Chapter 32: Skills.
I was absolutely determined to finish the framework of the system now; I only needed two big parts to make and I could try it out with a test subject!
I wanted to start work on the skill and class system now, as the two were interconnected and needed one another to work; Though the skills would be the easiest to handle first.
Now, I needed to make a way for me to not have to always be creating new skills that would take hours of boring work; so, I worked instead on a way to create new skills automatically without any outside input. I first thought of Artificial intelligence, after all, they weren't all that bad at stuff back on earth; But then I remembered all of the... not so great stuff about it too, I didn't want skills that would do seemingly random stuff. And, well, that was before I realized I already had some sort of 'fake' intelligence; My 'space Mana' already felt kind of living as well as the Living-Runes I had made, the runes could already adapt and overcome things... why not push that to its limit?
And so I took a bunch of mana and compressed it into a ball and started to carve my runes into it, making them all part of the same set to try and make it better connected together. I put in some basic rules for the runes to follow and also infused as much of the 'idea' of skills into them as I could; I also passed in some of the ideas I had for making the class system to see how it would react to it.
Mana started to flow into the ball and started to compress everything more and more; Until it was so compressed that only the runes were left visible, glowing with a faint golden light.
It took a few moments for the Living-Rune to stabilize and reach a consistent Mana flow; But once it was ready, I connected it to the system.
What it spouted out to me took a few hours for me to decipher, but I understood it as a sort of error message about not being connected to a living being; Apparently, I let more knowledge into it than I thought I did. I quickly hooked it up to Stan though, and watched as it actively flowed Mana through the Man's body and started to put out messages back to me.
Those messages, once translated and made more readable, looked like this: 'skill:<activate healing runes full power>, skill_name:<heal>, skill_description:<Heals the user.>, attributes_skill_class:<526545; 643908; 657815; 493656; 786451; 875323; 654532>'
Just from a quick look at it, I knew that it needed work; I mean, what the heck are those names and descriptions? I needed to make it better. But just as I was about to go and destroy it, a burst of Mana shot out of the rune and through the system all the way to me; It then forcefully connected to me, did something weird, disconnected from me, and returned back to the rune.
I stopped all that I was doing, slightly scared for my life, and suddenly realized that making anything close to the human level of intelligence was way too dangerous. But then, the rune put out a new message to me.
'skill:<Activate healing runes at above normal power for 5 seconds>, skill_name:<Basic heal.>, skill_description:<Activating this skill will slightly heal the body of the user.>, skill_cooldown:<30 seconds>, attributes_skill_class:<624956; 643908; 820464; 357315; 786451; 345765; 654532>'
I 'stared' at the message for a long few seconds before realizing what the rune had just done; It went and took information from my memories and thoughts forcefully which made everything all that more scary, at least I gave it a none destructive purpose.
I quickly went through everything and set up a simple way to store any new skills being created and added a skill menu to the system; I also added a way to activate the creation of new skills before putting the whole thing I just created away. I needed to take a break now...