When Johanna’s hand touched the old re-bound book, Moore got the biggest surprise since he’d started experiencing the entire System, after regaining awareness.

An entirely new interface popped up along her more familiar character sheet, unbidden, as time crawled to a halt from the Interface. It was similar to when a secondary sheet came up, yet totally different in this case.

Settings Scroll creation

Effects

Cost

Add +1 level

20 pages

Add +1 stat (unselected)

10 pages

Set specialization (unselected)

10 pages per tier

Add skill (unselected)

10 pages per tier

Remove skill (unselected)

5 pages per tier

Total pages available: 382

Total: 50 pages

COMMIT? No

What the?

And not only that, but for the first time ever, he also had a form of help added to the interface. The title part gave him a warning when he focused his attention on it:

Warning

User of the Settings scroll must be compatible with the content of the scroll:

- User must qualify for specialization after adding level/stat, if any

- User must not already have the specialization

- User must qualify for skill after adding level/stat, if any

- User must not already have the skill, if adding

- User must have the skill, if removing

Warning

User of the Settings scroll must pay the appropriate costs for all the settings alteration:

- User must have enough experience to gain the level, if any

- User must have enough experience to gain the stat, if any

- User must have enough experience to override the existing specialization, if any

- User must have enough skill points to acquire the skill, if any

- User must have enough experience to abandon the skill, if any

Notice

Settings scroll will be unable to be consumed if the user does not qualify or lacks enough resources. Scroll remains available until consumed or physically destroyed by sufficient force.

He plunged into the new interface using the time dilatation and quickly explored its limitations. The only problem he ran into was trying to fit things like Shadow Wings, which apparently exceeded the limit. You could only increase levels by 1, only one stat at a time and for a single point, and, obviously, only add or remove one skill at a time.

His own capacities, when he interacted with the team’s character… settings?… were much more diverse. He could preset multiple skills, at least if they related to different stats, add multiple points to separate stats, and the biggest difference was of course that he could tinker with all four characters and use the global experience pool to supplement their costs. And all that before he needed to commit any changes.

But the scroll interface was undeniably a stripped-down copy of the ability to tweak the team’s sheets, and the limit might even be related to his inability to see further than +1 in any “direction”.

Or maybe it’s the reverse. Can’t see more than +1 because it should be impossible to do it more than +1 at a time?

Wait, is that how people should naturally use the interface if they could see it? Can’t do more than one individual adjustment at a time?

That felt wrong, somehow. After all, what would prevent anyone from closing the interface after a commit, then re-open it? He did it all the time, after all.

What mattered was… for the first time, he saw a real way to directly affect the world. To interact with the system for someone that wasn’t one of the four on his team. Because if “creation” meant what he thought it did, he was going to make a… kind of macro, in physical form, for a “user” to adjust their character sheet. Any user. Any person.

Or so he hoped, anyway. Depending on how easy it was to use… he might even provide other types of specialization. Johanna and the rest were always going to be a powerful team, as powerful as he could make them, but it also opened perspectives to help others. Allies, friends. Toy with a crafter, or any of the weird specializations he’d picked so far.

The perspectives were endless. If… if he could make more than one. There had been something about that book in particular that prompted him for the option.

Ancient book. It’s an original. From before that Fall.

Like the Artifacts.

Please don’t be an Artifact. An Artifact that can be turned into a macro only because it doesn’t have a skill locked in yet.

It would be so horrible.

There was only one way to test. Do it… and see if it could be repeated. And the cost in pages almost certainly meant the book size was going to be the main deciding factor. For now, he had to think seriously about what he was going to do for his first and maybe unique attempt. And for whom he intended it.

Play it safe.

What had been Catherine Rocastle’s stats? She was well rounded, with Authority and Strength as her main stats, and the only one “self-boosted” being Perception to 15. Which meant he could go fighting or sorcery… the woman did not strike him as an adventurer or front-line commander or something given the moderate accumulated XP, although appearances could be deceiving…

What to do, what to do…

The metal mage specialization was the obvious play here, he decided. Her baseline Strength played into it. His big obstacle with that was that he couldn’t set a Metal Shaper or whatever, since he had yet to invest into Johanna’s Strength – for some molten metal stuff. But he’d never seen the specialization “outside” so far, and he wasn’t going to spend all of the accumulated XP on Johanna just to see a specialization for someone else.

So, future Metal Shaper.

One day.

And while he had multiple skills to pick from, there was one that would be very, very obvious once she used it, just like Johanna’s flame had been back then. Not only it was the highest tier he could find for her, but it was also safe to pick.

If he’d misjudged the situation with that noblewoman, it wouldn’t be too dangerous for her to have.

Metal Skin

Requires: Strength 16/Authority 17/Level 6

Effective: N × Strength + Level (adds mana)

Passive: Adds (Eff) stamina

Active: Alter your skin into a metallic form, protecting against piercing or slashing attacks by (Eff×3-skill or stat)%.

Active cost: 1 mana per (Eff) seconds

Duelist

AGI 17/STR 16/EMP 16/Lvl 4

N=1

Guardian

STR 16/PER 16/Lvl 2

N=1

Shaper

AUT 16/Lvl 1

N=1

The limitation on the number of skills was such that he’d need to use multiple scrolls if he wanted to grant her a reasonable build. He mentally winced at the base cost for every scroll. The book – assuming it was even re-usable – might barely be enough.

Given that governing principle, the first scroll for Rocastle was simple to set up. It would cost her 9000 XP for the level and stat gain, for which she had enough, and a single skill point, of which she had plenty once she was raised to level 6.

Settings Scroll creation

Effects

Cost

Add +1 level

20 pages

Add +1 stat (STR)

10 pages

Set specialization (Shaper)

20 pages

Add skill (Metal Skin)

90 pages

Remove skill (unselected)

5 pages per tier

Total pages available: 382

Total: 190 pages

COMMIT? Yes - No

Let’s hope that using the “scroll” is intuitive.