“There are rules to luck. Not everything is chance to the wise; luck can be helped by skill.”

Baltasar Gracian

I had already had two naps today. So, even though I was tiring quicker than I used to, I was not actually tired when everyone else went to bed. Aleera regaled me with the story of the tortoise and the hare. She had to explain the animals to me first seeing as I had never seen one in this life before. The story itself was the same as the one in my world. There were no last-minute deaths to gain experience. The differences lay in the fact that the tortoise won the race because the hare in the story was imbalanced. They had focused on one attribute alone. Until, they were all speed, no strength, endurance, or vitality. Let’s just say it didn’t end well for the hare.

Regardless, I listened to Aleera fall asleep, then mother, then father, Grandfather had gone for a walk so guess he was walking it off and thinking it out. But that left me with my wheels spinning. More so than usual, as my body still refused to move. I was safe the world had fallen asleep so I left my body to sleep and fell into my own world.

I hadn’t spent much time here recently but my home away from home was all still there. The Rooms waiting for me to return, But I had some limits on what I could do here now.

I needed to avoid adding any more to my mind,

I had to stop supplementing my senses,

I had to avoid adding any more to clarity,

Vitality would be fine to add to but that was the one stat I had never managed to add to within my mind.

Strength also was something that would be a challenge to achieve. It was difficult to build your muscles with your mind alone.

Endurance was pretty much the same. I was not sure where magic would fall in all of this but perhaps it was just best to avoid it as much as I loved it and the potential if offered for the moment.

That left me with Dexterity, Charisma, and Luck.

Dexterity seemed like the most important skill to practice right now if I wanted to help myself out of the hole I had dug myself into.

The question was which skills in here could I practice to improve my dexterity.

I went through my skill list and decided that drawing, painting, woodcarving, sewing, stitching, jewellery making, sculpting, fishing knots, and practicing my musical instruments were probably the best way to go for improving my dexterity. I did not have all of those skills yet but I had enough of them to get started on here in my head. Even if I hadn't practiced them in this lifetime I had tried a lot of different hobbies growing up in my old life and while I wouldn't have said that I excelled at any of them in the past I had enough knowledge to get started. The extra subjective time would support their improvement 10,000 hours to master something was a number bandied around often enough if I remembered that right. So plenty to keep me busy with. Although it wouldn't half get boring trapped in my own mind again.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

Plus they were probably the safest skills that I could practice without furthering my imbalance and I was not going to just sit here for the next 5 to 10 years waiting to be able to place my points in dexterity and hope that would be enough.

The next question was what could I do to practice my Charisma, I felt that my musical and performance skills would help with this when I was finally able to move my body again. But to do that I was going to actually have to perform to a larger audience than my family and actually acquire some instruments to do so.

Finally, I had luck. Now unfortunately I had made no progress improving my points on this one. But that also meant there was lots of room for improvement if I could work out how to do it. Plus, as far as I was aware it shouldn’t affect my imbalance either way. As it was not linked to either brawn or brain.

But how could you train luck? I felt my best bet would be to focus on something to do with probability. I thought I would start with something simple first. A fun fact I had learned in my last life was that flipping a coin is not actually 50/50 it’s actually closer to 51/49 and generally depends on whichever side was up when the coin is first thrown into the air. That being the side most likely to land upwards. The other fun fact is that when you spin a coin on a table the spinning coin will tend to fall towards the heavier side more often which again meant heads down and tails up.

Now in my magical mindscape would it even be effective if I was not winning anything I wasn’t sure but I could at least imagine an equally weighted coin to flip to see if I couldn’t work out exactly how much 2 points of luck weighted things in my favour.

It might be a bit of a boring night and might very well put me to sleep again. But it was worth finding out at least and safer use of my time for the moment. Moreover, it was better than any of the other skills I had been practicing in here that might have contributed to my imbalance.

Plus flipping a coin should be good for my dexterity anyway, killing two birds with one stone. In fact, while I was playing with coins I might as well see if I could get sleight of hand skills as well. Palming, French drop and the Muscle Pass were all ones to aim at along with card tricks later. Interesting thought, how were skills named, if I could get a generic sleight of hand skill or a specific french drop skill would it still be called a french drop when as far as I was aware France didn't exist in this world? Were skill names pulled from an existing bank of infinite skills? Or did my own preconceptions label the skill themselves?

Finally, I had had enough with the wool-gathering and started flipping coins.

It took about a minute to do 10 coin tosses and record the heads to tails.

6 heads to 4 tails.

A minute later,

7 heads to 3 tails.

A minute later,

8 heads to 2 tails.

Was I getting better at getting heads because of luck or simply because I was starting heads up to start off with anyway? I wasn’t sure.

I decided to stop trying to catch the coin and just let it land. That seemed be a fairer way to practice this.

100 throws in I was 60 heads and 40 tails. So 2 points of luck seemed to be working pretty well in my favour. But then I remembered an old statistics lesson about how many times you had to test a variable to have a statistically reliable result.

If I recalled correctly, and I was getting better and better at that, what with the weird and wonderful skills I was gaining, then I needed to be doing a sample size of at least 10,000 to reduce my statistical error to 1% which could very well wipe out any advantage 2 points of luck gave me.

I groaned, I could be here a while. Maybe save the dice rolling for another night.

I whiled away the night while my stamina slowly dropped down to zero. Admittedly it only felt like it was slowly dropping to zero. As with my brain moving quicker inside my head than outside all time was still subjective. Soon in the real world, I was soon sound asleep like the rest of my family.

Only to be rudely awakened by the words, "You're lying."