Chương 8: Chapter Eight: An Experiment in Applied Embarrassment

The evening before, on her way back from Crane Street, she had stopped at the chandler's on Greybell Lane and bought a small candle lantern. Horn-sided, a shilling and three pence, the kind that folded flat enough to carry in a basket and opened to throw a reasonable circle of light. She had been making do with borrowed lamps and fixed gas brackets in cut-throughs so far. Outside the ward boundary, in open marshland before sunrise, she was not going to be borrowing anything from anyone.

Back at Pell Street she had laid out everything the morning needed. The basket. The tinder-kit. The lantern. The knife from under the third floorboard, rewrapped in its cloth and put at the bottom of the basket. A half loaf and a wedge of hard cheese, wrapped in paper.

A coat, not Hyde's, was going to get muddy regardless of what she did, so she wore the spare dress from the chest, the darker one, heavier wool, over two lighter layers, and her worst boots, which had already made their peace with difficult conditions. She was out of the house before Mrs. Hatch reached the kitchen.

The gate opened at five. There were people already waiting there by the time she arrived, ten minutes before opening. The officer on morning watch looked at her basket, basically empty, obviously, she was going for flower gathering after all, and waved her through without further conversation. She had been, she could admit, braced for something more involved than that. Some questioning or curiosity, at minimum. Apparently not. Good.

The city thinned behind her, as she walked past, and then simply stopped, replaced by flat ground and a sky that was considerably larger than the one she'd been living under for two weeks. The cold was cleaner out here, without the coal smoke sitting underneath it. She walked northeast on the road, which became a track, which became two parallel lines of pressed grass, and twenty minutes after the gate she was standing at the edge of the Lea marshes before sunrise and it was very, very quiet.

She had grown up with a city's idea of quiet. This was not that. This was the absence of everything human, no carts, no voices, no wheels on stone. It was all replaced by reed warblers and the low sound of the river somewhere behind the reed beds, moving through a landscape that predated Londinium and would be there after it was gone. The cold sat in the ground and came up through her boots immediately. [Threat Detection] – Passive.

She had barely taken two steps before the notification popped up, along with a tingle at the back of her spine. Skill [Threat Detection] has leveled up!

Skill [Threat Detection] has leveled up! She turned around, holding the lantern close, but could not see anything through the darkness. There were still a few people around, but they were all wandering off to do their own tasks, and Alice couldn't understand why a skill that had not leveled even once despite the demons in the city, had just leveled twice at once. She watched carefully for a few minutes. [Observe] – Passive. But she couldn't see anything that would stand out.

She had to give up after a moment, still unsure of her surroundings, and called out the Status screen. [Threat Detection] was now Lv. 3, but more interestingly, the Acuity bar had dropped by two points. Attributes Vigour Lv. 3 (30/30) Acuity Lv. 6 (58/60) Full Vigour, for the first time in a while. The pitch cost her five or six points a day between standing and carrying and the small active uses, and food and sleep returned it overnight. She had, apparently, slept particularly well.

But regarding the passive activation of [Observe]. Skills fired without her permission quite often. She had spent several days trying to figure out the pattern: every passive skill use cost exactly one point of Acuity, whether she had chosen to use it or not, but it remained in use throughout until she became distracted with another activity. Vigour and active skill use worked differently, however. She had been trying to figure out how to use a skill actively for days. She had tried punching the wall in her room.

She had tried sprinting the length of Pell Street at six in the morning, which had produced only a passive [Sprint] notification and one deeply suspicious look from the postman. She had tried to will [Observe] into a higher gear while staring at the wallpaper at number fourteen until she saw shapes in it. Nothing had cooperated. The marshes were empty enough, and early enough, that nobody was going to watch her be an idiot.

Alice pushed deeper into the first line of scrub at the edge of the reed beds and tried again. The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. She looked at a bush. She looked at it deliberately, reminding herself of her undergrad bio classes in university. The leaves were remarkable, now that she was paying attention, too bright, with that special over-presence and saturation that apparently flora outside the city all had. She noted the leaf margins.

The way the stems kinked at the third joint. She was being extremely observant. She was observing with great intention and focus. Come on, System… [Observe] – Passive. She did not curse out loud, but it was a close thing. Alice straightened up and looked at a different bush, because perhaps the first one had been insufficiently interesting. This one had berries on it, small, red, clustered low and half-hidden under the leaves.

Strawberries, wild and out of season by any reasonable reckoning, but apparently magic simply ignored the inconveniences of the calendar weather entirely. She reached in and picked one. Skill created: [Forage] She stared at the notification for a moment. The wall-punching hadn't created [Strike] or [Attack] or anything like that. Deliberately walking fast hadn't created [Run], but was that because she already had [Sprint]? No, she had multiple social skills that could overlap.

But still, almost a week of attempts and it had taken her finding a strawberry to create her first skill. She took a deep breath. Either foraging was categorically simpler than fighting or other physical skills, which was possible, or skill creation required context. The right place and the right action, not just repetition or intent. Punching a wall in a room was not punching. Finding a wild strawberry in a marsh was, apparently, exactly foraging.

She had been trying to build skills like grinding in a game, when instead they might need the right trigger condition. This was useful information. She was tempted to eat the strawberry, but placed it in her basket instead, worried that the magical flora here might poison her, and kept thinking. She wasn't going to be distracted. Skill creation for another time. For now, active use! Alice spent the next twenty minutes testing [Observe] until she genuinely ran out of ideas.

She described leaves out loud, which did nothing. She listed the colours she could see, which did nothing. She consciously directed her attention at specific objects with great deliberateness, which produced two more passive activations and one level up notification. Skill [Observe] has leveled up! [Sprint], she tested next, getting well away from the track before she tried it. She ran. [Sprint] activated passively. She ran faster. [Sprint] activated passively again.

She slowed down, stood still, and tried to decide to sprint, and nothing happened at all until she started actually moving. Alice stopped and put her hands on her knees. Active skill use was not about wanting to, apparently. She stayed crouched in the scrub, catching her breath, and thought about it from the other direction. Every passive skill had a trigger, a condition that set it off. [Observe] triggered when she entered new environments. [Sprint] triggered when she ran.

What would it mean to trigger them deliberately, from the outside? She straightened up. This was the stupidest idea yet. She looked carefully at the bushes in front of her, and–"Observe," she said, out loud, feeling approximately as dignified as one felt saying magic words in a marsh at six in the morning. The world opened. It lasted only a few seconds, but in those seconds she saw the scrubland around her in a way that had no equivalent in her prior experience.

The colours of the leaves were not bright but precise, each one a different and specific shade her ordinary vision had been averaging together, the edges of things razor-defined, the three strawberry plants she hadn't noticed yet suddenly obvious from twenty feet away. It was extraordinary and completely overwhelming and it stopped when she stopped focusing, which she did when her eyes began to water from not blinking. Four points of Vigour less. She had just reached level 4 in [Observe]. One point, per second.

Active [Observe] could be maintained for exactly as long as its current level in seconds, she realized, but tested this once more, holding until the skill cut out, watching the count for Vigour tick down until she counted to four. At Level 4 she had four seconds, which was enough to see rather a lot. She looked at the three strawberry plants she'd spotted during the first activation and went to pick them.

"Sprint," she said, perhaps too excited, and the word had barely left her mouth before her body moved. She had been standing still. She was not standing still anymore. The sudden transition from stationary to full speed was so complete and so immediate that she had no time to adjust her footing, and she went down sideways into the scrub with a sound she chose not to describe, landing in something wet, and lay there for a moment looking up at the sky. Damage received. Condition created: [Bruised].

Well, that was new. She checked the attributes. Vigour Lv. 3 (20/30) So she had managed to only use [Sprint] for a second and then had lost an extra point of Vigour due to tripping. How wonderful. Active use, she thought, lying in the mud, gave her the optimal performance of this body, not warming up to it, not preparing for it, but arriving there instantly, from wherever she happened to be. Full speed from standing. Perfect technique from nothing.

The problem was that she was the person inside the body and the person inside the body needed to have braced for it first. As she looked at her list of skills, however, another issue arose. How was she going to use [Hide] or [Silent Step] if she needed to say the skills out loud to activate them? Was this a joke? Whoever had designed this system was an imbecile, she decided. Alice sat up. She was muddy. She was going to be muddier before the morning was done anyway.

This was going to require a tremendous amount of practice.