The Weight of Legacy
Chapter 104 - Peeking Under the Hood
This is so fucking dumb.
…
I love it.
Malwine wasn't about to deny the accuracy of what she had read prior to actually picking [Stylus in Style] up. Veit's father was absolutely right—whoever had come up with this needed to be talked to.
For now, however, she had a more important matter to work on, as the giant stylus continued to poke at the panel, 'writing' star emojis upon it. While the widow barely had a childhood, she'd known the kinds of styluses some gaming consoles of her youth used, especially those of the type other kids almost always carried on them. Back then, anyway.
Was there a point to this? …Not explicitly. She did have a lot of testing to do still, having only had these Skills for a week.
For one, [Write Anything] was difficult to wrap her mind around. She couldn't actually use it to draw the freehand family tree of her dreams… But she could certainly just swap words out for things she knew meant the same—she just needed to play around with it more.
☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆…An unexpected combination of how her Skills worked enabled her to basically write hands-free. Granted, she had always been able to turn her thoughts into words, but after rekindling all that muscle memory for actual writing during her lessons, this felt like an in-between that thrilled her far more than it should have.
[Stylus in Style] Anyone can write, but the art of writing isn't just about noting things down. It's about the experience! Manifest a visible and fully customizable writing implement that can not only affect externalized panels that aren't your own, but look good while doing it! Trait: None Aspect: NoneHad it not been for the journal's assurances that she really did need an implement, Malwine would have feared she'd wasted a slot on a cosmetic Skill.
She still feared that, actually.
At least it worked as advertised.
Her other new Skills were deceptively simple, and she couldn't help but notice the latter Skill didn't seem particularly themed to match its counterpart. Maybe that implied OBeryl's version had formed differently, or maybe whichever process Veit's father had used to make this possible didn't truly transfer full descriptions over—she couldn't tell.
[Write Anything]Not all civilizations have been limited by the needless rigidity of the written word. There is far more to communication than that, and to allow oneself to be held back alphabets and their cousins is to settle for mediocrity.
Any and all Skills that focus on writing can now treat anything that can be noted down as appropriate for their purposes, so long as it holds a meaning as concise as true examples of writing in the current medium would.
Meaning, for its purposes, is determined by available knowledge, not by any extant or theoretical standards. Trait: None Aspect: None [System Eye]Ever changing and ever accurate, panels show us that which lies within, yet we fail to understand what lies within them. The words we see are but a façade, and it takes more than sight to truly know what is being told.
By focusing on a panel, you attain a specialized sense that enables you to examine its true contents, if they run deeper than mere text.
This Skill does not enable you to change the panels you behold. It is purely exploratory. Efficacy of the Skill and quality of feedback may improve with further levels, but this Skill ultimately relies on raw Resilience for the parsing of information. Trait: None Aspect: NoneWhile she had admittedly lost herself a little with those first Skills, she attributed it to her physical age before swiftly declaring she deserved to have a bit of fun.
The only <Mind> Skill of the bunch took that up to eleven once she tried it out, though. Following the way her Skills panel was organized, she started with the <Body> category—with her first Skill there.
[Home Sweet Home] Home is where the heart is, and probably—hopefully—a safe space where you can hide from all your problems. Even if you have to run to get away from there. Up to once per day, you may return to a room of your choice within the location you deem your home at the cost of half your remaining [Integrity]. Wards and dimensional barriers may prevent this Skill from activating. Trait: None Aspect: [Homeward Roads]. You retain an awareness of the path home at all times.The panel unraveled before her.
Your [Mental Defense] Skill has improved! 18 → 19 Your [System Eye] Skill has improved! 0 → 1"Sister?"
Malwine felt a hand on her shoulder, lightly shaking her from the side. She blinked, turning in that direction to find Adelheid leaning closer, concern clear in her expression.
Okay. What?
"Sorry, I got distracted by a weird Skill. I'm alright."
With the unconvincing apology properly delivered, Malwine continued blinking. She nearly resummoned the panel, only to get the impression that she didn't need to. Not yet. Sure, the panel would show up, but what would be the point if she hadn't understood what she was sensing?
"I'm going to meditate again for a bit," Malwine told her little sister, hopefully preventing any further well-intentioned interruptions.
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That momentary lapse in focus that left her staring at nothing hadn't been a real blank. More like, stuff had become detectable, and her inability to parse it had interrupted the work of her Skills.
It was interesting and concerning all at once, but it felt ultimately harmless. Like it or not, it made sense. Messing with the Curse had helped her level [Mental Defense] even before she had proper Forger Skills. Whatever sense this Skill related to must have interacted with the panel in a much deeper level than her clumsy attempt back then had.
Focusing on [Home Sweet Home] again required holding on to it like a lifeline, but her grip grew firmer by the second, even as she ignored the notifications rolling by.
Your [System Eye] Skill has improved! 1 → 2 Your [Mental Defense] Skill has improved! 19 → 20 Your [System Eye] Skill has improved! 2 → 3Conditions. Rules. Actions.
She didn't know what each element was called, though they probably had an official name somewhere. The journal hadn't mentioned anything similar during her skim, but Veit's father had presumably been gathering information through external means. With the attitude his writing betrayed, he'd stolen all that information while laughing at the Guild's expense, and while Malwine found that commendable, it probably did mean he had literally no follow-up questions to work with.
Malwine was likewise on her own for this.
She bit her lip involuntarily and locked in on [Home Sweet Home]. As it once again unraveled before her mind's eye, she tried her best to make sense of it all.
Your [System Eye] Skill has improved! 3 → 4 You have reached Level 75!It was a Skill, certainly, but Skills came in all shapes and sizes. This, in particular, was what Malwine tentatively dubbed an action Skill. An active Skill that needed to be triggered, and it did something once that was done.
Strangely enough, the actual details of what it did felt secondary to that trigger. She got the distinct impression that even that trigger itself was locked behind… test conditions. Nothing felt as though it was given any ordinal priority over something else, and it was almost as if different elements were in a feedback loop.
What she had dubbed 'test conditions' for this active Skill to be used checked to ensure the target location was not behind a ward or barrier that could impede it, but it also checked—separately yet simultaneously—just what that location was.
That part was more confusing. The Skill somehow knew what the place she considered her home was. Somehow. It had to, because another test Malwine could sense within it was whether the room she targeted was indeed part of that designated home.
She wished she could recall every instance of one of her Skills failing—if she examined them now, using [System Eye], would she be able to figure out just why they had failed? Having known its rules from the description, Malwine had never even considered trying to use [Home Sweet Home] to teleport somewhere that wasn't a room in her home, but the safeguard existed anyway.
Similarly, whether she had used the Skill during the past day was considered, meaning the cooldown was enforced through these same test conditions.
The final thing the Skill appeared to check was the current value of her [Integrity]—for the Skill to work, she needed to have at least half of its maximum. Considering half her [Integrity] would be the cost of being teleported, that made perfect sense, yet that was another thing she would have never considered.
Beyond that was the result of action itself—the teleportation—that only triggered if all tests were passed. But it was not alone. Alongside it, some kind of switch was flipped, to mark the Skill as having been used that day. However it was that it was flipped back once a day passed was beyond Malwine—maybe it was within the nature of the 'switch' itself? Finally, the cost. Just as the Skill's action moved her to her destination, it took from her [Integrity] to power itself.
There was probably something for her to discover there, some implication due to the cost being a percentage and not a fixed cost, but that was beyond [System Eye]'s power to explain to her. For now, at least.
Malwine was as giddy as she was thrilled, and it clicked for her—this was why supposedly good Forgers had this Skill. While it did require having other Skills to look at, it also painted a clear picture of how they worked.
Instinctively, she knew she didn't have the ability to actually make these elements. She wouldn't have any idea how to start, let alone the power to. But this could provide a path towards at least understanding how Skills worked, and, hopefully, how to make them evolve as she wished even if truly Forging something like the ones on Matilda's Skill books was beyond her.
Making no effort to suppress her grin, Malwine examined the Aspect next. In her joy, she'd almost just moved on to [Unpacifiable], curious to know how that one would feel under these new senses, but she caught herself.
She had to at least try to be thorough, even if she was dying to know what made her favorite alarm tick.
…And she did feel less glad that she remembered to check once she started examining [Homeward Roads]. The purpose of its elements were less immediately clear to her, but they were… certainly there. The only thing she could identify clearly was something similar to what had been within the Aspect's Skill, a test to check what the location of her home was, but in this case, the test was closer to an anchor than something that needed to be passed for it to work.
That fit the description well enough, actually.
Rather than spending more time trying to figure out just what this Aspect did once it knew the location, Malwine finally gave in to her curiosity. This was something she could always revisit later, anyway.
Immediately, the difference between both of her original <Body> Skills was palpable.
[Unpacifiable] Ignorance is a leading cause of death according to wherever you pull statistics out of, and you know better than to let yourself be caught unawares. You are always acutely aware of any noticeable threats to your wellbeing, including anything that could trigger a negative status effect. Trait: None Aspect: [Implacable]. Your physical needs require less frequent attention, and you may burn [Integrity] to sustain yourself. You may choose to halve the natural decay of your [Integrity], at the cost of only being able to restore it via rest until the next time it returns to its maximum value.[Unpacifiable] was an active Skill, yet not. The entirety of it seemed to flicker at once from the moment she focused on it.
No tests appeared bound to it, but something stood at its core. It reminded her of the unfathomable way in which [Home Sweet Home] could identify what her home was—an unreadable element. The Skill was calling upon something, using unknown criteria to identify threats, but whatever that was, it was something beyond the Skill itself.
I wonder if Skills just reference things from the system?
That could prove troublesome, but she found the idea hard to dismiss. If these criteria wasn't held in the Skill, where else could it be but within the system?
Now, the Skill's action did not require her input, and no rules appeared to govern whether it could be used. It simply worked. However, Malwine found she could focus on [Unpacifiable], immediately sending out a pulse of sorts. She had no idea how it worked, beyond the fact that the Skill shook and something in its center activated sooner than it would have on its own.
Was that what she had done, all the times she had consulted the Skill intentionally? It certainly seemed that way.
If she did nothing, it would still happen periodically. Something was sent outwards, perhaps once every few minutes. She couldn't tell just where the pulse ended, if it did at all. It felt like it was casting a wide net everywhere, though nothing in the Skill's description hinted at anything like that. There were also no gaps between each instance of it.
Had she not been feeling this, she would have never considered that this Skill might not be constant—the pulses were so close together that the difference hardly mattered.
[Unpacifiable] was practically a passive Skill in function, even if what she'd glimpsed behind the curtain revealed that was technically not the case.
Malwine focused on her Curse, not bothering to poke at the Skill. Within a minute, the gnawing sensation she'd come to associate with a threat being flagged flashed through her mind.
Within the Skill, there'd been a fork in the road of sorts, and while it was business as usual as far as she could tell, now there had been a gap. The briefest of interruptions between pulses had sounded the alarm.
This didn't feel like something she could directly apply in any context, but it was incredibly interesting to explore.
Now, [Implacable]. This Aspect seemed to unlock not one but two actions that were treated as separate.
The first element she noticed was similar to what she'd seen in her first <Body> Skill. [Integrity] was consumed to fuel an outcome—in this case, the fulfillment of any of her body's needs. This was something she'd never experimented with, and likewise, the Aspect didn't contain anything that explained just what sustaining herself through its use entailed.
The second action the Aspect enabled was more complex. Choosing to make her [Integrity] drop at a slower rate triggered several simultaneous effects. One was obvious, another flipping of a switch. This was presumably what kept it from being restored until she rested enough for it to return to its maximum.
Malwine inhaled uneasily as she examined the last effect. Seriously? Is that…?
She wasn't doubting what [System Eye] implied, or even her own interpretation of it—she was just baffled. In no smart part because of how dumb she felt. Why hadn't she considered this before?
In hindsight, it felt obvious. This was an effect. Literally.
Facepalming to center herself, Malwine poked the element from every angle, looking at it in isolation, and in its normal state.
But her conclusion didn't change.
After all this time, Malwine finally understood why that panel was titled 'Visible Status Effects'.
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