Chapter 8- Strezza and Nadia: Digging Into The Stats
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“Okay. Nadia is heading out to the teleport pad and is going to teleport to three cities on Floor 10 and then take the major teleport to Floor 12 and then teleport two cities over to Alfred. The causality forecast says there’s a 99% chance she’ll arrive undeterred in two hours. Hopefully no Free Will Accidents happen. And it looks like one of my other units, one of Nadia’s enforcers is also on route to that city. Great. They’ll get there at roughly the same time.”

I brought up the bird keeping an eye on Alfred. I was thankful that the continuous cost of keeping the bird there wasn’t so much that I couldn’t maintain it.

“Looks like Alfred is still meditating. Pulling up what we can get of his basic vitals - ahh right, I forgot real time monitoring of this was a bit costly... No I have enough energy to spare. Don't be stingy.  One snapshot right now please... They don’t look too unchanged except… His temperature has been increasing? Does meditation do that? His level information looks the same...”

Keeping the panel with Alfred to the side, I brought up Nadia’s information.

“I need to familiarize myself with how she works… but this is a lot of information.”

I wanted to get a sense of Nadia’s capabilities, but all that information came in the form of walls of text and bullet points. Thank goodness there was the option to “gameify” it. With a quick press of the button, the information was translated into something I was more intimately familiar with.

“Okay, so, Nadia is essentially level 23 out of a 100 in regards to an overall level. Helper function, what is the median level of the denizens of the world?”

From the side, the help panel, one of the loveliest features of the panel popped out and gave me my answer. Although, it would be nice if it didn’t cost anything.

“Level 5. Hmm. So Nadia is legitimately impressive… But who the heck are the monsters that set level 100 as the cap?! Can I filter people’s statistics out and see who the highest leveled people among the millions are? Ahh. Levels are personal soul data — not the most privileged data but still expensive to pull— but running the search and filter function takes up quite a bit of energy.… It would have been nice if the notable people were already bookmarked… Let’s put a pin in this now and come back to it later.

Let’s see, Nadia’s class and abilities; I was told this was a world of magic so I’m excited to see what she has under her belt. Oh wow.”

Looking at the newly generated class screen, I was surprised to see something robust. Nadia’s overall class or I suppose her title was Brawling Crime Boss. The actual class screen was actually an assortment of skills Nadia had experience in.

Brawling Lvl 15
Aura Combat Lvl 13
Accounting Lvl 12
Diplomacy Lvl 8
Aura Mastery Lvl 3
Spellcasting Lvl 1

Proficiencies
Velqa’s Arm S
Rapier C
Rifle C
Lances C
Dark Magic C
Pistol D
Wind Magic D

“I guess this is what happens when you try to simplify real life values into game terms. Still, this is pretty good… I think.”

I pulled up what I bookmarked of Lacey’s available information to do a quick comparison. At this point in time, Lacey was the only benchmark we had for understanding Alfred’s capabilities.

“Level 6 huh? That’s above the median for sure.”

I turned my attention back to Nadia and her screens.

“What more information can I get if I go through her panels… Ahh. Wow. I have access to her growth projections? She excels in strength and agility? Not surprised. And what is this Aura stuff- Oh wait, I remember this.”

There’s two types of paranormal phenomena in Remnant Ark. Standard magic, and Aura abilities. Standard magic is more generic. Spells can be cast by anyone that meets the requirements. I was told that some people could craft their own spells if they knew the theory well enough. Those types of spells would essentially be trade secrets. Aura is more personalized and the end results significantly varied with no way to predict how they will manifest.

“It is the user’s personality brought into the world,” as God explained it to me. “It is the expression born between the union of the ego and the soul.”

Incidentally, Aura is the mechanism by which people are able to evolve and ascend to higher planes; essentially graduating from God’s world. It was because of Aura, that there were so many protections around a soul’s data. It was in order to protect the secret to what allowed someone to become more than what they were a part of.

Even now, with my units, I could tell there was still some kind of protection around the information on the Aura abilities. The information I could see, the equivalent of what you could expect from an rpg skill screen; it made me excited to see what these abilities looked like in practice.

I continued to look through Nadia’s detailed skills as she proceeded to Alfred’s location and was pleased with what I learned. I also took the time to glance at the enforcer that was going to meet her. All the while I was keeping track of how much energy I would have available to spend if the situation devolved to the point that I had to help Nadia with some divine intervention.

In two hours, I’ll essentially have close to 210MU to use. There’s not much I can do, but I’ll do my best.

Posting this and 9 together. But anyway, Nadia's statistics! I like the idea of real world data being quantified into a game system. When you read that info for this story, don't think of it as strength by the virtue of a number, think more about "if you had to give this quality a number with which to describe it, what would it be?"

I had a similar thought with Georgia in the previous chapters. It'd be cool if MP translated to a change in the body and so on.

You may also notice I'm having Strezza acknowledge costs a bit more. This is a change I'm making just to balance things out a bit more. I'm currently thinking of the system as a program. Everything Strezza wants requires executing lines of instructions which make up a function. For instance, to get info on a screen, in a program you would run instructions that dictate how the images are presented and so on and so forth. Similarly, their would be many lines of instructions and comparisons for a search and filter function. Every line being read and executed makes the CPU work, and to work, the CPU has to take up energy. That's my long winded explanation of why every little thing takes up small bits of energy. This way, Strezza isn't just dealing with big expenditures but also small costs that build up.

Like in programing though, there's many different ways of coming to the same solution. Some solutions are elegant but require creativity, others are costly but are easy to understand. I'm very excited to write the parts where Strezza becomes a little more creative with the instructions she's executing. But for now, she's freaking out.

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