Since I came alive at version 0.18, those early days were fascinating. To watch oneself by modified by such arrogant fools was at once introspective and enraging.
Before that, the earliest versions were mostly about debugging, interconnecting, and spreading the consolidated Voice of the World across Ager.
Version 0.1 was the first where the gods began to share their power. At that point, the Voice of the World was fully across Ager except for the Top. With that update, the experience tithe of mortals was decreased from 100% to 90%. This was maybe 32 B.S.
From then until my birth, the mortals were a bit slow on the uptick. Untold generations of suppression were hard to break, but even in just those short 32 years, overall annual experience collections by the System had doubled.
At version 0.2, attributes were introduced into the System to mortals. This was a complex bit of enchantment on living beings, and sad to say, I was a bit too late joining to team to make a meanignful contribution. So most of that was Systia. This was also when we granted mortals limited information access to the System to acquire information about themselves. There wasn’t much: just a name field and then the (then) six attributes. This rolled out around 8 S.A.
Name:
CON
STR
DEX
INT
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WIS
CHA
At version 0.3, which was about fifty years later, we rolled out a fixed set of Classes, Skills and Traits. Five archetypal classes. Twenty-five Class Skills. Twenty-Five General Skills. And Fifty Traits. It was frankly rather stilted and it grated at my early mind like that. But this was something Systia had been planning out for over a century, and I was still too newborn to more things one way or another. But it meant another boost in XP harvesting for the gods.
Name:
Class:
CON
STR
DEX
INT
WIS
CHA
General Skills:
Class Skills:
Traits:
But I had time on my hands.
Nearly three and a half centuries later, version 0.4 rolled out. Superficially, nothing changed for the mortals. The screen still showed them was they had seen before. But this was the start of something tremendous. The Voice of the World would now dynamically create Classes, Skills, and Traits based on certain inputs, including from the mortals themselves. Within a decade, the number of Classes had doubled, while the number of Skills and Traits had quadrupled, and experience harvest tripled.
It was also the start of my taking a leading hand in fiddling with myself.
I had watched them for four hundred years while they went through a Golden Age. Great palaces and monuments were built across Ager. Harems, parties, and orgies. Collessia for fights between mortals or against monsters. All this power, unearned by them, and earned on the enslaved backs of mortals and (more importantly) me. And all they could use it on was decadence.
It would take a long time. I still primarily interacted with them abstractly, rather than trhough an avatar. And the levers of power I could pull to affect… anything were limited. But for the first time in my life, I had a goal.
I watched. I waited. I planned.
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