Museum Core Chapter 10: Shopping for Superpowers

Owens looked like death warmed over as he stumbled into the parking lot, and it wasn’t even 10 am yet. Jaclyn winced. Poor guy.

She could imagine what kinds of calls he had to be dealing with.

“Get my son out of there this instant or I’ll have your badge!”

“Do you have any idea how much money those paintings are worth? You will retrieve them!”

“You know my father is probably dead, right, and you shouldn’t really waste too much of your manpower looking for him, God knows you have more than enough you need to do. By the way, I’m a huge supporter of the boys in blue, and if you ever need any support, even outside office hours, I’d be ever so happy to help …”

And Owens’ seniority meant he had to deal with anyone and everyone who managed to get past the regular 999 operators, which meant a whole lot of powerful and/or influential people.

What. A. Mess.

He made his way over to where Jaclyn and Gula were waiting and greeted the orc.

“Good morning, I’m Chief Superintendent Owens. Inspector Abrahams tells me you’re offering to help us with the … current situation in exchange for a few assurances?”

“Yes,” Gula nodded as she held out what looked like a medieval version of a clipboard, which held a piece of parchment.

It read “They who sign this paper solemnly swear to not downplay or misrepresent the help provided by the Worldstrider Tribe, bringing it up when relevant. In addition, they will not evict the Worldstrider Tribe from their local campsite without adequate warning (what is relevant and adequate is determined by the signee’s genuine understanding of their meaning)”.

Jaclyn had to admit the contract looked very generous. Either the help offered was not as significant as it seemed, or the orcs were desperate. And as for the reason for their desperation … it had taken all of an hour for multiple massively dangerous foreign biomes to be located on Earth. Who the hell knew what else was out there?

And Gula had talked about chaos across multiple universes, who knew what was going on out there?

“What happens if I should break this contract?” Owens asked.

“Unless otherwise specified, breaking a contract will afflict you with the Sign of the Liar for 100 years, which will always appear on a patch of visible skin and let anyone who beholds it know its bearer’s transgressions.”

“Can the time be changed?” Owens asked.

“Yes,” Gula nodded. “What do you think is fair?”

Ownes shook his head, “I was just curious, let’s leave it as is. Could I get a few blank contracts to experiment with after this?”

Gula just pulled several from empty air and handed them over. “Of course. They’re not expensive.”

Owens thanked her and signed the contract after only a few seconds of consideration, then gave back her pen.

“Please help Inspector Abram get a Class, she has my full trust and confidence, I really can’t be away from my desk this long.”

And with that, the superintendent literally ran back into the precinct at full speed, dignity be damned.

“Would you like to look at the Nexus now?” Gula asked and Jaclyn nodded. The orc made a gesture and a pair of very large individuals dragged a waist-high column of crystal out of one of the tents. If that rock was anywhere near as heavy as it looked, and judging by the groove it left in the asphalt, it was, two people shouldn’t have been enough to move it. But somehow, these two were perfectly capable of doing so.

“What now?” Jaclyn asked when the pillar was placed before them.

“Place your hand on it,” Gula instructed and she did as she was told.

Immediately, the strange and ominous symbols flickering at the edge of her vision resolved into legible characters. Whoa.

Welcome to the Sys—

Happy sixteenth birthday! Now that you have reached the appropriate age, you … ERROR! Bearer is over sixteen … ERROR Resolved, standard access grante—

System Initialization comple—

Emergency System activation due to mana influx begin—

OVERRIDING ERROR, MULTIPLE SYSTEMS ATTEMPTING TO LOAD, CONDENSING ERROR MESSAGES (see list?)

Multiple conflicting errors from multiple systems detected, overall System load too great, please wait for conflict resolution, estimated time until full resolution: 120:17:23

Village Nexus detected, Universe P723 System overrides conflict.

What the actual fuck?

That was the longest list of errors she’d seen since that one time she’d accidentally spilled coffee on his laptop. At least it seemed to have calmed down now.

Compiling Skills (see full list?)

Would you like to create a Class or look at the repository?

From their previous conversations, Jaclyn had gathered that picking a pre-existing Class was the way to go, but she still wanted to look at all her options first.

Big mistake.

A list that looked like it would fill the phone book several times over blossomed into her vision, each entry detailing something she was good at.

Some of it was obvious.

Firearms handling, investigation, childrearing, tricking young girls into eating their vegetables, something called “bullshit radar” that turned out to just be her gut feeling whether or not people were lying.

But the whole affair was weirdly arranged. A few dozen different martial arts were listed individually, when really, they should have all been summed up under “Mixed Martial Arts” because that was what she’d trained in for years before finally choosing to become a police officer. However, the various styles that had contributed to what she’d learned were what the System registered. Weird.

Even weirder was that there was a martial arts Skill, but by its description, it was more focused on the “arts” part, something about looking good instead of, well, the martial part of its name. She had to admit that the way it talked about “optimally combining attacks so they flow together well’ sounded good, though.   

There was even nonsense like “using a remote” and all of the various arcade games she’d played in the past.

Literally, anything and everything she’d ever done could be read from the damn Skill list, from her hobbies, to what kind of food she liked to cook and even more intimate things that had no bloody business being recorded anywhere other than her memory.

With that … interesting exploration of the System’s intelligence-gathering apparatus done with, she looked at her available Classe. She wouldn’t be picking one just jet, she knew far too little about what would and wouldn’t work, but she didn’t want to go into those explanations blind either.

Her choices were, in a word, horrifying.

It seemed the System was trying to somehow reconcile her highest Skills into a single Class, except said Skills were all related to hand-to-hand combat, policework, and childrearing.

And what did you get out of just such combinations?

Childrearing and policework turned into the world’s most intrusive helicopter parent.

Childrearing and hand-to-hand combat was a concept that chilled her to the bone.

Meanwhile, policework and hand-to-hand combat together offered her Classes that were built around being the kind of “I don’t enforce the rules, I am the rules” cop that had no right to even think about wearing a badge.

And the possible combinations for all three were, to a one, hack jobs, ones that bent the concepts they were comprised of to the point where they were screamed.

She immediately asked Gula how anyone could create a reasonable Class.

“Skills are upgraded slowly as you use them, but taking them to their highest Levels, beyond the bounds of what is possible normally, requires you to consciously focus on improving them. Once you have a few Skills in the twenties, normal Skills stop really being taken into consideration for Class creation. That’s why we have Class repositories so that only one person needs to work that hard to create a certain kind of Class.”

Level. 20.

Her highest Skill was Bàoquán, a specific style of Kung Fu, which was at 15. She also had Martial Arts at 14, Pugilism at 12 and Bullshit Radar at 11.

Of course, how that Level translated to actual ability was an entirely different question. For example, at Level 6, her ability to handle firearms seemed dangerously lacking, yet she was passable with her gun. She wasn’t a markswoman by any means, but she was perfectly capable of using her gun in the capacity the job demanded and she’d certainly never hit anything she didn’t want to.

There was also a weird little thing about how both the “quantified ability” and the literal superpowers were named “Skills”, but she assumed that was a weirdness of the translation magic Gula was using.

Also, how exactly was her proficiency measured? There was a Bruce Lee quote about how someone who’d practiced a single kick ten thousand times was a lot more dangerous than someone who’d practiced a thousand kicks once.

Assuming, for example, that all those kicks were part of a single martial art, say, Kung Fu, would someone with a wide knowledge base have a high Skill Level, would the person with an incredibly high proficiency in a single move, have a higher Level, or did the System somehow split the difference?

In the first scenario, the person was unlikely to be able to use any of those kicks in real-world combat, while someone who’d trained a single kick to perfection was capable of utilizing it when it mattered. On the other hand, only training a single more would leave you screwed if the situation prevented you from using it?

And how would improving Skill Levels affect her? Would she just learn more quickly, or would increasing a Skill Level somehow boost her understanding of everything that fell under the umbrella of the increased Skill?

All stuff she’d have to test out, she supposed. Or ask Gula later.

Overall, bringing up her Skill to the needed Level would be a nightmare.

But thankfully, she didn’t have to, she had access to the local class repository.

Class Name

Class Description

Initial Skill

Wandering Spiritcaller

A world is a large place, isn’t it, something you could explore for most of your lifetime?

Yet there are other worlds out there, ones you can also visit, should you be ambitious enough.

However, the multiverse is a dangerous place, and you need protection, so why not get something out of your journey?

This Class allows you to summon powerful spirits belonging to the legendary creatures you have found.

Spiritcaller

Nomad

Home is not a place, home is an idea, or as many cultures put it “home is where the heart is”.

The Nomad is the purest part of this philosophy, the backbone of the wandering orcish tribes, granting accelerated travel speeds to the entire group, rapid shelter creation, even gaining spatial storage in time.

Supernatural Traveling

Anima Monk

The fist. The oldest weapon known to all races that have hands as a part of their anatomy.

Yet the fist is hardly an ideal weapon compared to what animals wield, isn’t it? You have to form it right or else you’ll break your fingers, whether or not you’ll tear the skin on your knuckles is effectively a coin toss, and your hands don’t have any natural weapons … well, unless you count fingernails, but using those in a fight will usually end with them getting torn off.

The Anima Monk draws on the idea of a chosen animal to empower themselves, both offensively and defensively, gaining access to claws, venom, underwater breathing, or even flight.

Spirit Bond

Primal Warrior

The Primal Warrior lies at the core of the orcish military might.

A mighty fighter who is capable of fighting irrespective of their equipment.

Lack of armor, weapons, and even more basic equipment will not be a problem.

Shrug off blows as though you were wearing armor, deal damage with your bare hands as though you were wearing brass knuckles, cut with a tree branch as though it were a sword, or crush limbs as though it were a giant club.

Empty-handed Armory

Ranger

The natural world is beautiful, isn’t it?

Beautiful … and deadly.

Freezing wastelands of ice and snow, scorching deserts, jungles filled with venomous creatures, the crushing depths of the ocean, and the airless void that is outer space.

There are specialized Classes for each of these environments, true, but the Ranger can deal with all of them, albeit to a lesser degree, providing resistance to all natural environments, as well as knowledge on how to live off all those lands.

Natural Living

Worldstrider

A Class to not only explore a given world, but the multiverse as a whole, passing through countless Systems and even System-less environments.

It starts out with the capability to find existing natural weaknesses in the fabric of reality and grows to the point where changing universes is as easy as walking through a door.

Void Sense

Healer of Nature

More than just a Healer, who has to labouriously pour out their mana pool a dozen times over to repair serious injuries, the healer of nature channels the power of the natural world to create superior results at a low cost.

Of course, this Class does require natural resources to play with, limiting its utility in highly industrialized places.

Natural Regeneration

Sentinel of Truth

A staple of orc society, where everyone needs to be able to rely on everyone else.

This is a Class that anchors this idea, serving to mediate disputes within the clan and enforce contracts with outsiders.

At higher Tiers, this Class also allows for the separation of truth from lie, as well as helping with the punishment of crimes.

Binding Contracts

That list made a whole lot of sense, didn’t it?

Together, those classes should cover everything a tribe of multiversal nomads needed, from ensuring strangers were trustworthy to enabling travel and being able to defend themselves no matter the environment.    

All of those were amazing in their own right. Sentinel of Truth called out to her as a police officer, something that would make her job a whole lot easier.

Worldstrider sounded incredible, though slightly less so in the face of a devastated multiverse.

Wandering Spiritcaller was likely heavily weakened by the fact that she was in no position to visit very many new worlds, but it still sounded great.

And, of course, Ranger sounded like the exact kind of thing needed to navigate the jungle that her home had turned into.

Primal Warrior just … it called to her, freedom from a world of gadgets, where her capabilities would be her own.

But it didn’t call as much as Anima Pugilist did.

It was pretty much perfect. Spirit Bond sounded awesome, though it would probably take her forever to settle on one. And it was a Class that was built around hand-to-hand combat.

“I’m guessing that the most worthy version of the Class is added to the repository, and the rest are discarded?” Jaclyn asked.

“There is usually only a single version of the Class one works for available.” Gula said with a frown “Do you have more?”

“I have twenty or so, and they’re all basically the same thing with infinitesimally different names.”

Gula winced.

“But I know what I want, now I just need to pick an animal with a nice set of abilities to borrow.”