Kaori watched as the timer ticked over to 100% and the program that she and the rest of the select team had worked months on initiated. The golden letters in everyone’s vision read system startup initialized. Suddenly, every single person on the planet had a screen appear in front of them.

Accompanying the screen was the vocal message in her own voice. “System screen may be accessed at any time by thinking or saying; System. Only those that you mentally command the screen to be visible to will be able to see it. Hide the screen by thinking or saying; Hide Screen.”

The voice being her own and being presented right after her little speech to the populace was a theatrical concession. She wanted the populace to associate the system with their goddess so that nobody would be too tempted to try bucking the system. There were bound to be a few glitches to clean up like systems that didn’t initialize for their owners but she could deal with that a lot easier than having entire sections of the populace trying to avoid the system entirely.

Kaori watched as the tutorial of how to use the system played out in front of each of the citizens. The design they had settled on involved the use of the reading part of the omniglot power. Kaori had purchased the power but she ended up having to fiddle with the settings to get that part of it separated so she could plug it into the system.

The end result was right in front of her. There were around fifty elves in this little village and with the exception of the children who didn’t have the attention span for it, everyone else was reading the system messages and working through the features of their new system interface. The children weren’t excepted from getting system interfaces though.

In the case of the children, they had come up with a clever way to work things. The system could be accessed by a newborn but not really understood. There was a feature that hid system screens if they weren’t accessed in the first few minutes. That would leave a small box in the bottom right corner of a person’s vision. This system was also to help mitigate confusion upon waking from being asleep or passed out and having notifications waiting.

Children would be taught to use their basic system functions as they got a bit older by their parents. The message to play the tutorial would wait till they were old enough to use it. On the off chance that a child managed to run through the tutorial before they were old enough to understand or in the event of memory loss, the tutorial could always be accessed through the system menu and using that was part of the tutorial.

It was a bit strange watching a bunch of elves staring into the distance with their eyes flickering all over and occasionally pressing thin air in front of them with a finger. The sciurringen girl was also going through the menu like the rest. Kaori smiled once more at how adorable her being in Atha’s cleavage was. She was a little worried about her slipping and scratching the elf girl with her claws. Then she remembered that Atha would be wearing a hide bras and immediately felt better for her.

After a few minutes, several of the villagers began to finish with the tutorial. They then began to play with their system in earnest and there was a lot of talk back and forth about general stat levels and skills. Kaori listened intently to all the accolades and complaints but nothing really stood out to her.

She had just finished up her tutorial on how to use this magical marvel the goddess had bestowed upon them. She then did as she had heard dozens of other people doing and said the strange word out loud. “SYSTEM!” She knew that the meaning was just an orderly way of doing something but the word itself sounded strange to her. It was like when she heard the elves talking before today. It was a word that she had never heard until today, she was sure of it.

In the top right of her screen was the word name and below it: Aiko. She read the name several times and somehow it felt right to her. This was her name that she couldn’t remember ever hearing before. Not that there had been anybody to say it until Atha had helped her those months ago.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

She was so absorbed in the discovery of her own name that she momentarily forgot to look at the rest of the screen. At her stats and skills as the system called them. She kept reading which was strange in and of itself. There were stats for health, strength, speed, dexterity, stamina, intelligence, memory, creativity, mana conductivity, mana pool, confidence, and attractiveness.

There were bars beside each of the stats that she knew meant how much of each thing she had or how good she was at that thing. Aiko was surprised to find that she had a few high values. Her highest was in mana conductivity, whatever that was. She also had really high values in dexterity and attractiveness. She supposed that those were good things to have a high value in?

Below the section for stats was a section labelled skills and below that was one called abilities and still below that was one called gifts and blessings. She saw that she had things in all of those areas. Aiko wasn’t sure what that was about but she would have to look closer at them and figure it all out.

In her skills category she had by far the most. In it were the words: alertness II, climbing III, evasion II, jumping III, listening II, and scent I. She knew right away that these things were all related to her daily activities and how she survived. It was good to know that she had these.

In the abilities section she had only three things. The first was spatial awareness which she had no idea the meaning of. The second was chaos magic affinity and she had even less idea what that was about. Finally there was omniglot-chosen. Aiko remembered hearing about that a few moments ago but why did it say she was a chosen? Everything had the ability to be looked at in greater detail but she wanted to scan the last section before doing that.

The gifts and blessings section had two things in it. The first one was holy magic blessing which she didn’t understand but the last thing on the list drew her eyes far more. The last item in the list was ^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^. It seemed like there were words that just didn’t want to be seen.

Aiko was very curious and clicked on that listing. When she did, the description that came up was less than helpful. “This is a blessing that isn’t meant for you to know and it shall be revealed to you at the proper time.” When would the proper time be she wondered?

Aiko decided to start over at the top and click on everything starting with health. The bar beside her health was a grass green color but was rather short. Beside it was the number 15/18. She could tell that meant that she didn’t have much health. She wondered about the empty spot at the end of the bar and figured that the total of the bar must be the bigger number.

Realizing that her health bar wasn’t full she looked at the other bars and found that most of them were a darker tree green and full. All of the bars were kind of short but the differences were glaring. There was something different about the color of her health bar as well as some missing. It came to her that she wasn’t fully healed from nearly freezing to death.

Her strength was tiny at only 6 but it was full. Aiko guessed that was about right since she was so much smaller than most creatures or people. Then there was speed. She had a lot more of that. Her speed was a 14 so almost at the level of her health and overall pretty bad.

At least my dexterity is high! Aiko thought to herself. A 42 had to be pretty good right? Her stamina was fair at 35 too. She reasoned that this was a section for mostly physical stats.

Intelligence was so vastly different that it had to denote a different part of the stats. Her intelligence was a 21 so at least it beat out her health. Her memory was a 19 so she wondered if that made her prone to forget things.

Aiko wasn’t sure about creativity but it was a little high at 32. The thing that really took the credit away from everything else was her mana conductivity. “What does a 175 even mean in this? I don’t even know what it does.” She whispered to herself and was gratified to see that everyone else looked just as lost in their systems as she was.

That just left her mana pool of 21 to look at before getting to her worst stat, confidence. She wasn’t sure why but the 6 in confidence both rang true and stung at the same time. It was slightly balanced by the attractiveness of 40. “I don’t really get these numbers. This has to be wrong or I just don’t know how to read them maybe?”

Aiko wasn’t sure about her stats but she was giddy as she moved to read her Skills, abilities, and blessing/gifts. She stopped for a moment to wonder why this made her so excited. The moment over, she dived right into the descriptions for everything.

Kaori just had to chuckle.