[Quick Retcon: Chuck no longer checked out any library books when he went to the bank’s union meeting.]
And that was it for the day. I thought there would be more, maybe a meeting with the boss or some kind of status report on my progress, but there was nothing of the sort. After meandering around the lobby for a good ten minutes, one of the bouncers came up to me with an envelope.
“Here’s your pay for today, Goldshanks said you did a good job.”
I took it with a smile and thanked the man.
“Nah, thank you! I’ve never seen people try to cheat in all these weird ways before. Today was pretty fun. See you tomorrow.”
I nodded in agreement, and we both left the casino.
[Level up! (9)]
[Str: +0 | Con: +0 | End: +0 | Cha: +1 | Atr: +0 | Dex: +0 | Int: +2]
[Str: 14 | Con: 18 | End: 15 | Cha: 21 | Atr: 11 | Dex: 13 | Int: 19]
The drive back was thankfully uneventful, and since I was no longer in a rush, I didn’t have to floor the accelerator when I passed over speed bumps. But even at a snail’s pace, the car still impacted the ground in a thud. It didn’t hurt as much, thankfully, but it was still painful. Especially when I passed through a road with several of them in a row.
Thud
“Ow.”
Thud
“Ow.”
Thud
“Ow! Alright, who the hell put so many of these speed bumps on the road?! One more and I’m going to-”
Thud
My lips curled into a snarl at the last bump, and I seriously considered taking a detour through city hall to find out who exactly was responsible for all of this pain! But before I could slam on the accelerator and hit another inevitable bump, I stopped.
“What the? That last one didn’t hurt.”
I quickly pulled up my shirt and looked at my chest, expecting to see a massive splotch of maroon and purple over it. But to my surprise, the color of my skin was only a little off-beige.
“Could’ve sworn it was going to look a lot worse, almost like…” I grimaced. “Did I just get lucky? Or was it because of something else.”
My eyes flashed. “The System! My Constitution went up by two points a few minutes ago, it’s almost at peak-human levels, or at least way above average. Maybe it started to retroactively apply itself to my body after the level up, so the bruise isn’t as bad now?”
It made the most sense. But I realized that was only because I didn’t actually know much about the System, beyond a couple of fairy tales.
The lull in my suffering and responsibilities, along with the quiet road, gave me the chance to think. I thought I’d be able to take it easy with leveling up after hitting the mob’s finances, at least to the point where I’d only have to worry about my new job, but I was starting to feel like that wasn’t the case.
They were likely to have backup funds, and ways to build themselves back up. Not to mention that even though there weren’t any cameras in the place so they didn’t exactly have my face, they could still somehow try to come gunning for revenge in the off chance they figured out who I actually was. Not to mention that man who barged into my apartment that morning…
I let out a massive shiver.
This wasn’t over yet. I had a terrible feeling deep down that things were going to get very messy before they got any better, and that I was alone and vulnerable on a dark and dangerous sea where unseen horrors beneath the surface were getting ready to swallow me whole. Here be dragons. And much, much worse.
For all I had the System to light a path to safety, I didn’t really know how to point it in the right direction. It was still mostly a mystery since all the information I could find on it came from children’s stories. For something so ingrained into this world’s entire culture, you’d think there’d be more written on it, right? Even that history textbook mentioned it!
Wait… textbook. Academia…
I floored the pedal, making a beeline towards the library. Once I’d gotten what I was looking for there, I quickly headed back home, thankfully without being accosted either way. The last time I went to the library, things got a little… weird, so I didn’t exactly stay to browse. This time was much more calm however, and my time paid off.
“Here we go,” I said as I landed on the loveseat in my apartment with a pile of scholarly articles next to me.
The first one on the stack was bound in a thick cardboard, something expected of a traditional hardcover novel. I picked it up and gave it a look.
“History of the System Fairy Tale,” I read aloud, turning past the title page and into the table of contents, which was even further split into subsections. The first one just had a list of countries. According to the introductory chapter, each nation had its own collection of myths about the System, but none of them seemed pretty fancy. I was hoping for something like ancient Greece, the Roman empire, or Babylon, but there was nothing like that. Only places you could still find on a map… except for Yugoslavia.
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Skimming through the other chapters, all I saw were summaries of the stories themselves, and nothing that talked about them in-depth. That wasn’t what I was looking for right now. Besides, I’d already gotten my fill from the children’s section of the Newark library, so I jumped ahead to the second subsection.
The next few chapters were more historically focused. First up was a scholarly attempt to track down where exactly the System fairy tales started out, which after skipping to the end, I could tell they hadn’t actually reached any conclusions. All of the available historical records pointed towards the stories just popping up everywhere at the same time about six hundred years ago.
“Really helpful, Dr. Ruxenberry,” I scoffed, glancing at the name of the author on the back.
Afterwards was a series of notes on how local culture might have influenced the specifics of each tale, but that didn’t really matter much to me either. After skipping further ahead, I finally found a chapter that made me smile.
“Numerical analysis of the System.” Back home, knowing the numbers behind the scenes let you make the most of your character when playing a video game, and the System was essentially one big video game. A big mind-controlley one, but a video game nonetheless. I began to read the chapter out loud.
“Observing commonalities between the various retellings of myths, we were able to apply concrete numbers to more obscure aspects of the System beyond what they spell out for us. It is well known that general progress of System wielders is measured through Levels, which go up as the user obtains more worldly experience. However, ‘worldly experience’ is not merely a metaphor but an explicitly measurable variable.”
I raised my eyebrows and stuck my nose between the pages. Level ups always did feel like they came after some major event, but it still always felt a little arbitrary. Maybe some insight would change how I approached situations? I continued reading.
“Experience that leads to an increased Level can be roughly described as (sexual aspect + challenge) * worldly significance. The sexual aspect refers to how much sexual activity or sex-derived pleasure is created from the event the System user takes part in, and the challenge is how much difficulty they faced in overcoming the challenge. Worldly significance refers to how much of an effect on the world at large their actions or the event had, such that influencing worldwide events or politics would have a much greater weight than, say, securing a small promotion at work. Due to the metaphorical nature of many of these myths, specific values cannot readily be assigned to such events, but the general workings of Level ups are still clear.”
I nodded to myself. Actual numbers would’ve been nice, but there was only so much someone could do with just a couple of ‘children’ stories, and this was already a lot. I wasn’t exactly disposed to doing anything overtly sexual, but it was good to know all of the difficulties I faced made up for it. It didn’t look like I’d be doing anything of worldly significance for a long while either, but there had to be some kind of minimum possible value to explain the levels I did have. I continued onto the next paragraph.
“Attributes are another set of numbers tied to Level that have their own bounds for increasing. Every level up, one attribute goes up by a point for every ten levels the System user has, with a minimum of one. For the first ten levels, one attribute will increase, and for levels eleven to twenty, two attributes will increase, and so on. These increases can overlap on the same attribute. Beyond this, attributes can also increase if a particular threshold for use-case is surpassed for that particular attribute. For example, if enough physical activity is performed, the next Level up will give an extra point in Strength to the user beyond the other guaranteed points.”
I grumbled to myself. This particular way of handling attributes reminded me of an old game from back home. Its System wasn’t exactly popular, since it was easy to accidentally perform too much of an unwanted task or not enough of an important one, and get screwed over on your Level ups. It would be possible to miss out on tons of points if you didn’t know this and just tried to get through life, like I was doing.
I didn’t think I would be as upset about this as I was, but I just told myself it was because of the unfairness of this System rather than having missed out on countless bonuses by not hitting the gym or practicing juggling. I mean, why the hell would anyone living in a sexual fantasy world like this bother reading a PhD’s research paper? I tried to put the frustration out of my mind while I continued reading.
“Skills, a category independent of Level, follows a similar formula, which can roughly be described as (sexual aspect + action performed) * weight of result. Sexual aspect is the same as with level ups, and ‘action performed’ roughly indicates how ‘powerful’ or ‘significant’ the action performed with the Skill is, while ‘weight of result’ refers to how strongly others were affected by the application of the Skill.”
I squinted as I read that passage again before moving to the next, hoping for a better explanation. Thankfully, that was exactly what I got.
“These variables were very difficult to define, but these are their general definitions. ‘Action performed’ covers a wide range of qualifiers, but the general idea is that the more powerful the effect of the Skill, the larger this value is. As for ‘weight of the result’, this variable sounds very similar to worldly significance’ but it has some glaring differences. The ‘weight of the result’ is determined through a different scale that only takes immediate results into account, resulting in less needing to be done for a high number, but less counting towards it.
What makes Skills even more obtuse are their individual eccentricities. Each Skill, depending on how it works or what it does or even completely arbitrarily, will weigh the variables of its experience formula differently. For example, Skills dedicated to preventing sexual gratification would add a bonus to make up for the negative ‘sexual aspect’ variable, while other Skills that have very little to do with sexuality might choose to only count the weight of the result based on the sexual nature of what it was used for.”
I nodded again, taking a long moment to absorb the information. It made sense, and explained a lot of the System’s weird behavior. It explained why [Detect Cheating] leveled up consistently when I used it on card sharks as well as relationship cheaters, but also why it was so difficult to level up early on. The Skill wasn’t getting me anything beyond a name and a ‘yes’ or ‘no’. That meant unless I followed up on it with my own investigations, the ‘weight of result’ would be at a solid zero. But at the same time, even if I just found out the reason but didn’t act on it, it would still at least count as something. But what I read brought up an interesting idea I wanted to try out with that particular Skill. What if the sexual aspect was positive?
Beyond [Detect Cheating], this behavior also explained [Tinker]… sort of. It didn’t level up unless I fixed something that was being used sexually, probably because it wasn’t implicitly or explicitly a sexual Skill, so the ‘weight of result’ only registered for sexual use cases.
I let out a sigh as I dropped the book to my lap, my head falling backwards onto the sofa’s cushion. The System was fucking bullshit, and I had to live with it. But that just meant I could get around the worst parts of it if I put my mind to it.
Like I was doing right now.
The book had given me enough ammunition to have a go at something called power leveling, aka the only thing that’d give me a chance at getting strong enough to fight back against whatever threats loomed out there.
I got up and headed to the door. It was time to hit the town.