The 4-day journey to Myszno was difficult. There were no enemy mobs willing to take on a fleet of noisy warships and a dragon, but we didn’t need them. The trip from Taltos to Myszno was a raw test of Karalti’s endurance, our stamina, our patience and cooperation. Before now, the longest flight we’d made together had been about eighty miles outside the Taltos city limits. The first day of our voyage, we flew 315 miles, spending the other 200-ish laid out with exertion on the deck of the fleet’s flagship, the Orozlan. We would fly until Karalti’s Stamina reached 5%, land, recover, and then go back out until we had to rest again. But it paid off - big time.
For one thing, Karalti’s hunting problems were resolved out of necessity. She had to eat to support the amount of exercise she was doing, regardless of how much she wanted to whine about it. We snatched geese and Dimorphodons from the air and gazelles from the steppe below, and her stunted Hunting skill grew exponentially, shooting up from Beginner 2 to Apprentice 3. One of her vitally important skills, Laden Flight, climbed 10 points to Apprentice 4, lessening the burden of my weight and our gear. Her Stamina grew a full 10 points; her Dex swelled by 4 and her Str by 6.
She wasn’t the only one stacking on those sweet, sweet points. Depending on our altitude, I was either cooking or freezing in my armor, hanging onto the saddle with numb hands and aching with fatigue. My resistance to the elements only took the edge off, and there were times I had to buckle myself on and just sleep like the dead. The exhaustion was part altitude, part physical exertion, but the better part of it was the mental battle going on behind the scenes: my old friends ADHD and dyslexia.
Neither ADHD or dyslexia are states of mind: there was something physically wrong with my brain. I’d learned at an early age that if I wasn’t moving or doing something with my body, then my mind turned into a bucket of ferrets. The secret sauce to trigger this state of mind was boredom, and the only break in the monotony was when Karalti needed to hunt. Then, I could come back to my body with the adrenaline rush of flight. The rest of the time, when Karalti was gliding and trying to conserve as much energy as possible, I see-sawed between unfocused excitement and skull-splitting boredom as the Sathbar Plains inched along below. By middle of Day 2, I was about ready to claw my face off, so I did something I’d never done in my life. I willingly took out the book I’d borrowed from the Royal Library just before we’d left Vulkan Keep - ‘A Very Brief Physick of the Solonkratsu’ - and sat my ass down to read.
The book was written in Vlachian. Even though I knew how to speak the language, trying to read the script was hell. I’d gotten used to my augmented reading assistant, which compensated for my dyslexia and allowed me to flip through my HUD, my quest descriptions and the Wiki with relative ease. The ArchemiWiki suited my squirrel brain just fine, but this was ink on paper, words-on-page old-fashioned reading, and as it had been during my school days, it was pure torture.
Dyslexia is hard to describe to someone who doesn’t have it. Words don’t look like they’re spelled ‘right’ somehow. Punctuation seems to leap out of nowhere, causing my eyes to skip and flick around. Letters sitting next to each other join up in weird ways. The whole time, my brain ferrets screeched and wrestled, trying to get me to put the book down and so they could go off on a happy tangent into the audio-narrated ArchemiWiki. The ‘Very Brief’ book was just a field guide, twenty pages long. It took me two days to read all of it.
[Congratulations! Despite suffering a penalty, you have finished reading your first book: A Very Brief Physick of the Solonkratsu. +250 bonus EXP!]
[You have gained +1 Int, +1 Will]
[Through sheer force of willpower, you have reduced the severity of your Dyslexia debuff! You can now read books at 0.8% normal speed (up from 0.4%), and all language-related skills now gain -3% slower than normal (up from -5%)]
[You have gained new knowledge: Dragon Physiology (B-Grade)]
[New Feat: Budding Scholar. You have collected 10 items of knowledge at B-grade or higher! Find a Knowledge specialist (Librarian, Scholar, Archivist or similar) to learn more about the value of Knowledge and how to apply it!]
[You have gained access to a new skill: Field Medicine (Dragons). Learn and practice to level up this skill!]
Whoa, okay. I blinked as the notifications cleared, shivering as the stats jumped up. “Holy shit, Karalti. I just cured myself of part of my dyslexia.”
“Really? By doing the reading thingy?”
“Yeah.” I leaned back on the saddle. “And now I finally know why you have two hearts.”
“Yeah?”
“Yup. We’ll talk about it later.”
In fact, once I was over the mental torture I’d just inflicted on myself, the book had given me a lot to think about - like how Karalti could go from barely being able to carry me 10 miles during our maiden flight at Level 5 to almost 2000 at Level 8. And it was exciting, because it wasn’t just her physiology or anatomy at work: it had to do with the way that stats worked in Archemi.
Archemi’s stat system had been bugging me for a while. In most games, you got stat points to assign, and you leveled by gaining levels and splitting points. I’d reconciled myself to this game’s stat training system many levels ago, but in the back of my mind, I’d always wondered - why the fuck were the numbers so high overall, and what the fuck did those numbers mean?
For example: my Strength stat. I’d already figured that 10 was the average score across all stats for beginning players. When you went into character creation, the system then adjusted your scores a few points from the average based on your mental profile and your basic Path choice. Fairly simple - but what did it mean in context? Was 10 Str relative to, say, the hardness of a 2x4 plank of wood? Or someone’s jaw? Or to the weight of a sword like Suri’s?
My first revelation was this: if you added a decimal and a percentage sign to your stat score, the number began to make a lot more sense. ‘10’ was actually ‘1.0%’. My starting Str of 12 wasn’t ‘twelve’, but 1.2%. Not excessive, but realistic for my current level of ability. There weren’t many normal people who could ninja flip thirty feet in any direction.
But here was the interesting thing: the basic stat score of 1.0 was arbitrary. There was no ‘Average Joe 1.0%’ in Archemi. Everyone here, PC or NPC, had a unique set of racial, cultural, and Path-based modifiers at play. If I was correct about the stats being percentages of a base score, that base score wasn’t the one I could see on my character sheet. That meant my 4.7% Strength multiplier wasn’t ‘4.7% of 10’. It was 4.7% of an unseen number I didn’t know, a number that was not on my character sheet.
In other words, all characters in Archemi had HVs: Hidden Values.
Dun dun dunnnn.
Being an antique games nerd, I knew all about HVs. They were a core mechanic of a ridiculously addictive game from the late 1990s - the Pokémon series. HVs explained how two Pokémon of the same species at the same level could have wildly different stats. There were two kinds of HVs in that game: Individual Values, which were like a character’s genes, and Effort Values, which were hidden values you could improve by battling - to a maximum of 510 EV points across all stats and 255 to a single stat. You trained them using special items and by fighting enemies that gave you EV points to one or more stats. A fast Pokemon might give you 1 EV point toward speed, a Rock-type toward Defense, etc.
For example: if my hidden Strength score was 14 and my Str stat was 12, then at Level 1, I could multiply 14 by 1.2% to get my actual effective strength modifier: 2.32. Assuming that HV didn’t change, at my current level, my real Str score was 47 (14) - which came out to a percentile score of 9.212.
Let’s say I got into an arm-wrestling contest with a guy who had the same Str stat as me - 47 - but who had a lower Strength HV. His percentile score worked out to 9.200 Strength. Assuming no debuffs, I would win our arm wrestle. This would be true even if he was a higher level than me or his visible Str stat was higher than mine, as long as that HV was lower. The only thing that really mattered
was that secret percentile score.
There was probably other factors involved in the Real Stat Score calculation, like levels or your character race, but it could explain Karalti’s exponential stamina growth. It would also explain how lower-level characters here could beat higher-level characters by leaning on their HVs and using smart tactics. You could do that in Pokémon: a lower-level Fire Pokémon could often beat a higher-level Grass Pokémon through a combination of clever attack selection and good HVs. It was even possible that there were HVs in Archemi we didn’t know about, like a Luck stat, or a Karma stat… or a Corruption stat.
My experiences in the game so far seemed to support the existence of such a system. I could say with certainty that if I met another male Tuun Dark Dragoon who was the same level as me with a Level 9 dragon companion, that he and I would have very different stat arrays... and THAT led me down a brand-new train of thought. If Archemi had Individual Values, did it have Effort Values? And was there a way to hack EVs and increase those hidden scores?
If there was a way to grow these hidden values in the same way that you trained EVs in Pokémon - and assuming I wasn’t completely deluded - then your stats could multiply those real hidden scores to superheroic levels. In Karalti’s case, I was betting that was what happened to allow us to travel the distance we had in such a short period of time. That was the most exciting part of this whole thing, because I was pretty sure we had unintentionally been honing our EVs the entire time I’d been in the game.
The reason the book had tipped me off was because it focused on dragon hearts. Dragons had two hearts, and I’d learned that both of them served different functions. The Prime Heart was like a normal hearty-heart, pumping blood to Karalti’s brain and limbs and doing all the other regular things hearts do. The Drive Heart was a totally different beast. It was much larger than the Prime Heart, an ocarina-shaped, white and blue-fleshed organ that was connected to her lymphatic system. Most of the time, it was on standby. The Drive Heart only activated when she was about to fly. Whenever she pumped her wings, the organ came into gear: it would speed up, pressurizing her blood and charging it with mana as it activated the magic that lightened her body during flight. The book had said, and I quote:
“...A dragon’s Drive Heart and the vessels which control the ability of flight are the essence of their Words. Each dragon differs in the strength of the Words written into their flesh and blood, the strength of their hearts, and their maximum potential as individuals. All Queens have larger Drive Hearts than their subordinate female kin, sometimes twice as large as their sterile drone daughters and sisters. In fact, every Queen born, even the weakest, is created with unique Words and her own uniquely powerful Drive Heart, which she must strengthen through the course of her conquests. The strength of this organ is the deciding factor of battles between Queens, because she with the strongest hearts shall be proven as the swiftest flier, the most enduring warrior, and the most talented at magic.”
That ‘which she must strengthen through the course of her conquests ‘ line had gotten me thinking about HVs, because Karalti had drastically multiplied her flight distance over just three levels. The only way she could have done that was by percentage - by her visible Stamina score of 55 being multiplied against something.
Not only that, but the improvement in her range implied that her IVs and the rate that she could improve them had to be good - REALLY good. Like... ‘holy shit, I have caught the shiny Mewtwo of dragons’ good. I was betting that she was exceptional even by Queen Dragon standards... which explained why Baldr-Ororgael would go so far as to offer me the position of Knight-Commander. He was willing to let bygones be bygones and put me in charge of the Skyrdon, because if this IV/EV thing was correct, my dragon would be able to pass her crazy-ass HVs down to her children - his future dragon slaves. Given that Ororgael was a dev, he probably knew all about the math that went into the backend of Archemi... and that meant his offer to me via Lucien had been made in desperation. He didn’t want any old Queen dragon. He wanted THIS one.
I doubted I had stunning HVs myself. But as they say, A for Effort, right?
Hours after reaching this stunning conclusion, we laid eyes on Myszno for the first time. The Western Tashkar Range reared up over the flat grasslands like towering sentinels. The black mossy mountains were so tall they vanished into the clouds, and in the morning of our arrival, they were streaming with mist that poured down into crystal-clear lakes far below. The air was like nothing I’d ever smelled. Clear, dusty and grassy-sweet, it filled me with a strange longing. But once we passed into the shadow of the mountain, it turned bitterly cold.
With our improved stats - visible and hidden - Karalti was slightly faster than the warships and was able to fly much higher, to a maximum ceiling of twelve thousand feet. My Tuun physiology and the Trial of Marantha let me breathe at that height, but we cruised at just over five thousand. Even at this great height, we came nowhere near the height of the mountains. Our entry point was Vastil Pass, the major East-West trade route between Myszno and the rest of Vlachia. From a mile above the ground, it looked like a complete clusterfuck. Camps sprawled out like old bloodstains from the mouth of the pass, turning it into a bottleneck. They were disorderly, with no obvious signs of planning. There was no farmland, no settlements, and nothing to eat. The land around the camps was a dirty red-brown color, trampled to mud by wagons, animals, people, and their cargo. I bet it smelled like shit. Literally.
“Woah. That’s a lot of people,” Karalti remarked. “Is that the vampire guy’s army?”
“No. I’m pretty sure those are refugees, but we need to drop about two thousand feet if I’m going to make out any detail.”
Karalti dipped her wingtip and soared lower, descending in a lazy spiral around the perimeter of the camp. The leather saddle creaked under my hands, tightening with the sudden cold as we descended into mountain shadows and the temperature plummeted. Water vapor beaded on the crystal visor of my helmet, freezing in fine patterns across the glass. Swallowing against the change of pressure in my ears, I pushed myself upright and leaned forward on the saddle grips so I could see around her neck. “Yeah, no way those guys are undead. It doesn't look like a Sathbari plainsmen camp, either. Definitely refugees."
"You’re right. It’s all scared people. Smells bad." Karalti pulled into a thermal, filling her wings like sails. She pointed with her snout at one part of the camp. "Look, down there. People are fighting."
I closed my eyes for a moment, then flared them like a bird of prey and zoomed my vision to the area she was indicating. My HUD took over from my eyes at that point, magnifying the scene below to a superhuman level. Close to twenty people were arguing over a wagon loaded with livestock, with some trying to drag the goats and chickens off, and others standing on the wagon, beating them back. Everyone down there looked ragged and desperate. Unless you were a good hunter, food was hard to come by on the steppe.
“There’s nothing we can do. We have to focus on what we’re here for.” I grimaced and shook my head. “The only thing we can do is win.”
“Yep.” Karalti shifted down ten feet or so into the oncoming wind, and my stomach dropped like I was on a rollercoaster. “Hold on. I’m gonna lead the ships to the Pass!”
“Think you can wing it without resting for a while?”
“Yeah! I’ve still got half my stamina! I’ll be fine!”
Our course took us through Vastil Pass and then south. The Pass was a bleak, rocky canyon that zig-zagged through the mountains like a thunderbolt. The sun barely penetrated, and it was frigid and nearly lifeless, save for goats picking their way along the sheer cliff faces. But something had lived here, once. At the halfway mark, ruins began to appear. Fortresses built into the cliffs, and dragon-sized lairs crowded with crumbling wreckage. We turned a corner and came upon rows and rows of monolithic statues. The tall, pillar-like draconic statues loomed like graveyard angels over the road to either side of us, their features worn into nothingness by
the elements.
At the end of Vastil Pass was a massive gateway, and there, Myszno transformed again. I’d been expecting the province to have a cold, alpine climate, like Pre-Collapse Germany or Switzerland. It didn’t. Protected on all sides by mountains, it was a warm, verdant greenhouse of brilliant green forests and startlingly dark soil. The soaring hills and steep valleys were thick with sycamore and walnut, cedar and birch, fading out into pastures and meadows glittering with flowers. The lakes and rivers were a brilliant clear blue. There was an airship port and a village near the Pass, both of which were currently overwhelmed by refugees. Roads wound down toward one of the great cities of the province: Litvy, which was built in a valley beside one of the lakes. Slender spires reached up toward the sky from inside the city walls, like something out of an Elven fairytale.
From here, the journey was a lot more technical for the airships. We flew wide around Litvy, heading steadily south through the narrow mountain passes. It became warmer and more humid the further we went. We knew we were almost there when ash and an unmistakable sweet, rotten stench carried to us on the wind. Soon after that, we spotted our destination: the Endlar.
The Demon’s fires raged on the far southern side of the swamp, gnawing at the edge of the waterlogged forest that separated the army of the dead from the colossal fortifications of the Prezyemi Line. It was easy to see why the Demon’s march had been halted here. The highlands of Vastil County dropped abruptly and dramatically into the lowlands of Racsa, the county containing our intended future castle. On the plateau, the great rivers of Myszno converged into a glacial delta controlled and shaped by two titanic stone dams. They choked the rivers at the neck, forming lakes that in turn spilled out into smaller rivers and their tributaries that wound around a series of islands and tumbled off the plateau ridge as five great waterfalls.
Along that ridge was the Prezyemi Line itself: an enormous, implacable wall that was probably twenty miles long and added another thirty feet to the tall cliffs. The ramparts were wide enough for six hookwings to run side-by-side. Bastions, each set about a thousand yards apart, glowed with the light of distant torches.
Archemi Online Chronicles Boxset Page 89