The grey skinned information broker gave me a serious look. "The first thing you need to know, something that I pray will help you long into the future: Claudius Roman. That's my name, by the way. Can you say it back to me?"

I gave him a look but repeated the name. "Claudius Roman."

He made a contemplative look before continuing. "That was an informative experience. You see we don't speak the same language and so it doesn't translate the same every time. That time I focused on the meaning of my name and the universe found a way to translate it as closely as possible. If I was to focus on the sound of my name than it would sound like 'Clowd-ous Raou-an'. Mostly this doesn't matter, I just like to hear how other people say my name." He smiled.

I rolled my eyes.

"As for something more immediately important, the power of a point. When you spend your points on upgrades; weather it is soulbounds, abilities, or skills; you need to understand exactly what you should expect to get out of them. 'Create Water' is the prime example of this. Without any upgrades this one-point spell creates a stream of water with no more pressure than you might expect from a household spigot. It is also the most common point usage of any expenditure. The reason why becomes quickly apparent when you think about the utility of having clear, pure water whenever you might want it. Sure, not dying of desiccation is a great thing, and the survival aspects of The Game make it a strong contender for that alone, but that is actually the least immediately useful aspect of the spell. Afterall, anyone can buy a thermos that filters water out of the air." he smiled at me knowingly and I held back a groan. I really needed to find a way to keep people from looking into my hammerspace. The self-filling water bottle had seemed like a good idea at the time.

"No," he continued, "It isn't about having enough water to not die of thirst but having that water when or where you may want it immediately without having to carry or retrieve it. It is like carrying tens of gallons of water at all times without having to deal with the weight or volume. You might think the utility would fade as technological development got higher, but the opposite is true. Most spacecraft use basic water as the catalyst for their heat dissipation systems, they just heat it up and release the steam. Dimensional travel uses water for multiversal lubrication. Reality drives use frozen water as the ablative shield against non-reality corruption. In all these cases water isn't the best option but it is functional, nontoxic, generally nonreactive, and very very readily available.

"The same can be said about the second most used point expenditure: Create Air. Or the fourth and fifth most common point uses: Create Fire and Create Electricity. None of them are as directly useful by themselves but all of them directly or indirectly increase the user's potential by how they interact with the world around them. This is called 'external synergy' as it is a point's synergy with the outside world. You might ask, 'aren't all of these magic?' Yes, but the use you get out of being able to spontaneously create matter or energy from nothing but a fifteen minute jog's worth of exhaustion is hard to replace with something else.

"Of course we get the boring 'internal synergy' upgrades that are just useful as they are, though most of them require more than a single point to be useful. Flight would be an example. At four points you can fly at a slow hover or sixteen points you get full flight that is as good as your normal movement but in three dimensions. That can be quite useful if you don't want to run, don't want to jump, or want to say 'I can fly by my own power' rather than just using some form of flight technology like a normal person would. They are points that do a job, and you might need it for some reason, but you don't get back more value than the points use would suggest. Therefore I would call that a bad use of points. Instead we can look at the third most common point use: Dimensional Storage. The size of the basic version is small enough that you could conceivably carry everything it holds, so it doesn't hold very much direct internal synergy, but it enables the better use of other abilities. This is called 'horizontal synergy'."

"A quick question for clarification," I jumped in, "Is a Dimensional Storage the same as my Hammerspace?"

He paused for a moment. "Yes. Depending on how the person thinks of it the name may be Dimensional Storage, Soul Encapsulation, Spatial Offsetting, Soul Storage, or your Hammerspace. Most things aren't so confusing and you should be able to recognize the different words referring to the same upgrade, but there are a few things like that. The common point is that the confusing ones are more conceptually powered, but this is pretty rare at your level beyond the given example." He raised an eyebrow at me. "Do you want to talk about linguistics again?"

"Uh, no." I answered. "Lets go back to points again."

"Right." he nodded. "The value of points is in their utility and synergy. A lot of upgrades have utility built into themselves by interacting with the way the world works; like the Create Water and Create Air examples I mentioned before. A number of things have value without interacting with anything else; like telekinesis, the magic or the superpowered version. The point use is helpful but it will never, by themselves, get you more than what those points themselves might suggest. Then you have upgrades that get their value from how they work with other abilities; like Dimensional Storage.

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"Think about how it combines with your Soulbound computer. You can make a One Point computer small enough to fit in your hand but you loose a lot of power that way, and a Four Point computer is even more so. The loss is actually exponential, so your four points of computer is actually acting more like eight or ten when compared to something more easily portable. The same is true of your transmission device; and your Storage still has a lot of space left over. This is called 'cross point synergy', more often called 'horizontal synergy'. While external synergy gets its value from how well you can leverage it in the real world, horizontal synergy gets its value from how well it multiplies the power of your other abilities."

"Uh, Not to make a big deal out of this, but I don't know that I have enough credits to actually use this information."

This made him pause. "You killed the boss, didn't you? So you should have a good stash of credits. Enough to buy some stuff and get some upgrades."

"I, uh, spent some of it already." I admitted.

"Right, so what did you get?" he asked with his normal energy.

This made me pause. "I'm... not sure I should tell an information broker about my character build."

He rolled his eyes dramatically. "How else can I help you with your build if I don't know what it is. But, if it makes you feel better." He stood up and raised his hand in what looked like some sort of salute, "I do solemnly swear to not spread around anything about his build that this 'Johnny' person tells me." Yeah, at this point I'm not even questioning how he knows my name. He put down his hand and dropped back into his transparent chair, still referring to me in the third person. "Not that I won't watch what he does in his next fight and make the logical leaps based on that. But what else do you expect? It is literally my job."

I internally held back a groan while keeping a flat expression. He did make a good point. Could I hide the fact that I had super senses now? Maybe... But the first time I reacted to something I shouldn't be able to see or hear it would become obvious that something was going on. On the other hand his experience on how different abilities worked together would be invaluable in figuring what to take next. All things considered I had far more to gain than I was likely to loose by telling him. I still felt a bit overwhelmed by it all, however. "Fine. I got Super Senses from the boss."

He nodded along. "Right, that makes sense. Definitely more than the Four Point version, and you wouldn't know about dual specing yet, so that would give you the sixteen point version." He shook his head sadly. "Too bad you couldn't get the sixty-four point version, it comes with the ability to pick up things like electronic transmissions or magical fluctuations and actually understand them." Suddenly he was neutral again. "Not a bad pick, though. The only really bad pick, from his major abilities, was the one he used to create his minions. It was too gimmicky and you don't have the stats to support it anyhow. I may come across as biased by saying this, considering my job, but knowledge is power and your ability gives you plenty of potential knowledge.

"This brings up the next form of synergy: Vertical Synergy. Think of each point as a single extra upgrade that you have. You may upgrade your eyesight, and hearing, and ability to filter out noise, and ability to process the information; and do it all separately as four single point expenditures. Or you can upgrade them all in one packaged four point upgrade. The thing to remember, though, is that the combination is more valuable than the sum of its parts. The usually accepted formula is a 5 to 4 output to input ratio, generally speaking. And that formula multiplies over each level. So a tier two upgrade, four points, is worth five tier one upgrades; and a tier three upgrade, sixteen points, is worth twenty five tier one upgrades." He nodded along to himself as he spoke, before continuing with his lesson.

" 'So why not just focus on one type of upgrade and get it as high as possible?' you might ask. Some people do, and we call them one trick wonders. And when that one trick fails to be capable or appropriate, so do they. Most people treat individual upgrades like your dimensional storage: What good is it to have the space for an aircraft carrier when all you need is the space in a small closet? What good is a fireball that explodes in the size of a small building when you are being attacked by a monster in a small room?"

"Right," I answered back, really hoping that I didn't forget anything. "But I really do think you are overestimating the money and number of free points I have."

He gave me a discerning look. "I shouldn't be. Biologically you should have started out at level five or six, though there is a slight chance seven if you are some sort of super genius for your race. Mind stats are harder to estimate. This means that you should have between thirty and thirty five points to allocate in each category. And while you almost certainly maxed out your credits for beating the boss, the level based restriction is 'supposedly' there to prevent abuse, that should still leave you with around a hundred thousand credits before you started buying things."

"I currently have twenty-six thousand credits, with some extra left over."

He looked me over again. "The minimum level is one, and even that shouldn't be normally possible. This would put you at level five and give you considerably more credits. I can see the value of everything you are carrying. So, what other upgrades did you buy?"

I sighed. "I think that minimum level is more a 'rounding up' sort of situation rather than a 'set at this base level' sort of thing. I'm currently level four."

His face went through a number of complicated expressions before being covered over by a mask of joy and ambition. "That is unexpected, but not necessarily bad and maybe it is even good! It might be a bit more work, but I'm sure we can work something out!"