Travel between cities was dangerous. There were monsters out there, and unless you were with a powerful combat team like the… Red Phoenix, my new team, it was basically suicide to travel very far outside the protected confines of the cities.
Vehicles, post-crash when the fuel reserves were gone, were expensive, hard to maintain, and slow in comparison to some travel gifts. That and they were worth a good deal at system stores, which meant that even the wrecks got collected as salvage. There were still a few electric and alcohol-converted vehicles tooling around inside cities, but outside? The noise drew monsters from miles away, that were more than fast enough to catch and rip apart anyone that was stupid enough to try driving the highways.
Supposedly a few merchants still ran convoys in the wealthier parts of the country, lines of big trucks to transport goods, but those convoys had to be on constant alert and be protected by powerful rare or even very rare vocation warriors that could make a lot more delving rifts than babysitting stupid merchants. It was much safer to travel quietly, on foot, and quickly.
We were on constant alert, and the only sounds were our breathing and footsteps, and the constant quiet clopping of the horse’s hooves. Both Angel and I were on the horse, with my arms desperately wrapped around her waist because we were far slower than the average pace of the rest of the party, all of whom had movement gifts. Angel normally would have been on foot, bouncing from shadow to shadow among the trees that shrouded our journey, but with a wounded wing, that bird couldn’t fly yet.
She murmured quietly to me, not whispering. Whispering could be heard a lot farther away than the quiet talking she was using with our heads close together. “You think you can fix my leg?”
I shook my head, still afraid of falling off. I did not like big animals, not at all, and had zero experience with riding, and it showed. “Not like this. I don’t have any traits to direct my mending, so I have to do it while watching and touching. I also might have trouble concentrating while riding, so I might lose focus and do something bad by mistake, like adding an extra foot or something.”
She nodded, “That still sounds like an incredible gift. I noticed you are wearing Lilah’s node. Were you able to find out if you had any spare points or open trait slots?”
“Yes, but I don’t know how to spend them or use them.”
“Trait points are easy. You can’t talk to a portable node like you can to a shrine, but your fingers work just fine. Just think you are touching something, like an attribute, or trait slot, and it should open up and tell you what you can do with it. You can also stop and ask someone like me or Charlie for advice before you commit.”
“Not Lilah or Renee?”
She shook her head and murmured, “Renee doesn’t care. She’s sort of hyper-focused on combat, and I think she still has her three utility slots open while she decides what traits are most likely to help her in a fight. She’s great for picking out a fighting loadout, but useless for magic or utility. She is our off-tank, not quite as tough as Charlie, but makes up for it by being an absolute blizzard of destruction with her sword.”
“Charlie is a good leader. She’s mostly combat slots and has no magic slots, but she has learned about thousands of traits and puts them together in her head to come up with a good loadout for any situation. Lilah, on the other hand, is whimsical and has a weird sense of humor. She’s brilliant, but hides behind fake stupidity and has a short fuse and weird urges since I think she was hurt very badly when she was younger.”
“Lilah’s not a bad choice for magical trait advice, but it’s more likely to work for her than anyone else, and while her reasoning for other traits is often sound, she sometimes doesn’t bother to explain WHY she will recommend a trait, and you might never figure it out, either.”
I nodded, “Lilah was pushing me to get sexual empathy, and I thought she was making a pass until Charlie got her to explain that it would let me read physical sensations and maybe help heal problems even if someone wasn’t conscious to tell me or know what they were. I have some slots, so I am seriously thinking about taking her up on it, assuming I can get diagnose or something.”
“Some slots? More than one?”
I nodded slowly, “Yes. I have four utility slots.”
“Damn, that’s a hell of a lot for a noncombat.”
“Two combat slots.”
“Good, that’s pretty normal for a noncombat. Good for enhanced endurance and a decent attack skill, or maybe an attribute booster like enhanced speed.”
“And five magical slots.”
She turned her head to look at me in shock, and muttered, “That’s insane. Even uncommons rarely start with more than five total. That’s what… Eleven? What kind of path did you get?”
“Something called a troubleshooter. I get the feeling it’s a path designed to fill holes in a team.”
She nodded slowly, “Speaking of filling holes, I honestly thought for a moment that Charlie had grabbed you as a toy for the team, but that’s not really her thing. Fair warning, Lilah will flirt like crazy, but it’s her way of coping… she’s likely to try and seduce you and then leave you alone. If you stick with the team, you will probably eventually have a chance with one of us, but none of us are into girls or want to be part of some guy’s harem. That’s why I thought you were a toy. Sorry.”
“No worries. I honestly have no plans in that direction. I mean, obviously, I am a man and get urges and stuff, but humans aren’t owned by their instincts, only animals.”
“Oh. By the way, is this better?” We’d been traveling for several hours, ever since we’d left the city, passing through the gates surprisingly free of interference from the bored-looking guard classes. I opened up my mouth to show her what I had been using my mending on.
She glanced at me in surprise, “Damn, that is amazing, but I shouldn’t be surprised at what a true healer can do. Regeneration is amazing, but it’s a downtime thing… It will keep me alive in a fight and close wounds quickly, but regenerating real damage takes huge amounts of time. You might want to take up smoking or coffee, though… right now, those things are clean and straight, but if you smile too broadly you might cause a solar flare. Too damned white.”
I nodded and started working on giving them a little weathering. Not much, but enough to stop them from being blinding. I had to remember that some items weren’t ‘fixed’ unless they didn’t look brand new. No one would appreciated you fixing a piece of furniture if you stripped off all the varnish and stain in the process.
“We should be in Green Bay in about an hour. You look like you are starving, so we should probably eat first, find someplace to set up, and then tomorrow, we can see about you using your ability. We are running a little low, but still have more than enough for a month of downtime if we take it easy, but Renee will be desperate to hit a rift… Green Bay has some good ones, even if she’s short a mitt. Don’t let her poking and begging get to you.”
“Charlie lost out on her bonus for guarding the shrine, so we are a little short on funds, but not enough to risk a delve without support. Every one of us has saved the team multiple times, but I don’t want Renee’s impatience to get them to risk a rift without me. I am our team trapper, and most of Green Bay’s rifts are known for having kobolds, devious little trappers that can kill a team without ever seeing them.”
She sighed, “I love Renee to pieces, but I know that right now, all she’s thinking of is ‘we have a healer, we can take stupid risks.’ don’t let her talk you into something crazy. In her own way, she’s even nuttier than Lilah. She might even try to seduce you into supporting her plans, so fair warning.”
“You are awfully forthright about your team’s personalities.”
She shrugged, which made me gasp as I struggled to stay attached. “We have been together for a really long time. The last time we delved we tried an uncommon ranked rift that hadn’t been cleared in a while, at the request of a local warlord who couldn’t muster an uncommon team on her own. We nearly wiped, which is code for all of us dying, and because we couldn’t break it because of how fucked up we were, she refused to pay. I am not scared, but I certainly am burned, and I want that mistake to not be compounded by impatience. Having a new teammate, especially a male, adds an element of unpredictable chaos, and it makes me uncomfortable even if it helps us in the long run.”
She smiled slightly, “My life, my vocation, and my talents revolve around planning and removing unpredictability from the equation. I scout out threats so we are prepared to eliminate them safely, set traps to control and manipulate the enemy, and an ideal foe is one my team never encounters because I took them out safely before they ever showed up.”
“You are a chaotic element. I don’t dislike you personally, but I hate surprises, even if they are pleasant. Perhaps in time, when I learn how to predict your influence, I may grow less wary, but for right now, please don’t expect me to gleefully embrace your presence on my team. I care just enough to give you the information you need to avoid disrupting things.”
“How very clinical.”
Angelique covered her mouth and nose with her hand to silence a snort. “You should probably think of it that way… we are all old women, and mostly were already friends from college during the crash. Uncommon rank expanded our lives, but I used to be a clinician in Denver and was planning on getting married. Renee was a dance instructor in Boulder, and the crash killed her husband and three sons. She watched them die from the wasting, and Tony was only one year old. Charlie was in the Air Force, and we picked up Lilah a little later, she is by far the youngest, only a few years older than you are.”
“So forgive me if surprises raise red flags. In this world, surprises usually mean death or…” she glanced down at her leg, “maiming. I was just surprised that it took this long for Renee to have something permanent happen to her. Or maybe almost permanent, if you can fix it.”
“Why doesn’t she have regeneration?”
She sighed again. “I have low defenses and usually wind up in danger first. Before I got regeneration I was missing a couple of fingers, all of my teeth, and had a bunch of scars from… critical failures. So when we got the traitstone as a reward, they all insisted I needed it the most, even though I thought Charlie could use it better. Any form of magical healing is incredibly valuable, and the traitstone could have set us up for a decade of luxury, or maybe even being able to afford the services of an A-list breeder and having a family.”
“An A-list what?”
“Breeder. Wait, you know about breeders, right?”
I sighed, “Sort of. Guys who were whored out by their protectors to service women that wanted babies? The folks that ‘adopted’ me tried to encourage me to uhh… self-service so they could sell it.”
She shook her head carefully so I didn’t lose my balance. “That’s awful. Someone should burn Appleton to the ground.”
I sighed. “There are also lots of people just trying to live their lives and avoid getting eaten by monsters. The only problem is that there are too many monsters that walk on two legs and call themselves human. You don’t clean up a disease by murdering an entire city that has an outbreak. You quarantine the survivors and try to clean it up.”
She nodded, “I know, but sometimes I just get so mad. Humans are on the brink of extinction, and yet there are still people that would rather abuse children or stab people in the back instead of fighting it.”
“I thought humans were winning and expanding?”
She shook her head, “No, fewer and fewer births are happening. Sure, in theory, one male can impregnate a nearly unlimited number of females, but the reality is, who supports that mother while she’s pregnant and raising children, protects her from getting eaten, and helps her? Other women can, but it’s not common, and the women who are willing to do that are mostly uninterested in men or children.”
“What makes it worse, is that over half of all men are just sick of the whole thing or gay. The ones that remain are the sort of genetic specimens no woman would want to have children with, or they charge for their services… enormous amounts that often lock lower-ranked or non-combat women out of the possibility of having children. There’s also the ones that are one woman, one man types, which is honorable but unsustainable.”
She glanced at me, “It’s like a bad harem fantasy. Every rift, when it goes uncleared for too long, starts spawning monsters, and the ones that are capable of clearing them are getting less and less, which just adds to the danger. Added to that is the reproductive problems, and unless something changes, either the ratio of males to females gets a little closer to normal, or some sort of draconian laws that force men to donate sperm like your city does, in a generation or two this planet will belong to the monsters.”
“I think the only solution is to figure out what’s killing most males in the womb, but good luck with that.”
I looked at her in slight confusion, “But we already know what’s doing that. I just don’t think we have the technology anymore to fight it and have to find a magical solution.”
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“Wait, what?” she asked, almost raising her voice, and I held out my hand, palm-down, to urge her to quiet.
I nodded, “Yeah. I saw it on my character sheet. Under current afflictions. It said a tailored Y-gene decimation retrovirus. I mean, I assume that’s what is killing males, it certainly sounds about right.”
“You can see that? How? Why? Afflictions are usually super generic, like ‘diseased’, or ‘poisoned’.
I thought about that. “Perhaps my affinity? It’s really weird.”
“Can… I mean, can you cure it?”
I shrugged, “I haven’t tried yet. I certainly will, I found out I had latent Tuberculosis and fixed it while I was in the bath, but a virus is a LOT smaller than a bacteria, and it’s more virulent and spread out. I also need traits that will help me do that to other people. I can fix what I see, and inside myself, or my aura, I can sort of tell what is going on, but I don’t know if you have it, or if I can even cure it. I still haven’t even fixed your leg, and if it’s artificial or caused by the silhouette? I might not be allowed to fix it.”
She nodded slowly, “Still, that’s hope. You know you are an A-lister yourself, or you will be once you are able to fill out a little.”
“What do you mean?”
She shrugged, “You are attractive, and even though you are short, that won’t turn off a girl with baby rabies. You also have an affinity. Affinities, unlike vocations, often pass between generations, which we have found out recently as first-generation post-change babies have started getting vocations and having babies of their own.”
I shrugged, “If I wind up having to do it, I will, but just being a sperm donor is about as appealing as getting enslaved by Aster, which is what would probably happen anyway.”
The city had been getting closer and closer. Like all major cities, the thing had a big damned wall, and in a few minutes, we were finally past the guards, who surprisingly didn’t give us any flack.
“Mostly a place like Green Bay won’t screw with rifters. We pay a chunk of what we take from local rifts, most of us are a hell of a lot more powerful than local guards, and we spend money in their stores and commission their workers.” Charlie explained when I asked about it.
“Green Bay is a lot more expensive than Appleton,” Renee remarked. “We might have to delve into something soon to afford it.”
I shrugged, “Not until your hand is healed. Which means training, and also repairing or replacing your shield.”
“What? Why?”
I shrugged, “If you and Charlie want to run something, I can’t argue with you, except that one of you is supposed to protect me and you’d be breaking the contract. But I won’t go with you until I am ready and know I have the tools to keep you healthy. The contract said specifically that I could refuse if I feel you are sending me into a suicidal situation, and right now, without your hand or shield, you are not an off-tank, you are just a girl with a pointy stick.”
Renee was glaring at me as I continued. “If I can, I will try and help defray the costs. I don’t know what repairing delver gear is worth, but it should offer good training and maybe help pay for our stay. I am smart enough to know that like I am now, I am a liability with one semi-useful trait, one that is in a position to need a protector. Angelique is still crippled, and Lilah is not on the bodyguard list. That means soloing, Renee, and I have no idea if a basic-level dungeon, what you could probably solo injured as you are now, is even worth delving into.”
I was sort of talking out of my ass. I didn’t know if she could solo common-ranked rifts, but based on her glare she probably didn’t think she could either. “Fine.”
***
It wasn’t a fancy hotel with a suite. Green Bay was a lot more populated than Aster, but it was also a lot bigger city, which meant that there were plenty of places to stay if you weren’t that picky. We wound up renting a pre-crash house near the wall, in what I would have considered a high-class neighborhood but the girls grumbled about being a slum.
It was connected to the water and sewer system, which was a flat-out luxury, not too far a walk from the gate, and it even had natural gas for heat and cooking! Not that I could cook anything more complicated than toasting bread over a flame or making ‘throw everything in boiling water’ soup, but the thought was there.
Their biggest complaint was that we were a little too close to an old pre-crash dump site, but based on Charlie’s look at me, she had training plans for me that involved the mountains of broken pre-crash junk. The house also had a decent-sized yard, which Renee sneeringly informed me I was going to become intimately familiar with if I insisted on heavy training.
I was filling out rapidly. It was weird, feeling more strength in my limbs, but Charlie insisted I eat whenever possible and regularly, and I was also trying to hit myself with mend… the bracelet cheerfully informed me after two days:
Your health attribute has raised from poor to mediocre
Your durability attribute has raised from poor to mediocre
We even kind of had a party… more food, and I was able to eat more food now, Lilah cheerfully presented me with a box that had a brand-new enchanted node stone in it on a leather strap, so I would return hers.
The malnutrition condition slowly dropped from extreme to minor, and then eventually disappeared, along with the anemia, which was another goalpost crossed, and Charlie found temporary work as a rift control guard.
And once I started getting stronger, Lilah’s armor no longer fit. At first, Charlie brought me some decent but nearly worn-out clothing, but once she realized I could mend it, she brought me higher-quality but much harder-worn stuff. And she was right to do that.
“I am rank two now,” I said to Charlie that evening.
Charlie grinned broadly, “Seriously?”
I nodded, “Yeah, utility class, I guess I get advancement from fixing stuff.” I was working on Angelique’s armor. Her armor was common tier, which was well above my rank, and had an enchantment on it, but by working slowly and stopping when my concentration started to waver, I’d managed to repair it over several days since it wasn't technically broken, but I figured I would need actual leather to re-create the boot. My mana could replace small bits, but complicated and larger bits? They needed real materials.
Silhouette-recognized materials were necessary for creating armor and weapons that could effectively deal with monsters that spawned from rifts. That was why guns had become either a relic of the past or were newly-created black powder monstrosities that were almost more trouble than they were worth. Unrecognized bullets simply couldn’t harm monsters, which was why so many people died so quickly when they first appeared.
Silhouette-recognized materials, on the other hand, had a sort of low-level enchantment on them by default, probably due to that recognition. A modern weaponsmith, for example, could create weapons equal to their current vocation’s rarity that would tear apart monsters of that rarity and even affect monsters of a higher rarity, albeit at a reduced effect.
Charlie’s bare-hand attacks could tear the pre-crash cottage we had leased apart in seconds if she chose, but if it had been made of post-change seasoned wood and stone, by a craftsman with a vocation, it could hold up enormously better even if it was flimsier. I had a sneaking suspicion that my eventual ‘upgrade’ gold-circle gift would transform mundane pre-crash materials into their silhouette-recognized counterparts.
“Is Mediocre good?” I asked her.
She shrugged, “It’s good compared to poor. Poor is sort of the bottom, anything below that is considered a condition or a handicap. Mediocre is low, but much better, like someone who never exercised and spent all their life in a chair. Fair is below average but not bad, but average is kind of a nebulous concept.”
“Good is pretty much average for someone who does stuff with their attributes on a regular basis, above that you have varying extra ranks, great, superb, extreme, and legendary. Extreme is the maximum you can gain through regular training, human maximum, and legendary is for those who gain a special bonus to an attribute that cannot be accounted for by training or talent.”
“After that, you need to use traits to improve. Also, the actual value of the attributes is very different based on factors like sex, bloodlines, build, and of course affinities. Female extreme reflexes, for example, means incredible grace, fluidity, and balance, while male extreme reflexes lean towards lightning-fast actions and responses to threats.”
“Bloodlines?”
She nodded, “At very high ranks, people can unlock a bloodline. I don’t know how it works, but it seems to be reserved for rare and higher vocations. Of course, affinities like you and Lilah have are extremely valuable as well, and offer decent effects at low ranks, but often seem to be a part of a bloodline at higher ranks. One of the reasons we are called the Red Phoenix is because we all suspect that Lilah has a Phoenix bloodline. Her fire affinity not only strengthens her fire spells and takes away their mana costs, but she’s nearly immune to fire damage.”
“We waltz through cold-themed rifts, mostly because of her. Fire-themed rifts are pretty good too because she can manipulate fire, even if a lot of fire monsters ignore her damage spells, she can screw them over in other ways and blow off their abilities. So do you know how your life affinity works?”
I shook my head, “Not very well, but some of the ideas creep me out. I want to start on Renee’s hand soon, but we need stuff you don’t mind getting destroyed and fixed first for me to get a better idea. I am also worried that if she’s feeling too good, she will make a beeline for a rift even if the rest of us aren’t ready.”
“Been talking to Angel?”
I nodded, and Charlie smiled, “She’s right. How about Angel’s leg?”
I smiled slightly, “Her regeneration is really good. I am able to mend it a little, which seems to speed it up. Apparently, my life affinity sort of supercharges her regeneration for a while, and I suspect she should be back on her feet in a week. I am just concerned about trying to do it purely with mend.”
“Why?”
“Because mend would have to fix each system, individually, and because I can’t dig under someone’s skin, I have to do it in layers. I have no idea what would happen if I fixed the circulatory system in her leg without having all the muscles and fat that are supposed to protect it. She could pop and bleed out instantly, and then there’s the nerves, how much would setting that up hurt? And then, you would have a bare leg with bones and muscles and nerves all exposed while I do the skin… it would be like getting flayed in reverse.”
She almost gagged for a second, and then nodded, “Christ. I get it. And you want to find a way around it before you try to do Renee’s arm, but it’s good that you can speed up Angel’s healing.”
I nodded, “That’s why I wish I had been there when they got hurt. For an injury, well, everything is still there even if it’s cut apart or severed. It’s just a matter of reconnecting things and fixing them, and the little bit I have to use mana or essence to restore already has a pattern.
She nodded, “Have you gained any traits yet?”
I sighed, “I have been trying, but I think to get something like diagnose, I would need to train under someone who knows how to use the trait. I am kind of flailing in the dark. Mend as a heal seems to have strange limitations because it’s not exactly designed to heal, only my affinity seems to make it possible. I think it may be an aura thing since true healing traits or spells are probably designed to go right through someone else’s aura and ignore it, while Mend is stopped as if it were an attack. I can push through as long as I can see it and touch it, but there we are.”
“That doesn’t come into play with nonliving stuff?”
I shook my head, “Nope, no aura. I mean, I still have to see it, so I couldn’t like… fix a radio without opening it up, but it doesn’t resist like healing does. I also can’t fix anything complicated that’s been destroyed, so if a transistor is burned out, I’d have to find a replacement for it if I couldn’t repair the transistor itself.”
“You can fix radios?”
I laughed, “I was using that as an example. I haven’t seen a working radio in twelve years.”
I scratched my head, “I also think that my first rank was easy mode.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was getting advancement for non-system clothes at first rank. Now I am not. I think I need to start working with only enhanced materials, probably basic stuff, in order to gain advancement.” I pointed around the house, where I had fixed some stuff like holes in the walls and some bad framing in the basement. “This stuff, pre-crash stuff, isn’t adding to my advancement anymore.”
“That shouldn’t be too hard. I mean, cut down a tree now and it has a silhouette ranking. Even natural rocks have rankings.”
“Yes,” I said, “But I am not a crafter. I mean, I don’t really need any tools but mend can’t turn something into something else, not even if I know exactly what I am aiming for. Not yet, anyway. I could make a wooden spear, that’s easy enough, with my hands, a knife, and fire, and Silhouette would make it a crude spear, but unless I actually had a crafting trait, it wouldn’t ever be just a spear, and I couldn’t use mend to attach a metal spearhead to it… if I attached a metal spearhead by hand, it would still be a crude spear with a metal head.”
She nodded, “Can you use crafter traits?”
I looked at her very seriously, “I don’t know, could I?”
“Angelique told me you had eleven trait slots. That’s an insane number, but you said you don’t gain another vocation trait until gold circle, which might balance it. Most people, even with basic vocations, gain a new vocation trait or trait upgrade every other rank until their gold circle.”
“Is that normal? Then yeah. It looks like I trade innate traits for trait slots. And It’s twelve now, I gained a point and a utility trait slot at level two.”
She nodded, “That might be the trade-off for your vocation. You are a jack of all trades, have you spent your points?”
“No, I wanted to ask your advice.”
She thought about it. “Well, first off, you are only eighteen. Points can be used to enhance an existing trait with a competence rating, buy a new trait that’s part of the optional traits list for your vocation, enhance an attribute by one level, add a chunk to your mana or essence potential, or unlock bloodline or affinity specific abilities.”
“Conventional wisdom is to avoid using them for trait boosts while you are young because simple training can boost those. If you hit a blockade that’s below the human cap, which can happen for like… a bodybuilder that’s pushing for extreme health but that affects his maximum reflexes or speed, you use them to boost the suffering attributes. A lot of people spend their points early on useful vocation traits, but then stockpile them for later ranks to break through a blockade or enhance a trait that is impossible to train. That’s why I have six points still available… I plan on using them after I upgrade to a rare vocation, but even in a place like Green Bay, the price to access a rare shrine is huge.”
She opened her mouth slightly and tapped her teeth with a blunt fingernail. “There are some traits that can be trained, but letting a physician know you have true healing so they can train you in diagnostics is still too dangerous. Some traitstones will cover useful abilities, but they cost time or money and we are a little short on both at the moment. How about you open your sheet, tap your traits, and see what is available?”
“The bracelet won’t give you details on the traits, but even the name could give you a clue.”