Jules talked with his friends before heading into the game.
“It doesn’t really feel like a game, though,” said Isaac.
Jules thought about it for a bit. They were right, he supposed. Besides the fact that there was a status window and starting gear, the rest wasn’t really like a game. Nobody had seen a tutorial, or quests, and his friends hadn’t even seen a town. Jules hadn’t been let into the town, and that seemed like an important part of any game, having a hub to return to. Well, his friends had fought monsters, and managed to gain some levels, so it was somewhat like what they were expecting. However, it had been a real effort to find the monsters, and they were really just animals.
Jules learned something about the leveling system that he’d not learned about before… since he’d literally only heard of the game yesterday. Each level gained a player 10 status points, which could be distributed in any combination among the 10 basic attributes. He already knew basic attributes averages 100 at the start, so after 10 levels, one could be twice as good as a normal human in a category, if it scaled how he thought it would. Extrapolating, someone could be twice as good as a normal human in every category at level 100. There was theoretically no level cap, too, so it could happen, although Jules couldn’t think of any class archetype that would use all attributes equally.
——-
Jules returned to the game, and was glad to find his favorite guard on duty again. That is, the guard who had responded to his pestering and actually taught him words. Jules spent more of the day pesting the guard. That is,learning the language, of course. He wasn’t pestering him for fun. Not just for fun anyway.
After a little while, Jules noticed something odd. He didn’t have any trouble remembering the words after one time. While Jules considered himself intelligent, he knew for a fact that it hadn’t been this easy to learn a language before, in school. Obviously, the game system was helping him, and thus it was a thing that he was intended to try to do. This gave him the confidence to stay there learning it all day, except for a short break to find food.
He was so focused on what he was doing, that he didn’t notice the sun beginning to set. He did, however, notice a message window that popped up.
| Congratulations, you have learned a new skill! |
| Uesmethi has been learned. As the first player to gain basic proficiency in a language, you have received 5 free points in wisdom. |
Immediately, Jules opened up his skill window
| Skills: |
| Uesmethi (1.02): A very basic proficiency in the language. |
| View Data (6.03): See basic data. |
| Request Data (2.15): Obtain otherwise unknown data. |
Well, that didn’t tell him much, but he knew that the (1) was the level of the skill. He figured the “.02” was experience to the next level, effectively. The system had told him it was Uesmethi, but he wasn’t sure why it was called that. Well, obviously he’d find out eventually.
He then checked his attributes. He saw that the 5 points to wisdom had, indeed, been applied. However, he thought that wisdom and some of the other attributes were higher than he’d seen before, even counting the 5 points. Jules wondered if there was some way to find out. Then, suddenly, the window changed to show the change in stats from when he had started. He’d gained 2 points in intelligence and wisdom, as well as 1 in focus and willpower. He assumed this was because he’d been exercising his mental faculties, although the growth seemed pretty rapid. Well, it was a game after all. There had to be some progress easily visible. He wondered if there were partial attribute levels, like with skills. Then, he saw that it was, indeed so.
Jules thought this was a pretty convenient game menu, then he remembered his class. “Information”. He thought that was probably what let him see all of this. This was confirmed when he saw that Information had grown to level 5, and he’d gained a new skill “Request Data”, which he seemed to have been using unconsciously. In an attempt to use it actively, he went back to the skill panel, and looked at the experience progress. Then he tried to figure out if there was a more specific amount of progress available. Immediately, he saw the number go up to 2.67… and then a long string of digits that didn’t seem to end. He quickly shortened it back to two decimal places. Too much data was worse than useless. He was glad to know he could control it, and get however much he wanted, though.
After a few minutes of fiddling around mentally, Jules went back to talking with the guard. It definitely wasn’t at the level he would call a conversation, but the guard went with his whims of asking what things were, which he could at least do proficiently. The guard stayed alert, though, and his partner pretty much ignored Jules. That was a perfectly fair response, especially since a bunch of weird people had shown up recently. Obviously, these were the other players, and not Jules, since Jules was perfectly normal. Well, he knew that he wasn’t, sitting around talking at NPCs- Non Player Characters, hoping to get a response, literally for an entire day. Well, night not day, as was the time in the real world, but still many hours. Jules logged off again, because he really needed to get some sleep.