Chapter 4: Chapter 4 – Hugh levels up

No sooner did I dismiss the notification that Natalie accepted my invitation than another one popped up.

And then another one right after that.

And another.

Yes! I'd done it. I'd leveled up. And it was all thanks to Natalie. I quickly pulled up my status.

It wasn't exactly unexpected that the XP needed for the next level had increased, and everything else checked out. Level had increased to two. Number of users had increased to one. I had one free attribute point available. And the skill, Quest Giver, had been added.

"What are you doing?" Natalie asked, and I realized I'd been staring at screens she couldn't see.

"Well, because you accepted my invite, I leveled up."

"What exactly does that mean?" she asked.

"Mainly that I can, presumably, use the single free attribute point to increase one of my stats."

Naturally, that prompted her to ask about my possible choices, so I quickly described what I thought each of the abbreviations stood for. "AGL is almost definitely agility, which typically controls gross motor skills and possibly speed. CHA is pretty common shorthand for charisma, a measure of how attractive one is. CON is almost always means constitution, which is basically a measure of your health. END is most likely endurance, a stat that decides your stamina. MEN is an unusual one but not unheard of, and I think it stands for mental, some combination of intelligence and wisdom, maybe. And STR pretty much has to stand for strength, as in physical lifting capacity."

"Wait. You're telling me that I can literally make myself smarter?"

"I’m not saying anything of the sort. Nothing is definite at this point. I have only the barest of real information available, and I'm basing my guesses on works of fiction mostly written by amateur authors and hobbyists."

"Still," she said, "there a chance that I can literally make myself more intelligent, make school easier, just by adding one of these points?"

"That's my best guess. We really need to test it, though."

"How do I level up?" she asked.

"Let's put on the brakes a bit, okay? There are way too many unknowns. I think we should really carefully consider all our options in a calm, methodical matter."

"Yeah. Okay. That's probably best." Natalie let out a breath. "So what's next, then?"

"Ideally, between the two of us, we'd experiment with each of the six attributes. First, we'd establish a baseline with some kind of test so that we can measure exactly how much impact raising it has."

"Some of those will be easier than others. What are you thinking about first?"

"Well, strength seems easy to measure, but I'm not sure that raising it would help me a whole lot at the moment. Maybe agility? I don't know what a good test would be to provide definitive numbers, but I've always been a little bit clumsy. It would be nice not to have to worry so much about tripping over my own feet."

"I know," she said, "batting cages. My dad used to bring me all the time. You can set the speed of the pitch to be really consistent and do a bunch of tests, see how many balls you hit. Then you can raise the stat and do the tests over to see if you improved."

I wasn't sure that batting a baseball was solely dependent on agility, but the suggestion made a lot of sense in that the test certainly did involve some amount of agility and it seemed reproduceable. "Good idea!"

"Okay," she said. "What's next?"

It was easy to tell that she was very interested in getting done with my stuff so that we figure out how to raise her level, and, honestly, I understood that impulse. She was clearly interested in the idea of increasing her mental stat to see if it made her more intelligent.

I really did want to proceed calmly and rationally, though, so I took another look at my status. One big area of concern stood out. I was maxed out at one system user and had no idea how to add more. So far, I'd only encountered two sources of experience - completing a quest and Natalie leveling up. Until I received another system quest or Natalie leveled, I was stuck, and the inability to add new users tied my increases in strength one hundred percent to hers.

There wasn't much I could do about that, though.

I sighed. "Let's figure out how to get you experience."

She grinned nervously. Given our previous conversations about her taking her clothes off, I was right there with her - anxious about the prospect of embarrassment and nudity but a little bit excited as well, though the reasons for that last part was entirely different for me than for her.

I concentrated on the Quest Giver skill, and a box popped up.

That was actually an encouraging sign. Since there was a screen that gave me a choice, that implied that I'd eventually have more choices. I mentally selected Natalie.

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It did not escape my notice that I wasn't able to select the quest rewards, which really made perfect sense. Otherwise being able to assign an easy task and an astronomical amount of XP would be too broken.

"In order to level, you need to get experience points, and, so far, the only way I know of for you to get those points is by performing quests," I said. "Luckily, I happen to have just gained a skill that allows me to assign you quests."

It also did not escape my attention exactly how much control was being granted to me over her advancement. Right now, when our fates are so tightly linked because I could only level up when she did, that didn't seem like a big deal. If I had a dozen users, however, I would obviously be sorely tempted to have them do whatever my perverted little mind could come up with. This system was dangerous.

She took several deep breaths. "Okay. I'm ready. Send me a quest."

I chuckled. So eager now. "Slow and steady, right?"

She nodded.

"We need to figure out what the system will accept as a valid quest," I said. "I'm going to start as easy as possible."

She was sitting opposite me on her bed.

"Quest Title is, 'Stand Up.' Quest Terms are, 'Stand up.'"

A blue box popped up.

On one hand, I'd been expecting a message like that. On the other, it was frustrating because it gave me exactly zero information on how to make a quest that was actually valid.

After relaying the results to her, I said, "Obviously the terms that I specified don't relate in any way to what we think the system is all about, so that result is totally logical."

"Yeah. That probably would have been too easy."

It was tempting to move onto the next step, but I wanted to be thorough. I came up with another dozen simple tasks from getting me a drink of water to opening and closing the door to doing a sit up. All were invalid.

"Next step is maybe something that is a little embarrassing but doesn't involve you ... you know."

She swallowed. "Yeah. I know."

Blowing right on past that bout of serious uncomfortableness, I said, "Quest Title is, 'Hop on One Foot.' Quest Terms are, 'Stand up and hop on one foot.'"

Same error message.

When I informed her, she said, "Can we please just cut to the chase, now? At this point, the anticipation of what I'm going to have to do is getting to be as bad as I expect the task will be."

I frowned. I’d much rather be thorough, and I told her that. “Let’s try to think of some other embarrassing tasks that don’t involve nudity. Can you think of anything?”

She suggested singing, and a quick check revealed that wasn’t valid. She seemed relieved.

“I don’t have to do the quest, right?” she asked. “You’re just seeing if it’s valid?”

“Right.”

“So, if this was Truth or Dare, Julia would suggest something like calling a guy, which would be mortifying. And there are these two guys, Alan and Matt, who live downstairs. You could dare me to knock on their door, but I’m not going to do it for any reason.”

Considering her reaction to even the thought of doing a quest like that, her suggestion seemed to fit the bill for a test case perfectly. If the system had anything to do with embarrassment but not nudity, that would have to be valid.

“Nope,” I said. “Not valid.”

“I cannot believe I’m saying this, but can you just please go ahead come up with something that involved embarrassment and nudity to see if it works? This is killing me.”

Well, since she insisted...

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