“Let’s focus on things that you can talk about. What is an HP?” I asked.

“A hit point,” Denise replied immediately.

I frowned, “What does it represent?”

“A single point of damage,” Denise continued, looking at me like I was being stupid.

“What is the equivalency? What would cause one HP of damage?” I pressed.

“A training dagger,” she replied, baffled by my questions.

“What does a training dagger do exactly?”

Denise, growing frustrated, answered loudly, “Inflict one point of HP damage!”

I held up my hands. I need to try a different approach, “How many hit points does the average level 1 player have?”

Denise checked her phone, “That is a bit variable. Most players are Common Scale. They average two-point-five hit points per level. Uncommon players average three-point-five hit points per level. Rare players average four-point-five hits per level. After that things gain more structure, epic Scale players gain a flat ten hit points a level. The rate of growth increases as Scale does.”

I thought about that, “So Common players gain d4 hit points, Uncommon players gain d6, and Rare players gain d8. Why do higher Scale players get so many more hit points?”

“Because they are higher Scale,” Denise said, again like that is self-evident. Seeing that answer meant nothing to me she continued, “They have been selected by the narrative to have greater importance in the world’s story. Plus they are few and far between.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

Denise checked her phone again, “About eighty percent of the world’s population is Common Scale.”

“And Uncommon?”

She checked again, “Roughly sixteen percent.”

Shit, ninety-six percent of all people were in the lowest two levels of Scale. This whole being a titan spawn, one of six in the world, was starting to come into better focus. That would also imply that Angelica being heroic Scale and Celeste being Divine Scale meant us meeting like we did on accident was so unlikely that it had to have been arranged. I didn’t like the implications.

But I would worry about them when I could do something about it. “So how many attribute points do most players start with?”

“Um,” Denise had to check her phone again, “Okay, found it.” She frowned. “Uh… so this is extremely variable at the beginning. Common players usually start with a one in most attributes, but they have a small chance of starting with a two and an infinitesimal chance of starting with a three in an attribute. Uncommon players average out to have two points in each attribute. Rare average out to 3, and so on .

“Wait, so when I …spawned with eights in every attribute that meant I started out eight times stronger than the average player?” I had figured out I was coasting on high attributes but, still, that was nuts.

Denise laughed, “No my guy, you started out roughly equivalent to a level sixty-four Common player at point of spawn, assuming we are just factoring attributes. Scale, skills, perks, and traits would probably put you at roughly equivalent to a level eighty common player, if not higher.”

Well fuck. I honestly thought to this point I was…well, not doing great. Again, I knew I was coasting on high attributes. If Denise could be trusted, that meant that success on my end should be the default assumption. What she said had a ring of truth to it.

“Why is this system so unbalanced?” I asked. “It sounds like my existence breaks the game.”

“It does,” Denise agreed. “This isn’t a game made for balance. It was made for entertainment.” Her phone beeped. She looked at the screen, “Oh, I can mention this. Normally a world will only start with people reaching Rare Scale out of the gate. This world was unique in having things accelerate to late stages on day one. Normally at this point, there should only be a few Demigod Scale players, maybe one Divine Scale player. Having Nadia running around on the jump along with a few gods was… challenging.”

I let that all sink in. “So how long should it normally take for a titan spawn to appear?”

Denise shrugged, “Depends. The next earliest case was like… six hundred years. Normally it takes longer than that too, what with all the monsters and conflict.”

“What do you mean? I have been non-stop fighting monsters since I got here,” I asked. This place had plenty of conflict.

“You are in a dungeon,” Denise started. She paused and checked her phone, “A dungeon that has overflowed and broken half a dozen times this month alone.” She frowned. “It has been doing that for almost a year.” She looked back at me, but before I could ask she continued, “A dungeon overflowing is when the mobs spawn too fast. This causes the difficulty of the dungeon to increase. After it hits a certain point the dungeon will break. When a dungeon breaks, it opens and ejects all the mobs other than bosses and mini-bosses into the surrounding area.”

“How long does that normally take? A dungeon break, I mean,” I was getting a bad feeling about this.

“There are another four dungeons in The Wastes doing the same thing. Outside of that, the next fastest dungeon takes more than a year to break, provided no one clears it.”

This felt important, but I needed to focus. “Let’s get back to attributes. What do they do?”

“…everything.” Denise offered. Realizing that was a bad answer she continued. “How about I break them down attribute by attribute?” She nodded, “Okay. Power. Power is your ability to apply physical force. You have mostly used it for your melee attacks and damage. Mobility is your ability to move yourself with speed and precision. It also is the main attribute for any sort of direct ranged attacks. Body is related to physical endurance and the ability to resist injury and disease. Mind is your ability to apply mental force within the system as well as the main means of resisting mental attacks. Magic is your ability to apply metaphysical force and defense. Make sense?”

“No,” I shook my head. “That sounds like what I could just read off of the prompts.”

Denise sagged visibly, “What don’t you understand?”

“Everything. What happens when I punch someone?”

“Your mammoth mitt clobbers them and they probably die,” Denise replied, looking more on edge.

I took a deep breath, “What happens systematically?”

She paused, thinking, then she checked her phone. “In that situation, you would roll an Unarmed Attack roll. The roll will be a number of dice based on the difference in Scale between you and the target. Let’s assume you are fighting a Common Scale player of level 4, and they put everything they had in Mobility and are trained in the Dodge skill. So you would be rolling an Unarmed attack using your Power attribute, with a skill at Expert level against a Common Scale opponent with only Trained. That makes your dice pool 3d12 keep all of them, and add twenty to the roll plus your Power attribute.” She consulted her screen, “In this specific example you rolled 25 on the dice. That makes a total of 61 to hit the target. Compare that to the base difficulty of…” she glanced at her app again, “Four! You would hit.”

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“So I need to roll higher than four when I start with a plus sixteen base? That doesn’t make sense, I have missed attacks.” The sheer lopsided nature of imbalance stunned me.

“Not quite,” Denise replied, scrolling through text. “You always fail if you roll a critical failure, all ones on the dice.”

“Oh no, however shall I manage when I miss once in seventeen-hundred-twenty-eight attacks.” I scoffed, but that still was way below the amount of attacks I made that did not land.

“There is still the response stage of the attack sequence, but you are also forgetting most of the stuff you are missing attacks against are Epic, Heroic or Demigod Scale enemies. The odds of a crit fail would be higher. Also…” She looked up from her phone warily. “...you have a bad habit of making attacks while the target is out of reach. If you can’t hit, the roll defaults to a failure.”

“Response stage?” I asked.

Denise waved me down, going back to reading, “You were the one who wanted to know how things work systematically. If possible most players will try and use some sort of reaction. Like Dodge or Block. In this case, they would Dodge.” She pressed a button. “...and they rolled a critical success.

“Critical success?” I interjected.

“Critical successes take primacy over a regular success; they occur whenever someone rolls the highest number on all dice,” Denise explained as she pulled the phone closer to her face.

“So they would Dodge?” I thought I was getting a handle on this.

“Nope,” Denise answered. Seeing the look on my face she continued. “Their total was ten, yours was sixty-one. You rolled more than fifty higher than they did. So the crit is negated. You hit.”

“That’s just stupid,” I thought out loud.

“No, it is the system,” Denise pressed on. “So then you would roll damage. Your power attribute plus 3d12 keeping all with another twenty points on top due to difference in Scale.” The app rolled, “This causes fifty-five hit points of damage. Let’s assume they have a body attribute of one and are wearing common soft armor with a value of two. Their defense is three total. So you do fifty-two points of damage. Since at most they would have sixteen hit points they die.” She looked up at me and smiled like a teacher trying to encourage a struggling student, “Good?”

No it wasn’t. I still needed to confirm some things. “What if they attacked me?”

“They would roll an attack against a base difficulty drawing on your difference in Scale… eleven,” she peeked quickly at the phone, “They didn’t crit, so they miss, unless you chose to try and block. Which if you did, you would succeed, trigger the counter attack, hit, and kill them.”

That did roughly track with my fights with snow lions. “So how is a Common Scale player supposed to kill me?”

“They’re not,” Denise said, back to eyeing me like I was stupid.

“Wait, if you can use Dodge to avoid melee attacks, then what does Brand’s Evasive Combatant perk do?” I asked.

Denise sorted through some files, “Oh, that lets him dodge melee attacks like they were ranged attacks.”

“There’s a distinction?” I asked, expecting to be somehow pissed off by the answer.

Denise did not disappoint. “Melee attacks have variable difficulties to dodge based on the attack roll. Dodging ranged attacks just needs you to be a flat difficulty based on projectile speed and Scale of the attacker. So he has a much more consistent chance of dodging melee attacks.

“Then why are the snow lions hitting him?”

Denise frowned at her phone, “Because he has limited reactions. Most people don’t have a Cosmic martial art allowing them to annihilate the action economy.”

I thought about that. While interesting, Brand’s stats weren’t necessarily going to help me function better. I needed to figure out something more beneficial. Maybe skills. “How many skills are there?”

“Functionally infinite,” Denise replied. She smiled seemingly proud of this. “The system is really cool that way.”

I took a breath, to maintain patience. “What is a skill that could help me in this dungeon?”

She looked at me, blinking, for a long time. “How would I know?”

“You’re a Narrator!” I all but roared at her.

“I’m an intern!” she shouted back. “I don’t know everything. Stop yelling at me!”

I felt my fist clench. “What happened to you being afraid of me?”

“I am afraid of you! I am terrified something I say is going to set you off! The stress is making me snippy! Now I am yelling and I’m scared that if I stop, you will pulp me like a grape!” Denise clearly had to force herself to stop. She gulped visibly, swallowing her words. She watched me warily, waiting for me to make a move.

I really looked at her. I didn’t try to trigger Perception. I needed to try and see her without any system prompts. Thinking through this logically there were really only two possibilities. Either a) she was being honest, or b) she wasn’t. If she was telling the truth, she was a kid terrified of dying. If she was lying, she was using the excuse of my anger to stall, obscure or redirect the conversation to something they wanted. Both options meant my anger was useless. One meant I was allowing my feelings to take priority over a living being's welfare.

…shit. I had to try and be nice.

“I am sorry I yelled at you,” I said, forcing my tone to be calm and neutral.

Denise blinked at me, “What’s happening?”

“I am apologizing,” I explained.

Denise tilted her head watching me, “Okay… why?”

I managed to avoid sounding condescending as I explained, “Because, I care about your feelings and do not want to upset you.”

She put her phone away. “Okay… you get I can’t hurt you right?” That question told me all I needed to know about Narrator society.

“Let’s just move on,” I said. I wanted to get back to fishing for something useful.

“No,” Denise cut in. “This is important. Do you understand, I, Denise, cannot affect die rolls, events, or the world beyond pausing time to talk to you?”

“Yeah, Why is that important to you?” I asked.

“Impersonating a Narrator is a big deal, and the punishment is bad.” Denise explained, a truly haunted look in her eyes. She sort of just stood there remembering something awful.

“...So, what defensive skills do I have access to that I am not using?” I asked, steering the conversation back to hopefully useful territory.

Denise pulled her phone out again, “Let me see if I can filter stuff,” she tapped at the screen for a minute, “Can you phase through reality, yet?”

“No.”

“Fly?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. I tried thinking happy thoughts… nope, apparently not how that works.

“You would know,” Denise frowned at her phone, “you are using Block. Dodge isn’t going to meaningfully help you more than Block, since it won’t trigger a counter attack.” She scrolled some more, her frown deepened “You have the Redirect skill available. That would let you change the target of an attack after you block it…” she frowned again, “but you have counter-attacks and you punching things will do more damage. Really, the only skill left is Deflect.”

That has potential, “What’s that do?”

“It deflects damage using armor,” Denise said.

“My armor hasn’t deflected any damage,” I said.

“Did you use the skill after getting hit?” Denise asked.

“I did not.”

“There we go!” Denise all but cheered. “Okay, so once one of the attacks gets through roll Deflect and if you succeed you will deflect a percentage of the attacks based on your armor.”

I grinned, “What’s the percentage with the armor I have?”

Denise checked her phone. She stepped back, “Don’t get mad, but it is three percent.”

The smile slid off my face, “That’s basically nothing.”

“Sort of, against the Snow Lion Pride, an Epic Scale boss, using deflect would likely have saved you about one-hundred-and-twenty-five points of damage.” she looked up from the phone, “you get hit a lot.”

I nodded. No point arguing a point that we agreed about. “Wait, you mentioned that a melee attack will automatically fail if the target is out of reach. Is there some sort of skill that will put me out of reach of an attack just after they make the attack roll or is that just dodge.”

Back to the phone Denise went, “So Dodge is about minimal movement needed to avoid an immediate hit. Technically it isn’t going to reposition you, unless you dodge while already in motion.”

“Is there some sort of skill that will help me position myself so most of the lions can’t reach me?”

Denise eyed me, her entire face warped by the sheer amount of dubiousness, “You want a skill for standing?”

“In the right spot at the right time,” I clarified.

She tapped away at the screen, “Best I can find Is Parade Rest.”

“Yeah that is not going to help,” I racked my brain. I wasn’t asking the right questions. I felt the lightbulb click on, “How do the snow lions pick their targets?”

Denise shrugged, “I don’t know.”

I pointed at the phone,

Denise begrudgingly typed away, “Okay, so you can hear this. Most mobs have a behavior setup. Snow lions are programmed to target the lowest level player first. They will then swarm the highest Scale player. They also like to attack the player with the lowest hit point total, they like the blood.”

Her phone buzzed. “Wilson says I need to quit holding up time for today. Can I go?”

“Yeah,” I started, and before I could say anything else she was gone.