Maxi split her points between Luck and Creativity. She also had the All Skills ability that gave her a discount based on Luck. While it was listed at +11 because her luck was now at 57, it didn’t provide her quite a one for one discount. Either way, it gave her enough leftover points to purchase Mind Shard and boost it to level 10. With the boost in her creativity, she now had a 19-28 damage attack and a healthy amount of psy points to use it.
Psy points, like life points, regenerated while sitting in her chair at the rate of her level per hour and would fully refresh after a night’s rest. If she spent them all, it would currently take her 8 hours to get them back, which limited her to two quests a day without the use of items. Because of her financial situation, she didn’t have a choice but to only use items she found on the quests.
If she wanted to get better than a +10 in any skill, she could spend 2 skill points for every plus beyond ten, then 5 for every plus beyond 20, and ten points for every point beyond 50, and it only went up from there. Considering her Mind Shard ability was now +18, ten coming from her skill points and 8 from her 41 Creativity, she felt she was in pretty good shape as far as having a reasonably effective attack for her level.
The only problem now was that she couldn’t use it without the training. She needed to complete a 5-day seminar that would cost her some credits. Luckily, training was always considered available for an employee to purchase on credit.
Each day of the training was 8 hours with a man having long hair, John Lennon glasses, a beard, and named Swami Robinson.
The room was a yoga studio dojo with mats for all the new recruits of the Paranormal Investigators, one of them being the chainmail guy from her trial. The others participants were people from a smattering of different classes. They weren’t Generalists, as far as she could tell, but any sort of “magic”, like healing, was done through psy, so there were some new Customer Care Advocates as well.
Psy didn’t produce any visual effects, as far as she could tell. All the lightning bolts and firestorms she had witnessed during the raids were all weapons or tech wielded by the computer-using classes. As far as she could tell, the only people who could “see” psy were people who could wield it, or some such nonsense. Honestly, she tuned out all of Swami Robinson's pseudoreligious ramblings.
The Paranormal Investigator troops eyed her suspiciously. The five kept to themselves and made it clear they weren’t going to talk to her, even though chainmail looked like he wanted to chat when she first arrived. But the way the others closed him off from her, she got the impression that she was not welcome.
That didn’t stop him from cornering her on a break.
“Truce?” He said. “You left me for the dragon. I left you for the zombie.”
“Sure,” Maxi said, “but you better tell your friends you were trying to steal my lunch money before they find out there is a heart in the stone cold exterior.”
She eyed the PIs starring at them. Swami Robinson called the class to order before the guy could reply. He mostly led the class like it was a meditation retreat. They did yoga, breathing, and meditation exercises. He talked a lot about opening yourself to the cosmos, and all the woo one would expect from a White guy with the honorific of Swami.
Each day, after the eight hours of meditation and yoga was completed, she’d do her raid where she dutifully defended the higher-level players and fell back when she was too damaged to fight. She’d then do a quest from her class if she was high enough level to select it, or one of the many fetch quests. The Printer of Never Jamming II was still in the list, but when she attempted to select it, it said “requirements not met”, and all HR Terry could say was that triggers were not always viewable by players.
The Generalist quests at her level were mainly temping while people were on vacation, sick, or other such things. It was as close to a day job as she'd ever had. In the meantime, she slept in her Company assigned pod that was pretty much like a coffin with a bed. The sleeping capsules were in a giant room of about one hundred. One morning she accidentally forgot to set an alarm on her phone, and a Worker, clinging to the ladder, impatiently woke her up, claiming that her shift was over and the pod was his for the next eight hours.
None of her Office Pool was in the same room as she was, so she assumed there were other pods out there. She took her one allotted shower, only used the requisite amount of soap, a single towel, and didn’t let the water run longer than five minutes. She ate at the cafeteria in the free meal line with the rest of the yellow shirts, which was as bad as expected. There were lots of other stations with delicious food. There was even a mall floor in the building that had “all the best restaurants”.
So, she meditated during the day, quested in the evening, and used the yoga retreat as an excuse to her mom about why she wasn’t coming home. She said it was “a new employee training upstate that even had a yoga studio”, and to her mom’s credit, she sent some workout clothes, so Maxi wasn’t stuck doing the training in her yellow shirt like she did on the first day.
Unfortunately, the Company mailing address was a PO Box, so Maxi couldn’t glean anything more about the mysterious place, other than that her mother’s delivery was already in the mail room the day after she mailed it. With the proper clothes, she was ready to learn some psychic ability. However, no matter how much she attempted to “open her mind, clear her thoughts, and be one with the cosmos”, she didn’t feel any different.
Sure, she was relaxed, and probably had the lowest blood pressure she'd ever had in her life, but she still felt like Maxi, a regular human with no extraordinary mind abilities.
It wasn’t until the fourth day that something happened. At first, she thought that she was dying. She felt pressure on her chest like she was being crushed by a weight. At the same time, she felt a pull, like someone was yanking on her, but she was pinned under a car. The two forces pushing and pulling her eventually reached a breaking point, and she popped out of her body. Swami Robinson and the rest of the class were pulling on a ghost form of her.
She looked back and saw her body lying on the floor where she left it. There was a silver cord connecting her to her Earthly form. She looked down at her ghost self, and it looked normal enough. However, her hand passed right through her chest.
“Nice of you to join us,” Swami Robinson said. He seemed less ethereal than the other members of the class, who were all ghosts like her.
“Finally,” one of the PIs scoffed. “It’s no wonder she failed the trials.”
“Some of us train our whole lives for this, you know,” a Customer Care Advocate said.
Great, Company legacy brats, Maxi thought, and she could hear her thoughts as if she had spoken them aloud. “Crap, you can hear my thoughts?”
The Customer Care Advocate who had come to her aid scowled at her.
“We are in the plane of pure thought. It takes a while to control them,” Swami said. “Each person moves at their own pace, so let’s begin.”
“We’ve been able to do this for days!” the PI said. “It took the entire class to yank her out!”
“Each learns in their own way,” Swami said. “Maxi, go with the other Mind Shards, and Joaquin, can you catch her up? I will be helping the Healers, and Janus can take the Shrieks.”
Chainmail from the Paranormal Investigators nodded. Two of his PI friends formed their own group and began practicing on a dummy. Joaquin was well built under that chainmail armor. He was a looker in the all-American blond hair and blue eyes way, though his body was fuzzy like everything else except their instructor.
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Joaquin blushed, and said, “You're not bad looking yourself.”
This is going to take some getting used to, Maxi thought.
While the room had contained just yoga mats before, now there were practice dummies and other equipment that hadn’t been there in the real world. The items seemed to also be ethereal, as when one of the shrieking group used their skill to shatter a glass window, it then reset itself for the next person.
Swami Robinson was reaching into the leg of a practice dummy, lecturing to his Healer group. The other two Mind Shard PIs darted across the room in the blink of an eye and sliced their dummy with weapons that materialized in their hands. Joaquin showed Maxi to a dummy that wasn’t being used by the others and said, “Right. So, use your Mind Shard ability on that dummy over there. You can’t hurt him. All the stuff here is created by the mind of Swami Robinson.”
When Maxi stood in the spot Joaquin indicated, the dummy turned from a glorified punching bag from a martial arts gym to what looked like a living, breathing person. She became disoriented and stepped back. The thing was back to being a dummy.
“Happened to me the first time, too,” Joaquin said. “The astral plane doesn’t really follow all the same rules as our world.”
“Like?”
“See that cord connected to your body? Sever it, and you’ll never get back to your body again.”
“I’m guessing that’s one way to die the chair doesn’t regen,” Maxi said.
“Officially, you’ll be in a coma, but with no brain waves. Your family will be able to keep you going with food and hydration, but it won’t be worth it. You’ll be an empty shell.”
“Okay,” Maxi said. “So why are we learning to fight in this world?”
“It’s how all psy works. Weren’t you paying attention?”
“Honestly,” Maxi said, “I fell asleep during some of the meditations.”
“No wonder why we couldn’t get you out of your body. Swami had us try each lesson. Says the easiest way to leave your body the first time is getting yanked out. Okay, um, so, beginner stuff. Swami said we enter this world to do all psychic attacks.”
“Hold on a minute. I leave my body vulnerable in the real world to attack in this one? What good is psy, then, if we are all just lumps getting chewed by monsters in the real world? You were there in the dragon’s lair. That thing isn’t gonna wait!”
Joaquin winced and said, “Time passes differently here, and you don’t leave your body for that long with a Mind Shard attack. You just blink in and out in this world and are back in your body before anyone knows you were gone.”
Maxi watched the other two PIs. They blinked from their starting square, sliced the dummy and were back all in the same moment. Maxi stood back in the square and concentrated on moving in close to her opponent. Before she knew it, she was right next to the guy. The guy planted a palm in her chest, and she went flying.
The other two PIs laughed. Joaquin was kind enough to help her up and said, “I forgot to mention, the dummy knocks you back if you aren’t doing it right. Try this. Blink, attack, go back.”
She stepped back into the starting square and concentrated again on closing the distances. In an instant, she was there, but one palm strike later, she was on the floor again.
“You’re thinking about it too much,” Joaquin said.
“How am I supposed to do an attack without thinking about it?”
Several attempts later, she was getting nowhere. No matter how he explained it, she couldn’t just manifest a sword into reality, at least what her mind was telling her was reality. The PIs all did it with ease. They blinked, a weapon appeared in their hands, then they were back in the starting square before the dummy had time to finish wobbling from the blow.
She was about to give up on the whole thing when Swami sat next to her while the others practiced. Even Joaquin, who had been patient in the beginning, said he needed to practice and told her to work on it by herself. Swami smiled and said, “Looks like you’re struggling a bit.”
“Is there a do over? Can I buy back skill points?”
“No, you can dual class later if you’d like a fresh start, but that would be wasting even more points. No, no, you are where you are meant to be.”
“What do you know? You get paid regardless of who passes the class.”
“Ahh, but as a Trainer class with specialization in Psychic powers, my monthly ranking is based on completion rates.”
“You’re in the bottom tiers?”
“Ever since the last raid that failed…” Swami said grimly. “But nothing to worry about now. This month is on track. Look, I’ve been the intro Psychic teacher for a while now, and never once have I seen anyone drop out.”
“I seem to be a first for a lot of things. Besides, aren't the people here legacies? Training their whole life for this? How am I supposed to learn this in five days? Two days now.”
“Time moves differently here.”
“So I’m told.”
“The Company started back in the 80s, so sure, maybe some have been taking prep classes since they were kids, but they don’t have any more advantage than you. Company policy prevents teaching of any skills which aren’t purchased from the skill tree, so it’s meditation and yoga classes at best.”
“That’s exactly it. I’m not so good at sitting still. I have an active mind, and I thought this company was older than time...Knights Templar or some such nonsense. What’s this about starting in the 80s?”
“You think all of this can be achieved by a sedentary mind?” He motioned to the training room with all the objects that weren’t in the real world. “Anyway, the current iteration of the Company started in the 80s. We don’t really know how people dealt with monsters before that because there aren’t records. Look, you are here, outside your body. That’s the hardest step.”
“After you dragged me out.”
“The Company has a way of sorting out all the people who can’t cut it with Psychic abilities.”
“I failed the PI trials,” Maxi said glumly.
“But you became a Generalist,” Swami glanced around the room, and then leaned in close. “I almost put everything into Luck, too, but then my Pool said I was wasting my talent, that I was a good teacher and should pick the Trainer class. I almost didn’t have the stats, but sure enough a lucky quest pushed my Emotional Intelligence to meet the minimum requirements despite dumping a lot of points into Luck.”
“Do you still level Luck?”
Swami laughed. “No, no way. Luck is useless for a Trainer. But I always wondered what could have happened. Even the Generalists stop upgrading Luck after a while. Most people find a job that isn’t in the bottom tiers and just stay there. Power Twelve? They are untouchable. Think about it. In order to even get to their level, you must be as rich as the economy of a small country, and when they have all that wealth, do you think they’ll let anyone come close?”
“I thought both players have to agree for a PVP battle—”
“I’m not talking PVP, that’s for the chumps who fancy themselves arena champions. Have you ever seen a Power Twelve even step into the ring?”
During the little time Maxi had off, she had watched the arena matches from time to time. The higher levels streamed the matches, the lower just appeared on the leaderboards. The highest Tier player she had ever seen was a five.
“No… I can’t say that I have,” Maxi said
“That’s because death has worse consequences the higher you get, and if they slip up, even for one encounter, they go down a rank. Think about it. There are only 12 people in Tier 1. 1.1-1.12 respectively. There are 24 people in Tier 2. 72 in Tier 3. 288 in Tier 4 and so forth.
“By the time you get to the higher ranks, you don’t know how many share the 5.6 or 10.3 or whatever it is with you. However, in Tier 1 there is only one Tier 1.5 player and you can bet that the two 2.1 players are just salivating at the chance to take your spot. However, think about it, even at Rank 1.12 you can out XP, out credit, and out do anyone ready to take your spot. No matter how many quests you complete, or credits you earn, the Power 12 can no doubt do more, by an order of magnitude.
“How do you think there are so many of us higher-rank players that got stuck in lower Tiers? It’s a treadmill that once you get on, you keep going or you die.”
“This is supposed to be a pep talk?” Maxi said. “Who ever heard of demotivational coaching?”
“What I’m saying is that playing the game only gets you deeper into the game. Soon you switch from raising Tiers to just keeping your Tier. When you are competing with everyone else here, you start living to work and not working to live.”
Despite the woo he was brain-dumping on her, he was starting to make sense.
“Think about it,” he continued. “Once you have the credits to take some time off, do you? Robby in the cube next door isn’t, and he’s getting close to your Tier. Maybe the day off isn’t worth it. Maybe you got the credits for some of that fancier food or perhaps a day in the holodeck.”
“We have a holodeck?!”
“Holographic Projector Simulation Chamber, or HPSC. You were inside when you first started.”
“Oh.” Maxi frowned. She remembered the holographic Terry experience being rather underwhelming.
“But are those things worth the credits? There’s some equipment a higher Tier player is selling that will help you keep your edge on Robby. Sure, you've got unlimited time off, best pay in the world, but what good is it if you aren’t using it?”
“What are you saying? Just ignore rank? Find myself dead after a bad month?” Maxi said.
“No, I’m just saying you can raise your Creativity, probably earn some good psychic abilities, go on PI leftover quests, and probably carve out a good middle-class existence for yourself. Maybe even run the Generalist Branch one day when Ted retires. It’s not a bad life. Branch Managers get a cut of what their Branch brings in for the Company, but even if you were a PI, do you think you can ever level yourself up or get your Creativity even in the ballpark of the Power Twelve? They’ll get all the choice PI quests before you even have a chance to look at them. They’ll make sure that everything that happens will keep them untouchable. Unless...well, unless a player just happens to get lucky.”
Swami darted back towards the people practicing healing and yelled at a guy who was tossing the dummy around like a rag doll. Maxi stood up and went back to her starting square. The dummy changed into a human that seemed to be goading her.
Luck...how does one use Luck?
She concentrated and blinked. A battle axe appeared in her hands, and she cleaved the practice dummy in half.