I only had one data point, and that was myself. The first thing I needed to do was acquire more data. I had this appraisal skill, so I should probably use it. I just had to figure out how.

I had triggered my own profile menu to display by imagining an interface I was already familiar with. Since the people of this world had not grown up playing video games, it stood to reason that wouldn’t be possible for most. The existence of an appraisal skill meant that others might also have the skill, so there must be an accepted means of using it for them. I dismissed my own profile screen by simply imagining it gone, then tried to bring it up without thinking of pressing P on my keyboard.

Except I did think of pressing P on my keyboard, which brought the profile screen up again. It was hard not to think of something when it was already on your mind. I closed it again, thought really hard about a basket of oranges to distract myself, then thought “profile.”

Nothing happened.

I looked around the room, trying to distract myself with the sights around me so as to not mentally imagine anything else, then my eyes settled on my mother. Sharma was a young woman with long, black, wavy hair. She was thin and pale, and had an academic look to her, and she had an intense gaze with bright green eyes. While staring at her, I again thought “profile,” but again, nothing happened.

I tried “status,” “display,” “character sheet,” “menu,” and more, but nothing worked.

I brought up my own profile screen again by imagining pressing the P key on my keyboard, and looked at it again. I examined it closely, despite the information being exactly the same. A simple window, with a simple border. It didn’t even say “profile” on it anywhere.

Ah. Why was I even calling it a profile screen? The only reason I was thinking of it like that was because that was often what it was called in a game like this, hence the P key. However, that was only for my own character. The skill I got when I opened it was called “appraisal,” not “profile.” That was a pretty heavy-handed hint.

I looked at my mother again and thought “appraisal,” and a window popped up in front of her, although it was facing me.

Sharma Horgwif (Lv 23)

HP: 162/164

MP: 356/389

Status: none

EXP: 1589/2300

Skills: 4-Point Magic(++), 5-Point Magic, Cooking(+), Horticulture, Inkmaking(+), Literacy(++), Needlework, Negotiation(+)

Well, well, well, I thought to myself. That actually raised more questions than answers. I was also coming to realize that I didn’t actually know as much about my own mother in this world as I might have thought I did. I would need to probe her for some details later.

What I could clearly see right away was that EXP needed to earn a level scaled, another 100 EXP per level on top of what the previous level required. As leveling didn’t require some massively exponentially growing number of points, it suggested that one needn’t necessarily grind too repetitively to gain strength in this world, although surely the amount of novel experiences one can gain diminishes over time without pursuing vastly new circumstances. My mother was only level 23, which was probably more or less her age, if I took a guess. If she was pretty average, then one could expect to gain a level each year. Whether or not that were true, one could certainly gain one level per year by living exactly like she had. The last four years had seemed fairly average, to me, and I had no memories of her hunting goblins or anything similar.

How HP and MP grew was less clear. I had 10 HP and 13 MP, but those numbers didn’t seem to grow by the same values each level in my mother’s case. Looking at her skills, it was pretty clear that she spent her life in the pursuit of magic and study, which could explain why her HP seemed low for her level while her MP seemed high.

The skills themselves were interesting, and also provided a lot of details to unpack. For one thing, stuff like “cooking” and “literacy” were on the list, but not things like “parenting” or “walking”–although if “walking” had been a skill, I figured I would already have it as well. I wondered what makes something a formal skill versus just something that people did. I also wonder what “skills” even meant. If I could gain a skill for something I didn’t already know how to do, would I just magically know how to do that thing? This required a significant amount of additional exploration.

I found myself interested in my mother’s name, as well. It seems in lieu of a family name, both she and I carried my father’s name as part of our own. This certainly suggests a patriarchal social system, which didn’t particularly surprise me given that this world seemed to have some level of agriculture, since we did eat bread with many meals. Bread meant wheat, which meant plowing, which without mechanical and industrial engineering would require a lot of physical upper body strength for human labor and fieldwork. That would make men the primary breadwinners, literally. I was not surprised as that was likely the same vector for the patriarchy in my world. Feminism didn’t significantly rise until after industrialization and the democratization of physical power with cheap fossil energy.

Still, I didn’t notice much in the way of abusive or toxic masculinity in my household, or in what little I had gleaned from the town outside. That likely had to do with the presence of magic, which clearly my mother was rather adept at. On Earth, technology leveled the playing field for the sexes, whereas here magic could do the same. How democratized was magic, though?

I was quite interested in the two forms of magic my mother seemed to know, what the terms meant, and what the difference was. I had expected something like “water magic” or a list of spells, but I couldn’t think of what 4-point or 5-point could mean. I was very impressed with her literacy skill, which I suspect related to her magic; presumably it required a lot of study to achieve, assuming the (++) meant some kind of double-advanced mastery. I wondered what was required or what constituted skill advancement.

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

I started forming a mental list of questions I would have had to figure out how to ask Sharma, without sounding too much like a grown man, when my father entered the house, so I broke off that train of thought and appraised him next.

Horg Vulfson (Lv 52)

HP: 715/737

MP: 198/198

Status: none

EXP: 283/5200

Skills: 4-Point Magic, Acrobatics(+), Cooking, Detect(+), Foraging, Literacy, Negotiation(+), One-Armed(+++), Ranged(+), Smithing, Stealth(+), Two-Armed(++), Unarmed(++)

Master Skills: Sword Mastery

I gaped, dumbfounded. Just who in the world was my father?

* * *

The revelation of my father’s profile had me question what I had thought I had figured out from my mother’s. Was my father absurdly strong, or was my mother weak? I had figured you could get a level each year, but my father was not middle-aged; he seemed approximately the same age as my mother, at least within five years of her. I could tell that my father was fit. He was well muscled and tall, with blond-brown hair which was short and messy. He had a tan as he presumably spent more time outdoors than my mother. He had clear, blue eyes that lit up when he smiled. He looked healthy and strong but he didn’t particularly seem like a master swordsman to me. Was that simply the innocent eyes of childhood?

My father had already left the room before I got my wits about me, so I approached my mother just to make sure I wasn’t way off the mark.

“Mama,” I said to Sharma from beside her chair, pulling on the hem of her shirt.

She looked up from the parchment she was scribing, then down at me and smiled. “Yes my love,” she responded.

“How old am I?” I asked her, opening the line of questioning.

“You are almost four years old,” she responded, “as your birthday is next month.” We were approaching the end of summer, so I had an early fall birthday.

“How old are you?” I asked next.

She half-frowned, and I wasn’t sure she would answer honestly, but she went on to say “I am twenty-one years old, and my birthday is in the winter.”

Wow, I thought, she had me young. Although perhaps seventeen wasn’t young for one’s first child in this world. Still, it confirmed that her level and age weren’t terribly far apart, especially if I considered that one wasn’t likely to get to level 2 until they were older than four years old. “How old is Papa?” I asked.

“Your papa is twenty-three, and his birthday was three months ago. Do you remember the day we went to the beach? That was for his birthday,” she told me, explaining slowly. That was interesting, as that was the day I really started remembering things, although I didn’t think that was anything more than a coincidence. Anyway, I was relieved that Horg wasn’t substantially older than her, especially given how young she conceived me. However, that means my father had averaged more than 2 levels per year of his life.

I wanted to ask her more questions before she got back to work, but she set down her quill and stood up. “Time to clean up and make some dinner,” she said, and tousled my hair.

“May I go play outside for a bit?” I asked as she walked towards the kitchen.

“Just for a bit, then come inside and wash up,” she answered.

I wandered out the front door, which was open to let the late summer’s air move through the house, and into the front yard. My mother’s garden occupied most of the space on either side of the path, and I grabbed a fruit–some kind of cherry tomato–and popped it into my mouth as I walked to the fenceline which enclosed the space. I peered through two pickets and watched for foot traffic. At this time of day, many people were coming home, just as my father had.

I appraised a handful of neighbors as they came and went, waving to those who seemed to recognize me as they smiled. After ten minutes, I tallied my findings and walked back to the house to wash my hands before I got scolded. Some of the young adults I had seen were approximately my mother’s level, although the majority of them were even lower level and only in the teens range. Most of the older people trended into the high 20s, with a few in the 30 range, and one older man was level 41. No one I saw had come close to my father’s level.

So, my father was clearly very well-trained. His triple-advanced one-armed skill must have been the prerequisite for his master skill. Since I saw no other adults with master skills, I assumed that one doesn’t just stumble upon them, and that it wouldn’t be unusual for a person to only ever have one at most. Since I didn’t truly understand what was necessary to acquire skills, I had no idea what special extra ingredient was needed for a master skill.

I had also noted, with both my parents and then also with my neighbors, that the appraisal skill was not common; in fact, I appeared to be the only one who had it. That didn’t mean I wouldn’t ever come across someone else with it one day, though.

I scrunched up my nose and thought about myself again. I had developed a habit of appraising people, so this time when I thought about myself and thought “appraisal” I was able to bring up my profile screen the way I expected was usual for this world, no need for a mental keyboard.

Except… I had a mental keyboard, didn’t I? And on it were more keys. I wanted to know more about skills. Well, the S key was reserved for movement in games, but sometimes you could open the skill menu with the K key…

As I envisioned myself pressing K, my skill board appeared. Sadly, it wasn’t tremendously interesting.

SP: 0

+ Appraisal (0/10)

I had no available skill points, which didn’t surprise me. Either I had 0 to begin with, or any that I had were used up when I learned appraisal; I wish I could have checked beforehand, but that wouldn’t have been possible since I got appraisal as soon as I accessed these menus. Although maybe I could acquire another non-standard skill with my menus?

Next up, I pressed the I key, and opened my inventory. It was empty, of course, but what I was more interested in was the subsequent pop-up:

Skill acquired: Inventory

When I glanced at my skill board again, I still had 0 SP, but now I had the two skills. So either base skills don’t cost anything to learn, and you simply need to acquire the base skill somehow–probably through study or practice–or I was somehow cheating the system with my unusual knowledge and interface. I decided then to call this game interface my “metasystem” for this world.

The skills on my skill board both had a plus sign next to them, which I assumed I could tap if I had the skill points to apply towards advancement. It appeared to take 10 points to advance once, but I wouldn’t know how many points it would take to advance again, let alone achieve mastery, until I could acquire SP, which I also didn’t know how to do.

Advancing my level would probably teach me a lot more, and I was excited to start playing with my inventory, but then my mother called me for dinner.