The Past...

“Hazé, I have a question.” Mama Greta was seated outside, rocking in her favorite chair, her shawl on as she watched the sun go down. Hazé would usually leave to go Life-Lining about this time, but they often watched the sun go down together before she did.

Hazé looked at Mama inquiringly. She never held anything back when showing things to Mama, which the older woman appreciated intensely. She knew she wasn’t as powerful as Hazé and probably never would even get close, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have the right to be curious. “Yes, Mama?”

“This... Assaying. The... rendering the world down to math.” Mama waved her hands. “It is just so unbelievable. How did they do it?”

“Bored hyperintelligent Casters with too much time on their hands,” Hazé replied promptly. She winked. “That shouldn’t surprise you.”

“They actually came up with something useful, instead of an easy path to power and ruling the world?” Mama scoffed, waving her hand dismissively. “How exactly did it begin?”

“Shards and clay targets,” Hazé nodded.

“Really?” Mama blinked at the prompt answer. “How so?”

“It’s quite simple. Some bored Wizard decided he wanted to measure how much power individual Shards had. So, he made up a lot of clay targets he could reform with a wave of his hand, and shot them with hundreds and hundreds of Shards, recording all the results. Then he had his friends do the same, recording them, and then reviewed the differences.

“When he did, he found that Shards had exactly six different damage ranges. One hundred percent of the time, they would penetrate a target under a certain thickness. Five out of six times, they would penetrate a target slightly thicker. Four out of six times, a target that was the same amount thicker again, all the way up to six additions, where no single Shard would penetrate.

“Of course, there were differences. Some of his friends’ Shards were weaker, their minimum thickness they could penetrate was lower, the maximum also. Some were the reverse, able to penetrate tougher targets. But all of them progressed the same way, five more additional base thicknesses, and then they couldn’t penetrate at all.”

“So, every Shard was doing 1-6 points of damage... plus something?” Mama deduced alertly.

“Indeed, and they went looking for that something. That’s when they found the differences between a Warcaster and a Tome Wizard.

“Certain of them simply had no bonuses, and the six different thicknesses totally reflected their Shards. But others, who focused on casting skill and control, did more damage. These people were always Wizards, and they compared Levels by Matrices to see if there were any differences. Very quickly, they realized that the extra points of damage matched up exactly to the fact that the higher-level Wizards all had more memorized spells than the others. Furthermore, they confirmed that whatever the factor was that restricted your Level and accomplishments, it was the same one dealing out additional damage with Shards.

“Being too smart for their own good, they named this characteristic ‘Intellect’, and more accurate measurements followed.

“They found that this Intellect had two factors. One side affected your ability to memorize extra spells and the raw amount of practical knowledge you could learn, i.e., ‘Skills’. The other side affected the extra damage with battle magic, and how good your ability to improvise, figure things out quickly, and create on the fly was.

“One side became a bonus, and the other side a modifier.

“Just like that, they found that it required a minimum Intellect of +1 per Level to gain a Level. They assigned 10 as the human average, so a Ten Wizard needs to have a 20 Intellect to reach that Level. There’s no way around it, it’s a minimum.

“And what do you imagine they did then?”

“They went and saw if the same rules applied to others,” Mama said firmly.

Hazé nodded. “Correct. With other spellcasters, it was easy. Each time you gain a Karmic Level, you gain access to new Slots or Valences. It was literally a matter of counting on your fingers and recording any differences in the powers gained, then comparing them.

“Then, all you had to do was look at the Auras of others. Stand two people right next to one another, and you can measure the light of their souls through Alignment-detecting magic quite easily. So, line up ten Wizards from One to Ten, match them up visually against other Casters, confirm the rules are the same, and then go and apply the same rules to warriors and other non-Casters.

“Turns out strong souls all look equally powerful, and all break through the same Levels, all have Stat limitations, and the First and Second Ceilings are definitely a thing.

“So, what a basic Assay does is simply look for those indicators, the Six Stats that drive the system, measure them against a universal standard, and then render everything down so it is easy to see.”

“But what about Skills? How does one measure such things?” Mama asked with a frown. “Can you really measure how much someone knows?”

“Yes.” Hazé lifted her eyebrows. “To measure, you must have a standard. They can measure Stats, so that eliminates one variable. So, they used apprentices again, added in people with improved levels of skill, and combined them with QL testing, making masterwork spellbooks and the like.

“Being able to remove Stats, they simply looked at success results for a while, and the results were all over the place... until the maker reached a certain level of skill where they could routinely hit the required standard, Master’s Work, and they went from variable to absolute success.”

“Taking 10,” she immediately identified the principle. Where you were good enough that an average effort satisfied the requirements.

“Yes. And with Master’s Work as the standard, they were easily able to measure casual improvements. Furthermore, they could clearly see people who had invested extra time and effort into mastering Spellcraft, because they worked faster and did better work than those who hadn’t put in similar efforts. The difference was measurable between otherwise identical people, and because it was something gained over time, it was a learned thing, outside of just being a Skill... it was being better AT a Skill.

“Thus, the definition of a Feat, and Skill Focus was the first. A ton of ‘tricks’ were immediately re-categorized as Feats.

“They noticed that people in certain broad professions were naturally better at certain Skills than others without that profession. For instance, Bards are much better at performance Skills than Wizards, ignoring Stats. So, the idea of ‘Class Skills’ came about, and it was simply a matter of learning which Skills had ties to which Classes.

“Then there was the people who, without any training, were just naturally really good at something, and so Talents were discovered and that everyone has them, even if they are a little ridiculous at times, and not always Skill-related.”

Mama nodded. Her Talent was Trustworthy, which gave her a surprising bonus to Charisma checks as long as her motives were pure. It was basically how she had survived all these years, making good products and standing by them. People knew she did, trusted her, and bought from her.

“Therein followed different magicks to modify skills, discovering what those modifiers were, and then Soul Magic and the Akasha, where you could see the resonance between people and our ancestors, and measure them against everyone who came before.

“Once that happened, Assay was in full bloom, and you could start breaking a whole lot of the world down to math. Test, compare, verify, and soon a great deal of things started having math behind them, even if the things themselves were fairly vague.”

Mama sighed. “It feels like being a puppet, dancing to rules you have no hope of changing.”

“I would agree with you... except I know enough that not being able to measure such things has many more drawbacks. Once you know and can measure what works and what does not... it is far easier to learn what works, plan, and avoid mistakes.”

“Health? Soak?”

“You can measure Health precisely with Healing Reserve. Likewise, there are spells that can read Soak, and then it is a simple matter of making comparisons between the weak and powerful, throwing Cure spells into the mix, and so forth. Likewise, the axiomatic nature of Sieged Magic means measuring the amount of damage something can take is a matter of a few spells being Cast, and determining the effect. Easy to do.” Hazé made a dismissive gesture. “There are even Divination spells now which tell exactly how much Health and Soak those in range have.”

Mama sighed. “I guess I keep wishing the numbers were bigger.”

“Eh!” Hazé laughed cheerfully. “Add 000’s to everything, and you find you’re doing 9,127 points of damage, instead of 9 or 9.127. They don’t change anything, except to look more impressive. It’s all a scale, and you just follow it. If it doesn’t break the threshold, it’s not important, so why bother?”

Mama sighed. “I know, I know.” The sunset was a spectacular orange and red tonight, and they watched it in silence for long minutes before Hazé finally stood up.

“Should I ask where you are going?” Mama inquired teasingly.

“No, Mama. It really is better if you don’t know,” Hazé smiled. She ran skipping down the stones in the back yard; past the clean, painted, and well-lit barn, and towards her Energized Seal. She was about to take a long trip, and resume her explorations from yesterday.

There was a thieves’ guild in the port city of Seawall that looked like a prime target for some property redistribution. If she just so happened to kill a bunch of them, well, it was just business, right? She was sure someone would take advantage of the opportunity, and seeing the guild was tied so tightly to the church of Shoul left her not at all sympathetic to the members...

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It was a castle, built high on a windswept tor overlooking a lake. The road to get up there was long and winding, easily defended.

On this stormy night, fires were breaking out all over it, lightning was crashing down, and inhuman screams as loud as thunder were going off, right up until a massive white flash silenced them.

With a groan of overstressed stone, the mountain beneath the castle gave way, and the whole edifice began a slow, grand fall towards the storm-churned waters below.

A line of light departed the castle as the collapse broke its Wards, and Hazé watched from the mountainside as the Widened Rock to Mud liquified the foundations of the place, and it fell under its own weight.

Tons of rock gave way, revealing the buried chambers of the dungeon and the caverns beneath, which collapsed further as more stone came down upon them. While she didn’t get the entire castle, she got about half of it, and the chambers below were now exposed to the sky.

Aberrations. This fuckwit of a Wizard had been bargaining with Things Outside Creation, and even mated two of his underlings to them. An immature and a mature Star Spawn, ever demanding of more food and blood, resulting in the asshole noble pillaging his own domain of impossible amounts of livestock and even humans to feed to the things.

They didn’t like a castle coming down on their heads, or a Cerulean Seal mixed with some vivus to devour them cleanly. The cultists were mostly dead or scattering in fear, if the Earth Elemental she’d brought in didn’t catch them while they were fleeing through their secret tunnels. The Fire Elemental was burning the inner supports of the castle, anything wooden going up in flames and helping the collapse along. The Earth Elemental would be back to start knocking down stone walls and foundations, and really making a mess of stuff.

She’d cleaned out his treasury and made off with a lot of phat lewt, her Masspack brimming with loot to be melted down and purged.

Aberrations infiltrating the nobility. Mmm, that could mean bad news. His correspondence might give her a better idea of who else would be a ripe victim...