< You have fully discovered a new attribute : Vis Vitalis >
< You have earned a new achievement for having discovered this new attribute and its main mod all on your own >
< You have gained 2 Vitalia >
< You have levelled up >
Sure enough, Agi had gotten a nice bonus from all that effort. Sure enough he now had 3 free stat points and the cap for the next level had grown to 4. It seemed the number of stat points gotten grew together with the levels but only time would confirm whether they actually doubled up every time like the requirements or if they simply corresponded to the level he had gotten to.
He thus took some more time to distribute these. Putting them into one single stat would bring about unknown consequences that he might not really want to deal with, such as the headache from even putting one point into perception without improving his mental stats. Putting all of his points into strength might make him look like a mister Olympia, which he might not dislike but would rather get there without ever cheating with such things, and if he went further, it would also get to a point where he'd end up looking like some kind of monster. People where already threading that fine line with but effort and steroids so if you could enhance yourself this way, going beyond might be a bit too easy. That was also the reason why when he put his stat point into strength, he focused on making his muscles more dense for more pure strength and increase their endurance in order not to tire them out in a single movement or two.
He ended up spreading them between all of his physical stats except perception, and opened his full status screen to see how it was looking:
[---------------------------------]
Status sheet:
- Name: Agi Rosenzweig
- Level: 2 (requirements for next level: 0/4 Vitalia).
- System class: Unavailable
- Class: none
- System achievements: unavailable
- Achievements: 3
- Attributes:
Vis Vitalis: 0 free stat points
Extension (body):
Statistics:
Height: 1.93 meters
Weight: 108 kgs
Bodyfat percentage: 4.2%
Strength: 3
Dexterity: 3
Constitution: 3
Perception: 2
Thought (mind):
Memory: 2
Intuition: 2
Processing speed: 2
Consciousness, reason and rationality: present
- Concepts: 1
[---------------------------------]
Agi didn't know whether it was his monkey brain whose dopamine receptors were weirdly easy to activate, but seeing numbers go up in such a fashion motivated him to keep going on such a primal level that he felt like it might actually be the system trying to have some influence over him.
Making use of that motivation, he started to try and figure out his new limits. Trying physical exercises first, but he quickly realized he couldn't really figure out anything on his own. Sure he could count how many push-ups and pull-ups he could do, but that wouldn't bring him very far, running in this environment was out of the question. For his constitution, was he supposed to hit himself, or try to break his own bones to see how resistant they became? And what about his mental stats, was he supposed to see how much faster he became at solving math problems, or better try to prove some theorems from scratch to test out his intuition. As for his dexterity, he could feel that he was more flexible, but how would he test out how good his reflexes were?
At that very moment of the reflection, his ears picked up a strange noise, and his body moved before he even realized what was happening, narrowly avoiding a fist sized rock hurling straight for the side of his head.
Looking in the direction it came from, he saw himself, or rather a less detailed version of himself, staring straight at him with pure black eyes.
He knew what it was, and yet the panic and the urge to flee didn't come this time, he stayed rooted in place as did the polymorph, having quite an intense stare down.
No matter how long this mutual examination took, Agi never felt any danger coming from the creature, he didn't even feel much of a tension rising, just a mutual acknowledgement, and then, out of nowhere, it pounced.
Its speed, while fast even for a sprint, could be followed easily thanks to his improved senses. Not knowing how to fight at all though, Agi just ended up trusting his body to not get hurt instead of trying to overthink and end up down before he could even come up with a viable strategy.
His muscles tensed, he squatted down midway, one leg in front of the other, and pulled his arms in front preparing for a big impact, as the polymorph didn't look like it was doing anything else than mindlessly charge onto him at fullspeed.
And sure enough, the impact came, it was both heavier and lighter than he expected, he didn't tumble backwards, but he had to take a few steps back, while trying to get both of his arms between his other version's torso and upper arms.
He only managed to get one in before they came a halt, and before he knew it, his body double had already managed to get under his arms and was now smashing him down on the ground.
He felt the impact through his whole body, and clenched his jaw for a while before realizing it didn't really hurt, Agi had also automatically tried to get his knees towards his torso, and his arms to his face, but at that point he had already been mounted, and the last thing he saw before getting punched unconscious was a grinning version of himself.
When Agi came back to his senses, he was resting up in a tree, and before he could even formulate a theory about how he ended up here he saw two notable things.
The first one is that through this brief combat, he had gained a point in constitution ( and more precisely 2 points in toughness ) thanks to his one and only concept.
The second one is that the polymorph was currently watching him not even a meter away, which caused him a bit of a jumpscare.
They spent seconds like that, staring at each other, and after a while, Agi just couldn't stand how awkward it felt to have a stare down with himself, and thus tried to engage in a conversation, or at least a communication attempt:
«Can you understand me?»
He didn't get any response, but kept pushing:
«Can you speak a language, any language? Tongue? Logos?»
After a brief pause and still no response, he decided to simply make any and all sound with his vocal cords to try and get his impostor to do the same.
He got a reaction out of that last attempt, though not the one he expected. His body double didn't utter a simple sound and instead got closer, a lot closer. Just as close as it did the first time when it took human form.
Except closing the distance didn't seem like enough this time, and the polymorph went as far as to touch him. First it was on his neck, then torso, after that, abdomen, and finally, the forehead.
Agi was guessing this was to get a more precise image of the human body, perhaps of the insides too, and sure enough after some time, it started uttering sounds. They were mostly broken and of varying tones, he couldn't tell whether that was because it was experimenting with the scope of voices it had, or simply because it had absolutely no mastery over it.
After this first voice came out from mimicking creature, Agi thought he could try to communicate once again since by touching his forehead, it could only have attempted to get information on his brain.
«Can you understand me now?»
The thing, which was spacing out a moment before locked eyes with him and seemed to focus really hard on something, but after a while it gave up and just fell asleep on the spot.
This was the most vulnerable Agi had ever seen the polymorph, and since it hadn't assumed back to its original form, he was just staring at himself sleeping, which he didn't enjoy much to say the least.
After this interaction though, he was certain. This entity, whatever it really was, posed no danger to him, in fact he was starting to see it more like a curious child, if a curious child could coldly murder a seven foot tall dark brown gorilla-like man like it was a simple sheet of paper that is.
Seeing it sleep, he decided to approach it himself. He got it back to a stable position, one that would not be harmful to a human physique, and then thought of a way to make it change its appearance to something else than himself as soon as it woke up.
He wished he had some kind of note book or something of the sort in which he could explain himself with images instead of words. He couldn't get to the end of thoughts before the polymorph was back up.
With no specific plan in mind he just attempted basic communication for the third time around:
«Do. You. Understand.me?»
To which it nodded and even tried to formulate a response out loud but once again failed miserably. The fact that it nodded meant that he had come to learn of some form of human custom while spacing out and its potential understanding would make their future cooperation way easier.
«Can you please change your appearance then, I like to have conversations with myself but not this literally»
His attempt at basic humor seemed to go straight through it, but it at least seemed to have understood his demand as it slowly shifted its body into a mess that seemed half human half something else, which he thought he could make out to be the only other animal living in this forest except for them.
«Wait! You know what, go back to before, this is simply worse. I'll tell you step by step how to morph yourself alright?»
It shifted back into looking like him and seemed expectant of what he would say next. Having a human claydoll at his disposition, Agi wanted to transform it into any and everything which passed through his mind. It could be a cute girl, an old sage, a huge body builder, or maybe even a cat.
Instead of letting his imagination run wild, which would probably end up in a terrible result, he decided to make it go for the most basic body ever, average height, a strong lean build capable of fighting efficiently, a boring face with short black hair, thin eyebrows, blue eyes with a hooded shape making him look a bit more intense, a nice roman nose, which was the most difficult thing for him to describe to it apparently, and a set of the most normal looking mouth there was for which he just let it copy his and then slightly modify it to its pleasing since after the nose, he had just given up.
With a now normal looking human being standing across from him, one that could seemingly understand him at that, Agi decided to propose a deal between the two of them:
«Hey, how about we both help each other out here, I'll teach you how to speak, read and write in my language, and then teach you about culture, history, some science, and anything else that might quench your curiosity, in exchange, you have to teach me how to fight, survive a fight, and if necessary kill»
It seemed like he might have over estimated his new friend's comprehending capability, as all he got in response was a blank stare. He rolled his eyes and simplified his demand:
«I teach you language and knowledge you teach me fight and kill. OK?»
The response he got this time was some uncontrolled excitement and unidentifiable noises coming out of his mouth that he wildly interpreted as an agreement to his proposition.
And thus started the cooperation between Agi and the polymorph.