Zeroth Moment: My Cheat Skill Is Stupid, So I'll Just Ignore It

Topher slept until noon; he had a hangover the size of Mount Pinatubo. When he finally managed to drag himself out of bed, he drank what felt like an ocean's worth of water, then stopped, trying to puzzle out where he'd gotten it. I didn't bring water up here with me. Did I? Investigation determined that Elara had brought two bottles of water up the night before (which he felt guilty about and tipped her for), but that only raised more questions. Where did they get the water? The nearest river's a mile away. Did they haul it here? Did they collect rainwater? Are there wells? He tried asking around, but people only gave him confused looks.

Disgruntled, he went out to the hill to kill Jelly Slimes, but got distracted again by the problem of their population. They were hard to count with all their hopping around, but he made a serious effort out of it, never arriving at a number higher than six. Immediately after killing one, he counted again, and counted six again; it drove him insane. This makes no fucking sense. Where the hell are they coming from? Is the concept of quantity broken in this universe? At least he could take his anger out on the slimes; he killed another twenty or so, but only got about four Magic Stones this time before his body revolted against this abuse. Staggering back into the town, he lurked around the farms and orchard, counting apples and chickens; it was here that he got his first big clue exactly how fucked up everything was. He watched, very carefully, as an apple-cheeked farmwife went into a henhouse containing exactly four hens, and came out with a tray of one hundred eggs. And then went back in and came out with a second tray. He almost threw up from sheer outrage at the impossibility of it all. Chickens lay one egg a day. This is beyond ridiculous.

Infuriated, he went back to the inn to order lunch, but a thought struck him. "Is there any chance I could get a chicken sandwich?" he asked Gropp, who assured him that there was. "If so, can I watch you make it? I know it's a weird request, but humor me?" Gropp, puzzled in a way that Topher felt was extremely relatable, was confused but agreed. Topher was almost rubbing his hands as he went into the kitchen with the larger bearded man. Now we'll get some fucking answers.

Unfortunately, things proceeded to get worse; Gropp produced a fresh loaf of bread from an oven (despite there being no wheat being grown anywhere in Frostford) and pulled a chicken breast out of his icebox. Topher carefully examined the icebox; there were four more chicken breasts in there. "Actually, could I get two sandwiches? I'm really hungry." Gropp, becoming more confused by the minute, agreed and pulled out another chicken breast; when Topher opened the icebox to count again while Gropp was grilling the meat, there were four in there again. He had to sit down.

Is it a magic endless icebox? No, magic items cost a premium everywhere in this universe. And there damn sure aren't any mages casting Summon Chicken Breast spells in this town of forty-odd people. For that matter, where'd he get the chicken to begin with? This town only has eight chickens in it! He was pretty sure he knew the answer, and hated it; that when chicken meat was called for, one of the chickens would be removed from the henhouse and slaughtered, but the henhouse would still contain four chickens. It offended him deeply in his core, and he felt himself getting angrier every minute he contemplated it.

The next two weeks became monotonous; each day, he'd investigate another aspect of the town's resource production and be infuriated by the answer, then go to take out his frustrations on slimes until he was too sore and tired to continue without risking getting curbstomped by their endlessly-renewed population. It was the same everywhere he looked; the town's lumber supply was created by endlessly cutting down four of the same sixteen trees, its river reliably disgorged an endless quantity of the same nine fish, and the same eight birds endlessly wheeled above the town, pooping scattershot on the same exposed surfaces. It was all done very intuitively; the trees didn't grow back when they were cut down, there just happened to be more trees and fewer stumps when you came back to the area. You could over-fish a spot on the river, but never over-fish the entire river. If he marked a stump after a tree was cut down, the mark was there when he came back; if he marked every stump, every stump would be marked, but there were fewer stumps. He even tried marking them with numbers, but the numbers always adjusted themselves accurately; stumps 1-3 were always present, but stumps above 4 could not be counted on to exist.

After a while, he started to wonder if he was dreaming or something; but anything he tried to prove he was in a dream always failed. Quantities of anything in his possession always stayed consistent, as did quantities of unimportant things; he spent several days counting and assembling pebbles by a stream, and all of the pebbles behaved exactly like he expected them to. The inconsistency itself was worse than the uncertainty, and he drank himself to sleep most nights; not always to excess, but always enough to make falling asleep a sure thing. He knew he was avoiding remembering whatever had happened to Hotaka and the others, but didn't care. Bury the past.

Finally, on his seventeenth day in Frostford, it happened; he was sitting in the inn after a long day of killing slimes (he was up to fifty-eight gold, and was hoping to buy that prayer scroll when he hit sixty) when he decided on a whim to check his Status.

Name:

Christopher Bailey

Level:

5

Class:

Clerk

HP:

15/15

MP:

20/20

SP:

5/5

Strength:

Rank F

Dexterity:

Rank F

Constitution:

Rank D [+1: Rank D]

Intelligence:

Rank D

Wisdom:

Rank D [+1: Rank D]

Charisma:

Rank F

Skills:

Literacy (Rank D)

Mathematics (Rank D)

Cooking (Rank F)

Customer Service (Rank D)

Data Entry and Filing (Rank B)

Packaging and Shipping (Rank D)

Home Appliance Repair (Rank F)

Pen Spinning (Rank A)

[Cold Resistance (Rank F)]

[Heat Resistance (Rank F)]

Special Skills:

Disrupt Illusion

Mage Shield (Rank F)

Mage Light (Rank F)

Improved Status

Summon Ledger

Unique Skill:

Attract Object

He stared at his Status, dumbfounded. He had thought this shitty universe had run out of ways to mock him, but there it was, right there in front of him; a new way for him to be creatively shit upon. "Clerk," he mumbled to himself in disbelief. "Clerk."

The worst part was that it made sense; he recalled hearing once that "Clerk" was the modern version of "Cleric" in its original sense, as in "Clerical", so that would technically make him a Priest class. It also explained why he had MP, although not why he was able cast Mage spells; he wasn't sure if that was just a side benefit of him studying them while having an MP-granting class, or if it was something intrinsic to the Clerk class. And he still had to count himself lucky; if he could be given a Clerk class, he could just have easily been granted a "Janitor" or "Assistant Manager" class, which would have been even worse. He ordered a beer and drowned his indignation before he could think of something more self-destructive to do to express his emotions.

Over the next few days, he asked around, but nobody had ever heard of the "Clerk" class; worse, he eventually realized that the Jelly Slimes had stopped giving him experience and no longer dropped Magic Stones when he killed them. After the third day of coming back to the inn empty-handed, he realized that he was going to have to move up to hunting more dangerous monsters, and he groaned and let his head thump to the table in despair. God dammit. Best of all, his Summon Ledger Skill proved to be almost as useless as his Attract Object Skill; it allowed him to conjure a non-magical notebook from thin air, write whatever he wanted in it, then banish it to be summoned again with a gesture; in other words, it was exactly as useful as a normal non-magical notebook that he could have bought for three copper. He felt like breaking things.

"Elara," he asked her once he was able to speak coherently, "what monsters do Adventurers usually hunt around here that are stronger than Jelly Slimes? I know there's a board posting for goblins, but I just want to be sure there's nothing in between that I'm overlooking."

"Oh gosh, Mister Bailey, I can't think of anything. Stronger than Jelly Slimes, but weaker than goblins?" She crossed her arms and pursed her lips, looking contempatively upwards; she was so sweet she gave him diabetes. He despised having to interact with her, which he found deeply unfair -- she was an endearing and fair young lady, and it wasn't at all her fault that he found her cutesy charm threatening and uncomfortable. "I suppose you could find a weaker goblin, but that's about all I can think of. You'd definitely want to try to have a party for that if you could, though; goblins are pretty tough! You don't want to end up like Finian, Mister Bailey, we had to collect all the pieces before we could bury him, and it took us --"

"That's fine, Elara, thank you," said Topher hurriedly. He wandered around the town for a while, thinking, but in the end it wasn't much of a choice; he went to Jerp's item shop and forked over fifty gold for the prayer scroll.

"Oh, fine choice, Mister Bailey," said the gnome, handing it over as Topher watched the vast majority of all the material wealth he had remaining from every effort since he'd arrived in this stupid world disappear into the gnome's cash till. "Nothing quite like getting your first new spells, I hear. I wouldn't know it myself -- I've got the Tinkerer Class -- but I've heard the younger folk talk, and they say it's quite the experience."

"Thanks, Jerp," mumbled Topher, shoving the scroll into the central pocket of his hoodie. "I'll let you know how it goes."

"Oh, please do! And if you come across any more Magic Stones, I hope you'll sell 'em to me -- always a market for those!"

Topher paused. "What do you do with the Magic Stones I sell you, Jerp? If you don't mind me asking."

"Oh that's easy, Mister Bailey. I sell 'em to the Adventurer's Guild; they store 'em in the storehouse and have 'em shipped out to gods know where. The way of commerce, you know."

"Oh, I do." Topher's eyes narrowed to slits. "I do indeed."

When he'd gotten back to his pathetic room in the inn, Topher unrolled the scroll and stared at it with disappointment; it was just as complicated as the Mage Classes had been, only now he didn't have an instructor. Sighing, he got to work; he read until his eyes burned, slept, then read some more. He cross-referenced sacred names and rites and symbols, keeping track of everything in his Ledger; it took him nearly another week to make any sense of it at all. And when he did, he was beyond incensed to discover that it was just a remapping of the same runes he'd learned in his mage class, only arranged along a different axes (positive emotions, negative emotions, and virtues, instead of season, moon phase, and time of day). He would have thrown the whole thing into the fire if not for the "basic exercises" listed towards the bottom of the scroll.

When he'd calmed down enough to speak without shouting swear words, he tried out the basic prayer, just to see what it did. He untangled the instructions, cleared his mind, and chanted, "Elg Solmi Suu Inush", then held his breath, waiting to see what would happen.

When the feeling stole over him, like a slight warm fire in his belly, he barely noticed it at first; but then a smile crept slowly over his lips, and a maniacal laugh erupted from his mouth completely involuntarily. Everything up until now had been a long, unending chain of steel-toed kicks to the jimmy; a ceaseless parade of boots to the head. But this? This was a game-changer.

Name:

Christopher Bailey

Level:

5

Class:

Clerk

HP:

15/15

MP:

19/20

SP:

5/5

Strength:

Rank F

Dexterity:

Rank F

Constitution:

Rank D [+1: Rank D]

Intelligence:

Rank D

Wisdom:

Rank D [+1: Rank D]

Charisma:

Rank F

Skills:

Literacy (Rank D)

Mathematics (Rank D)

Cooking (Rank F)

Customer Service (Rank D)

Data Entry and Filing (Rank B)

Packaging and Shipping (Rank D)

Home Appliance Repair (Rank F)

Pen Spinning (Rank A)

[Cold Resistance (Rank F)]

[Heat Resistance (Rank F)]

Special Skills:

Disrupt Illusion

Mage Shield (Rank F)

Mage Light (Rank F)

Improved Status

Summon Ledger

Remove Fatigue (Rank F)

Unique Skill:

Attract Object