Awesome! I was happy with the results of my new character sheet, but I was glad I could make changes and tweaks later on. I was able to add any stat I could think of and The System would get the relevant data, so I either had to constantly watch thousands of stats (nobody could truly be boiled down to a dozen numbers), or set what definitions I could and focus on those. I chose the ones that came to mind as easily understood and blatantly relatable to real-world interactions.

But nearly all the fields displayed just displayed one hundred percent, and I couldn’t figure out why. Maybe… because there was nothing to compare too? I mean, I wasn’t injured, so maybe it was telling me that my stats were at 100% of my current operating capacity... which was not very helpful. I decided to test out my theory, and went back online to make some changes.

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It was nearly morning by the time I had some reasonable numbers. I instructed the system to display my stats compared to the average humanoid, which gave me another percentile but with vastly different values. I decided to instruct it to set ten as the average value for an adult humanoid, with twenty being the absolute limit of what could be naturally obtained and zero as the lowest. This gave me a number with four decimal places… so I set it to round up or down to the nearest number.

Primary Stats: Personal / Modified ValueSecondary Stats: Personal / Modified ValueStrength: 2Health Points (HP): 2Dexterity: 3 Current HP: 2Intelligence: 24Fatigue Points (FP): 3Fitness: 4 Current FP: 3Will Power: 14Total Soul-points earned: 1Perception: 12Soul Points Spent: 0Charisma: 21Remaining Soul-points: 1

There was something wrong with both the Intelligence and Charisma fields – I had obviously not set the definitions very well... But how did one measure things like those? Being a child probably skewed my charisma score, and Intelligence was because I included reasoning, philosophy, math, and literacy (among other things) – skills very rare or simply not available on more primitive worlds. I deleted both stat fields, wanting to move onto other things. My Intelligence is what made me… well… me, and I didn’t want to screw with it. I might add processing speed or memory later if I could figure out how, but for now I wanted to deal with a more pressing matter: Super-Powers!

I decided to see how Mark was doing,

He replied.

I had no idea what he was doing to get all these warnings, but I wanted to ask him if he had bought any abilities yet (but not what they were, because I didn’t want a warning).

*Warning, this message will be harmful to Mark. Would you like to proceed?*

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The next few months were spent refining what I had already discovered. Mark and I were severely limited in our conversation topics, with System Warnings constantly popping up for both of us. Even basic questions like how to define stats were blocked, which made no sense to me. I had been brainstorming different types of powers and advantages that I wanted to add from all the games I had played, but while the potential list was long (in the low hundreds) I had only managed to figure out how to add a few to my System list (the reason being I had to figure out how the power might work, and then visualize manifesting the ability with universal energy for several minutes – not as easy as it sounds).

Back in the Village things continued to rapidly return to normal, with the last lingering effects of the attack visible only in the eyes of those who had lost loved ones. I know that a large number of roofs were destroyed during the attack, but I never saw any signs of damage or repairs – the only damage on our street was a few broken doors (our house was completely fine). But I had other things on my mind, so it is very likely that I missed something.

Mother raised a huge fuss when Jaws tried to take me to the smithy that first month after the attacks, which sucked because I had been really looking forward to it. Dad actually relented this time, but not until mom agreed that I could start going again starting after things were a bit more settled.

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Now that I was just over a year old I started ramping up what I allowed myself to do; and while I didn’t have full conversations with my parents (by choice), I did start interacting with them more and more. Mother was delighted and responsive, and father always gave me a huge grin and a thoughtful reply – I didn’t really find his smiles scary any more, but they were still impressively toothy. Luckily they didn’t notice the fact that I had a strange accent, and I was hoping they assumed it was a childhood lisp of some kind.

I started moving around a lot quicker as well. I had been able to walk for quite a while now, but I didn’t remember what age babies were supposed to walk by… so I just decided on one year. At least, I think it was one year. They have a very odd way of keeping track of days, which seems to be based around the number twenty.

They would obviously know that I was picking things up at an incredibly rapid pace, but I was trying to keep it within reason. I practiced my language skills with mom, but I kept away from asking any of the questions burning a hole in the back of my mind (why had the wolves attacked; who is Merrik; why is the village all stone; how come I still haven’t seen a book after a whole year; and a whole bunch more).

The glowing formation still kept me company every night as I went to sleep, but I didn’t notice any progress yet. Mark and I would often chat, being careful to steer clear of certain topics. I started visiting the forge again with dad, which I was pretty excited about. Mom and I would hold meaningless conversations, with me pretending to slowly improve my language ability (this was actually quite hard for two reasons: It was hard to pretend to learn something you already knew, and I felt slightly dishonest in deceiving her).

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In this manner an entire year passed by.

I'm definitely leaning more towards the batch releases now.

:;^^: