The breeze coming off the quay was bitingly cold, and the stevedores were singing as they unloaded the cargo that came into Zeres every day. The ever-present smell of salt was less, and the sun was shining brightly for once. Monsoon season hadn’t been good to Vlss, and he was grateful for the reprieve from the thunder and the wet.
He wrapped his jacket tighter around himself and shoved his claws deeper into his pockets as he walked briskly towards the place he was to meet Qwyliss. It was called a “cafe”, and it was new in town, just opened up a couple months ago selling a new drink called coffee. Vlss had only been in there once so far, but he liked the atmosphere it had, where someone could just sit and talk with their friends for hours without needing to buy anything. Most did, since they were curious to taste this new drink that was spreading like wildfire. They did have other drinks though, and since this was Zeres, it was practically a civic duty to keep a few barrels of Zeresian grog on hand. Vlss hated the stuff, but it was great for hazing visitors from other places.
As Vlss opened the wooden door to the cafe, he scanned the room, looking for a sign of his friend. Qwyliss was seated in the corner, near the wooden walls furthest away from the door’s line of sight. Making his way over, he overheard snatches of various conversations.
“...that Reinhart woman will be the death of us all. No self-respecting Drake would ever be in bed with those humans.”
“No self-respecting Zeresian, you mean.”
“Hah! True enough.”
“...I’m telling you, just this once…”
“...I’ve heard some rumors about strange Humans…”
“...that Wall Lady from Manus, I’d like to fuck her till she can’t walk straight.”
“She’d put you six feet under before you even got close, my guy…”
Vlss tuned out the rest of that conversation. They weren’t going to be saying much else of use anyway. He’d been to enough dive bars to peg their type, the kind of person who’d be rip-roaring drunk before noon. Sure enough, when Vlss looked over, they were downing cups of grog like it was water.
As he sat down, Qwyliss spoke, “Had a rough time getting here? I know you’ve not been in the best mood lately.”
“No I haven’t,” Vlss admitted, “but today was sunny, and that helped a lot.”
Qwyliss smiled. “I’m glad to hear that. I was getting kind of worried about you, you know. You were moving like you were living with your dad again.”
Vlss clenched his fist at that. “We all have our own battles to fight, Qwyliss. I’ll thank you kindly to drop it now.”
“Alright, alright, no need to get snippy at me now, I was just worried about you is all. People care about you, you know? With how you are, I feel like it bears repeating once in a while.”
“Alright, fine,” Vlss grumbled. He didn’t like sympathy much and bore it with ill grace. He waited for Qwyliss to continue speaking, and when he realized Qwyliss was waiting for a response, he snapped, “Alright, I’ll keep that in mind. Happy?”
“Not really.” Qwyliss ran his claws over his spines, frustrated. “Vlss, you don’t live with him anymore. You don’t have to push people away when they try to help you, your dad’s not able to reach you here. You can’t live in fear of his shadow forever, man.”
“Easy for you to say,” Vlss said through gritted teeth, “You’re not the one with a high leveled shambolic caricature of a Drake posing as a father.”
Qwyliss exhaled, exasperated. “Maybe not, but how long are you going to hide here in fear that he’s going to find you?”
“As long as it takes,” Vlss retorted, “I’ll do it until the fucker dies, if I have to. Now can you fucking drop it?”
Qwyliss sighed. “I’ll stop for now. Let’s talk about something else. What’s been on your mind lately, young Vlss?”
Vlss thought about it for a second. Then he said, “I’ve been thinking a lot about levels lately.”
“Oh?” Qwyliss leaned forward, intrigued. “Go on.”
“We take levels for granted, like they’re an immutable truth of the world that’s been there since the very beginning,” Vlss gestured around, “This whole thing, this place we live in, was built on the idea of levels, and more specifically classes. They’re essential to the whole, take them away and we crumble.”
Qwyliss nodded. “Yes, levels are important. They give you power and specialization in your chosen profession. But,” he held up a finger, “you miss one important aspect of how most think about leveling.”
Vlss furrowed his brow. “What’s that?”
“Personhood.” Qwyliss stated. “The Book of Levels treats leveling as sacrosanct, as if leveling itself is the act of living, and most people follow. Sentience means little to most people when thinking about moral considerations, they only care about whether the person in question can level.”
Vlss nodded rapidly. “Right, and that’s a symptom of the underlying problem we have with levels.”
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
“Problem?” Qwyliss frowned. “I think I’ll need you to state your position in full because I’m not sure I understand you clearly.”
Vlss paused at that. “Damn, and here I thought you were going to agree with me.”
Qwyliss shook his head at that. “It doesn’t matter if I agree with you or not, it’s good debate practice to establish your premise first and lead with that instead of starting in the middle of your chain of logic.”
“Fine,” Vlss sighed, “I’ll do that. Hmm…I haven’t actually figured out the premise of my position yet. Huh.”
“And this is why you need to start at the beginning, Vlss,” Qwyliss grinned and said, “Let’s start with the basics. What do you mean by levels?”
“Levels are what we receive from that voice in our head after we do something particularly noteworthy or difficult,” Vlss stated. “It’s that number we hear in our head, that announcement where the voice says [World’s Worst Father Level 82!]. That number which sums up and represents our amount of power is our level. Leveling then, is the act of engaging in activities that would prompt this announcement.”
Qwyliss nodded. “Good so far. What about [Classes]?”
“Classes are a statement of how you spend your time,” Vlss stated. “They’re the activities you choose to do that you’re good at or enjoy, ideally both, whether that be killing monsters, shooting a bow, or baking bread. As you increase your level in these classes, you get Skills that help you do things faster or better in some way, and these Skills are almost always tailored to you specifically.”
“Pause, pause,” Qwyliss held up his claws. “You’re getting ahead of yourself there. Pretend I don’t live in the same society you do and you need to explain everything to me. What are Skills?”
Vlss rubbed his chin as he pondered the question. He opened his mouth, ready to reply when he realized that his definition was imperfect and would need to be reworked to cover all the ones he knew of. He decided to work it out with Qwyliss and spoke haltingly, “Skills are…discrete units of achievement, I think.”
“Not all of them. You know about that [Innkeeper’s] Skill [Garden of Sanctuary]. That’s not an achievement so much as it is a place, codified in time.”
Vlss nodded. “Right, It'd be more accurate to say that Skills are borrowed ability. If you achieve something that is deemed to be of sufficient merit, you’ll either get a Skill that corresponds roughly to the deed you’ve done, but better in some way specific to the achievement it was given for. If there’s no analogous comparison, you create your own, new Skill that others will eventually get. [Garden of Sanctuary] was probably just a garden the first owner had where they went to be away from the worries of the world for a while, and the garden was so good at it that whoever creates Skills thought it worthy of being codified into a Skill and passed down. It’s an achievement in that sense, of being a monument to your existence, a creation that will outlast you until the end of Skills themselves.”
Qwyliss nodded. “Very good, young Vlss. Now you can move on your central premise. You say us relying on levels is a problem. Why?”
“Skills, and to a lesser extent, levels, are tailored towards the individual.” Vlss answered. “This is, while a great benefit to the person receiving these gifts in the short term, a net loss for their society in the long term.”
Qwyliss’s eyes narrowed. “And why is that?” he asked.
“There’s no standardization,” Vlss stated, “Any knowledge a person may acquire, any process or product a person may make or improve in their lifetime is unique to their lived experience, and thus will die with them. Other people will not be able to replicate what they were capable of, and the higher leveled the person was, the worse this knowledge loss is.”
“And which classes do you think would suffer the most from this knowledge loss?” asked Qwyliss.
“Production classes,” Vlss answered, “Any class that produces a product for consumption would suffer the most from this knowledge loss. Take an [Alchemist] for example. Potions they invent or streamline the brewing process for are going to be highly dependent on the Skills they have. If anyone else wants to make the potion they make, they’re going to have a hard time trying to accurately reproduce it, if the [Alchemist] in question even leaves notes on how to make it after they’re dead. That’s another thing Skills disincentivize, note taking. If you get [Perfect Recall] or another similar skill related to memory and recalling things clearly, then there’s no real reason to take notes at all for personal reference. Even if you do take notes, the higher level you are, the harder your notes will be for lower level [Alchemists] to understand because of the burden of knowledge you carry. It’s just a bad framework all around for knowledge retention.”
Qwyliss sat back. “Alright, you’ve made your point there about lack of standardization leading to knowledge loss. What about the lack of standardization in general?”
“That’s an issue in the same vein,” Vlss said. “This lack of standardization means that efficiency is lost because you have to account for all the different effects bespoke Skills have and the best way to utilize them. Take the Driver’s Guild. Their job is to transport things across Izril as fast as possible, but they’re not very good at it. For the most part, everyone’s mostly left to their own devices in choosing to take different routes and shipments. It’s a free-for-all, and it’s a mess. Unprofitable towns on trade routes don’t get service for much, and you have to look real hard and pay extra to find a driver who’s willing to take any slightly dangerous material for you. And all these drivers have different Skills unique to some point in their life that make them most suited to a particular type of delivery, and while their skills might be transferable across different routes, their Skills aren’t.”
“You’re describing a common state of affairs for most guilds though” Qwyliss replied, “And the services and products they provide are of satisfactory quality most of the time.”
“Yes, but they could do it better,” Vlss shot back, frustrated. “The Driver’s Guild in particular, they could transport more stuff, a larger variety of stuff too, if only they introduced some standardization in their system of transport beyond just weight classes. But Skills make that an unpopular decision that would decrease their effectiveness and efficiency in the short term.”
“Oi, whatcha ramblin’ about now, Vlss? Your head stuck in the clouds again?”
Vlss sighed. “Fuck you too, Seress.”
“And I think that’s enough for now,” Qwyliss interrupted them before Seress could bait Vlss into a shouting match again. “That was a good discussion there, Vlss. I don’t agree with your conclusion of the System being bad for us, especially since it’s the great equalizer for all of us, but you do raise some good points. I think we’ve stayed in here long enough though. It seems that our little conversation might have attracted more attention than we anticipated.” He looked around at the patrons nearest to him, who were all pretending very hard that they hadn’t been listening in the whole time and failing at it.
He stood up and pushed in his chair, and gestured for Vlss to do the same. “I think we’re done with this for the day. We’ll pick up where we left off tomorrow.”
Vlss stood up and pushed in his chair, vaguely annoyed at Seress for interrupting the conversation when he was starting to get going. The Drake in question winked at him when he looked over at her, which only heightened his annoyance. He briefly thought about exacting vengeance on her, before discarding the idea as a waste of his time. He ordered some coffee and walked out of the cafe, thinking over what he had said and what he would say to Qwyliss the next time they met.