Gaming the System

by P A Wikoff

  Then I heard something disconcerting. “You’re dead, loser. Worse than dead—recreated,” the voice echoed across the night sky. It was Tag, and I had no idea how near or far he was.

  Without waiting for my stamina to fully recover, I bolted towards the door.

  “You know, I’m no germaphobe, but you don’t wear another man’s pants. It’s just rude,” Tag said, louder this time.

  He was closer than I thought. I had to pick up the pace.

  Making my way up the five steps, I quickly unlatched the door, opened it up, and darted inside the tree.

  Chapter Twenty

  UFC Personal Trainer

  T he hallway was dim, in a warm and welcoming sort of way. The light was coming from squat torches which lined the floor leading toward a dead end. The inside was deceptively larger than the outer limits of the tree. It was like I had shrunk or gone into another dimension of space. Either way, my mind hurt trying to comprehend what forces were at play here. I reminded myself that it was only a game, and the rules that reality abides by could be broken here.

  Waiting for me at the dead end was an elderly man with a white beard. He had glowing runes on his robes and two large dice inside his left hand. He sat there cross-legged and motionless, much like a statue. If it weren’t for his occasionally blinking eyes, I would have even thought as much.

  This was the trainer alright, but a player or monster, it was not. Something was different about him, eerily so.

  I looked at Moogi who was using a finger to spell something out in the air, “N-P-C.”

  I looked back at the bearded man with new eyes, searching his face for clues.

  The NPC trainer stared back at me vacantly through soulless eyes. He had a godlike arrogance, which nearly radiated off of him. That smirk—he wore a grin so devilish it could cut glass. Maybe he was trying to scare me as some sort of test.

  With that concept pushing me along, I took a couple of steps closer. It was strange meeting the first non-player character in the game. I knew that NPCs existed, but I didn’t know what to expect when I found one.

  Technically, Moogi wasn’t a player. It also wasn’t a character, even though it had a lot of character. Actually, I still hadn’t figured out where the little asset fit in the broad scheme of programs and people, but it didn’t really matter at the moment because Moogi didn’t give me the creeps. Now, after meeting an honest to goodness NPC, I could rule out Moogi being one of them.

  Each of my footfalls caused the torch lights to flicker as I approached. There was no hiding my advance and no turning back.

  Remember to breathe. Act normal. I had to get a grip on my anxiety. Why was I so on edge? Maybe it was the possibility that Tag could bust in at any moment. I did have a lot of experience points on the line, and I didn’t want to lose them now.

  “Welcome, child of the light. Do you seek eternal advancement?” the trainer asked. Though steady in volume, his voice sounded hollow and thin.

  “I absolutely have,” I said with a grin I couldn’t have hidden if I had wanted to. My excitement overcame my fear. This was it. I had won. I had beaten those bullies at their own game. Well, Erilyn mostly had done it, but I had done my part in getting here, and now it was time to collect my reward.

  I knelt in front of the trainer, after giving a quick bow.

  Moogi was next to me in a similar pose.

  The trainer placed an ancient hand upon my shoulder. He had unnatural movements, more like an animatronic doll than anything else. “Let us bleed you of your experiences.”

  Suddenly, I felt a heaviness leave my body. It was as though something were being siphoned out of me. I tried to speak, but my voice was breathless and backwards. Then I tried to move, but my body slowly twisted and contorted as if I were under water.

  I was detached, depleted, with a burning sensation radiating from my arm. I glanced down and saw my experience points counting down while fading right off my tattoo. I reached for them and tried to press them back on my forearm, but it only made them dissipate faster.

  Peering into the trainer’s eyes, I saw images of my game life playing inside them. I saw my kills and the places I’d discovered. I caught myself smiling along with him while we relived the moment of blowing up the three GDFs. His face manifested my exact emotions while he witnessed my life in sped-up time. How did he feel what I felt? It was haunting and horrifying to watch.

  It was then that I realized that there was no way to hide the truth from this NPC. It stole my experiences right out of me.

  About the point where I thought I couldn’t take any more of this, my tattoo stopped draining—at 782 EXP.

  “You have been rewarded two levels of advancement in exchange for your past adventures. Choose wisely,” the trainer said, as he tossed the two dice out of his grasp and onto the hard ground beside me.

  They rolled disturbingly slowly, bouncing and bounding on each end—flipping and turning, until they finally stopped with a slight wobble. They each had strange symbols on them. One looked like summer, while the other was winter.

  Before I could figure out what was in season for, everything around me turned golden in a great big flash of light.

  I was somewhere else.

  ***

  This room was similar to the one I had been in during my character creation, except instead of white, the reflective walls were washed with metallic gold. They sparkled and shimmered with tiny flecks of color. It was truly magicallooking.

  In the corner stood a dull burlap punching bag that vaguely resembled a person. Stitches in the shape of X’s marked out its eyes, and hay spilled out of the two open armholes.

  “I guess someone took my suggestion for a practice dummy to heart,” I said aloud but got no response.

  My eyes followed the corner up the wall to find that the clock was still hanging there. Only now it read “1093,” which told me that two whole days had gone by.

  “That was fast.”

  Game time was much different than real time. Even though I wasn’t exactly counting sunrises and sunsets, to me it seemed like only a couple of hours had passed. If this game experience was going to continue this way, my sentence would be done in no time—well, technically less time. Of course, that was only if I accumulated enough online currency to pay off my debt to society.

  “Are you seeing this, Moogi?” I asked, giving it plenty of time to respond. “Moogi?”

  My asset was nowhere in sight. I suddenly found myself wishing that I had someone around to share in my joy—even if they laughed at me from time to time.

  “I guess this is a place just for me.”

  Slowly falling from the ceiling was a prompt. It read “upgrade/exit.”

  Slapping the word upgrade, I was more than ready to see what was in store for me. An indicator flashed above me, showing—or indicating, rather—that I had two advancement points available to use.

  The room started to rumble and quake, then four skill trees sprouted up around me, creating a small upgrade garden.

  To my left grew a nice-looking tree that almost resembled a man. Extending outward like fingers were eight branches, which each represented one of my statistics. Which made sense, seeing as this was my statistics tree. The longest, of course, was my Charm branch. It had a low-hanging fruit showing the Safe Passage perk I had unlocked.

  As I focused on each pathway, an opaque outline revealed to me the growth possibilities. This meant that each of my stats could be increased past my initial starting choices. I could give myself more strength and perhaps do increased damage. Or better yet, I could raise my Psionics so that I might have enough mana to summon two instant healing potions at a time.

  I wondered, if I invested all my points into one stat, bringing it past the five-point threshold, would I unlock other perks? My excitement fizzled out when I remembered that most of my other base stats were uniformly two, and I currently had only two advancement points to spend—not the three I would need to go perk hunting. What choices I ma
de now could very much mean life or death for my future. So, I had to make good use of them.

  “If only Moogi was here to bounce some ideas off of,” I said through a deep sigh.

  Behind me was a small metal tree that looked like some medieval torture device. It had spikes and blades jutting out every which way. This was my equipment skill tree. Unfortunately, after looking around a bit, the only thing on the tree that could be upgraded was the Blood Dagger +2 that Moogi had stolen for me. Not only that, but it was already leveled up twice on the Blood Effect skill—increasing its rate to cause bleed damage by 50%, giving it a 70% total chance to proc the effect. One final upgrade on this skill would yield a whopping 100% bleed chance with each strike. That was very tempting. Other upgrade paths were increasing its speed, overall damage, or how much the bleed damage over time (or DOT) did.

  Then it hit me like a blue duck. I hadn’t just stolen Bagmy’s weapon—I stole two levels’ worth of upgrades from him. That wasn’t going to be something he would easily forgive and forget. One thing was for certain, I was screwed if I didn’t find a way to avoid him. Mulling over the very real possibility that I might have to return his weapon at some point, I decided this wasn’t the time or place for weapon advancement.

  Continuing on through the garden, I made my way over to my racial skill tree—the very one that I had overlooked during character creation. Its branches were yellow with small speckles everywhere, much like French vanilla ice cream.

  There were three large boughs growing out of its trunk: Greed, Versatility, and Faith. Each bough had growth options to unlock leading to other, smaller offshoot paths and onward to higher tiers.

  Under the Greed path, I could pick either unlocking the Improved Coins, Quality Loot, or Memorable Experiences skills. All of these skills could be leveled up further, but only to a maximum of three. It also seemed that each of the Greed skills unlocked different denominations of increased rewards (money, loot, or EXP) based on the skill’s specialty. Within the fine print, I found the specialty choices were the same for each skill: creature drops, discovery, quest rewards, or PVP.

  “This makes a lot of sense. I bet Bagmy had the Memorable Experiences skill unlocked to level three, with the PVP specialty. That would explain why I was nearly cleaned out of my EXP when he killed me,” I said, tapping my index finger on my cheek while I thought about it.

  If that was the case, I could understand why it was much more beneficial for him to gank people like me, rather than doing honest grinding or questing. It would prove to be much more bang for the buck…or shmuck, in his case.

  As far as Humans go, this advancement path was a great way to pinpoint your character’s role and establish a true playstyle, even if that playstyle was used to attack other players.

  Extra rewards seemed quite beneficial and all, but they would be worthless if I couldn’t actually kill anything to reap the benefits. I could always come back to this in later advancement levels. So, I continued on, looking for the perfect skill to invest in.

  Under the Versatility branch, there were four skills to choose from in the first tier: Consume, Improved Armor, Specialist, and Weapons Master.

  Consume increased effects from either eating, drinking, or getting buffed. That could be super helpful if I wanted my potions to always heal me to full, even if I was at one hit point.

  Improved armor gave the ability to wear armor outside your class restrictions. This could be a game changer for this race, especially if you were trying to hide your class from other players. What skills could be unlocked further up the tiers? The combinations could be limitless. Currently, I was limited to my small understanding of other classes, so I couldn’t utilize this option to its full potential. Up until now, I hadn’t even known that classes had armor restrictions.

  The Specialist skill allowed you to invest in multiple specialties. This meant that I could specialize in other types of potions, other than just healing. The only problem was that it seemed it would cost me one point to unlock the ability to multi-specialize and another point to dump into the skill I wanted to upgrade. This skill could be really powerful but quite expensive, in my opinion.

  Finally, there was the Weapons Master skill which allowed you to have multiple weapon slots equipped at the same time, depending on how many times you leveled up the ability. I wasn’t sure if I understood the wording correctly, but it seemed that I could switch between weapons seamlessly during combat but not actually attack with both at the same time. This might be a great way to manage stamina consumption and create devastating combos. Being new to this world, that level of number crunching seemed more suited for a veteran.

  Each skill I unlocked would grow upwards, granting more skill options at the next higher tier. Perhaps later on this path might allow for such a thing as multiple attacks with the weapons in your slots. That would be really great, except I only had the one weapon at the moment.

  “I could always put one point in Weapon Summoning and one in Weapons Master, then I could have two weapons at my disposal.” But the more I thought about it, the more it didn’t seem useful enough at this juncture.

  I moved on to the third and last Human branch, Faith. Faith had only two skills to unlock on the first tier, Blessing and Hex, and based on your choice of god, you could either pray for a blessing or do a dark ritual for a smiting. Blessing and Hex could both be leveled up five times each, making them equally powerful. It also seemed that your reputation could be lowered or raised based on your actions.

  The specialty for this branch had a ton of gods. Even the option “none” could be selected as your god. I wondered if that meant that you were an atheist, or if you worshipped a god named None, but I didn’t care enough to delve into my curiosity more than I already had.

  “Man, this list keeps going,” I said, as I scrolled further.

  I didn’t have time to go through them all, not when there could potentially be a bunch of GDF knocking down the trainer’s door right now.

  Then I found the winged boar-man god I had stolen the candlestick from—Balrok the Tangible. I quickly skimmed through Balrok’s lore to find that he was a god of many faces. Light up his altar to feel his ever-warming touch; extinguish his flame to feel the cold side of death. I was pretty sure this had to do with the buffs he would grant his followers.

  I skimmed through countless tales of him charging into battle, tusks first, when I spotted the passage I was looking for. “Defilers of his domain are subject to increased judgment from the faithful, under the cloak of night.”

  “Okay, so that wasn’t as bad as I thought.” As far as I knew, I hadn’t run into any of Balrok’s followers, and maybe I never would. Still, I wasn’t going to chance taking any more candlesticks. There was no way I wanted to mess around with praying, hexing, and reputation—not at this time, anyway.

  I went over to my blue summoning skill tree, which I recognized from when I did my character creation. I thought about getting Summon Armor, but it seemed that I could always just buy some if I really needed it. Plus, right now I knew how to kill earwigs without sustaining much damage.

  I could always get another healing potion type and double down on that theme. But I was limited by my mana pool. If I wanted more potions, I would first be required to invest in my Psionics stat, which I was seriously considering at this point.

  There was a path leading off of Potion Summoning onto the second-tier options. One skill had Potion Summoning as a prerequisite.

  “Immunity: While drinking or summoning a potion, you’re immune to damage for one second for each upgrade level,” I read aloud. That was powerful. I thought of countless ways for me to use that skill in a pinch, such as if I had been drinking it when Bagmy was attacking me. It could have been an instant shield.

  There were two other skills on the second tier that didn’t require any prerequisites, Double Dip and Deep Discount.

  Double Dip gave you a chance to spawn an extra item during every summoning spell, based on your sp
ecialties. The skill could be upgraded three times to guarantee the chance of effect, up to one hundred percent.

  Discount reduced the mana cost for casting all summoning spells, not just potions. Less cost meant more potions. It was kind of the same thing as Double Dip but going at it from an entirely different angle. Imagine if I had both advancement slots fully unlocked. I could have quite a lot of potions at my disposal. Juggling potions wasn’t really my interest, so I continued on with my search.

  I went right past the Monster Summoning branch because I doubted I could handle any more companionship above and beyond Moogi.

  I landed on the Chaos Summoning branch. It had three skill options to unlock: Summon Barrier, Summon Trap, and Summon Portal. I didn’t even need to read the first two because this was it, my ticket out of here—a portal. If I could go from one place to another without having to run into any GDF along the way, that would make my life substantially better.

  Before I could change my mind, I dumped my first point into the portal-summoning skill. A visual prompt asked me to choose my specialization.

  “Oh, right. I forgot to check out that part.”

  The prompt read, “You have assigned one advancement point in Summon Portal. Please select your specialization: location portals or time portals.”

  “Wait, what now? Like a time-travel portal?” I said incredulously. I wanted that, and I wanted it badly. But I was faced with the same problem as before—it couldn’t help me in my current predicament. I already knew what I had to do.

  “You can now summon a portal that lasts five minutes or until used. Location portals can only be destinations you have previously visited. All other choices are no longer available to you,” the room voice said, nearly scaring me out of my skin. Up until now, I had only been getting visual alerts.