Asheron's Fall: The Power of Ten, Book Six

“Not at all.” The list of Augmentations the Mick had from Karmic investment and that Luminance energy he’d spoken of was quite long. I pointed at one line. “Aetheric Vision, ‘enhances chances of an Aetheric Surge’. Aetheric is usually a euphemism for astral or spirit-psi energies interfacing. I haven’t seen any indication of such things here, but then, except for him, I’ve not seen any external examples of this ‘Luminance’, either.”

“Are you thinking it might also be a control conduit?” Kris asked what was on her mind.

“I’m pretty sure there’s an affinity built into it, because the forces of ‘Light’ wouldn’t want their power to be given away to their enemies, so they’d want a way to take it back. As for direct control... anything is possible. Even if they were ‘too noble’ to use such a thing, it might still well be there.”

“Sort of like our Marks,” Kris nodded. Since Nulls couldn’t project mental energy any more than any other kind of energy, the control factor built into their knocked-off Succubi Blessings was basically useless without jumping through some hoops using Artifice, and if active, had a VERY different feel to it.

I knew, because Aelryinth and the original Sama had tested out such things back on Terra-Luna. Being able to use Charm-type spells through a Mark was an incredibly powerful command and control tool, especially against someone who had been magically suborned themselves. With Sama’s approval and a lot of practice, Aelryinth was able to reach through the Markspace and directly seize the will of the Marked, something he’d had to do a handful of times when the minds and souls of Marked people were seized by powerful forces.

In all but one of the cases, said hostile mind control had worked by shattering their minds and reducing them to enslaved vegetables, extensions of the controlling invasive intellect. Aelryinth had shattered the control vector and sent the suborned back against the slaver in best murderous rebellion style, complete with the instant power-ups the entities had given their new toys, much to their discomfort.

Only two of those people had been recoverable, the rest he had to euthanize and vivify, purging the alien energies from their ravaged souls and sending them on their way.

The ones he’d rescued from the mind-fuckery? They’d been broken badly, and even with Divinely-powered Restorations and similar spells to ease their trauma, they’d given up the active adventuring life for support functions, staying far from the fighting which could result in the rape of mind, body, and soul like that, at least until they could overcome their fears.

It had also made a certain fellow named Termerial an overwhelmingly obsessed survivor regarding such entities. When another mindstalker had happened to wander into the area he lived in, ho, Mithar, had Termerial gone off on the bastard with a whole slew of psychic Counters, Spikes, Dispels, Mindshatters, and similar magicks that had torn that psivore a very, very traumatic new one. Its psychic death cry had lingered in the mindscape for nearly a month as it was pulled apart slowly.

Ember, the home town of the Lanterns where he lived, hadn’t had a mindfeeder problem since then, imagine that. Termerial’s Kit of Paranoid Techniques for Dealing with Mindfuckers had gone from a kludgy assembly of Feats, Masteries, Techniques, and Spells to an intensely-studied and streamlined program of must-have capabilities for any serious defender of the mental landscape.

As they said, ignorance was bliss. Learning that program really made people aware of all the shit that was out there that fed on minds and souls, stole bodies, invaded dreams, and so forth. And yet, learning how to deal with them actually helped you get back to sleep at night.

“So, you noticed the horrifying weakness, too.”

Kris nodded slowly. “The Isparian system has absolutely nothing in it to deal with mindfuckery. All these Augments completely ignore anything other than enhancement of Stats. There’s no mental or spiritual protection at all.”

It was a hugely glaring weakness. “The magical field here supports Summons, Binding and Sealing, and Necromancy. There’s no way that Enchantments and psychic fuckery doesn’t work here, and that’s ignoring just what Divinations can do, too.”

Knowledge-ferreting Isparian magic only worked through the various Assess Skills, low magic anyone could learn.

“Perhaps this ‘Asheron’s Protection’ he spoke of included a Protection from Evil or similar effect to it?” she asked archly. “After all, there was no functional Charm-type magic working on Ispar that we knew of, and let me tell you, Mom looked for that stuff really hard everywhere. Our Curses love going off on mind-control stuff.”

“I’m aware. There was a Thought Devourer infestation back on Terra, and Sama there was actually leading around Void Brothers finding the things. Amping up Vajra sensitivity to Mindfuckery is basically required if you’re any kind of serious about the stuff.

“There was also a subtle invasion by a group of Homo Mentos fleeing their own homeworld, our first exposure to true psionics. They immediately fucked around with the heads of the local Powered and people, which didn’t raise our opinion of them at all, as you might imagine.”

Kris snarled in reflexive agreement, staring at the display of Augments, both ‘normal’ and Luminance-derived. “Do you think this is another capped System, or could we keep adding to this?”

“Level 700? What do you think?” I replied, eyeing the many magical investments. “However, there’s something weird going on with the caps.” I pointed at two of the parallel skills. “Look at this. This Salvaging Skill both works on its own or is derived from a Tinkering Skill, whatever is more effective. It’s a magical means of stripping materials of useful raw materials, to be used for some other purpose.

“All those scattered bins of materials we have? Likely came via use of this Skill.”

The Princess nodded once. “If you’re getting tons of random spontaneously-created trash, I suppose that’s useful? The Isparian System doesn’t have a pure goldweight harvesting mechanic to it, where you can strip Artifice of its essence completely, like the PoT system does. What does that have to do with an Augment maximizing that ability?”

I drew lines down from the Augmentation to below his listed Luminance abilities, an empty area. “At some point, the Mick had Tinker Skills. Weapon Tinker, if I’m not mistaken.”

I touched the Holo of the Deep Assay, and a section opened up, although it was empty of the filled bars of Luminance.

“Enhancement of Craft and Tinker Skills?” The line led back up to his Augmentations, where his specializing in Salvaging dropped down, revealing the shadow of a formerly filled Weapon Tinker skill... and the open possibility of three others: Item, Armor, and Magical Item.

She blinked at it for a moment. “Okay, that’s enhancement of some specific trade skills...” and then she blinked. “It’s specialization. It’s manufacturing Skill Points out of nowhere...”

The arc of light curved back down to the Luminance Gift of Skill, which had expanded the total Skill points possible by two.

The Luminance Gifts of the World and Specialization provided more bonuses to Skills. I drew the connecting line to the Gift of the Craftsman, which provided stacking bonuses to Craft and Tinker Skills selected.

Princess Kristi studied the links intensely, ignoring the bonuses, looking at the implications behind them.

“Okay, this Luminance can make new general Skill Points, and for some reason has an arbitrary cap of two... unlike all the other Gifts, which go to five or ten levels. Augmentation can also make Skill points out of nothing, but restricted itself to Specializing the Tinkering Skills, for some reason, just like the Luminance arbitrarily restricted the additional stacking bonuses of its Craftsman Gift...” She rubbed her temples as she stared at the system. “It sort of makes sense if you are making some sort of warrior system for fighting. Nobody is going to waste Skill Points on side skills without some incentive if they trying to stay alive in combat. It becomes even more important when you WILL die if you fail...”

“But giving those Skill Points to other Skills may end up giving too much power in the area of combat? Someone made an arbitrary judgment on how many to hand out?”

“Or the System has a hard lock at 275, even though it doubtless continues on higher. Perhaps past 275 Skill Points unlock Eternal-level Skills, breaking the normal restrictions?”

“Can’t have that in our slave soldiers,” Kris muttered under her breath, crossing her arms and staring at the display. “So, we know that the Skill Points thing can be expanded by Augment Gems. It restricted itself to Tinkering Skills, but reasonably, it should be able to pay the cost for ANY specialized Skills, so we don’t have to.”

“Probably subject to massive differences in required investment.” I pointed out several Augmentations that had required multiple boosts to do what they did, such as the defunct one that allowed them to bring all their belongings with them when they died and were reformed/resurrected at the Deathstones. “But if you CAN do them, you get all those Skill Points back...”

“Allowing you the opportunity to buy all the foundational Skills, including the non-combat ones.” She was definitely not slow. “You just have to crack open the System to allow it. We already know there’s room for at least ten more Skill Points under the cap with the Specialization of that Salvaging and the four Tinker Skills...”

“And another stacking +1 bonus to a family of Skills, currently restricted to those non-Combat Skills.” The Gift of the Craftsman glowed for attention. “If we assume complete modularity with arbitrary restrictions laid down, the Isparian system, bolstered with these Augments, could be fantastically stronger than we know of.”

And the Power of Ten System, while it had its restrictions and its ceilings, complete with Class-based Leveling instead of the very organic model of the Isparian System, also had extreme power within that system, modularity, and very importantly... no true caps, only ceilings to be surpassed.

“You want to use the Power of Ten system to crack open the Isparian System,” Princess Kristi grinned openly, double canines on display in a predatory manner. “You’re going to use the Mick to guinea pig the process?”

“He should love it.” I pointed to his Sword Skill, Melee Defense, and Health. “Add those together, and what do they look like to you?”

She tilted her head slightly. “Melee Defense is the outlier here. But his weapon Skill is basically a restricted Melee Attack Bonus, and Health derived from the Endurance and Health Stats is basically Health and Soak, respectively. It’s the shell of Ironskull Warrior Levels, sans skill Ranks.”

“Remember that the Power of Ten combat system starts with a base fifty percent miss chance, modified by Attack Bonus and Power/Strength.” She blinked as she processed that. “The Isparian System starts with a Coord/Quick-based miss chance, opposed by Strength/Coord. In PoT terms, the starting fifty-percent miss chance varies from six percent with a 10/10 Coord/Quick start, to a 66-percent, with an idealized 100/100.”

“Coordination and Quickness translate over into a Dexterity bonus, and Melee Defense is a Dodge bonus on top of that...” she murmured intently.

“Similar to the Dodge Feat stacking with a Melee’s Armor Mastery. Except Dodge works against ALL attacks that require a roll to hit, and the Isparian system for some reason breaks out magic defense, melee defense, and missile defense, which involve separate things.”

“Closer to Dodge Missile, or Parry Missile,” Kris nodded agreement with me. “And most Isparian War Magic is basically variants of Ray spells. All the area-effect stuff tends to be very slow or in very close combat. Magic Defense is basically Spell Resistance in the Power of Ten system. The Isparian system doesn’t have a Skill for dodging magical spells, only directly resisting them...”

“Yes, it is quite strange,” I agreed with her unspoken comment. Isparian War Magic could be trivially easy to dodge at any distance, because it didn’t move that fast and proceeded in straight lines, kinda like dodging a fast pitch at you. Predicting movements and launching spells to intercept moving targets was as much an art for mages as anyone else, but there was no automatic ‘dodge’ defense, perhaps justified because most War Magic ignored armor, and the neutralized attacks bounced off the armor?

Power of Ten battle magic was much harder to avoid. Auto-hit Shards, lightning-fast Rays, area of effect Bolts, Bursts, Lances, Cones, Storms, Comets, Meteors, Fogs, Walls, and so forth. The relatively slow but powerful Isparian Magic looked very restricted in return.

That Isparian Magic was basically six different spells Forms – Bolt, Blast, Arc, Streak, Wall, Volley, and Ring – and the only real difference was the Element they used. Well, it was incredibly simplistic to a Power of Ten Caster. The Sculpt Spell Feat basically took all the spell Forms and made them available to any spell with some practice. The Elemental Mastery eventually gave you access to the full array of Elemental energies with any spell that used Elemental power.

An entire School of Magic that basically was covered by a Feat, a Mastery, and only needed one spell at each Valence Level was, eh, deucedly strange. It didn’t even have a viable Touch Spell range, although Casting in Combat was a standard part of Isparian War Mage training. Trying to do that point-blank in the PoT System was asking to be slaughtered, and the tales told of dead War Mages who had their spells interrupted after the Fall had driven the point home in blood that Casters now better not try that in weapon range unless they were REALLY good.

Monsters, however, didn’t seem to have the same restrictions, which alluded to the fact they might have set abilities that were more like Spell-like Abilities than Cast spells...

The holes in the System were being filled in as magic itself had chucked off its restrictions and was either returning to or newly entering a broader area of ‘reality’. Artificial limits were no longer there, and the narrowness of Isparian magic was loosening up!