Science Classes

After wanking, John had reclaimed a bit of his mental focus and clarity. Enough so, at least, to realize that he had completely forgotten to work on leveling Observe during art class. This irked his gamer instincts a bit, but he was also self-aware enough to realize that under no circumstances, short of a life-and-**** scenario, would a chance at scoring with June not have pushed everything else into the background.

So, rather than lament lost opportunities, John just set about leveling the skill on his way to his next class. The information it gave was neither interesting nor surprising and-

Observe Skill lvl 4.

-getting the next level of the skill didn’t bring anything new to the table either. So he just kept ‘shooting’ and made his way to class.

Due to his little detour after Art class, John only barely made it on time, and before he could continue his Observe grind, the teacher, Mr. Stone, was handing out new textbooks for the semester. When John received his, thoughts of skill grinding went to the back of his mind yet again in the face of a system prompt from the book.

Skill Book.
Learn Biology 101?
Yes | No

John selected ‘Yes’ with a bare minimum of thought and was immediately hit by a strong feeling of vertigo as information was crammed into his brain at a pace orders of magnitude above what his senses could provide. A moment later, the feeling subsided, leaving behind a bunch of biology knowledge John hadn’t had a few seconds ago and two notifications.

Implied existence of inorganic life aside, that was just awesome. The flat HP boost was almost half the size of John’s total before getting the skill, and while that would presumably become a gradually lower portion of his total as he gained levels, the percentage bonuses would only get more valuable as his stats increased. The active skill, meanwhile, read like a golden ticket to actual attractiveness instead of being a scrawny nerd. Sure, it’d take leveling up the skill some more and the upgrades would be for show, but it’d still be nice. Plus, it should be able to help with the dick size situation, and even if, for some reason, that didn’t count as a cosmetic alteration, it stood to reason that another Biomancy Skill would exist somewhere that would do the trick.

John’s gleeful train of thought was interrupted by Mr. Stone clapping once to get everyone’s attention.

“I know the schedule says Biology this period and Chemistry the next, but since the roster is the same for both and the fields have a decent amount of overlap, we’re going to combine the periods. Don’t worry, we will still cover what needs to be covered in time for the semester’s tests, but some days are going to be all biology, some are going to be all chemistry and some, like today, we’re going to cover something where the fields overlap and have both at once. That also means you’ll need your Chemistry books immediately, so I’ll be handing them out next.”

Someone followed that up by asking why he hadn’t just handed out both books in one go, but John was too preoccupied with mentally celebrating that he was likely getting a second Skill Book in 5 minutes to join in the snickering. Celebrating for all of a few seconds that is before something occurred to him that he felt rather stupid about not thinking of sooner. Pretty much universally in games, learning a skill from a Skill Book consumed the book in the process. Yet his unopened biology textbook sat there, still looking fresh off the print. In other words, John had probably missed something important.

A quick look inside confirmed his suspicions as John found the book’s pages to be blank, except for the table of contents and the foreword about the authors’ credentials. In other words, the entire skill portion of the Skill Book had ceased to exist. That could have been more than a little awkward when it came time to return the textbook at the end of the semester. Having caught it now made it a lot simpler to deal with; John just showed it to Mr. Stone when he came by with the chemistry textbook. The teacher took a look, mumbled something about a strange print error and told John to go get one of the books that were in surplus on account of two students being absent.

That presented an opportunity as well, since Mr. Stone had left two chemistry books behind on his desk while handing out. If the next ‘print error’ happened to a different student, and maybe wasn’t even discovered on the same day, that should be enough to keep anyone from connecting them to John. Sure, there wasn’t really any reasonable way for mundane logic to arrive at blaming him anyways, but until he knew something about what the hidden magical world that presumably existed actually looked like, it was probably best to keep a low profile.

Back to the present, John picked up his replacement biology book, checked to make sure nobody was paying attention to him, and then picked up one of the spare chemistry books. As soon as he had gotten the prompt and selected ‘Yes’, he put it back down and returned to his seat. Since he knew it was coming, he had been able to brace himself for the vertigo which made it manageable, though he probably still looked queasy for a few seconds.

Once he was back in his seat, John turned his focus to the new popups.

Achievement Unlocked: Combat Ready!
Get your first damage skill.
Well, it’s a very indirect damage skill but I’m feeling generous so I’ll let it count.
+3 vials of Inferior Alchemist’s Fire, +1 Minor Healing Potion

The Theft skill was a bit of a puzzler until John realized that he probably got it from using someone else’s Skill Book on the sly, rather than from the actual contents of the book. That aside, his new skills looked interesting. Theft was some nice utility, especially once it got some more range, but probably not something he was going to consider a main skill. Low Alchemy hinted at a wealth of possibilities in the future, not least of which being the probable existence of ‘High’ Alchemy. As for the immediate benefits, buffing and healing consumables were often quite powerful and getting more mileage out of them was likely to be valuable as soon as he got his hands on some. On top of that, a multiplicative damage boost was pretty much always good.

Conjure Inferior Alchemist’s Fire was clearly a preparatory spell rather than something to use once a battle had started. Other than that, it was hard to assess how good it was without knowing more about the item it created. Fortunately, the Achievement had given him some to Observe, and he didn’t even need to take them out of his Inventory to do so.

That was 55 damage total for one vial, or put in other words: enough to one-shot John with a direct hit! Well, it was before he had gotten the HP boost from Biomancy at least. Granted, between his low level and low Endurance, John was probably very fragile as far as things went, and he also didn’t know what the availability of damage mitigation effects were or how the damage would be affected if it got splashed on someone’s clothes instead of directly on skin.

On the flip side, creating one vial of the stuff took more than he could fit in his Mana Bar, and 45 minutes worth of MP Regen, not counting a Food Buff. Clocking in at just under 2 MP per point of Damage… well, he had no in-system comparison point but that was a very bad ratio in the vast majority of games. The ability probably paid a serious premium for being able to stockpile them ahead of time, though. All in all, it looked like a powerful ability but one he would need to use very sparingly.

All of that was assuming he would even need to fight something with any real frequency, which he really wasn’t very keen on. Unfortunately, between the system Level taking combat skill into account for ‘Abyssals’ and the tooltip for Strength referencing weapon damage, it seemed like the system was built with an assumption of regular combat. That meant that, at least until he knew more, John felt it would be foolish not to try to be prepared to defend himself.

On the topic of being prepared, John used Observe on the Minor Healing Potion as well.

A tooltip on the (+5.3) part revealed it to be the effect of his bonuses to potion effect and incoming healing from Low Alchemy and Biomancy respectively. A penalty to HP Regen for a whopping 4 days stung pretty hard, and penalties like that were far from his favorite type of mechanic to prevent players from guzzling Healing Potions by the gallon. At least it didn’t cost more in lost regen than it gave in up-front healing, even without John’s bonuses.

Without any more new tooltips or items to take a look at, John returned his attention to class briefly. Mr. Stone was currently pointing out some of the substances in the organic chemistry section of that textbook that were also important ‘actors’ in metabolism, as mentioned in the biology textbook. It took all of 5 minutes for John to feel complete confidence that learning the textbooks as Skill Books had made paying attention completely superfluous, after which he tuned out the teacher’s voice yet again.

Thinking about how to best approach the Quest objective about buying a girl lunch brought his mind back to RS values. Since only about half the people in the class had a value displayed above their head, that naturally led back to needing to grind up Observe. Starting out with a guy that had been on the bus confirmed that he still didn’t get Skill EXP for repeated targets; at this point John thought this likely either reset on a daily basis or was based on a benchmark of ‘significant change’ of some sort.

That done, he then swept the ‘new faces’ with the skill before settling back into pondering the lunch objective for the rest of the class.