Aetherios System: Whirlwind

Chapter 5: Experience Points

Time Remaining; 717 Days, 6 Hours, 33 Minutes…

The leaves brushed up against the scales on his forearms as Ghirzu pushed against the large bush in front of him. While his claws held back the annoying prickly bush, his eyes stayed glued to the floor, looking diligently and carefully for… well Ghirzu wasn’t entirely sure.

His uncle had brought him along and said it was a “searching mission”, which Ghirzu was excited about because he was a really good searcher. Out of all the Kobolds in the village, he was the best searcher they had.

It was tough when you didn’t know what you were searching for though. He was only told to look. That was what Doudra had told him anyway.

“Powerful surge was in this direction, so Chieftain has us looking around. Just look for anything out of the ordinary.” Doudra had said, just before she and the other members of the searching party had left through the village gates.

He didn’t know what that meant. Finding things that were ‘wardinary’. Wards were magic stuff, he was pretty sure of that, and Ghirzu didn’t know magic. But Doudra was the boss, so whatever she said, Ghirzu would do.

Now he was out in the forest, looking for magic stuff that out in the ‘wardinary!

So far he had found many promising things that he was sure his uncle and Doudra would like. He had many cool rocks in his pouch by now, he was certain those would be wanted. He also found a big looking claw to a beast that must have fallen off when it was scratching a tree. It was three times bigger than Ghirzu’s own claw anyway.

By now it had been a couple hours, and he had to return back to the team so Doudra can look through everything they had found. Ghirzu was positive he would get extra rat at dinner today. He had found many cool rocks after all.

***

Figuring out the ins and outs of a video game system was always an intriguing and exciting task for Alex back in his home world. The numbers crunch and the power building of RPG's was a rush, and he always liked finding the optimal character builds. The time and effort put in were always rewarded with a sense of accomplishment and pride.

At the current moment though, Alex was sitting frozen, his hand poised in the air as if about to tap on an invisible surface. He was hesitating, badly. Uncertainty crept into his mind and soul like a strangling vine wrapping around his very being.

Fear, he knew it to be fear.

Back home the character-building process, the stats and spells screens, all of it was exactly that. It was a game. But here, right now, Alex knew this wasn't "just" some game. This may feel like a video game or computer program from back home, but this wasn’t Alex’s home world. This was something else entirely.

Whatever this system may be, it was very real. As real as he was. As real as the log he sat under, and the taste of the deer meat that still clung to the roof of his mouth from the dinner he had cooked an hour earlier. As real as the sorrow that swept the world when Danny Devito died in 2051.

Okay maybe not that real, that was a seriously dark day.

"Damn it," Alex grumbled. He dropped his hand and let out a sigh of frustration, "I can't make a mistake here. They always say small mistakes in a build can be fixed later, but that isn't always true. Setting the foundations for your build can ripple out for your entire play-through."

Play-through, he snorted and shook his head. He was still thinking in terms of back home. There wasn't a play-through. The play-through here, being his actual life, Alex knew that. If he died, he wouldn't get to try again with a "new character".

He couldn't be sure what choice he wanted to make after figuring out the basics of the experience system from Sylvaris. Once Alex left the area where he had met the elf, he returned to the makeshift camp he had created for himself and got to work fulfilling his human needs first. Creating a fire, cleaning and preparing the deer he had killed, and getting a meal made for himself. Once he got his fire going and while the deer had cooked over the flames, he got to poking and prodding at his character screen to learn more about the experience system.

And oh did he figure some things out.

First of all, he couldn't just pour experience into whatever he wanted and get a result. Trying to mentally or physically prod the "spells" section for the screen had gotten him nothing at all. Just a jarring noise in his mind that he had assumed meant an error message.

The same went for ‘Skills’ and ‘Abilities’. It appeared he would have to unlock those or fill them through some other means. Most likely learning the skills directly, or a spellbook of some kind? Alex still wasn't certain about that. So he had moved on to other parts of the screen instead.

His attempts at clicking on his "core" had treated him to an interesting new message though. When he mentally poked at that line and had tried to "move" his experience there -which was how Alex assumed the process worked- he had gotten the same mental blaring noise, but also a new screen.