008 – Death By Hummingbird

Time to Seal: 06:18

“Okay, first things first. You said I made choices, Gabriel. Are you allowed to explain to me why?”

I sat down at the end of the line of shelves and went through my menus.

“Yes, I can, mostly.” Her voice in my head sounded just a bit different than in the flesh.

“Why this class, why not some kind of caster? Why the Inaptitude?”

“Your stats are certainly good to start out with as a caster, but if you’ll look at your attributes section you’ll see that you have 4 points to spend on them already. That’s the gap between an average smart person and your extraordinary Intellect stat.”

“Okay, stats are meaningless for class selection if you can achieve a couple of levels with your chosen one. But I still feel like actual magic would end up being a lot more powerful and flexible than some seemingly random and potentially useless animal shapes?”

“More powerful, yes, sometimes. More flexible? Not exactly. One thing your Intellect and Intuition stats do is increase the rate at which you learn skills. This doesn’t happen with spells. They level at a predetermined rate and need to be used a lot to level up. So even if you were to get your hands on a sizable arsenal, you’d be stuck with only a handful of spells at meaningful levels.”

“You are saying Constance will be the Holy Bolt bot for the rest of her life?”

“Most likely, yes.”

Looking over the list of Tasks I had accomplished, and their rewards, I suddenly understood what I was missing. I’d be collecting shapes; developing a toolbox. But this one fucking sucked. I minimized the window for now, and took a look at my skills.

“I’m starting to understand.”

“Sadly, your initial shape was pretty much useless without significant levels in the Instinct skills. It was a risk you were aware of and we had a plan for what to do if that happened.”

On the other side of the room, Jamie and Lucy were talking while they examined the contents of a now-thawing freezer.

“Nuke my Charisma growth to allow me to pick Loki’s Gift.”

“Exactly. Which, you came to understand, would solve two problems at once.”

“I can see one problem solved. What’s the second?”

“The fact that if left to your own devices, you’d stop playing to your strengths.”

I took a deep breath. The idea that I made those decisions and was made to forget bothered me immensely. I didn’t trust myself to do the smart thing on the best of days. Now I was paranoid that a self I’d never been aware of did something dumb to screw me over.

“Go on.”

“You are a kind and empathic person. But you lack the self-confidence and willingness to manipulate to lead, which makes up a big part of the Charisma stat. Still, you’d eventually end up trying to do so anyway, spending points there, investing perks, to help out others. You’d know what to do to manipulate them, too, but you’d hate yourself for doing so.”

I hated, with a burning passion, how much sense that made. The cold math behind that perk.

Gabriel’s voice became warmer. “You chose well, Eve. You will be a boon to the people around you, of that I am certain.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it. Any recommendations for how to spend those attribute points? Should I look through completed Tasks first?”

“Absolutely do Tasks first. You might find the odd surprise in there. Regarding attributes: Even though you don’t apply any of the points you distribute into physical attributes when you shift, I’d recommend raising them all by at least two points before you invest in mental attributes.”

“Why?”

“Because you’ll get caught out of ATP eventually, and when you do, you need to be able to escape. In your current shape, you would have died if those hounds had been any closer when you got marked.”

The matter-of-fact tone with which she dropped that analysis made me shudder. I remembered her voice when that curse hit me. It was an excellent point and I’d absolutely heed it.

“Now please check out those Tasks you completed. I’ve been looking forward to it for a while now.”

“Glad you can find joy in what we do.”

Jamie and Lucy also stepped closer.

“Good luck,” Jamie said.

I had a dozen different Tasks I had already completed. They weren’t chronologically sorted.

The first one was for killing five enemies while shapeshifted, and its reward was called ‘Collar of the Loyal Guardian’. I mentally clicked accept. Nothing happened.

“Huh?”

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“Oh, you immediately got an item. It went into your inventory. Let me explain how those work,” Gabriel said. Her voice carried actual excitement. I guess this was the highlight of her job. “You should also pay attention, Jamie. You’ll use this a lot, and probably as soon as you head out there.”

Gabriel led us through the steps of accessing the inventory menu. Thanks to the glyph in our hand we could move real-world objects between some kind of pocket dimension and our hand. It had limitations on what we could carry, based on our Strength attribute, but they were generous. Even in cat shape I’d be able to store more things in my inventory than I could feasibly carry in my regular human shape.

I summoned the Collar into my open hand. Lucy burst out laughing, and Jamie couldn’t really hide his amusement either. Hoping against all reason, I had held onto the hope that it wouldn’t look like this. But it was a dog collar. As I looked at it, text appeared over it, floating there like a tooltip.

[Collar of the Loyal Guardian (not bonded)

Grants Shape: Golden Retriever (Cost: 1 ATP)

+2 to all Physical Attributes while shapeshifted. Bonus doubled in Golden Retriever Shape.]

“Is that… good?” I asked.