Progress bar

As Aite Láechrad locked in my chosen skill, it provided me with a kind of mental progress bar. I was currently at a flat zero, denoting that I knew absolutely nothing about it, and it went all the way up to…about seven, although there were some strange “halfway” points where it felt like I could specialize and be really good at one aspect while being average at the rest. I didn’t want that, though. I wanted to completely master this skill.

So, the first thing I needed to learn was…

The Apple Feat.

Right, and that was…juggling, basically, plus throwing. Aite Láechrad showed me — although “show” wasn’t exactly the right term; it was more like it just dumped the information directly into my head — that the objective was to develop hand-eye coordination and train your ability to aim properly.

I looked around the warehouse, but it was an old, abandoned warehouse; of course it didn’t have any fresh apples sitting around, just waiting for me to use, so I had to make do with bits of rubble and concrete that were scattered all over the floor. I found three good-sized chunks that were about as big as an apple, walked back into the center of the clearing, and, feeling a bit stupid and clownish, I started juggling.

I must have gone at it for an hour or two, just tossing them around and juggling like an idiot. Sometimes, I dropped them — especially within the first few minutes; if my power hadn’t given me some kind of energy shield, my toes would’ve been broken a dozen times over — because I’d never juggled before in my life, but I just picked them back up when that happened and kept going. In my head, that progress bar slowly began to fill, and as it did, I thought that it was getting easier to juggle and easier to keep track of the bits of rubble.

It might just have been my imagination, though.

After those two hours, however, it started to get boring. Well, okay, it was basically boring from the beginning, but I managed to force myself to do it for the whole two hours, and I had to stop because my fingers were starting to go numb. So, making sure to catch those bits of rubble, I set them down out of the way; next time, if this actually worked, I’d bring a few apples to use.

“Okay. What else, then?”

I examined that progress bar to find that I was still basically a novice, I was just a slightly better novice. I wouldn’t be punching out Lung anytime soon, but I was in somewhat better shape than when I’d started.