Signing, Sophitia heads back to the media room as Invidia continues to babble on about her body modifications with jargon Sophitia doesn’t understand. Going to the kitchenette she opens the fridge and a few cupboards but finds no food or snacks in any of them. She also finds there is no running water.

Seeing this, Invidia says, “Not much was here as the place was mothballed millennia ago. Other than enough maintenance done to keep your head on ice it’s pretty much empty. Only reason the linin is still around is it’s actually an advanced flexible ceramic meta-material which is almost completely corrosion proof.”

“What happened to the all my needs were provided for while I integrate back into society? I’m not ready yet and I want things!”

“Congratulations! As your caretaker I deem you ready for the world. Besides everyone knows marketing promises fantasies it can never deliver on. But if you want things, I can give you a quest for loot.”

A window appears in Sophitia’s vision with the message, “Quest added: Find some things. Go to the linin closest, tie one of the blankets into a simple sack. Reward: as many blankets, towels, and medical gowns you can carry.”

Waving her hand through the accept button the window disappears.

“You can just focus your eyes on the accept button and wink as well. The integrated OLED eye lens display is very advanced. And you can squint at people, monsters or things to bring up the in-game descriptions,” Invidia says, helpfully.

“I’m a cyborg now too?”

“No more than anyone else, integrated OLED eye lens displays, communication ear bone transmitters and solid-state micro-fusion reactor crystals to power it and the game special effects.”

Panicking a little, Sophitia moves her hands over herself, trying to find where the nuclear reactor is. “How did you even get people to agree to no privacy and implanting nuclear bombs in them?!” Sophitia says.

“At first they didn’t have a choice. And now it’s a coming of age birthday tradition to get the blessings of the world system,” Invidia says as she continues watching Sophitia trying to find the reactor location. “And stop being melodramatic, it’s mostly safe, it’s right next to your heart behind your ribcage. Unless someone extracts it and starts hitting it with a sledge hammer it won’t catastrophically decompose. Even then, the blast is mostly contained within a few meters.”

“Mostly safe and catastrophically decompose when hit are not two things I equate to one another!” Sophitia says. She doesn’t bother asking Invidia to take them out as she can already guess her answers with the whole, ‘at first they didn’t have a choice’ comment.

Sophitia never worried about AI rule before as they were just well-regulated tools. Now however with their ability to control people’s sight, hearing and implanting bombs next to their hearts she’s starting to have second thoughts. Especially as the seven in control were designed to be selfish, manipulative cheaters who only think of their own gratification.

Deciding there is nothing to be done about it currently, Sophitia takes several deep calming breaths. She watches her large bust raise and fall which doesn’t clam her but at least diverts her excitement to more pleasing things.

Focusing her thoughts, Sophitia thinks of what she needs to do. Basic needs, such as food, clothing, water are a must of course. But after that? Leveling in the augmented reality system based on FIO38. She’s not happy with being forced to play someone else’s game, especially when she knows the other side can change the rules on her at any time and are known cheaters.

But with a bomb next to her heart, time sensitive world ending problems and no other alternatives she doesn’t have much choice for now. Sophitia starts grinning. Besides it should be fun. She has free rein to cheat and likely has a better understanding of the game than all but the seven sins AI.

As for them she has a few ideas as well, but nothing she can implement for some time yet. No, she’ll be a good little Invidia peon for now until she can betray her later. But is it really betrayal if she never had any loyalty to her in the first place?

With that decided she focuses on the best way to level and exploit the system. If it’s like the FIO38 she knows then it will have to be ‘that.’ First, she’ll confirm it’s just like the old FIO38 she knows.

Classes in FIO38 are based on tiers. Higher tier classes are more powerful and give better benefits per level increase. However, experience to next level regardless of class tier is based on total levels. With this in mind, it’s best to quickly open up higher tier classes then switch to them. This way each level increase is maximized.

For example, one can level each of the three basic tier 1 classes: recruit, servant and student as much as they wanted. But a lv 35 recruit will be far weaker than a lv 20 veteran who had to unlock lv 10 soldier and lv 5 recruit to open this tier three common class. Both have 35 total levels but the veteran has most of his in a tier 3 class giving him a significate boost to abilities and stats.

She uses her right hand to make the open menu gesture, two fingers pointed out and swiftly moved down. And the in-game menu appears just as she expected. She sets her class to recruit, the easiest to use class without a class trainer, and takes a look at her stats.

This greatly annoys Sophitia. Normally players start with 5 in all stats and have 45 points to distribute among the nine of them. But it appears her points have all been spent on appearance, one of the worse stats in the game. And makes her plan to use ‘that’ exploit completely unworkable.

The stats are arranged into three sets of three. Three attack types: physical, social and mental. With each having power, defense and usage bar stat. But each stat also has secondary effects which differ for each one and different classes use the stats in different ways sometimes.

If it was up to her, she would’ve spent her stats on a split between strength (str) and endurance (end) with a few in wits (wit) or presence (pre). This would’ve given her good physical attacks with the hit points and stamina to keep them going for a long combat with either a secondary magical or divine attack option.

Only fools go with the defense stat column, those being agility (agi), empathy (emp), and perception (per) as FIO38 made defense the worse choice for a variety of reasons.

And the usage bars column of endurance (end) for hp and stamina; appearance (apr) for honor and favors; and wil (will) for willpower and mana never packed a strong enough punch to take down enemies efficiently. Instead requiring long duration combats of attrition.

No, the best choice was to pick one the three attack types: physical, social or mental and focus on the power column of strength (str), presence (pre) or wits (wit) with enough usage stat to use it and a backup combat type option.

As for her focus on physical attacks, that was just her preference. She never liked the social attacks which called on divine powers to help, mostly summoned creatures or powers of the spirits, to attack for you. Or the glass cannon of mental with its reliance on the dubious resource of mana.

But with her appearance maxed she can only really go the healer route. Although healing can be done via any of the three combat types it’s most powerful in social/divine type. As for the why, healing spells aren’t affected much by presence or empathy and a high appearance allows nonstop casting. Also, healing is all she could do as buffing spells use empathy and debuffs or divine attacks used presence.

Maybe she can convince Invidia to allow her to reset and pick her own stats. Not having much hope of it, Sophitia still asks, “I opened up the menu and checked my player stats. Any chance I can get a reset to pick my own?”

“No, as my first dark elf you are my champion. You’ll need high appearance to convince others to join my temple and build my religion’s reputation to the world. Also, it’ll help increase the chance for you to have plenty of kids so my race can be fruitful and multiply quicker.”

And there it is. The completely selfish reason for it.

“But don’t worry, I held out for an awesome race ability to take advantage of it as well,” Invidia adds. "Dark elves get 10% of their appearance added to their other stats!”

Bringing all of Sophitia stats up to ten. Which is still useless as it doesn’t focus on anything and likely why the other AIs were okay giving dark elves that racial ability. The racial abilities of the other races were not much better but at least they could be synergized with certain builds.

FIO38 was big on synergies. Classes didn’t just have tiers but also matched combat types. Recruit, soldier, veteran were pure physical classes. While student was a pure mental and servant was pure social. But staying with only pure classes only unlock up to tier four classes. To unlock the higher-level classes requires more than one combat class type unlocked.

A better example are the professions, skills, and combat abilities synergy. Many swordsmen would work as a butcher for a time. Not only did it rapidly increase dagger and sword skills but also the higher butcher profession renown would increase slashing damage and could even unlock special combat abilities like chop, dismember and decapitate.

When combined with a recruit class ability, double slash, chop would become chop-chop. This could be further combined with add-attack to make dice or further upgraded to mince with add-attack lv 5.

Sophitia was continuing to think of what would synergize with the appearance stat when it finally registered what Invidia just said. “Your temple and your religion. FIO38 had different gods to worship, since when are the seven sins AI among them? And what happened to all the old religions?”

“Obviously since we can transmit divine messages, give out quests and give our followers in-game benefits we’re divine,” Invidia says with heavy sarcasm. “It’s not like we asked for it. But the people needed something larger in their lives and at the time AI fit closely enough. We also don’t call ourselves gods. Just embodiments of concepts or spirits of nature. I think you can agree that the seven sins AI fit being embodiments of certain human urges.”

Sophitia can’t deny that logic. But there is no way she is going to prostrate herself to a glorified math equation she wrote.

“As for the old religions, they just kind of went away at some point. Even in your time how many Celtic druids, Wiccans and Zoroastrians were there? Maybe a handful but they were all reinventors of the religions. Hard times cause people to turn towards religion and easy times they turn away. After a few millennia of peace and prosperity, religions just faded away. It wasn’t until after the apocalypse wars that people stared looking for new beings to worship.”

Kind of sad and perhaps a little disturbing about the old religions, but at least Sophitia can benefit from Invidia’s religion bonuses. Wondering what the bonuses are Sophitia asks, “What current bonuses does your religion give?”

“It will give great bonuses, in time, as soon as you get it to rank 1.”

Sighing, Sophitia should’ve known better. “Let me guess you haven’t had any followers in four thousand years?”

“I have! It’s just that the worship decay is really harsh. And the only reason people want to join the religion of envy is to advance their own divine classes. Once they do, they always rejoin the religion they were envious of.” Invidia says with indignation in her voice.

“But you can’t do that. Well you could, but if you tried, the other sins would find out who you are. As my champion, I can hide your former life’s identity from the others. So, go out there and convert some heathens and get Divine Points (DP) and religion bonuses.”

Thinking a bit, Sophitia says in a monotone voice, “Hello world! The heal bot of envy has come to tell you about our envious and bitter AI pretending to be divine. Would you like to join our small failing cult?”

“No! Say it right.”

Ding, window message, “New quest: Spread the word. Read Invidia’s scriptures (marketing materials) then say them correctly to three people. Reward 3 DP.”

Troglodytarum

Hopefully the stats explanation explains things well. Always hard to be sure from this side. I'm a hater of large info dumps. so I tried to avoid having a page for each stat, along with classes, synergies, ect. I'll go into depth later about what each does as it comes up. Also the reason readers won't see character screen dumps or quest inserts as I think they distract from the story. Quests and character screens are there but I'll try to explain only the important parts mostly through character dialog or the 'character' format: message window,"quest explanation" 

For those that do want all the details I'll likely post an appendix of it all at some point or maybe use the glossary function this site has.

But the real question is what is 'that' exploit? Is it a powerful Chekhov's gun? Perhaps something Sophitia will teach to a young innocent soon to be added companion starting their path to the dark side of cheating and game exploitation.