Chapter 101: Chapter 101 – The Nature of a Paladin

Name: Amber Ashborn

Age: 27 years old

Class Skills: Healing Touch, Endurance, Channel Divinity, Paladin’s Grace

General Skills: Instrumental, Conjure Weapon, Dampen Damage, Endure Elements, Adaptive Resistance

Traits: Reca

I frown vaguely, chewing on the side of my cheek, staring in dissatisfaction at my notes. “Okay, I need to do triage on information.”

“My lord?”

“Informational triage.” I sigh mournfully. “There’s so much I don’t know about that there isn’t enough time to learn it all, and I need to learn the most important things first.”

“Truly, this must be the greatest of vicissitudes for you.”

I glower at Amber, which has the expected effect of making her smirk and lean over to kiss me. “It really is,” I murmur once she breaks away, letting my genuine annoyance with the fact show alongside the still-simmering joy. “Usually I have more time to learn things than I know what to do with, when it comes to the basics.”

“Triage, then?”

“There’s some sort of Class… hierarchy, right, and this gives you progression paths, and the sort of normal thing to do is you just work through them. You start off with a super basic name and you get more specific and interesting as you go up.” She nods at me. “All of that isn’t important, because none of you need my advice and I don’t think this will let me Class up even if we get another Pylon.”

“It is very unlikely.” Sara’s at the low table, sitting with her legs folded under her, posture perfect. “That was the precise mechanism that your deceased parasite intended to sabotage. At most, your artifact will grow in strength, though that is certain regardless, as it…”

I wait a bit longer than usual for Sara’s pauses, especially given that usually she brings her sentence to a complete stop and doesn’t trail off. “Settles in?”

“That will do as a description, though it is imprecise.”

I hide my chuckles at her scowl, and instead nod at Amber. “I know enough to know that your Paladin class normally wouldn’t be available to anyone at Apprentice Tier, right?”

“Sometimes at the third,” she agrees blandly.

“Yeah, sometimes.” I do what feels like flexing my brain, almost; it’s the act of willing for there to be a change. I’d had to learn to do that in the first place to make use of the Visor, and it wasn’t all that different from an Interface from back home—from back on the Spirit. What’s different is that now I’m having to work on training myself to not trigger the Visor when I don’t want to, because it’s gotten a lot more sensitive. Class: Paladin writes itself on a new line, floating in my vision. “Are there any, like, sub-categorizations of human?”

“No.”

“Not anymore.”

Amber turns to Sara in surprise. “There once were?”

“So it is written.” Sara pauses a moment to collect her thoughts, this time, and it crosses my mind to wonder why she hadn’t before. “There are recordings of humans of sufficient tiers unlocking Heritages and Progressions. These recordings seem adequately attested; if they are incorrect, it is an active disinformation effort.”

“As opposed to just people getting things wrong in good faith.” Sara nods at my clarification. “Does, uh, if I called something a Bloodline, would that be the same as a Heritage?”

I get a somewhat puzzled look from Amber and Sara’s usual flat expressionlessness. “Zidanya!”

“Sara?” Zidanya props her elbows on the long… table, counter, workspace, whichever it is depends on how we’re using it, after all, and she leans out to look at us. “Oil bears no kinship with eternity.”

That gets one of the by-now-standard double blinks and a moment’s pause. “Are Heritages also known as Bloodlines?” Sara mangles the pronunciation a bit, but it’s recognizable.

“Not in this Age,” Zidanya says with a false brightness, “nor in the one before. But in the oldest of days, before the First War, yes.”

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“Resume—”

“How about—”

Sara and I both start and both stop, and she points at me, which I infer to mean that I should say my piece. “How about Progressions and Metamorphoses?”

“Aye, likewise.” I nod my head to Sara, who waits an additional moment anyway.

“Resume your cooking before your oil smokes, then. And thank you,” she adds almost belatedly.

“So, no… any of that. Ilk of human, not otherwise modified.”

“Does your… you said that the Pylon displayed it as a simple list of words?”

“Yeah. And I… don’t know? It had a lot of things that it said was locked, whatever that means. Bloodline, Metamorphosis, Subspecies,” I start ticking them off on my fingers, thumb, index, thumb-and-index. “Perks, Traits, Feats, Stats. Imbued Essence of Body, Imbued Essence of Mind, Imbued Essence of Soul. Runic Attunement, Fundamental Key, Boons, Temperings, Ancestral Tithe. Talent, Attunement.” I cross-check with my Visor, nodding to myself. “And Titles. Yup, that’s all of them. Eighteen in all.”

Amber looks extremely intrigued and a little confused. “How do you count that on one hand?”

“Binary,” Sara and I say in more-or-less unison. We look at each other, and then I shrug and leave it at that, which gets me a muttered mages from Amber.

“That is an astonishing list, sir.” Sara has an emotion on her face, which is unusual enough for me to notice. “I have heard of… seven of those?”

“Which seven, and which ones are they?” Amber has pen and paper in hand, looking expectantly at Sara. “I wonder if we know different ones.”

“Bloodlines and Metamorphoses we know as Heritages and Progressions. I find it very likely that Ilkane is this Subspecies, and if Stats rise from the numbers-root as it seems, they are our Attributes.” Sara fires this off rapidly, then pauses. “Deeds for Titles; that is a word which remains in our lexicon, but we no longer use it. Fundamental Key is archaic but remains the term for a matter specific to Bards and related Classes; likewise Runic Attunement for certain mages, though I thought it to be nonsense.”

“I know Ilkane, but we call them Natures in Ion, and I suspect our Glories are my lord’s Feats.”

“You know,” I say quietly, “we do have someone here who probably can tell us the answers to all of this.”

“Would you not rather solve the puzzle, my lord?”

I kiss Amber’s smirking face, and then sigh. “No. I mean, yes, but no.” That gets me a raised eyebrow, and I shrug. “We’re short on time. It would be fun, but… triage, remember? I want to get the Visor closer to being a full replacement for what I’ve lost, fast, because we do actually have a fight coming up, and I think I’ll be able to contribute better if we figure this out.”

Accusations of my being a spoilsport fly, but they fly while Sara heads over to fetch Vonne, and I can see the humor in Amber’s eyes. I take the opportunity while it’s just the two of us in the common space to kiss her, letting my hands roam a bit hungrily, and manage to break off in time to be able to catch Vonne when she performs a flying tackle of a hug onto the couch.

She gives us a rapid run-down with the caveat that this is just her personal understanding, and both Amber and I take notes. Imbued Essences require a specific Class archetype that none of us has, and which as far as Vonne is aware nobody on Iavshet has, so that’s just entirely not relevant, and neither is Temperings for the same reason. Ancestral Tithe requires children who follow in your path, which certainly isn’t relevant right now—if any of my kids manifested the Voidsight, it would have been a whole thing, and I wouldn’t have been on the Spirit for long after I trained them—and Talent is a sort of if it’s relevant, you’ll know kind of thing, where if you have the potential to unlock it, it’s in your… Self-view, what I saw as a sort of descriptive sheet of paper and which Amber apparently sees as a representation of the Great Temple.

Others are more relevant. Runic Attunements are a minor approachability, mindset, and efficiency thing; mine is Void, to nobody’s surprise, and apparently Zidanya has one for Nature. Attunements, unmodified, are the same but for schools of magic; Vonne has one for illusion magics, but none of the rest of us do. Then there’s the stuff that other people also know about, which they all pool their information on: Titles or Deeds for stuff that you’d be known by or for, Traits—which they realize mid-conversation they all know by like five different names, just not by that name—for fundamental personality stuff, and Feats or Glories for stuff that’s impressive to the System as opposed to other people.

I still have my notes from when I used that first Pylon, but we don’t wind up spending any time talking about me. I mean, not that I wasn’t in some ways eager to share, but what we needed was for me to get my Visor working better, not for me to… vent my emotions, yet again.

Amber lays out everything that she is, quiet, matter of fact, like it’s nothing to her. It takes us through dinner; Traits, Glories, Deeds, and with every resonant word the world shivers and my model of her expands and refines. It changes on a fundamental level; I’m still displaying it as a simple list, something ridiculously reductive which is easily grasped and rapidly digested, but the underlying data, the model, whatever, is changing with every aspect of her that she reveals.

It’s more of a world now. Initially I think it’s a solar system, and maybe I could represent it that way too, but the physics actually makes more sense as a planet. There’s a core to her, something that has nothing to do with the System, chaotic and fluid and, well, appropriately molten, in a way; it runs hot and passionate, for sure. But there’s topography and plate tectonics and weather systems, all of them metaphorical; there’s nothing there that is meant to be looked at in the raw or at this remove from the raw, and while I do have a model that’ll tell me if a System connection is healthy or rotted in that specific dybbuk way, I’ve had no luck in understanding how the communication works or how information might be stored by the System or by the Self.

It’s beautiful, of course. Every thrumming, resonant word she intones makes it all the more beautiful as it refines it to be something closer to who and what she is, because she’s beautiful, in so many ways. Every word of it does something else, too, something I don’t fully understand; connections, maybe, like nigh-invisibly thin tendril equivalents to Sara’s own soul-access methods, associated maybe with something else I haven’t figured out, something to which the best I can do is ascribe directionality and strength as attributes relative to the world-model.

She’s shivering when I guide her to bed, almost shaking, and we lie there for a while, my arms wrapped around her softness and strength, trying to understand why and what to do.

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