Chapter 5: The System
After reassuring himself that he wasn’t still bleeding from half a dozen horrible wounds, the first thing that Simon did was to reach for the mostly full bottle of wine that was sitting on the bedside table as always and drank deeply to steady his nerves. He had never been much of a drinker, and much preferred smoking a bowl or two to a six pack, but right now he only had this awful sour grape juice to drown the horrible memory of those spikes piercing his body. He would have chugged any swill to try to forget the memory of that terrible pain. He hadn’t known anything could hurt that bad in his whole life. Even now, with the memory receding, and the sensations fading he still shuddered if he tried to think about the moment he’d tried to pull himself off the spikes in that pit.
“This isn’t how this is supposed to work!” he declared suddenly, turning toward the mirror. “There’s supposed to be hit points and skills. I’m supposed to gain experience, not get fucking tortured to death!” He was mostly just looking for a reason not to have to go back down there and deal with those terrifying traps again, but to his surprise the mirror lit up and a response started to “type” for lack of a better word in a flowing script that looked like it was being entered one character at a time. Apparently, it spoke back every time it thought you were talking to it, even if you were just thinking out loud. He didn’t know if that feature was handy or annoying.
‘The Pit is exactly as described in the contract you signed.’ the screen printed as a ghostly version of the contract materialized in the background. ‘Would you like to review it?’
“I don’t want to review that. I want to review my character sheet.” Simon insisted. “I want to see my level and my skills and…” As he spoke the screen changed. Materializing what looked to be a sort of crude character sheet, like whatever spirit was in the mirror was trying to grant his request.
Name: Simon Jacoby
Level: 2
Deaths: 3
Experience Points: -2740
The negative experience points meant there was some kind of penalty for death, since he’d died three times. That wasn’t the worst system in the world though, and even with those deaths he was still leveling up, so he could work with that. As realistic as everything felt in this game, that was probably a better choice than one of those timed debuffs that had gotten so big in popular titles recently. His eyes moved past that minor issue to the rest of the screen which was a long list of skills: Archery, Armor (light), Athletics, Cook, Craft, Deception, Escape, Investigate, Maces, Ride, Search, Sneak, Spears, Spell Casting, Steal, Swimming, and Swords. They didn’t have any numbers beside them. Instead, they had words, and the words next to almost every one of his skills was ‘very poor.’ As he continued his increasingly frustrated review, he was surprised to find that only two skills that weren't ‘very poor’ was swords which was rated ‘poor’, and spell casting, which was rated ‘None’. He was insulted by the evaluation.