Chapter 45.3

She cleared her throat awkwardly.  “Uh… yes.  Of course.  Well, Passives in this category are usually designed to assist in gaining language proficiencies, but the only types with any interest in that tend to be Scholars, Scribes, and the like.  Not Questers, in short.”

“No, I think we’re looking for something a little more immediate,” I agreed.  “Something like that Magic Tongues spell you suggested once.”

“Bline suggested once,” she corrected me.  “But even if I could replicate that spell exactly, it wouldn’t do.  You’ll need something for written text.”

“Why not something that works for both writing and speech?”

Mia’s reply was delayed slightly by the sound of a repressed moan.  “N-not possible in the Foundation Layers.  Too many variables.”

That was a refrain I had heard before.  From what I had gathered, each Layer had its own restrictions as to what you could and could not buy, and they usually made a certain amount of sense when you thought about them.  Because the skill system in this world was so open-ended, there would be nothing preventing you from buying a city-spanning nuke with your first skill pick without some rules in place.

And it would seem having a… dubiously loyal purveyor of skills in our corner had done little to change that.

“Okay… and do we want a skill stemming from Class or kind?”

That was a new one on me, and I fell silent to ponder it.

However, I was not the only one to be struck by its oddness.  The question tugged just enough at Jax’s curiosity to pull her out of her self-pity, and she sat up, scrubbing at her eyes.  “What do ye—”  She stopped, remembering what had happened the last time a thoughtless question had passed her lips.  “Err… I nay ken the question.  Explain the difference.”

Mia sighed.  “You didn’t think the ability to convert status ailments into Life Energy came from being a Tenebrous Warrior, did you?”

“Course not, ye bloody weapon!” Jax replied hotly, perhaps compensating a little.  “I were wanting ye to be specific, be all.  The difference the skill would take.”

“Oh.  Well, that part is somewhat flexible but, generally speaking, it’s a thematic question.  Is this something you’ve learned to do with the sorts of abilities your Class deals with, or is it something you’ve learned to do because of the unique way your body behaves?”

Jax made to reply, but the mental hamster-wheel made an abrupt return, leaving her mouth hanging open.

“So…” I hazarded, saving her from her own awkwardness.  “You’re saying you couldn’t just give Arx the ability to read all languages.  There has to be some sort of flavor attached to it.”

“That is correct, my lord,” she explained brightly. “There is nothing specific about Dolilim that could grant such a supernatural ability directly.  That I can think of, anyway.  I’ll need to check.  And the Siren’s theme seems to be based around vocal entrancement.”

“Meaning if we went the Siren route, the skill would have to do with singing,” Arx said for clarity’s sake.

“Most likely.”

She grunted.  “I’d like to avoid that if I can.  Singing for everything gets a little annoying.”

Mia made a little noise of agreement.  “Now, are there any other requests or restrictions you’d like to make on this skill?  Or shall I mock something up?”

We traded blank glances.

“Go ahead, Mia,” I said after a moment.

“My lord,” she agreed then fell silent.

While we waited, I pondered on the nature of this new spin we had been presented.  Mia had already explained that skills were just assemblies of Words meant to describe an effect of some kind.  So there seemed to be no reason a person needed to be restricted in the abilities they might purchase beyond basic concerns like power-scaling.  With such an open-ended system, why did we even need Classes in the first place?  Why not just let us pick skills and and assemble the tool-kit we deemed necessary to run our lives?

And what did a person’s kind have to do with anything?  For that matter, what sort of skills might I qualify for just by being human?  What was unique about myrace?

That was an interesting question.  Normally, I would have said that humanity’s true power stemmed from our over-developed brains, but that was not even uncommon on this planet.  Other than that, the only interesting thing humans had going for them was a penchant for long-distance running. And I would be damned before I started investing in skills like that—the occasional structural collapse notwithstanding.

I was a wizard!  No matter what technicalities Mia claimed.

Although, there might be some potential with this whole dreaming business.  All of the other races remembered theirs.  And I did not.

Mia seemed to believe this was something that could be cured simply by improving my Intelligence, but I suspected it would be so simple as that.  Dreams—or human dreams anyway—had to do with the divide between the conscious and the subconscious mind.

Do people on this world not have a subconscious?

About then, Mia returned.  “Huh. I suppose I’m not all that surprised, but still…”

“Don’t make us ask, Mia,” I prompted.

She cleared her throat.  “Apologies, my lord.  I know this sort of thing ruffles your sensibilities, else I would not hesitate to mention it.  However, it seems as though the Life Energy component within your Dolilim’s vaginal secretions can serve as an extremely flexible magical catalyst.”

My face fell totally flat, and I closed my eyes.  I did not know what else I could have expected, but it would have been nice to make a discovery that did not further my swan-dive into degradation.

A ‘flexible magical catalyst,’ huh?  Fantastic.

Meaning that if we were to be at all practical about things, the three of them would one day be traipsing about smearing the stuff all over the place.

Fuck me…  I had even theorized about its potential as a healing elixir.

And now that little smear on the card made so much more sense.  It was a perverse little hint about a perverse little method of solving the Demon Queen’s perverse little riddle.

As for the Dolilim, their reactions were a little mixed.

The comment was enough to finally pull Lynnria out of her stupor, and she sat up ramrod straight, an expression of mortified horror on her face.  However, she quickly began chewing on one of her claws, her eyes darting about as though connecting the lines in a grand conspiracy of implications.

Jax, meanwhile, was a tad slower on the uptake.  Mia’s vocabulary trended toward the decided opposite extreme from her own on the scale of incomprehensibility, so it took her a moment to even realize what she meant.  But once she had, she only shrugged.  She was a being of Lust by her own admission.  What was the big deal?

Then, there was Arx—who greeted the pronouncement with nothing short of approval.  And once got her breath back from laughing, she practically shouted, “I’ll take it!”