Jimmy frowns, “While I do prefer to tell the truth when possible, you seem to be overly focused on doing so.”

Kyle laughs, “There is a reason for that and I guess I’ll need to reveal one of my hidden cards. Though I’m mostly certain a few of you have already figured it out. Plus, we are past the point that I need to keep it hidden from everyone here as it has already served its purpose. From my background as a lawyer, I gained access to the ability to detect lies. Specifically lies mind you, I can only detect what you believe to be a lie. I’m not connected to some deeper fundamental truth or what have you.”

“If I can do this, others will as well. In fact, I’m willing to bet Mr. Stansible has the same sort of ability, if not a more powerful one. After all, he was probably in the legal profession for longer than I’ve been alive. I say we play it straight with anyone that a group of people send to handle negotiations.”

Ace nods, “An important ability that I am sure there are one hundred and one ways to beat. Now we can’t keep them waiting too long. They should have figured out who they want to send in.” With that, everyone files out of the dungeon and heads toward the wall again.

And while they get that squared away, Doyle has turned to Ally with another question. ‘Do similar skills provide a bonus? On one hand, it would make sense that knowing how to carve one thing would make it easier to carve another thing, there are also differences.’

Ally takes a moment to gather her thoughts. ‘I don’t have a cheat sheet for this one, but I do somewhat know the answer. A better example of this though would be smithing. Many people tend to use blacksmith to mean smiths in general, but that isn’t correct. The skill for blacksmithing is purely to work with iron, steel, and other similar if more magical metals.This is as opposed to someone who works with brass, copper, and such who would be a brownsmith. Though they could even specialize in copper and its magical alternatives to be a coppersmith.’

‘Though of course the most popular type of smithing skill isn’t by metal but rather to work specifically with weapons and so becoming a weaponsmith. Honestly, the more you specialize the more specific of a skill you can get.The most common specialized smith for instance is the swordsmith. Someone who only forges swords.’

‘Does that mean they can’t forge a dagger? No, but they won’t be as good as a weaponsmith or a bladesmith. Better than a blacksmith though, as their focus was on a bladed weapon so some of that does cross over. Just don’t expect them to make a decent hammer.’

‘For a world like this? Such specialization would only hurt them. Even a weaponsmith would hold back the settlement. You need a very developed city to support such things. After all, there aren’t even fifty people in the settlement right now. There is no way to keep a weaponsmith busy.’

‘There is a benefit to such things, though. Someone with the swordsmith skill will be able to advance the skill quicker than a more general smith and be able to make better swords compared to other smithing skills at the same level. But this brings us back to skills. If a specialized skill is nice but you also want to do more general stuff, why not know both skills?’

‘First is the fact that even if you could, that removes the advantage of specialization. Any work done would send experience to both skills and thus halve the speed of advancement. This can already happen if different skills end up being used at the same time.’

‘Though you might have noticed, I said, even if you could a moment ago. Because you can’t, not really. After all, you’ve already seen the system’s answer to this kind of shenanigans. It gives you a main skill and then places the subskills below it. For you, this is seen with your patterns. For a smith that only does weapons they might end up with the weaponsmith skill.’

‘However, if they start to branch off into tool smithing, the system will at first have their weaponsmithing skill advance at a slower speed. Then once a threshold is passed, their weaponsmithing skill will become a more general skill, maybe even just smithing. And that skill would contain weaponsmithing and tool smithing. As soon as that happens, there is no going back.’

Doyle nods, ‘That does make sense. How does it work with things like bone carving and wood carving, though?’

Ally coughs, ‘For that specific example it would end up as the generic carving skill. For poor Jimmy, though, that won’t be the case because he doesn’t have wood carving, he has carpentry. To combine the skills he will need to jump through a few more hoops. First, he has to go beyond carving the bones and get the umbrella skill of bone working. On the other side he will need to do about the same thing with carpentry but in reverse. He already has a skill for building with wood so instead will need to get the skill for carving wood and so qualify for woodworking.’

‘Once he has both woodworking and bone working, we reach an impasse. Jimmy would already know both skills and so will have gotten path points for them. Combining them into a more general skill for building with materials would end up with a combined lower level. To do that would require him to give up path points equal to the difference between the two. Luckily the system will warn him about this when he intends to go down that path.’

Doyle sighs, ‘That sounds really complicated. I can see why people would do it, of course. With a limited number of skills you can know, especially if you try to stay on the straight and narrow with a class path, it would be quite useful. Though it must take more time than most would be willing to devote to it.’

Ally shrugs, ‘The very reason I know so much about it is because it takes so long. The higher tiers of doing this are basically limited to creatures like the fae, and so of course it was a common bragging point in court. Smithing, especially since most fae have a weakness to one metal or another. Being able to get the smithing skill is seen as quite the feat.’

‘Of course, the truly ancient people out there will know some super generic skills like crafting. Seriously, a skill to represent that they can craft anything through any method you could interpret as a craft? You aren’t simply showing off at that point. You’ve literally done everything.’

‘Though there is the flip side of the coin. Someone who has trained in a very specific thing for their entire life will end up with a skill that sounds like someone threw adjectives at the wall to see what sticks. Because not only can you generalize a skill, you can specialize it as well. A lot harder, as you have to be careful not to do other things. But if you stick with it long enough, the system will change the name of your skill to match what you’ve achieved.’

‘You don’t really get that chance though. All the skills you were given are already super general. For goodness sakes, you know a skill called creation. Sure, it has the modifiers of being energy based and using patterns, but still. The only thing you can do with that is broaden it even more by learning to create things through other means instead of just energy.’

Doyle flashes brightly for a moment and mentally coughs. Ally stops ranting and Doyle tilts towards the entrance display, ‘While what you are saying is interesting, Susan has shown up in the entrance hall. Going by what they planned, I need to assume the outsiders have their party figured out and are about to enter.’

Ally shrugs, ‘Fair enough. I wonder who is going to be diving?’

Doyle is about to take a peek outside when a group of six people file into the dungeon, removing the need to do so. They form up with one surprising member taking the lead.

Mr. Stansible looks over the other five people with him and nods, “Well, they didn’t lie about anything as far as I could tell, so this should be too much of a challenge. Jamie, take your hat off, we don’t need your abilities stifled while in here.”

Jamie takes off his sand colored hat to reveal a small horn growing out of his left temple. The horn curves upward before following the outline of his head. It doesn’t go far, but it has been growing longer. He rolls his eyes, “Just because my psychic powers couldn’t spy on what that Ace was saying before doesn’t mean wearing my hat blocks it. In fact, all the leader types were able to block my ability. If I had to guess something about their being the leaders here gave them protection. It is just a guess, of course, but about the only other person I’ve met able to do so is Ben, so it would add up.”

Mr. Stansible shrugs, “Well, we can’t help that. At least our more long eared in the crowd managed to catch what was said. Despite how little info it gave us, we at least know they haven’t found a way to protect against that kind of eavesdropping yet. Except of course entering the dungeon. That worked just fine at blocking everything. Now let’s get a move on. They let us in but if we lollygag too much things it will stretch their goodwill towards us and Ben entrusted me with making sure our interests were taken care of here.”

The group of six get started on the first floor, but Doyle isn’t quite paying all that much attention to them to start. Mostly because of Jamie’s horn.

Doyle turns to Ally and asks, ‘What is up with that? Everyone on the planet should be human as far as I know. Well, except you, I guess. And of course anyone else that has managed to sneak in. Even so, it sounds like he was just a normal person who lived on the planet before the system came.’

Ally shrugs, ‘Must have some kind of mutation. Psionic powers are real. In fact, they are one of the few powers besides luck which existed in this dimension before the system, if not to the extent they exist now. From the sounds of it he has a simple far sight ability.’

‘As for the horn? Seeing as it is growing out of his temple, I would guess he had the ability to use psionic powers before, but not the capacity. When the system came along and woke up the power within it needed somewhere to manifest from and be stored. The temples on a human are already somewhat of a weak point, and he only has it worse. That horn likely hasn’t grown over the skull but is instead the skull growing outwards. If it gets broken off, then there will be a hole directly into his brain.’

‘It will both limit him and allow him to grow. A normal human capable of using psionics would have a limited amount of power they can store. Sure, that amount will grow, but quite slowly. Jamie there can continue to grow his pool of power just by having that horn grow longer and wider. The problem is his ability will never advance beyond what it is now. Part of what forces psionic advancements is the pressure cooker of power the brain turns into. With Jamie, it is like someone forgot to seal said pressure cooker. Oh, and as a fun little side fact, psionic only refers to sapients. Non-sapients are called phrenic. Anyway, we’ve already missed them fighting through the first few rooms, so lets refocus on them.’