Trystan’s mouth slams shut as he takes in his Luck score. Sure, Luck wasn’t quite as standardized as the other stats as to what it did. Unlike Strength, where you could tell how much you could lift based on its score, Luck was more fluid. Granting a small increase to anything that could be based on luck, scoring critical hits, stumbling in the right area in order to find something you might have overlooked, getting extra points, or equipment from kills. Luck just about impacted everything for good or ill, and in ways people never could quite understand. Having a complete lack of Luck was unheard of, and something that was greatly concerning.

Trystan looks over to Maria, “Hey Maria, quick question for you before I head out...have you ever heard of anyone that is completely lacking a Luck stat?”

Maria looks utterly confused and shakes her head, “No, that shouldn’t be possible. Everyone, even us NPC’s have a luck stat.” Her eyes go wide as the second sentence slips out of her mouth and she puts her hands over her mouth quickly looking around scared.

“What’s wrong?” Trystan asks in a concerned voice.

Maria just shakes her head quickly, waiting for a moment before sighing with relief. Then, speaking softly, “We’re not allowed to speak on some subjects, we’re just NPC’s and it wouldn’t do for certain subjects to be discussed. But, I guess this wasn’t over the line.”

Trystan nods slowly, filing away this information for the future. It made some sense, the Store Keeper’s never really seemed to talk to or open up to the ‘Players’ of the Tower. If they had restrictions in place, things they couldn’t talk about. Trystan stops himself from going down that line of thought too much further. He wouldn’t be able to ask them about it anyway, not without risking whatever punishment the Tower enacted on those who broke its rules. Given the way she had responded, whatever the punishment, it was obviously one that they would go through some lengths to avoid. Turning his thoughts back to his missing Luck stat he tries asking the System directly, seeing what it stated.

‘Status, Luck’ he thinks, trying to get a more detailed examination of his stat.

Status - Luck

Base: %Error%

Bonuses: %Error%

Debuffs: #$##%^@@$%

Total: --

Luck Stat removed due to #$##%^@@$%.

Trystan studies the error message received carefully, trying to remember where he had seen that string of symbols before. Pulling up all of his System messages he finds that he has nothing in his log since the System was initialized during the Test. Cursing softly under his breath he closes out his logs, there just wasn’t much that could be done now but to move forward.

He turns and smiles softly to Maria, “Thank you for your help. I suppose I should head out now. I hope that you don’t get in too much trouble for helping me.” he gives her a roguish smile as he looks for the door in the room.

Maria’s cheeks dimple and she smiles with a light blush appearing, “No trouble at all sir. I hope you find your climb better than ours.” As she finishes her sentence a door appears on the far side of the room.

Trystan nods his thanks over to Maria again and opens the door, stepping through the field of light and into the Tower for his second first time.

***

Trystan’s stumbles as he steps through the doorway and onto what he was expecting to be solid ground, but instead, his foot drops another foot before it finds purchase. Already he can feel the water pouring into his shoes as he sees where his starting point is for the first time. A curse escapes his lips as he realizes he is on the exact opposite side of the Tower that he was expecting to be, and inside a disease-ridden swamp to boot.

-1 hp

Trystan feels a small bite on the back of his neck and smacks at it quickly, pulling away a hand that has a large smear of a mosquito, a mosquito almost the size of his palm. His health ticks down again as another mosquito bites him. He would have to do something about this and quickly. He had been expecting to show up near Riverside, at least the last time he had, only about a day travel out from it. That would have allowed him to meet up with the rest of the group quickly and plan for a way to get through the Tower, instead he was in the swamp. There was a nearby town, one that he would likely have to go to instead, but Opiales was not exactly known to be the most inviting of towns.

Another health tick has him searching through his abilities for anything that could help. He already knew that magic bolt would be close to useless here, sure it would kill any one of them, but there would be just far too many mosquitos to kill with the limited amount of mana he had, plus he wasn’t sure he could kill them all before his life ticked away. He pulls up the status for Mana Shield.

Mana Shield - Initiate

The most basic of Mana based defenses Mana shield encompasses the body and provides a shielding aura capable of absorbing a small amount of damage.

Description: Shield with a base value of 10 points, value modified by Spellpower.

Cost: 10 mana

Trystan nods to himself as he starts to visualize the spell and then says “Mana Shield” activating the spell, a shimmering force of mana surrounds his body. It wouldn’t reduce much damage, but since it was only a single point of damage it would end up helping a lot in this instance, plus every little bit would help later. Trystan waits for a moment to see the actual impact of the ability and finds no further damage notifications. Sighing with relief he nods to himself, the ticks were happening almost every five to ten seconds or so, so he would have to recast Mana Shield often, but it might be enough. He quickly runs some numbers through his head, three mana regenerated every minute, ten mana used every two to three minutes, looking at an approximate deficit of one to four mana. Assuming the worst, losing four mana every two minutes with his current mana pool he was looking at around two and a half hours of shielding before he would run out of Mana.

Trystan frowns slightly, it would really depend on where in the swamp he landed, as well as what other creatures he encountered. He had never gone to the swamplands on his first run, but he did hear about the other animals that dwelt either in the patches of muddy land or within the water itself. If he was smack dab in the middle, the difficulty of traveling through the muck could be enough to take the entire day to get out.

He glances up at the sky looking for the sun. Some of the levels of the Tower didn’t have a natural-seeming light source, but this first one did. Its sun was definitely something that you could navigate by at least. It was currently rising in the Tower’s ‘east’, and if he recalled correctly Opiales was set to the east of the swamp, so he’d start by heading in that direction, using his shadow to make sure he continued to follow the right direction. Then, with a smile he reaches into his backpack and pulls out a compass, only to have the smile quickly fade. The needle of the compass just spins and spins without stopping. Of course, that would be far too easy to have worked. The shadow it is he thinks to himself as he takes out the paper packaging holding his armor and sword and unwraps it so that he can get dressed as quickly as possible. While the armor may do nothing against the bugs, it will likely be required later on when dealing with the other wild-life in the area. As he gets the chainmail shirt put on a piece of paper flutters out and down into the murky water he is standing in. Trystan quickly picks it up and sees a short hastily jotted note, “The first step to the First is knowledge.”

Trystan looks at the note for a moment, confusion on his face. He must have made a good impression on the storekeeper, or else she wouldn’t have risked passing a note his way. But couldn’t she have been a bit more direct about what information she was giving him? He shrugs and puts the note away into his backpack, he’d have more time to investigate it later. For now, it was time to start sloshing his way through the swamp, hopefully in the direction of Opiales.

After two refreshes of the shield, he feels a sharp stinging bite on his leg.

-15 hp

Luckily, he had already regenerated from the initial mosquito bites, but this was just unreal, and that’s when he saw the next notice and started to feel the numbness climbing up his leg.

*You have been Poisoned*

Looking down he sees the jaws of a large black snake closed around his lower leg, it’s body starting to wrap around his leg as it continues to pump its poison into his bloodstream.

-5 hp

The first tick of the poison’s damage occurs and he realizes that his Mana shield must have come crashing down from the original bite. He had been letting the Mana shield run down to the very last tick of damage to try and extend how long he could live in this area, but that may have been a mistake.

He quickly lashes out with the Copper sword, trying to cut the snake off of his leg before it managed to constrict around it completely. His first swing misses completely, he takes a steadying breath and remembering all of his previous experience swings again. The sword slices into the snake and he is rewarded with a brief system message that his damage was applied to the snake, but it wasn’t enough to kill it or to get it to let go of his leg.

Pointing downwards with an open hand he calls back to the knowledge of Mana Bolt and recites its name as well to activate it. A bolt of crackling mana flashes down at the snake and strikes it solidly on the head. The snake shudders for a moment and then falls off his leg dead. Another system message flashes across his vision, the damage notification for the snake and a point awarded to him for the killing of a mob.

-5 hp

The poison damage continues, however, to tick away on him. He hadn’t thought about bringing any anti-poison or purchasing them through the store. That may have helped, and he didn’t have any healing spells or healing potions, not that he could have afforded the first, but the second he may have been able to, had he thought about it. For all of his planning, he had done for the rest of his friends and family, including what items to purchase and what to focus on in the beginning, he had completely forgotten to follow his own advice and to stock up on the life-saving items he would need. Instead, he would need to try and make his way out of here and into Opiales with only the gear that he had in his backpack.

Trystan sucks in his breath as he feels his health starting to slip away from him, casting Mana Shield he quickly realizes that it does nothing to alleviate the damage from the poison flowing through his system. Generally speaking, though poisons weren’t forever, eventually it’s timer would run out, the real question was whether it would run out before his health did or not. Movement, he needed to reduce his movement, if he could reduce how fast his blood was flowing through his system it was likely that he could increase the time between poison ticks, the Tower may be a game-like system, but it kept some realism as well. It didn’t matter how much health you had if your head was cut off and you didn’t have a special ability for that then you would die. Similar principles could be applied to the slow of poison spreading through a person’s body.

Spotting a small island of muddy earth to the left he wades through the muck and looks at it closely, ensuring it was clear of wildlife before he climbs up onto the muddy grass and vegetation. Going into the middle of this small piece of land he sits down and begins to attempt to meditate. The ticks of poison damage caused him to lose his focus but with about nineteen hp left he manages grasp onto the meditative mind state. His breathing slows and his blood stops racing through his body. The poison stops ticking every ten seconds and slows down to once every twenty, then forty, then a minute.

A couple of minutes later and the poison stops ticking away. Trystan thinks for a moment, realizing that the poison was applied for almost 6 minutes before it stopped. At every ten seconds that was a killer of anything with a hp score of less than around two hundred health. That was absolutely terrifying to think about. Trystan checks his health level and can only blink with relief. Two hit points left, with a regeneration of two health per minute he was looking at around an hour before he would be fully healed up, and he was going to wait for the full hour, there was no way that he was going to risk going out again without a full health bar and a full shield, that poison was just too damned dangerous.

It was just his luck that he would start out in one of the most inhospitable of locations, or perhaps, as he glances once more at his Luck stat, it was just his lack of luck.