Specialization is for insects.

Pre-Fall science-fiction writer.

They expected more of the same, but things changed when the four arrived early in the morning back at the Army compound to brainstorm on how to use the capacities of the newly Talented soldiers.

Johanna had brought in the book remains she’d dragged from New Sandusky. There were enough for probably two more full builds and maybe some additional quality improvement parchments.

But when they arrived, they found a small case full of books. Probably twenty or so, all looking very old and not all in good condition.

“Wish a Book is the largest bookstore in Vernon, and they have a section on antique books, which I know well,” General Sharpe said.

“Unfortunately, they don’t distinguish between books that were printed before the Fall and those that were merely printed around the Wars of Unification or just before. It’s just ‘older than a century’. I was there as soon as they opened, and I’m not sure I got all of them. After all, you were coming back early,” he added.

“We’re going to send a few officers to scour all the bookstores in the city next Monday,” another of the generals added.

Johanna dumped her partially consumed collection next to the crate and started sorting the books. Just like they’d done back when they recruited the scavengers, books were in various conservation states, and she sorted them accordingly. There were three that included a lot of central illustrations, and those she set aside, wondering if they would convert or if Moore would be unable to do anything with them, like the books that were made of pictures and illustrations back then.

There might be enough actual text pages, she speculated. Then she stopped herself because she was pretty sure Moore’s conversion included completely blank pages or pages with just the title at the beginning of books. She dismissed the speculation. They would find out soon enough.

“So?” Sharpe asked.

“Roughly, with all the additional possibly needed qualities, it takes 160 pages per Talent, on average. It takes more when you include the specialization, but that’s only once per person. You’ve seen it: most of your books would give us two parchments at best. So…” she made a quick estimation, “we have probably builds for ten or eleven people here.”

“That’s all? I spent over six thousand dollars for that, and all it gives me is ten people?”

“Including what I have already, yes,” she confirmed.

“To be fair, training a single new recruit costs that much over six months,” another general added. “Ignoring infrastructure costs.”

Sharpe gave him an annoyed eye, and Johanna guessed he might have advanced the cash. Well, he was a general.

“This is a one-time investment. The Talent House was going to charge around $300 per month over five years per fully Talented person,” Ulrich injected. “Including additional Talents over time, if possible.”

“What? That’s outrageous. That’s what, 20k per person? Those books cost a fifth for ten times more.”

“You’re welcome to ask the competition for a better bid,” Ulrich laughed.

“Oh, right, there is no competition,” he added after a theatrical pause, and everyone rolled their eyes.

“And it is about the difference per month between a sergeant and a senior lieutenant or junior captain. I doubt the difference is as good as what we’ve seen those Talents give,” the same general noted.

“Well, I know a lot of veterans who would say the sergeant might be a better choice than the captain, but then, that’s an opinion I don’t share,” Sharpe countered.

“in most cases,” he added sotto voce, but the rest of the officers laughed.

“Let’s bring back the rest of yesterday’s squad.”

That’s going to go slowly, Moore noted. He’d already noted that the Talent House had sent an expedition back to the Library of Congress to replace the stock of books. The generals had helpfully included it in their timetable yesterday when they’d drawn up various plans for training and testing. They were planning on having a shipment of books in three months, early next year. He had no way to check on that expedition since all four were there in the state capital, but there were enough people back in New Sandusky with complete builds to do it successfully.

In theory, with the power of a state rather than a, well, starting adventurer’s guild, they could probably transfer the entire Library back into safe land in a year or less. They could build escort teams and send dozens of wagons on regular schedules while ramping up the number of escort teams. In time, even the Talent House could afford to do that. But given that time might be of the essence, it was a good compromise.

Get enough books, like, now.

Of course, that meant he had to squeeze the most out of each book despite the fact that they were making people’s builds one by one. A challenge, given that the collection of books to be used was… even more eclectic than what was pulled out of the shelves of Congress this summer.

Well, more XP. His total was still under the 8k minimum needed for pulling at least one of the four in the Beyond.

He was definitively not going to keep a hoard of personal XP to use Exchange again, at least not until they brought back all those books. For now, he would try to push them as close to level 10 as he could. One additional skill at the very minimum, and then carefully checking if there was an additional specialization tier hiding at that level.

Given how inconsistent the system was, he wouldn’t bet on it, nor against it. Well, Johanna was going to be it again. She had only accumulated 4k XP out of the 55k needed for that level, and he was definitively not going to find them right now. In any case, he would also need one additional Authority point for the skills he’d spotted. But, with enough books…

The session started completely strange. With yesterday’s squad aligned, eagerly awaiting their turn now that they’d seen what “those people” could bestow, Johanna had thought it would go the same way.

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But after the first soldier sat, and she carefully put her hand on a book, and nothing happened, she started to freak out. A quick check showed her that this was a “brand new” book, so it wasn’t as if she had already converted part of it. Tom couldn’t get a parchment, and neither did Laura or Peter. And a second book failed to convert.

“Maybe Moore does not think you’re a priority?” she finally said.

“Really?” the soldier objected.

She merely shrugged. She had little control over Moore’s actions, after all. The soldier finally conceded, and she shook hands with the next candidate.

Nothing happened, either.

By the fourth soldier, she was getting worried. General Sharpe was muttering about being broken when suddenly, the familiar cold sensation started under her palm, and the lights came up above the book.

It was Gauge Stamina, along with both Level and Perception, and that would finally help. Kartmann was nice – for a 7-foot tall, slightly hairy guy with 3-foot horns and a smushed nose – but she was sure the army wanted that particular Talent in-house. She passed the volume to Tom, and… nothing happened again.

She picked another volume and tried again. She didn’t have any success, but the next book immediately gave off its cold feel, and another parchment dropped. Keeper, Strength, Level, and Interrupt.

“What’s going on? Are the books bad?” Sharpe asked.

“I don’t know. They don’t look that bad… There should be enough left for another parchment or two, depending on how many pages are left…”

She stopped, a glimmer of an idea coming up.

“Anyone got paper and pencil?”

One of the generals found some almost immediately, making her nearly chuckle at the idea of having generals at her service. Back in New Benton, that had been definitively the reverse – when she’d been lucky to warrant the presence of such higher officers.

She pulled back the book she’d just converted, noting from the first page number left how many pages had been consumed in the conversion. She then got the first converted book from Tom and did the same; then she looked at the last pages.

She looked at the numbers, adding and then subtracting next to the totals.

If the first book had been used for the two parchments, it would have had a mere 56 pages left. That wasn’t enough for a simple quality or level parchment, she knew, as Professor Gomez had done some math and figured out what were probably the rules behind the conversion process once he had had the entire catalog of requirements for each specialization and Talent.

Clever girl, Moore thought. Johanna must have realized that there must be a reason if he wasn’t converting books as soon as possible. He’d done the same back in the Library of Congress toward the end, ensuring that there were as few pages left as possible when each book was finished.

Of course, this had been way easier then. He had not been making people-specific builds, just bundles of random scrolls to be sorted and used later.

Right now, it was like juggling with multiple numbers in his head, even immaterial as it was. Here, the lack of grey matter to host his mind had to help. If he’d been using neurons instead of being an immaterial spirit, he was sure his memory and mental math would not be up to the task, given the lack of notepads and pencils like the ones Johanna had been using. There was something he remembered being told about being able to hold only 7 “things” in short-term memory at any given time. His memory seemed better than that. Remembering everyone’s descriptor, adding totals for setting scrolls…

Back when he was alive, way back, mental calculus was definitively not a skill of his. He was pretty sure he had to have learned to do that as a kid – there was no way the elementary school curriculum did not force children to learn to do math the hard way – but modern days provided enough tools that you did not need to do math in your head at all and, like all skills that were not used, that one went to the graveyard of recycled brain connections.

The end of modern technology had to have been pretty hard on everyone. But he guessed the survivors would be those who could regain old skills. Without technology, anyone had to know how to do math.

Then he had to laugh, silently and mentally, because Johanna had just needed to do math on paper rather than in her head.

Welcome to the club of bad-at-math, Jo.

“Peter, shake the hands of everyone,” she ordered.

“Uh?”

“Moore can’t see the full potential of someone until one of us touches them, remember. That’s why he often waited until I shook hands – if I hadn’t before, he needed that first touch. I know he can see the level and specialization if you have one but for the rest…”

She focused back on the newly induced Keeper. If Moore was juggling books, then she needed a different approach. She put back the two already used books, along with the nine partially consumed books she’d brought with her, in front of Tom, then squared the intact ones in front of her.

“If I don’t convert a book, then you start shuffling yours,” she informed her husband, who nodded back. “If you get one of them, you hand it to Laura afterward.”

Tom nodded again, and she went through her books again. The last one started a conversion, and she relaxed, sure she had the new “protocol” in hand. The soldier received and activated an Agility-Armored parchment, and the conversion went on as Ulrich kept track of the provided changes.

“Welcome to the rank of Heroes, Keeper Johnson,” she finally said when no book would convert, and Ulrich handed him the finalized Talent House sheet.

“What’s a Keeper?” Johnson asked.

“Kind of defensive specialization. Good for frontline. You’ve seen Kartmann parrying attacks yesterday? He’s a Contender, and there’s some overlap. Different aspects, though,” Ulrich told him.

“Like what?”

The thirster quickly consulted his copy of the Gomez Guide draft.

“You have Deflect and Interrupt, like him. However, Deflect is of tier 4 for a Keeper and only 3 for a Contender – meaning you have a better ability to, well, deflect attacks and use less stamina doing it. While Interrupt, which interrupts and blocks other Talents, is only tier 2 for you and 3 for Kartmann. His own last longer.”

Johanna could see in the eyes of Johnson that the man still had no idea what that meant.

It will come.

When the last soldier sat, the book stock was almost entirely depleted, and none of the four could trigger a conversion.

“Looks like that’s all we can do today,” she announced reluctantly, and the soldier grumbled.

There were only three of the original veteran squad left untalented, and she quickly added, “If there are more books on Monday, we’ll do it again.”

And again, and again, as each batch arrives.

She hadn’t properly appreciated how easy it had been to convert books back in Washington. But of course, then, Moore had focused on quantity, not quality. There were enough books that you could convert them without a specific goal. Save for the handful of information dumps for Gomez’s benefit.

“You were not kidding when you said there were all sorts of specializations.”

“And more at higher levels. I am surprised we don’t have anyone level 8 since it’s all soldiers, but it’s not anything we can fix,” she said.

She looked at the notes from Ulrich. Each soldier had, of course, received his sheet with the best guesses on what his build scores were.

“So far, two Rangers, two Lancers, a Swordbringer, a Keeper, a Deadeye, a Quick Battler, for Heroes. Two Fixers, Combat and Fast, which is good. Two Water Shapers, one Fire and a Metal Shaper, for Sorcerers. And… well, call it hybrid. The Adept Sentinel Lapierre.”

“Hybrid?”

“His Talents cover both mana and stamina. That’s good and bad,” Ulrich explained.

“Bad? I thought the Ancient was going to provide the best…”

“It’s good because he will regenerate both energies simultaneously, so he will recover twice as fast. But it has its drawbacks. The energy pool is smaller for both, so if Sergeant Lapierre draws too much on one single Talent, he’ll run out faster.”

Ulrich rechecked the sheet, tabulating the talent tiers in his reference list.

“Probably slightly more mana than stamina. There are heroic specializations that use mana too, but they usually have low tiers for sorcerous Talents. The Adept Sentinel gets decent tiers for almost all in his arsenal,” he completed.

Johanna could see that the officers couldn’t quite grasp instinctively the meaning of the explanations, but then, they were just introduced to the weirdness that was underlying the Talent system. They had had two months to start to make sense of the information Gomez had received and compiled.

She hoped they could track the missing professor. He was probably a captive of the Warden.

We’ll be there to free him.