Jules thought about what his use in a party might be, especially if he joined up with Mary. Presumably, she already had people who were capable of combat with her. Jules would rate himself as ever-so-slightly above a random person picked up off the street. At least, a random starting adventurer. Not that he didn’t think he could become more useful, but he wasn’t going to be extremely useful. However, he had an idea of what he could bring that others couldn’t. Information. It was, after all, his “class”. Jules wasn’t sure how much help knowing an enemy’s attributes would be, but it couldn’t hurt. While he had been killing plyks, he had thought to look at their data. At first, he’d only been able to get vague numbers in only some of the attributes. However, upon observing more of them, he’d gotten what he knew to be more accurate numbers. A somewhat typical specimen looked like this:
| Subject: | Plyk | Type: | Animal |
| Physical | Mental | Fortune | |
| Power | Strength: 50 | Intelligence: 42 | Luck: 113 |
| Finesse | Dexterity: 167 | Wisdom: 44 | – |
| Durability | Toughness: 67 | Willpower: 56 | – |
| Quantity | Constitution: 56 | Focus: 103 | Quantum Flux: – |
As animals, their mental capacities weren’t particularly strong, though the numbers were actually somewhat high for animals. Of course, since they were small, their Strength was low compared to humans, which also made sense. Their Dexterity was quite good. Jules was still comparing their values to an “average” adult human, which was somewhat odd, but he couldn’t think of another standard that would be particularly more sensible. At least he had some idea of what the values should be, this way.
On the other hand, Jules had reason to believe that there wasn’t really any need to be in combat. Certainly, if this were actually a game, combat would be the primary way to level up. However, this was obviously a relatively peaceful planet. There wasn’t much need to fight here. Except that couldn’t be entirely true. The cities were surrounded by walls, and there were always guards. That meant to Jules that there was some danger, and perhaps it could come at any time. Either way, Jules was certain that there would be more danger on subsequent planets, if and when they managed to get them “unlocked”. If it was just a game, the next section would unlock after certain conditions, such as a certain number of players getting to the required level, or completing a specific event. While the first thing that could be tracked, Jules doubted that most future events could be predicted with any sort of accuracy. Then again, maybe they could. He had telekinesis after all, what else worked? Though, he’d done a casual sweep of the city and found nothing that would suggest precognitive abilities were publicly available.
In summary, Jules still felt that it would be useful to become proficient at combat, at least for the future. It was unfortunate that Jules still had to work in the “real world”. After all, his body there… which was slightly more real than his other one, probably, still needed food. Plus, there were books there that still needed reading.
—–
Working wasn’t entirely a waste of time in Jules’ eyes. Although he still didn’t feel like this vault of book was particularly important, he managed to get a lot of practice in telekinesis. He wanted to carry all of the books around with telekinesis, but unfortunately each object he was moving made it significantly harder. Splitting his concentration into many pieces was not something he could do. At best, he could carry about three books consistently. He’d tried stacking them, but any wobbling would easily drop them from the pile. So, he carried as many as he could with telekinesis, and still used the cart for the rest. He still used telekinesis to place the books where they went, even if they were going on shelves within easy arm’s reach. He wasn’t worried about his coworkers seeing him, since he hadn’t seen any of them in his section in a long time. Plus, the whole place was very echoey, so he would hear them coming from far away if they did come. Jules had used that technique to prevent getting caught reading at work… once or twice. Maybe more.
An interesting side effect of having new abilities that he constantly used, was that Jules started to use them unconsciously. Telekinesis was one thing, since he’d always tried to use it to pick up pens that he was too lazy to reach, but his other abilities as well. Of course the ability to view data was used when he wanted to know what section a book should go in, but also in another case he hadn’t expected. Jules had to occasionally go through and check for misshelved books. While he usually got them right, there were a lot of books to place, and a lot of monotony to get distracted by. Plus, it was in his job description that he had to check. Jules found that he could take in a view of an entire row of shelves, and quickly determine which books were out of place. It wasn’t really a conscious thing, where he particularly thought about it. Instead, he was able to visually mark the books, like a display in a game. He supposed that was a sort of viewing of data that he made up. After all, the windows that displayed information looked like what he wanted, so there was no reason he couldn’t display other things. However, after using the ability, Jules felt somewhat mentally tired. Not as much as if he had personally inspected each book, as he previously had done, but tired. On the other hand, maybe it was about the same amount of effort, and his mental capacity was just enough higher. Though, as usual, the actual result was probably “some of each”. It didn’t take as much energy as doing it all manually, and he also had more mental capacity. In the end, Jules was glad to find ways to train his “game” skills while at work.