You have reached the limit of Tier 0 and can advance to Tier 1: Foundation Base Class… Choose a Class Advancement. Squire: You’re not a noble knight but are extremely qualified to carry a dressage and change out a codpiece. Baby Animal Tamer: You can’t compel them but maybe you can talk to them real sweet and they’ll help you out. Or eat you. Average Camper: Slightly above average in camping skills. You learn and retain outdoorsy stuff faster. You’ve gone camping a lot and you’re still starting from average, so don’t expect any miracles. Shooty McGunGuy Jr.: Increase your shooty skills. Learn to load your own ammo to change up your loadout and the effects of your firearms. Sneaky Bow Guy: Shoot them and pray to whatever heathen god you have that they don’t get close (looooool try ‘odin’ or ‘thor’). Oh wait. You don’t even have a bow. Still, you can choose this if you want. Super sweet Mage, but seriously, it’s totally not magic: Whoops, not for you. You don’t have the proper Affinities. Shadow Lord of Death: Honestly this class selection is kind of OP. I don’t even want to make it available but… *sigh* I don’t make the rules.
I selected Shadow Lord of Death. Impulsive? Yes. Stupid? Almost assuredly yes, but I was getting tired of constantly deciphering bullshit. Gabby must think he’s funny because the other angels he is in charge of politely laugh at his terrible jokes. Same vibes.
Oh damn. Sorry, you don’t have and can’t select ‘Touch of Evil’ due to a currently inactive Light Affinity. Yikes, sorry I didn’t mean to show you that Class Selection.
“Fuck you Gabby!” I slammed my fist on the school desk and the other two started and spilled coffee onto the floor. I gave them both a look and poured more coffee into their cups to shut them up.
I didn’t know if they were looking at me or going to say anything but I tuned them out regardless.
Well. First of all, bullshit. Second, this Affinity crap was really chapping my last ass cheek. My first cheek was already in a state of near-constant chapping from the Law of Averages crap. I didn’t like the idea of losing Feat points or stats or whatever the official name was. Actually, I needed to know the official name because the Penitent System was the most unintuitive piece of shit I’d ever seen. This thing would have bombed on the app store. I added ‘figure out the real name of the stats’ onto my mental list that I probably wouldn’t remember in an hour.
I had four options. Well, three technically. I didn’t give a shit about Animal Taming if there was no ability to ‘compel’ animals. Maybe I would eventually be able to do that at higher levels or at advanced classes or whatever, but I wasn’t about to spend a month, or even a week for that matter, sweet talking some homicidal squirrel into helping me pretty please. I wasn’t going to negotiate with animals unless… well unless I was forced to like I was with a mini-horse sized Chibi.
Bow shit was also out, I don’t know if you end up losing skills depending on your class but that wasn’t a risk I wanted to take, especially while I didn’t have a bow to replace my current weapons. I mean it could be pretty cool, the idea of being a Robinhood-type of figure, firing off multi-shots and other cool shit. In fact, that sounded pretty sweet. The returning fact that I didn’t have a bow cooled me off a bit and I realized that I would never be sneakier than a nemesis shadow-wolf especially with, what was an educated guess, its Dark Affinity. I wouldn’t find somewhere to spend the night all of the time and with a sneaky Nemesis wolf on my ass. I’m not Legolas so I’m not going to get in a close range fight and start stabbing with arrows by hand. And I was sure she would be ambushing me whenever she found a good opportunity.
So, Squire, Average Camper, and Shooty McGunGuy. Now we had some options. I didn’t like being reliant on shooting, which meant being reliant on ammunition. The amount that had already been fired must have been astronomical by this point if everyone’s pets had all the woodland critters had turned baaaahd. Plus the zombies, classic bullet sponges.
I sighed at my own pun, terrible, but not in a good way, then thought deeper about it all. There were probably some gun skills to make stuff more powerful or to assist with wielding, but I remembered what Gabe had said during the first message. Guns wouldn’t be useful forever. It felt like a trap, a doomed class. Was that possible? I thought of that smarmy asshole and instantly knew that absolutely could be a class trap. Maybe it wasn’t? Did I want to take that risk? The Gaia shit had been almost obviously a trap, maybe even an easy one to get us used to it? Though it kind of chapped to give Gabe any credit for being any amount of helpful.
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Average Camper… could actually be good, but I didn’t particularly want to spend more time in the wilds than I already had. I was pretty okay never camping again in my life, however short that ended up being. I really didn’t want a class that centered around it.
That left… Squire. Although the description sucked… but didn’t Gabriel write those? I started to feel better about the whole idea. After all, it did seem like it would probably mesh well with my Ren Faire Skillz and I stopped hesitating and selected it with a mumble, “Choose Squire Foundational Base Class Advancement. Select Foundational Base Class Advancement: Squire.”
A series of chimes flowed through my head and I felt a wash of rejuvenation. I checked my somewhat healed wounds and didn’t notice any improvement on them…
“Did you just get taller?”
I looked at Lena in confusion, “No? Maybe? I don’t know.”
Before I could tune her out and go back into my Status she annoyed me with another question, “Are you looking at your Status screen?”
I gave her an eyebrow, “Yeah, why?”
“Do you know how you activated it? Do you know if there are other parts?”
“Yeah… there are a ton, you just have to…”
I raised a hand, “You know what, no. This is valuable information and I’d be more than happy to tell you after we’ve done some trading. Display Status.”
I smiled, I had gained a point across the board, except in Divine Spark of course. Everything was up to 7, except External Will, which was at 5. Now that was a problem since everything else was balanced, next time my status sheet balanced itself it would be a downward weight on the rest. I still didn’t know how much it would affect everything else, if there was some threshold it would have before I started losing points or if stats would round downward at 6.99. Knowing Gabriel, and if he had any say in it, it absolutely would. The thought of losing 5 stat points meant that I had to get that up to 7, at my highest priority. No matter what.
“... you’re a jerk.”
I turned to look at her, apparently, she saw the confusion on my face because she repeated herself.
“No, no, I heard you. And I can assume why you called me that, but why would I give away an advantage like that unless I got something for it?”
I didn’t want to give them ideas, but it could also be one of the only things keeping me alive in regards to their hospitality. A bit paranoid, sure.
Gramps stood up and pressed knuckles into his back, “You ready to do some tradin’?”
I stood and stretched my arms over my head, then leaned to each side. Damn I felt good. I felt strong, stronger than I ever had before. Mind clear. Spirit solid.
“Let’s do it, Gramps. You need me to find your walker or are you having a good day?”
----------------------------------------
Someone had moved a long science desk into one corner of the auditorium. I followed Gramps and Lena as I took the time to look over the crowd. Well, ‘crowd’ was being a bit generous. There were like 20 people. It looked like most that were left tended to be older as well.
Gramps took a moment to announce who I was, it included some combination of ‘young, idiot, trade, found, NOT working with the Mortician’, and a few other things I summarily ignored. I continued to ignore him and moved to decide on what I actually wanted to trade. It had sounded like a good idea, but I also didn’t have a huge backpack, most everything I bothered to carry was stuff that I would want to use. I settled on taking out both boxes of 50 rounds of .45, one full the other half-full and… I felt like I should have something else so I took out some of the chocolate bars I had grabbed from the farmhouse.
This wasn’t some post-apocalyptic market though, it was a small, very small, town and I was, if not friendly and trusted, at least a spoken-for outsider.
“Where’re you from?”
“Los Angeles, I ha-”
“What the hell are you doing all the way out here? You made it from there to here in 10 days?”
“No, I was camping at the mouth of the valley to the East. I drove in on the day it happened.”
“Why’d you come here?”
“I stopped by the gas station on my way there. Seemed better than a car in the woods.”
“Hey! I remember you, wasn’t there a girl that was with you?”
“She’s… gone.” I got some sympathetic nods at that.
“She’s dead?” An elderly side of middle-aged woman slapped the man next to her on the shoulder, fairly hard.
“No, well at least I don’t think so. She got Raptured.”
Maybe… maybe I shouldn’t have said that.
“She got taken?” “She was one of the 144,000?” “144…”
The whispering grew in intensity until I just decided to sit and wait at the rickety chair that had been set up behind the table.