With his eyes closed, Quinten started up the breathing exercise from before while remaining mindful of the area around him. A couple minutes later, a mild, calming warmth spread throughout his body as he fell into the meditative state. This time, he noticed the buff icon popup in the corner. It depicted the silhouette of a man in a lotus pose. Every so often it pulsed in tune with the slight uptick in health. The gentle warmth suffused into his muscles and, with the recovery of health, Quinten noticed his overworked muscles started to relax as well. The lactic acid seemed to slowly drain out, leaving his body feeling fresher as the minutes ticked by. After thirty minutes, the meditation buff blinked out of existence and, with the sudden disappearance of the warming sensation, Quinten was surprised out of his relaxed state. 'Maybe it's limited to only a half an hour?' He attempted to enter into meditation once again, but while he could continue the meditation and breathing exercise, the buff wouldn't activate. 'A cooldowns too? Complicated...' A new line flashed in the area of the text box and when Quinten brought his focus into it, it expanded to show the last few lines. 'Way more convenient!' A satisfied smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. With nothing more he could do with meditation, Quinten settled down to take stock of his situation and maybe mess around with the UI a bit. His health had recovered to around 85%, but what was more exciting, his body felt fresh and energized. 'I wonder if it recovers stamina as well? There isn't any bar so is stamina a thing?' Questions he didn't know the answer to, all he could do was guess. Quinten rolled his once damaged shoulder and noticed the previous injury was mostly gone. All that remained was a stiff soreness and, when he pulled away the bandage to have a look, a thin, corded scar greeted him. Feeling around to the back with his hand, he found an identical scar there as well. 'Man, healing that took only a few hours! It was a relatively small wound but still... This world is nuts.' he couldn't believe the healing rate this place afforded him. The combination of first aid, food, and meditation reduced the recovery time by quite a bit. Sliding off his bag, Quinten fished out the small bag of 9mm rounds he brought to reload the magazines. 17 to a cartridge with a couple for the currently loaded mag. All that remained was 3 bullets in the bag once he was done. He mentally slapped himself for but bringing more. 'Oh, I'll only need a handful of extras! How dangerous could the ancient dungeon even be?!' With a mocking tone, he scolded himself. With everything set up, Quinten took a quick swig of water to satiate his thirst and checked on his supplies. A quarter of the water was left. Most of his first aid supplies were gone. There was still a protein bar but he decided to eat it later. Only 3 bullets left but all the magazines are full. The parts from the other golems shuffled around. 'Oh right, have to loot those guys' Quinten thought as he cast a curious glance at the three bodies. With all that taken care of, Quinten turned his focus to the UI. As of this moment, the only thing visible was a small dot at the bottom left. Sending his focus that way, Quinten expanded the text box. There were several lines of unreadable text. Thinking of possible ways to manipulate what he'd seen so far, he thought to himself: 'Could I move you around?' Mentally 'dragging, the box to the other side, Quinten was delighted to find it moved according to his will. He drug it up and around and ultimately put it back to its original place. Next, he tried expanding it, which worked, bit became too big so left it at the default size. Another discovery that brought a smile to his face was the fact that he could scroll back through older messages (for all the use that was at the moment). He figured maybe it would help later with learning the language or something. Now that he knew he could mess with stuff pretty freely, Quinten thought about his health bar and it appeared as of summoned into existence. Surprise shot through him when he noticed it was a little more filled out. 'At least now I know I do heal a bit naturally, if super slow... it's barely moved a percent'. With a willful push, Quinten forced the bar to stay visible so he could track the changes. A thought struck him and he wondered whether stamina had a bar or even Mana. A moment later, two new bars appeared just below the health bar. The middle bar was a deep forest green, which he took to mean stamina, and below that was a color that could only be described as midnight purple. 'An odd color for what I assume is Mana?' Still hesitant about drawing the attention of any nearby golems, he continued to refrain from speaking out loud. A fractional increase in health drew Quinten's attention for a moment. It had only been about 7 minutes since he started tracking. It seemed like an odd time so he continued his watch for confirmation. Going back to thinking about the two new bars, he chose to test out what he thought was the stamina bar. Five minutes of jumping jacks and 15 push-ups later, Quinten found the bar had been reduced by about a quarter while his breathing was labored and a slight, cold burning could be felt with each breath. Acclimating to the gravity was still a chore but he found himself moving around with a bit more ease than before. After finishing, Quinten started keeping track of the recovery rate. After ten seconds, the bar ticked up maybe a single percent. Another ten seconds, another percent. 2 more minutes watching his stamina fill back up and his health increased again. '10 minutes that time, and it looked to increase by a single percent. Does everything increase by a percent? So one percent every 10 minutes for health and one percent every 10 seconds for stamina. Wish I could test out mana... but sadly I don't know any magic.' Without anything else to really do, Quinten just sat there, watching his stamina fill back up to full. In total, it took a little over 5 minutes to go from 75% to full. 'Seems my calculations for stamina were correct.' He let out a content sigh once his stamina completely filled up. Satisfied with the minor testing, yet not willing to push too much in his current situation, Quinten left the resource bars floating there for constant feedback while he went on with more experimentation. For another 20 minutes, Quinten thought up various different possible changes to make to the UI while his health bar slowly filled up. In the end, the only other thing he found was one more bright green bar that appeared on the bottom of his vision. At the moment, it was somewhere around 60% full with a single, stylized character above it. The bar appeared when he thought about possible levels and experience so it was a safe bet that's what it was. The bar was a bit too vibrant, so Quinten willed the opacity and brightness down a few notches and decreased the size. With that done, He was about to finish up when he realized something he should have thought of ages ago. Something ubiquitous to ever RPG he's ever played. Something he couldn't help but slap his forehead for not thinking of earlier. The Menu. The moment Quinten focused his thoughts on that idea, an enormous wall of indecipherable text accosted him, filling up all but the edges of his vision. The only thing he could even remotely recognize was the small, 3-D image of himself in the top left corner. It appeared to be like any other MMO status screen, but the lack of intelligible text made it impossible to comprehend what was going on. Unwilling to mess with anything out of fear of breaking something, Quinten quickly closed out, pulled himself into a ball and silently wept at the thought of the incomprehensible abyss waiting for him next time he opened that screen back up. 'Nope. Not touching that thing again for a loooong time. Never thought I'd be so hard to understand.' He mentally stomped down the anguish he was experiencing and shuddered. 'From the looks of it, it would take another two hours or so to fully heal, so better to just get going.' After picking himself up and stretching out his cramped muscles, He went after the three dead robots to loot what he could and continue on toward sweet, sweet freedom. ------ The waiting was really boring for Demi. Quinten basically just sat there and fiddled with random stuff while resting, so there was nothing really too exciting happening. When he finally opened his Soul Status menu for the first time she was ecstatic, but he instantly closed it and curled into a ball and laid there for an entire minute. The scene left her thoroughly confused. What she didn't realize, even after all this time, was that she had left the settings in the common language and he couldn't read anything it said. She'd missed both times he mentioned it out loud so how could she know? Even though he couldn't read it, she had been pleasantly surprised by his growth so far.

Menu

Status | Inventory | Vehicles | Achievements and Titles

Name: Quinten Locke

Title: Fearless

Level: 9 - 61%

Race: Human

Class: None

Profession: None

Health: 98/110 (Regen: 1.1 / 10 min)

Stamina: 130/130 (Regen: 1.3 / 10 sec)

Mana: 160/160 (Regen: 1.6 / min)

Attributes:

Free Points: 45

Primary: (base|trained|equipment)

Strength: 11 +2

Intelligence: 16

Constitution: 10 +1

Dexterity: 10 +1

Wisdom: 14 +1

Perception: 11

Spirit: 11 +1

Luck: 12

Secondary:

Faith: 1

Karma: 0

Fame: 2

Skills:

Clubs - 1 - 72%

Knives - 1 - 45%

First Aid - 2 - 22%

Skinning - 1 - 97%

Butchering - 2 - 13%

Cooking - 2 - 8%

Driving - 1 - 52%

Firearms - 3 - 56%

Aim - 2 - 12%

Disassemble - 1 - 66%

Meditation - 2 - 25%

Abilities:

Free Points: 9

Dodge - 2 - 18%

Spells:

Summon Vehicle

Once per day, summon bound vehicle from anywhere within 10 km

Cost: 250 Mana

Traits:

Heroic Destiny

One destined to rise to greatness, or fall to tragedy. Those with a heroic destiny are aided by the very heavens themselves to accomplish feats far exceeding the mundane. The cosmos will act to challenge the hero with difficult trials while allowing for almost limitless potential. Their soul is open to them through a personal UI, providing a customizable menu and H.U.D. With these tools, the hero can cultivate their own growth to better survive the path ahead of them.