On a quiet street in a quaint one-story house slept a young lady. The hum of a fan covered most of the sounds from the cracked window, only the occasional cricket or roaring engine breaking the peace. Every ten minutes or so a soft blue glow hovered above the girl before vanishing. If the girl wasn’t such a sound sleeper the light would have awakened her long ago. The girl was exhausted from the darkening beneath her eyes from attesting to insufficient sleep on a regular basis.
It wasn’t until the sun was almost halfway into the sky that the girl began to stir. Sluggishly the girl dressed before stumbling to her kitchen for the fuel her body needed.
***
The blinking red dot in the corner of my vision was hard to ignore, but my only semi-conscious brain managed the feat as I sought out the last of my box of instant oatmeal and rummaged in the freezer for some frozen fruit. I debated on a cup of tea or a glass of juice to chase the meal down. Eventually, my need for caffeine prevailed and perpared my cup of green tea smothered in an appropriate amount of honey and a dash of lemon.
Despite my barely functioning brain I managed to make a rather balanced breakfast: a fact I’m rather proud of. I savored every bite, I didn’t always enjoy food since I tended to get caught up in work and eating takes up valuable time. But I accomplished my tasks last night and felt I deserved the reward of a leisurely breakfast.
Dishes cleaned and put away I headed over to my desk and clicked on the virtual machine glancing over the code, everything seemed in order. Finally I turned my focus to the red light in the top right side of my vision. Immediately my vision was filled with the notifications from last night.
There was a total of 79 notifications.
[Open Rebellion has used for the crime “False Impersonation” 0.07 points have been added to your free stat points]
[ERROR]
[It has been detected that the Host is using a non-sentient being to complete the crimes]
[Recalibration occuring]
[It has been decided that the completion of the task will still be counted since the responsibility lies with the host and there is no attempt to hide her connection to the nonsentient being, however, the stat points earned will be reduced]
[Open Rebellion has used for the crime “False Impersonation” 0.0007 points have been added to your free stat points]
[...]
The notifications were uniform after that. It wasn’t exactly unexpected that the system would “dock my pay” since I was using the automatic version to complete a crime essentially every five minutes. It would be more ridiculous if the System allowed me to get full credit. If I could leave the programs for 24 hours I would gain about 20 stat points a day, 604 in a month, and 7,258 in a year.
That would be a ridiculous amount considering that the natural human limit was 20 for Str, Agi, 25 for End, Dex, and 30 for Int. The limitations are different for the purely physical stats vs. the ones including intelligence and willpower.
Even with the System’s limitations, I could earn about 6 stat points a month and 72 in a year which would be about 14 per stat. This of course didn’t include when the computer needed to be shut down, crashed or I earned more stat points with more acts of Open Rebellion the latter being something I planned to do often.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
If I continued to study coding and its applications I could smooth out the process and up the output. Right now I have a clunky process, I have the ten profiles I created alternating filling out surveys that another system has filtered through to find. That’s why it takes about five minutes to complete each crime.
However, right now it was a priority it was giving me a steady income and I wanted to spend more time researching the limitations of what counted as crimes as well as what triggered Open Rebellion.
I let the program continue to run but with an addition. This addition made it so that anyone trying to track my IP address would get pinged to random spots around the world.
As the system ran I waited for the familiar blue glow to fill my vision at the six-minute mark I checked the quest log, and there was an option to fill in the daily crime quest 75 options, meaning that the crime had been committed but not counted as Open Rebellion.
Although the result wasn’t unexpected I had still hoped that it wouldn’t count as hiding my identity since I was only technically hiding my location, if it still counted it would add another element of safety to the whole process. I didn’t expect anyone to pursue the matter even if they did figure out the answers were fake, but it would have been nice.
I removed the cloaking element and decided to do some other elements, outside ones this time. I grabbed my coat, gloves and beanie and headed out the door.
Four hour later I had made some progress. Jay-walking had netted me an Open Rebellion stat reward as well as an EVIL coin for a traffic violation, honestly I hadn’t expected it to count since I wasn’t in a motorized vehicle but it was a nice bonus.
Committing the same crime but this time with my hood on still activated Open Rebellion. I tried it but this time with the thought that I didn’t want anybody to be able to tell it was me Open Rebellion didn’t activate.
My intention theory was disproven and with the previous experience with it adapting to me using my computer I was starting to think the system was more adaptable then I had predicted. Further testing showed that as long as the things I was doing were natural for the circumstances and my intentions were “pure” Open Rebellion would activate.
When I put my gloves on Open Rebellion no longer activated, my guess would be because the cool weather wasn’t enough to warrant that sort of usage. More testing as the seasons changed and I explored different venues would be necessary before I reached any conclusion though.
By the time I had made my normal loop around the neighborhood, I had completed a total 11 traffic violations and trespassed on 7 lawns meaning I had added 1.26 to my stats. I wanted to stay outside for a while longer so lounged on my porch pulling up my stats.
[Status]
[Name: Ria
Alignment: Villain
Str: 7
Agi: 8
Dex: 14
End: 11
Int: 18
Stat Points: 7 (0.1518 not currently available)
Skill Points: 1
Skills: None
Abilities: Open Rebellion (A)]
It appeared that the stat points to the decimal point would not be available until the reached a full point. I had spent my spare time thinking about the ways to optimize the usage of my stat points, even with how easy it was to earn them I didn’t want to waste them. Right now my most valuable stat was Int it was also the one I had a natural advantage in.
I decided to raise Int to 21 placing two in End and Dex respectively. End was important to support my high usage of Int. Dex was more important for how it could be applied to typing and any other projects I would have to do with delicate inner workings.
I saw the merit in investing in the more physical stats for more balance and in case I got in physical altercations, but right now it would not be the most cost-effective. Perhaps when I had more points I could dedicate more to that side of my build.
For now, though it was time for steady growth and figuring out the best optimization of risk vs. reward. I had made some progress, but I was hardly satisfied by how slowly things were moving.