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2. Additional remuneration to the author is to be enacted by a transfer of experience points (XP) from the reader to the author. Without regard to the levels of each party, the reader agrees to forfeit twenty-five (25) of their current experience and transfer it immediately and directly to the author. This transfer of XP is required even if the novel is acquired on sale (defined as obtained through officially licensed means for a GOLD cost of less than the original asking price) or given as a free/promotional copy.
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***
Greetings reader and thank you for joining me for this collection of tales from the Upgrade. The Upgrade is old news of course, but lately, there’s been a spike in interest for stories about those turbulent early days of the phenomenon. History books tell of the chaos and wonder of the first years after the Upgrade, from the riots against the leaders of the world for their initial mishandling of the event to the normal human reactions at being given the potential for amazing power.
The history books you all read as kids tell of these things in a normal, clinical, sterile, and frankly boring manner. You, my dear reader, want the real dirt. You want to be in the trenches with and peek into the minds of those who lived…and died in those early days.
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I suppose we shouldn’t be too surprised at what happens in these tales as our history before the upgrade is replete with similar examples…well…examples without magic, creatures from our nightmares, or near god-like powers. So, the question on your lips might be why? Why did yours truly get selected to compile these stories? To answer that I’ll have to tell you a little about myself and my own career from before the Upgrade.
I was a news reporter. Specifically, I fancied myself an investigative reporter of the highest caliber. Unfortunately, neither my readers nor my boss felt as highly of my skills as I did. From there, I became a simple fiction author before everything happened, writing in the LitRPG and Dungeon Core genre. Laugh all you want; my entire genre was destroyed when the Upgrade happened. We authors of the genre—one and all—fell on hard times.
Suffice to say, people don’t want to read fantasy or science fiction when the real-life things happening to them are just as amazing and terrifying. Unlike many others whose jobs were rendered obsolete by the Upgrade, LitRPG authors bounced back with style. Living in a world changed into the very things we wrote about, lent itself to the min-maxing of our skills like a pro. Since the beginning, LitRPG authors and their readers have consistently been near the top of the pack when it comes to leveling and efficiency of build.
Back to the question at hand, why me? Indulge me for a bit dear reader. You see, I decided I loved writing too much to give it up just because of the Upgrade, so I “built” my skills accordingly. Without going into the boring details of my character sheet, I can give you a rundown of the pertinent points for our story.
I can use an ability I gained early on to jump inside the head of anyone I write about. My editors would wail and moan at me head-hopping too much while writing…who knew that foible would be the key to my future success! Take that, pre-Upgrade editors!
You should understand I’m not omniscient while using this ability, but I do get a glimpse of what others have seen and I can feel a bit of what they felt at the time. My abilities are limited, as I need some grounding in who the person was and what they did. The more information I can gather about them, the more detailed I can recreate their tale.
In the process of writing this novel, I combed through hundreds of news broadcasts, police logs, declassified government docs, articles, blogs, and cat videos to piece these stories together and discover how they were linked. I then interviewed everyone I could in person, at least those who were still alive. To do this I used another of my Upgrade skills—Gumshoe Reporter—to help me to track down story leads and locate the persons involved.
An obscure news article might lead me to a relative of someone who wrote a blog about it…so on…so forth, until I had a good idea of what happened. The cat videos you ask? How did they help with this novel? Well, I like to watch them when I take short breaks from writing. It’s been scientifically proven that Upgraded individuals who watch cat videos have an Intelligence stat at least 10% higher than the norm. That more than outweighs the 25% drop in social standing you get from watching more than four cat videos in your lifetime.
I’ve blathered on long enough, let’s get started with what happened at the beginning. We start our tales with those in power, those who were the first to hear about, and shape the event that would change all our lives forever…