by Sean Oswald
Emily chimed in next, saying that given her stat bonuses she was gonna put 2 more points into agility and 2 into wisdom. Dave pointed out that in the future, she may need to sink some points into Strength, Constitution, Endurance, and Intelligence for various reasons but didn’t object or try to talk her out of spending the points like that. After they had both assigned their points and experienced the rush that comes with the increase in the physical and mental capabilities, they both turned toward Mira to see what she had to say. Mira told them that she wanted to increase her Intelligence and Charisma, and after some discussion, they were able to convince her that putting the 2 points she had intended to put into Intelligence into Wisdom instead would be good because she needed to increase her mana regeneration rate, but they couldn’t get her to budge on the Charisma points or even really explain why she wanted a high Charisma. Amidst it all, Dave couldn’t help but grin as he heard Emily using game terms to explain the need to balance a mana pool and mana regeneration, something which he had already lectured her about. It was also sorta interesting to watch as Mira applied the stat changes. It wasn’t so much that she suddenly got prettier or that she changed in any visible way. In his eyes as a father, she was already beautiful beyond measure, yet it was obvious when she applied the stat points from the way that her body shuddered, and she seemed to be more alive, more radiant if that was possible.
Dave realized that after all the fighting that he had done this morning that he should probably be starving, but he wasn’t the least bit hungry. He just had to chalk that up as another benefit of leveling up, but by now it was mid-morning and Sara was asking about a snack. When offered some more of the tack bread, she started to whine about wanting something “good.” Dave and Emily exchanged the look of long-suffering parents at her complaining, but Emily quickly moved to pull her off to the side of the platform for a little lecture about the reality of their situation, or at least as much of it as an eight-year-old could handle. In the meantime, Dave and Mira kept talking about their options for character point assignment and whether it was better to hold back or keep assigning them. All the while, Jackson was looking on with a hungry look of jealousy, but at least he didn’t complain anymore after Dave had assured him that as soon as it was safe, they would do everything in their power to make sure that he could level up too.
Eventually, they settled on a compromise plan of trying to maximize their important skills now since most of them seemed to be capped at level 10 for now and to save the rest of the points rather than opening up new skills that weren’t needed. Jackson made the valid point that often times it is better to have two or three skills that are really solid and you can rely upon rather than having a wider assortment which you are unsure of or might forget about in a moment of stress. Mira decided to sink enough points into Charm and Conjuration Magic skills to max them out at 10 and that left her with 10 unspent character points. Which prompted a discussion about adding yet another school of magic, but since she had three maxed out types of magic, at least for her level, they decided it would be best if she got used to using them first.
As for Dave, he decided that he liked the increased damage that weapon specialization had given him, so he spent five points maxing that out and another point increasing his shaping magic to its max so that he would have an extra six seconds on Minor Enlarge. He still had a lot of points burning a hole in his proverbial pocket though, and contrary to pro-gamer tips, he had never really been one to hold back on spending his points. As he saw it, he had a couple of options for how to spend the points. He could maximize out Divination Magic, although after Shaping Magic, he wasn’t all that impressed with it and wondered if it would be wasted points. Although, on the other hand, 9 extra points would increase his critical strike chance on Sure Strike by another 27%, which, from what he could calculate, would bring it up to 55% plus whatever his unknown base chance was and would increase the damage bonus on a critical strike by another 54%. At least from his damage notifications, he knew that the base extra damage on a critical strike was +100%, and so when using Sure Strike, it would go up to +210% if he spent the 9 points. He could also increase his Long Blade skill for accuracy, although with the beasts he had been fighting, that hadn’t been much of an issue. He wondered for a second if he might someday be called up to fight sentients like humans or elves and how important accuracy might be then. In the end, he decided to bite the bullet and spend the extra 9 for Divination Magic and 5 for Long Blade Proficiency, leaving him with 18 points left.
He almost decided that was good enough but then he remembered the Dodge skill that the one hound had used when fighting him. It seemed from Dave’s perspective as if he had hit the beast but that the skill had negated that attack. He looked through the melee skills tab in his mind’s eye, and sure enough, there it was under Melee Stamina Skills: Dodge. He laughed. Not exactly a creative name for the skill, but it served its purpose. It apparently cost stamina to use any of the skills in this category, and he realized that he would only be able to use this skill once because it would use up his entire stamina bar to do so, but since it might be a game-changer, he wasn’t gonna argue with the impossibility of a skill that could be triggered to negate an otherwise successful attack.
Dodge: Declared Action: Automatically avoids an otherwise successful melee or ranged melee atk (not spells). May be used 1/round +.1/level (rounded down). Stamina: 4.
He wasn’t exactly sure what it meant that it had to be a declared action, but he figured it only cost him one point, and he could experiment around with it. After that, he took his son’s advice and decided to focus on improving the use of the skills he had already chosen and to save the rest of his points, even if it made his eye twitch a bit to leave unspent points.
After finishing with Sara, Emily looked a bit frazzled, so Dave came over and hugged her. He wanted to fix things for her but knew that he couldn’t. It had only taken three years of couples counseling and several thousand dollars to learn that he couldn’t fix everything for her and that sometimes even trying was offensive. It didn’t mean that it wasn't his default setting, but he tried. As he held her, she said, “I don’t know if we can make it two more days up here, Dave. I know you want to level up, but it’s going pretty fast. I think now that Mira has that horse spell that we should try going up and down the river on this side to look for any bridges or other signs of civilization tomorrow. I just don’t know if me and the kids or our frayed nerves can hold on for a second day.”
Dave couldn’t help but sigh. “Of course, I’m sorry if I am making this harder on you all. I just want us all to be safe. First thing tomorrow morning we can test out the horse spell and see how it goes from there.” Then he grinned and said, “But for now, I’m gonna go down this tree and see if I can pass you up in levels.”
Chapter Sixteen
“Brothers born of blood share a common mother. Brothers born in blood share a trust which comes only from standing toe to toe against a foe.” —Sir Erik Eikhorn, First Knight of Albia
Dave’s afternoon progressed as smoothly as he could have hoped. He found and fought an assortment of animals similar to those that the Nelsons had already encountered, but each of the fights came in singles, whether it was a young wandering flame lynx or a boar. Within five hours of descending, he had already managed six fights, but as the second sun started to move toward its setting, he noticed that the forest seemed to come more alive. He started to feel as though he was being watched, and it was making him uncomfortable enough to call it a day. He had made level 9 and even passed Emily in raw XP, but he had not yet reached level 10. The XP requirement to go from 9 to 10 seemed massive to him even with his racial bonus.
His favorite fight of the day had been the last and had been against another of the boars, which had come so close to killing him just the day before. This fight had gone very differently. He was finding that with his Minor Enlarge spell and as long as he wasn’t caught off guard, all of the fights were easy and ended predictably
. His final notification for the day showed the difference between fighting the beast on his own verses in a team.
You have defeated: Small Alpha Boar Level 8. XP: 48 x 2 (killing blow bonus) = 96 x racial bonus 50% -Net gain =144
You have 7 new character points. You have 44 character points available.
This time the boar’s 250 health had done little to stand up to blows that were shaving nearly 40 health per whack and even less to the critical hit that he had scored to start the fight. It was over before he realized it, although Dave had used the fight as an opportunity to test out his new Dodge skill and found that it worked wonderfully as long as he thought to activate it. The problem being that with his endurance where it was, he only had enough stamina to use the skill about once per three hours.
Equally as exciting as the XP that he gained was the fact that these few hours with the need for frequent rest periods between fights gave him a lot more time to analyze and process the way Eloria seemed to work. He wasn’t naïve enough to believe that he had all of the data necessary for an accurate or detailed assessment, but he was able to apply what he had learned to start to draw some general conclusions. Yes, Eloria was a world with game-like rules but for everything that worked as he expected, there was something else that didn’t work at all as he expected or even the opposite. Take stamina, for example. He would have assumed that as he drained his stamina pool, he would have become fatigued and unable to function at the same level, but instead, stamina seemed to be a pool of points that could be used to activate other abilities. It wasn’t that his Endurance score didn’t seem to influence how tired he became with activities or the duration of intense action that he could maintain. It was more that the exact specifics of it were not revealed on his character sheet. This prompted him to dig through the tabs and see if he could find more information. He wasn’t able to find any way of correlating his Endurance score to just how tired or refreshed he felt, but he did at least learn that he could reshape his character sheet some. At the bottom of the sheet, he added a list of his skills and spells.
Name: David Nelson
Race: Human
Age: 40
Level: 9
Movement: 12 (46)
Alignment: 0
Factions:
Guild:
Stats
Core Attributes
Regen Rates:
STRENGTH: 20
Health: 180 (260)
1.8/hour
DEXTERITY: 8
Mana: 170
150/hour
AGILITY: 9
Stamina: 4
1.4/hour
CONSTITUTION: 18
Fury: 8
1.6/hour
ENDURANCE: 16
Teamwork: 3
1/hour
INTELLIGENCE: 17
Bravery: 6
2/hour
WISDOM: 10
Faith: 3
1/hour
CHARISMA: 10
Base Defense: 5
LUCK: 0
Base Attack: 10
Total XP: 1774
Unspent Stat Points:2
Total CP:177
XP to Next: 144
Unspent CP: 50
Skills
Running: 3
Unarmed Combat: 10
Spell:
Sense Motives: 5
Archery: 5
Identify
Speak Languages:7
Long Blade: 10
Assess Enemy
Diplomacy: 3
Weapon Spec: 10
Sure Strike
Know-Research: 25
Shaping Magic: 10
Minor Binding
Knowledge- Law: 15
Divination Magic: 10
Minor Mending
Survival- Forest: 5
Dodge: 1
Minor Enlarge
Survival-Desert: 7
Taunt: 1
Heavy Armor: 1
After rearranging his character sheet, Dave had used the rest of the time between fights to think about the other so-called core attributes on his character sheet. Some of them he had thought he understood immediately and others he was starting to figure out. Health seemed the easiest. It was essentially a quantification of his ability to take damage as well as the rate that said damage would heal at and seemed to have a direct correlation to his Constitution score. Each point of Constitution gave him 10 points of health and 1/10th of a point of regeneration per hour. As a gamer, it was interesting to him that the regeneration wasn’t fast enough to be relevant to combat but was fast enough to heal up a person with an almost total loss of health in a matter of days. Presumably on earth, if a person had multiple fractures and organ injuries that would correlate to almost total loss of all health, it would take months for them to heal up properly, if at all. So far, he hadn’t found any limits on what could be healed up and stab wounds, bruises, or broken bones all seemed to heal up the same with no scars and no lingering effects. Although the least serious wounds always seemed to heal first, in the end, they all healed up. He couldn’t help but wonder how this would affect his aging process and if this was part of why he felt so vibrantly alive. Mana was much the same, although it was interesting to him that two different stats controlled mana: Intelligence for the total amount of mana he could hold at any one time and Wisdom for the regeneration rate. It also seemed odd to him that the mana regeneration rate was so much higher than that of the health regeneration. It still wasn’t high enough to be useful in the type of combat in Eloria so far, but thinking back to his days in Iraq with the USMC, he realized that not all combat had to take place in a matter of seconds. Some fights, especially when both sides were intelligent thinking creatures rather than brutish beasts could be done in a very hit-and-run, kinda drag-it-out pace. In a situation like that, a high mana regeneration rate would be very desirable.
The only other of the core attributes that had seemed straightforward to him from the beginning were the base defense and base attack attributes. What had him perplexed now though was that he had increased his stats and weapon skills but had not seen any increase in base defense or attack. He wondered if they were fixed stats that he was born or created with. Dave may have been nervous about Emily’s plan to seek out civilization, but besides the obvious hope of safety for his children, he was also hoping that civilization would provide him with books or even teachers who could explain how this all worked.
The other core abilities he now understood a little bit better after using the Dodge skill. Stamina, Fury, Teamwork, Bravery, and Faith just all seemed to be alternative mana pools to allow for different types of skills. All in all, it seemed like in Eloria there was a great emphasis placed upon the value of each of the stats both physical and mental which of course raised the question of how much he should continue to focus on Strength and Constitution versus being more diverse. Of course, that raised a whole other set of questions, like: How many levels were there? Was there a cap on the highest level he could obtain? Normally if he was playing an MMO, he would have read the online guides before beginning and would have plotted a course of development for his character based upon the desired result at max level. That way, he would be ready for the end game or the time when it was no longer about leveling but about raiding with friends from all around the world for loot by killing catastrophically difficult boss monsters, but he had no guarantee that Eloria worked like that or that there was any sort of end game at all. For all he knew, level 20 would be the highest level he could reach, and he would only get two more stat points for each level. He was pretty sure the levels would continue past 10 due to the notifications they had gotten about having to progress to tier two. Add to these uncertainties, questions about how many tiers there were and if they made much of a difference, and Dave didn’t feel like he had a good grasp on Eloria at all. The one thing about tier that he knew was that the dire crocodile that he had fought had been tier two and was dramatically stronger than anything that they had fought up
to this point. None of that was even to mention his jealousy about Emily getting a class or his questions about how he could get a class of his own.
As Dave was busy hunting, Emily was left back to tend the house. Except for now, the house was an exposed platform of interwoven branches sticking out from the side of a tree some fifty feet in the air. A part of her wanted to be furious with Dave for leaving them while he was out playing with life as though it was one of his online games. Even though she understood his reasoning and even agreed with it at some level, the basis for her agreement with him continued to lessen the longer that she had to sit on this platform with three anxious children. Mira was a mess. She probably hadn’t gone two waking hours without social media in the last couple of years, let alone two days. Jackson was moping and feeling left out. Dave was always telling her that it is important to encourage a young man’s adventurous side, but that certainly wasn’t going to happen here. Jackson could mope about all he wanted to, if she had anything to say about it, it would be years before Jackson ever had to engage any of these Elorian monsters again. Sara was no better than Mira, but instead of being dark and gloomy huddled up against the side of the tree, she was being chipper and annoying, getting in everyone’s faces trying to get attention. Mira and Jackson had quickly rebuffed Sara, hurting her feelings in the process so that now she was stuck to Emily’s side like stink at a carnival port-a-potty. Normally when Sara got lonely like this, which wasn’t uncommon, two teenage siblings could hardly be expected to want to have much to do with their eight-year-old sister, after all. Emily would just send her down to the family room to watch Netflix. Now, however, there was no electronic babysitter for her, and Emily’s anxiety was making it very hard for her to answer Sara’s questions about their circumstances or offer predictions about the future without snapping at the girl. Worse, the platform may have kept them safe above the animals that they occasionally saw wandering around on the ground below, but it also didn’t provide them with much room for private space.