Observations

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Objective Complete. Observe species of Abyssal beasts 10/10

New Skill Level: Observe 10
Creature Sheet fully unlocked
Person Sheet fully unlocked

John immediately closed the Observe window and opened a new one, to see what had been unlocked.

The new information box looked like it contained exactly the kind of stuff he had been hoping to get for the last bit of the creature sheet. No more going in completely blind against things. As for the rest, he swiped the window in Qhila’s direction, causing it to orient for her ease of reading. A system feature they had discovered earlier today. “Does any of that look worth farming?”

They were getting severely penalized EXP for Tier 0 Arena mobs, but between the level disparity and the fact that a new Tier had opened, that was unsurprising. That didn’t mean that the materials couldn’t be worth farming, so while they were clearing his Observe objective, they had been making note of the drop tables. They hadn’t looked at the new Tier yet, but the tooltip said that the enemies ranged from Level 11 to the lower of his current Level or 20, and that he had unlocked the Tier by reaching Level 15 and defeating at least one Arena Boss from the previous one.

The slime barrier had the look of what John would assume a chemical factory to be. Vats and boilers and pressure chambers, connected by a labyrinthine mess of tubes ranging in thickness from his thumb to large enough to crawl through. They were Observing the slimes from an elevated walkway that they had presumed would be safe, even if the things caught their scent.

So far, the late morning had been spent popping into Arenas, Observing the mobs in there and leaving without fighting them. Except for that first one where they tested how hard the EXP got nerfed, anyway. The answer was, almost as hard as doing one with Marisa had been, but as with her, the loot was unchanged. The ‘improvised robots’, roomba-like moving discs with a sensor and weapon rigged on top, mostly dropped useless scrap, but there had been some mana cables Qhila could use and the First Kill Bonus included a roomba that he had decided to give to his mom.

“Well… all of this stuff, we can just buy from the Market or the Auction.” Qhila had finished reading and rendered her verdict. “But depending on the amounts, this could be the biggest monetary value per clear we’ve seen. Though it would help to know which acids, bases and salts are in uncommon.”

John chuckled. “Yeah I guess it’s pretty vague. Come to think of it, aren’t the rare and epic stuff also acids and bases just by old names? At least I’m pretty sure the aqua regia is.”

“Not exactly. Or they might be that too, in mundane terms, I guess. Generally, the mundane term for a compound is used when you’re not really observing any requirements for the mana or other esoteric values, while these substance names come with standards for those values. We didn’t get to that the other day, but it’s also mostly relevant at an intermediary level of low alchemy and above. The only recipe in the list you showed me where that matters is the elixir of clarity. Does make the ingredients significantly more expensive though.”

“Expensive enough that we should clear it while we’re here?”

Qhila thought about that for a moment, then shook her head. “We can do it if we end up needing to restock any of the stuff they drop. For now, let’s head back and put a shopping list together, stop by Karason’s on the way back from the Market, and then hit the lab.”

John nodded and they left the barrier, but once they were back in her nest barrier, John brought up something else, “Before we get on the shopping list, Observe got upgraded for people too. Maybe we should check that out?”

Qhila thought about that for a moment, then nodded. “Sure, hit me.”

Skipping over the parts that were largely unchanged, the first thing to catch his eyes was the text in the relationship box. Seeing something like that, he couldn’t just not cuddle her. So without further ado, he picked her up, prompting a soft yelp and an accusation of being a dummy, and walked them to the beanbag where he sat down with her in his lap. Then he recast the Skill because he had accidentally closed the window while he was relocating them.

Skipping to the new fields at the bottom, having one for sexual experience was, in general, highly pleasing to his inner pervert. The thought of raising Qhila’s grades through their combined efforts tickled both the lecherous and completionist parts of his brain in all the right ways. However, all of that was tainted by the knowledge of why her grades were what they were at this point, awakening the spark of wrath that had been festering in the back of his mind since he first saw her genuine surprise that he wasn’t going to demand compensation for stopping a rat ogre from **** her. So he lingered on that only just long enough to note a tooltip stating that the ratings were based entirely on the amount of experience had, not what or how much was learned from that experience.

The more interesting part in a practical sense was the stat ratings. Rather than try to guess what the stars meant, though, he checked for tooltips first.

Base Ability Score
For you, Base Ability Scores are the values used to calculate Perk Slots, calculate % increases to an Ability Score, qualify for system requirements and select other derived statistics. For others, it is the sum of relevant characteristics that are semi-permanent, intrinsic, and effortless to maintain in the short term.

Spellpower (POW)
Spellpower is a measure of how much effect a person can achieve with their primary supernatural abilities, and as such is a combination of how much mana they can use at a time and how efficiently it is used. What determines Spellpower varies by both individual and the type of magic used. Your comparison point is a weighted average of the Base Ability Scores that your highest leveled magic Skills scale with. It is currently determined by:
Intelligence (100% weight)

Okay. The star rating referring to his stats was somewhat annoying. He would have much preferred if they were rated against the same thing down the line, like the average Ability Score for someone of that level, so he could tell at a glance which was someone’s highest and so on. Instead, because his own AGI was fairly low and his INT high, it was actually possible that Qhila could have a higher INT stat despite having more stars in AGI.

It made sense though, considering that Observe was a gamified presentation of an actual sense that all Abyssals possessed. When pushing against some ****, the actual sensation was in relation to your own strength and any attempts at an absolute gauging of it was based on having built a frame of reference. It also made sense that the rating stopped at 75% difference, because there came a point where you just either steamrolled or got steamrolled and it was hard to tell by exactly how much. The ratings working like this also explained why June’s ratings had looked fairly poor, mostly 3 or 4 stars out of 7: she was being compared to someone more than half-again her Level.

As for Qhila’s stat ratings, the first thing that jumped out at him was that her base LIB was apparently higher than his. That surprised him for a moment before remembering that nearly half his total score was from fucking Achievement rewards. So in other words, their total LIB scores might be in a similar ballpark at the moment.

That the green star was there because of her heat, he didn’t need to look at her buff icons to figure out. But looking at them did tell him that it was currently “sated”, putting her at the smallest possible increase of +15% LIB and preventing her from being less than “slightly” aroused. He was a bit curious what the buff would say tomorrow morning before they got to “symptom management”, but in any case it didn’t look like her warning that she might be uninterested in sex outside of heat was likely to hold up in practice.

Outside of LIB, which as far as he could tell only really impacted non-bedroom performance when it got in the way, her highest stats were AGI and INT followed by WIS and CHA, likely in that order, with END and STR bringing up the rear in whatever order they came in.

If he had to guess, STR was probably the lower of the two, but it was still actually higher than expected. They hadn’t really had contests of strength as such, but he had both seen and felt her in vigorous motion and based on that he would’ve guessed that he could’ve overpowered her on that metric even before he got his powers.

With the rating in mind, however, he quickly realized the flaws in his thinking. For one, he was thinking about the stat wrong. The tooltip explaining it had said it was about how much **** a person’s muscles could put out. But that wasn’t all there was to most of the things games typically associated with strength. Even before getting combat Skills, John had been aware of the concept of putting your weight into a punch, for instance.

At the same time, muscle **** output mattered for a bunch of things that were not typically associated with a STR stat, but rather with either AGI or working completely independently. The tooltip for his STR stat called out running speed directly, but it was hardly the only example. Meanwhile, his version of AGI was entirely about precision, control, and coordination.

And Qhila was quick on her feet. Despite his legs being almost as long as she was tall, he had never had to slow down his gait for her to keep pace with him. In fact when she was moving urgently, such as returning to her nest on Monday or going to the forest for ingredients, he had had to put in effort to keep up. In summary, for someone as small and lightweight as Qhila, it seemed like STR was really more of a mobility stat than an offense one in most cases.

Beyond that Spellpower was a nice stat to have a rating for. Between having had a Skill that did magical things and scaled off of something else than INT and the way many games had magic able to key off of different things, he had expected that at least some of the same variability applied here, but with this he got a rough read on someone’s magical power without having to guess which stats their spells scaled off.

That his own was currently entirely INT based was unsurprising. That Qhila’s clearly wasn’t was more surprising. Surely, INT was the most pertinent stat for her alchemy, as well as for her traps. Maybe it was because they weren’t actually powered by her own mana, at least not directly? The traps with magical components ran either on arcanotech and mana batteries or on simple mechanics and an alchemical payload, and she had said during the alchemy lesson the other day that most of the magical power of low alchemy products came from the ingredients, and that handling and combining them in such a way as to retain as much of it as possible in the finished product was key to success.

And now that he thought about it, the only alchemical “recipe” he had that came with a stat scaling was his conjured alchemist’s fire. The rest had scalings for material Item Level and the Quality Factor that was based on his Skill Levels in Craft and Low Alchemy. So maybe the reason that particular product had such as scaling was because the only ingredient was his own mana.

With all of that in mind, perhaps Qhila’s Spellpower didn’t apply to her traps or concoctions either, but only to the small utility spells she used. Like the one that adhered light objects to walls for quicker setting of simple traps.

While all that had gone through John’s mind, Qhila caught up to his perk-enhanced, native English speaker reading speed. “Well, these ratings are useless without your stats to refer to then…”

“Right. Sorry.” He quickly brought up his own sheet and placed it so none of the windows overlapped.

“So that’s 13-18 STR, at least 30 AGI, 13-18 again for END, 36-43 for INT, 19-31 WIS, 12-20 CHA, 29-33 LIB normally with up to another almost 5 from my bloody heat and 22-36 POW. The tribe’s staple utility spells are all intuition and feel, and derived from a shamanic tradition, so if that’s where my POW is from and it connects to the other stats it’s probably mostly WIS. Which matches with the two having similar ranges.” That all came out very hot on the heels on her getting a look at his character sheet. If her slow reading had somehow made him forget, that would have provided a handy reminder that Qhila was very smart. Certainly, she’d done those mental calculations faster than he could have.

After a moment, she turned her head more towards him. “So does that look good or bad?”

“Uh. Well, it looks like a stat balance that makes sense for a ranged DPS/support hybrid. But as far as evaluating good or bad, you’re pretty much looking at my entire frame of reference.” He gestured towards the open windows.

“No frame of reference from video games?” She cocked an eyebrow.

“Not a useful one. In most D&D derived games, these stat values would make us firmly superhuman.