper and ink, two scribes who specialized in making spell scrolls, a couple of clothiers, a woodworker, and even a small library that the town had invested in to help educate the children. On his trip, he ran into quite a few idle villagers and began to realize that people would have vastly more free time once they had a skill up to a high enough level that they could make a living. Their skill would only grow in that area, giving them more and more of an edge over any possible competition but they, themselves, would have to spend noticeably less time producing quality goods as they grew stronger. Most of the adults in the town were basically idle for the vast majority of the day. They whiled away the hours learning new skills, visiting, or simply entertaining by playing games and eating. The owners of shops and the Wardens were notable exceptions. They all worked regularly to keep up with the high demand placed upon their services by the majority of the folks who didn¡¯t contribute nearly as much day-to-day value as these hard workers. Not only did he receive enough experience to get his Identify ability up to level 25, and his Identify skill up to level 13, but he learned a very important detail about Marin¡¯s society: very few people worked hard when given the gift of knowledge from the system. Instead, they seemed to find an equilibrium where they had to do a minimal amount of work to satisfy their desires ¡­ then they totally quit trying to improve themselves. He had wondered how the highest level in the village could only be in the 20s ¡­ and now he had a pretty good idea: either they couldn¡¯t find the right quality of support or items to progress, or they stopped altogether to enjoy life instead of gathering strength. Some of this ¨C hell, most of this ¨C might be because of the goddesses¡¯ spell, Alex thought, as he entered the Wardens¡¯ building with his lunch. With such a high sex-drive and small proportion of the population, the men of Marin are almost completely sequestered away into villages and towns. The population is trying to produce enough males to continue the next generation which rewards women who try to get pregnant at every possible opportunity. Then, due to the increase in production from skills fed by self-renewing mana, not many workers are needed to actually support a large population. So people are rewarded for being in a town far more than they are for going out and trying to tame the problems that are cropping up across their world. They¡¯ve got a large potential production and safety increase if they managed their time better, but convincing people that there¡¯s a problem and that they would be better off risking themselves to try to fix it could be a real challenge.
Alex shifted gears as he sat at a table with Sam, the Wardens¡¯ leader, and Helen, their tactician and began to eat his lunch. He showed them the effects he¡¯d achieved yesterday with his rough scripts and found a quick visual alarm to plug into the interface ¨C as each timer expired, a small bell would appear in the upper-left of the person¡¯s vision. One could think alarm and a window would appear with text the user had entered earlier to remind them what the alarm was for. They tried out different kinds of interface changes and eventually built up a few scripts which would allow multiple alarms to run at the same time while consolidating all alerts under the one image of a bell. A summary text would be shown beside the bell when an alarm went off so that the user need not open up the full text if they were in a critical situation. Alex hadn¡¯t figured out how to use sound yet, so the alarm was purely visual. The ladies were excited nonetheless and happily gave him 10 small silver. Alex¡¯s jaw dropped. ¡°This is too much!¡± Sam replied, ¡°I feel bad just paying you this much. This is going to make our parties¡¯ cohesion skyrocket and there¡¯s really not a high enough price for such a thing. We would have happily paid platinum for this if it came from a caravan merchant. If you can figure out how to add sound to the alerts, the Wardens will pay you 10 more small silver.¡± ¡°Besides, having just one decent pair of clothes, it must be a pain to keep clean. Get yourself a good pair of boots and a second pair of clothes ¨C you should have about 2 silver left to have some fun with!¡± ¡°Thanks, Sam!¡± Alex said as he hopped up and came around the table to give her a huge hug. He hugged Helen next and then plopped down in his chair again. Though Alex didn¡¯t notice, Helen blushed fully pink from the contact and turned her head away from him so that her hair would hide her face. ¡°About the rat dungeon,¡± Alex segued, ¡°What should I expect?¡± ¡°Oh, it¡¯s just a single level dungeon,¡± Sam replied, ¡°No one¡¯s ever met the hidden condition to unlock the lower levels so all you¡¯ll run into are various numbers of level 1 rats. To get there, exit the West Gate, then head North around town. Follow the first gravel path you see, and you¡¯ll arrive at the entrance.¡± ¡°Once you get inside, the entrance room has a single hall leading away from it directly opposite you. On your left and right will be five dead-end rooms before the first turn in the path. These rooms have between one and three rats in each room. I¡¯d recommend you kill these until you get at least to level 5. That will give you a bit of a health boost from your natural regeneration raising your base stats.¡± ¡°Make sure you¡¯ve got at least 250 health before you go any further. Also, make sure you¡¯ve got tons of health potions.¡± Sam paused and looked at him to make sure he¡¯d heard her so Alex nodded and repeated: ¡°At least 250 health and tons of HP potions before going past the turn.¡± Sam nodded back. ¡°It¡¯s rare, but people do sometimes die inside the dungeon. It¡¯s just got masses of rats, but the damage adds up and you can find yourself overwhelmed pretty quickly without armor or the right amount of potions. Make sure you kill all but one of the rats in the first rooms and let the last one chew on you a bit before you progress as well. You need to be ready for the pain and to understand how much damage they can do when they get to you.¡± ¡°After the first turn, the dungeon becomes a massive spiral curl to the right. The floor stays pretty even, but rooms filled with anywhere between 10 and 30 rats will be along the path. They all dead-end off of the single path forward and there¡¯s no boss monster. It¡¯s just tons and tons and tons of rats.¡± Alex replied ¡°That second portion really ramps up in difficulty. From a minimum of twice as many rats as you¡¯d previously fought to a maximum of six times as many. And the first room could contain six times as many with no warning. Ouch.¡± Helen agreed, ¡°Dungeons are a great place to train up skills because the monsters continually respawn giving you an always-available opportunity to be practicing, but they are all dangerous. Some of the Warden¡¯s texts suggest that before the goddesses¡¯ spell and whatever then affected the dungeons, some people had communicated with dungeon cores and discovered that the dungeons were alive and earned their mana from the deaths of those who fell in the dungeon.¡± ¡°A dungeon core?¡±, Alex interjected. ¡°Ah, at the end of every dungeon, there¡¯s a crystal like the monster cores that occasionally drop from monsters. It¡¯s far bigger than your average monster core: typically large enough that it could barely fit in your hand. If someone takes a dungeon core from the dungeon, the dungeon dies. Whether or not the dungeon core is alive, I¡¯m not sure. Our local dungeons are far too dangerous past the first level for anyone to try to defeat them.¡± ¡°I¡¯m inclined to believe that the dungeons are alive though. It would explain what happened after the goddesses¡¯ spell ¨C some sickness spread and affected large numbers of dungeons. The rat dungeon, notably, probably wasn¡¯t affected because whatever sickness couldn¡¯t get past the first floor of the dungeon to the dungeon core where it could cause problems.¡± ¡°Regardless, make sure you take plenty of potions. Going through 10, or even 20, potions for each of health, mana, and stamina isn¡¯t uncommon for people pushing through a dungeon for the first time.¡± Alex blushed then saying, ¡°I actually don¡¯t have any potions. I kept making them, then selling them immediately to Mother Edith until the rush started on potions yesterday. I had kept a few of my best mana potions for myself, but I ran through them this morning. Then, I didn¡¯t make any more since we talked about entering the dungeon.¡± ¡°Ah,¡± Sam said, ¡°don¡¯t worry about it this time. We¡¯ve got a number of old potions kept for emergencies that are about to go bad. They won¡¯t have lasted another 3 days, but it¡¯s unlikely that an emergency will pop up with the slimes killing everything on the south side of town. I¡¯ll go get you 20 of each of the basic potions.¡± ¡°Uh, when can I pay you back?¡±, Alex replied. Sam tsk¡¯d and said, ¡°You can donate the next emergency supply after you get to level 10.¡± So, Alex and Helen sat and chatted about the people he¡¯d met in town and how his first few days had gone. When Helen asked how he''d used his mana potions this morning, he explained about the Parrot explosions and Helen got to laughing pretty hard and attracted quite a bit of attention. Before Sam returned, Alex had recounted parts of the story three times and had most of the Wardens present for lunch in hysterics. Polly was now infamous and Alex eventually caved and cast a Blade through Polly so that everyone could see her. He got quite a bit of appreciation for her colors and how cute she was due to her tiny size. When she spoke everyone reacted differently, but the shock was apparent as gasps and laughter rang out. Sam had returned by this time and handed Alex a small belt. It had 6 potions accessible in small tight pouches that would make them easy to reach and draw out. There was a second, large, pouch on the side and a third pouch with a cover on the other side. Sam demonstrated that you could remove one of the six potions from the pouches on the front and another of the same type would instantly appear in the same slot. The empty potion bottles and cork caps could be dropped into the lidless pouch and would be moved from there to inside the pouch with the cover. The covered pouch held the remainder of the 60 potions even though it appeared far larger on the inside than it was on the outside. When Sam dropped an empty vial and cork she¡¯d brought along for this purpose into the empty pouch, they appeared in the covered pouch in one of the slots on the side, the cork in the vial. Nothing would be broken and you¡¯d always have access to all your potions using this bag. ¡°Wow,¡± said Alex, ¡°This has got to be worth a lot of money. How can I pay you back?¡± Sam and Helen both giggled a bit, then Helen replied, ¡°They¡¯re very common drops from monsters. You could find a 100 slot belt in the rat dungeon on a bad day pretty easily. That one is probably just one of the ones we keep for training purposes for new Wardens, right Sam?¡± ¡°Definitely. Don¡¯t worry about paying for it, just give it back sometime over the next few days once you get a better one from the rats.¡± ¡°Thanks!¡±, Alex replied. So, Alex left to the sounds of laughter and his exploits from just this morning being retold to new passersby ¡­ Helen and Victoria both watched from different points inside the common room as he left, each hoping for his success for different reasons. Alex''s current status: Spoiler
Name Alexander Carpenter Level 5 Title
Health 234 Mana 238 Stamina 234
Constitution 11 Intelligence 12 Endurance 11
HP regen 1.53 MP regen 2.39 SP regen 1.53
Vitality 12 Wisdom 15 Metabolism 12
Skill Level
Cartography 1
Force spells 1
Healing spells 1
Herbalism 1
Interface 1
Language Basics 1
Potions 10
Reading 1
Spell language 5
Survivalist 1
Identify 13
Ability Governing skill Level
Mapping Cartography 1
Map Cartography 1
Blade Force spells 1
Push Force spells 1
Heal Healing spells 1
Detect herbs Herbalism 1
Spell language dictionary Spell language 3
Detect water Survivalist 1
Identify Identify 25
Healthy ingredients Potions 4
4 hour tutorial … welcome to FFMMXVIII The hair! It¡¯s so glorious! See the majestic waves and ¡­ gasp ¡­ look, there are individual fibers wafting in the wind. Heh. That¡¯s what the cinematics would show if I were in an RPG. Instead, I¡¯m stuck trying to get this branch untangled from my scalp. Indeed, Alex¡¯s bent over form was arguing unsuccessfully with a tree that looked like a bright purple Bald Cyprus. As he¡¯d been walking down the slightly overgrown gravel path towards the rat dungeon, he kept feeling branches scrape against his head but ignored it in favor of trying to move quickly. This backfired when this particular tree got a branch tangled up in his hair. And now, off on his first monster-hunting quest he was ¡­ uh ¡­ gracefully trying to unwind his hair from the branch so that he could stand up and continue. He struggled for about 15 minutes before he gave up and broke the end of the branch off. By bending it back and forth he was able to eventually separate the end of the branch from his thick mop of hair. I knew I should have cut my hair two weeks ago. Alex thought, But nooo, I was just too lazy to stop by a barber and get it done. I wonder if they have barbers here ¡­ whatever: when I get back tonight, I¡¯ll ask Erin where I can go to get it lopped off. Hopefully, I¡¯ll go bald soon like Grandpa so that I don¡¯t have to deal with it anymore. So, Alex continued his way along to the kiddie ¡°tutorial¡± dungeon that all RPGs have: ¡°Kill ten rats. Oh, in the sewers. Uh, bring me their rat tails. That¡¯ll ¡­ uhm ¡­ thin the population down enough so that they stop eating my cabbages! Blah, blah, blah. I¡¯ll reward you greatly! (2 small copper and a new kill X monsters quest.)¡± Unfortunately, there¡¯s no respawn here and I certainly don¡¯t want to die to rats. Regardless of how much danger a given situation has, I¡¯m determined to play it as safely as possible. Caution and preparedness win hardcore runs. The only difference between those runs and my life is that ¨C I only get one chance and there are no guides to help me along. So: prepare, be cautious, and fucking run away if you get in trouble. There¡¯s no shame in living to see tomorrow. Abruptly, Alex¡¯s inner dialog hiccuped. He¡¯d arrived at the dungeon entrance. There was an exposed face of a small hill. Limestone shelves predominated except for the entrance which the path led to: a granite arch built with seemingly no seams and carved to show a wide variety of monsters. There¡¯s no way anyone could miss this thing. Besides the arch, the black vortex which it encompasses is extremely flashy. Stars whirling into an abyss ¡­ it totally looks like some early RPG dungeon entrances but with better than 32-bit graphics. And, though the central portion steals the prize for complete awe, the arch itself isn¡¯t exactly mundane. Why would a rat-only dungeon have such an intricate entrance? The base of this arch has rats, sure, but immediately above that is a ¨C hmm ¨C valley of rest? There¡¯s a pool which elves? fairies? are drinking from and a bunch of sleeping forms as well as even a few fruit trees. Then the rest of the arch has so many different monsters: slimes, spiders, some kind of flying mob ¡­ drakies, maybe? and then lizard men ¨C kobolds. This arch is too varied for just a rat dungeon. Helen must have been right: there¡¯s more to this dungeon than anyone has ever seen before. Maybe there¡¯s a hidden riddle or key to enter the rest of the dungeon. I¡¯ll certainly search for something like that when I can clear out the whole first floor and have a decent reserve of potions. Ahh, but there¡¯s no time for daydreaming. Forward into the abyss! And so Alex stepped into the span between the arch¡¯s pillars and through the swirling black hole effect. His eyes were briefly occluded by a pair of stars and, once the light was gone, he found himself inside a new room. Turning around, he saw that the entrance was completely behind him with the same archway and carvings on this face as were on the obverse and the same black hole swirling within its span. He¡¯d traveled completely through the 6-foot thick archway with a single step, however. He blinked for a few seconds, disoriented by how simply the transfer happened. I¡¯d expected a bit of nausea, or maybe a feeling of pinching together to travel a wormhole, or something other than just taking a step and being inside. That was altogether anticlimactic. Well ¡­ no time like the present. So, Alex turned again and examined the cave he had entered. This room was, helpfully, lit by monster cores with the light enchantment. Alex opened up his notes and immediately made a literal note to himself to bring a couple of charged light cores to dungeons in the future so that he wouldn¡¯t find himself completely blind and surrounded by enemies. Also kindly, the entrance had no monsters. He wasn¡¯t set upon the instant he entered, so he could take some time to prepare if he had needed it. Well, even if I forgot something as simple as a light source, at least I did practice casting Blade on the way over here. I managed to level it from one to three and learned that 6 mana has a significant amount of force within 3 yards and 9 mana gives me enough force to break an inch-thick branch off of a tree at 12 yards. I¡¯ll just define three variants now. 6, 9, and 12 mana variants so that I can cast it extremely quickly. I¡¯ll call them ShortBlade, MidBlade, and LongBlade. Then I can say, essentially, ¡°Cast ShortBlade! Cast MidBlade! CastShortBlade!¡± and form three spells rapidly enough to take out two short-range rats and one mid-range rat. It¡¯ll be in Xigun, but it will still be far faster than repeating the entire spell each time. After he¡¯d defined the three spells successfully he cast each one once to be sure they worked, then began to sneak down the sole corridor leading from the room. This pathway also had light cores shedding a small amount of luminescence so that the center of the room was well lit but the floor and, especially, the ceiling lived in eternal twilight. Definitely bringing a light source next time. Maybe tied to a belt around my forehead like those camping headlamps. I¡¯ll have to ¨C ah, there¡¯s the first room on the left. A gaping entrance appeared on the left of the pathway. Not rounded like it had been mined, but just an angled slice through the limestone that was darker than the path Alex found himself upon. As he came upon the entrance he was happy to see that it, too, was illuminated by light stones along the wall near the floor. Sneaking a glance around the corner, Alex¡¯s eyes rounded and his pupils dilated completely open. Laying with its rear towards Alex and curled slightly to the right was the biggest rat Alex had ever seen. Look, I know that RPGs make a habit out of up-sizing normal animals to make them scary ¨C but a waist tall golden-retriever sized rat??? That monsters¡¯ teeth must be as thick as my thumb and as sharp as flint. And I¡¯m supposed to let one chew on me for a bit to feel how painful it is before going around the bend? Fuck. Fuuuuuuck. Okay, don¡¯t panic. First thing¡¯s first: let¡¯s fix the spells. Redefine the ShortBlade to be 15 mana, then the MidBlade to be 30 mana, and the LongBlade to be 45 mana. Hope to god I don¡¯t need it, but let¡¯s make a new one called FuckBlade at 60 mana. And finally, the weapon to end all arguments, the ShitBlade at 103 mana: if I can crunch a high-level wolf from in a tree using that much, I can certainly end a level 1 wolf with the same spell. I just hope I don¡¯t have to use the ShitBlade then run away. Running with a mana-deprivation headache would not be fun. So, screwing up his courage, Alex poked his head around the corner again and after three deep, steadying breaths began his first prepared assault against entrenched enemies. Well, he cast ShortBlade at the rat sleeping on the floor. crunch His ShortBlade sliced directly through the rat¡¯s skin, fat, ligaments, and muscles until it encountered the spine of the monster just behind the midway point along those bones. There, it crushed the 5 vertebrae it encountered and proceeded through the rat to break several ribs and do massive internal damage. The rat¡¯s blood squirted from the wound but disappeared almost instantly: the rat was dead and, as a monster of a dungeon, it was being replaced by the loot it dropped. Where the rat had been peacefully slumbering, a small skeleton appeared upon the ground along with a single copper piece. Alex had no time to examine his loot, however, as a few squeals had erupted from the depths of the room beyond the entrance he peeked so carefully around. Running rapidly two rats appeared from the left of the entrance and barreled down upon Alex. ¡°Cast ShortBlade! Cast ShortBlade!¡±, Alex chanted as quickly as he was able. Two more crunches later and the last rat died only a few feet away from Alex. He leaned against the wall of the pathway and slid down to sit with his legs sprawled in front and his shoulders slumped. Fighting against things which actually mean to harm you is a hell of a lot harder than I imagined. These didn¡¯t even really have a chance, yet I¡¯m completely mentally exhausted. My fingers are shaking. Adrenalin is pumping ¨C or something ¨C and I¡¯m just so done. He sat there for a good few minutes in which he aged far more than the time elapsed. He breathed and simply existed. It was enough to exist. Slowly an impetus moved within him to continue. A drive existed that he¡¯d never noticed before. This is now my world. Hiding from the monsters won¡¯t do anything. There will be an attack against the city in just a few days ¨C and time will only bring more strength against me. I choose to gain strength now. I¡¯ll risk my life ¨C carefully like a miser spends gold ¨C in order to gain the strength I need to survive, protect, and move forward. Shit ¨C my origin story is ¡°And then I fought three rats and ¨C fuck was I scared!¡± Alex chuckled at his inner monologue and then laughed for a few seconds. Yeah, the rats were far more fearsome than he¡¯d expected, but he had the tools he needed to kill these things pretty easily.And, after all,he¡¯d learned his first, and most important, lesson about battles ¨C survive! I¡¯ve not even been injured yet and I¡¯ve taken out three of them for what would be 8 minutes of mana regeneration. I¡¯m super fucking overpowered for a small number of these guys. I¡¯ll take it slow at first and ease into getting comfortable with fighting these guys, then I¡¯ll be able to take on more and more as time passes. So, he collected the copper coins that each rat had dropped. He ignored the lizard skeleton the first rat had dropped as well as the rat tail that the second rat had dropped. He wasn¡¯t sure what those things could be used for, but he wasn¡¯t going to be lugging around trash when he didn¡¯t have a good way to carry anything. Second literal note to self: get some kind of bag of holding for loot. Probably better make that two bags of holding. One for messy things and another for gear and supplies. He checked the inner portion of the room and found that it was simply a small space about the size of a closet. The two rats that he¡¯d killed second had been just around the corner and had, probably, not even been moving at their maximum speed. These things are quick. I¡¯ll probably not really be able to retreat if I run into more than I can handle. I¡¯ll have to be super careful before moving beyond the bend. So, Alex continued down the path. He killed all the rats in each of the next three rooms rapidly. There were 2 in each of the rooms, so he ended up with 6 more small copper and constantly maxed mana. When he cast a single spell, the mana drain debuff spells would see that he was below his threshold and cancel themselves. He noticed the issue but didn¡¯t stop to fix the spells because he wanted to get through these first five rooms before stopping. In the last room, there was only one rat. Alex could see it from the entrance so he cast ShortBlade aiming at the wall and allowed the rat to run up to him and start chewing on his leg. That ¡­ hurts ¡­ It feels like ¡­ ugh ¡­ like something chewing on my muscles. Fuck. Ow. ¡°Cast Shor ¨C fuck! Cast ShortBl ¨C fuck! Cast ShortBlade!¡± crunch As the final rat fell, Alex learned several important lessons: Getting damaged hurts just like it would on Earth. Casting spells is far harder when something is distracting you by eating your leg. Spell backfire headaches compound. Casting a shorter incantation definitely lowers the pain from a backfire. That headache on the first day was far worse than even this compounded one. Damn it, I¡¯m taking a health potion.Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. Okay, last lesson for this excursion: health potions actually deaden an area as well as healing it. That¡¯s pretty important. I wonder if I can just make potions that help to deaden the pain without removing it completely. I¡¯d much rather be in complete control of my faculties while nearing death than simply passing out and falling to pain. So, Alex took his lessons ¨C and his single copper coin ¨C and turned his back on the obvious left turn in the path ahead, walking instead back to the entrance of the dungeon. He was careful on the way back to peek into each of the rooms along the way to be sure that the monsters hadn¡¯t respawned. They had not, so he made it back to the entrance room and sat on a convenient ledge near the portal leading outside. I¡¯m going to rework these debuffs while I¡¯m waiting for the monsters to respawn. Obviously having them disappear each time I cast a spell or get hit by some kind of attack is less than ideal. I¡¯ll want a way to turn them off manually without having to reach the threshold, but I¡¯ll want them to basically be running otherwise unless I reach a truly dangerous amount in the pool. Hmm ¡­ Okay, here¡¯s what I¡¯m going to do: I¡¯m going to calculate the drain amount directly from my new knowledge ¨C 1 mana corresponds to 10 HP / MP / SP drained ¨C and the link the spell can have to my interface. So, with my current HP regen of 1.53 HP per minute, I¡¯d want to feed 0.153 mana to the DrainHP spell every minute. Since ThrottleHPDrain runs every millisecond, that¡¯s0.00000255 mana per tick. I¡¯ll only recalculate this value every 10 minutes. If my HP regeneration goes up in the meantime, I can deal with a few minutes of inefficiency to keep the spell running more efficiently the rest of the time. Having to check the timer is slow compared to just spinning through the loop. So, ThrottleHPDrain will simply feed that amount of mana to the DrainHP spell every tick unless the total HP hits a new threshold. I¡¯ll set it to be 60% of my total HP because I want to be as conservative as possible for now. If my HP drops that low, the spell will shut off so that I can get the maximum healing possible. As long as my HP is above 60%, but below the original threshold of maxHP ¨C 2 * HPRegen, I¡¯ll set the spell to feed only a minimal amount of mana to the spell ¨C the new minimum will be 0.0000001 mana per tick ¨C which should keep the spells active but not impede my healing too much. And, finally, for the manual shut off, I¡¯ll just add another input to the Throttle spells which will stop the spell whenever it receives an input. Then all I¡¯ll have to do is send a bit of a mana to that input and the spells will shut down. After a few minutes of tinkering, Alex had a new version of the DrainMP and ThrottleMPDrain spells ready so he left the dungeon and set up his testing Radios to keep Polly far away from him. After 3 explosions, Alex found his sole bug and got the spell working. He examined Polly to be sure, and then re-worked and tested both the HP and SP versions of the spell. Once everything seemed to be working, he redefined the spells and cast them himself. Everything seemed to work fine, so he checked that the manual off switches worked, then recast them again. Turning, he reentered the dungeon and started the grind. After his second run through the dungeon, he realized that monsters wouldn¡¯t respawn unless he went outside the dungeon. After his third run, he realized that monsters would respawn as soon as he exited the dungeon. After his third hour running the dungeon, Alex noticed that the Throttle spells still weren¡¯t quite what he wanted. His MP bar rapidly jumped around the upper threshold even when he wasn¡¯t casting spells. Well, that took a bit of thought, but what¡¯s happening is that the other Throttle spells are draining a bit of mana for upkeep and that¡¯s putting my calculation of how much mana to drain per tick off. So, then, the spell pretty quickly drops below the threshold I want it to be and moves around far more rapidly than the others. Waffling between two tiny numbers, the spell isn¡¯t actually causing any harm because of the super-small value I¡¯ll drain if my mana drops below the upper threshold, but even if there¡¯s no problem with it I want a more elegant solution. Elegant programming is beautiful and something that I can be proud of. What I¡¯ve got now just looks like it was hacked together by someone who didn¡¯t know the system ¡­ which it was. I¡¯ll refactor the whole thing on the morning the slimes are supposed to attack. For now, it¡¯s good enough and I don¡¯t want to waste time blowing Polly up which could be better spent killing dog-sized rats. Towards the end of the day, Alex decided that he¡¯d be doing his final run. On this last run, he let a rat chew on him for a full 15 minutes. He nearly broke down and killed the thing several times, but his patience paid off. At the end of the 15 minutes he saw a new line pop up in his changelog: 6:54 pm ¨C Concentration stat change from level 0 to level 1 Fuck yes! Alex thought.
Concentration This stat increases a person¡¯s capability to fight through distraction and continue their current actions.
It¡¯s my first new stat. I wasn¡¯t even sure that new stats could be added. It¡¯s a little weird given that the rest of the system seems to be focused on increasing your knowledge and allowing you to become stronger through that kind of power. But directly increasing one¡¯s focus when dealing with pain is certainly a bad-ass way of allowing people to actually use their full HP bar ¨C instead of simply fainting when they get hit too hard. Alex immediately killed the rat, took an HP potion, then exited the dungeon and headed back to Scottstown. Along the way, he checked his changelog to see what he¡¯d gained. Blade leveled to 7, up 4 levels which pushed Alex¡¯s Force Spells skill up to level 3. His Constitution, Intelligence, and Endurance had all been pushed up by 2 due to his Vitality, Wisdom, and Metabolism going up by 4. But his Intelligence had also increased by another 7 throughout the dungeon run and his Constitution had gone up by 3 as well. There¡¯s some other way to gain base stats than just regenerating my pool. I mean, that¡¯s obvious because my changelog has increases in Int without any corresponding increase in Wis, but it wasn¡¯t something I knew before today. So ¡­ that¡¯s another thing to ask about tonight. I guess the good news is that, with those increases, my HP is now 250 and my MP is now 300 ¨C though I feel like the MP could be much higher. Well, I didn¡¯t level today so maybe there¡¯s a limit on max MP dependent upon your level? Hmm ¡­ okay, after some calculations, MP should definitely be 524 at 21 Int. So there is some kind of upper threshold holding that back. maximum MP formula information
maximum MP formula floor((A+log(Lvl))*100*floor(Lvl/10+1))
Where A = log(200), Lvl = personal level
So ¡­ n*log(n) again, but this time the cap is with respect to level. While you can grow your base stats as high as you like, if you don¡¯t increase your personal level, your excess base stats won¡¯t have any effect. Alex checked for HP and SP and found the exact same formula regulated growth there as well. Well ¡­ now it¡¯s clear why level 10 is such a huge deal for survival on Marin. The maximum pools for HP, MP, and SP all increase from 325 to 660. That¡¯s an increase of 181% at level 10. No wonder everyone¡¯s all in agreement that the survival rate of those over level 10 is so much better than it is for anyone under it. While there will be similar bumps every 10 levels, the first one is so very important because it has the highest relative jump. At level 20, you¡¯d only get an increase of 51% and the percentage will continue to decrease as you gain levels. It makes sense that even the goddesses made it easier to get to level 10 because they really want people to have a chance! So, puzzling over these numbers and keeping an eye out for overreaching limbs, Alex arrived back at Scottstown and headed to the West Inn for some supper and a close to the day.
Erin arrived shortly after Alex had gotten meals for both of them and they sat and chatted through their supper. After a few minutes, Victoria showed up to eat too and they were all joined by Helen only a short time afterward. Alex asked about a haircut and Helen volunteered to clip it for him. Alex was surprised, but they went outside immediately and Helen used a spell which did the cutting. It took only a few moments before they were done and they headed back inside. Victoria and Erin both complimented Helen on a job well done and they all sat back down to keep chatting. After a while, Alex mentioned how well he¡¯d done in the dungeon and asked about the growth in base stats which wasn¡¯t from regeneration. The ladies variously informed him that when fighting against monsters that were spawned, large usage of any pool resource would give bonuses to the base stat that regulated it. These bonuses would fall off the more a person entered dungeons so they weren¡¯t often mentioned. Bonus stats like this were the only way, however, that one could achieve the maximum pool values ¨C though that was less and less likely as your level grew. When he followed up with a question about Concentration, Victoria promised to get him a list of auxiliary stats which could be earned. Then Alex followed up with his observation about Concentration: ¡°It seems like a weird thing to me, that the system would modify your physical body. All the skills and abilities seem to be focused on giving you knowledge and then letting you use that to grow stronger instead of directly altering you.¡± Helen replied, ¡°And what of the base stats? When you gain Constitution does your body not suddenly become more hale? You become literally harder to kill with an increase in this stat. With an increase in Intelligence, your body is able to hold more mana at a given time. With an increase in Wisdom, your body is able to reach out and pull more mana in, channeling it to fill your pool more rapidly.¡± ¡°The system modifies your body; it¡¯s just somewhat sneaky about it. From what I hear, you had a pretty significant gut when you first arrived, but it¡¯s nearly gone now. Just a few levels and the system is already modifying you to be closer to your ideal.¡± Alex looked down and blushed ¨C his inactivity gut was disappearing. Helen¡¯s right. I¡¯ve just been so focused on the two areas where I¡¯ve only seen increases in knowledge that I¡¯ve neglected the base of the whole thing. Even though it doesn¡¯t seem like I¡¯ll get Superman level of strength or the capability to run like the Flash, my body is definitely being slightly altered by the system every day. A slight increase in either my capability to ignore pain or a slight decrease in the pain that I feel is not outside the bounds of what I¡¯ve already seen occurring ¨C even if I wasn¡¯t paying enough attention. ¡°I ¡­ uh ¡­ thanks for correcting me, Helen. Also, my gut might have been larger than now, but it wasn¡¯t ¨C significant ¨C just present.¡± ¡°Aww,¡± teased Erin, ¡°I liked you just fine with your gut. Don¡¯t worry about it. You¡¯re obviously a person who works hard. You won¡¯t have to worry about having a gut or tons of extra fat again under the system.¡± ¡°That¡¯s true,¡± said Victoria, ¡°I look quite athletic and I barely work. Just a few hours of mobility training with Sam a week and the system has taken care of the rest!¡± All three ladies smiled at Alex and he found himself grinning back. He discussed the rest of his gains and was reminded to use Push as well as Blade so that his Force Spells skill would level up faster. He also made a note to go and get a second pair of clothes and shoes in the morning. After ordering a final round of drinks, they all chatted about Helen¡¯s planning for the slime siege, Victoria¡¯s planning for a new spell to strike up at the slimes¡¯ cores ¨C here Alex gave her the final version of Parrot, Radio, and all his currently-successful spells written in Pigeon ¨C and Erin¡¯s day hunting game on the North East side of town where she found several deer which she sold to the East and West Inns. Victoria and Helen left to go home and Alex and Erin took their bath together for the first time since she¡¯d come home from the slime dungeon. They just washed each other and quickly left the room. They talked for a few minutes in his room about the party for the next evening and Alex paid Erin for the Inn. Then, they made love slowly and carefully. ¡°Erin,¡± said Alex, ¡°Thank you for choosing me. You¡¯re a wonderful person and I enjoy the time we have together.¡± ¡°I love you too, Alex.¡± ¡°I love you, Erin.¡± They fell asleep in each others¡¯ arms, and Alex¡¯s last thoughts were, Thanks, Phoebe. This is a town filled with decent folks. There are even people like Erin, here, who will help you through a difficult time; grow closer to you; but not bind you away from your dreams. Thanks for the great spawn, Phoebe!