Roanoak surveyed the final arena of the first testing section. There were three dead spiders, three dead goblins, and one blood drenched human. As expected. The weapons scattered about, obviously used in the fight, were a little surprising. He had expected Dix to use them one at a time, not all together like this. Other than the knives that is. But the most unusual thing in the room was the smile on the human’s face. The vast majority of transfers that make it through the first testing usually look traumatized, perhaps bordering on insane. All of them look exhausted and drained. Dix was the first to ever look excited and energized.

With a casual wave of his hand, all of the weapons he had given Dix floated free from wherever they were and floated towards him, the blood and grime all left behind. Dix looked around for a moment, then shrugged and followed the weapons towards the still laughing god. Roanoak stopped laughing long enough to poke a little fun at Dix, “What did you do, bathe in them? And why were your weapons all over the place? Considering how well you use them, I figured you knew how to care for them too.” His laughter boomed out again. Seeing a centaur slap his own knee in raucous glee was new for Dix, but still amusing.

Dix just sighed and waited, leaning up against the wall on his shoulder. After another minute he crossly asked, “Are you done yet?”

Roanoak slowly brought himself under control. This human was fantastic for entertainment. He couldn’t wait until he actually got out into the world. Still fighting his chuckles, he waved Dix closer before teleporting them somewhere else. Although the weapons Dix had been using had disappeared, there were plenty more to be found around them. Once again they were in a large cavernous chamber filled with weapons of many types. The ones that Dix actually recognized all had something in common, they were ranged weapons. About the same time he figured out what the similarity of the weapons was, Roanoak waved an arm in grandiose fashion, announcing, “Welcome to the Hall of Wood!”

Dix was briefly confused. Why the hell would anyone name this the hall of wood? The only ranged weapons that really use wood are bows. And the haft of thrown weapons. And… Alright, I guess it’s not THAT bad of a name. Still sounds stupid though. Keeping his thoughts to himself, all he said was, “Nice.” He looked around for a moment, briefly trying to figure out some of the weapons he didn’t recognize, although he gave up quickly, and went searching for answers instead. “Before we get started looking for ranged weapons, I have a few questions.” He was watching the centaur while he spoke, so he saw the brief sight of surprise flitting across his features before he nodded. “Why were certain aspects of combat so much easier for me than normal? Hell, I run faster, move smoother, and am more aware of my surroundings than ever. Is it skills, or what?”

Roanoak casually raised his arm and a couple of benches popped out of the ground. He nodded to one as he lowered himself onto the other. After Dix sat, he began his explanation. “You are correct that it is skills that have made those changes to how everything works for you. Tuti was supposed to explain them to you, but the changes that were made to her personality to make her more ‘human approachable’ screwed up her ability to follow the directions she was originally given. I suppose I should at least give you an overview. You must understand that gods don’t have the system like you will, so our understanding of these sorts of things is different than yours may be. That means some of it could be wrong. Still want the overview?” Dix thought for a moment before nodding in agreement. Roanoak scratched his chin a bit, and then got back to it.

“Skills, when we are discussing those embedded in the system that will empower you when you get to Mantra, are a very diverse lot. Some will always be active; most humans have called them passives. This type of skill is best represented by things like resistances. They will reduce how affected you will be by something. You already earned Pain Resistance in the beginning of the last test, so now things will hurt you less than they would before. There is no cost for most of these skills, nor are there limits to how many you can have at one time. Other similar skills would be another couple you already have, Running and Sprinting. These two seem as though they may be the same thing, but actually affect two different aspects of the same action. Running reduces the energy needed to run, and Sprinting makes you run faster for the same amount of energy. With me so far?” Once more he paused for Dix to nod before continuing. For his part, Dix was largely aware of most of this, but was waiting to see if there were any large differences from things he had experienced in games. He would ask further questions if he felt it necessary.

“The other main type of skills are active skills, and this is where it starts to get a little complicated. Active skills can do just about anything, but they always have a cost of some kind. The most common costs are stamina, or mana. Sometimes they cost health, but that’s fairly rare. The effects can be very impressive. Going back to your skills Running and Sprinting, there are also active skills that can affect how you run as well. One of them is called Dash. It takes stamina to activate, but lets you run at five times your normal rate for ten seconds. After it is used however, not only can you not use it for quite some time, it will also deactivate all passive skills that relate to it for that same period of time, such as Running and Sprinting. Dash is actually one of the more extreme in terms of cost. Most active skills will only cost you one type of thing: resource, time, or passive effect. Other effects are things like stronger or faster attacks, magical effects like fire added to attacks, platforms made of air, or even summoning creatures to fight for you. There are so many different skills, no one really knows how many there are.

“Finally, there are other types of skills, but they are fairly rare and don’t fit into categories. These can have a variety of costs, effects, and purposes. There doesn’t really seem to be a logical section some skills can fit in. Let me give you an example. There was a man who had a skill that was normally passive. It made him stronger at no cost, a lot stronger. But, the very same skill could be activated. The cost was that it would turn off his strength and make him immoble for a brief period of time. The effect was that his defenses went way up, to the point that he was virtually invulnerable. When it ended his strength would slowly start returning to him over about twenty seconds or so, and then he could use the active portion of his skill again. Used by a wise man, it was incredibly powerful. Most of the skills in this ‘category’ are quite bizarre.”

While Roanoak paused for a moment, seemingly lost in thought, Dix was doing the same thing. Dix was trying to figure out the skills he had learned. Since he didn’t have access to the system yet, he couldn’t actually see any of them, but he could codify the changes they had made to him. The main one was how aware he was of the creatures around him. Right now it was only Roanoak, but, even without looking, he knew where the god was in relation to himself. Sight, hearing, smell, and touch, hell, even taste, all gave him hints to where things were, but something had changed in his brain that could now put together a clear picture of where other beings were. While this was the main difference that he had noticed while fighting his way through the test, his pondering on the changes in his fighting style revealed that there were others as well. Perhaps the most striking of these was actually the basics of his fighting style itself. Before he died he had carried different weapons into fights, but never used more than one at a time. Now, not only did he use multiple weapons in one fight, he actually fought in such a way that changing weapons mid-fight was more effective and efficient. Additionally, even weapon types that he had rarely used prior to his death were easier to use, and felt more comfortable in his hands.

It was all rather disturbing, in an awesome sort of way. After another moment of thinking, he decided to throw out ‘disturbing’. Who cares how exactly it happened, he had become a more deadly fighter. Finally comfortable in his thoughts again, he looked back up at Roanoak. The lava-like centaur seemed to have finished his thinking at the same time as Dix, so seeing the human looking eager for the conversation to continue, that’s what he did.

“Perhaps the most important thing I can tell you about skills is how to acquire them, although, again, I am not sure if this will help, as people all seem to need to do things their own way. So, just the basics. All active skills require four things to create: visualization, intent, power, and action. Visualization is simple. You need to focus on what you want to happen, see it all in your head. Create a full sensory image of how you want your skill to look, feel, and sound. Next is intent, probably the hardest to understand. It must be a purpose, a driving force. You must NEED this to happen with everything you are. When you can do all of this, then you move on to power. This step is actually rather easy. Feed your visualization into the power source of your choice. Really the only thing you need to do here is choose wisely. Some skills don’t do well with certain power pools, and others react oddly. All of them will be affected by the stats that govern those pools. This just means that if you link a jumping skill to your mana, you will jump higher and farther as your magic damage governing stat goes up. If you never intend to increase those types of stats, why are you linking your jumping skill to them? Finally, action. You should be able to figure this out, but I’ll tell you anyways. If you made a jumping skill, you need to jump. An attacking skill? Attack. Stealth? Hide. It’s that simple.” There was a pause for a couple seconds, then Roanoak smiled and looked down at Dix. “Questions?”

Dix just snorted. “So how do you make passive skills then?”

Roanoak briefly looked lost, then his smile came back. “Ah, sorry about that, I forgot to tell you about those. Passives are much easier to get. Passives aren’t actually skills at all in some ways. Really they are more of a numerical representation of how you have grown to be able to do something better than you did before. So to get a passive skill, you just have to do better at a particular action than you did before. Fire resistance? Hold your hand in a fire longer than before without screaming your head off. Cold resistance? Dip your boys in a half frozen stream for longer than you have before. Pick an action, get better than you were, and you gain the skill. After that is when they become more skill like, because afterwards you can increase their level with the help of the system, pushing you far beyond what you could ever do alone.

“Don’t bother asking how to get the more unique style of skills, I have no idea how you would go about making one of those. Most of them are so weird I don’t think anyone understands them. Good luck if you want to try for any of them. If you figure it out, do let me know please. Any other questions?”

“Do skills evolve, or change at all?”

“Ah, yes. Passives are notorious for changing, and you have a few of the evolved ones already. Let's use weapons for an example this time. Right now you have the skill Swords. You also have Bastard Sword, Long Sword, Rapier, Great Sword, Short Sword, Katana, Gladius, Sabres, Wakazashi, Jian, Dao, Odachi, Ninjato, Kopesh, Falchion, Machete, Epee, Claymore, Estoc, and Scimitar. Don’t even get me started on what you have for knives. Anyways, all of the specific sword types you have are called subskills, which will only have bonuses for that particular type of weapon. So the more you use a sabre, the better you will be with a sabre, but it will not make you better with an estoc. However, due to the number of different sword based subskills you have, you have also gained the general weapon skill Swords. This skill applies to every type of sword in existence. It also gets the bonuses from not just from the level of Swords, but also from the levels of all of the sub skills that apply to it. If you manage to get another subskill under Swords, or just increase the levels of the ones you have, your bonus to Swords will increase. You need to have at least five different sub skills before you can get the general weapon skill. Luckily, you listened to my advice before you started the melee trial, and actually used all of the different weapons I had laid out for you. Because of that, you now have most of the general melee weapon skills for humans and humanoids: Sword, Axe, Knife, Polearm, and Mace. You can get the others on your own time if you want them.

“Some of the other passives work the same way. Conditioning is one of the evolved passives, and you have most of the necessary passives to get it. The nice thing is that if you get Conditioning, then the skills that were needed to make it become subskills, and their bonuses transfer to Conditioning instead. This means that if you have Dash, when it disables Running and Sprinting, you will no longer lose the bonuses to the cost of running and run speed, because the bonuses come from Conditioning once you have it. Unlike the weapons, not every evolved passive needs five subskills. You already have Running, Sprinting, and Jumping, so you only need Swimming to get Conditioning.

“Another thing is that subskills can be used for more than one evolved skill, passive and active. There are several that need the subskills under Conditioning, for instance. Hell, even Conditioning is needed for a number of them. Even some of the general weapons skills, and even subskills, are necessary.

“Active skills are, again, a bit different. You evolve them the same way that you get them in the first place. Visualization, intent, power, action. Most of the ability to evolve them is based on the idea that you have used them quite a bit, so they will be easier to visualize the basic idea behind the skill, and then modify it to do what you want it to do now. Keep in mind that things won’t always go the way you want them to. The system will interpret your visualization the way it wants to. Most of the time you will get what you were trying to, but sometimes… it gets weird. The original form of your skill will still be available as it just becomes a sub skill. You can also use the same trick to combine skills to make new, more powerful, or useful ones.

“Keep in mind that bonuses flow both ways with active skills and their sub skills. Say you manage to combine Dash with Power Attack, a pretty common thing to do. Depending on how you visualize you will get different skills, but, for the sake of argument, let’s assume that you got Dashing Power Attack. As the level of Dash increases, the lower the cost of using it, and Dashing Power Attack. The reverse works as well, but usually with a different bonus. In this case, as Dashing Power Attack increases in levels, the faster Dash will make you run. Power Attack levels would increase the damage of both attacks, and Dashing Power Attack levels will decrease the cost of Power Attack.

“Once again, I have no idea about the unique skills. The only thing I can really say is that I suspect that many of them are weird misinterpretations by the system from when people tried to upgrade, combine, or create active skills. Or the people that made the skills are crazy. Take your pick.

“Anything else?”

Shaking his head, Dix stood and stretched. This would be enough for now, and he was really eager to get to the magic. He was quite curious how that all worked. Roanoak hadn’t mentioned anything at all about how magic is related to skills. Maybe it’s not. Or maybe magic is just different active skills. However it worked out, he was eager to learn it. First though, he needed to make sure he got the general weapon skills for some ranged weapons he would like to use. Who knows, they might have guns. With an eager smile he turned to ask Roanoak.

Before he even got his mouth open, Roanoak said, “Just a heads up, there’s no guns.”