Congratulations on using your home base key for the first time. Would you like to establish a connection to this location or a one-time portal?
Unsure what the System message means, I look it up in the guidebooks. It takes me a minute to locate the information on portals, but it seems like I can create a semi-permanent portal between any location in the world my home base allowing for quick travel as long as the connection exists. That must be what Lillian did when she took me to her home base in New York. I was able to travel between the two locations without any problems. According to the guidebook, only one of these connections can be established at a time, and one connection between places has to be disconnected before another can be created. Otherwise, it’s just a one-way portal to my home base that disappears as soon as I walk through it.
Well, that's reassuring. At least I know I’m not leaving some open door to my home base for anyone to walk through. I answer the prompt that I want to create a one-time portal and it disappears. Opening the green door, I see black beyond the doorway. Trusting that I’m not entering some black hole, I confidently walk through the door into the dark.
At first, the all-encompassing blackness surrounds me, and I panic for a moment, thinking that something has gone wrong. Then slowly the darkness fades away, and I find myself standing by the open doorway of my room. The green door closes behind me and then transforms into the door to my room.
Looking around my messy room, I can’t help but smile. Well, that is neat. A quick return trip from dungeon running. Then I remember how long it took me to find the dungeon and I realize I’m not sure which mall I was at. I slap my forehead at my stupidity. I rode around rather randomly on that bus for hours just using Dungeon Scan. Once I found it, I totally forgot to write down where the dungeon was. God, I wish my phone worked, I would have just looked at my map.
I slap my forehead again. Duh, I used one of my skill points to get Mapping. Sure, I mostly got it because it is a prerequisite for the Dungeon Mapping skill. But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been working this whole time. I say, “Map,” and see another map pop-up of my room and the house. I zoom out and see the parts of the neighborhood I’ve walked through since I got the skill. If I follow the non-blacked out area, I can see the places the bus took me. Even better there’s a red pin on the map marking where I found the dungeon. I do another little happy dance since I don’t have to figure out where that dungeon’s located again. Man, this System thing is kind of cool.
My little dance over, I sit at the edge of my bed and pull up the System Store window and tap on the Sell tab to see what I can get for all my loot. Unfortunately, the loot isn’t worth as much as I was hoping it would be. The blob balls are only worth one credit a piece and the Goombie shoes are worth two credits. It looks like I picked up some trash items. Still, after selling them, I have a total of ten credits in my inventory. Looking for all the items in the store by price, I see I can afford to buy two more Super Ultra Wake Me Up Coffee drinks, or I can save up to buy a minor health potion for twenty credits. I opt for the two coffee drinks because I still need to be awake for class later and my current buff has a timer that says it’s only going to last another three hours. That sounds a little off until I realize that the buff continued to count down when I was in the dungeon. I drop the coffee drinks in my inventory and close the System Store. No use browsing through it without credits to spend.
Instead, I pull up my character sheet to see how that level up affected me. Viewing the character sheet, I see that I now have four more stat points and a total of fifteen skill points to use. The only base difference that I can see that my new level has is that it increases my health, mana, and TP by ten points each. I already know that increasing constitution, intelligence, or wisdom will raise health, mana, or TP respectively by ten points for every stat point invested. Since I’ve been using my Absorb ability so much, I figure I need to raise my TP pool. I know that when I play video games, I usually play as a caster and I’d like to learn some spells at some point so that I don’t have to keep picking up sticks and bashing things with them. So, I decided to invest some stat points in intelligence also. Two stat points go to wisdom, and the other two go to intelligence and see the difference in my character sheet.
Anthony Tinoco
Level 2
Unspent stat points: 0
Unspent skill points: 15
Health 110
Mana 160
TP 140
Strength8
Dexterity8
Constitution9
Intelligence14
Wisdom12
Charisma9
I say “Save Character Sheet,” and feel an intense pressure in my head, but it’s gone the next instant. My mind feels clear, and I’m suddenly able to connect little bits of information that I hadn’t thought of before. I realize that in addition to the boosts to mana and TP, increasing intelligence and wisdom also have real-life effects. That’s probably the reason I realized earlier today that there would be skills specifically for finding dungeons—I’d just increased my intelligence and wisdom, so I was able to see the connections.
I’m rather curious about exactly how those two stats affect the human mind. I realize that I don’t have to guess. I can test it between now and my next level up. I pull out an old SAT prep book I have and start to flip through the pages. I chose math since I’m already pretty good at that and start to take a sample test. Already I find that the answers are coming to me a little faster than I remember them coming when I took it in high school. I remember theorems and formulas that I haven’t used in months. I also see patterns in the trigonometry questions that I remembered struggling with. By no means is the math section a breeze. I still have to write down calculations and proofs, but it seems a bit easier. When I check my answer against the test key, I get a score of 89%, which means even with those raised stats I still make mistakes.
When I was preparing for the SATs, I wrote down how long it took me to complete each section, and when I finish this time, I realize that I’ve beaten my best time by a full ten minutes. I mean, I know that doesn’t seem like a lot but my best time was after I’d been studying for weeks straight and taking prep courses. I consider taking the other portions of the SATs but realize that I won’t likely get any more useful data form that. I can already guess that intelligence relates to information absorption and recall. Wisdom probably refers to the ability to connect that information to actual use and capacity to understand connections. It’s kind of cool. I briefly wonder if I’ve increased my IQ. Then I remember that I don’t have to wonder. I log onto our home computer and find a web page with an IQ test. I complete the test in a little over an hour and get a score of 112 on the Stanford–Binet scale. According to the results page that puts me at the low end of ‘high average intelligence.’
Is it weird that I feel a little disappointed? I mean, high average intelligence is good, but that means that before I increased my intelligence and wisdom that I was likely just of average intelligence. I never thought that I was a genius or anything, but I’d thought of myself as smart. But then again, I’m sure everyone thinks that they’re smarter than they are. I shrug it away and make a note in the SAT book of the IQ test results and that I’m to repeat the test after I level up again to see if there’s any difference.