When they arrived, Dylan realized they were in the middle of everyone. Which instantly made him nervous. But Balrim and Myrin didn’t seem to mind. Even when they started talking about game mechanics in front of everyone.

Did the NPCs have access to all this as well?

“First of all,” Balrim said, “you can navigate your menus, right?”

“It all seems pretty self-explanatory,” Kaldalis said, mentally opening his inventory again. “As long as I know what I’m looking for, it’s not that hard to get to.” He mentally retrieved one of the charms from his inventory. This one was a little thumb-sized stone, encircled with a burgundy cloth held in place by little metal bands. “So do I just clip this somewhere?”

“Open your character page,” Myrin advised.

Character page?

As if he’d mentally requested it just by thinking about it, a menu popped out on the left side of his vision. It looked like a character model of himself, surrounded by a series of boxes. Only three of them were occupied right now, holding his cotton tunic, leather breeches, and thick boots. As he mentally examined them, he saw that they were cosmetic items labelled as Basic Townsfolk Garb.

He was surprised at how many open slots there still were. It looked like there was slots for an undershirt beneath his tunic, a jacket over it, greaves separate from his pants, socks separate from his shoes, a hat, a mask, and even eyewear.

There were also five slots along the bottom of the sheet labelled for charms. Dylan mentally placed the charm in his hand into the first slot. There was a slight bit of resistance and then it suddenly wasn’t in his hand. As he patted himself down, he found that the little stone decoration was hanging on his belt.

“You can move it around now, if you like. You can drag it around on the little model there.” Myrin’s eyes narrowed and she focused, and as Dylan watched, a hanging bit of wood about the size of a dime slid over her body, moving from the cuff of her sleeve over her body until it dangled from her ear.

Dylan experimented with the charm, dragging it around. It seemed to find some way to be attached no matter where he put it. He dragged it up his shirt, and it wove itself into the fabric like it was always there. Moving it to his neck seemed to generate a leather thong for it to hang off like a pendant, and then dragging it up made the thong shorter and shorter until it became a choker. Dragging it to his head made it weave into his hair - but with his selected hairstyle close-cropped, it gave him a single misplaced lock of hair for it to dangle off of. He could make it a piercing on his ear, and even off of his horns. For now, he put it back on his belt. It seemed to interact well with the cosmetic gear, so he decided he would fiddle with it more later once he had some gear he liked the look of. For now, the belt was a fine place. It was out of the way and unlikely to get lost.

He looked at the charm itself and its stats appeared to his mind.

Convalescent Charm

Item level: 1

Acumen: 5

Clout: 5

Vigor: 6

Light affinity: 4

“So what do these stats mean?” Kaldalis asked.

“It’s complicated. How about you put them all on and we’ll see where you’re at.”

One by one, he moved the charms from his inventory to his belt. As he looked at them, there were a few things they had in common. They were all item level one, and they all gave five to Acumen and Clout, whatever those were, and six to Vigor. The rest of the stats were a mishmash of assorted descriptors. Putting them all on increased his Armor and Attack by four, his Resistance by three, and another one gave Wind Affinity four. Whatever any of those actually represented.

“Okay, so take a look at your stats,” Balrim suggested. “It should be a tab on your character page.”

As soon as he issued the mental order, the little character model broke away and Dylan could see a readout of all his stats.

Kaldalis, Level 1 Bodyguard

HP: 131

Aplomb: 100/100

EXP: 150/500

Acumen: 37

Clout: 36

Vigor: 54

Armor: 31

Attack: 22

There was a long portion of the sheet describing affinities, broken down into two groups of twelve categories. The six Elemental Affinities were fire, wind, earth, water, dark, and light. They were mostly at twenty-one, except light and wind, which were increased to twenty-five by the charms that had affinity on them as a stat. The other six appeared to be debuffs, labelled Poison, Slow, Burn, Sleep, Seal and Gust. They were all at 19.

There were a selection of other stats all greyed out at zero. They were Critical Hit Rating, Critical Damage Multiplier, Life Leech, Attack Speed, and Cooldown Reduction.

“Okay,” Kaldalis said, actively trying to focus on thinking of himself as Kaldalis. “So what does it all mean?”

“Well, we don’t have datamined formulae,” Myrin said, her eyes still slightly narrowed as she was no doubt looking at her own stuff. “But it seems pretty basic. Acumen is the mental stat, and affects your affinities - which appears to be your resistances. Clout is your attack stat, and Vigor is your defense stat.”

“Affinity - and by extension, Acumen - also affects healing,” Balrim explained. “Specifically, Light Affinity.”

“So then it’s kind of a loss that one of my charms is Light Affinity when I’m a tank, huh?”

“No, that’s good,” Balrim said with another toothy smile. “Because it also affects your healing received.”

“Oh, cool. Alright, So HP and EXP are self-explanatory, but what’s Aplomb?”

“Oh, the tutorial went over that one pretty explicitly,” Myrin said with a nod. “You lose it when you die. It acts as a multiplier on your maximum HP.”

“So how do I get it back if I die?”

“There are three ways,” Balrim explained, before he started counting off on his clawed fingers. “First is by killing the specific thing that killed you, if applicable. Second is by avoiding the specific attack that finished you off. Obviously you regain a little less from that, but you can proc that multiple times.” He dropped his hands. “The third one is probably the worst one. You regenerate Aplomb very slowly over time. So if you end up against something you can’t beat, you can just AFK - er… whatever - for about seventy-five minutes to fully recover.”

“Alright, good. Good.” Kaldalis nodded. That system made sense. It encouraged people to learn from their failures and overcome challenges. And at the same time, if he was being streamed, he was massively incentivised not to stand around for over an hour doing nothing after every death. He returned the character sheet tab to his gear, wondering if he should put on the armor items. They didn’t do anything, so he thought he’d skip it for now. “So there’s a weapon slot, too. Are weapons also a cosmetic item?”

“No, weapons have stats,” Myrin said, patting the daggers on her hips.

“One of them is always Affinity,” Balrim said, “and it dictates an additional effect on your attacks. Either a portion of your damage will be elemental, or you’ll inflict a debuff.”

“So what weapon do I use?” Kaldalis asked. “The sword and shield appears to be the obvious one, but why did they give me all these others if there’s just one good one?”

“They went over that in the tutorial,” Balrim said, “all classes can use all weapons. None of them are actually that much better for any specific role. There are benefits and drawbacks, but you can do what you want.”

Dylan had four weapons in his inventory, and he looked at them now. One of them was a sword and shield, as he had mentioned. The others were a glaive, a larger sword, and a staff.

“Four weapons doesn’t seem like a lot of options,” he observed.

“Everyone starts with a different group of four based on their class.” Balrim pulled one hand from behind his back, producing a bow. “I’m sure they probably didn’t give you this option.”

“Right,” Kaldalis shook his head. Of course there were more options. Myrin had a pair of daggers right there. “But we can equip outside of the stuff explicitly given to us, right?”

“Try it out,” Myrin said, pulling the daggers off her belt and tossing them to him.

Dylan caught them and tried to focus on putting them in the weapon slot on his character page. There was barely a moment’s hesitation before the weapons vanished from his hands and reappeared on his belt.

“Huh. I didn’t expect that,” he said.

“Me neither,” Myrin laughed. “But how about you try them out? I’m not attached to them at all. Between the three of us we should have a full set of weapons. We could try and feel out what we all like.”

“I’m not worried,” Balrim said, settling back against the mast. “I know I’m sticking with the bow. As a healer, my positioning is going to need to be flexible. Unless either of you have another ranged weapon, I’m sticking with this.”

“Alright, fine,” Myrin said, eyes unfocusing for a moment before she pulled out a glaive.

“Wait, so how does combat work?” Kaldalis asked, suddenly aware of where this was going.

“Let’s figure it out together,” Myrin said, whirling the weapon around and levelling the point at him.

“Um, Balrim?” Kaldalis drew the daggers clumsily, and tried to hold them in a way that made sense defensively. “You did the tutorial and I didn’t. Is this a bad idea?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Balrim said with a toothy lizard grin. “I’m a healer. I’ll take care of you both just fine.”

Before Kaldalis could argue another second, Myrin lunged, the point of her polearm lancing towards his chest.