Chapter 2: The Purgatory That Was Class Selection

I made camp that night on the other side of the meadow from my spawn-in point, overall, I was trying to head in the direction of the Chateau/mountain town in the distance. I didn’t have any need to go there but I needed to find my feet in this new world and civilization would probably be my best bet for that.

The camp I’d made was all a result of realizing that the air around here was pretty fucking cold and jeans with a singlet were the extent of my protection. Then I spent an hour warming up while working to rectify that with a hole dug in the soft, damp ground that I filled with easily accessible twigs, dry pine needles and finally a few inch-thick bits of branches topped with larger branches splintered by the hatchet. The whole thing went up very nicely with a touch from the firelighter and I commended myself on being a little bit of a pyro in high school. It was by this small fire that I first looked into the system that ran the world, I had made heat reflectors on either side of the fire by driving a quartet of sticks into the ground and stacking branches between them to make a barrier that would keep the fire’s heat focused on me rather than diffusing too much and was intending to sleep without a blanket or any other such niceties. I didn’t have to worry about that because I never got any sleep, I had eaten a can of lentils and soup, used the empty can to boil and drink clear water from the river and then promptly slipped into a distinctly video game like set of menus when I had examined the sledgehammer from my trolley. All I had done was stare at it and sort of allowed my eyes to unfocus for a moment and suddenly there I was, menu after menu drifted before my eyes and I found myself overloading with information. A herculean mental effort brought me out of the chaos and into something more logical, I saw inventory, skills, attributes, party/relationships and personal. First I clicked on attributes and saw:

Jack Wells Class: Unselected Level 0

HP: 8 [Base=6 + 2 per level from Constitution] Stamina: 21 [Base =20+1 from strength-2 from agility+2 from constitution. Mana: 8 [Base=10 +0 from Intelligence -2 from Willpower

Strength 11 [Slightly Above Average]

Agility 8 [Clumsy Bastard]

Intelligence 10 [Basic Problem Solver]

Willpower 8 [ Substance abuser: Alcohol]

Constitution 12 [High alcohol tolerance, solid pain tolerance]

Charisma 12 [ Awkward, yet likeable, in a pathetic kind of way]

Made sense to me, next came skills, I organised by descending order and saw a list that started with the disappointing but only slightly surprising:

Adept level Skills

Candlemaking: Level 27 [ craft wick, craft dual wicked candle, layered candle, dipped candle, spiral candle, fast burning candle, scented, essential oil infused, herb infused, twisted candle, variegated wick…

I mentally skipped past when the skill description for fucking candle making continued to drone on and on without stopping. I had done a brief course on candlemaking when I was a kid as part of a Sunday school lesson, then in a primary school art contest I used that prior experience to beat everyone else and won a book on candle making as a result. Of course I had then become obsessed with the hobby as it was the only moment of success in my life. For nearly 9 months I spent all of my paper route money on materials so that I could try all the different recipes and techniques arranged within the book. Of course, I stopped immediately when I got absolutely bullied and shit on by every kid in my year after they found out.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Then in high school things got good again as I started using that formerly reviled skillset to hook up with the overlap of astrology and art chicks as soon as it became a possibility. That’s where I learned that the trick to getting pussy as an anxious loser is to not act like an anxious loser without going too far and seeming like a psycho or douchebag.

Essentially If you can treat a girl like a normal person and share some interests with her then your chances go way up, astronomically up. But now this trajectory I had followed in my youth meant that candlemaking was my highest skill, which made sense I supposed, the kind of elaborate and varied candle-making I knew wasn’t the kind of necessary skillset that would find use outside of the imperial core in which I had lived. Indeed, on Earth I had enjoyed access to many materials, essences, and fragrances that wouldn’t have been available to anyone other than the most wealthy and skilled craftsmen in medieval society.

So if this world was anything like mine then my experience was genuinely pretty high in terms of candles. I decided not to worry about my presumably useless skill and see what was next on my skill list, nothing else in the adept column, apprentice skills had reading which was pretty self explanatory, apparently I had a 40 percent increase to reading speed and a base 95 percent comprehension. After reading though my skills jumped straight over apprentice down to novice which included:

Novice Level skills

Farming: Level 2 [ Plant seed, make compost, water plant, check for disease and craft pesticide”

Crude woodworking: Level 1 [Sand timber, split log, glue and measure timber products]

Weaponcrafting: Level 3 [ Shivs, improvised spears, fishing spears, slingshot]

Medicine: Level 1 [First aid competency]

Fighting Unarmed: Level 2 [ Make fist, throw punch, block poorly]

Headbutt: Level 3 [Experienced with headbutt, can be used for surprise attack bonus]

I clicked my tongue nervously, I had a few other skills related to swinging tools and making repairs etc. but I didn’t seem particularly prepared for an adventure as I had hoped. The rest of my night was spent hunting through menus, not even realising as time passed and my fire died out completely leaving me shivering in the freezing night air.

The party menu was greyed out, which made sense for a solo traveller such as myself and the inventory showed both the items on my person as well as the contents of my trolley. The trolley itself registered as enchanted with level 3 sturdiness and level 3 terrain bonuses. “Thank you Agramon” I whispered to myself as I moved on to the tool. It turned out the hatchet, knife and sledge were just normal tools and the groceries were completely mundane, except for one thing. The tiny bottle of fireball cinnamon whisky was enchanted with Unending 1 and would apparently refill itself once a day indefinitely. Not enough to get much more than a buzz going but it was still a very nice gesture from the purveyor of the Rot-Fleshed pits or whatever he had said.

I briefly dipped into the personal tab which showed my health bar, several minor debuffs relating to cold and the locations of my many scars accrued via 7 years of ignominious toil in the steel industry.

The flames still kept the cold at bay and I felt myself continuing to drift away as I delved into the class selection section of the menu system. And that is where I lost myself beneath a wave of information. Class, multiclass, prestige, hybrid, legacy, dual, split, fiendish, pact, bonded, broken, sundered, cultural and a hundred other categories of class choices exploded before me, it was like grabbing a livewire in both hands. Immediately my jaw went slack and I felt myself getting caught in the torrent of information, I couldn’t resist, couldn’t stop it from pulling, tugging, dragging me into a mental labyrinth of conflicting, Daedalian paths.

I saw myself as a Rogue, then as multiple different types of Rogue, in one iteration conjured the tools of my trade as I needed them and slipped past guards with the aid of illusions and enchantment. Another iteration showed me as an assassin, brewing toxins and alchemical weapons that gave me the edge on all kinds of foes. Then the visions changed, now I was a Spellbreaker, I functioned as a bodyguard for those who could afford me or perhaps those I felt deserved protection. I saw myself using magic to rip apart incoming spells and dissipate their energy into a hundred innocuous directions instead of blowing the head off my charge, then I felt blood pounding through my veins, rage slamming my mind as I forced myself onwards, trudging through a storm of razorlike sand and hot glass between me and the man who had wronged me. After that I was a Politician, speaking with venom more toxic than the assassin could have distilled, defusing pointed questions more adeptly than the spell breaker could undo a curse, bulling ahead through terrible decision after terrible decision and bringing ruin to all those around me as I filled my pockets. The nightmares continued, I felt myself shot, stabbed, burnt, electrocuted and dissolved, experiencing the highs and lows of dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of classes and subclasses with seemingly no end, no concept of time beyond the terrible present.