The Solarium was the name of an empire that spanned all over the Scared Solar System, but also managed to spread its influence all over the galaxy. However, the core of its power always remained in its capital, Planet Urd, the one we call Earth.
In the First Solar Age, humanity always tried to move itself outside Urd after the disaster that ended the Fossil Age, or as the most fanatical of the Solarium like to call it, the Dark Fossil Age.
Most of the writers of the series "Wartopia" were fans of environmental horror, and that is exactly how the Dark Fossil Age ended. The Earth turned on humanity, and disasters followed one after the other to the point where the atmosphere was badly damaged in the Fossil Wars, resulting in the desertification of most of the world, which became a scorched hell by day and a frigid winter by night.
People overthrew their fossil overlords and shifted their civilization to solar and wind power, marking the beginning of the First Solar Age. This great era saw the world of Urd gradually healing but still far from going back to what it once was. At least people could return to the surface again after living for centuries in Silo cities; however, such outer communities were unregulated and had little to no presence of law and order, devolving into a Wild West-like anarchy.
Even still, all living environments needed life-support systems, and activities such as farming were completely conducted in greenhouses, while meats were rare and only produced synthetically in Silo cities.
However, the remarkable efficiency of solar energy in that world proved advantageous. Inventions like solar sails, which captured solar currents for boundless space travel, and Blazer Cells, rechargeable by sunlight, fire, or other means, emerged. These innovations, coupled with hyper-efficient solar cells, ushered in the First Solar Era.
The planet was slowly healing, though at a much slower rate than it was damaged, requiring centuries. By then, causing further environmental damage had become taboo on Urd, but during wartime, people still resorted to burning and mass industrialization. Consequently, many chose to live in space, with the Moon being the first colonized frontier, followed by Mars and Venus. Colonizing these planets in small, enclosed, independent states enabled extensive underground industrialization without atmospheric concerns.
That whole situation lasted until the end of the First Solar Age—which lasted nearly 1000 years—and the beginning of the Stellar Age, when the first Antimatter Engine was produced on the moon colonies and humanity achieved FTL (Faster Then Light) travel for the first time, and the frontier was pushed far beyond anything humanity had ever thought possible, opening humanity to a new realm known as the Void.
The access to the local solar system was already a thing with the solar sails, but now that other Systems were within the grasp of humanity thanks to traversing the Void. Nations started to migrate en masse as soon as habitable planets were found, and the population of Earth, as well as its environmental state, started reaching much better levels.
However, Urd never recovered.
The planet had reached a point of no return regarding some of the damage. Though still habitable, it remained arid and unforgiving. It was there, in what was once Africa, now Urd's Sector 1, that Prince Kamaru Adawala, the revered father of the Imperial Sun, unified the planet, planting the first seed of the Empire of the Sacred Solar System for Sol Imperius to rule.
All of that knowledge was something embedded in the heart and soul of every Solar Knight.
Captain Solomon Creed looked around himself as he and Adam walked around the ruined city, filled with fallen trees, ruined cars, the occupational scenes of death and destruction.
To his mind, it was all too strange, unnatural even. The weather outside his Power Armor was like an interior if a Life-Supported Environment so seamlessly and naturally, the sky had a bright blue color, and there were flying birds and wild animals that were extinct on Urd.
It was all… strange.
He watched Adam as he nervously looked around and waved at the air every now and then. He looked disturbed and in deep thought.
The Solar Paladin wasn't bothered with what was on the mind of the puny young man, as it never occurred to him that Adam was now discovering the truth behind it all.
Earlier during their escape from the Gobzkin horde, Adam had seen words floating in the air a few times, two of which were telling him that he acquired an Experience Point, a term he was surely familiar with, and the other messages were when he got too close to the Gobzkins.
He remembered the early days of the monster invasion. Those green-skinned monsters, known in pop culture as Goblins, were being called Gobzkins by some militia people and military. Even Victor was calling them that too, and so the group has gone with it.
The reason wasn't explicitly stated, but it turns out there was a very strange reason.
Words appear in thin air like a video game's UI. Well, a very poor-looking UI since the letters were actually very badly shaped, but still… words in thin air.
Of course, geeks and nerds know what a system window is when they see one, but Adam failed to see his own system window.
Still, it turns out he was late to the party and other people were already having their own system. How else would they call Goblins as Gobzkins, Giants as Jotnar, and Zombies as Blighters and Dark Hosts?
Only when he decided to go near a ruined car, and take a look at himself in the side mirror intently, did these words appear.
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Name — Adam Clay
Role — Survivor
Class — Sorcerer
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Statisitics (EXP: 6)
— Might: 2 [+]
— Trick: 3 [+]
— Spirit: 2 [+]
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Skills
— Artifice (IX)
— Cook (V)
— Charisma (IV)
— Firearms (II)
— Psyche (II)
— Sanity (I)
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Powers
— Font of Magic: (Class) You can sense the weave of magic within runes and tap it safely.
— Puppeteer Rune: You can summon familiars and objects using puppets and dolls as medium. The quality of the summon depends on the quality of the puppet. If the quality is low, the puppet will need to be given an order for every action, but if it is high, a puppet may even start acting the way it is predicted of it to act. The deeper the knowledge you have of your puppet, the better the quality of the summon will be, even enabling it to have magical powers or an ego of its own. This, however, will make managing a puppet harder than it should be if the quality is too high for your skill.
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And that's when it hit him like a sledgehammer on the head. There it was… every answer to his current situation.
He had a Status window now like any proper main character he ever read about. It felt good except for the fact that his stats were weird and too low.
Still, he felt like he heard those words before in that exact order: Adam, Survivor, Sorcerer.
It was like that time he was passed out when he touched the Gobzkin Shaman's club and passed out.
So that's how people get a status window! They touch something that belonged to a monster… a boss monster preferably, and that thing, if it had some supernatural ability in it, would give it to them.
For example, Adam killed a puppeteer Gobzkin Shaman, and he now got the Puppeteer rune and was designated a Sorcerer.
Thanks to that immense luck, he got to summon Captain Creed as a Familiar.
But once Adam read the description of that Puppeteering power, he gulped and almost felt like his head was exploding.
He can summon familiars like the Shaman Gobzkin did using Puppets… or Miniatures…
It says: "You can summon familiars and objects using puppets and dolls as medium."
Wouldn't that mean if he used other Wartopia Miniatures like Captain Creed's?
"Oh, boy!"
Forget about monsters… a few more Star Paladins like Creed and you can say bye-bye to every monster in the world.
He had to do this… it is going to be so overpowered and…
Hold on! He's a gamer, he knows balance when he sees a system, and this one seems somewhat balanced. Still, the Puppeteer Rune power seems rather broke. Magic like that should always demand some sort of a price.
First, it says: "The quality of the summon matches the quality of the puppet."
That checks, after all, nobody would spend 24 hours painting a single miniature unless it is going to be a fucking masterpiece.
It also says: "If the quality is low, the puppet will need to be given an order for every action, but if it is high, a puppet may even start acting the way it is predicted of it to act."
Not only that, it also says: "The deeper the knowledge you have of your puppet, the better the quality of the summon will be, even enabling it to have magical powers or an ego of its own."
Quality is achieved through both the puppet's craftsmanship and the puppeteer's knowledge. While Adam's craftsmanship was flawless, his comprehensive knowledge of Captain Creed was equally impressive.
He played the three Action RPGs of Wartopia: Star Paladin back to back with 100% completion rate of all achievements, challenges, and even on brutal iron-man mode. Also, since he is very involved in the tabletop war game, he knows the lore of Wartopia like a Techno Monk from SolTech to HereTech, as they say.
So regarding quality and knowledge, it is not that the system is not balanced, Adam's "Geekness" is just broken.
Was it worth breaking up with his girlfriend for? Yeah, he may have been sad, but now as he is walking in the shadow of Captain Creed himself…
"WORTH IT!"
"…"
However, there was one last sentence that made his whole thing as a puppeteer a little bit scary. It says: "This, however, will make managing a puppet harder than it should be if the overall quality is too high for your skill."
This exactly is what happened with Captain Creed. Just like other games with magic, if a summoning isn't done with enough skill, the summon can be "unbound" to the caster, meaning it can act freely and even attack the user.
Luckily, Creed was a Lawful-Good guy by paladin standards, and what Adam told him about the way he died really touched him. Still, once they reach safety, they will have to part ways.
Who knows if there are other limitations on the puppets themselves, like a duration, a distance from the summoner, and all that. Adam would have loved to know, but he was sure a Star Paladin wouldn't waste his time experimenting with magic powers.
Also, Creed seemed very passive about the fact that he was summoned from the future. To him, this must be the Fossil Age where humanity shattered the world. However, his faith in the Eternal Peace must be strong enough for him to see this as a different world altogether.
So in regards to this situation, Adam realized that he needs to further increase his power in order to be able to further control Creed, and rather than making him disobey and go on his own, he may be at least be able to order him to stay.
This brought Adam back to his Status Window.
There was another power aside from the "Puppeteer Rune" called the "Font of Magic." It was stated that this comes from the Class, the Sorcerer. The magic of this system seems to have to do with runes, he possesses one rune already, so if he wants to further widen his scope of power, maybe he should collect more Runes.
Regardless, that was a problem for later since there wasn't much he could do about it. What he could address, however, were the Ability Points.
There were these little "+" icons near every number, and right beside the Abilities section, there was an indicator that he got 6 Experience points to spare. Probably some experience was from the time he was still unawakened in the ways of the system.
Since he was a min-max type of player, he should just dump them all in the ability that feeds into magic. Looking at them, the abilities were called "Might," "Trick," and "Spirit."
The abilities were non-classical, but Might sounds like Strength, Trick like Dexterity, and Spirit like Wisdom. So if he was to choose, he would dump everything into Spirit.
He did so right away, pressing multiple times at once, but rather than jumping from 2 to 8, the Spirit score just got to 3 and stopped increasing.
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Name — Adam Clay
Role — Survivor
Class — Sorcerer
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Statisitics (EXP: 3)
— Might: 2 [+]
— Trick: 3
— Spirit: 3
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Looking at his remaining Experience Points, Adam discovered that to reach 3 in Spirit, he had to spend 3 EXP. With the "+" sign disappearing, it meant that to get it to 4 Spirit, he'd need 4 EXP.
It wasn't what he hoped for, but that seemed like a balanced system to him, unusual but balanced. He would conserve the remaining EXP, but knowing that he is physically miserable, he desired to break his style and raised his Might to 3 as well.
Just as he may expected, he felt something growing within him but it seemed like he didn't really get that stronger, something he had to find time and place to test on properly.
——————————
Name — Adam Clay
Role — Survivor
Class — Sorcerer
——————————
Statisitics (EXP: 0)
— Might: 3
— Trick: 3
— Spirit: 3
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Skills
— Artifice (IX)
— Cook (V)
— Charisma (IV)
— Firearms (II)
— Psyche (II)
— Sanity (I)
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What remained were the skills, which he couldn't seem to understand without description, especially with that Artifice skill and how ridiculously high it was. He could tell what is high from looking at numbers alone, and if his Firearms skill, which he's bad at, is 2, and his cooking skill, which he is really good at, is 5, his Artifice, which is at 9, must be divine.
Just what is it? He kept thinking.
"The shelter you seek, how soon do we reach it?"
At that time, Captain Creed initiated conversation.
"The shelter? It is anything but, really, just an old military base that got occupied by people when the national guard pulled back," Adam replied.
"A base, then? It will be… instructive to witness this world's relics."
"Instructive?" Adam looked at him intently. "I don't think you need to worry about heresy, now. You should also restock on ammunition and food."
"With armament like yours, this world offers little of worth."
"But you'll run out of Plasma charges, won't you? And there are no blazers in this world, either. I know you can make your own weapons, but you'll need to scrap something first, not to mention the food… you need to eat a lot if you don't have your special sustenance ration."
"Your insight surprises me. You are more versed in the Sunforged ways than I anticipated."
"This is a disappointing world, Captain. Reading about Heroes like you is what kept it interesting to many of us."
"There are others?"
"Heh!" Adam laughed and turned to Captain Creed. "Few but still many. In fact, before we get to the shelter, I think I know where one might be. He'll be on our way. There is something I certainly must try."
"What manner of place is that destination, then?"
Adam paused for a while before answering that, then spoke with a voice filled with longing.
"It is a place where I have a lot of memories in, good ones mostly, the fun and the games and everything. Never got near it since the world… you know."
"…"
Creed remained passive without a reply as he observed the emotional twists Adam seemed to be going through. Still, Adam still gathered the last bit of resolve as he made way for his Wartopia playground.
"Next stop, the Kave!"