ALL NOVEL 015.1 - Part Deux!
Chapter Fifteen
Another five days passed without too much strangeness and Joe quickly settled into his new found fame as people seemed to continue greeting him and interacting with him. The oddness of it soon passed and Joe simply accepted it as the uniqueness of a new culture and the basic culture of small villages where everyone knew each other and that closeness necessitated politeness and acknowledgement. The mornings and early afternoons were spent in the hunt, clearing out slimes from the neighboring forest, but as each new job increased his learning, he was coming home earlier to find more people greeting and interacting with him.
After the training, Joe ended up getting to know ‘slime-guy’ quite well and found him to be quite a nice guy named Marcan. Turned out he was a single guy, from what he could make of it, just recently come into his own farm and was doing decently for himself. It seemed that he had even recently begun ‘courting’ a young local girl. Joe thought of it as basically dating, and he seemed certain that was what he was getting from the poor communication he was getting from the two guys, but they seemed to insist that there was something a bit more serious to the whole affair. He wondered if they were engaged, but the sense he got was there seemed to be four stages to the whole process, instead of the typical western earth three of dating, engaged, and married. It seemed to fall somewhere in between dating and engaged, following some kind of ritual that he just couldn’t wrap his head around from the descriptions the two were giving him. The story played out over the last five days during their evening bathing time, and Joe found the camaraderie enjoyable, if a bit strange over a bath.
The five jobs he had gotten up to level five were fisherman, miner, baker, cook, and metropolitan. None of them proved very amazing, although he did find a couple of nice extras from them. Fisherman and miner both gave him a small amount of luck. Only a quarter per level, but since nothing else was giving him any luck, he noted them in a small ‘luck stat’ page he had at the back of his notebook which listed all the jobs he had currently found that gave him luck. This was right next to the recent page on ‘learning’ that he had created which, sadly, remained empty since every job he had so far was only giving him a single learning point per level. Only two of the jobs gave any resistances: miner and cook. The cook got a very small increase to crush, slash, and fire, while the miner got a whopping three crush per level! Joe felt the nicest boost he got out of the five jobs was the three strength from the miner job!
In contrast, he was deeply disappointed with metropolitan which turned out to be even more useless than the commoner job, not even having some minor resistances as commoner did. Despite that, he had the highest hopes for metropolitan because he felt that it was the most likely to unlock other jobs. His villager job had unlocked a good dozen common villager jobs, as they appeared to be, and he could only hope that metropolitan would do the same in unlocking a bunch of city jobs. Maybe I can be a hair dresser! Yeah!
Status
Current Job
Available Jobs
Current Skills
Available Skills
Log
Joe McConnell
Magical Resistances
Status
Physical Resistances
HP
5.00
Physical:
MP
5.00
Piercing
0.00
Attack
5.00
Crushing
0.00
Defense
5.00
Slashing
0.00
Magic
5.00
Magic Defense
5.00
Strength
5.00
Dexterity
5.00
Agility
5.00
Metropolitan
5
IQ
5.00
Wisdom
5.00
Learning
5.00
Luck
0.00
Status
Current Job
Available Jobs
Current Skills
Available Skills
Log
Joe McConnell
Magical Resistances
Status
Physical Resistances
HP
5.00
Physical:
MP
5.00
Piercing
0.00
Attack
5.00
Crushing
15.00
Defense
5.00
Slashing
0.00
Magic
5.00
Magic Defense
5.00
Strength
15.00
Dexterity
5.00
Agility
5.00
Miner
5
IQ
5.00
Wisdom
5.00
Learning
5.00
Luck
1.25
Status
Current Job
Available Jobs
Current Skills
Available Skills
Log
Joe McConnell
Magical Resistances
Status
Physical Resistances
HP
5.00
Physical:
MP
5.00
Piercing
5.00
Attack
5.00
Crushing
0.00
Defense
5.00
Slashing
0.00
Magic
5.00
Magic Defense
5.00
Strength
5.00
Dexterity
10.00
Agility
5.00
Fisherman
5
IQ
5.00
Wisdom
5.00
Learning
5.00
Luck
1.25
Status
Current Job
Available Jobs
Current Skills
Available Skills
Log
Joe McConnell
Magical Resistances
Status
Physical Resistances
Fire
2.50
HP
5.00
Physical:
MP
5.00
Piercing
0.00
Attack
5.00
Crushing
1.25
Defense
5.00
Slashing
1.25
Magic
5.00
Magic Defense
5.00
Strength
5.00
Dexterity
10.00
Agility
5.00
Cook
5
IQ
7.50
Wisdom
5.00
Learning
5.00
Luck
0.00
Status
Current Job
Available Jobs
Current Skills
Available Skills
Log
Joe McConnell
Magical Resistances
Status
Physical Resistances
Fire
2.50
HP
5.00
Physical:
MP
5.00
Piercing
0.00
Attack
5.00
Crushing
0.00
Defense
5.00
Slashing
0.00
Magic
5.00
Magic Defense
5.00
Strength
10.00
Dexterity
10.00
Agility
5.00
Baker
5
IQ
5.00
Wisdom
5.00
Learning
5.00
Luck
0.00
One strange thing he did notice was that metropolitan did have a unique unlock. It appeared that people could only unlock the metropolitan job if they lived in a city. He didn’t really notice it until he had taken the time one night to go over the available jobs tab and studied each job and clicked on each one, studying what was shown there. He was quite certain that there was no information there until he had actually unlocked and leveled up the job at least one level. This certainty increased when he looked at and saw the same notice for the villager job, except it specified needing to live in a village. None of the other jobs had this caveat and he had been certain that he had studied the job listing carefully when he was choosing his first new job after reaching twenty with commoner. Huh… they keep things hidden until you figure it out… What’s the point of a help system that won’t show you any help until you actually do it? Joe fumed with some frustration when he realized this but then let it go. There was little he could do, but he did learn a valuable piece of information. Some jobs only opened after the person completed a specific task. I hope there’s a way to figure it all out!
Despite all these new pieces of information, the only unique thing about today to mark it any different from the previous days was simply that he now had to make a decision. Every currently available job to him was now level five. He had to decide what to do next. It seemed obvious to him that metropolitan would reveal many more jobs, but he wasn’t sure how high he had to get it. If commoner needed twenty to open up villager jobs, Joe could only assume that metropolitan would also need that, at minimum! Playing with the numbers he had now, he came out to needing thirty three days to go from level five to level twenty, which was much better than the forty days he needed just to level the final five levels to twenty for commoner!
Thirty three days to hit twenty excited him, but he didn’t want to waste so much time only to get what amounted to as a base two points per stat. Thirty three days to do that seemed foolish, especially when he ran the numbers and learned he could take a little over twenty four days to level all of his current level five jobs to level ten, and gain another half a point per job: another eight points per stat just for the stats which were only getting the basic one per level anyway! Several of them, like miner, were giving quite a bit more points in some stats, and he wouldn’t be surprised if he would get around another ten points or more. With that boost, leveling to twenty on metropolitan might turn out to be even faster and he would have a better spread of stats as well. His base stats were quite significant now, especially considering what they were originally, and Joe felt like he was on the right path. His growth was substantial in the last few days, and he really couldn’t deny it.
Even now, he could feel the days had become longer and a bit warmer, and Joe didn’t feel comfortable wasting the longer days he gained from summer. His calculations showed him taking about one and a half days to get from level five to ten, a far cry from the five or so days he originally needed. He was pretty sure a part of that was his much greater skill in slime killing, but the biggest part of that was the fact that his learning was now starting in the double digits; a significant boost. It would be a lot faster if I could get out more slimes… we lose a bit of time hunting them down… they all seem to be coming from the same place… hmm… Maybe find the source?
Joe considered his options and decided that making it to level ten in his current jobs would be worth it, giving him a stronger foundation for his stats and a much quicker trip through the next jobs that would come along. He ran the numbers, guesstimating what he would have for learning if all his jobs were level ten, and he realized that making it to level fifteen would only take five days for his jobs, and the final push to twenty would only take twenty three days, or a total of around twenty eight days. Huh… really not a lot of difference. Maybe I should… No! I’ve got to remember… I need the stats. That’s what I need. What would I have if… Joe ran the numbers again really quick, extrapolating out everything to ten and was shocked to see many of his noncombat stats approaching thirty and with the addition of any jobs basic level ten stats, he was over a third of the way to what he saw as the minimum one hundred points for his stats. Incredible! Even if I just got about forty or fifty jobs to level ten, I’d be done! Right? Of course, if I wanted to start a new level zero job, I’ll be in trouble… hmm… for future growth, I think I need to stick to my original plan. Get my stats to around a hundred, although with how easy this is turning out to be, I think I’ll push to at least equal my current Earth stats!
Status
Current Job
Available Jobs
Current Skills
Available Skills
Log
Joe McConnell
Magical Resistances
Status
Physical Resistances
Wind
1.75
HP
10 (138)
Physical:
Water
1.50
MP
10 (100)
Piercing
1 (48)
Fire
.25
Attack
10 (181)
Crushing
1.625 (132)
Ice
1.38
Defense
10 (158)
Slashing
1.25 (39)
Magic
10 (100)
Magic Defense
10 (100)
Strength
14 (148)
Dexterity
13 (112)
Agility
11.5 (133)
IQ
12 (132)
Wisdom
11.75 (105)
Learning
10.00
Luck
0.63
With seeing the outcome of his stats, Joe decided that taking the time to hit ten in these jobs wouldn’t be meaningless. They really didn’t offer much, but their ten percent bonus was as big as he had expected it to be. Besides, I uncovered a new skill! Making flour! Yeah! Bah… Joe snorted with some frustration over the job skills that were currently available to him. Or, more correctly, the absolute lack of almost any useable or available skill. It was quite depressing. He had to be a level five baker before he could even make flour. How do these people even live? What do they eat? Even the cook can’t do anything yet!
Decision made, Joe decided to at least have a semi-backup plan and decided to level metropolitan first to ten, despite its overwhelmingly useless stats. He figured that it might be possible that more jobs opened up even at level ten and could only hope so. With the time necessary being about one and a half days, Joe hoped he could trim that down to only a day after another couple of jobs reached ten, giving him a couple more points in learning. If possible, he might even run back at lunch time and swap a job with the priest before heading back out again, but right now, it seemed that he wouldn’t finish out reaching level ten until he had come close to mid-afternoon on the second day. Or, that’s what his numbers seemed to be implying. He hoped he could fiddle with them a bit because of the extra summer hours, but he wouldn’t know until he tried tomorrow.