Golden Experience

Chapter 6: “Contemplating”

—Huh? What? “Tame”? I can tame her? An NPC?

The fact that it appeared she could tame a human NPC was of course shocking, but more importantly, there had never been any whispers of a taming system at all before. It wasn’t available in the closed beta. Maybe she just never found out about it, but whatever the case, Rare was currently completely clueless.

She had no idea what kind of system it was, but based on the error message she received, something happened that caused a tame action to activate. Normally, you’d think it came about due to Kerry’s request. “I want you to become our leader;” in other words, from a gameplay perspective, a “Rare wants to tame” expression of intent, or so she believed. However, because Rare didn’t have a skill related to taming, the “Accept/Decline” part of the process was stymied which prompted an error message.

During the closed beta, she tried all sorts of builds in the character creator, using different combinations of skills and improving her character to see more skill trees. She discovered countless skills and the conditions for unlocking their skill trees. In order to try out that many builds, she had to reroll countless times, which meant she restarted the game that many times.

During all that testing, she had never found any skills related to taming. This probably meant that either they didn’t exist during the closed beta, or their prerequisites couldn’t be met with only the starting 100 XP.

If it were a new system that didn’t exist during the closed beta, then if people rerolled now, there was a possibility they’d already be able to learn these skills. However, you couldn’t skip the tutorial anymore. In order to test by rerolling, you’d need to invest a huge amount of time. Including the one-hour tutorial and the amount of time it took to actually create the character, if she wanted to try five different builds, it would require as much time as she’d spent in the game so far. Not to mention that she didn’t know if she could find the skill in just five rerolls.

The other possibility was that taming had always existed, but that 100 XP was insufficient to meet the minimum requirements to unlock it. It was also hard to imagine any other players discovering this skill at this point in the game’s life. After finishing the tutorial, they’d have to go earn more XP, and they’d be looking for a taming-related skill that they don’t even know the prerequisites for. There probably weren’t any players who would waste time farming XP for no concrete reason.

In either case, that meant there probably weren’t any players out there who had information on taming-related skills; if there were, there wouldn’t be many of them, Rare herself being one.

Rare was beginning to feel pretty excited about this situation.

In particular, she was stealing a march on other players and getting a leg up in the struggle for information. She wasn’t planning on hoarding information, but being the only one who had this piece of info was terribly alluring. Without needing to consult with anyone anywhere about this situation, she could meticulously conduct investigations all by herself. It was also possible that, like her, someone could somehow meet the conditions and receive this error message, but considering how she got here, it was hard to imagine the stars aligning for another person.

“I guess… we’re no good, huh,” Kerry muttered sadly.

Oh crap. I ignored the all-important taming target.

“That’s not it at all. I don’t believe I have any qualms with becoming your leader. In fact, I should be the one asking you. It’s just that… Right, I need to consider some things first. My apologies, but please make yourselves more comfortable. What about your meal? It slipped my mind, but you were in the middle of eating, weren’t you?”

At Rare’s suggestion, the four girls relaxed, allowing the tension to drain, and went about warming up their food at the campfire. Rare fell into thought, considering the implications of the [Subordinate] skill that the error message mentioned in relation to taming. The most likely possibility was the [Discipline] skill tree. NPCs that had been [Disciplined] could be [Subordinated]; that sounded logical. However, during the closed beta, the [Discipline] skill tree contained only [Discipline] and nothing else. Plus, the active skill [Discipline] was described as “When successful, allows you to command the target for a fixed period of time.” For example, while battling monsters, the skill was used to turn one monster hostile to all other monsters. This didn’t seem to match the idea of “taming;” it was just a kind of quirky crowd control skill.

Along the same lines, another possibility was the [Mental Magic] skill [Confuse]. You couldn’t control the target, but confused enemies would simply begin attacking the nearest target, so the end result was something similar. It was also very cheap to activate. Speaking of [Mental Magic], those skills were much more expensive to acquire than [Discipline], but [Charm] and [Fear] both had very high success rates. When used in conjunction with their prerequisite skill [Stupefy], the success rate increased even further. In addition, when using the [Control] skill on targets afflicted by [Charm] or [Fear]—

—Could the key maybe be [Mental Magic]?

It wasn’t the most ludicrous idea. [Control] resonated conceptually. However, going down the [Mental Magic] tree to get [Control] cost at the very least 150 XP. It was absolutely impossible to get there with the starting XP. It was still worth noting [Control] as a possibility on the list, though.

Testers weren’t allowed to share information about the closed beta publicly. Instead, perhaps to avoid building up too much frustration, there was a closed beta social networking site where the beta testers could chat about the game all they wanted. Since no one was allowed to talk about the beta anywhere else, it got a lot of activity. Groups of volunteers shared the results of their data collection, and those results inspired both new investigations and more players to help out, resulting in a positive feedback loop. Thanks to those volunteers investigating as much as they could during the limited closed beta period, they found a ton of new skills by trying various combinations that wouldn’t normally be explored. She wouldn’t have enough XP to get [Control], but she could get as far as [Charm] and [Fear] and still have enough for [Discipline]. Just by the name [Control], one would think it’d be overpowered, but she didn’t think any testers had tried it out. Or at least, Rare couldn’t think of anyone who had.

That being the case, either learning [Control] was necessary, or it was a red herring. Considering what exact in-game conditions she’d need to fulfill, the first was obviously being connected to the right NPC; if she learned some useful skills that turned out to be unrelated, she could just go earn more XP and try again. The catkin girls had sophisticated AIs, so even if Rare were unable to tame them, she could still cooperate with them. She was going to be their leader, after all. Which means she should just consider the information she had on hand and determine the plan that had the highest chance of success. She could set aside [Mental Magic] as the first possibility and consider alternatives.

When thinking of the word “tame,” the meaning was a bit off, but there was also the [Summon] skill. Just like with [Discipline], the [Summon] skill tree didn’t have anything but [Summon]. This skill let you summon a random monster to your side and command it. Unless the summoned monster died, it would return to wherever it came from either after the time limit of ten minutes or when the summoner perished. While looking through the Help documentation for details on obtainable skills, Rare had learned that the summoned monster could choose whether or not to respond to the summon. If it refused, the summon would attempt to resist. If it succeeded, the [Summon] would misfire and end immediately. Since the type of monster summoned was random, the chance of it resisting a summons would vary based on its overall stats. In other words, [Summon]’s fatal design flaw as a skill was that its success rate varied too much. Testers all considered it a trash skill.

—In the first place, why was it designed to only summon something at random?

By the way, speaking of [Discipline], it was hard to suss out the reason for designing something as inefficient as a skill tree with only one skill in it. Another tree with only one skill was [Alchemy]. After learning the [Pharmacy] tree’s [Pharmacy] skill, the Alchemy tree gained a skill to craft magic potions, [Formulate]. However, the [Alchemy] skill itself seemed to have a totally pointless effect: “Required to use Alchemy tree skills. Alchemy tree skill effects gain a bonus,” which led to the conclusion that there must be hidden skills in the tree. If that could be extrapolated to [Discipline] and [Summon], then the follow-up question was how to unlock them. For now, she could hypothesize that [Discipline] and [Summon] had hidden depths and designate them as the second possibility.

Next, she would consider not the idea of “taming,” but instead the idea of “subordinating.” Rare thought that, out of the initially available skills, the one that came closest to the concept in her head was [Necromancy]. The common perception of necromancers was someone who controls the souls of the dead. However, just like with the previous two trees, the [Necromancy] tree only had the one skill. Its description was “Turns a corpse within mid-range into a controllable undead for 5 minutes. When the effect ends, the corpse is destroyed and returned to the earth.” While it seems useful at first glance, if the soul of the corpse was still there, then, just like [Summon], it could resist the [Necromancy]; if there was no soul, the resulting undead was so weak that it could be felled with a single blow. A rather questionable skill. She was just now realizing this, but lining up all the most likely skill trees, it seemed way too conspicuous for them to all be weird one-shot skills. Or maybe that was just her wishful thinking, wanting there to be a reason behind it.

Glancing around the cavern, it seemed like the girls were about done eating. They periodically came to offer her food, but she wasn’t hungry… or more like this wasn’t the time for her to be eating, so she always politely declined.

Either way, time was about up. She needed to wrap things up and come to a decision, then just start taking action.