[Perks]
Current Perks
Stage 1: The Mage
The Mage warps the world
Gain double Magicka
Stage 3: Body
Endurance
Resilience
Temperance
In your quest you will push your body to its limits.
In your quest you will face death many times.
In your quest you will journey far beyond the plenty of civilisation.
Your body's natural endurance is increased by 50%.
Your body's natural toughness is increased by 50%.
Your body's natural need for nourishment is decreased by 50%.
Even in the dilated time, Simon felt the pool of energy in his mind swell as his Magicka doubled. He looked over the Stage 3 Perks with interest. Endurance and Resilience both seemed like they could be potentially life saving, but he found Temperance to be a little underwhelming.
A Pocket’s base size was measured as one tenth of Stamina in kilograms, which was then modified by your Pocketry Skill Bonus. With his current Stamina and Pocketry level, Simon could carry 804kg with him at all times. Bringing a month or two’s supply of food and water would be trivial.
Simon closed his menu and immediately stumbled as the momentum from his walking kicked back in.
“If you had to pick between improving your body’s endurance or toughness, which would you choose?” Simon asked, ignoring the looks his companions were giving him; confusion from Hadvar and amusement from Larenia.
“Toughness,” Hadvar answered immediately, with the same forceful certainty that Larenia had recommended The Mage. “Toughness is the one thing that your Body Bonus won’t impact. Any increase to the amount of Damage it takes to cut through your body could easily be the difference between a flesh wound and a major artery.”
“Well,” Simon said, “that sounds fairly decisive.”
Larenia nodded. “The fact that you will be specialised in magic, to at least some degree, tips the scales even further towards toughness, since physical endurance won’t be quite as important for you in combat.”
“Still, wouldn’t endurance functionally increase my Stamina?” Simon asked.
“No,” said Hadvar, “the Stamina cost for a given action is fixed; it’s based on the amount of energy the action requires. A high Body Bonus allows you to store more energy to fuel the increased expenditure but that, along with your body’s endurance, only becomes relevant after you run out of Stamina.”
“Alright then.”
This time, Simon stopped walking before he opened his menu. After selecting Toughness, he didn’t really feel any different. Closing the menu, he poked his arm a few times. It was… maybe a bit firmer, perhaps. He couldn’t really tell.
Ignoring the strange looks that he had once again earned from his companions, Simon raised a delicate subject with all the grace and eloquence he could muster.
“Do you guys mind if I shoot you with lightning?”
Larenia glared at him. “I’m sorry, you want to do what?”
“Shoot you with lightning,” he reiterated. “According to the spell tome, Destruction Damage is ten times arcane weight, so Jolt only does ten Damage. Both of you should be able to regenerate that pretty quickly. I need to cast the spell on a valid target to level my Destruction. If I can use it on the two of you whenever you’re at max Health, I should level fairly quickly. Although, Destruction has one of the worst skill use multiplier to skill improvement multiplier ratios, so it won’t be that quick.”
Larenia closed her eyes and took a long, slow breath in through her nose and out through clenched teeth.
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“Fine,” she said.
Hadvar just rolled his eyes and nodded.
And so, they continued walking. Every minute or so for Hadvar, and every thirty seconds for Lavernia, he would cast Jolt. Protected by their Health, his companions weren’t affected by the pain the spells might otherwise have caused.
As the first few levels rolled in, Simon learned several interesting things about magic in general, Destruction magic in particular and the Destruction Skill itself.
Larenia had told him that spells were made up of spellforms, runes and hand signs. Given that the changelog said that his Skill levels would give him the knowledge that would normally be needed to acquire them, Simon had expected to receive new spell components as he levelled. In the form of actual spells if he was lucky.
The hand signs came much as expected. By level 3 he already knew all five Destruction hand signs: Single-Burst (which was used in Jolt), Continuous, Mark Visual Target, Charge and Manifestation Ranging. His ability to physically make the hand signs was slow and a little rough around the edges, but he had the basic knowledge of what they did and he got better with every level.
For the runes, rather than give him complete runes, his Skill levels gave him the meanings of the various squiggles, circles and accents that were used to make them. He also learned, from level 1, that enclosing a rune in a square box made it a Destruction rune, allowing it to be bound to a Destruction spellform.
Some of the components were universal, the runic equivalents of prepositions, connectives and so on. Others, such as the components dictating the size and shape of a beam, were only functional when used in a Destruction rune. Then there were the myriad rules governing how the components interacted with both each other and whatever spellform they were attached to.
Trying, and mostly failing, to puzzle together new runes served as an entertaining diversion for Simon in between his occasional casting of Jolt and slipping the odd rock into Larenia’s Pocket.
Since he was no longer consumed by learning a new spell, it was relatively simple for him to maintain just the right amount of pressure on his Bosmer companion to maximise her gains from the exercise. The noticeable rate at which she improved was, according to his Pocketry Skill, highly unusual; albeit rather glacial compared to his own speed.
In the course of the three or so hours before the sun began to set, she had actually reached a point of being able to intercept most of his less subtle insertions. She even succeeded in sending one back. Admittedly, that was while he was distracted by creating a fold in her Pocket, much like the one in which the inquisitor Sergius hid his key, and tucking stones into it. Still, it was his own fault for overestimating himself. Her look of annoyance once she finally noticed it was more than worth the minor loss.
In the course of their travel, Simon’s Destruction levelling slowed rapidly from the first levels taking a mere handful of casts to the low twenties taking over half an hour each. Though inevitably, when Simon complained about this, Hadvar and Larenia were less than sympathetic.
Once he got past the early levels, he finally started receiving spellforms, which introduced him to the five branches of Destruction magic as they trickled in. The first few spellforms were, naturally, of the lightning branch. After that came fire and force spellforms, soon followed by frost and finally enervation.
The frost and lightning spellforms depicted mostly natural phenomena: a blanket of snow, a sheet of ice, a flash of lightning and so on. Fire and force were a little more man made in nature: a roaring campfire or the swing of a hammer. Enervation’s spellforms stood out from the rest. Not because their content was any more or less natural than the other branches, but because they were… unnerving.
A slumped, exhausted form, a vacant, hollow expression, a rotting corpse. Where the other branches used external force to destroy, enervation worked from within; draining Health, Stamina or Mana before ultimately acting upon that which the attributes protected. From his Skill knowledge, Simon knew that rotting from the inside out was a particularly nasty way to go; to say nothing of the literal dementia that Mana focused enervation spells could induce.
Unfortunately, though he had all the pieces needed for enough spells to fill a library of spell tomes, nothing was ever so simple. The hand signs were simple enough, being few in number and extremely intuitive. It was in the combination of runes and spellforms that difficulty arose. Every spellform interacted differently with every runic component and most of those interactions, if improperly guided by the rune as a whole, resulted in an uncontrolled explosion of some form. Usually with unpleasant consequences for the caster.
Experimenting with Journeyman spells, where the Damage was limited to 10 Health, was one thing. But an Adept spell would deal at least 160 Damage, potentially lethal to a Mage without any Warrior Skills. A Master spell could easily annihilate almost any Mage with a Damage output of 2430. Enough to kill a Warrior well past Stage 10, let alone a squishy Mage.
Of course, that was what the Manifestation Ranging hand sign was for, enabling the caster to form the spell potentially dozens of metres away, depending on how far apart they could get the tips of their middle finger and thumb. It was a tricky thing to use in combat, but for spell designing it was invaluable. Even if it would only work for spells containing a Destruction spellform.
At the tail end of Simon’s musings, not long after his Destruction had reached level 22, night began to truly fall as the sun sank below the mountaintops along the valley’s West side.
“We’ll stop here for the night,” Hadvar said, gesturing to a patch of ground that was little different from any other save for being slightly more free of debris and vegetation.
Simon shrugged, not feeling especially tired despite the intensity of the events that had occurred since he was ripped from Earth by Sithis. It was no doubt a function of his now very high Stamina.
“I suppose it isn’t the best idea to travel in the dark,” he commented.
“No,” replied Hadvar, giving him a knowing look, “but also, you still need sleep. Even if it doesn’t feel like it. You’re using a portion of your Stamina regen to ward off tiredness at the moment. Leave it too long, probably a full day or two at your Thief Stage, and that slowed regen will become a full on drain.”
“Huh,” Simon frowned, a little annoyed that he hadn’t figured that out for himself. “That makes a lot of sense. Anyway,” he took a deep breath and shook himself a little, “I’m assuming that we’ll need to keep a watch. I’m happy to take the middle one. You two did most of the work of getting us out alive.”
That the middle watch was the worst, since it split your sleep in two, was a random piece of logic that he had picked up from some fantasy book or another. From the surprised and grateful looks that his companions gave him, the reasoning held true in reality.
“I can’t say I would have expected you to think of that,” Hadvar said. “I’ll take first watch then, I’ll wake you when the moons rise over the mountains.”
The imperial officer manifested two bedrolls from his Pocket and took a seat against a nearby tree.
Simon wrapped himself up in one of the rough sleeping bags and, rolling his eyes when Larenia almost immediately began to snore, set to the task of falling asleep without being remotely tired.