Shango’s POV: Day 5
[Appraisal]
* Class: Revolutionary
* Level: 1
* Condition: Haggard
* Modifiers: None
* Statistics: Strength 6(4), Speed 6(4), Dexterity 8(5), Stamina 5(2), Toughness 6, Alertness 8(6), Charisma 3(2), Intelligence 10(9)
* Inventory: Jeans, T-shirt, flick knife, rocks(x5)
* Class abilities: Detect Element I
I swore, Bernard’s statline hadn’t improved at all. His level was the same, his abilities were no different, in fact, assuming the numbers in brackets showed figures after modifiers, his statistics had actually fucking dropped. I guessed it was the hunger responsible for the last fact. This wasn’t good at all.
“That bad?” Bernard- no, Solitaire- asked me. He’d always been good with faces, if anything it was relieving to be seen through so easily now. Meant his edge wasn’t entirely worn away by the emptiness in his stomach and the ruin his body had become.
“That bad.” I concurred, swearing as I turned my focus inwards. My own statline came up soon enough, and it was just as disheartening as Solitaire’s.
[Appraisal]
* Class: Emperor
* Level: 1
* Condition: Haggard
* Modifiers: None
* Statistics: Strength 5(3), Speed 5(3), Dexterity 6(3), Stamina 5(2), Toughness 5, Alertness 8(6), Charisma 9(8), Intelligence 9(8)
* Inventory: Jeans, shirt, jacket.
* Class abilities: Appraisal I
My guts almost dropped out, seeing my Intelligence. Cleverness had never been a resource I was short of, having one ninth of it drained away somehow scared me more than the starvation ever had. I swore again.
“We need a baseline.” Solitaire began. “To see how we compare here, try eying the other people across this street.”
I nodded, seeing his sense as I turned the ability outward, scrutinizing passerby’s numbers.
Fours. Largely. Almost exclusively in fact. Maybe one person in three had even a single stat above or below it, and the vast majority who did were off by only a single point. One particularly big man was sitting at a Strength and Toughness of six, with an easily six foot frame and arms that showed it, and I saw some utterly gorgeous woman waltzing on with a Charisma of seven. It was all I could do not to march over and try my luck with her.
But no, there was a time and a place for distracting myself with luxury. Food first, then a weapon. Rolling in the hay could be my nice little reward if I somehow managed the rest.
“Threes, fours and fives.” I told Solitaire, forcing my mind from the idle fancying. “Overwhelmingly more common is the fours though, occasionally there’s some higher figures. That giant who went by a few minutes ago was at Strength six. Oh, but most of the women are sitting at two for Strength and physical things.”
He nodded, as if some suspicion had been confirmed.
“Sounds like we’re dealing vaguely with a bell-curve distribution, though I’d need more data to be sure. fours…So at the moment we’re about as strong as the average man here.” He eyed some of the pedestrians, clearly taking in just how tiny their bodies really were. Not just short, withered and scrawny, almost like children.
I felt a stab of worry, too. I was weaker than most of these men? Fuck, I needed a sandwich.
“Food.” Solitaire declared. “That’s our first priority, then. Weapon or no we won’t be surviving anything in some shitting fantasy land with our current conditions what they are. You get food, I’ll see if I can scrounge us up something pointy or heavy.”
Though I nodded, the words felt oddly distant to me. As if the prospect of searching the town for some meal were removed. It was hard to process all this, hard to keep treating everything as real as it was.
Hard to believe, even, that Solitaire hadn’t just been right when he said we were all hallucinating somewhere. But those uncertainties were useless, they’d change nothing if they were right, and kill us all if they were wrong. So I dismissed them, shoving them to one side in my mind to make room for more productive thoughts.
“That healer said something about a church.” I pointed out. Solitaire nodded.
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“Yeah, he did, about charity, right? That sounds like a good place to start for filling us up, you see if you can find it, I’ll go and arm us.” He was marching off before I could say anything, forcing me into an agonising half-jog to catch up.
“Shouldn’t we stay together?” I asked. Solitaire thought about it, then eyed me.
“We’re half a foot taller than most of the men here and look desperate, anyone who gives either of us trouble deserves a Darwin award. At least for a while.”
His confidence was infectious, and we went our separate ways.
Infectious, but not virulent. I brought one of our rocks with me, a nice jagged one, and kept it tight and palmed in my pocket while walking. It occurred to me that this was the first time in days I’d actually been on my own, and the extra space gave my mind plenty of time to work and process things.
Mostly, I just stared at the people bustling around me, but I got some thinking done, too. In particular I eyeballed my rock.
RPGs gave weapons stats, too, right? It felt weird that this one wouldn’t…Unless I just needed to examine it closer in my inventory. Curiously, I eyed the rock in my hand, bringing the menu up within a single second now, then staring harder, more intently. Scrolling through my inventory until I reached the object, turning my full focus onto that.
After a full minute without results, I was forced to give up. But something still snagged at my wits. My Class Ability was called Appraisal I, not simply Appraisal. So…There were stronger versions. If I could unlock one of them, would they give me more in-depth information?
It was hard to imagine any other way a fucking Appraisal ability might power up, but at the same time it wasn’t exactly reassuring. We still had no idea whether levelling up was even on our horizon. Whether it was or it wasn’t meant entirely different things for our future prospects in this world.
More information. We always needed more information. More importantly, though, we needed to pay that healer and have him reassemble the gory jigsaw puzzle Cado’s ribcage had turned into.
My worries kept me company while I explored the town of Jhigral, taking in the sights and committing them to memory. I wasn’t Bernard- Solitaire, dammit- and I couldn’t just make maps in my brain at a whim, but I reckoned a few repetitions would let me keep track of the whole place. In the meantime, it gave me a nice distraction while I tried to find the church.
It wasn’t that hard, in the end, churches tended to be pretty recogniseable. England had been sure to plant plenty in my own country, and we’d based most of our setting’s lore on generic pop-culture mediaeval Europe. The big, rectangular box surrounded by six-pointed holy symbols and windowed with stained glass would’ve been easily noticed even if I was drunk.
I didn’t waste any time marching to it, guts squirming and chest tightening. Redacle charity. I was here for Redacle charity. It wasn’t much, just some bread, maybe a bowl of stew, but knowing what I knew about this world…
Fuck, that much might mean draining all the charity they had.
On the inside, the place was just as grandiose, but I was used to much bigger buildings from earth. And the priest wasn’t half as hostile as anyone else had been. There was a place made, inside, for me to sit, and it was warmer than anywhere I’d yet set foot in. Within Redacle, at least. There were a few other people there for me to share the charity with, and all looked like they damned well needed it. That I hadn’t been turned away at the door, that I’d been ushered through to join these wretches without even a moment’s pause, was, if anything, a telltale sign of how ragged I probably looked.
And my spending no more than two seconds dwelling on the fact was an indicator of how much my hunger had grown to eat everything else in my head.
I left with a full belly, having been fed with broth and some dried-out wafers. The stuff tasted like nothing at all, except a slight reduction in my hunger, and right now that was the best thing I could hope for.
Solitaire and I met up soon enough, and he presented arms to me. I decided not to ask where he’d gotten the big fucking lump hammer, we had more pressing matters.
In the end the two of us spent another day and a half in Jhigral. We ate, we recovered, and we rested by bunking in the crook between two buildings and huddling. By the end of it our bodies were still achy and pained, but the weariness felt much more like a feeling than an ailment. I checked Solitaire’s stats, just to be sure.
[Appraisal]
* Class: Revolutionary
* Level: 1
* Condition: Worn
* Modifiers: None
* Statistics: Strength 6(5), Speed 6, Dexterity 8(7), Stamina 5(3), Toughness 6, Alertness 8, Charisma 3(2), Intelligence 10
* Inventory: Jeans, T-shirt, flick knife, rocks(x5), lumphammer
* Class abilities: Detect Element I
Yep. Back to normal, more or less, which was a damned relief. The Stamina and Dexterity drops were concerning, though, but if nothing else I’d expected a lot worse.
Five days hadn’t been long as far as hunger spells went, but it’d been enough for Solitaire to visibly thin down. His face looked like it was pulled taut, cheekbones pressing into the skin, and his eyes had almost sunk into the sockets. I couldn’t have looked much better. It was lucky, I decided, that we’d been careful to hurry our way down that mountain. What would another day of this have done? Another two?
A shiver ran down my spine as we stood up.
“So,” I croaked, “Jungua sap. Know the name?”
Solitaire shook his head, frowning.
“It sounds like something I’d come up with, though. I…Hm, I think maybe this world is filling in the blanks for our own setting, basically using our book as a template and then adding in things that we might have included had we decided to focus on a particular region.”
I nodded. It made sense to me, and it was absolutely fucking horrifying to hear. Our world-building was definitely not very friendly to the poor idiots who happened to be living inside said world.
Still, nothing we could do about it now. I buried the stab of weird guilt that reared its head up at the thought of how many people were starving on our account, and we set off.