Chapter III

Ok, that type of System I described in the last chapter was horrible, so how about we talk about one that goes into a completely different direction?

There are Systems out there that are insanely specific, where there is a Skill and Stat for everything, and maybe even a Resource Pool for everything.

If you are affected by them, they tend to fairly accurately analyze what your actual abilities are and allow you to use them. Not always, and it is not uncommon for abilities to gain weird and unusual limitations, so that they fit within what the System considers a Skill, but the chance is better than even that you will keep your abilities if affected.

So, how are these Systems bad?

First of all, while they seem to have a skill for everything, there are always curious exceptions.

Hell, I have a seen a System where there was a skill to move blood into a certain part of the body, not important which one, but in that System there was no general Skill to move blood around in the body, or even into other parts of the body than this specific one.

And this is the thing that annoys me most about those Systems. They go into excrutiating detail in certain areas, but completely ignore others.

I sometimes like to think that those Systems have interests. The places where they go into that kind of detail are their interests, their hobbies, so to speak.

That might make sense, excluding the fact that I do not think that Systems are sentient.

I could be wrong here, but how else do you explain the utter stupidity and odd weirdness Systems exhibit?

Ok, humans for example can be pretty stupid as well, but they are not, as a civilization, that consistently, that weirdly, stupid.

I think at least.

So ok, I admit, that might be an explanation. I do not think it is a good one, but I must admit it explains a lot of the weirdness in very easy and good to understand ways.

But enough of that.

Let us talk about the two main categories of insanely specific Systems I have found instead:

First: The System is everything. It controls everything, or at least pretends to control everything, it does every single process in the background manually, or, again, pretends to do so and so on.

Those kinds of Systems are dangerous, I hope I do not need to explain why. But they also tend to be far more fair and better to you, the random non hero than the Systems out of the last chapter, so it generally is not that dangerous.

You better hope that you get the breathing Skill unlocked quickly, though.

And the eating Skill.

And, well, you get the point.

The sad thing is, that it can sometimes be difficult to get Skill unlocks from experiences that you made outside the System. Which is how you have full grown adults suffocating, simply because the System says that they cannot breath, for they do not have the Skill for that. Even though they have breathed air for their entire live to this point.

It is not uncommon for that to happen if some people outside such a System come into such a System.

And I can near guarantee you, the insanely specific Systems all have a breathing Skill, or something that fulfills the same role. There might be multiple Skills necessary.

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Which is really annoying, when you have limited time and need to unlock several Skills. Luckily, those kinds of Systems are always of the kind that there is not a limited amount of Skill slots, and very, very rarely you need to do something special, like touch that super shiny stone over there to really unlock a Skill. Or apply Skill points to be capable of using an unlocked Skill…

That would be really not fun if it were the case.

Luckily, it is not. Or at least, I have never seen it. I personally find it unlikely that there even is something like that out there.

But then again, I have been wrong before, and I am man enough to admit that I simply do not know and am speculating.

But lets get away from Skills and instead talk about Stats.

These kinds of Systems have a tendency to have a lot of Stats. After all, the average of between five and seven Stats is to little to even remotely describe what exactly a human or similar is capable of.

Of course, increasing those Stats one at the time through Stat points would be annoying, time consuming and mostly pointless. Also requiring enormous amounts of Stat points to get anything sensible done. So, in general you can increase the Stats through training in those Systems. But Stat points or other sources similar to them are a near universal part of Systems, so they need to be used in this kind of System as well.

How do they do it?

In general, there is a small group of Stats, tending to fall inside the average of five to seven Stats, although lower and higher amounts of course exist, which all other Stats are sorted under.

Increase one of the super Stats, and you increase all of the Stats that are part of it by a certain amount.

The particular formula of how what is increased is, of course, System dependent, although the user often has some input.

That input might be active, or it might be passive, but it is almost always there.

Active input means that the user can, at least to a certain extent willfully and specifically control that distribution by manipulating the part of the System he can see.

Passive input means that that distribution is simply controlled by what the user does. What he concentrates on when he is using training to increase his Stats. The same kind of statistical distribution is then applied to the sub Stat distribution.

It is not uncommon for it to be a mixture of active and passive input, as well as the Systems own ideas, partly to balance things out.

Most of the time, the System does not want to be your enemy. It just tends to do things that you, as a multiversal traveler, find adversial. Mostly because Systems dislike letting the ones it affects outside of its sphere of influence.

There are Systems that love multiversal travel, but those are not bound to a universe, but to a person. Also, they tend to be constrained to a certain subsection of the multiverse.

A topic for another time.

Where was I? Right, I was finished with the Stat distribution.

So, then lets look at Resource Pools.

Now, you might think that those Systems go into similar detail in the amount of Resource Pools available to the users?

Wrong. Well, mostly.

There are the Systems of that type out there that have a myriad of Ressource Pools. Those Systems are rare, however.

It is fairly common for these extremely specific Systems to have at most one more Resource Pool.

The basic underlying calculations for the existing Resource Pools tend to be very complex.

The Resource Pools also might give a number of effects, depending on the exact composition of the sub Stats.

But all in all, they are simply normal Resource Pools.

What is the point? No fucking clue.

And here goes another keyboard. Damn it!

So, let us end it here, before I loose even more equipment, and talk about the second general type of insanely specific Systems.

I like to call that type the: I am totally innocent and not doing anything, promise, type.

That type says it is simply putting reality into a set of numbers, and that there are of course slight deviations where it did not account for something.

That is the best type of System to be affected by as a multiversal traveler. Not great still, but if you need to be affected by a System and can choose, choose this. They still have issues, no doubt about it, and they are not nearly as doing nothing as they pretend to be, but still.

They tend to accept abilities coming from outside of the System, as long as the System does not have an equivalent somewhere.

Be wary though: those kinds of Systems can adapt and might at some point decide that they are able to quantify your ability, which means transforming it into a System Skill.

That might not have any effect you can see or feel or otherwise realize, and in fact, that is their goal with that, in fact the ability will likely become a small bit more powerful, but the System can always miss something. And the part it missed might be fairly vital to you. And thanks to the System overwriting your ability with the Skill, well you are out of luck.

But wait, you say, did that System not say that it is only codifying the things that are already there?

Yes, but Systems lie. They lie all the time. They like lying.

Oh, there is a decent chance that you can somehow manage to gain access to the overwritten ability in such a System. But it will not be easy. Partly because that type of System tends to love mind controlling its users, to prevent anyone realizing that it is actually overwriting reality, not just measuring it.

While this kind of System is the best to be affected by, it still is not good. And in some ways, it is the worst kind to be affected by, because you can manage to loose sight of the truth, that this is a System, and Systems are unquestionably evil. They simply cannot help themselves.

It is in the nature of Systems to be, in some way, evil and all consuming.

Systems are controlling. They not only want to control, they need to control. It is a core aspect of what they are.

Systems are fascinating, yes, but they are also dangerous, and dislike loosing something they have managed to control. And whatever enters what they can affect, they will try to control it.

I am not sure if Systems are good for the multiverse.

My opinion is the less System Universes there are, the better.

Another keyboard lost, damn it all!

Back to a more interesting topic, maybe.

How do those Systems, who pretend to not affect anything, explain to their users the existence of Resource Pools?

Well, simple: They say that they measured an existing resource, and often they also explain exactly what the unit is.

That the Resource Pools tend to end up having nice, round numbers, well, no one will realize that, considering the mind control Systems like.

Never forget the dangers of multiversal travel, my dear reader.

And never forget, that the biggest dangers are those that pretend to not be dangers at all, but merely harmless things.

And the worst dangers are those that are like that, but honestly believe that they are those harmless little things.

Like the Systems I have talked about in this last segment.