Chapter One: Airship
For Pyrrha Nikos…life is…..boring.
Like really boring.
So boring that she stopped finding it a challenge, everything was so…predictable.
It may have been due to her semblance. Contrary to what her instructors thought, it wasn't in fact, polarity. Her control over polarity was derived from her semblance. Her semblance was in fact not directly related to electromagnetism.
If Pyrrha Nikos had to describe her semblance, it was the ability to see a video game HUD for her life.
Well, at least that's what she thought at first. She only activated her semblance about four years ago. Funnily enough, the last time Pyrrha had actually played a video game she must have been ten. In fact, in her parent's house, there wasn't even a video game console to be found. Which was curious in the fact that this was her semblance, since she wasn't a big gamer.
She had been waking up from the day after her acceptance into Sanctum. Except there was some kind of floating green box in front of her. Her initial reaction had been to flail widely before falling out of her bed.
It had taken a few minutes to realize that she wasn't in some crazy dream and there was indeed a dialogue box floating in front of her saying, "Tutorial".
When she finally came to senses, and tentatively hit the "Next" button on the bottom right of the box. Nothing happened, or rather, her hand met no resistance and passed right through it. Pulling back her hand, it went through the entire floating box.
How am I supposed to hit next?
When her mental voice said 'Next' the button on the dialog box depressed, as if it had been touched, leading to it dissolving and another dialogue box appearing, with a very lengthy looking text document embedded in it…looking suspiciously similar to a terms and agreements page. Except there was no agree or disagree. Instead, titled at the top..
"Welcome to the Gamer Semblance"
With those words, Pyrrha's life changed.
Hours of tinkering with the tutorial page, she was able to figure out how to control, or rather how to use her new-found ability. Similar to a game, she had a UI or HUD, as well as a limited ability to guide her own characteristics. To control it, she didn't click on anything, or touch things, as they were, rather, mentally saying the command and focusing on it, caused the relevant page or UI bit to be brought up.
When the tutorial mentioned a character page, Pyrrha was more than a little excited, since this would give her an objective view of herself, not some subjective view others were bound to give her!
Pyrrha Nikos
Achilles' Successor
Level 1 Trainee
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HP: 10/10
ST: 0/50
AP: 5/5
SP: 0/0
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STR: 10
DEX: 10
CON: 10
WIS: 10
INT: 10
CHA: 10
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Status Effects: None
Emotions: Excitement, nervousness, confusion.
That was what her character sheet had said when she first saw it. It laid her very life bare, completely average. In four years, Pyrrha had changed it. She had added a lot to her core abilities.
Pyrrha Nikos
Achilles' Successor
Level 9 Electromagnetic Alteration Champion
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HP: 91/91
ST: 0/600
AP: 350/350
SP: 1070/1070
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STR: 16
DEX: 18
CON: 15
WIS: 14
INT: 16
CHA: 17
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Status Effects: None
Emotions: Calm
Each of these…initials in the second stat block, meant something important;
STR was strength, or how strong her body was, her much muscle she had.
DEX stood for dexterity, in practice this meant precision or the ability to quickly react, it also related to speed. As of now, it was her highest ability score, allowing her to react fast during battles, which in turn allowed her to do rather subtle usage of her polarity ability.
CON stood for constitution, or the ability of her body to take punishment. In all honesty, she had put the most points into that, because of how little physical harm she got during training.
WIS stood for wisdom, which was one of the tricky stats. It is related to INT or intelligence, in the sense of both pertain to knowledge. While intelligence was described as learned knowledge, then wisdom was innate knowledge, or the instincts. Wisdom definitely needed to be raised, but that was rather hard for her. In practice, Intelligence was easy to raise, due to it meant learning from books or classes. Wisdom meant having actual experiences, or sparring matches that went wrong, so she could develop instincts for that.
CHA is charisma. In short, it was how well people will like your personality, your physical beauty, how much others will believe you. When Pyrrha had first read the description for charisma, she had immediately decided to increase that stat as fast as possible. She had dumped her first ability upgrade into charisma. To be fair, she WAS a thirteen year old girl.
Those were her core stats.
The first stat block had to do with her aura and health.
AP stood for Aura points….in essence the amount of damage she could withstand before she started to take actual damage due to her aura being depleted. She could boost it by taking strain, but too much strain and she would collapse with exhaustion. ST stood for Strain, which was essentially how much she pushed herself. If her hit points were the amount of lethal damage she could take, her strain was the amount of non-lethal damage she could take before she collapsed. In essence, it was a measure of exhaustion. HP simply stood for hit points.
Her SP stood for her…special points. Outwardly Pyrrha scowled at that. The end of the tutorial had asked her to pick one element to be proficient in, listing Water, Earth, Wind, Fire, Light, and Metal. Pyrrha had picked metal, hence her ability to utilize polarity. Her SP was her limit for how much she could use her polarity ability.
At the time, she had thought it was like that MMO she had played when she was ten, where you could respec your stats later. She should of really of read the fine print. The amount of times she had regretted starting the Metal Proficiency was beyond counting.
That being said, Pyrrha had still made polarity into her own ability. It was useful when fighting someone who had any metal on their person, especially if it was a weapon. She was untouchable some said, with an uncanny ability to avoid every strike.
The invincible girl.
How she hated that name. It made her almost sick to her stomach, if only because she started to believe sometimes herself.
Yet, as she mused, at least I don't have it as bad as that guy. She thought as she stared at the blonde haired, admittedly, cute, kid in a hoodie staggering through the airship, trying to not vomit up his stomach, and failing.
Oddly enough, he stood out amongst the crowd, he didn't hold the same level of confidence that everyone else here was displaying. Which was odd. Pyrrha's eyebrows slightly knitted together. To get into Beacon, one of the most prestigious of the hunting schools, one had to be very strong. Everyone here had earned their spot. Either by invitation, passing the entrance exam or by recommendation from one of the lower tiered academies like Sanctum or Signal. In Pyrrha's case it was the entrance exam. She could have gotten a recommendation from any of the instructors at Sanctum, but had opted to take the entrance exam.
To say it had been tough, had been an understatement. She had to fight a large number of Grimm. Normally this wouldn't of been an issue if there had been so MANY of them. She had ran out of her ability to use polarity late into the exam, despite her attempts to conserve her points. Even with a decent regeneration rate for her aura, it hadn't been enough. But she had made it, even managing to go up a level in the process.
Still, it had been a challenge, a genuine one at that, not one of those fights against other students. Everyone used a metal weapon, and therefore it was little real challenge unless she handicapped herself. Things like 'Don't use polarity' or 'Only use polarity twice'. Hopefully there will be more of a challenge here, Pyrrha mused.
Even looking at other people, she could see that there were some powerful beings on the airship;
Ruby Rose
Aspiring Hero
Level 9 Reaper
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Yang Xiao Long
Dragon
Level 8 Pyromancer Brawler
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Weiss Schnee
The Frozen
Level 7 Heiress
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Blake Belladonna
Shadows
Level 8 Ninja
Sometimes it was handy to use her ability, although she usually kept this ability toggled off, her HUD that was. At least in circumstances like this.
If Pyrrha had to guess, the most powerful individual here was probably either Yang Xiao Long or Ruby Rose. Levels only mattered so much, to a certain degree, titles mattered quite a bit. Especially Ruby Rose's class of Reaper, and title of "Aspiring Hero". That being said, she had never understood what her own title meant, "Achilles' Successor". She had a number of titles, including "The Invincible Girl" or "Mistral Champion X4", but she had decided to keep it at the one she had started with, "Achilles' Successor".
Clicking on Ruby Rose's small stat block above her head, it brought up her bio;
Ruby Rose
Aspiring Hero
Level 9 Reaper
Emotions; Excitement, Nervousness, Disgust
Status Effects; Queasy (Minor)
Species: Human
Gender: Female
Age: 15
Family;
Father: Taiyang Xiao Long - Alive
Mother: Summer Rose – Deceased
Half-sister: Yang Xiao Long – Alive
Uncle: Qrow Branwren – Alive
Pet: Zwei - Alive
Biography:
Ruby Rose was born to Taiyang Xiao Long and his second wife, Summer Rose….
Pyrrha closed the box before she went any further.
It didn't take her long to start to loath her semblance back at Sanctum, she could literally read anyone's bio, and learn what she wanted on their emotional state, or history. It made her seem unbelievably good at social interactions; she knew where to take a conversation without causing some kind of social faux pas, she knew relatively well how to cheer up most anyone, or knew what was on their mind. It also made life dull.
Social interactions….
What a formal word, it almost sounded like clinical word, so removed from emotions. Not unlike how Pyrrha felt.
IF someone were to look at Pyrrha Nikos, the Mistral Champion, they would think that if she felt alone it is because her success made her feel alone. They would be wrong. It wasn't the success, it was the ability to cheat when it comes to social interactions. If she wanted to learn something about someone, she could just look at their bio.
Even if she really did NOT want to.
The saying that "Curiosity killed the cat" is particularly apt, seeing as the decision on whether or not to look at someone's bio was a mental choice. If she slipped up for even a moment, the dialogue box would pop up, and curiosity would get the better of her. That was partially why she was going to Beacon instead of Haven. Most of her fellow graduates from Sanctum were heading to Haven, a few of them dropping out of the Hunter and Huntress program completely. None of them were going to Beacon however.
In essence, a fresh start for Pyrrha Nikos, one where she didn't know everything about everyone. Except a little about Ruby Rose. Shit.
Turning back from her brief scan of the room to look at the information leaflet about Beacon, a glorified campus map, she did a double take.
Something had happened that was outside of her norms. Something she hadn't seen occur while her HUD ability was on. Question marks.
A blonde head popped up from being stationed over a trashcan, before diving back down, to expel more of a meal. For a moment, a brief moment, she saw his bio above his head.
?
?
Level ? ?
AU0: Holy crap I'm realizing this is just a giant information dump, and I'm sorry.
AU1: I SHOULD be writing a paper, but after finding the third Gamer story that didn't include Pyrrha, I decided that maybe….just maybe she should get her own story in the Gamer-verse….thingy.
To be completely honest, the actual gameplay mechanics I'm drawing from for this, at least as a base, is a heavily modified version of Dungeons and Dragons…because I know that best. The biggest thing you are going to notice about this story, is that unlike other Gamer fics, this is a relatively low powered version. If we are going to compare to 'The Games We Play' (which, lets be real here, we probably are as that is the benchmark for RWBY stories as well as Gamer stories), Pyrrha has the ability to observe, and a very limited ability to influence her own stats. She gets a few points per level to change her characteristics/ability scores, but that's really about it. Her ability to control polarity stems from her class choice.
At least that's what I'm thinking at the moment.
I have a vague plan for what I'm going to do with this. Vague being the keyword.
I'm not going to lie, I really don't think I'm a good writer of any kind, but I just want to have SOMETHING put paper…er…word document. Yes. That. I'm going to try and keep it at least 2k words a chapter, because, else I feel like I'm cheating myself on my own ability to write. So Review this and give actual feedback, so I can improve my writing, please and thank you!
AU2: I suppose I should also say the only Gamers Fics I've read have been The Games We Play and Sunfire General.
AU3: Uhhhhh totally didn't just edit this because a lot of the line breaks didn't survive the transition into . Nope.
3/20/15: Views surpassed word count on this chapter.