Chương 67: Chapter 66: Best Roles to Play

The System discussion came out sideways, the way it does, off an argument about whether the class descriptors had been written by anybody. Elia held that the wording came out of a generator, that the apparent differences between one descriptor and another amounted to noise, and that the entire player base had spent three months reading intention into randomness. He put it forward the way you put forward a thing you want demolished.

"The language is doing work," Luca said.

"Cannot and will not aren't the same word, and they don't appear in the same places. When a descriptor tells you a class cannot do something, that's a ceiling and it holds at every tier above it. When it says will not, that's a disposition. Dispositions move. Which means the class has somewhere to go that the text isn't telling you about, and the text knows it isn't telling you."

"You're talking about interpretation," Nicolò broke in.

"Not rules."

"Yes. I am." Luca turned toward him, matching his energy because he recognized this argument, or something like it, from his own team's early nights.

"Interpretation is what gets you from what the text says to what the text is. The System isn't written like an engineering schematic. It's written like it wants to be understood by someone who pays attention." The way they were all watching now, like they'd been waiting for this conversation, confirmed he'd been right to ask. Sofia spoke from the wall. She'd been quiet long enough that he'd started to think she would stay quiet, but when she broke, it landed cleanly in the space.

"The classes are reading like somebody built a personality engine to generate them. And that doesn't mean they're random. That means the personalities are deliberate." He turned toward her, waiting. She kept her eyes on him and went on.

"A real system that cares about gameplay and doesn't want to kill all the new players in the first hour isn't going to leave it to luck what a player sees in the text. If I write a scenario where you have to figure out what kind of trap you're walking into based on the language of the clue, the language of the clue matters. I don't generate it at random and hope you get it. The same way I don't make an AI personality system that talks in word salad.

The personality comes from the choices you make when you write it." He wanted to hear her go on, just for the structure of her thinking, which reminded him a little too sharply of himself. But she stopped there, because she had said the piece that mattered, and that seemed to be her habit.

"You build personality engines?" He made it sound curious and interested and not at all like it might be a question he already suspected he knew the answer to. Sofia nodded.

"In Unreal, and in Unity. Not at a level where anyone pays for it. It's a hobby. And I don't have the engine code here to keep doing it, so now it's an obsolete hobby." There wasn't much to add to that, but it landed, in the quiet space it made, the shape of it sat next to what she wasn't saying. If the System cared about personalities in the way a human writer would, there were a few directions it could have taken that. Some of them would make sense. Some of them wouldn't. He let that settle with them.

If they caught the shape of the question behind it, they would ask. Nicolò took the pause to steer it another way.

"All right, so you think the System's classes are designed with intent. You think the designers wanted us to find hidden options, to read into what's there, figure out what isn't. But how? Why wouldn't they just write the real descriptions?" The question opened the floor, which Luca suspected was deliberate. He didn't mind. He'd wanted them here anyway.

"For the same reason you write anything under layers." He put his elbows on the table and leaned in, just a little, enough to make it clear he wanted their eyes on him when he answered.

"If you want to separate the people who pay attention from the people who don't, you don't put everything in plain text. You make them work for it. You reward the ones who think through the options." He glanced at Sofia as he said it, and caught a faint shift in her posture, the barest nod.

"The System is running an evolution experiment," he went on.

"The three class options at initialization are a sorting hat. You pick the class you think describes you best, but only one of the options has the highest potential ceiling. Another one has a high front-end payoff but caps out fast. And one of them's likely randomly picked and doesn't take into account someone's real profile. It's designed to create variability, not optimize."

"That's insane," Tommaso said.

"Who designs a game that starts people off on the wrong path and waits to see who notices?"

"I made the same category error early on, but what we're living through now isn't a game, no matter how many mechanics there are or what the UI looks like." Luca took off his glasses, wiped them clean on his shirt. The move always got people's attention; it told them something new was coming.

"This is a civilization test. We've all read enough history to know that a change on this scale reshapes everything that sits on top of it. Governments, borders, who controls what. So what does the System care about?" He looked up from the lenses and found Marta waiting with her eyes sharp and clear.

"The same thing any emerging power cares about. The right people at the top. If the old world is broken, what comes after it will look more like whoever the System picks than whoever it doesn't. That's the long-term strategy. We're all part of the vetting process. And we don't get a choice about it." The room went still in a different way now, the kind of quiet that comes after you hear someone say out loud what you already knew, and the sound of it in the air makes the weight of it different.

He didn't push harder. It was a heavy thought, and the whole point was to let them sit with it. But Marta met his eyes across the table, and the green of them looked almost luminous against the dim of the room.

"Wait. You're the one who posted the class breakdown. Archimede, right?" He hadn't expected to be known for that. He nodded. Nicolò sat forward fast, his chair scraping on the floor.

"That's what I thought. You wrote the post that blew up every theory thread the day the screens went live."

"It didn't blow up. A few people liked it." Tommaso made a noise, half laugh, half disbelief.

"A few thousand people liked it. Everybody I know linked that post."

"I was glad to see the work getting around," Luca said. It was close enough to the truth, though he left out that it also made it easier for people like Cecilia to find him.

"We picked off your post," Elia said.

"All five of us. We were upstairs in the flat with the notifications up and about ninety minutes left on the window, and nobody could decide anything, and Marta found the thread and told us to shut up and read. So we did." Luca felt a small warmth settle under his ribs, the quiet satisfaction of something that started in his bedroom ending up useful in somebody else's.

"I'm glad it helped. That's why I put it up." Nicolò folded his arms.

"Well, it helped us, anyway. But we were pretty much already decided on what we wanted before we read it." Luca let that sit, a lead-in waiting for the next part. Nicolò saw it, glanced at the others, and nodded.

"So what classes did you take?" Luca asked, and even as he asked, he thought of his own first night, the blue screen hovering in the air, the way it made you feel the world could be anything you picked. He knew the shape of what they were about to say, even before he heard it. Elia, unsurprisingly, went first.

"I'm a Druid." He looked the man over. Nothing about Elia screamed magic, or nature, or the particular System-driven synthesis of both. But he'd seen Bianca walk into a room, so he wasn't judging on looks anymore. If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

"I've been interested in sustainable agriculture since I was a kid," Elia went on, defensive but trying not to show it.

"If I could help us survive on less and grow more of what we needed, I figured I could actually be useful."

"I think you are," Luca said, and let it sit as truth. Tommaso held his pipe in his hands and tapped the end against the table once.

"Paladin." Again, Luca took him in, the scaffolder, the civil engineer, the one who looked like the only reason they still had a roof overhead. The image of a Paladin—bright sword, holy oath—didn't sit with the quiet, heavy presence of the man holding the metal pipe. Tommaso seemed to know what he was thinking, because he shook his head slightly, smiling in a wry, knowing way.

"I wanted something that would let me stand in front. Keep people safe. Not sit back and work it out later." That landed a little closer to Luca's expectations, though he wondered, quietly, what Tommaso's skills actually looked like in practice. Nicolò made a show of thinking about it, though his posture told Luca he'd already rehearsed this, too.

"I went Bard. The class looked like it could go anywhere. Support, control, knowledge gathering. And the text sounded more interesting than the others. That was what sold me, to be honest. I already know how to produce music and play the guitar, but if it gave me some edge in understanding what's going on here, that's where I want to be." There was a pattern emerging. It made Luca's scalp tingle, the sense that he could draw a line from these choices back to a single decision they'd all made together.

But he kept quiet and looked at Marta, waiting for the next piece.

"Mage." She said it the way he'd said Architect, the way you name something you still weren't quite settled in, but you'd committed to anyway.

"I wanted the spell theory. And it said something about 'deconstructing' magical effects. I liked that. It felt like a class that could adapt to whatever we found." Four out of five, then, and they were all around the same theme.

"You all didn't choose your classes based on the characters you played in your tabletop game, right?" He meant it lightly, as if the question didn't matter much, but he knew the moment it came out that he'd pushed a button. The four looked at one another, then back at him, with something that looked like shared guilt. Elia even winced slightly, like the point was sore.

"That obvious, huh?" Nicolò said.

"No, I don't—" Luca started, but then stopped himself, recalibrating.

"I just wondered, because the pattern in your picks isn't obvious from your backgrounds, but it's a lot like the pattern in the party comp I'd expect from a group of people who've played together. I mentioned before that two of the three class options have some correlation to the profile the System built for you, so if one of the options is close to your profession, then the other one would likely be linked to your interest, your hobby, your personality." Marta cut in.

"Our party in the game. Yeah." She glanced over at Sofia, still sitting against the wall. Luca hadn't been able to read her much, beyond the quiet competence and the analytical clarity. Now she just watched him back, like the next step in this conversation belonged to her, and she wanted to see what he'd do. Luca hesitated, then gave a small, acknowledging nod, shifting his focus entirely to Sofia.

"What class did you take?" Sofia tilted her head. The light caught her glasses in a way that hid her eyes for a second. When she answered, her voice was even, unhurried.

"Dungeon Master." Luca felt a laugh bubble up before he could stop it. He stifled it quickly, but not before he saw a flash of amusement in Sofia's face.

"You have to be kidding." She shook her head, deadpan.

"No." The room felt lighter after that, like the admission of something so unexpected and fitting that it rearranged all their pieces into a clearer picture. It also, suddenly, made a lot of other things fall into place. He leaned back, smiling openly now, because there was no reason not to.

"That makes all of you a gaming party that translated straight into System roles. And that's how you ended up together, in a closed loop. Your tabletop game was a dress rehearsal." The way they nodded, slow and collective, told him it wasn't a new idea to them, but that they hadn't expected anyone else to say it out loud.

"We realized early on," Nicolò said.

"We're stronger together than we'd be apart. The classes fit, and we already knew how to work together. It made more sense to stay in the pattern than break it. So we did. And that's how we ended up... here." They went two more hours and it was, without any exaggeration, the longest uninterrupted stretch of System mechanics Luca had talked about since the early weeks of his team.

Between them they knew things he didn't know, had run into creatures he hadn't catalogued yet, had made the kind of errors of assumption that he recognized because his own people made them too. They argued about whether a Scenario's stated objective had ever once matched what the Scenario was actually measuring. Luca held that it had not and could not prove it. Elia held that it happened about half the time and couldn't prove that either, and enjoyed himself considerably more in the failing.

The energy was loose and quick. The conversation flowed the way a gaming group talked through a session that got away from them, with half-formed theories and interjections and corrections, but none of it got stuck. He understood it all now the way he understood how Ermilio argued or why Ivan paused before he spoke. They made a different shape from his team, but the pattern behind it was the same. They wanted to make sense of what the System did, and they cared enough to work it through.

Tommaso had described something close to thirty engagements over the course of an evening. Elia had spawn distribution across four creature types. Marta had corrected Luca twice on tier thresholds and had been right both times, and neither correction had sounded like a performance. He ran their conversation in his head, and didn't like the shape of the answer. Six blocks, suppressed far enough down that Ivan needed a private scale to describe them. Flat minimum, eleven weeks running.

By every model Luca could build, effectively nothing spawned inside that rectangle and effectively nothing died in it. There is no experience in a dead zone. That is the definition of the term. Five students don't come out of eleven weeks in one looking like this. He put his cup down and heard it land harder than he meant.

Marta's eyes went to it, and then to his face, and he understood that whatever he asked next he would be asking of somebody who had spent the entire evening waiting to find out when he would get around to it.

"Where do you level?" Nobody moved. Tommaso looked at the floor. Elia looked at Marta. Nicolò looked at Luca and kept looking, which answered on its own, and across the shop, Sofia closed her hand around the flat thing under her arm and held it there.

"Around," Marta said.

"Around where? I'm asking because the numbers don't work. Tommaso has described about thirty engagements to me without noticing he was doing it, and you've corrected me twice on thresholds nobody has published, and neither of those comes out of sitting quietly in six blocks of a neighborhood with barely any ambient spawn activity for almost three months."

"Around," she said again, slowly, the way you repeat an address to somebody who has already been given it. He let it sit. They didn't offer more. That meant he'd misjudged how fast to go, or he'd gone fast enough and now the adjustment had to come from him.

"You're being careful," he said.

"That's fair. I wouldn't be in this room right now if you hadn't decided we're not here to make a threat. I'm here because Cecilia doesn't want to fight you for the secret, and neither do I. I'm just interested." He put his hands up, empty palms facing the table, the posture people use when they want it to be understood that they are unarmed.

"So if there's a secret worth hiding here, you've earned the right to hide it. And I'd like to be on the team that helps you do that, instead of the team that tries to figure it out the hard way." Luca closed the door to the tabaccheria behind him and stepped out into the dark of Aurora's streets. The street lamps, the ones that worked at all, had been spaced out at distances intended for a quieter part of the city, and they didn't light the street as much as mark its edges.

At the corner, under a lamp that buzzed but gave off barely enough glow to find your way by, Cecilia leaned against the wall and looked like she hadn't moved all evening. Beside her, Bianca straightened off her own post, which was as close as she came to showing impatience.

"How did it go?" Cecilia asked. Luca walked over, shoved his hands in his pockets.

"We talked."

"I meant the part that isn't just talk." He shrugged, not to evade the question but because the honest answer was complicated.

"They're considering it. But it's not going to be an instant yes."

"That's fine. Did you find anything I should know about?" Luca paused, deciding how much of the evening to compress. Then he decided to go with all of it, because Cecilia would hear the gap if he left one.

"Their class choices align almost perfectly with the tabletop game they played together before all this. One-to-one. The person in charge is the Dungeon Master, literally. That's why they've stuck together. It's familiar territory, and they trust the pattern." He glanced back at the shop, still closed and silent behind him.

"But they've leveled more than makes sense for the time they've been here, and when I asked about that, they clammed up. I don't know where they're going or how they're doing it, but there's another piece of this we haven't seen." Cecilia's eyes flicked toward the tabaccheria and back.

"And the suppression? Did you find out how it works?"

"Not yet. But I'm pretty sure it's Sofia. The DM. Whatever class that translates to in the System, she's the key."

"You trust them?" Bianca asked, direct as always.

"I trust them to protect what they've built." Luca turned to her fully.

"Whether that's something we can use or not, I'm still working out. They're careful. They're not stupid."

"That's a start," Cecilia said, pushing off the wall.

"Tomorrow we'll find out if they're interested. For now, we've done what we came to do." Luca nodded, falling into step beside her as they turned south, Bianca trailing a few steps behind, the light from the buzzing lamp fading in the distance.