The Todd advances. Just a few steps this time: the queue has been slow going.
He feels a squeeze to the crook of his elbow and looks down at the woman linked arm in arm to him. Élena Ortìz de Landázuri is wearing her floral dress and boots from yesterday, standing out against the mass of folk wearing their [System] provided martial Gis. She fusses with her still-wet greying hair and tuts distractedly before noticing Todd’s attention.
“Que buen chico,” she coos, patting his arm and shuffling forward.
“Uh yea,” Todd assures her. “Don’t worry Mrs Landázuri, the line isn’t too much longer.”
He sighs. There are still about a dozen people ahead of them, breaking out into some aggressive foot tapping. A voice ahead loses their patience and shouts, “make up your mind already!” Which in turn rattles pockmarked Jingshu, the lanky kid that’s got his hand pressed to the floating, dark-smoke crystal.
Instead of engaging in an oncoming pain in the ass, Todd adjusts his hold on Élena’s arm and turns back to look out towards the courtyard. A few dozen yards out, Dr Chowdhury stands in the middle of three or four hundred people, the latter down meditatively; sat on the floor and trying to Cultivate.
“I don’t understand why you think I know how this works,” the Doctor wearily twines. “I’m a podiatrist, not a magic kung-fu guru!” But her point is somewhat undercut by the heroic figure she strikes in her battle-robe. “Just follow the instructions in your Cultivation Manual,” she implores them.
Satisfied the Doctor has the level-ones well in hand, and spotting Randall hard at work inhaling himself towards immortality, Todd pulls back to take another step forward. Searching dartingly through his adjacent, he calls out, “does someone still have the [Skill Catalogue Chit]?”
A short woman with dirty blonde hair and a freckly sunburn replies, “oh you’re one of Joe’s friends, right?”
His eyes narrow. “Yea. I’m Todd.” He tries to offer her his free left hand but they fail to successfully negotiate a handshake.
She pats him on the shoulder instead. “Bernice.”
“Oh. The cop?”
She laughs, “don’t worry kid, whatever you think you’ve done, you’re out of my jurisdiction.”
“Wha – I haven’t...”
“I’m kidding, kidding! Cop joke.” She sticks a thumb over further to her left, “Jen Roth’s got it, I think.”
“Business Jenny?”
Officer Bernice frowns in amusement. “You kids. Has everybody got a nickname already?” She shakes her head. “I’ll tell her you need it next.” Then she holds a hand out to put a pause on the conversation, and looks up. Ciforre, trailing her robe through the air is drifting overhead.
“Miss Ciforre! I wanted to ask you,” Officer Bernice cups her hands about her mouth to project her voice, then drops them as the pixie descends.
“Ms O’Shea. I am pleased to see you amongst the level-twos. If it is within my power to answer, I am happy to field any query.”
“Two questions. Number one, do I have a cool name meaning?”
Ciforre removes her frames, and bunching a few folds of her substance rubs it against the lens before replacing them on her face. “Victory from the Noble Hawk.”
“Very cool. Question number two,” Bernice taps a finger against the side of her nose before wagging it forward in emphasis. “Is there going to be a Skill in there that lets me tell the truth?”
Ciforre goes very still. “Is there something preventing you from telling it now?” She probes.
“No, I mean: I want to be able to tell when someone is lying. But ah, like 100% for certain.”
The pixie purses her lips and then glowers suspiciously at Todd. Why? What did he do?
The whorling energy of Ciforre’s top-knot darkens, and her grip on her stone tome tightens. “There is an available Skill which can give your bare fist the strength to crush a boulder.”
“Oh I don’t need that. I’m gonna get stronger if I level up anyway right?” She flits her hand to dismiss the idea. “I want a magic Lie Detector spell.”
“The [Spring Leap] technique is a versatile asset in the toolbox of any warrior. It would offer you exceptional vertical mobility.”
“Thank you, no. Fuck that,” Bernice grins with a bubbling enthusiasm. “Lie detector!”
An aura of menacing, electric static sets the hairs on Todd's arm to noticeably standing on end. He vigorously shakes his head to deny responsibility.
“Ms O’Shea,” the pixie grips her book with both hands and presses them forward in an urgent plea. "The challenges ahead will test the mettle of any warrior.” She manufactures an expression of concern. “You are a wise woman. Would you not rather select a skill to defeat your enemies and keep your people safe?"
“All due respect ma’am, but I been a cop for seven years. Do you have any idea what I would give to know whether a perp was lying to me? For real, for real? Any cop worth their salt’d shit themselves runny for a superpower like that.”
"I suppose,” Ciforre’s grip tightens into a claw, “we can peruse the skills list to see if an appropriate divination skill is available…"
“Hell yes! Lie detector!” She cheers, giving Todd a thumbs up. He tepidly returns the gesture.
“Even if you might regret that choice in the heat of mortal combat? Do you truly understand that you will shortly face true monsters? Will you be prepared when the time comes?"
Bernice rolls her eyes. “I’ll just mash them with a sword or something.” She leans towards Todd and whispers conspiratorially. “This is gonna be a sword kinda thing right?”
Meeting the pixie’s eyes from the corner of his own, Todd cautiously replies, “yea. Yea pretty sure we’ll get swords.”
Releasing her death grip, Ciforre raises one hand to adjust her hair, taking care not to let her fingers get sucked into its event horizon. Her purple saturates back from menacing thundercloud to benevolent royal. "We will make certain to find you such an ability." She regards Todd's with one last teaspoon of tempest flashing in her irises.
Wilting under her intensity, he raises his hands up in alarmed surrender. “I’m getting a combat ability, I swear!” He insists.
Begrudgingly satisfied, the creature rises in the air; flowing away towards another nearby cluster of people. As she leaves, Todd wheezes out a bellow’s worth of stress.
Bernice gleefully taps her knuckles against his shoulder. “This is pretty great right?”
----------------------------------------
“Hey! Don’t cut in line!” Joe shouts, slapping Todd on the bicep before jogging off to keep the peace. Looking down at the point of injury and rolling his shoulder, Todd decides to forgive him. Joe had been running all morning, making sure the queues were orderly and respected. He’d been ferrying news, information and instructions between leadership, the pixies, and the crowd. He couldn’t hang around all day chatting.
Looking around and hoping for a diversion, Todd spots Candra, but she’s helping Pete limp along with his broken leg. They’re in another line, round the other side of the crystal. He sighs, knowing he would have appreciated the company of her foul mouth right now.
Todd and Élena move forward another position in the line. By this point the elder woman has started telling a long winded and expressive story, from which he has yet to discern the clear meaning of a single word. When she stops suddenly, he realizes it’s because the man next to him is trying to get his attention.
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“Oh, hey how can I help you?” Todd greets him. As he does, he notes the course, draping shift the stranger is wearing.
“Ah,” the man looks down and pinches at the fabric of the gown. “It’s pretty uncomfortable, but it’s better than being buck naked. Befor said it’s made out of rat-spider silk,” he scowls.
“I’ve never heard of a rat spider.”
The man shakes his head. “Yea, no. You’re probably thinking I mean a spider that’s named after a rat. She said it’s actually like a rat with a big old spider abdomen instead of a tail.”
“Gross.”
“Yep.”
“So what happened, you got caught in the shower?”
“No. It was, ah – it was the temperature. I guess everybody’s heat broke down?”
“Oh, yea that was weird. The thermostat malfunctioned, it happened to me too.”
“It got real hot. I mean REAL hot before I figured out my menu and fixed it. Super sweaty. By that time,” the man shrugs. “I kind of just fell asleep in the buff.”
How are people struggling so bad to figure out their menus? “I didn’t realize it got so warm,” Todd under-empathizes curtly. “Did you… anyway, did you need something?”
“Oh, yea.” The man reaches out his hand and presents a thin rectangular sliver of semi-precious stone. It gleams inkily with the same color as the [System] crystal.
“The Catalogue?” Todd accepts the chit graciously.
The man confirms. “It’s got a list of all the available [Skill]s you can choose. But there’s also a whole bunch of stuff you can buy with Nexus Coins. Some of it’s pretty weird.”
“Yea?”
“There’s a lot there. I had some trouble searching when I was looking for something in particular, but I guess it’s pre-sorted to show you what the [System] thinks will be most suited for you.”
“Thanks, that sounds pretty useful,” Todd murmurs, curious about the additional merchandise features.
“It’s real nice of Joe to ask you to take care of granny Élena,” the man pats Todd on the shoulder and heads back to his place in line.
“Joe asked?” Todd grumbles. “I can be a nice guy too. And why does everybody keep touching me,” he growls, looking to Mrs Landázuri for some appreciation.
“No me hagas esperar, mocoso. Quiero disparar balas mágicas de mis dedos,” Élena replies, curling her fingers out in front of her. “Dame la cosa de cristal.”
“Yea, you’re right I just need to get over it,” Todd sighs. He raises the catalogue to press against his forehead and closes his eyes.
If he had expected the available to number many, he should have thunk to think multitudinous.
“Damn,” Todd whispers.
The catalogue list is laid out like a computer menu. There’s a main panel below which has various sub categories and search tools, but at the top level he sees the header categories. Free [Skill] looks like a temporary entry, and a cursory investigation seems to suggest that it has heavy overlap with the larger purchasable [Skill] list. That means picking an ability today doesn’t need to be an irrevocable decision, he could always buy another skill later with Nexus Coins.
It would be smart to compare some costs against the 50 coins he has available, so Todd finds the basic starting skill [Force Arrow] and then inspects its price in the store. His jaw droops as the blood drains from his face. Nope.
Placing a moratorium on his hope for secondary skill purchases, Todd re-resolves to make his choice count. Out of curiosity he tabs open the store equipment menu; but again the price on the top item [F – Entropic Ray Wand] is high enough to convince him he won’t be doing any shopping today, so he swaps back to the free skills list.
The man in the gown had said that the list had been curated by the [System]; that might be a valuable opportunity. Instead of deciding what to think of his choices, Todd wonders what his choices imply the [System] thinks of him. He inspects the top item in his list, [Arc Whip] and opens a detailed description.
Arc Whip: An electrical attack that is effective at short to medium distances. Effectiveness scales with Int (Primary), and Dexterity (Secondary). Equipment focus not required. Classified as basic At-Will ability. Cosmic Energy Cost: High. Upgradeable.
Okay, wow. That’s twice as tasty as he might have guessed. Todd closes the details panel and continues down the line. [Thunderstruck] seems interesting, another electrical attack but with much longer range. However this one appears to require a piece of equipment to be effective. Maybe it’s meant for some kind of lightning archer? Eyes still shut, Todd frowns. This ability doesn’t appeal to him very much, so why is it included so high in his list?
Continuing to [Force Arrow], he finds a mid range attack that hurls a missile of magical energy. It doesn’t seem to require a lot of Cosmic energy, and paired with its longer range and lack of an equipment requirement, reads as a superior attack. That might suggest the attack is less powerful, or maybe that there’s some kind of value to elemental affinities that hasn’t become clear yet.
Of course, Todd considers grimly, maybe these abilities aren’t balanced at all. Maybe seeding a bunch of duds into the list is a part of the test. How unfair would that be?
This one is unusual. [Empath’s Foresight] isn’t an offensive ability at first glance. It looks like a limited ability to see the future. Looking at it closer, he can see it’s labeled as a perception skill. He’d seen that sub-category over in the Store list. It isn’t purely a matter of divination though, the description implies that Todd would only be able to guess the physical movements of other living or sentient things. Huh. Maybe he’ll come back to this one.
[Flame Bolt] looks like a pretty standard ranged fire attack, but then he reconsiders. Standard compared to what? No, he can’t make the mistake of thinking his time playing nerdy games will apply here. He goes carefully over the ability description before progressing to the next. [Ghost Step] is interesting, it would make him insubstantial (but not invisible) for a brief moment. He can imagine a lot of ways that could be very powerful, but it again doesn’t entirely seem to be his style.
The next block of abilities all seem to be mid to long range elemental attack spells. [Stone Needles], [Frost Spike], [Chaotic Orb], [Lambent Ray]. Starting to see a theme here. But there are some oddballs, including the disgusting touch-ranged ability [Putrid Caress] that causes necrotic internal tissue damage. What the hell?
Feeling a tug at his arm, Todd shakes out of the Catalog and notices they’ve advanced a spot in line so he lets Élena lead him before closing his eyes to return.
[Accelerando Ball] brings an amused smile to his face. It’s marked with a ☆ and is probably the weirdest, most specialized skill so far. Apparently it creates a sphere that consumes Cosmic Energy, but in exchange for enhancing his physical abilities. The twist is that he can actually pass the ball to someone else, which sucks on their Cosmic Energy. Every time the ball passes hands, the cost, as well as the power boost increase. It seems like a support ability?
Chewing on this last skill for a few moments, he can’t understand why the [System] would think he would ever want to choose it. Then it hits him.
It’s because the [System] can’t read his mind. It only knows what it can see and detect, and it saw him playing sports on a team. It saw he’s hanging out with Joe and Candra.
Clearly all the attack spells peg him as an offensive spell casting type, which might even be right. But it had been strange that so many electric attacks are high on his list, now it occurs to him that the Catalogue is responding to how strongly he had been affected by the Thunder Champion vision. It also occurs to him that if the System had been in his mind, it would have known that the lightning had been the bit he’d cared for the least. A chill of goosebumps get him wiggling in his skin.
It was the pixies. They were adding their own suggestions to his list. That would explain where the space and time abilities were coming from, Ciforre would have recommended them. The gross, inhumane abilities would have been Befor’s sick version of a joke. Aefore would have bumped the hybrid attack [Thunderstruck] above the other pure magic abilities.
Todd scrolls a bit further down the list, just in case. There are a few more specially selected skills but generally the further he goes, the more hybridized the skills become, and the more support abilities begin appearing. It’s interesting but in the end it doesn’t matter, he’s made his choice.
Opening his eyes, he sees Élena irritatedly proffering her empty palm in front of his nose.
“Sorry,” he murmurs, placing the chit in her hand. Her smile spreads leeringly wide as she slaps the chit against her head and squeezes her eyes shut hard. “Okay, jeez.”
“You pick something, super cool?” Befor asks, flushing in like a pink bubble bath spilt out of a particle collider.
“You’ll probably think it’s boring,” he glacially replies, acutely conscious of how much of a façade her public persona represents.
A sober look from the pixie hints at the sharp mind hidden underneath. “Which means you're picking from one of Aefore’s, aren’t you? Poor Cee-fee," she folds her fingertips under her chin, and raised her elbows impishly. "You keep breaking her widdle heart.”
“Not exactly, but also sort of yes,” Todd tries to explain as the last person in front of him removes their hand from the crystal and backs away.
“Sort of yes? Have you managed to invent a new flavor of no?” She muses, but with a little vocal squeal for keeping up appearances.
Blushing, Todd extracts himself from Élena and places his palm directly on the surface of the crystal. “She had the right idea,” he concedes. “She just misunderstood what I was looking at.”
A line of flowing energy surges from his heart and out along a groove written into his spirit. It rides up to his shoulder, then streams along and down the length of his arm and to the pad of his finger. The moment his spirit makes contact with the crystal and activates his choice, a frigid cold settles deep into his hand and he braces his whole body against the sensation.
Gripping his own hand and gritting his teeth, Todd hears the faint, churning voice of the [System] as it accepts his wish.
[Skill] Selected, it says.
[Water Spear]