Building a magic system on threat of destruction

It took Jack longer than he thought to get enough keys. If he took more than a minute to transform the broken-off piece of system screen into an object of his choosing, it would fade away into nothing. The pieces he had turned into “objects” remained, including his pick, the first piece he had broken off.

By the time he was done, he had 48 keys. After making each one, he used his pick to scratch characters into the keys. Despite having imagined them as keys for a keyboard, he was still surprised that they didn’t repair the scratches. Seemingly, they knew that this was the intended purpose for them, created to have symbols on their surfaces.

He had made enough keys for all the letters, numbers, and miscellaneous keys that he figured he would use. He didn’t plan on using a num pad, f keys, or anything like that.

Once all of those had been made, he unceremoniously dumped them into a pile and took his pick back out. He sliced a vertical line across the bottom of the status screen and then snapped off the rectangle.

Now came the tricky part. He hadn’t been able to make anything complicated. Just the right shapes, he had to put all the detail in himself. If he couldn’t combine these into a functional keyboard with whatever magic was going on here, then he was at a dead end. Jack had thought about asking Deis for help, but after the cloak’s anger, he was concerned about what might happen if he bothered the god.

He sat down and placed the long rectangle of blue on the ground, then placed the keys in the proper order. He didn’t have any means of making them attach to the board part of the keyboard but hoped this would be enough.

He once again conjured the image of a keyboard in his mind and felt it solidify. This time, however, he looked at what he had constructed and focused on it instead. The pile of blue screen bits before him seemed to vibrate slightly, seeking form. He focused hard, imagining all of the pieces as a whole, being used to type things. Then suddenly, the image in his mind vanished and the blue keyboard floated in the air.

Jack pumped his fist in excitement, “Nice!” then examined it. It seemed to be a complete piece, the keys not falling off as the keyboard floated up in front of him. Now, he had to make it work with the status screen…

He experimentally typed on his keyboard to see if there was any effect. Tiny blue letters appeared in the space in front of him. Crisp, well-formed letters, as if from a typewriter rather than the letters he had carved into his makeshift device. The letters hung in the air for a moment, before slowly fading away to nothing. ‘Well, at least it made letters.’ he supposed.

He grabbed both the floating keyboard and the status screen, and connected them. Like a laptop, the keyboard would sit at an angle to the screen as both hovered in the air, connected at the bottom edge.

Jack quickly added “Name:” and “Race:” to the top left corner of the screen.

In the name space, he simply typed ‘Jack’

The effect was immediate. A sudden sense of grounding came over him. He felt more real, full of purpose and feeling. He hadn’t realized just how lost and dazed he felt in this white void. The clarity that comes with self-identity was powerful and intoxicating.

Feeling like a million bucks, Jack put his race as human. However, there was no effect like when he had inserted his name. ‘Nothing?” he muttered to himself. He tried Homo Sapien, also to no effect along with things like Earthling or Earth human. Nothing seemed to affect him at all. Perhaps the name was the only significant category?

Once he gave up fiddling with the race option, he stopped and stretched. He hadn’t gotten much done, but he felt exhausted. He was on a deadline, literally. If he couldn’t get something convincing up and running, Deis would probably destroy him. ‘Heh,’ he thought to himself, ‘just like working a nine-to-five.’

Deciding that he would put a bit more work in before taking a break, he decided to include age as well. It wasn’t always included in status screens in fiction, but Jack figured it couldn’t hurt.

That marked the end of the low-hanging fruit. There wasn’t much more Jack could add without putting a ton of thought and effort into it. Things like stats, skills, and classes weren’t always intuitive, and Jack didn’t know anything about the people that these would be applied to. At a certain point, he would need input from Deis to make it workable, but for the time being he decided to just start fiddling with things.

For now, he decided that putting in categories would work. Systems in fiction tended to revolve around combat and combat-related abilities, but Jack had read stories where classes could include things like “Farmer” or “Chef” and the like. He put two categories on the right side, “Combat Skills” and “Lifestyle Skills”. For now, that would likely cover most of what the system would entail, he could break it down into different categories later if he needed to.

Then came stats. Jack had played D&D before, and then stat breakdown had seemed to cover a lot of the bases he needed. Strength and dexterity felt like a staple to him. But dexterity was also something of a nebulous concept in his mind. Strength could be measured, and even improved on in day-to-day activity. But dexterity was more about reflexes and hand-eye coordination. That could be learned and trained, but was harder to measure with numbers.

Jack thought about what each of the two stats represented. If Strength was how much power a person had, then dexterity would be closer to how much skill a person had, not just with their hands but with any physical application. He changed them to Power and Skill respectively.

Satisfied for the moment, Jack turned to other stats. Intelligence? Sure. Wisdom? Also sure. Charisma…Jack had issues with charisma. It was a trope in stories that high charisma basically equaled something akin to mind control. People becoming so influential and attractive that they could be irresistible to the masses. Though Jack supposed there were people on Earth who were like that, celebrities or political figures who could probably run the world if they wanted to. He decided to include it.

Constitution was another weird one. It represented fortitude? Like not getting sick and stuff, but also about health typically. There was no such thing as health points in real life, which made constitution feel a bit lackluster. He decided he would go with Fortitude for now, it would mostly involve a person's ability to resist harmful effects towards the body. Taking a moment to think, he decided to add Toughness as well. Fortitude would mostly be about things like disease and magical influence, toughness would be about strengthening the body, making the skin harder and bones stronger.

Having broken down constitution into two parts, Jack looked at the other stats critically. Intelligence and Wisdom would probably break down in a similar way, their purpose to cover different parts of the same whole, but Jack supposed their current labels would be fine. Charisma would need some examination. It was too general and potentially powerful to really leave alone, but Jack would need more information on the world before he could make a decision.

Of course, this was all a moot point. He didn’t have any numbers or frame of reference for what stats should be, but the status screen was looking a bit more impressive now. It had information, stats, and skill sections. It would need some fiddling, and obviously, the inclusion of the actual skills and stats would need to be added by Deis, but all in all it didn’t look too bad.

Deciding that he had reached a good stopping point, Jack decided to try and lie down. He had been through some stressful scenarios, and wracking his brain about magic systems was mentally taxing. He thought that a nap might help him clear his head a bit.

As Jack began to lay down, the status screen moved down with him, hovering in front of him. “Huh?” Jack was confused for a moment. “Oh, duh.” he hadn’t closed the screen. Then he paused. How did he close it?

“Close status.” Nothing happened. “Go Away?” Nothing happened. “Disappear!” Again, nothing happened. He tried gesturing dramatically, and shouting anything he could think of to make it go away, but the screen just kept hovering in front of him. He tapped on the screen, tried to shove it away, or even run away from it. Despite his best efforts, the status page remained hovering in front of him, seemingly ignoring all his efforts.

After failing to run away from the screen, Jack sat staring at it, panting with exertion. “Well if you don’t have a way to turn off, I’ll make a way.” Jack had pulled his keyboard off of the status screen during his testing, and it was sitting back where he had started, the only speck of color in the white void aside from Jack himself. Walking back over there, Jack dug in his pocket for the pick he had accidentally made. He carved out a square from the bottom corner of the status screen, then imagined it to be a button. A square button that he could attach to the top right of the status page.

Once the button had shrunk to the right size, Jack carved a small ‘X’ into it, then pressed it against the blue screen. He imagined it for what it was, a way to close the status page, like an internet browser close button. When his hand came away, the button remained, affixed as if it had always been there.

Smiling to himself in satisfaction, Jack promptly hit the close button and the status screen blinked out.

It was at that moment that Jack realized he had no idea how to get the screen back. “Well…That could be a problem.”