Civilization- Barbarians

by Tim Underwood

  Next to the praying hands was a green number that said 196, and next to that “spiritual energy per hour”.

  When I willed on the number, overlaid on the view of the interior of the tent and the gem was a big statistics page, that was for once fully populated.

  11,000 spiritual energy stored out of a maximum of 100,000.

  84 per hour produced by specialists, 112 per hour produced passively.

  1 per hour used to maintain the guiding spirit’s consciousness.

  When I looked closer at the number produced by the specialists, I found that the amount of spiritual energy gained each hour was doubled by my leader trait focused on spiritual energy. Also there was a set of little pictures of people, twenty of them, and when I willed on one of them, I found this description of his spiritual energy production: Base spiritual energy production .1, 2x due to civilizational understanding of meditation techniques, 3x personal skill as a meditator, 2x racial bonus, 1.5x due to being spiritually sensitive, 2x devotion. Total, 3.6 spiritual energy produced per hour.

  That all sounded good. I still didn’t know what I could do with all of this spiritual energy, but I was sure I’d figure it out eventually.

  One of the little person icons in the menu was blinking yellow, and in the tent the person who looked just like that icon also blinked yellow.

  As I looked at him, a name appeared over his head: Virtunis, chief monk and mayor, age 373, assigned to meditation. He looked like a small, trim white Gandhi. With pointed ears. He was completely bald, thin, and he wore a loincloth that displayed a lightly tanned chest through which you could almost see the ribs.

  I willed myself to examine him closer, and a popup came up:

  Oh Mr. Cuddles the Destroyer

  Virtunis is the leader of the Atari elf clan now, for he led them in their worship in the great sky temple of Artoran.

  You didn’t think that you were the ruler of this group? Nah, you are the guiding spider who functions in the background pulling the strands of your mighty web to order them to do pretty much anything, though it does take the use of spiritual energy to tell them what you want. None of these messages will call you the Great, or the Pious Ruler, and you will not be Mr. President or Mr. Prime Minister after you switch to the Democracy form of government. You are always Mr. Cuddles.

  This character is the respected leader of the group, he was the chief monk in the sky temples you are no doubt bored of hearing about. He is more a spiritual leader than an actual mayor, and certainly not a king. He will serve you in council meetings as your religious advisor, commerce advisor, and population happiness advisor. You can dismiss him if you wish, and eventually you will need to replace him, when he gets old and dies. But these elves do live for seven hundred years, so even if he is middle aged already, it’s going to be a bit of a wait before you need to worry about that.

  But as every good CEO knows, it is never too early to start worrying about succession planning.

  Virtunis is not well suited for many of his roles. His main talent is as an expert meditator, and he can advise you and the other elves on matters of devotion and the acquisition of spiritual energy. You should find a different member of the community to track matters of production, someone who has a mind for numbers and details. That is if you ever want to see the other statistics lists fully populated.

  If you can find an elf with those weird tendencies. Math, phthath.

  New quest: Find a hippie elf who likes math. Lol.

  Reward: Unlock more stats

  God, the system was such a dick.

  Also I realized that what I was doing right now definitely was functioning as a tutorial where the system was going to give me these quests that told me how to do things it thought I needed to understand. Of course it gave me the quests in the most dickish way that it could imagine.

  Before hunting for a mathematically inclined elf, I decided to look a bit more at Virtunis’ character sheet.

  Standard stuff, mostly.

  Opinion of me: Worshipful.

  Well that was good from my chief worshipper.

  A set of bars that showed his skills. The top one was supreme meditation mastery. He had maxed out meditation. While I examined it, the tooltip appeared above it: The highest form of meditation mastery. He has nearly touched nirvana. He can channel all the forces of his mind to his guiding spirit to empower him quickly and greatly. Mortal creatures can advance no further in the spiritual arts. Frankly, it probably isn’t a good idea for them to advance this far. When meditating in a place of power his skills provide 4x the base amount of spiritual energy.

  Awesome.

  Beneath that were other skills.

  Persuasion, which was marked as expert level, and that bar was half filled.

  Stoneworking, which had a marker of journeyman skill having been just started.

  Hunting. Same journeyman marker.

  There were a long list of other skills present in the list. Fighting skills, cooking skills (nonexistent, apparently he did not cook), gardening, which he had at the start of an expert level — apparently he had a hobby in the sky temples of Artoran. And more and more. He had a skill for lots of things — including apparently being a decent dancer and a good singer. Which allowed him to lead hymnals in my honor according to the tooltip that would increase the passive generation of spiritual energy.

  I felt more than a little disturbed by the idea of my praises being sung.

  Next to that was traits. Some were racial. Elvish agility: This man can run easily in the forests and climb trees like a chimpanzee.

  Others were specific to him and important. Highly spiritually sensitive: This man was born to commune with the incommunicable. To seek knowledge of the beyond beyond the beyond. To touch the untouchable, with his mind. Learns religious skills 100% faster. Provides 100% more spiritual energy both passively, and when he meditates.

  Religious leader: Centuries of meditation have given Virtunis a peculiar intensity. When he speaks, even the profane and pagan must listen. +50% to persuasion checks. +25% to reputation.

  Ascetic: Fasting many, many times to hone his religious fervor has given him an indifference to the needs of the body: 10% longer lifespan, eats 25% less food, able to last forty days and forty nights without eating, morale unaffected by low rations.

  Cool.

  Of course he did not have any mathematical inclinations.

  And as soon as I wondered how I could find a hippie elf who was mathematically inclined, a little magnifying glass began blinking in the bottom right corner of my viewfield. I willed on it, and it opened up with a box for me to enter the search term.

  Math.

  Nope, nothing.

  Well not nothing.

  The help file opened a page with a Wikipedia-like description of what math was: Mathematics includes the study of such topics as quantity, structure, space, and change. Mathematicians seek and use patterns to formulate new conjectures...

  Not useful.

  I tried several other words, and none of them worked, only bringing up information texts. Though I did get to read about the mathematics character trait. It made people excellent accountants, good at certain types of research, and slightly annoying at parties. Reputation -10%.

  That did not make sense. I would not have been pointed to use the search function in this way if there were no mathematically inclined hippie elves in my group, or no way to find them with the search function.

  I willed on the no longer flashing magnifying glass harder, and up popped a menu of types of searches I could make. The default was to just look up information. I really, really suspected that was just because the system was trying to be annoying.

  I could look up provinces or areas, I could look up character names, I could look up stat pages, and of course I could search character traits.

  Moments later I had the list of all my elves with mathematical tendencies. That is, I had a list with just the one elf out of my thousand elves who had mathematical tendencie
s.

  At least he was young, only 217, so I wouldn’t need to hope some other elf was equally weird by chance.

  Besides mathematics he had the spiritually sensitive trait, though without the star next to it that Virtunis had.

  Curious I focused on that, and a popup appeared which told me that each trait had a common version and a rare version.

  When I searched the spiritually sensitive trait, 933 of the 934 people in my community had it, with 23 having the starred version of the trait. Thirteen of those were worshipping me (which was rather uncomfortable to think upon, yet pleasing, in an incense burning way) in the tent, along with seven of the other elves.

  What was wrong with the hippie elf who didn’t have the trait?

  It took me another minute of willing on different parts of the search function before I figured out how to filter out the search so that it only showed me those without any spiritual sensitivity.

  Once again I was looking at a list of one person.

  The portrait that appeared was of an impossibly buff young human man, with a thick black beard like the man who’d blown himself and me up in Tel Aviv. His name was Marcus.

  Oh, yes. I had been promised that there was a human warrior in the group. He looked muscular enough to be useful.

  I would look at him later, but I first wanted to unlock the statistics.

  I looked back at my mathematically inclined elf. His name was Numericus. I felt like I was being made fun of, simply with that name, but whatever. I wondered if his parents had been able to see right at birth what his trait was, and gave him the name as a result.

  Under profession Numericus had hunter currently. That made sense to me, I thought I had half of the people currently busy grabbing the deer meat from the forests and the clearings, or gathering apples and other fruits from around the forests. I willed further on the profession field, and the change assigned task menu appeared. One of the options was to assign him to a council position, and when I opened it up, a list of possible slots appeared, with on the bottom was the option to create a custom council position.

  That would probably be useful later, but for now I selected “Minister of finance and production.”

  I got a new popup:

  First new council member

  The efficiency of resource use will increase based on the skills and experience of the person who you have assigned. Your stats will start appearing.

  Resource use efficiency was now 10% higher. That seemed good. And unexpected for hiring a bureaucrat. Weren’t they always supposed to make things worse?

  Now that I had appointed my math elf to head of statistics production, I did not yet have another tutorial quest to work on. My point of view was centered on Numericus who I watched as he walked from where he’d been part of a hunting party out in the woods back to the center of the settlement. As he walked he pointed at the trees and counted down on his fingers, and in my view, an estimate of the density of trees and their total number in this area appeared.

  Sustainability of current use: Infinite.

  Numericus had walked out of the viewfield, so I willed the viewfield to center on him again. It did. And when I further willed on both him and the camera at once, it then auto centered on Numericus and followed him as he walked towards the center of the camp.

  I started playing around with my point of view, fascinated by the fun of changing the angles and visibility of the view.

  I also could hear what was going on right around where my view was centered. The birds chirped, and the deer hoofed, and the elves softly stepped, and I could hear it all. And the smells also: the rich loam of the forest, the scent of pollen and mold, someone had pooped over there, and I could smell it. I smelled all the bursting explosion of life around me. I could even smell the dirt. It was wonderful and amazing to have additional senses beyond vision, though there were still no body sensations to go with the sounds or smells.

  I could twist the point of view as simply as I could move my hands up, down, side to side.

  For a few minutes I whirled my viewpoint wildly, with each impulse of my mind pushing it this way and that, but soon I settled down. I could look up at the bright shining yellow sun that did look like Earth’s sun. I could move the spot the camera pointed up and down, till I was looking with it from the top of one of the hundred meter tall trees, or down till I was looking up the loincloths of my elves.

  Deciding that was inappropriate voyeurism, and a little disturbed that I didn’t even feel that echo of a sexual reaction I had had since I lost my important body part, I pulled the camera back up to eye level.

  A pretty pointed-eared girl had finished talking with her friends and was walking into the forest. I wanted to have the camera follow her, and suddenly, without quite knowing what I had done to make it so, I was looking at her from a few feet above, like she was your avatar walking around in the third person PoV mode in a game like Skyrim.

  Cool.

  I could still turn and move the camera around, changing the direction independently, while the location always stayed a foot above and behind her head.

  Suddenly the sound of screams interrupted my playing with the camera.

  Chapter Five

  A giant red popup appeared with the text narrated again in Leonard Nimoy’s voice:

  First Barbarian Encounter

  You are being attacked, already, after being given barely enough time to figure out the system. Just an hour after being called to be the guiding spirit. You would have figured out more of the system if you hadn’t spent the time playing with camera angles. But now you need to fight off a group of ravenous cannibals — yes, they are actually cannibals, and yes, they are actually ravenously hungry — who want to eat your people.

  Reward for success: Your people don’t get ritually eaten.

  Live Long and Prosper!

  Somehow the cheerful simulacra of Spock’s voice shouting LLAP did not fill me with confidence.

  There was now a little minimap on the edge of my view screen that was blinking red. Simply willing my view there made my point of view to switch to where the alarm was.

  Two elves, one of them a child, had been knocked over the head. Their status bar when I looked at them had a little face with a string of z’s next to it, promising that they were only unconscious. Good if I won, bad if I lost, because presumably they had been knocked out instead of killed for the sake of keeping the meat fresh.

  Best to win then.

  When I looked at their status screen I saw that there was one bar that was showing zero, I guessed that would be the hit points bar. However as soon as I had that thought, a question mark started blinking on the edge of the screen. I willed it open, and it said this:

  There is no such thing as “hit points” in this world. A world with hit points would obviously be nonsense. People and other animals have so many working parts, there is no possible way you could reduce all of the ways a human could be damaged to just one number, or even any of them. Someone with a bruised spleen and a bruised ribcage and a bruised skull, and a bruised spine, and bruises everywhere else will be no closer to dying, and no less combat effective if you add a bruise on the back of his skull to the one already there on the top of his skull.

  An enemy must break the skull to kill him.

  The stat that you see is stamina. Lots of damage can slow down and weaken one of your people. And this can cumulatively lower his general effectiveness at everything, but when someone is desperate, the adrenaline means that this damage does not slow them very much, they need a specific disabling injury for them to be less effective in combat.

  Okay. So no hit points.

  That sucked, I like hit points.

  There were only eleven barbarians. They held long spears with sharp stone tips that they waved in the air and hooted as they ran to attack two more elves who ran to get away. The barbarians had shown up in the area where the apple trees had been marked, and were attacking the people filling woven baskets with fruit.
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br />   While I expected the elves, who looked like a couple, to be killed by the barbarians easily, they immediately climbed into the trees, and started running through the tree branches, like squirrels. The thick forest meant they could easily jump from tree to tree.

  There were several dozen other elves in the area. So I had to rescue the two who had already been captured from the barbarians, and hopefully kill all of the barbarians, but most importantly keep from losing any of my people.

  And then things got worse.

  The barbarians on the ground moved faster than my elves, moving twenty feet high in the thick branches of the dense forest. Somehow I’d expected that running through the branches of trees would be faster than running on the ground. Like in the Tarzan movie.

  It wasn’t.

  Even if you were fleetfooted, there was a great deal of caution required in clambering from branch to branch, while the barbarians on the ground just needed to keep from stumbling over the thick tree roots.

  One of them reached the ground under the two elves, cocked his arm and tossed his spear.

  It caught the woman in her leg, and she helplessly grabbed at the branches as she tumbled down. She somehow twisted as she fell, and landed on her arms, breaking the wrists, but not her back or head.

  The man left in the trees looked helplessly down at her. He was much higher up, and the next spear thrown at him missed, going under his foot.

  The barbarian leader smacked the man who threw the spear on the back of the head and stalked towards the downed woman.

  And the unexpectedly brave and stupid elf in the trees roared, and clambered down to fight the barbarians.

  Two of the barbarians had the first two captured elves slung over their backs, and when the group reached her they frowned over the helpless woman. One of them grunted to the tallest barbarian, their leader, who had a bigger axe and longer spear than any of the others. He gestured stabbingly at the woman, apparently asking if she should be killed, as she was too injured.