All skills target myself? So if I cast a fireball, I fireball myself in the face?
It felt incredibly weird standing in this sterile tent, holding this pink slip of paper, reading its judgment over him and his life while some tech support guy talked empty words in the background.
“...Good boons often evened out, or even overshone by bad banes. The effects only become noticeable when you start producing mana yourself at Tier 1, so if one is dangerously detrimental you can stay at baseline and live a happy life. Of course, you can’t use skills as a Tier 0, so the point is…”
I can’t become a pok-ball player, was his first thought, and he almost laughed. It’s not his fault. He’s just a support guy.
Isaac blinked. “Sorry, did you say something?”
“You can put the assignment into question, but the chance of a mistake on our side is infinitesimally small. Still, there are always a few soccer-moms or helicopter-dads that demand a retrial, not even because their boon is bad, but because it’s the wrong kind. Think of a clan of tamers suddenly getting someone with an affinity for fire spells.”
Like parents thinking that their kids were entitled to be the next Excalibjorn, mulching monsters and wooing maidens all day. Others were much worse in a simpler way, hoping that one of their kids turned out as a golden goose. Not that Isaac knew how that felt. Claire loved him and his siblings no matter what. There were no expectations and no shouted reprimand, just endless, unconditional support and kindness.
I just wanted to pay her back a bit.
“You can take a gift from the big yellow box when you leave. Heck, I don’t think my supervisors would be miffed if you took the entire bin.”
He blinked at it and slowly shuffled over, rummaging through its innards. It was full with merchandise and gadgets, little spinny things and rubix cubes.
Pity prizes. For people who didn’t win anything special.
“I’ll just take one,” he said, grabbing the next best thing. “Can I go now?”
“Yes. And sorry kid. Your ID will arrive in four to eight weeks by mail. And hey, maybe if you make it to Tier 5, your second combo might even out your first?”
Ah. So, if I stay on Wett, never.
Wett was only Tier 4. Delvers regularly got to Tier 5 and then continued their careers off-world. But anybody forced to make due with natural essence was stuck at the same level the planet was. The essence was simply not dense enough, and lifespans not long enough.
He left and when he looked up, the sky seemed a little more gray with clouds. Claire was there, waiting with open arms and an expression that said she truly understood.
Must have been hard, being born under water and gaining a boon for fire, and a bane that makes water hurt like acid. Leaving wasn’t even a choice.
Compared to that, he really should count himself lucky. He didn’t suddenly develop ulcers, or grow allergic to air. His boon was even pretty good. But if anyone looked at his resume, they’d be seeing that fat D+ / detrimental, and that would close so many doors. The rating system the empire used was touted as flawless, objective, and absolute. Whether they used AI, or an aggregate of a horde of mid-tier analysts specced out with the best mind-related skills, the truth was that people trusted the empire in handing out certificates. It was supposed to only represent an approximation of an objectively measurable value, but to Isaac, nothing felt quite as final as that one letter.
In his case, they wouldn’t even have to measure much. Once he reached Tier 1, any skill that didn’t already target the user would turn awkward to use in the best case. In the worst case, well… fireball, face.
Claire was understanding and for once, neither Zach nor Sophia pestered him for answers.
“Claire,” he said, his voice distant, “how did you deal with getting your bane?”
The hand ruffling his hair stilled for a split second.
“I did many things. I railed. I raged. I cried. Then, I did something stupid, and found a fire to burn myself at. Many were the idiocies of young Claar’Rhileigh. She didn’t know what she needed, only that she wanted to go somewhere far, far away. That is how she left, but that is also how she found this home and her three little mudskips.”
She ruffled his hair some more, conveniently skipping all the in-betweens, the adventuring, the rift-delving, Hammond’s accidental knighting after they killed a faux-dragon with a cave in. The cave in had been by accident, as originally they had been sent to the planet to help with a localized famine. The big lizard had been absorbing all the mana and essence of its surroundings, turning the ground of the Tier 6 world so barren even baseline plants would have had a hard time growing when Hammond began to magically till it, and, well...
Hammond killed a dragon by accident. Me, I’d make a bad adventurer the same way I’d make a bad pok-ball player.
It was at least as hard to get an adventurer’s license as it was to win Wett’s pok-ball world championship. Though, adventurers made big splashes in the news about as frequently as local top-tier players. He was fairly certain that making charities was ingrained into their culture, and city-saving heroics were broadcasted at least as far as the many tournaments they participated in or outright hosted.
Just last week, Big Samson had fished a juvenile titan that had been gobbling up motorboats in the East Deep up and donated the creature to the marine biology university, who were understandably overwhelmed by the fact that it was still twitching and wriggling against invisible constraints.
“What, need a bigger pool?” he’d asked with a grin, stemming the hundred meter nine-eyes eel with one hand.
It was a nice image, child-friendly too if you replaced the beer can he was sipping from with soda. Hammond had described him as ‘a big cat that cleans your house when you’re not looking, and lazes about when you are’. The description was clearly not just because he had a mink bloodline, though weak enough that he didn’t have fur sprouting all over is body.
“Is there anything I can do to make you feel better?” Claire’s voice brought him back to the present.
Isaac just shrugged. “I mean, it wasn’t all bad. I did get a grand gift of… earbuds.”
Claire had a blank look of confusion. “You don’t have a phone.”
He sighed and shook his head in defeat. He extricated himself from her embrace, because as nice as the hug was, it was starting to get a bit awkward.
That’s the Tuttle-thoughts speaking. Hugs are free and for everyone.
“Oh!” Suddenly, Claire perked up. “Wait here, I have just the thing.”
She disappeared in a breeze, bounding towards the house with steps that were blatantly beyond even a Tier 4. There was probably a pie or a pudding waiting inside and she was just getting him the first piece. But no, she returned too fast to keep pudding in one piece. Instead, she handed him a black brick. It was sleek, a thick rectangle that weighed a bit more than it should have.
“It’s my old honest tablet-transponder-reader-caller. I have activated most of its functions. It makes pictures. With color!”
The way it looked, it must have been from the last millennium. He knew what a phone and tablet looked like from ads on TV, but Seagull island was too far from the nearest tower to have WetNet access. And if anybody got lost or hurt on the island, someone was always in yelling distance. The rectangle blooped on, a light-blue script running across its rock-like surface. For a moment, he was worried that it ran off of mana crystals, but he eventually found a couple ports for cables.
“Thanks Claire, it’s…” not a pity present - not just. It’s got stickers on the back, and a mollusk-themed keychain that reads ‘you clam do it!’. It looks like someone treasured it for a long time. “It’s great.”
“Now you have something for your earbuds.” She nodded, quirking her lips with victorious smugness. “It has a clock too, and an alarm, and many other things. But calling it the honest tablet-transponder-reader-caller-alarm-clock-and-many-other-things is a bit much.”
He smiled, if only a little. “Thanks Claire.”
I’m calling it ‘the brick’.
He went in for another hug.
After assuring herself that Isaac wasn’t going to ‘melt into a sad puddle’, Claire left, leaving Isaac exactly one short breath before Zach and Sophia were upon him. He knew those looks well enough. They were being considerate about not badgering him, but they still really wanted to know. He gave them the pink slip.
“It’s not that bad,” Sophia said. “There are still plenty of skills you can use.”
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“In theory.”
“In theory.” Zach nodded with his eighteen and a half years of wisdom. “C’mon, how about we test that theory at Torwig’s? He’s got the newest catalogs, and Sophia wanted to get the latest issue of Mothers of the Deep anyways.”
+++
Nobody ever dared say anything bad about Torwig’s Skillshop & Sundries. It wasn’t even owned by Torwig, people just called it that because he was the only actual person that worked there. They all discounted the wooden mannequin lounging on a chair like an innocent piece of furniture. It was actually some sort of magical construct. Isaac had seen it grab an irate Tier 3 by the scruff as if it was handling an indignant kitten, then boot him out with a whip-crack kick.
He made sure to give it a wide berth and a respectful nod. Currently, someone had draped it in a flowery t-shirt, a hat that said ‘DOG’ in all caps, and three separate pairs of sunglasses.
The floor was always immaculately clean, the air-conditioning was heavenly, as Isaac walked through a section of floral T-shirts and then a section that looked like a hardware store. The shop was set up in a quaint little shack on a plot that had once housed a big family house before it had been rented out. It reminded Isaac of a mountain hut, straight out of the painting Claire had hung over the dinner table last year.
The counter was piled high with magazines, tobacco, and little sweet treats that were all horrendously overpriced. The display windows were disappointingly mundane. But if asked, every one of Claire’s orphans could tell you something different about the shop that was ever so slightly off, from the ways the comic-section was numbered using only prime numbers to the flavors of sweets only someone in an asylum could think of.
“Thirty-two, thirty-three — you were right Zach, the inside is bigger.” If only by a couple steps. Zach tore his eyes away from a pack of Bug Bits, Ground Mana Rocks, and Squishy Marrow Sticks that were all making his hair stand on end.
“Of course I was right. Now, have you finished stalling?”
Isaac wasn’t stalling. He was just thinking of the many uses people might have for steel cables.
“Isaac, get over here so we can help troubleshoot your bane.”
“It’s the bane of my existence, for sure.” He walked up to the counter. Torwig was reading a newspaper, or maybe using it as a shield against unwanted solicitations, drama, and non-paying customers. Like Isaac.
It was as good an invitation as any to sidle up and start bothering him.
“So, what’s it like being a shopkeep?” he asked.
The old man’s newspaper rustled. “The pay’s alright, by local standards. Comes with some demerits though.”
“Nothing to do?”
“Nosy children.”
“Neat. I need the skill catalog for a bit, so if you wouldn’t mind…”
There was a cough and a rustle as he bent down to get it. Everybody thought Torwig was an oddball who didn’t like children, but Isaac knew better. He was an oddball who didn’t like people in general. If you didn’t take his general disinterest or quiet stares as a personal insult, he was an ok kind of guy, if suspiciously mundane.
“Don’t forget to take Fluffkins out for a walk,” Torwig muttered.
Isaac frowned and looked at the little dog lying in his little doggy bed, obviously glaring at him. Even after three days his fur was more purple than white. It wasn’t Isaac’s fault that the little bark-machine had run between their legs while they’d been filling water balloons with paint, but he did feel bad about it, and Torwig hadn’t objected when he’d offered to take him for walks as an apology.
“I won’t,” he said, and when he picked the little barker up, he got a catalog, one filled with a forest of post-it notes and little hints that weren’t there before.
He looked to Torwig. Torwig hid behind his newspaper.
“Huh. I didn’t know you could be this considerate.”
“Consider it a trade.”
“For walking your dog?”
“Consultations are free,” the old man muttered, but Isaac knew a lie or half-truth when he heard of it.
Isaac managed a small smile. “Thanks Torwig.”
“Don’t get too excited. You don’t have a weapon’s license, so no lethal offensive spells for you,” Torwig muttered.
Zach and Sophia were already busy by the time he turned to them, a few pages of notes, scribbles, and other ideas strewn between them. They took to annotated catalog with the rabidness of a badger in a beehive, and who wouldn’t? Skills were among the rarest rift-drops and could do just about anything.
Skills were important, Isaac had learned that much when he had looked into nearby universities and discovered exactly how many of the courses required at least one out of a great list of skills just to even be considered for entry. Generals, adventurers, delvers, scientists, craftsmen, you could point anywhere and find just as many people who were talented geniuses as there were people who focused more on their Skills instead of their skills. A good skill could literally make you a millionaire, while buying a great skill could force even a millionaire to take out a loan.
Your core had space for one skill per Tier. That was why pok-ball leagues only got really interesting at around Tier 3, when everyone could have some variant of the three basic pok skills: [Magnetize] to change the ball’s trajectory or to make it stick to your bat, [Quickstep] to set up moves, and [Bash]-variants ranging from quick to slow, all dependent on the support skill you attached to it. You could only attach one support skill per base skill up until Tier 7, but that didn’t matter since even pro players couldn’t afford to buy the clean essence needed to get that far.
When he was younger and discovered that magic wasn’t just something that happened on TV and in comics, but that it was real, like any other curious kid he just had to know all about it. Making builds was fun. That was why Zach, Sophia, and Isaac had spent hours scribbling their imaginary adventures down through every kind of tabletop-rpg out there.
Zach and Sophia tried to out-do each other with flashy moves, while Isaac was always on the lookout for new funny, or downright broken combinations. The gravity-bomber, who exploded things before pulling them back in to explode them again, was a longstanding favorite, as was the interraptor, a build based around using every annoying skill like [Smokescreen], [Goo-trap], and [Minor Illusion] in tandem to get in the way of their enemies, interrupt their plans, and make their lives as miserable as possible.
They’d all pretended they were adventurers once, delving forgotten ruins, exploring places they’d never seen, and saving faraway worlds.
A little bit of that dream was still alive. Except now, Isaac didn’t have the luxury of ignoring the funny little price tags, with their silly zeros and ludicrous deals. “Buy a [Steady hand] now, get a violin for free. Now only one-million ninety-nine”. The glass cabinet didn’t even hold any skill pearls besides ‘cheap’ utility ones like [Clean], [Sparkle], or [Avanazzar’s harrowing flower wilter]. The rest was filled with tags, and an order-by-number system.
Half of them didn’t even bother to write their price tags in gups. Their worth was measured in entire freaking mana crystals. The only other times he’d heard of anyone asking for a price in crystals was when they wanted to buy a house, or a fancy speedboat.
While he was perusing the useless skills section of the shop, Zach and Sophia had pored over the skill catalog like ravenous hydras, their pink slips strewn haphazardly about. Isaac snuck a peak at Sophia’s boon.
Boon: Your actions create less sound and vibration.
Bane: Your presence is hard to notice.
Rank: B- / Beneficial.
He blinked. That was a good boon for a delver, though Sophia had said multiple times that she would never want to become one. Her passions lay elsewhere, while Zach…
Zach’s slip was already gone. The boy who enjoyed making secrets out of everything was as quite happy to make one out of this too. It was like a game to him, not telling where he'd hidden all of Isaac's socks, what the answer to their latest homework was, and so on. Sometimes it got so bad even Isaac didn’t know what he was thinking, and they were literally brothers.
Mysterious.
“Hey Isaac,” Zach said, before staring at his cargo. “Dog?”
“Dog.” He patted Fluffkins while trying and failing to navigate the unfamiliar brick interface with his free hand. Fluffkins growled tiredly. “I hope he doesn’t pee on me.”
“I’m sure he won’t,” said Sophia. “You’re not Zach. He could make a pelican toss its own eggs after him just to get him to leave.”
Zach scooted a bit away from the dog.
“Here’s a first spread of skills,” he said, tearing a note from a notebook and practically pressing it into Isaac’s chest. “The ones circled in green are the ones you can definitely use and that are beneficial, while the ones in blue are ones you can use, but that might not have a desired effect.”
“What about the ones I can’t use?”
“Everything that isn’t circled,” Sophia added, pointing to a few categories that were left entirely blank. “are skills that would break before your bane does, or that would just end up in you hurting yourself. If it targets objects it’s just not gonna work when you cast it on yourself, which means most skills for melee, enchanting, tools are right out.”
No tool skills. No [Magnetize], no [Bash]. Isaac let out a shaky breath. I knew it. I’m so screwed.
“Hey,” Zach said, “there’s plenty of stuff you can do that doesn’t require a skill.”
“The same way there are plenty of things you can do without a degree?” Isaac snorted, though Zach seemed entirely serious and way too optimistic.
“You could become a beacon of buffs. Every beneficial effect targeting people will still be able to target yourself. Then, you just need to add a support skill to your true skill to transmit the effect to others in an area, and bam. You’d be a living, breathing buff machine.”
“Buff skills are the second most expensive skills out there” Isaac countered. “The only thing more expensive you could suggest would be giving me a healing-build, and nobody wants to shell out millions for a doctor or combat healer who can only heal themselves.”
“Eh, we could probably steal one.”
“Zach! Not helping!” Isaac threw his hand up in the air, startling the dog. “We can talk about skills this and that all day, but fact is, my selection has just gotten so narrow you couldn’t drop a needle through it. A [Mana bolt] requires a license and will likely just blast me in the face, [Data log] will probably automatically write anything I think of all over my chest, and none of that even considers that I’m just a poor, resourceless orphan who can’t afford half of a single skill.”
“Technically, we’re all poor orphans,” Zach said.
Sophia nodded wisely. “We should combine and create one giant mega-poor orphan.”
He would have laughed at that, normally. But if there was any day where he was allowed to be a bit of a party pooper, it was today.
“You know,” said Zach “if we combined all of our savings and inheritances, we could buy you a decent skill.”
“Absolutely not.” The last thing he wanted was to use his brother and sister’s future to prop-up his own mediocrity. The room was getting stuffy. Frustrated, he put the brick aside and got up. “I’m going out for a bit.”
“Why? We’ve just started.” Zach asked before getting an elbow to the ribs. For once, Sophia looked genuinely apologetic.
“Take your time,” Sophia called after him. “We’ll still be here when you get back. And don’t forget to cultivate the free government essence.”
“Yes mom.” Isaac rolled his eyes. And then he was outside, buffeted by a cool evening wind. Fluffkins was patiently waiting for Isaac to leash him and seemed entirely too excited about a mundane walk. “Alright, let’s go.”
The dog tugged on the leash and Isaac nearly ate dirt.