Freedom of Choice

Under normal circumstances, your guardian would help you find a class that's appropriate to your situation.

So, congratulations! You get to choose your class without anyone stepping on your toes! Follow your dreams, choose from over 5,000 classes, and become the man you always wanted to be!

Matt couldn't help but feel that he was being cheated.

5,000 classes was a lot, sure, but Matt had no idea what was going on. If the guardian’s input was expected, it was almost sure that some of the classes sucked. Flipping through the menus until he got to class selection, he found that the class choices included some questionable, highly specific choices.

Aantorath Hunter

The vicious scourge of Aantoraths will be stopped – by you. Your fighting style is optimized for a specific prey, making you a highly specialized and deadly threat to Aantoraths everywhere.

Stat Emphasis: DEX, WIS

“Any help on Aantoraths, system? What are they? Why would I want to kill one?”

Error. Local information knowledge base inaccessible. Analyzing.

“Have you tried unplugging the planet, then replugging it in?” Matt retorted. No answer.

Like the days after he was diagnosed with cancer when his friends had suddenly gone silent, Matt was on his own. Luckily, the class list had a search function, and Matt found a couple of stock fantasy world classes.

Swordsman

Nobody is better with swords than a swordsman - unless it’s a class dedicated to a specific sword, like Khukri Master or Gladius Wielder. You can cut, slice, and thrust with the best of them. This is the class that most transplants choose.

Stat Emphasis: DEX, STR

Archer

Why get close when you can poke holes in things from far away? The archer is skilled with all ranged weapons that utilize kinetic energy stored in small pieces of stretched rope, and are a vital part of complete adventuring parties.

Stat Emphasis: DEX, PER

Shield-bearer, Spearman, and several other classes all tracked with his expectations in the same way. Some, like Rogue, turned out to be second-tier classes he didn’t have access to yet. He’d probably have to take “Dagger Master” and… level it, maybe? Other classes didn’t track with expectations at all.

Barbarian

You are charmingly rural. To other rural people, that is. You sleep outside and wear the outsides of things you’ve killed as clothes. If you prefer tents to houses and the open steppe to city walls, this class gives you all the skills you need to meaningfully contribute to the rest of your outdoorsy, uncultured friends. Enjoy!

Stat Emphasis: PER, WIS

The worst part was that there didn’t seem to be any way to get more details about the classes than the short system summary. Queries to the system didn’t bring up anything new, and he poked the system window in multiple different ways without being able to pull up a single piece of new knowledge. Eventually, Matt thought to pull up his status screen to see if his stats might help him make a selection.

Matt Perison

Level 1 - Unclassed

Health (HP): 25

Mana (MP): N/A

Stamina (STAM): 10

Strength (STR): 5

Dexterity (DEX): 5

Perception (PER): 5

Vitality (VIT): 5

Wisdom (WIS): 5

Intelligence (INT): 5

*Warning: The unclassed do not have class goals, and thus cannot gain levels. Their stats can only be improved through great effort. There is no advantage in putting off class selection.*

His stats were level, which usually he'd like; it meant he wasn't being guided towards a specific class. In this case, it was a mixed bag; guidance was the resource he was lowest on, and there was a limit to how much freedom was actually helpful. Matt went back to the class screen.

Most of the classes were filled with nonsense descriptions like fighting Aantoraths. Without more information, there was no way to sift through the list of classes outside of guessing at specific search terms, and time was something he didn’t have.

He sighed and called up the system compass. An open-world style guidance compass appeared in his field of view like a HUD. Rotating his body around, Matt found the pointer pointing in a specific direction that looked identical to the other directions. It was about as helpful as the two suns in the sky. Or the equivalent to a suspect man waving you deeper into an alley, or a friend swearing they weren't lost and saying that they'd “only go a few more miles”. But, it was a direction as good as any other. It was the best lead Matt had.

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Matt put off his class selection. So far, he hadn't seen anything living, let alone a threat. As long as he didn't come across a giant wasteland worm or something, he was probably fine taking a “wait and see” approach.

All that was left was to walk. Easy enough.

—

It turned out walking was hard. Or at least it was if you did it long enough without food, water, or any way of telling the time. Matt had discovered that the twin suns never moved. It appeared that Gaia didn’t spin or spun slowly enough that he couldn’t track the resulting relative motion. His best guess for why he wasn’t getting baked was that neither of the suns seemed all that powerful in comparison with Earth’s. It also helped that the sky itself seemed permanently hazed by dust.

At some point in his journey, he had come to a new and profound appreciation of sneakers. The sandals had given him blisters which eventually popped, and now every step ground new dust and pain into the wounds.

He was thirsty, over-warm, and generally hating every aspect of his existence. He was exhausted and with no clear idea of how far he was from his target, he sat down in the dust.

Hours later, Matt woke up with a headache. He was red on one side from the baked dirt and at some point during his slumber, he had kicked off his sandals. As he put them back on, he realized that his painful blisters were gone. His feet were still dirty, but uninjured.

“Hey, system, what’s going on with my feet? They shouldn’t have healed that fast.”

The vitality (VIT) stat represents a creature’s ability to both withstand force and recover from it. Even at low levels, the vitality stat works constantly to close and repair wounds. This healing ability is not inherently linked to metabolic processes or overall health.

“Wow. I think that’s the most complete answer you’ve given me so far,” Matt responded. In his head, he added that this was also the best news he had heard from the system since he landed on Gaia. It was also worth figuring out the limits of what the system could and couldn’t answer. It seemed that the system didn’t know anything about where he was or what happened to Gaia, but did slightly better with questions that had to do with the system or himself.

“Does the system do anything to help with thirst or hunger? Does my vitality score help with that?”

Thirst and hunger are separate conditions not controlled by the system unless a creature possesses a class feature that specifically links them. Most creatures are reliant on food and water in some form, and will sicken or die without it.

This was not the answer Matt was hoping for, but he had suspected it might be the case. His headache was probably caused by dehydration, and his throat felt like it was about to permanently dry out. He missed indoor plumbing and running water, but his eyes just saw red dust all around him. Without better options, Matt put his head down, picked himself up, and began walking again.

As he did, he got what information he could out of the system regarding the other stats. Strength and dexterity were pretty much what they said on the tin. Dexterity was linked to how well and fast he could move his body - reflexes, general agility, and things like that. Strength was basically how much he could lift or how hard he could swing something, essentially a max-output stat just like on Earth.

Wisdom and intelligence were a bit harder to understand; the former seemed related to how much he knew and how well he could use his intuition, while intelligence was more about calculating from actual data. Matt suspected that each might have further uses. If there was more to know about either, it seemed it was class-locked at the moment.

After some time, hours? days even? Matt was in pretty bad shape. It turned out that water, or the lack thereof, was a key part of fatigue. He felt sore and tired and dumb. His tongue was thick and dry in his mouth.

He wasn't quite dying, but the lack of any kind of visible water was beginning to sink in as a serious threat. For the first time, he realized that he had to find something. Otherwise, he might not make it.

He looked in the classes again, hoping to find some sort of water-related magic class. He found a couple, but every class that explicitly allowed for the manipulation of water was much more advanced than what he had access to.

So he walked. After a while, he didn’t even try to think. He just plodded on and on. He ignored the dirt, he ignored the suns, ignored his sore muscles, and his dry mouth. He ignored the squishing of the ground.

He paused. There was something important that he was missing, but his brain refused to work. He closed his eyes and tried to muster his last bit of energy to think.

The ground had squished. That was new and maybe that meant… Before Matt could finish his thought, he opened his eyes and dropped to his knees. He crawled backwards to find the ground that had made the noise.

The culprit was a slightly damp patch of soil. Matt dug into the patch, scooping away barely wet dirt until he had a fairly good-sized hole. Matt had expected that he was standing on something like a spring – that as he dug, the soil would get wetter and wetter. That didn’t happen. The soil kept the same semi-wet consistency the further down he dug. What he did eventually uncover, however, was a rock. A rune covered glowing rock.

The rock itself was more-or-less teardrop shaped, and glowed primarily from runes inscribed onto the stone. Runes that looked enough like waves that Matt was fairly confident he had solved the wet-soil origin story mystery. Less good was that the rock was flickering and making irregularly clicking and popping noises. Matt’s video-game instincts were shouting at him that however important this stone looked, it also looked like it was about to explode.

Matt slowly and very carefully reached out to touch the stone, laying his hand on it as softly as possible. Nothing happened. The stone kept on buzzing and clicking as always, and Matt was blissful to find he had not blown up. Where the stone had looked slightly moist, Matt was surprised to find it felt completely dry. Apparently it wasn’t so much seeping water as causing other things around it to be wet, somehow.

But as he lifted the stone it immediately hissed, popped loudly, and fizzled out.

“No! No!”

Matt tapped and shook the stone. This kind of worked. The stone would momentarily flicker back on, then immediately cut out if he moved it at all. In a panic, he put it back in the hole, then carefully tapped it until it sprang back to life. He didn’t dare move it again. If it broke permanently, he’d probably die. He’d probably die anyway, but he wasn’t eager to burn his only chance at avoiding it.

He still had to get water out of the thing somehow; the alternative was dying. The difficulty had ramped up substantially given that he couldn’t move it, though, and his dehydrated brain wasn't doing him any favors in the creative problem-solving department. The dirt around where he had set the stone got visibly wetter, over the next few minutes, but not wet enough to squeeze any liquid out of. With his current resources, there was nothing he could do.

As he stared at the rock, Matt knew that he was observing his only chance at survival. If he couldn't figure this problem out, he might die again.

He really, really wanted to survive.