The fight had provided something akin to emotion for Moore. The disembodied gamer entity had apparently nothing that could fuel adrenaline or any emotional effect, but having the four “characters” fighting a full-on battle against feral canine monsters was an extremely… interesting time. For Chinese times version of interesting.

The creatures were, at least to him, clearly identified as “Canids” when he looked at them as if they had some form of game tag overlaid over them. Two level 2 creatures, and a level 3 “Elite Fire Canid”. He could guess the elite was aptly named, judging from its aura or whatever the glowing and smoke aspect it had taken was.

Still, his team had won. The fight was a bit chaotic, from his perspective at least, but a win was a win. And very obviously, from the way they acted now – still silently, without any perceivable sound – they were very, very surprised by that outcome. Milton dropping her knife as she saw Ms. Vogel do Close Wounds on Welter was a clear indication that she had not expected that.

I did give you those class specializations for something.

As he was turning to the character descriptors, he noticed that time wound down. While his attention shifted, the four seemed to slow to a crawl. Curious, he watched carefully, keeping his attention to the side. The fact that he did not seem to have peripheral vision helped.

They were moving somewhat, but infinitesimally slowly, he decided after a short while. Like a real-time game with various speed settings but no true pause function. “Discarding” the sheet and focusing back only on Milton or any other restored the speed of their movements, bringing it fast to a normal-feeling flow of time. “Looking” at her character sheet turned the ratio down. He had no idea by how much. Possibly a factor of thousands, tens of minutes or more of personal time while less than a second elapsed “outside”.

Or inside. That is too much of a video game. Well, except for the fact that the game itself seems absolutely photorealistic with accurate physics, while my “gaming room” is now an abstract artist’s dream on mushrooms.

Still, that distortion left him plenty of time to ponder new options. Now he had an opportunity to see firsthand what experience rewards one got from a fight.

Johanna Marcia Milton

Female human, 19 years, 2 months

Shaper

Level: 2 (2000 XP needed)

54/66 mana (+14 per hour)

0 unallocated skills points

XP: 1919 + 850

STR: 14

AUT: 17 (964 XP needed)

Fire Handling (36)

AGI: 15

PER: 14 (978 XP needed)

Mana Sight (30)

DEX: 16

EMP: 15

The XP needed on the two stats was a surprise. Milton had used her Fire Handling during the fight, and it had given her experience directly invested in the associated statistic. And an amount equal to her skill level, which made sense. The perception he had no idea about. She probably had made use of Mana Sight at one point, but what for, he had no idea, nor why it was worth only 22 points when she had a skill of 30.

Still, one thing was now established: no matter what, the stats would finally raise on their own, at least over a long time. The level, however, did not seem to, which meant that, unless he spent XP on it, it wouldn’t increase on its own.

Except it had. Only one of the four had not started with a level 2, despite having apparently a bit over the same amount of total XP as the others. So, obviously, someone's level could increase somehow.

In any proper game, that would be some backstory reason, to provide Moore with more control over his party’s setup. Here? There must be a better reason for it. So far, Moore had no clue what it could be.

He kept playing with the interfaces of the four. As long as he did not commit the change, he could indeed play a lot. And he quickly figured out some additional interesting details.

Firstly, the additional “plus” XP was not XP for Johanna Milton. It was XP for the entire group. He could spend either her experience points or the second pool – or rather, a combination of both – but spending anything from that second total reduced the “additional” XP listed on everyone else’s descriptor.

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

So far, about 20% of the total XP earned had landed on some form of a global pool rather than each individual, and they all seemed to have earned the same basic amount, regardless of how the combat had turned out for them. So, that meant he could reallocate some of the XP earned by individuals to the benefit of the group. But where to do so?

At this point, Moore would probably have sold his soul for a build simulator and a full list of skills sorted by tier from S to F. If a soul was not obviously the only thing he still had in his bodiless state. But at least, he could still play with the character sheets without committing the changes.

Peter Donnall was the most obvious guinea pig for it. His personal XP was already high enough to raise him now to level 3 without dipping into group XP, leaving him with enough potential points to play further.

Peter Malik Donnall

Male human, 18 years, 10 months

Discreet

Level: 3 (3000 XP needed)

31/72 stamina (+13 per hour)

1 unallocated skill point

XP: 382 + 850

STR: 13

AUT: 14

AGI: 16 (966 XP needed)

Deflect (35)

PER: 16

DEX: 17 (964 XP needed)

Reconnaissance (37)

EMP: 15

As he’d expected after seeing the XP cost increase from Donnall’s first leveling, the cost was still climbing, but not as much as he’d feared. At least it wasn’t quadratic or something. He also tested with the Dexterity value and wasn’t surprised to see its cost rise as well to 2000. It did look like the stats followed the same formula as levels, just starting from an arbitrary point rather than level 1. He canceled the allocation completely, reverting to the original level, and pondered his options.

There was a compromise to be made there. Those 2000 points spent on a level gave two skill levels and stamina, and potentially one new skill. Or just under 2000 points spent in existing stats would give Donnall four skill increases and stamina to boot, but no new skill opportunity.

Decisions, decisions…

He was still going blind, using general gaming experience. Given the number of skills, basic and advanced, and the fact that using skills meant getting XP, then grabbing more skills was probably an early priority. Once it was costing him tens of thousands of XP to unlock a new skill because levels were becoming expensive and he needed more than one skill point, sure, it would be time for stats and performance improvement. But stats would raise, or at least become cheaper by themselves anyway…

Okay, no second-guessing. Everyone gets to level 3 first.

The move left him with only 510 group XP, not enough to do anything else, not even a stat raise for Donnall.

Well, not anything else experience-related. His next set of decisions was now about skills. With a new level each, all members of the party had an unallocated skill point. He could either find a new skill in an unused stat, to give them a new ability or he could bank the points to get a second one in what seemed to be their most significant stat with the next level. Or mix the approaches, depending on the characters.

If he still had hands and chin, he’d have probably sunk his fingers in his old scraggly goatee, as the various possibilities balanced themselves in his mind. Skill now or skill later?

Which reminded him of the elite canid’s fire effect… Did it exist as a skill?

It did. Or at least something that definitively looked the same.

Burning Body

Requires: Dexterity 19/Authority 18/Level 3

Effective: N × Dexterity + Level (adds mana)

Passive: Grant bodily immunity to fire, up to (300 + 10×Eff) °F

Active: Heat your body to maximum tolerable heat

Active cost: 1 mana per (Eff) sec

Whelp. No wonder it takes an “Elite” mob to have it at level 3. The stats required are quite high.

And while it had a multiplier for a Shaper, it wasn’t as good as most of the other skills. Probably because Shaper was about non-bodily skills, and this one was physical and based on Dexterity. After all, the healer’s – Vogel – Dexterity-based First Aid also had a multiplier of 1 while the main-stat Close Wounds skill had a value of 2. In any case, it wasn’t something Johanna Milton would be able to use without spending significant XP in her stats, XP which she wasn’t going to get soon unless she somehow started to grind. And no other specialization had any multiplier for it, so even if someone like Donnall could pick it with pretty much the same XP investment, he wasn’t going to bother just for a tiny fire resistance passive.

At least it solved a small mystery for Moore. If you assumed that the Canid had just enough stats for it, that added to a Shaper skill level of 22. She’d probably spotted the skill being used.

Stop being sidetracked, Douglas. Even if you are stealing time.

Laura Vogel was probably a candidate for getting some direct combat skill. She was the only one who hadn’t used both skills during the fight, and now that he knew skill use led to free XP, he wasn’t going to let them waste experience opportunities. Moore was the kind of guy who did every side quest, no matter what. First Aid was a life-saver skill but left unused if there was no life to save right then.

On the other hand, there was no good skill he could see worth giving her right now. When he restricted the list of skills to what a Fixer could pick right now based on her current stats and levels, there were no immediately useful offensive skills, a small set of utility-type ones like Milton’s Mana Sight – for which she had only a 1 multiplier, not 2, curiously enough – and the rest were a couple of healer skills which now required two points to unlock and the same thing for the Dexterity-based one…

In theory, he could give her Mana Sight, true. But it was skill duplication, and she wouldn’t be as good as Milton. She wouldn’t have spotted the Canid’s skill, for instance. Or, well, he could also wait.

He quickly looked at the other’s available skills for each of their separate stats, but most skill lists remained empty when restricted to what was available right now. Milton did have a skill available for Dexterity, true, but Dark Flame was a utility skill, allowing her to light a fire that would yield no light. Possibly useful for camping purposes, or maybe a trap, but definitively not worth it for fighting. And given the encounter, they definitively needed that boost.

In the end, he could only bank the skill point for all, and then see how things unfolded. Jumping the shark with level allocation was good, since it provided them with some immediate benefit, both in skill and earning further XP, and it wasn’t as if he wasn’t going to increase it further when possible. The rest was going to have to wait.

He let all the character information sheets fold themselves closed, and focused back on the party, as time started to return to a normal flow.