Chapter 68 - 66: Church and System
A boy much like Tulland was standing next to an arch, staring at it longingly.
I don't know why you do that. I've already explained you won't have a combat class.
"And I've already explained that's not good enough." The boy flexed his hands, as if not quite allowing them to become fists. "I want to do something important, System. I won't be a potter or a wainwright. I want to help in real ways.
Those classes do help.
"Sure. Everyone desperately needs another pot." The boy whipped his head around, as if glaring directly at Tulland. With a shock, Tulland realized he was looking directly from the System's point of view, as experienced by the System itself. "You know I can do more."
Yes. I do. Please do not look directly at me like that. It's off-putting. How do you even know?
"I just know." The boy kicked at the ground in frustration. "I could always tell you were there."
Nobody else can. There must be some trick to it.
"Well, there isn't. I'm just special. In a useless way." The boy coughed. "In a way that can't breathe well enough to run and jump. In a way that can't fight. Great trade, if you ask me. Real good value."
Tulland felt a burning in the System's perspective, something he instinctively understood as a desire to help that clashed with an inability to do anything. Anything safe, anyway. Somewhere in the periphery of Tulland's understanding, there was another option. Something he-as-the-System understood as a possibility.
If the System wanted to, there was one way it could do more for the boy. It was dangerous and foolish, but it was something. The System just had to be willing to take a risk.
Something broke in the System's desire to restrain itself then.
There is one thing.
The boy perked up immediately.
"I knew it. Tell me."
It would be dangerous.
"I don't care." The boy coughed, harder this time. "Tell me."
The System spun some wheels in the mechanical aspects of things that underwrote the universe, and made a notification window that he willed towards the boy.
| Variable Class Offered! Behind every illusion of order is chaos. Without randomness, things tend to atrophy. Every living, healthy thing you see engages with this chance and disorder on some level, a fact that is observable simply by noticing them thriving. Most classes a System offers lean into whatever order they can access, tracking well-known ruts in the road of progress. These classes are safe and predictable. They grow in expected ways, with some small variation provided by the person who holds them and their own will for their own future. Variable classes lean the other way. In the assignment of a variable class, The System invites chaos to come to play, spinning off the essence of what you are and your intent for your own future and allowing randomness to run rampant in the creation of something new. Variable classes are both the strongest and weakest classes there are, depending on unpredictable factors that cannot, by definition, be controlled. In accepting a variable class, you also accept these risks.
|