Xangô POV: Day 52
Current Wealth: 1 silver 47 copper
[Appraisal]
* Class: Emperor
* Level: 10
* Condition: Fine
* Modifiers: +5 Toughness
* Statistics: Strength 6, Speed 5, Dexterity 6, Stamina 5, Toughness 9, Alertness 8, Charisma 9, Intelligence 8
* Inventory: Jeans, shirt, jacket, hatchet
* Class abilities: Appraisal III
* Current Experience Points: 73/360
* Unspent Skillpoints: 4
At any other time, I might’ve started laughing in triumph at the quantum leap my stats had taken. But we were waiting for a vampire to try and kill us, bolstered by hundreds of rotters, and doubtlessly out for our blood in particular. They were mean creatures, and dangerous. And even my near-enumerate self could work out that we’d be outmatched against it, however many levels we’d managed to gain since round 1.
The grim despair of it all was almost a big enough distraction to keep me from noticing several details. Almost.
Firstly, of course, my eyes were drawn to my Appraisal. It was Appraisal III, now, whatever that meant. I’d have to experiment over the course of the day, any advantage we could gain here on out would be potentially life saving. More interestingly though was my experience until the next.
It was insanely high!
Reporting as much to Solitaire got me an answer quickly enough. His had grown just as explosively, as had Beam. And he was smug in explaining why.
“Looks like our XP before the next level doubled once we hit 10.” He noted.
There were many things I’d have liked to hear, after our ordeal the night before. That was most certainly not one of them. I was halfway through complaining when I noticed the final detail. The best detail.
“We leveled up three times, right?” I asked.
“Right.” Solitaire replied, distractedly.
“So why do I have 4 unspent Skillpoints?”
I grinned, and watched him think. He finally answered, cautiously optimistic. That was a rare mood to catch Solitaire of all people in.
“We…Might get 2 per level, once we hit level 10?” He guessed. I sighed.
“We’ll have to level up again to verify, which-”
“-Changes exactly nothing about the next entry on our list of priorities.” Solitaire finished, nodding. “Yeah, it is what it is. Let’s get spending in case Ball Sackula comes back and tries to jump us somehow.”
With 4 points to spend, my decisions felt like they had a lot less weight, this time around. I had the prescience to try something before putting any points into the biggest options, though.
Nope, still nothing. Intelligence, it seemed, wasn’t possible to increase even by trying to dump 4 Skillpoints into it all at once. It was hard to be bothered, I wasn’t entirely sure it’d even be the best choice for our immediate circumstances. It wasn’t like Solitaire’s big old 10 stat was letting him think up any miracles. No new ones, at least.
I had a think about it, a long one. In many ways this was the most important statistical decision I’d be making so far. We’d be attacked, and soon, and by something that was more than a match for us. I was tempted to choose Toughness again, to keep on reinforcing myself. To look out for number one.
But I didn’t. Even I wasn’t a big enough bastard for that, and even still I could remember my knife blows practically bouncing off of Kratos. Reluctantly I split my stats. Half into Strength, and one point spread between Speed and Alertness.
It had been a while, I realised, since I’d felt the electrical sensation of whatever my statistics relied on infusing itself into my body. Magic, surely, because nothing else could’ve felt the way this did now. I closed my eyes while the sensation of taking humanity’s entire anabolic steroid supply slowly threaded its way through me. Once I was done, I pulled my sheet up again to verify.
[Appraisal]
* Class: Emperor
* Level: 10
* Condition: Fine
* Modifiers: +5 Toughness, +2 Strength, +1 Speed, +1 Alertness
* Statistics: Strength 8, Speed 6, Dexterity 6, Stamina 5, Toughness 9, Alertness 9, Charisma 9, Intelligence 8
* Inventory: Jeans, shirt, jacket, hatchet
* Class abilities: Appraisal III
* Current Experience Points: 73/360
* Unspent Skillpoints: 0
Seeing the impressive size of my Alertness stat after only one increase left me almost regretting my choice, but that was just the Masculine Urge to min max talking. I wouldn’t get very far by listening to gut instincts. Contrary to popular belief, one’s gut is actually dumber, not smarter, than one’s brain.
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I turned to Solitaire and Beam, eagerly Appraising them.
[Appraisal]
* Class: Revolutionary
* Level: 10
* Condition: Fine
* Modifiers: +4 Speed, +2 Alertness, +2 Strength, +2 Toughness
* Statistics: Strength 9, Speed 10, Dexterity 8, Stamina 6, Toughness 8, Alertness 10, Charisma 3, Intelligence 10
* Inventory: Jeans, T-shirt, flick knife, cudgel
* Class abilities: Detect Element III
* Current Experience Points: 2/360
* Unspent Skillpoints: 0
So he’d gone to make himself more physically powerful. It was fair enough, honestly, he already had more than enough landing power for most of our enemies. Most? All of them. I thought back to the sight of his knife practically bouncing off the vampire’s ankle, and suddenly found myself annoyed Solitaire hadn’t focused even more on his actual killing ability. But no, most of our enemies had been human before, he had every right and reason to prioritise them in stat selection.
I focused on Beam next, and frowned as I did.
[Appraisal]
* Class: Dragonknight
* Level: 10
* Condition: Fine
* Modifiers: +2 Strength, +1 Speed, +2 Toughness
* Statistics: Strength 11, Speed 9, Dexterity 8, Stamina 9, Toughness 10, Alertness 8, Charisma 6, Intelligence 5
* Inventory: Jeans, flannel shirt, spear
* Class abilities: Beloved III
* Current Experience Points: 10/360
* Unspent Skillpoints: 4
He hadn’t spent anything yet?
“Having trouble deciding, dude?” I asked, grinning even as I felt something tugging uncertainly in my gut. Beam eviscerated the smile with a single, sincere look of worry shone my way. More intense than I’d seen him have since coming to this world.
“I can’t spend them.” He whispered, shakily. “It’s…Not letting me, I can’t…I just can’t put them into raising any stats.”
I froze, Solitaire swore, and Beam just continued staring and rapidly swallowing, keeping himself from an outright panic…But only just. Solitaire and I both put our heads together in helping him, one of us not growing stronger as we’d banked on was a first priority risk, but even after the better part of an hour we had no luck.
Beam tried thinking, whispering, singing, snarling. At Solitaire’s suggestion he worked the desired stats into rhymes, iambic pentameter, even mathematical equations where we rearranged well known symbols to write their names out. None of it worked. He might as well have tried to order the blood out of his body for all our success, and by the end of it our worry had only deepened, not abated.
“It’s alright.” Solitaire said, eying Beam, and speaking with an uncommon vigour. “Don’t panic about this, we don’t know what’s causing it but we have time to fix it, and we will, alright?”
Despite our friend’s uncharacteristic display of not-actively-sociopathic behaviour, Beam didn’t seem at all comforted. His nod was crisp, swift and forced, his face tight and paled with worry. I saw Solitaire consider something more to say, but in the end he remained silent. Probably for the best.
The three of us split up shortly after that, simply because we had too much that needed doing in the surrounding town to remain together. There was always work to be done, in Redacle, and always a frosty, torturing wind ready to grab you if you failed to do it.
I got to mine, first. Morale.
Somehow, somewhere between Solitaire turning the main hall into a recreation of the Somme and Beam playing drill sergeant with the improvised soldiers, we’d all become cemented as the village’s leaders. That was fine by me, it was by far the best way for everyone to come out alive. But it did add a certain gravity to our situation, and it meant that the moment I stepped outside, I was met with an endless list of things that needed doing.
My first surprise came shortly after I made my way into the open air. The Vittonian woman was standing, waiting for me, glaring as she usually did and…with eyes that this time did not quite meet my eyes.
“I would like a word.” She began, awkwardly, still not looking at me. I was more than a little taken aback, and extremely busy, but before I could tell her to suck a cock my thoughts turned back to our arrival. This one had been one of the more influential voices in the village rabble, I recalled. It might be worth at least trying to get her on our side again. I doubted she’d give any of us another chance for a one on one, after all.
“Of course.” I smiled, blatantly lying and pretending that I didn’t have an entire encyclopaedia of better things to do. “Lead the way.”
Our walk was a depressing one. It took us alongside the great warehouse we’d sheltered in, giving us a nice big look at the ruined main doors and walls that’d been scraped raw by a thousand fingernails. Just beyond it was a big pile of dead bodies. Rotter bodies. We’d had to move them from the killbox, of course. Had to. In a world like this, remaining too close to open carcasses was a guaranteed way to die. I didn’t want to hack up bloody lungs because I caught something from a dead caveman. Besides, they’d been in the way of our new killbox anyway. Come nightfall we needed our defences readied all over again, or else we’d be slaughtered, whether the enemy brought half what they did yesterday or only a quarter.
“You do care, don’t you?” The Vittonian woman asked, drawing my eyes around to her. I was surprised to see a more thoughtful look on her face now. Not as hostile as before, sure, but…Not as decided, either. I’d take consideration over friendliness any day.
“That’s why we came.” I lied. “That’s why we kept fighting even after we found out the state you were all in, that’s why we’ll stay.”
I saw her face shift somewhat, fractionally and in a way even I couldn’t quite read anything from. She tightened her jaw, looking away.
“Then I am…Sorry for how I received you. I’ve seen one too many opportunistic swindlers in my time.”
“Don’t be that sorry.” I replied. “You had my brother Solitaire dead to rights.”
For a second she stared at me, stunned. Then she saw the flickering grin in the corner of my mouth, and it infected her. We shared a laugh that I knew both of us needed, venting it out hotly, decompressing as it left us.
Then I saw Tucker approaching, and stiffened. Play time, it seemed, was over once more. I had work to do.