For those unfamiliar with TWI, a "Green" Skill (which shows up as green in level ups like [Slave] shows up in red) is sometimes referred to as an "Original" Skill, a totally unique Skill which has never been seen within the System before. As the System has been around for a LONG time, this is considered exceptionally rare. However, as we've seen, Earthers bring with them a lot of new ideas and concepts, which lend themselves towards the creation of Original Skills.
This is generally seen as a VERY good thing, as the creator gets access to an ability uniquely suited for them that nobody knows how to counter, which can potentially be gained much sooner than the creator "should" have gotten a Skill of that caliber given their level. The only downside is that now that the Skill has been created, it enters the "pool" of Skills that other people can eventually gain as part of their standard level ups... including people you'd rather NOT have access to said Skill.
Feel free to give us skills that will help us teach if it fits this setting. I'm not familiar with TWI lore that's why I went for a more generic option.
Alright... so. I wonder if leveling up with increase the stat buffs or mechanical boosts from our skills? Innworld that's usually a thing. Using lower leveled skills more often, to greater effect and the like.
That's not a negation against anything I said in that quote.
So here's the thing. There are lots of situation in which calling of your next move is stupid, yes. But
1) there are situation where it either it isn't stupid, or at least silly but harmless. Like say, once a while during training.
2) The reality is, there a lot of times when someone do stupid things regardless for the sake of looking cool.
That's what I mean by seeing it occasionally both making sense and realistics. Either is an occasion when its doesn't carry harm to do so, or its an occasional stupid person.
A big part of any Combat Sport is to fight while not telegraphing your attack. These training matches are supposed to simulate a real gladiatorial fight. No competent fighter would ever take the time to call out an attack.
If they are actually simulating a real fight, they will chose proper opponent instead of bait slaves.
Some form of training are simulation to the real thing as close possible, but training can also take certain deliberate breaks from how actual things goes for certain purpose. I can imagine, a form of training where the trainee receive a clear signal what skill is being used and when, so they can learn how to possible recognize that Skill and how to counter it (which will of course must be followed with training form that doesn't use signaling). Alternatively, in case the trainee develop new Skill, the trainers may want it signaled, at least at first, so they can recognize that the trainee have new skill and studied its effect in fight.
Its also the first time she use the skill. Pragmatism of doing so regularly aside, the first time someone got and use a new skill? They will want to show off, and because this is training, she can do safely.
The next morning, Sophie wakes you early and bids you attend Miss Livia. You're grumpy from the early hour and distracted by trying to feel out your new Skill when you emerge from the closet, and so it takes you a moment to realize that Livia is actually here to meet you. It takes you by surprise - always, whenever you're summoned, it's to meet her in her room.
She looks like she's gotten up even earlier than you, or perhaps, never been to sleep. The skin around her eyes is wrinkled and the stitches on her face are standing out more than normal, both clear signs of exhaustion amongst the String People. Before today, you'd only seen them on the [Slaves]. But she straightens up when she sees you, tilting her head back in an imperious way that might look less ridiculous if she weren't twelve and more than a foot shorter than you.
"Your performance has been exemplary, as befits one of the best of my [Slaves]," Livia begins. The words sound rehearsed, and would perhaps be more impressive if she owned more than two [Slaves]. "As disobedience brings punishment, so too does such service bring rewards. Sophie."
Livia holds something out to the [Handmaiden], who accepts it gingerly in both hands. Then Sophie carries it from her master to you. It's a small package, wrapped in hemp cloth and sealed with twine. You study it, confused.
"Open it!" Livia says, sounding expectant.
You undo the twine and the cloth falls away, revealing a leather-bound journal. The leather is patchwork, stitched together inexpertly, causing it to bunch up a bit as you run your thumb across the cover. You flip it open to find it full of sheets of rough-cut paper, all blank. You look up to Livia, confused.
"You're always complaining about how hard it is to plan lessons without being able to write anything down," Livia says. She's talking quickly, excited, instead of with the forced reserve that always seems so awkward on someone her age. "I was going to get you something once we're out of the desert, but then that woman you were teaching consolidated her class and I wanted to do something now, so… "
The words come from her all in a rush. She pauses expectantly, then asks, "Do you like it?"
And right then she doesn't look like a [Slaver]. She doesn't look like a little girl who watches people die. She doesn't look… evil. She just looks like a little girl showing off an art project to her parents. One it looks like she spent the whole night on.
You run your thumb over the journal cover, feeling the way the leather bunches beneath your fingertip. "Did you make this yourself?" you ask.
She nods.
You want to throw it at her. To ask if the Hemp she'd used to wrap it came from that [Slave]. But… she's just a kid. You sigh.
"Thank you," you say. "It was very thoughtful of you."
Livia pumps her fist in victory, before realizing how she must look. Her face flushes, and she clears her throat. "Well. I am Silk, so of course thinking of something was as simple as it was to make it."
You don't contest the obvious lie. Livia put effort into this. She also gives you a dozen quills - actual, feather quills - and a resealable glass inkwell. It's a useful, practical gift.
You're not entirely sure how you feel about it. Part of you wants to dismiss it as just the girl wanting to make you more productive, and therefore valuable, as a [Slave]. Another part of you can't help but picture the very real joy on her face when she realized you liked it. And a third part… you just don't know.
It is useful, though. You have many, many things you've been wanting to take notes on.
----------
Spend the caravan journey riding in the wagon
-Finding out more about the world
One of the first things you do with your new journal is begin to take notes on this strange world you've found yourself in. There are parts of it that continually blindside you as just being weird. Like the fact that English is the only language on this entire continent.
No, really.
They don't call it English, but that's what it is: modern, twenty-first century English. There are a few alternative writing systems for it, mostly just regional variations on what the letters of the alphabet look like, but there's no other actively-used languages. That strikes you as very odd, though it does make it somewhat trivial to encode your journal: you write it in Japanese. Spending a semester abroad has its advantages.
Your familiarity with the language is most certainly not because you spent far too much of your teenage years watching anime. Definitely not.
You're writing down an outline for a lesson on the concept of 'elasticity' for Livia - a measure of how responsive something is to a change in price - when the girl herself peers over your shoulder.
"You know Drathian?" she asks.
You flinch in surprise, leaving a large blot of ink in the center of the page. "What?" you ask.
She points towards your journal. "Drathian," she repeats. "Their language looks like that. Sort of."
You look down to your journal. "I was… I thought you didn't know of any languages besides the common one?"
She shrugs. "Well, everybody knows about Drathian," she says.
"Of course everyone does," you say. And of course, out of all the secondary languages you could have learned, apparently you learned the only one that might also be readable to someone from this world.
"Papa owns some of their calligraphy scrolls," Livia says. "But they look different. All the characters are more complicated than yours."
With some encouragement, you manage to get her to show you one of the scrolls in her father's study. It is not, to your surprise, Japanese. It's some hodgepodge of Korean and Chinese, though you're not familiar enough with either language to do more than recognize the characters.
"Is Drath… close to Chandrar?" you ask.
Livia looks at you as if you've asked something particularly stupid.
"I studied economics, not geography!"
She realizes that she knows something you don't, and is immediately thrilled by the idea of being more knowledgeable than her [Teacher]. "Gimme that!" she commands, grabbing your journal. She flips to an empty page, then begins to sketch out - with clean, precise movements that leave behind neat lines that put your quill handling to shame - a rough map of the world for you.
"This is Chandrar," she says, pointing to the landmass in the southern part of her map. "And we're here, in the Great Zeikhal Desert. This continent to the north of us is Izril, which has Drakes and Gnolls in the south and Humans in the north. It's cooler there than here, and it rains more, but they don't allow slavery. But Papa says they're just splitting threads because they let us travel through and will return escaped [Slaves] anyway. West of them is Baleros, which is this jungle place absolutely full of Lizardfolk. Papa says it's just as hot as here, but it rains all the time and you get soaked through your silk and have to be careful about stitch-rot. There's no countries there, just a bunch of mercenary companies constantly warring over everything. Sounds like an awful place to live, but wars make for lots of [Slaves]."
It makes sense that Livia's understanding of the world comes entirely through the lens of being a [Slaver], though it's still disturbing to hear a twelve year old girl talk about how a continent being in a state of perpetual war is good for business.
"Up at the north end of Baleros I heard it gets so cold that the rain turns to ice and the mountains are covered in white, powdery ice, but I think Papa was teasing me. Anyway, here to the east of Baleros, but north of Izril, is Terrandria. Slavery's outlawed there, of course, but Papa says it's because they don't want anyone to realize that there's no difference between a [Slave] and a [Peasant]. And they'll still turn over escaped slaves, just like Izril. All the kingdoms up there are run by humans who say they're from the Hundred Families but most of them probably aren't. Oh, and there's a bunch of half-elf villages, but nobody cares about those."
"What about these over here?" you ask, pointing to four smaller landmasses east of Izril.
"That's Wistram, the big academy of [Mages]. They pretend to be neutral but they're not. And they have an army of golems, so they don't need [Slaves]. They used to be more important, but they haven't had [Archmages] with the Class in like a hundred years. Their [Mages] still get respect, because full graduates are almost all level twenty-five or higher, but Papa says they're useless academics who don't understand anything about the real world."
High-minded academics? Why couldn't you have appeared there, instead of in the sands of Chandrar? But something about what she said sticks out to you.
"They're only level twenty-five?" you ask. That seems kind of… low. Maybe levels get a lot harder to gain as you go up, but you've only been doing this for two weeks and you're already level six.
Livia looks at you strangely. "Most people will be about that level if they do something their whole lives," she says. "Wistram can teach it in five years."
That still seems absurdly low. Something of your thoughts must show on your face, because Livia crosses her arms in a huff.
"It's true!" she says. "Maybe you should have actually learned more about levels before deciding you didn't want any. Most people never break level thirty - maybe one in a thousand. Of those, only a handful will reach level forty."
"What about fifty?" you ask, wondering if there's a cap.
"Those people are the best in the world," she says. "Kingdoms will fight over them. Past that? Legends. The King of Destruction's level is rumored to be in the sixties, and he conquered all of Chandrar before giving up and falling into slumber."
"Anyway, before I was so rudely interrupted," Livia says, turning her attention back to the map she's sketched in your journal. "These islands here in the northeast are Drath." It's on the literal opposite end of the world from you, so you understand why she thought 'is it close to Chandrar' was a stupid question. Except…
"Couldn't you sail southwest to get to Drath?" you ask. The Earth is round, after all.
"What, over the Last Tide?" Livia asks. "That's just a sailor's legend. Papa's grandpapa tried that and lost all the family's money and Papa's papa had to rebuild it from nothing."
You pause at that. There's… an actual edge to the world? Is it not round? How does any of that work? Maybe Livia's wrong, but you don't want to just assume that things work the same way here that they did on Earth.
"Anyway, Drath doesn't like outsiders, but they love silk, so we trade with them sometimes. This island down here in the southeast of the Isle of Minos, which is a bunch of minotaurs who are all 'honor' this and 'honor' that, like they're better than us and we've forgotten their empire. Finally, of course… " she pauses, looking a bit scared. "Rhir. All the worst monsters of the world, like Crelers and Demons, come from Rhir. Everybody in the world gives money and troops to the Blighted Kingdom to keep all the… the Rhir-ness stuck on Rhir."
You look at the map. It's a big world. How big, though? If this is to scale…
"How far across is Chandrar?" you ask.
"From east to west? About… nine thousand miles, I think," Livia says. "More like seven if you start at the bay south of Savere, here."
You rock back in your seat. That's… this one continent is the size of Eurasia. And it doesn't look that much bigger than any of the others, with massive oceans separating each continent.
A big world indeed.
"But we're not crossing the whole thing," Livia says. "Sure, Roshal is way to the southwest, on the other end of the Zeikhal, but we're only going to Nerrhavia's Fall. Papa says we'll be there in about two more weeks."
"Nerrhavia's Fall?" you ask. "Where'd it get a name like that?"
"It's where Nerrhavia, the Eternal Tyrant, died," Livia says. "That's why our national motto is 'Tyrants shall ever die.' It used to be a lot smaller, but it conquered a bunch of neighboring kingdoms a few hundred years ago. Nowadays we don't declare war much, even though we have the hugest armies, because everybody's nice to Nerrhavia's Fall - they're worried about getting on our bad side! Queen Yisame's ruled ever since we regained independence from the King of Destruction twenty years ago, and we're one of the richest kingdoms in all of Chandrar! There's bound djinni that do all sorts of magic, and magic academies as good as Wistram, and gladiator arenas, and - it's just a great kingdom! Papa says it's the best place to be Silk."
You filter the child-like patriotism out of her outburst and come away with a mental image of a nation founded on overthrowing tyranny, yet which currently embraces slavery, a caste system, and blood sports, all while exerting military and diplomatic pressure on its neighbors to maintain economic supremacy. There are probably worse nations, but it sounds like a particularly bad place to be a [Slave].
You look over the map, tracing the vast distances of Chandrar. If Livia's to be believed - and you have no reason not to - then the Great Zeikhal Desert is larger than North and South America combined. "Why would anyone take a caravan through here?" you ask, gesturing towards the desert.
"Papa says the rough terrain helps the [Slaves] level," she says. "Some of them will even learn skills like [Lesser Endurance] or [Sure Footing], but that's rare. But the real reason is monsters and taxes."
"What?" you ask. Did she say monsters?
"Yeah, if we went through the main trade roads we'd have to pay taxes and stuff at every border. But Papa's Skills mean we can go through the desert pretty quick, and the storage enchantments on the wagons are high grade, so they don't leak any magic and we don't have to worry about the monsters out here."
"What monsters?" you ask.
Livia tilts her head to the side, thinking. "Well there's the usual stuff - bandits, goblins, Crelers - but also sand spiders, basilisks, hexishen, manticores, Jaws of Zeikhal… there's lots of bad monsters out in the desert. Nobody lives here, so nobody's paying adventurers to clear them out, you know?"
You feel somewhat faint. Monsters. There are actual monsters in this world, which you feel already had enough problems with [Slavers] and [Tyrants].
"Aw, don't worry," Livia says. "We do this trip every other year, and we've never been attacked by monsters! We're perfectly safe here."
----------
You are attacked by a monster the next morning.
You don't realize it at first. You're busy teaching another lesson to your [Students], though this time you have the benefit of notes to refer to. The students are also rather more attentive now that Katrin is a [Learned Duelist], which makes sense. They'd been going along with the lessons out of grudging obedience to their master more than anything else, but now they know that there's something of value they can get out of it.
You're not sure what your Philosophy professors back home would think if they knew that their introspective discipline had found real-world applications in the form of reality altering sword-fighting techniques.
And while you're briefly focused on that amusing thought, everything goes wrong.
The ground beneath you erupts in a blinding wall of send, knocking you from your feet. Then the dune collapses, the mountain of sand abruptly inverting as it falls towards a newly formed pit mere inches away from your feet. And at the bottom of that pit is a gaping hole the size of a semi truck. You see someone fall into that hole, and their scream of terror coming to an abrupt halt as the opening closes with a wet crunch echoes over the sound of falling sand.
"Pit viper!" shouts someone.
You stumble away from the edge of the pit. As you watch, the bottom of the pit shifts, revealing a pair of giant, slit-pupiled eyes, each the size of your torso. Then the sands shift as the pit viper pushes its enormous head above the sands, its forked tongue darting out to taste the air as it hisses at you all.
The [Guards] finally react, sending a volley of crossbow bolts into the beast. The bolts shatter on its scales to no effect, but the viper hisses with fury - and then disappears beneath the sands once more.
The panicked shouting continues, as [Guards] and [Slaves] alike begin to try and rescue comrades trapped by the mountains of sand displaced by the pit viper.
And then there's another boom of displaced sand as the pit viper demolishes another dune, turning it into a sucking pit of sand that draws [Slaves] towards its open maw. You can barely hear the screams over the panicked, thundering beat of your own heart. You need to do something.
But what?
==========
[ ] Run for the wagon
It's likely the safest place here
[ ] Help the other slaves
Some of the slaves are stuck, half-buried by the mountains of displaced sand
[ ] Help the guards fight
The sooner this thing dies, the better
I don't know if it's the best choice but I think Davis would care about saving the slaves rather than fight a monster he knows nothing about. I don't know how useful he would be at Combat without any prior knowledge or skill.
In the Innverse, any level you get, no matter the class, adds to the experience needed for the next level. And with higher levels giving more and better benefits it's generally not such a great idea to multiclass. Though this is a secret guarded by the nobility, at least in Izril.
Still, we level faster than others and some ability to defend ourself would not go amiss.
Running is the safest option, but it may got us branded as coward if we don't do anything.
Helping the fight ... unless there's something obviously advantageous we can do or we are literally at the point where we dead meat regardless, then it is better to leave fighting to people who actually knows how to do it.
Helping the other slaves is aligned with previous vote result for caring for others, and may win some more respect from other slaves.
It isn't specified why, but people summoned to the inn-verse level faster. Perhaps because they are in a constant state of "I'm about to die" or don't stick to common sense because nobody told them something was dangerous and they go and do it, we also bring new ideas that if they stick in this new world you are rewarded with levels
Slavery's outlawed there, of course, but Papa says it's because they don't want anyone to realize that there's no difference between a [Slave] and a [Peasant]
...I think I finally get it. If you believe that a society NEEDS a dedicated underclass that isn't able to independently follow the migratory pulls of supply and demand, then slavery looks like a viable way to accomplish that. I kept trying to figure out what the "moral" justification for slavery was if racism wasn't the reason (since slavery here seems an equal-opportunity "employer"), but now I see that part of the reason racism was adopted in America was because "you can't rise above your station" is explicitly not part of American culture.
It isn't specified why, but people summoned to the inn-verse level faster. Perhaps because they are in a constant state of "I'm about to die" or don't stick to common sense because nobody told them something was dangerous and they go and do it, we also bring new ideas that if they stick in this new world you are rewarded with levels
I thought it had something to do with the Rhir ritual? I'm not entirely sure since I haven't read anything since the end of volume 7, and I know a lot of crazy stuff happened since then.
