“Okay guys, we’re on the last phase of this boss,” I said. “That doesn’t mean slack on the heals, Steve. And Dallas, you better keep those buffs up. Alec is taking hella damage, and the more we can reflect back, the better.”
We’ve been grinding the last boss in Firecrown for the last hour and a half, and oh Lord I gotta pee. But after this last phase, we all get the “Hellfire” achievement and the Hell Hound mount for beating a 10 man dungeon with only 4 people, so it’s definitely worth it.
“Alec, make sure you pop your shield after the fire wave finishes. Ozai hits heavy for the next 30 seconds after.” I have to keep on top of these guys, or else it’s like they’ve never done this dungeon before.
After another 30 minutes of grueling grinding, we finally have Ozai at 5% health. I’m about to tell Steve to ignore healing on anyone but the tank when my screen goes black.
“OH COME ON!” I start yelling. I look around and notice all the lights are off, and I can't see a single thing. In fact, it’s pitch black. ”This is the worst time for a power outage. We were RIGHT THERE! Ugh!”
“Sorry kiddo, but there's no power outage” I hear a deep voice say. “Here's the deal. One of my godly buddies messed up and now you're dead. I won't go into the specifics, cause it'll fry your brain and all that, but just know there was an accident and since I owe him a favor, I’ll be putting you into one of my more fun worlds.”
I looked around everywhere and saw nothing. That's when I realized I didn't feel that I had to pee anymore. In fact, I couldn't feel anything. I started to panic when I felt a wave of warm energy flow over me.
“Calm down, calm down. I’m not gonna hurt yah. I’m just here for your introduction and power selection. After that, you’re on your own. Although, I suggest staying away from the mermaids. They’re tricky ones, alright.”
“Where are you?” I ask. The energy helped some, but I was still apprehensive of some guy claiming to be a god. “Why can’t I see you? And better yet, WHO are you?”
“Huh? OH! My bad, I forgot to turn your senses back on, one second.”
I heard a switch get flicked, and all of a sudden I was sitting at a school desk wearing plain white linens. I started checking my body out. Everything seemed to be in place. That's when I looked up to say thanks and noticed a man standing there. I'd say he looked almost like Hagrid, from the Harry Potter movies. He sat at what looked more like a teachers desk, with many stacks of papers that needed grading. “That better?” he asked.
“A bit,” I replied. I’m still suspicious of this guy, even if he looks like my favorite movie character ever. “So who exactly are you, and why am I here? If I'm dead, shouldn't I be in heaven or something? I like to think I lived a pretty good life, if uneventful.”
“‘Uneventful’ he says. Bah! You've spent more time playing those video games of yours than you have with your own family. But no, this is neither heaven nor hell. This is my home, and in a few minutes, I’ll be sending you to one of the worlds I oversee, its name being ^%^$ [EARTH]. As for who I am, you’ll find out more about that when I send you down.”
I cringed a little when he said the name. Confused, I asked him, “What was that noise you made? It sounded like you said Earth, but it was really garbled up, like you have a mouth full of food.”
“Ah, my name for it is different from what it’ll be called when you get there. Essentially, all sapients on all worlds call their home planet ‘Earth’”, he explained. “Us gods call each planet we manage by their own unique names. You can’t understand it because it’s in a divine language and you don’t have the qualifications to hear it yet.”
“Okay, bu-,” I started.
“Anyways, we’re getting off track.” He seemed annoyed at how long this was taking. “So I'll be sending you to my planet. It’s a newer planet that I modeled after the RPG’s you have on your home world. Although after the time field i put it through, it’s about medieval times. Basically one of those fantasy anime you’ve watched so much of. Adults, when they come of age, have the chance to receive 6 skills. They are broken up into 2 categories: passive skills, which run automat-”
“As you know, I know games, so you can skip category explanations on me. I get passive versus active skills” How does HE like being interrupted? “How many can I have of each category?”
He looked less than pleased about the interruption. “You can have 3 of each category.” Well, that’s pretty awesome. “Usually people already know what skills they want on their Choosing Day and only take at most 5 days to search through the master skill list for what they desire. However, again because of the whole accident thing, you can have as long as you want to examine the list. I’ll put you in a time bubble so I don't have to sit through this part.” He started to raise his hand, fingers ready to snap. ”When you have made your selection, call out your name 5 times and you’ll be brought back here so i can give the rest of this spiel and get you started on your way. Whatever name you call out will be your new name on my world. So choose carefully”
He snapped, and the next thing I knew three books plopped down on my desk, one red, one blue, and the last yellow. The books had scribbles written on the front that changed to English after a few seconds. I guessed that that means there’s an auto-translation system in place. After blinking a few times, I looked at the front of the red book again. This time it read as “Active Skills”, and after looking at the blue book, it read as ”Passive Skills”. The yellow seemed to be just blank notebook paper. I guess it’s available to me to jot down possible skill combinations I wanted before I made my final decision.
I started with the blue book, skimming through the pages to see how it’s organized. It appears to be alphabetical. There also seems to be a lot of repeater and numbered skills. After flipping for a while, I took a closer look at the “Accel 1”, “Accel 2”, and “Accel 3” skills to see what the differences were. After reading the skill descriptions a few times, I realized that version 1 was a mental accelerator, version 2 was a reflex accelerator, and version 3 provides a boost in speed to thrown projectiles. I looked down the list a little further at “Accel 4” and that provided a boost in speed to magic attacks. I need to be careful about which version of a skill I choose, since they appear to provide different improvements based on the number indicator. After a bit of mental back and forth, I decided to keep moving since these don’t really appeal to me. Maybe the Magic skill, but that only because MAGIC!
Oh I am excited to actually be able to do magic. There is literally no way that I won't choose some sort of magic active skill. But that means that I’ll have to choose my passive skills carefully in order to properly boost my magic. But I also can’t ignore my physical needs either. This is going to take a long time to look at all these skills and think of all the possible combinations.
No matter how many pages of the thin book I flipped through though, there always seemed to be more. Curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to flip all the way to the back. I was flipping for over 12 hours before I finished flipping through the ‘A’s. Well, now I realize why the big guy decided to wait this one out. I turned the book back over to actually start analyzing the skills and see which onesI want. I’m thinking of a general magic booster, or maybe a mana potency booster.
After what feels like months have passed, I learned a few things. First is that skills apparently have levels. I assumed previously that it would be me that leveled, and that I'd get stats and all the good stuff of an RPG. Second was that there were resource pools. Just the basic Health, Mana, and Stamina, but some skills can give you access to weird pools, like demonic essence. I don’t particularly feel like going down the demonic pathway, but to each their own, I guess. It all seems reasonable enough to me. Finally, I decided on my 3 passive skills. It took me nearly 20 pages of deliberation on which combinations I wanted, but boy was I excited with what I ended up with.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Enhanced Body 12
[Bones, tendons, and muscles will be strengthened. Eyesight, hearing, and reflexes will be improved. Metabolism will become more efficient. Less sleep will be needed to be considered fully rested. The degree of improvement increases with a higher skill level. Health and stamina pools along with regeneration of these pools will be slightly increased upon receiving this skill. The amount of increase will improve with skill level.]
It’s not exactly the mana booster I was planning on, but I did want a physical skill too. This will be my only physical skill though. If I am going to go to a magic world, then I am so going to use magic, damn it! But I recognize that a boost in both health and stamina will definitely help me if I get into fights and if I have to walk everywhere. I doubt cars will be a thing, it being a medieval world and all. Up next I got
Increased Mental Capacity 7
[Thoughts will flow faster. Memory will be improved. Skills that require a mental component will be easier and faster to use. Capacity increased with skill level. Mana pool is largely increased and mana regeneration is mildly increased. The amount of increase will improve with skill level.]
So I recognize that I can be a little stupid sometimes. This, however, has nothing to do with that! It’s one of the few skill types that increase mana capacity and appear to affect ease of use of active skills. And the more mana I have means that whatever magic skills I eventually choose can level a lot faster. I plan on being a powerhouse in this new life. So I have high hopes for this one.
Make me not a dumbass please!
…
I mean, make me a fireball throwing wizard, please!
Regeneration 23
[3 resource pools: health, mana, stamina. Primary and secondary priority pools can be set as desired upon receiving the skill. The highest priority pool that is not full will be the target of regeneration. The rate of regeneration increases with higher skill level.]
Right here is the skill that took me a week to decide on. There were over 120 different variations of this one skill, all doing slightly different things. I’m still tempted to go back and pick a slightly different version. Other versions only regenerate one pool, give overflow of a pool to the nearest ally, or stock up an emergency pool. But this is the perfect version for me since I plan on going solo for adventures. I do want to be a powerhouse, afterall.
There was a version that regenerated all three pools at the same time, but from what I can tell, that version lowered the regeneration rate significantly. The way that version 23 takes turns regenerating keeps the rate up, and I can choose which pools I want regenerated and the priority I want them done in. I really want to put mana as primary, but the wording of the description makes it so as long as I am uninjured, mana will regenerate anyways.
Regardless of which version I went with Regen, I'd still have a boosted regeneration from my other two passives, so I am pretty much set. But with Regen 23, my pools will pretty much be bottomless at higher levels. Oh, this is going to be good!
“Alright, time to start figuring out what activities I want. Definitely magic, but what kind? What kind, indeed.”
I opened the red book and read the first page. There were options for how I wanted the skills organized, the default being alphabetical. The second option was by category, and the final option which held my attention was by compatibility with chosen passive skills. Compatibility had potential, since I had mostly resource pool size and regeneration as my main aspect for now. I assume most of the compatible skills would be skills with heavy costs.
I decided to start with having the skills ordered by compatibility first. As I imagined, the first few skills were aura based skills that had a relatively heavy mana or stamina cost to them. I Still didn’t know numerically how much health, mana and stamina I would start with, but given the first skill, I assumed probably 100 of each pool, before multipliers were taken into account. The first was an elemental based aura that cost 30 mana per second of activation. With the 100 mana I assume I had, that was a pretty short skill activation time. I checked all the other aura skills, and it seems that 30 m/s was a pretty heavy price to pay. There was a cleaning aura for only 5 m/s. That seems pretty useful for everyday life, but not quite what I'm looking for. A little further down, I see a summoning skill that looks pretty nice.
Summon Monster (Slime Line)
[User is able to summon a monster from the Slime evolution line. Initial summoning is instant, but requires a relatively large amount of mana and concentration. A third of the summoning cost (rounded to nearest whole number) will be deducted as a maintenance cost per minute of the summon’s continued existence. Summoning cost will be reduced as skill increases in level. Strength of monsters increases with skill level.
Other variations of the skill just change the monster type. I saw draconic, undead, and even variations on elemental canine summons. But I don't want to be a one man army. I want to focus on my own power. I will say it was tempting for a few minutes to imagine summoning a dragon though. That just sounds awesome, and like every gamer’s wet dream right there. Despite all this I moved on to the next skill.
After a few minutes of browsing, I decided to switch the organization to category. I immediately went to the magic category and nearly fainted from excitement. Every type of magic I could think of was listed. There was water, fire, earth, wind, light, dark, healing, affliction, and more that I hadn't even thought of. Barrier magic sounded pretty interesting.
Barrier Magic
[At the cost of mana and concentration, the user can erect a barrier at desired locations. Barrier size and durability are determined by initial mana output. Barriers can stay active after being damaged or passed as long as mana is supplied and the user has the mental concentration to spare. Additional effects can be added to the barrier as the skill levels.]
I felt a strange connection with this one for some reason. I was 100% planning on some sort of elemental magic, like fire or earth. But barriers seemed to call to me, so I had to at least jot it down for later. I was glad the yellow book seemed to have limitless pages to it. Passive skills took me a while to get through.
After writing down barrier magic for later contemplation, I kept going through the list. The elemental magic all seems pretty standard stuff. Summon fireballs, water walls, or earth spears. It was so fun imagining all the combinations I could do with these. It took me a full day just to get past the basic elements to see what else there was.
After all the elements were listed, something else came that drew my attention.
Arcane Magic
[Arcane magic requires large amounts of mana and concentration to perform. Arcane magic holds no affinity, but attacks deal large amounts of damage due to mana concentration. As the skill levels, more magic patterns are revealed. Higher levels allow for higher degrees of freedom for making original patterns.]
This seemed perfect for me. I was going for the bottomless resource pool build anyways, so this has a lot of potential to fit right in with me. I saw it earlier when everything was organized by compatibility, but after reading it a second time, I just had to have it. I can already imagine throwing endless amounts of balls of pure energy at monsters. It made me excited to get started that I almost picked a random element to start my new life as an adventurer. But I refused to be that newbie guy and had to calm myself down before I could continue reading the master list.
“So I already had defense with barrier magic, and offense with arcane magic, what else should i go for?” I started to flip through the book to the crafting page and checked out tailoring, leatherworking, and blacksmithing. All sounded like decent choices, but none fit for me. Maybe jewelcrafting? That sounded too expensive though. Enchanting could be good since I had arcane magic and a decent mana supply, but I'm not exactly a crafting kind of guy.
While I was considering crafting skills, I flipped through more pages to see various other possibilities. I considered a void storage skill, but wondered if I put bottles in there if they would explode due to a vacuum. It seemed like a good skill to keep food from spoiling, but other than that other skills could be less destructive.
“Ooh, this looks pretty useful. And the name seems pretty self explanatory.”
Game-like Storage
[A UI can be called upon with a mental command of "Open Bag" or dismissed with "Close Bag" that will show 4 slots. A small amount of mana will be consumed when objects enter or exit a slot. Similar items can be stacked. An item description will be provided for each item in a slot. Descriptions will become more detailed with higher skill levels. The number of available slots will increase with skill level (2 per level)]
“Kind of seems pretty awesome. From all the games I've played, I would assume that food also wouldn’t spoil here either. I wonder how the skills level though. I can’t imagine my bag growing just from killing monsters. That would be kind of ridiculous. Maybe they grow from being used? Each use of a skill gives skill XP or something? I’ll have to ask Hagrid about that later.”
I've come to use Hagrid as the Big Guy’s name for now. After months of solitary confinement, I’ve started talking to myself a lot, mainly pointed towards Hagrid. Despite him not even being her to respond in my time bubble, It’s soothing to at least hear my own voice.
Growing tired of the isolation, I closed the book I've been reading for the longest time and opened the yellow book again. I added the game storage to my possible list of active skills and started playing with different combinations. I had all the elements listed, barrier magic, enchanting, and even the frost aura. I probably won't go with auras, but it has the potential for fun. The biggest limit in my opinion is the short activation time and the unknown range. I guessed that the range could be improved by throwing more mana into the skill, but I wasn't willing to risk it at the moment.
My biggest contenders for skills were arcane, barrier and storage. The balance of having a heavy hitting skill like arcane magic while hiding behind a thick barrier that no monster could get through was so alluring. Then my lazy self wants some skill so i don't have to carry my spoils of the fights. The ability to stack similar items was also pretty damn good too. It makes it better in my opinion than just having 1 cubic yard to pile everything into.
“Alright, this is it. I’ve chosen. My 3 passive skills are Enhanced Body 12, Increased Mental Capacity 7, and Regeneration 23. My 3 active skills are Arcane Magic, Barrier Magic, and Game-like Storage.” I felt a shudder run through my body as I finished saying that. It felt right. I know I said that I was choosing a storage skill to be lazy, but after seeing the rest of my skill build all written down nice and neatly, everything just seemed right.
The last choice I had to make wasn’t even a choice. I knew from the moment that Hagrid said to choose my new name that I'd choose the name that I've used for every character I've ever played. Now to say it 5 times out loud and move on to the excitement.
“CLAFF.”
I took a deep breath.
“CLAFF.”
Good Hagrid, I’m nervous.
“CLAFF.”
This was it, the start of a new life. A new adventure.
“CLAFF.”
A new me.
“CLAFF.”