“What do you mean by that?”

Raul took a deep breath, letting it out slowly, in a near sigh.

“Most of the people that come through here have one stat that’s decent, but the rest of their stats start out under ten, which limits their options. Almost all of your stats are above ten, save two, giving you more options as far as which classes you can choose.”

“What sort of classes are there to choose from?”

Raul hopped up from his chair, as though just remembering something important. He strolled over to one of the shelves of books that wrapped around the study on both levels, grabbing a four books from one of the closest shelves. They were shelved next to each other, and he pulled the entire stack from the shelf between his hands and turned back towards the rooms center. As he passed his chair, he thrust the books forward, like he was passing a basketball to a teammate. The books flipped open, landing in a perfect square pattern at the center of the room.

I raised an eyebrow, curious at the strangely abusive way he had treated the books. I wondered how long it would take for me to get used to the casual nature in which people treated objects of perceived value in UNDR. Books in the real world were not exceptionally rare, even though printed paper books had fallen out of favor a decade before, but the ones that were still in existence were almost always valuable.

The instant that the books settled, thin beams of light shot up from each corner terminating at a height of about seven feet. The four beams of white light from each book tilted together, hinging at their lowest points until they each connected at the top, creating four elongated pyramids. The lines flickered, then faded, and were replaced by four vaguely humanoid forms. Translucent white in appearance, the forms rotated slowly in place above the books beneath them.

Raul spun each of them with his hand as circled around them, describing each in turn.

“There are hundreds of classes, but they all branch from the same four master classes. Everyone starts off choosing one of these base offerings, and as their stats dictate, they are offered the chance to specialize from there. At this level, everything is all terribly generic, with classes like Mauler…”

He took a step and spun the next.

“Technomancer”

He continued walking around the roughly six foot circle, as he spun each one of them, the forms blurred slightly.

“Netrunner”

The expression on his face indicated he personally didn’t think much of those.

“Transhumanist”

He glanced at me, making sure I was still paying attention.

“Now, as I said before, none of these classes are especially interesting, but the subclasses are much more interesting. Being that UNDR is a cyberpunk themed world, all powers are derived from technology. If you have a background in games, you can consider them roughly equivalent to Fighter, Mage, Rogue, and Cleric.”

The four forms resolved as they slowed their spinning. Each of them looked like me, just with different outfits. I stood and walked forward to get a closer look. The outfits were all plain, low level, stereotypical garb for each class. Fighter me wore generic leather armor, whereas the Technomancer and Transhumanist wore robes of dark and light fabric, respectively. The Netrunner wore dark pants and a dark long sleeved shirt with a scarf wrapped around its neck, hiding the lower half of its face, poorly hiding metallic implants near the side and back of it’s skull.

Raul met me as I paced around the offerings.

“Don’t get discouraged by these base classes. They’re...well...quite honestly they’re boring. Nobody ends up playing any of these classes, anyway. Consider them more category than classes. You’ll leave this room with something much more interesting, especially with your stats. Before we get into these, it might help to see what your random start drops included for items, since those can sometimes be fairly decent, and might have a bearing on the class you start off with.”

“Starter items?”

Raul stared at me, as though he had to have heard me wrong. I broke the silence before it could grow any more awkward.

“Oh, yeah. Sorry, I sort of jumped into UNDR on a whim, and didn’t get a chance to read the introduction all the way through.”

Raul sighed and turned to the wall behind him. He extended his arm, and a large book shot out of the case and into his hand, the binding striking his palm with a snap that I could hear six feet away. He handed it to me.

“Here, use this. This is going to take infinitely longer if I have to keep stopping to give you information you should already know.”

A little irritated at his sudden change of mood, I took the offered book.

“You’re going to stand here while I read this entire thing? This is going to take hours.”

He took the book from me, opened it, and handed it back.

“Here.”

I took it, and no sooner had I glanced at the first page than the pages began turning faster and faster, as though an industrial strength floor fan was blowing on it from just off screen. My mind experienced the time compressed equivalent of an all night study session, drying out my eyes and causing the front of my head to adopt a pulsing headache. The entire thing only took about three seconds, at which time the book snapped shut and flew back to where it had come from on the shelf. In my periphery, an overlay of menu options encircled my view. One of them pulsed an attention getting shade of blue, and I looked up at it.

When looking straight ahead, the menu options were blurred out and partially obscured by the unfocused darkness that marked the physical limits of my eyelids. When my eyes went to the blue tinged option, it not only resolved into great detail, it raised slightly and a transparent shade dropped down, bearing the following prompt:

ITEM

INFO

EXP GAIN

Introductory Tutorial

Repository

Type: Tome

You now know all information contained inside the Introductory Tutorial Tome.

+25

Intelligence

My eyes went wide. Every question I considered, I easily found the information in my mind, or knew that it wasn’t covered by the ITT.

“Damn. That was...intense.”

Raul smiled. It felt good to be back on his good side.

“I bet. What you just experienced was what is called a “Knowledge Repository”. They can take on different forms, usually in the form of a book, crystal, tablet, artifact, etc. But they all basically work the same, functioning as a fast way to download knowledge or skills. They don’t work for everything, and they are all prohibitively expensive in game, but as time saving measures go, they’re pretty much the easiest way to learn anything. In game.”

I glanced around at the huge shelves of books around me, wondering how much of that wealth of information I could cram into my brain. If I had something like this for journalism school, college would have been a much more enjoyable experience.

“No.”

I looked over to Raul.

“No what?”

“I see you looking at all of the books in here. The answer is no. The only reason I gave you that one was because not having to hold your hand through all of this was to my benefit. There’s a chance I might share some of these Tomes with you at a later date, but you’ll have to earn that. Right now you’re not ready. You have to learn to walk before you can learn to run.”

I smiled sheepishly and nodded in understanding before breaking the tension by getting back to the task at hand. I walked over to the Mage class and touching my ethereal fighter form on the chest to select it. The other three forms disappeared, and all four of the books materialized new Mage-like variants.

CLASS SELECTED: TECHNOMANCER

Based on stats, the following four subclasses are available.

I already knew what each of them were, from the ITT, but I reviewed each of them in turn, helpful menu options materializing next to the chest of each, outlining their basic abilities.

SUBCLASS TYPE: RECTIFIER

The proverbial glass cannon. Supremely powerful in directed energy attacks, but not worth much in hand to hand combat. As long as they are protected from melee combat, they can deal more Damage Per Second than any other class.

SUBCLASS TYPE: ENGINEER

Able to control surrounding technology, including that of some enemies, and in a world suffused with technology, are not to be taken for granted. At higher levels, become immune to surveillance, are master trap makers, and are able to bend security bots to their will.

SUBCLASS TYPE: RENDER

Can craft temporary exoskeletal augments for their own bodies and create specially crafted minions. At higher levels, able to summon armies of creatures, crafted from the underlying geometry and materials of the world.

SUBCLASS TYPE: BLACK HAT

This class relies primarily on their powerful mind implants, and are able to craft direct attacks on the psyche on opponents through wireless signals, and also impart illusionary misdirection and debilitating debuffs such as confusion or blindness.

Before I could move to make a selection, Raul spoke up.

“Actually, wait. We never went over your starter items.”

I took a step back from the rotating forms and turned to him.

In the lower right hand corner of my field of view, I could see the word “Inventory”, exactly where my implanted knowledge told me it would be. Focusing on it pulled out a transparent panel with a grid of box shaped voids. I willed the menu to dislodge from the corner of my vision, and as it slowly drifted away, it enlarged, and I was able to physically turn it with my hand. Once my hand made contact, the panel instantly became more opaque and a shift in Raul’s gaze told me he was able to see it.

“Looks like someone has a fairy godmother.”

Rather than spin the menu back around to face me, I took a couple of steps around behind Raul and looked at the panel.

INVENTORY

NNF-S45 VEST

ONI BLACK DUELLER JACKET

NAKAMURA KA-616 FIREWALL SHARD

SENDAI-113 PORTAL GLOVES

TYPE-31 BOOSTER HYPO

DAEMON CRYSTAL

NEMESIS 8 RAIL REVOLVER

REGEN INDUSTRIES NANO MOD

I had no idea what any of the items were, but as Raul tapped on them one of them at a time and handed them to me, I knew I had hit the motherload.

The NNF-045 vest was thin and flexible, but when Raul held it up in mid air and struck it with a closed fist, the fabric turned rigid.

“These things are really cool. The fabric has an internal bladder matrix, filled with a non-newtonian fluid called Stonewall t45. At normal pressures, the fabric stays flexible, but when abrupt force is introduced,” he punched the vest, and the impact area turned rigid,”the fluid turns into a hardened shell, stopping most small arms fire.”

My eyebrows went up at that, and I took the slate black vest and pulled it on over my plain black t-shirt. The outside was a textured material, almost rough to the touch, but the inside was smooth, like a breathable satin, rippling reflectively as I pulled it away from my body to line up the closure. In place of a zipper, a contact bond seal ran the vertical length of the front, and when I touched the contact patches together, they snapped together as though magnetized. Raul nodded in appreciation as I turned to face him, the vest shrunk to fit snugly across my torso. The non-newtonian fluid flexed easily as I tilted from side to side, and despite the protection it offered, there was no restriction of movement.

I smiled at Raul, impressed.

“And the jacket?”

Raul had already retrieved the jacket from my inventory, and was looking it over.

“I actually wanted one of these a while back, but they limited the run, and since they’re soul bound on equip, so the few that have never been equipped and end up on the resale market are ridiculously expensive.”

I took the jacket from him and looked it over. The jacket was long in the back, appeared to be made from a synthetic leather inlaid with a reflective circuit pattern running from the neck and shoulders vertically down the majority of the jacket. Across the central section of the shoulders, a semicircle of ballistic polymer was doing double duty as an epicly popped collar and a retractable hood.

One thing was for certain, I’d never owned anything half as cool as the jacket in my hands. I felt like a badass just looking at it.

“Are you just going to stand there looking at it, or are you going to put it on? We still need to get your subclass selected.”

For another moment, the paralysis held...then I whipped the coat around and pulled it on over an arm, then the other. The front seam snapped together in much the same way as the vest, and the hood snapped to attention over my head.

When I looked at Raul, his expression was a combination of envy and awe.

“You look like a total badass in that thing, Q.”

He’d obviously come to the same conclusion I had when I first saw the ridiculous auto-generated name pop up in my profile screen.

I flexed my arms, already loving the way the light glinted off of the black chrome inlay, and laughed.

“I guess I do.”

Just then the jacket finished resized itself, and a prompt appeared in my vision.

ITEM:

ONI DUELLER JACKET

PERKS:

+5 DEFENSE AGAINST HEADSHOTS.

RADAR REFLECTIVE.

+3 DEFENSE AGAINST ELECTRICAL ATTACKS.

SCALING ADAPTIVE CAMOUFLAGE.

With a thought, the hood retracted back into the collar of the jacket, and I laughed, entirely too pleased with myself. Raul was reaching back towards the inventory screen to grab the next item, but I cut him off.

“Actually, let’s wait on that for a minute.”

He didn’t say anything, but his expression was all question.

“Let’s get this class situation sorted out before I open the rest of my presents. I think I’m ready to choose.”