All right, calm down. If I’m going to be breaking out of some kind of experimental lab, I’m going to have to prep for it. Let’s check and see if I can find out more about my race.

  Hmm. I could see a lot of possibilities with those options. I guess that’s what the ‘choose your path’ thing from earlier was talking about, huh? I’ll need to pick one before I go spending my points, then.

  My Fame (or lack thereof) was pretty insane for a starting character. Given that one title I had, I figured there was a connection.

  Well fuck. So, keeping people from knowing what I was could mean the difference between life and death. How I did that would depend on my path, it seemed. With that in mind, I looked back at the paths again.

  Battery looked to be an interesting hybrid of tank and support. Except I didn’t feel like being anyone’s Blaster to their Master. That wasn’t going to fly in my book. There were potential options there, but this was the least useful (to me), and the path that would probably be hardest to keep under wraps.

  Hunter was also not something I was really interested in. It sounded like a Ranger or Druid type build, or your typical Lycan build. Probably give me excellent DPS in the short term, but it would be wildly obvious what I was, and I didn’t think I could simply gloss it over.

  Stalker would be ideal for a rogue or assassin type. I definitely liked the idea of being able to hide from people hunting me once I got up in levels. But did I really want to be an invisible assassin in a universe full of things to see and do? It’d be awesome, if I managed to get to high levels with it, but getting to the level where I could act freely would be a pain.

  Then there was the Infiltrator. This screamed ‘doppleganger’ to me, as it would to pretty much anyone who had ever picked up the Monster Manual from any edition of Dungeons and Dragons. Being able to change my face would allow me to adopt a lot of different disguises, so even if I was discovered, I could slip back into the shadows without too much trouble.

  The ’weaker in physical combat’ bit was troubling, especially since it seemed like I would be facing a really tough start, but I signed on for a challenge, right? What could be more challenging than taking something that should not be, playing on the hardest difficulty, and doing it with a handicap?

  Well, that was good. I should probably check and see what the individual stats did.

  Hmm. So specializing in any one stat could be useful, but is more severely handicapping in this game than it would be in others. While you could throw everything into DEX trying to be the ultimate sniper, if you neglected STR, your accuracy would be crap. So you had to try and find a balance. Even with psionics, this game’s version of magic, you couldn’t just dump everything in INT. Sure, you’d get more PP that way, but the power of your attacks and your ability to defend against enemy ‘mages’ would suffer if you didn’t put anything in your other mental stats. Very clever.

  Now, I had to spend my points. Bringing up the point menu again, I considered what I needed most. I was going to be doing a high risk, high reward start, so I couldn’t count on a long training period in order to get my bearings and build my stats. Not at first, anyways. So I had to think in terms of breaking out of whatever lab I was in.

  But after I escaped, I would still have to survive, and I didn’t want to blow all my points on things that would only come into play early on. What I really needed were skills and passive abilities. That would provide a lot of benefit in the early game, thanks to not needing to grind stats, and they’d still have some effect in the mid to late game, even if they were just a fallback option for my ‘Lost Everything’ plan. Passives were damned hard to take away, unlike gear (which could be stolen) or abilities (which could probably be sealed).

  But I’d still need SOME abilities and attributes, especially support abilities. The hourly regen of HP was harsh. I’d need to get a healing ability, or something like it, if I was going to have a chance of fighting free of a base.

  So, I started with Psy abilities, and started spending.

  All right, that would give me a basic arsenal for fighting my way free, and healing myself if I got into trouble, and couldn’t find a medkit. Of course, considering that, at the moment, I only had 200 PP, the healing abilities were pretty damn expensive. Guess I wouldn’t be able to just start off like Wolverine and claw my way through everything. Well, if I wanted to do that, I would have chosen a Hunter or Stalker type.

  All right. Next was these Titles, Perks, and Skills. First, I want to do something about that Luck score. Then I’ll work on passives for the rest. That’ll make things easier.

  At this point, I’d already spent more than basic users would have to spend. But I was going to need all this, and more.