Chapter 20

Often, ideas dreamed up while in the depths of one’s cups don’t hold up in the harsh light of day the way they had the inebriated night prior. But the XP counter I’d devised while drunk on a rooftop definitely qualified as awesome in my books.

I only vaguely recalled being drunkenly annoyed by the occasional XP alert popping up over my vision last night, but with my IA’s assistance I had created a simple XP counter that appeared in the corner of my vision. By the time I woke up the next morning I found the counter showed me 2500 XP, indicating a total of 10 children had died. This pushed me up to Level 6, and I had another Skill and Perk point to assign.

As the morning had worn on, I discovered that I was still getting kills, but with the rested bonus I was actually getting 500XP per death instead of a mere 250. Once or twice I even got a full 1000, which told me some of the older kids down there had just bit the big one as well.

In the spirit of maximizing my gains from my kills, I devised a very simple plan. I would stay awake for 4 hours, during the time while I was getting the rested bonus, and then I would use my sleep timer to sleep for another 8 hours to reset it. Over the course of the next four days I spent a full two thirds of my time sleeping, much to Sara’s amusement. She found my laziness odd, but in keeping with my general oddness that she already considered to be a personality trait of mine.

Sara had changed a bit herself recently. Her new haircut was the most prominent visual change, beyond the muscle upgrade. She had cut her hair short from her previous shoulder length cut down to about 6 inches long. Her hair now formed a series of swept back spikes in bright red with yellow and orange highlights that made her look vaguely as though her head were on fire. Combined with the upgrade to her muscles, she almost looked like a completely new person. And she definitely liked how she looked. She had taken to wearing a used tier 2 flak vest that she picked up for relatively cheap at a second hand clothing store. The thick grayish green vest covered her from throat to waist but left her muscular arms open to the air, and given that she didn’t seem to ever wear a shirt beneath it, it did a fine job of showing off her new bulging biceps.

Sara had also picked up a brand new GoreTech automatic shotgun that she seemed to be vaguely in love with. It was a solid piece of engineering that Gary had helped her pick out and she had ordered directly from the corporation itself via Gary’s Gun Garage. She had lovingly petted the red enameled murder machine while espousing its many merits to me. Apparently you could beat a man to death with it, and it’d still fire just fine. Personally, I thought the 32 round drum mags made it seem a bit unwieldy, but if that’s what she likes, that’s what she likes.

Sara had started hanging out down in the pit at The Drunken Kitten at Lizzy’s recommendation as to a place to get some work. She’d taken on a couple of jobs now and was very happy with the creds she was earning. It also didn’t hurt that her chatty nature seemed to be making her friends, according to what I heard from Lizzy.

As I slept the week away I found the XP counter seemed to be moving faster and faster as the week’s end approached. I made plans with Lizzy, the twins, and Sara. We’d be meeting up at The Kitten tomorrow at noon, the eighth day since I poisoned sublevel 10. We’d all gear up, meet up for a quick drink, and then trek down for a bit of a bloodbath. Myself, I was hoping it would just be more along the lines of verifying the job was already complete. But, hope for the best, plan for the worst and all that, so I’d had Sara buy me some ammo and spare clips for my Python.

I lay in bed, finishing up one last preparation that I’d been putting off before I’d be getting one final sleep session in, I just needed to select some perks and skills. I checked my XP counter and found it was just under 320,000 XP. I was all the way up to Level 25, and 15500 XP towards 26. I had no fewer than 21 Skill Points to apply, and 22 Perk Points.

I did a quick check over my skills. With only a couple of four hour windows a day to work out in the apartment or work on various skills like playing my guitar to get my Rockerboy skill up, I hadn’t gotten as many advancements as I’d been hoping for but there were some notable improvements. Body was only up to 2000/4000 XP towards Level 3, but with all my cartwheeling, somersaulting stupidity I’d finally pushed Acrobatics up to Level 1 and it was halfway to Level 2 already…though I had yet to successfully perform a kickflip off a wall.

First and foremost, my Poisoner Skill had been rocketing up like nobody’s business. It had just an hour ago passed Level 10, and I had received a total of four Poisoner specific perks, at Levels 2, 3, 5, and 10 respectively, to choose.

My progress on Rockerboy had begun to slow down a bit, but I had managed to get it up to level 2, earning a Rockerboy specific perk that I had yet to select. Actually, I think I know what I want for that one. I’d gone through those perks the other day and had been ruminating on my choice. I was pretty sure what I wanted but had wanted to sleep on it. I went ahead and made my selection for Rockerboy.

+Mind of Mozart Perk

I double checked the description, ‘Recall every note and every lyric of every song you’ve ever heard.’ I smiled as I felt knowledge absolutely pouring into me. Okay, yeah. Didn’t need to think about it that much. Definitely the right choice.I thought to myself as I finally knew what all the lyrics Kurt Kobain was mumbling in Smells Like Teen Spirit were. That should motivate me to get into my Rockerboy skill hardcore in the near future.

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But first things first, I had a lot of Skill and Perk points to allocate. I moved over to the Poisoner perk and read through the long list of Perks available within the skill. With the skill all the way up to Level 10 already, some of the higher ranked Perks had unlocked and were available for selection. The first one I chose required a rather high Poisoner Level but just seemed like a good idea. ‘Selectively Venomous’ It gave me the ability to decide whether my various attacks would be poisonous or not, which would be rather key, given my second selection. ‘Touch of the Viper,’ where all attacks add poison damage. I had no idea how much that would actually do damage-wise…but I had an image in my mind of railing away at some borged out badass using a machine pistol and causing massive damage as the poison spread through his system even though the bullets did almost nothing. WIth that in mind I put my last two Poisoner specific Perk Points into a Perk that could stack up to three times. ‘Certain Death,’ with a shrug I used one of my many regular Perk Points and pushed it all the way up to the third stack, each additional Perk point added 33% additional poison damage. With three stacks all poison damage was now doubled.

I could now flick someone in the forehead with my finger and cause them to be poisoned. I’d need to do some experimentation to see just how poisonous my attacks actually were, and if the level of poison involved scaled with actual damage done with other methods. Still, very cool, very deadly stuff.

With a pile more Perk Points to go, I decided to move over to my skill points. The first thing I did was add 2 points each to Reflex, Tech, Net, and Cool, bringing them all up to Level 3, equal with body. I couldn’t say for certain I’d need them, but better safe than sorry. I’d been tempted to up Body some as well, but I didn’t want to suddenly go from a skinny, albeit athletic, dude to some kind of musclehead like my sister overnight. People would ask questions I didn’t feel like answering. Besides, I was feeling like I was in pretty good shape overall and was rather enjoying my exercise regime, and kinda just wanted to keep that up to see how far I could take it without using points on it. That said, I’d save some skill points for emergencies, just in case.

That said, there were a couple of Skills I’d found in the list while planning out the cleanup that I thought would be pretty clutch. I’d been considering how we’d hunt down any survivors down there to clear out the entire level. With literally thousands of apartments, checking every single one of them would take days. I needed a way to tell if someone was in a given apartment or not just by walking past it. Thus, I had done a selective search of the Skills list, cross referencing the words ‘detect’ and ‘sense,” to see what I could find. The one I had finally settled on for tracking down the remaining wayward, knife wielding, orphans was called simply ‘Life Sense.’ The description made it clear that I should be able to detect any life within 10 meters of myself, and as the skill leveled up that range should increase. I selected it.

+Life Sense Skill

Suddenly I could feel two people walking around in the apartment on the floor above ours. It was an odd sensation. I couldn’t see a glow through the walls or anything useful like that that I could use to potentially wall shoot someone, if the walls/ceiling weren’t made of duracrete anyway. It was just a more general amorphous feeling. I knew they were there, and could feel them moving around a bit, but couldn’t tell any specifics. Maybe after I level it up it’ll become more clear.

In the process of looking for sense or detect skills I had found one that might very well keep me alive. ‘Detect Trap,’ which according to the description does just what it says on the label. I selected it.

+Detect Trap Skill

I just had this vision of a kid duck taping a grenade to an apartment door and blowing me the fuck up the moment I entered…Hopefully this skill would keep that from happening.

That left me with 11 Skill points remaining and I decided to leave those alone for now. Never know when I’ll need an ace in the hole, and the ability to learn literally any skill needed for some unforeseen situation along with the ability to level that skill up to an expert level in a matter of seconds? Priceless.

I moved on to my Perk Points. With all my many Skills and with my attributes all up to Level 3 I had more than a few choices to go through. After an in depth perusal of my many options, I decided to focus on survivability first and dropped no less than 6 points into various Body Perks. My old faithful ‘Suck it Up’ Perk could be stacked three times and I immediately did so, which boosted inhaler efficacy from its previously boosted +50% up to +200%, which I figured would make a single inhaler almost enough to bring me back from the dead. In addition to that, and in the interest of saving some money on inhalers, I dropped 3 points into the ‘Wolverine’ Perk, which increased my rate of regeneration by a total 200%. With my top of the line nanomachine organ, I figured that should make me pretty damn hardy. The name of the perk had given me pause though. Was that a damn Marvel reference? Ultimately, I chalked it up to just one more thing regarding the GEMA system that I’d probably never know. The last perk I put down in the Body category was ‘Iron Lungs’, which would, I thought, double the amount of exercise I’d be capable of before wearing myself out, since it straight up doubled my stamina.

And even after all that I still had a lot of Perk Points left. I quickly dropped one into ‘Ambidextrous’ under Reflexes. Really wanted to be able to dual wield my pistols properly.

And I found a Perk under Cool called ‘Did You See That?’ that would let me make one perfect throw once per hour. It was stackable to lower the cooldown, but I held off for now.

I still had 11 Skill Points and 14 Perk Points to my name. But frankly I was beginning to become overwhelmed with the sheer number of choices available to me. Ultimately I’d hold on to what I had left for now. Better to wait and see what the future has in store before I lock myself in. There can’t be that many opportunities for mass murder like this in Noir City…right?

I set my sleep timer for 8 hours one last time. Tomorrow we finish it.