Sometimes, it’s painful to be a leader. Often, however, setting an example – the standard of what is expected and normal – just needs to be done.
Doing his best to avoid wincing in any – all-to-visible – manner, Mendal stretched out two fingers and deposited the golden Sovereign into the Cleric’s proffered hand.
Looking to distract himself from this most recent ordeal, Mendal perused his pizzaz. One fun fact Mendal would not be bringing up during the Outworld job interview was what pizazz was short for stood for.
If memory served – which it did Power, Energy, Speed, Subtlety, Aptitude, Allure, and Sense Status System. Originally P.E.S.S.A.A.S.S.S.
The Exile developers had then taken some liberties during the pre-launch and cleaned up the spelling.
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Name: Mendal Meddler
Race: Human
Class: Demonologist
Level: MAX
FITpoints: 155/890
* Power: 62 (+16)
* Energy: 45 (+12)
* Speed: 57 (+23)
* Subtlety: 68 (+9)
* Aptitude: 91 (+4)
* Allure: 47 (+8)
* Sense Status System: 52 (+1)
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He was in the endgame and his attributes reflected that.
In Exile, all an individual's or creature's stats were relative to every other being's, and each successive point in a given attribute was exponentially harder to acquire than the last. Some Sovereign or mythical beings possessed a God-like 100 – someone had to!
Of all the stats, only those outside of his Pizaz (like his FITpoints) operated along a predetermined scale introduced long, long ago by the original Exile developers.
For the Losers and NPC’s, however, all these interesting tidbits of real-world lore were best left to the annals of forgotten-history – lest anyone's feelings got hurt.
And, speaking of getting hurt, both Remember the Fallen and No Man Left Behind, the Soldier of Fortune’s maxed out passive skills, were still ticking away in the background. They would definitely be coming in clutch in the near future.
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REMEMBER THE FALLEN (PASSIVE): Brave souls die in combat, but their sacrifice, regardless of distance traveled or the the passage of the centuries, shall never be forgotten.
Player’s party gains a minor boost to morale, a hefty discount to any healing costs, and a substantial boost to loot drops. Buff negated when player falls in combat.
Instead, when player is fallen in combat, allies gain a scaling 2% stat increase per hour but also a 3% increase in healing and mana costs for every hour that passes. Skill also negatively impacts FIT point and mana regeneration.
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NO MAN LEFT BEHIND (PASSIVE): Bolsters party strength so that no man shall ever be willingly left behind. If player has recently been revived, removes weight and/or capacity restrictions from player and player’s party travel spells. Duration of buff: size-of-party plus two, minus one minute for every living party member.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
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The [name of dungeon] dungeon limited the party’s size to 10. So Mendal had assembled a team to take full advantage of this. Per the dungeon’s criteria for entry: if the party was successful, and if at least three members survived the whole ordeal, all party members would be revived with no items of equipment lost. The big secret, outlined briefly on a page in an other world’s splayed-open notebook was that Mendal had no intention of successfully completing the dungeon – on his first attempt, that is.
Anyway, back to matters at hand: so far as he could tell with his enchanter class, mid-tier Sense, the party had successfully gotten away from the mid-boss ambush engagement with Dolus the Traitor…for now, at least—albeit, not without casualty.
My poor, poor wallet. Half its levels lost would have been a better fate. Those pesky healers!
“Whatever asshat at Dormant designed that shitshow deserves his hat shoved right back his ass!” exclaimed the Sound Smith, the echos of his outburst preemptively drowning out most of the other's mumbles of ascent.
"Mine too" added Viking-helmet.
Mendal closed both eyes to get a clearer image on his remaining Sanity Points. The empty stat bar and single crowning digit read as harrowing as a graphic horror novel, and as he reaches elbow deep into his bottomless satchel, a matching sensation, like that of sinking in quicksand, enveloped his groping hand before settling throughout the rest of his body. He’d shared his last flask of sedating petalite tincture with the rest of the party back in the winding black passageway.
His regret ate away another point of SP, but Mendal did his best not to show it.
“Alright, team. I know you hate it, but it’s time to put in for the Corona before its timer hits zero. We didn’t come this far just to die stumbling blindly into a pitfall.”
The master cleric nodded and began filling a golden censer from a wineskin of ambrosia worth more than a month’s wages of guildsman’s work. Blessing the vessel with a crystalized red carnation, he started praying to the sixteen Sovereigns while the younger-looking cleric proffered the collective coffer. Not one of the nine remaining party members was happy about the exorbitant expense, but neither did anyone refuse to “donate” his fistful of silver Princes or single, golden Sovereign coin—not even the Rogue, though he made quite a bit of noise about it, more than he ought to after having been informed he'd been revived by the Apprentice Cleric’s single-use, max level Miracle. A lie, of course, but charity was always a good cause.
Instead of displaying gratitude, however, the Rogue grabbed for new ways to justify his resentment.
“Exploitative bastards. First you rob me for a Resurrection—which I didn’t even ask for—and now you’re charging me to keep up a spell after I already paid. It’s extortion! If you’re supposed to be part of our party, your healing should be free. ‘From each his abilities, to each his needs.’ Ain’t that what they preach in the Sovereigns’ Assembly?”
He bickered back and forth with the cleric's apprentice a while longer, yet that didn’t stop the metallic chime of his coin in the copper coffer causing the veteran’s Corona to shine all the more. With each “donation,” a bit of the clinging darkness got bitten back by the pale white light until the whole of the cavernous rotunda showed a scuffed, matte, obsidian dome—save for a ring of iron enshrining a slab of stone inscribed with indecipherable runes and circled by cast-iron busts the size of gibbets. Each of the patinaed heads gaped jaw-to-breast with a cage door for a grimace...
It was a puzzle room if they’d ever seen one ...and likely a trap as well.
The number of busts mirrored the number of their remaining party members: nine of them in all, though there was space for many more.
Strange… Mendal had thought it unlikely this chamber would be modular. According to the Outworld forum archives, this was supposed to be the infamous choke point, the real reason why the devs had restricted the party to a measly ten. There were exploits he could have used to sneak in a few more party members... Reassessing the rough condition of his crew, he almost lamented not recruiting an extra member or two.
Almost.
That said, an additional Enchanter would have been nice...