The final, and the most difficult to describe Number is charisma. While all other Numbers are either physical or mental, charisma deals directly with both physical and mental aspects, as well as with aspects outside of the bounds of physical or mental descriptions. Perhaps the best summary of charisma is by Ryder in the 17th century: “the conforming of one’s identity to their, and others’, perception of the ideal.” While many potential sub-attributes of charisma are hotly debated, this text considers appearance, influence, and healing to have been verified as valid sub-attributes.

- Excerpt from “The Five Numbers, 5th Edition”

I wake up an unknown amount of time later, groggy and confused. What happened...? Why was I...wait. Claws. Teeth. Blood!

My heart suddenly pounds through my chest and adrenaline pours through me as I sit up. I gasp out in pain at the fire that runs down my arms. There's so much blood! I'm still bleeding from my chest and forearm, and the blood staining my hands and dripping from my fingertips hasn't even started to dry, so I can't have been out for more than a few minutes.

I try to examine the cuts in my arm, the place where I feel the most pain, but cannot make out anything through the blood. I take the bottom end of my shirt, already shredded, and press it to my left forearm, feeling suddenly dizzy from the pain. I struggle to keep from passing out again; I need to staunch the blood flow, I've lost so much already.

Gritting my teeth against the pain, I awkwardly attempt to tear part of my shirt off with only one arm. If it hadn't already been torn, I don't think I would have managed -- at least the monster's claws were good for something. I glance over to the corpse lying next to me and attempt to spit, but find there's not enough moisture in my mouth to form anything but tiny drops of spittle. Oh well. It's dead and I'm alive. That's enough for now, I just need to make sure it stays that way.

With tears in my eyes, I hold one end of my shirt's fabric pressed between my elbow and side, and use my right hand to wrap the deep cuts as tightly as I am able to withstand, tucking the ends back underneath itself. I hope it is enough to slow the blood flow.

I look at my makeshift bandage. Already, blood is soaking through the thin material, and the tightness is causing a weird pulsing feeling to come from the wound, keeping time with my beating heart.

I'm no medic. My first-aid knowledge for how to deal with cuts begins and ends with keeping the blood on the inside and keeping the dirt and germs on the outside. I'm not sure what else I should do to make sure I stay healthy, and don't know if I even could do anything if I had the knowledge.

I do know, however, that there is no way I am able to walk, or even stand, in my present condition. Every movement causes my muscles and joints to groan in protest, and I can't stop my hands from shaking.

I have a flash of inspiration, and realize that I may still have some Numbers left I may still be able to increase. I touch above where I know my strength and charisma Numbers to be, hoping that I’m able to increase the Numbers by tapping through the makeshift bandage. I think I can feel the increased strength pulse through me, but with all the pain from the cuts calling for my attention, I can’t tell for sure.

With a sigh, I lay back down on my side, clutching my injured arm to my chest, and attempt to ignore the pain.

Some time later -- I'm not sure how long, I had been drifting in and out of consciousness -- I sit up. I need water, badly. My mouth feels like I swallowed a handful of cotton balls, and my dizziness has only seemed to grow worse as time goes on. There's no way I am able to make it to the shed, but thinking back to my bag of supplies, I remember a can of corn that had been wetly sloshing around as I packed it up.

I glance to my left. The bag is five feet away, where I dropped it before being tackled to the ground. With agonizing pain and slowness, I crawl the distance, using only my good arm and legs. With every movement, my body voices its complaints through the shooting burning from the cuts, the dull throbbing from the bruises, and the general ache from my overall weakness.

Just before making the crawl, I finally remember to check on the cuts on my chest and stomach. Luckily, they aren't anywhere near as bad as the cuts on my arm, and had stopped bleeding on their own by the time I examined them. My crawl causes what's left of my shirt, sticky with my own blood, to rub against the wounds, making me wince and pause, but not for longer than a few seconds.

I finally get to the bag of supplies and start digging through, hoping my memory is correct. Success! I pull out the can of corn, clumsily wrestling one-armed with it as I pop the top off of it. Thank goodness for cans that don't need openers.

The juice from the can is thicker than I expected, but the liquid tastes glorious sliding down my throat. I never thought that I would appreciate corn this much.

Two slow hours pass, and I end up draining the juices down from three of the four cans I brought -- I'm not planning on trying to down the salty canned chili until I have better access to water. I don't feel nearly as dehydrated as I had earlier. I still feel like I can drain a gallon of water in seconds, but my mouth isn't quite as cottony and parched as it had been, and the dizziness has faded almost completely.

I am actually surprised as to how good I am feeling. Walking back to the shed doesn't seem like quite as impossible of a task as it did after first wrapping up my arm. This is fortunate, as it is finally starting to get dark again, and I no longer feel comfortable staying out of shelter for any longer than I need to. Thinking about my feelings towards the shed twenty-four hours earlier, I'm amazed at how quickly something is able to go from being absolutely repellent to being heartwarmingly appealing. I guess that's what a life-or-death battle will do to you -- you'll very rapidly re-evaluate your priorities.

Grabbing the last can from the bag in my right hand, I struggle to my feet. If something tries to attack me before I make it back to the shed, the odds that I will live are next to nothing, but any attacker will be surprised if they think to take me down unopposed. The can will give my hits that much more umph, and will serve as a decent projectile if necessary.

I'm surprised by the pace I am able to maintain. Even with the frequent rest stops and with my head practically on a swivel checking behind me nonstop, it takes less than an hour to arrive at the front doors. By the time I finally get to the final few steps, I'm more concerned with speed and not tripping than with looking around into the almost complete surrounding darkness.

I breathe a sigh of relief as I pull the door closed behind me. Finally, a margin of safety.

I'm under no illusion that I am truly safe, as images of the burning cabin flash through my head superimposed with images of the shed in a similar inferno -- but with me trapped inside. I shake the images away. This is the best I can do for now. That's all I can focus on -- now. I don't think I have the current capacity to plan for beyond this night. All I think about are the blankets at the base of the stairs beneath the closed trap door.

The complete darkness convinces me that the basement can wait though. The trapdoor, the stairs -- it all feels like just too much. I collapse to the ground on top of the trapdoor, curl up into a ball, and fall asleep.

Light is trickling through the cracks around the door when I finally wake up again. My body still feels terrible, but also much better than it has any right to feel based off of my Numbers and my condition after the fight.

A person's health, also called vitality, is recognized as a sub-attribute of strength and charisma. There are many different aspects to vitality, but common knowledge of the sub-attribute is that strength determines how difficult it is to hurt someone while charisma determines how quickly someone will recover after being hurt. Persons who have strength over five hundred are incredibly difficult to injure, and there are theories that if a person has high enough charisma they would be able to completely regrow an amputated limb. Of course, I've never heard of anyone ever having a high enough charisma Number to test this, much less being willing to amputate a limb to simply see if it will grow back.

Regardless, since the resetting of my stats, my vitality has been next to nothing, so I wouldn't expect to be able to even walk after taking such damage to my body. True, I have very little experience with such drastic wounds or with such minuscule Numbers, but I can't imagine that a two year old, which my current Numbers are roughly equivalent to, would be doing as well as I currently am doing.

On the other hand, my low Numbers are housed within a teenager's body and mind -- I'm not sure how much my base physical capabilities, separate from my Numbers, affect my abilities, but I guess that could account for any discrepancies in my expectations.

Slightly reassured with my conclusion, I reach down and pull up the trapdoor for the basement. The thirst that I was able to stave off yesterday is back with a vengeance, now with hunger to go along with it. Carefully balancing my way down the steps, I head directly to one of the gallon jugs of water.

A quarter of the jug goes into my mouth, while the rest is used to wash my bloodstained hands of the worst of the dirt and stains. Luckily, there is a drain in the middle of the concrete floor of the basement which allows me to use the water liberally without having to worry about mess.

Before sating my hunger, I decide to take care of the other pressing issue. Looking at my hastily wrapped arm, I cringe. What was yesterday the remnants of my torn shirt wrapped tightly around my arm is now a solid mass of dirt and blood, held in place more by the dried blood than by any sort of careful wrapping.

I begin by pouring almost a half gallon of water over my arm to simply loosen the wrapping. When it is finally cleaned enough for me to find the end of the wrap, I take a deep breath to prepare myself, and slowly start to unwrap it.

"AGGGGHHH!" I yell out in pain, as the sticky wrap pulls at the shredded skin. Going even slower, I continue to pull on the shirt. After a painfully long amount of time, my wound is completely uncovered, and I pour more water over the top to get rid of some more dried blood, dabbing gently with one of the spare blankets. The stinging of the dabbing and water is painful, but much less than pulling off the bandage.

After a minute of this, my skin finally becomes exposed. The skin is terribly torn up and I almost cannot decipher the values of my Numbers, but by closely examining and wiping off the flaps of skin, I piece them together.

My jaw drops. No wonder I feel unexpectedly strong.

S: 49

D: 24

W: 27

I: 25

C: 14

11

I stare in shock at my Numbers. How are they so high?

I glance down at my palm. Eleven. Before the battle with the monster, I had nineteen remaining. But my strength and charisma Numbers have increased by so much more than just eight. There’s no way I could have increased my Numbers, specifically strength and charisma, by as much as they did naturally.

Typically, my Numbers only increase after extensive amounts of training and repetition, although extremely strenuous acts have been known to result in small jumps in specific Numbers. This, however, is unprecedented. Between all five of my Numbers, I seem to have gained over thirty points in less than one day, not counting the eight that have come from my palm. That's almost as much as I regularly average over an entire year!

I have no idea what to make of the jump. After a minute or two of contemplation though, I decide to not worry about it. Compared to my Numbers resetting, the burnt cabin, my missing classmates, and the killer monster from a horror movie, a jump in my Numbers is a minor, if welcome, surprise.

With only a small amount of hesitation, I apply eleven more points into my charisma attribute, bringing the total to twenty-five. As the Numbers get higher and higher it becomes more and more difficult to acquire each extra point, which makes me regret spending all of my "free" points into an attribute that barely has any points in it yet. However, I deem any extra healing that the charisma attribute can offer me is worth it in my current predicament.

I laugh silently to myself, thinking back to my former constant inward derision of the charisma Number. I had always seen it as the most useless of all attributes, and remember looking down on the pretty-boys and -girls in school who focused on increasing it through smooth speech and cosmetics. It had all felt so useless compared to the concrete improvements the other Numbers could offer me.

Now though I fully realize the usefulness of charisma. If another monster were to have attacked me on the walk back to the shed, the largest factor in the battle between life and death would not be my strength, dexterity, or intelligence. While all of those are useful, essential even, to victory, they are not what would be most important. If I were not recovered enough from the first battle, my strength would be sapped from my blood loss, my actions would be slow and uncoordinated, and each bump, fall, and jostle could potentially render me unconscious or unable to function through the pain. The only way to make full use of my other Numbers is to ensure my charisma Number has the time and power to heal me.

I immediately feel slightly cleaner after applying the extra points into charisma, as if some of the dirt, upon seeing my increase in Number, decided my body was no longer the place for it. In spite of this, I continue my washing session, fully stripping down and cleaning off the accumulated dirt, sweat, and blood from the past few days, using one of the blankets for a rag.

Cleaner than I was before, although unfortunately redressed in the same disgusting clothes, I grit my teeth together. Now it is time for the truly painful part. I pour a handful of antiseptic goop into my right hand, and with only a second's hesitation to take a deep breath, I slather the goop onto the cuts on my left arm.

The stinging! For a full minute, it feels as if my arm is on fire, but eventually the pain dies down. Taking a full yard of clean sticky bandage, I carefully and tightly wrap the cuts, until nothing below my elbow and above my palm is exposed to open air.

After considering it for a few seconds, I decide to do the same to my stomach, which uses even more of the sticky bandage. By the end, I only have a few yards left, but I don't anticipate being injured again anytime soon.

With that thought, I quickly reach over and rap my knuckles twice onto the wooden stairs. I'm not overly superstitious, but some things are just asking for trouble.

S: 49 (+23)

D: 24

W: 27 (+3)

I: 25

C: 25 (+24)

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