What would be a good name for my new semi-game-like interface, I wondered to myself, or would it even need a name? Maybe... the Heller Gaming System. Nah, that was long and unwieldy, plus it wasn't like I could safely discuss it with anyone anyway - including Mark, thanks to the warning from the Celestial's message - so there wasn't much point in naming my 'System' at the moment.
It took me a few hours of fiddling with my new menu function until I was happy with the results of my new character sheet. I was able to add any type of skill, statistic, or attribute that I could think of, and my System used the information-displaying function of the Celestial's gift to access and display the relevant data based on whatever definitions I chose to set up. Getting the displays to output results that were meaningful was one of the hardest parts of the entire exercise, and when I tried to display my Strength (which I defined as my ability to lift, push, and pull things) as a number, the result was:
Strength: 100%
Which was... not very useful. I was 100% as strong as myself, great, thank you oh wise System! Of course, the true culprit was me and my unrefined definitions, but nobody needed to know that, right?
Eventually, I figured out how to compare my statistics to the average statistic of my fellow villagers, which strangely enough cost me nearly half of an entire CP just to enable. I was guessing that I needed to provide the energy required to measure something as difficult to quantify 'average attribute of an entire village', but in the end I decided that the cost was well worth it.
Strength: 11.2392%
Still not the most useful result, and much too unwieldy. Also, I felt quite certain that I was nowhere near 11% as strong as an adult, so the results must have included the very young and the infirm, thereby reducing the average. Then again, if we were the same as humans, an average eight-month-old baby was able to start crawling around that time, so, essentially, they were moving around 17 pounds of baby (their own weight, not a baby lifting another baby...) on their own, which was already in the 10% range of what an adult would weigh... maybe it was more accurate than I had given it credit for?
Regardless, for the sake of brevity I instructed the System to set ten as the average value for an adult in my village, scaling linearly down to zero (with zero meaning that the person would be completely unable to move under their own power) and with no upper limit (since an upper limit would just be foolish in a real-world reporting system). This gave me a number with, again, four decimal places, so I set it to round up or down to the nearest whole number.
Primary Statistics
Strength: 1
Dexterity: 2
Intelligence: 24
Fitness: 4
Willpower: 14
Perception: 12
Charisma: 21
Powers
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Minor Shock (79% trained)
It was basic, and maybe not immediately useful, but I found it pretty interesting to be able to keep track of things like that in real-time. Maybe in the future I would even add something like 'health points', but to be honest that sounded like a very complex concept to try and nail down. How would one even define something like that?
I was also pretty sure that I had messed up when defining many of the stats. Intelligence and Charisma, for example, were drastically higher than the rest. For Intelligence, I had set the criteria to include knowledge of basic physical principles, as well as problem-solving and reasoning skills; for Charisma, I had set it to largely represent a person's general outward appearance of fitness and health (healthy is hot, right?), while also factoring in a sliding scale representing one's ability to make and retain allies. All in all, pretty hard to tie down any kind of useful concrete numbers for more nebulous statistics like that...
As for why a few of my numbers were showing as being over twice the average, I could only imagine that it was because I still retained my Earth-based skills in philosophy, advanced math, scientific reasoning, and literacy in two languages (Chinese and English) - all skills that were possibly either very rare here, or they might not even exist on more primitive worlds such as this one. In addition, since I was still a baby it was likely that my ability to 'make first impressions' and 'retain allies' would be pretty skewed...
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Setting up scheduled soul-link meetups with Mark turned out to be more difficult than we had first expected, while also revealing something very important: We shared a 'sunrise' time, which meant it was very likely that we had both been reborn relatively close to each other. The hardships that we encountered were that neither of us was exactly in charge of our own schedules yet, and sunrise was a little hard to judge while trapped in a crib inside a room with only a single window that always seemed to have its damn shutter closed!
So, yes, there were interruptions occasionally that made one or the other of us miss our 'sunrise' meeting time. And I may have slept through at least one scheduled meeting...
Hey! Not my fault that my alarm clock is in a different dimension!
Thankfully, at least one of those issues was solved by my use of my System, since I was able to both check the exact time AND set an alarm that only I could hear! It was very situationally useful, sure, as babies didn't usually need to wake up on a fixed schedule, but it sure made meetings with Mark easier!
It didn't really bother me that my clock was somewhat inaccurate since I had to set it myself, and I didn't exactly have an existing timekeeping device that I could set it against; all I could do was mark the occurrence of one sunrise as 'A', then wait a day for the next one, mark that second sunrise as 'B', and set the time in between as '24 hours'. Then I divided that period of time by 86,400 to turn it into seconds, etc, etc, and bam boom I had invented my own only slightly crappy timekeeping technique.
Well, it wasn't that crappy, but after a few weeks I did start to notice that my predictions of sunrise were a bit off, which could also be explained by the seasons shifting, or any number of things that I hadn't thought of yet. The mysterious blob of data aggregating potential that was the Celestial's gift had let me know that it was capable of taking a survey, or whatever it was the thing did to collect information, and utilizing the results to construct a perfect timekeeping system, but it was asking for just under 40 CP to complete the task. That was way more than I wanted to spend on something that I didn't really even need, so I just stayed with my own 'freemium' solution. Plus, it was kinda fun figuring things out on your own sometimes!
I refocused my thoughts as my System alarm clock went off (I had already woken up naturally just a few minutes beforehand, which seemed to only happen to me after I set a damn alarm...) and got ready to access the soul-link. Maybe Mark actually made it on time?
I had no idea what he was doing to get all these warnings, but I wanted to ask him if he had bought any abilities yet, like my Minor Shock (but without mentioning specifics, because I didn’t want a warning),
*Warning, this message will be harmful to Mark. Would you like to proceed?*
Oh... well that was a little embarrassing. Should I tell him I triggered a warning? Maybe I should just change the subject, find out if he got a clock and alarm setup working like I had,
*Warning, this message will be harmful to Mark. Would you like to proceed?*
OH, FOR THE LOVE OF...!!