Thaniel Kushman Grimm
Vocation: Rank 2 Mender(basic) (13%)
Path: Troubleshooter
Health: mediocre
Durability: mediocre
Reflex: good
Speed: mediocre
Will: good
Acuity: great
____________________
Combat Trait slots: 2
Utility trait slots: 5
Mend
Magical Trait slots: 5
Free points available: 2
____________________
Affinity: Life
Mana: ∞ (Life affinity override)
Essence: ∞ (Life affinity override)
____________________
Current conditions:
stunted growth
Tailored Y-gene decimation retrovirus (permanent remission)
Neither my mana nor my essence would accept any points. Either that meant they were effectively limitless, or I guess I just didn’t have any traits that used them that were not tied to my life affinity.
Mend itself could be boosted to mend (apprentice) and probably to mend (journeyman) if I wanted to use both points, but Charlie told me that simply using it frequently to train it could accomplish that while giving me advancement to boot. In theory, any traits I could unlock with points should be able to add to my advancement when I used them, but utility vocations were different in weird ways from combat, crafting, and magic vocations. Sometimes their advancement was easy, sometimes hard, but often they were shrouded in mystery unless lots of people had it, like porters.
Utility traits available:
activate substance
improvised fieldcraft (221 basic crafts)
engage formula
deep scan (life affinity)
Combat traits available:
drain essence (life affinity)
improvised weapons
improvised blocking
inattention
Magic traits available:
recognize
mercy (life affinity)
aura violation (life affinity)
ranged trait (1 available)
looting
amplify space
preserve patterns
runic library (basic)
rune creation
I talked out my choices to Charlie, and she was looking a little confused. “Some of those traits I have no idea about, Deep scan is probably exactly what you need, but aura violation? Will that let you heal someone who is resisting it? Drain essence is absolutely a monster ability, and the ranged trait enhances another trait with range… incredibly useful, if you have traits that can profit from being ranged, like mend.”
“So you think deep scan and ranged trait on mend are the way to go?”
She nodded, “Yes, except that mend as it is might not be worth making ranged… you might want to wait until you get it to apprentice, and maybe that will let you mend multiple things at once. Renee would scream at you to get fieldcraft and looting.”
“Why, what are those?”
She smiled broadly, “Fieldcraft is like having dozens of different crafting skills at their most basic level, and is the key trait of the scavenger vocation. It’s sort of like bushcraft, but it’s a lot more limited with a broader skill base. Bushcrafters can create stuff with simple tools that are like beginner versions of crafter vocations but are limited to natural ingredients, while fieldcraft includes things like scraps and finished parts, but leaves out stuff like field herbology. I imagine that improvised fieldcraft takes it a step further, allowing you to use finished products in unintended ways for fieldcraft.”
“Looting allows you to take apart a dead creature as if you were field dressing it and separating its useful components like meat, bones, glands, organs, and even cores. It’s based upon your skills and traits, though, which means fieldcraft, which includes skinning and dressing meats, would give you a hugely better result. We also have no idea what your life affinity will add to the mix, but Renee would be screaming about the profit potential of being able to instantly loot monsters and sell their components to alchemists, crafters, and enchanters.”
“Lilah would probably insist you get ranged trait for mend, in hopes it unlocks area effect and rune creation… that’s a trait that is usually the gold circle of an uncommon vocation, runesmith. I don’t even have to ask Angel to know she’d insist you get inattention, which reduces a monster’s chance to target you and she'd also want you to get activate substance.”
“What does activate substance do?”
“It allows you to turn chemistry from before the crash into a silhouette-recognized substance. That’s another gold-circle gift of some basic crafting classes, including the trapper vocation she started with at basic.”
“And then there is a bunch of stuff I have never heard of from any vocation or traitstone. Simply because they are unique is enough of a reason for you to look at them seriously. Engage formula? No idea, but it sounds alchemical and might mesh well with improvised fieldcraft and your life affinity. Recognize? It sounds powerful, single-word traits usually are. It might be a decent identify trait. Amplify space sounds like a trait version of spatial storage enchantments, which could be amazingly useful. Improvised blocking is a new one, but it sounds like Jackie Chan shit… using any old items lying around to stop serious attacks meaningfully.”
She sighed. “I didn’t realize just how many options you would have, and as I said, it points at Mender being a sort of catch-all class. Fix whatever problems your team has, and patch the holes in their abilities. I am afraid that I can’t advise you very well.”
“You already have,” I replied.
“Oh?”
I nodded, “Yes, I have a pretty good idea what I am going to do, at least for the moment, since I am only rank two. I figure I can still gain a rank or two before we have to start delving, and then I can choose traits that should help fill the team’s holes better.”
“Wait, you already decided?”
I nodded, “Let me know if you can get these easier from traitstones, but I am thinking improvised fieldcraft, and recognize. Hopefully, I can boost mend to apprentice, and if I can actually fix two systems at once, that might be enough to mend Renee’s hand without killing her in the process.”
“Why improvised fieldcraft?”
“Because it says 221 basic crafts. That might only mean things like weaving a straw hat that Silhouette recognizes as protection from the sun and starting a system-recognized campfire, but it sounds extraordinarily useful both for traveling and for training my advancement. Looting sounds like too good an ability to pass up, but without some way of determining what something would be useful for, I don’t know that it would help yet.”
“But everything about this vocation seems to be about making do with inadequate or no tools. I figured if it gave me the basic skills to craft even the worst sort of system-recognized items, it could also help me loot as much as possible without resorting to tools. There seems to be a theme to the vocation, and I am hoping that running with that theme helps me realize its potential.”
“I want recognize, because it might be able to help me with healing. Scan is something you know about, it gives you parts of someone’s character sheet. Deep Scan sounds like more of the same… I don’t need to see someone’s traits to heal them, but recognize might help… not to mention, I will probably accept her traitstone offering. If I can feel and recognize exactly what is wrong with someone, I might be able to mend it without having to see through their skin, or whatever.”
“You have really thought this through. Advancement and research. I wouldn’t say I would have picked those myself, but I am not you,” Charlie stated.
I grinned, “Thank you, I value your judgment.”
She growled, “Don’t kiss my ass without permission.”
“Maybe I am trying to get permission.”
She sighed and rolled her eyes as I touched the back of my bracelet and finalized my decision.
***
Recognize was… different. Very, very different from what I expected. Not bad, since it did, in fact, link with my life affinity to allow me to ‘recognize’ the potential of things I looked at.
It didn’t show me someone’s character sheet, which was good because it did not trigger whatever allowed people to realize they were being scanned. Instead, I could look at something, or someone, and recognize their predominant effects rather than seeing their actual traits. Of course, improvised fieldcraft seemed to help.
Charlie, for example, was a bit tired and stressed, but she was extremely tough and durable, definitely uncommon-level, and while she wasn’t particularly fast, she could hit very hard. I mean, I knew that already, but recognize confirmed it. If I had a way to determine what was wrong with someone, I could probably mend it just by the signs it gave off… I could close my eyes and fix problems with Angel’s armor without even seeing them, which was a huge hole mend needed to be filled, and recognize definitely fit the bill.
Improvised fieldcraft, on the other hand, was even stranger. When I had a need, I could look around and match it with recognize to fill that need. The traits worked out very well together and even seemed to apply to pre-change materials. By the end of the day, I had turned some long grass in the yard into the aforementioned straw hat, drew threads from long grasses to repair a pair of boots, and it even seemed to enhance the materials to allow them to perform in ways far beyond what they should do normally… like the threads from long grasses, which should never have been strong enough to sew a boot sole onto a boot.
It also seemed to trigger that weird old soul knowledge pretty frequently, and I wound up making a chicken and rice soup for dinner for everyone that Renee insisted scanned as temporarily improving your recovery rate.
After finally accepting Lilah’s pill, I looked at my new character sheet, pleased that my handicrafts had added to my advancement potential.
Thaniel Kushman Grimm
Vocation: Rank 2 Mender(basic) (49%)
Path: Troubleshooter
Health: mediocre
Durability: mediocre
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Reflex: good
Speed: mediocre
Will: good
Acuity: great
____________________
Combat Trait slots: 2
Utility trait slots: 4
Mend
Improvised Fieldcraft
Magical Trait slots: 4
Recognize
Free points available: 0
____________________
Affinity: Life
Mana: ∞ (Life affinity override)
Essence: ∞ (Life affinity override)
____________________
Current conditions:
stunted growth
Tailored Y-gene decimation retrovirus (permanent remission)
Almost halfway through the rank just because I made some thread, a straw hat, a disgustingly durable 2x4 stepladder that silhouette recognized as a ‘crude stepladder’ despite it being made of pre-crash material, and some basic-rank mud bricks that I used to fix a hole in the brick cottage’s foundation.
Apparently, improvised fieldcraft could help me create and force recognition for nearly anything I made as ‘crude’. That seemed to be the cap on its quality, crude, but since it took nearly no tools to create other than my own hands and whatever improvised instruments I could come up with, it could potentially be incredibly useful. It also seemed to speed up the item creation, since my straw hat, made of pulled green grass, was a nice and dry golden color in only a few minutes.
“So, I figured out how to advance really quickly,” I told the girls as we settled down for dinner. Charlie was off doing her temporary job, and Angel was able to start stumping around on a cane while her foot regrew with a brace to keep the regenerating limb from touching the floor.
Renee raised an eyebrow, “Oh really? Is it something you can use? And did you finally get rid of your status effects?”
I nodded, “All except for a couple of things that don’t really affect me right now and I am a little worried about touching yet. And yes, fixing things!”
“I thought we already knew that.”
I shrugged, “Yes, but with improvised fieldcraft, I can fix stuff and Silhouette recognizes it. Right now, the foundation of the house is considered crude quality, rather than being completely unrecognized, and I got nearly thirty percent advancement from it!
Lilah smiled a little, “How is the traitstone working out?”
“I am still a little worried, and would rather get to at least apprentice mend before I work on Renee’s hand so I don’t hurt her unless you’d like a basic-rank crude prosthetic?” I asked her. “I could make one of those,” I said, looking around for any junk that might fit the bill.
Renee shook her head, “So could Angel. No thanks. If we could get one of those advanced prosthetics I might think about it, but I’d much rather have my own hand back. Still, that’s pretty impressive. Congratulations, tomorrow you start your training.”
“I thought I was already training?”
She nodded, “Yes, but now you have to learn how not to die if something ranked gives you a dirty look. As you are fond of pointing out, it’s in your contract.”
I nodded slowly, wobbling the old pre-crash kitchen chair I was perched on. With a thought, I mended it, tightening up the spokes and growing together a split where the steel rungs were pinned to the particle board underside. That didn’t make it silhouette-recognized, but if I could replace the screws with some metal pins that were recognized, it should be linked.
“The early ranks are like a teenager in bed… very fast and rarely satisfying for anyone but the teenager.” Lilah offered. “As you get higher ranks, advancement slows way down unless you are constantly doing incredibly innovative and difficult things, fighting monsters way out of your league, or doing your job under some kind of incredible risk or strain. That’s where rifts come into play.”
“Will being in a team with much higher-ranked people mess with my advancement?”
Renee shook her head, “Not at all. As a utility, your job is to support your team, not fight. If you can support your team, every time you use your skills and traits to be meaningfully useful to your team, it’s nearly as much advancement as fighting a creature of the same rank as we are… once we get you into a rift, if you survive, your ranks will soar.”
Angel added, swishing her long black hair, “If you survive is the most important point. Just being there as a noncombat support will net you advancement because unlike us, you aren’t expected to have the tools to defeat the rift.”
“I do have some potential combat traits…”
Angel smiled. “That’s good. That means that if you do get some fighting in, that should add a little to your advancement as well, but since it’s not your primary vocation, avoiding dangerous fights shouldn’t slow you down much. That also means we could find you some decent defensive traitstones to help you survive in a hostile environment.”
“So how do we get traitstones?”
“Money,” Angel sighed. “The golden rule. The one with the gold makes the rules. Traitstones come from rifts, and when a team doesn’t use them they sell them. Its value is not based on its rarity, though… a very rare traitstone might have a specialty trait that is almost totally useless or only works in conjunction with certain other traitstones, and a basic traitstone might be extraordinarily valuable. Also, the actual rarity is different… identity is extremely common, but everyone wants it, and so they usually are very hard or expensive to get, while spear of a thousand points is only useful for a spear-based combat vocation.”
“It also requires you to build yourself with that in mind. Health, reflex, speed, and accuracy bonuses, a melee spear build, and defenses that will protect you even if you are locked into a two-second combat activity. I have seen it done, but you lose a lot of utility simply for a very rare point-blank area-of-effect attack. Most people, even if they have the right vocation, won’t waste their time. So it’s cheap, or people use the stone as a component for building other stones, like hail of spears, if they are a trait maker.”
I nodded, “This whole thing sounds like an old video game.”
Renee nodded, “It is.”
“Huh?”
Angel glanced at Renee, “That’s speculation.”
Renee shook her head, “No it isn’t. Everyone says that the Grays caused the crash, but they didn’t… There were witnesses, some of whom are still alive. The crash was caused by us, the Grays simply sold us the Silhouette and administrated it.”
Angel sighed, “Here we go again.”
Renee shrugged, “I remember, I was there. No one knows what caused the rifts to form, but overnight, monsters were invading everywhere. People were shooting off fireballs, exploding and dying, or trying to fight with inadequate weapons and getting eaten. The Grays showed up and offered the silhouette as a way to get our abilities under control, and the leadership accepted.”
“It was the childhood protection that really sold us, but we didn’t find out until later that the grays were scummy frauds that sold us a cheap, bottom-of-the-barrel tutorial system created by the universal equivalent of third-world labor. It’s also possible that they were the ones that created male-death syndrome, as a way to make us desperate, because at the time, males were the primary workforce for almost every infrastructure, production, and delivery system in the world.”
Angelique nodded, “There’s no question that Silhouette is garbage. We sometimes get… visitors from other system worlds, drawn to adventure here because of how overcrowded we are with rifts, and all of them are disgusted with the silhouette, especially since the administrators get to choose our vocations, based on whatever they think we need or will earn them the most profits.”
“What are Grays?”
Angel shrugged, “Aliens, or extradimensional merchants, or something. Short, hairless, giant eyes and heads, gray skin… They used to be a joke among the UFO crowd, but it turns out that they’d been scoping out our world for centuries, waiting for Earth’s essence and mana to stabilize enough to start calling rifts, and occasionally killing or kidnapping humans and animals to see if we’d developed a system. Either they finally had enough local mana to trigger the rifts, which is what I suspect, or they swooped in to profit off of it like Renee thinks.”
Renee shrugged and started collecting the bowls. “Either way, every delve of a controlled rift, every penny of taxes that city lords collect, every shrine fee and quest reward, the Grays take a good chunk as a tithe of the resources because they control Silhouette. If you don’t like it and refuse, they shut you down, and very few people can control their abilities without a system.”
“Wait, so you are saying that these...powers, we get, don’t come from Silhouette?”
Angel shook her head, “Nope. If anything, Silhouette gets powers from us. It’s a bargain-budget system, and instead of having a distributed network of nodes, or even a central control, it taps the processing of all of the people connected to it. If it were well-made, that would probably make it amazing, but it’s crap, and basically just sucks off some of our brain memory space and processing speed to do… well… nothing but act like a glorified spreadsheet.”
I scratched my head, that was weird.
“Did you get a ‘processing’ message while you were waiting for your vocation?” Renee asked.
I nodded.
“That was Silhouette using your own brain to outline your strengths and profit potential. They think that is why healers are so rare… Earthlings are all cogs in the machine now, and when a cog breaks, you throw it away and replace it. Most true healers don’t personally produce much in the way of resources, and there’s no way to tax healing, at least not for a system as simple as the silhouette,” she said, looking thoughtful for a moment.
“I am betting that even mender is not supposed to be a healing class. Silhouette can identify affinities, but is fortunately too stupid to be able to determine their potential interactions with the other traits it organizes. Mender is probably supposed to be a broom-pushing maintenance class, keeping the systems in better repair now that the whole thing is breaking down and the population is dropping. Trust a stupid AI to ‘innovate’ a mechanic after only twenty years of breakdowns.”
Lilah giggled, “I give Silhouette a bad case of diarrhea every time we hit an ice or fire rift.”
“How so?”
Angel laughed, “Because of her affinity, we are able to tackle content that is supposed to be far outside of our abilities as an unbalanced team. Silhouette usually responds by giving us a crapton of ‘processing’ messages, and flat-out errors, and it even goes back on its own reward promises occasionally claiming we are using ‘unbalanced exploits’. Of course, it can’t go back on the advancement, since the advancement and team-up systems are apparently a universal standard, but sometimes it… pouts.”
Renee nodded, “The Grays can’t ban us for cheating, but they can and do soak up as much of the resources we gain from clearing a rift as they can. They use ‘exploit penalties’, ‘service fees’, and ‘over-ranked penalties’ as often as they can to keep us broke, just like they do most teams, especially since we are willing to hit overloading rifts well below our rank to keep them from spilling out and hurting people.”
Angel beamed, “You know what they can’t take, though?”
“What?”
“Traitstones. Technically we create them by our presence in the rift. They can tax the profits, but when Traitstones drop, they are ours, no question. They also cannot touch harvested resources until they are crafted, although city lords can certainly tax those, and they can’t touch advancement.”
Lilah hopped up, “Well, I am out. I have spells to make. You two can keep schooling him, but when you want a REAL education, like a man-woman education, come see me… there aren’t as many words to plow through.”
Renee scowled at her.
She giggled as she headed back to her room, and I asked, “Why not?”
“Why not what?”
“Why don’t they take traitstones?”
Renee shrugged, “As far as we know, they can’t. They certainly take a chunk of the profits when they are auctioned through the system store, but the grays are… civilized, like most alien races.”
Angel snorted, “Inbred.”
Renee nodded, “They are an old race, like most of the galactic races. Old races tend to guide their evolution into service or mercantile. Earth is a hell world, and our traits reflect that. They wouldn’t sully themselves with things like combat or crafting, and even our service traits, like mercantile, are far below their standards or the standards of the other races they do business with.”
“A hell-world?” I asked.
She nodded, “Yeah. Most races are sort of… weak. A lot of them don’t even have physical attributes at all. They rely on the ‘barbarian’ younger races like humans to clear rifts for them and survive like leeches on them. Supposedly, without clearing them, the entire galaxy would eventually be overwhelmed with the rift-spawned, but humans are...special.”
“Our world’s gravity is like ten times as heavy as most of them can survive. Our comfortable temperature is also well above the melting temperature of water, and water itself is like acid to most of them. Oxygen? Totally poisonous. We are incredibly strong giants that breathe acid and drink lava from the planet Mercury to most of them, and we can fight rift-born monsters pretty easily once we are trained and gain access to our abilities. Our traits are mostly only useful to our own species.”
“As a result, most of the resources we gain from rifts are useless to them until they have been refined. Organic resources are utterly worthless, but refined metals, non-combat magical gear, ceramics, magical and essence resources, well, occasionally that sort of stuff gets ‘confiscated to maintain a balanced economy’ from the system store. You can find all the food, leather, and alchemical materials you want in the auction, but look for better than a basic sword. Good luck, no weaponsmith or armorsmith with a brain would ever let that stuff touch the store because it stands a good chance of getting confiscated ‘for the greater good’ and leaving them with nothing.”
“Doesn’t that impact the ability of people to actually fight rifts and gain resources? That seems sort of like slitting your own throat.”
Renee snerked, “In the long term? Absolutely. Before the crash, though, multinational corporations were more than happy to prove that the merchant mindset can only be seen until the next profit report or quarter. An easy profit now is worth more than ten times the profit in a year.”
“Better to let third world barbarians like Earth humans die off and their world be destroyed if that means a decent short-term profit. After all, there are always more barbarians out there to exploit.”
I’d been hit with multiple eye-opening revelations in a short period, and my brain was practically reeling from it.
“Okay, to bring things back down to Earth, you know that you are going to be our servant, right?”
“What?”
Renee beamed. “You are a utility vocation. That means that anything you do that assists your party will get you advancement. Don’t be surprised when that includes things like setting up the camp, doing grunt work, cooking, and cleaning, as well as maintaining and repairing gear.”
Angel nodded, “I will be right there with you. My vocation is combat utility, so fieldcraft and other woodland support stuff net me some advancement too… but when we are in a city or civilization, it doesn’t, unless it’s based on survival traits. That means that while we are in town, you get most of the scut work. It’s good for you.”
Yeah, that brought me back down to Earth, but I was fed, had a place to sleep, and was improving myself while doing it so I wouldn’t complain about it. “Very well.”
Renee grinned, “Great. Now do the dishes. Consider it a training opportunity.”