12 Attributes and Programming!
{6th Floor Gym, Megabuilding H10, Little China, Watson}
{45 Minutes Later}
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My hands stung as I walked back toward my apartment. My first outing wasn't that bad, and I also put some of my paranoia about Night City to rest. The city wasn't bad; sure most of it smelled like piss and rotten food, and I could hear sounds of gunfire ringing from somewhere far away... Okay, so the city was terrible, but not nearly as many cyberpsychos were present as I had led myself to believe.
I punched the open button next to my door, and it slid open; the panel had a biometric lock or something, but it didn't ask me for anything as my apartment revealed itself to me. The dull black carpet and interior welcomed me back as I walked into the room. My arms felt a little heavy, and my knuckles felt a little sore; another new thing I learned about the stamina bar is that although it refills quite quickly in the beginning, as fatigue accumulates, the rate of its regeneration slows down also.
As I dragged myself into the shower, my feet felt like they had been filled with lead. Getting rid of the T-shirt and jeans, I slowly removed all of my clothing before I hopped into the shower and turned the dial around. An interface popped into my sight, telling me that I had transferred €$10 to the Megabuilding Corp.
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[Transfer: -€$10]
[€$33,808]
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'Somehow, I managed to burn through 20k in a single day, most of which was spent on the Programming lesson; Wilson took a heavy chunk with the gun, bullets, and attachments. Plus, if I want to survive, I'm sure I would need to spend more to get new skills, a new cyberdeck, an armored jacket, and clothes similar to what Wilson showed me.' I thought the cool water rushing down my body helped.
Today was still a success. I survived a day longer and even acquired some skills that would provide a better foundation for me. However, the way in which my gamer powers functioned and the desire to learn new skills itched at me. Through my playthrough of the game, I realized that focusing on a particular build was always better, and I had even thought of what I wanted: to be a netrunner.
The most overpowered abilities in the game involved the net, but given how easily I could learn at least the basics of a skill, I didn't want to disregard the possibility of a more tactical build. Washing the dust off my body, I turned around, letting the water, which I had paid 10 dollars for, stream down my back. I opened the interface and dove a little deeper into what my stats meant.
'I have had stat upgrades two times now, with my {Body} going from 3->4 and {Reflex} going from 4->5. Both of these instances felt a lot different. While I could feel my muscles and the power that I could produce increase with {Body} attribute increasing, the {Reflex} one felt a little stranger. I could feel that I'm a lot faster and that I have more control of my body.' I mused that it was a lot harder to describe how to translate {Reflex} upgrade into words, so I thought about looking at the official definition.
I navigated to the [Character] page once again and looked at the five stats arranged in a pentagonal formation in front of me. I thought about hovering over the {Body} attribute, like with a mouse, and another window appeared before me.
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[Body determines your raw physical power and fortitude. It enables you to handle better power-based weapons like shotguns, light machine guns, and most blunt weapons. It also allows you better stamina regeneration and prevents you from using some weapons that have a lot of recoil.]
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'Huh, is it the same as the game or not? I don't know, but the explanation makes sense; what about the rest of the attributes.' I switched to Reflex. This one has been puzzling me for a while.
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[Reflex determines your body's ability to evade and dodge attacks based on instinct while also determining the proficiency of your control over your limbs. Progressing in this attribute not only increases your ability to handle lighter weapons like assault rifles, most handguns, and blades but also directly correlates to your ability to handle cyberware, which can slow down your perceptions of time.]
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'So, Body is strength and Reflex is Dex. Increasing it would allow me more maneuverability in combat and probably would determine my proficiency in weapons I would most likely use.' The water trickled off, I turned back to look at the knob, and it had closed on its own.
'Was it like a microwave timer, fucking hell are they charging water by the minute?' I cursed in my mind before I stepped off. A towel was hanging in front of the mirror, which I quickly used to wipe myself down, and then I walked over to my wardrobe. The feeling of walking on the dirty floor irked me, but I pushed that thought aside for now. I'm too poor to deal with this right now.
I picked another similar-looking T-shirt and jeans before I walked toward my bed. On the way, I bought another Burrito, this time the Rosado flavor, to try something new as I hopped onto my bed and looked at the next attribute.
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[Technical Ability determines your ability to work with hardware and tools present in the world. Increasing this ability also increases your ability to handle and extract more use out of your installed cyberware, allowing you to exceed the limits of your cyberware and even determine how most of them function. With an increased Technical ability, the time it takes to learn how to operate a new device decreases significantly.]
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'This one is a little weird. I'm not sure how to describe it, but it's almost telling me that if I want to work creating my own cyberware, I could do so by increasing the Technical ability attribute. Which in hindsight makes sense...' My first playthrough of the game was as a corpo, so I had started out as V from Arasaka counter-intel and had my cyberware disabled on a whim. Because of the paranoia, it had caused me to stay away from Arasaka labeled cyberware from quite deep into the playthrough.
'Still malfunctioning cyberware isn't really an issue. I could cause the same effects in my second playthrough with the Cyberware Malfunction and even System Failure quickhack. Although it would be cool to create my own cyberware, I don't know if I would have enough points to level this up. Maybe in the future...' The thought was pushed aside as I moved on to the last two attributes, the two I needed to upgrade for my build quickly, one of which was already at a decent level.
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[Intelligence determines your netrunning capabilities. Progression allows you to better understand how to handle data and the net while increasing the effectiveness of your quickhacks and daemons. Every four points in this attribute gives an extra natural Ram.]
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'Simple but effective. Not only is my intelligence at 6, but I also have netrunning skills. After looking at cool, I need to go through the programming course and get started on my netrunning journey.'
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[Cool determines your assassination skills and your ability to sneak around. Progressing in this attribute allows you to handle the most precision and silenced rifles and handguns and determine the weak spots in a target's armor with increased proficiency. The higher the target's level, the longer it would take to assess their weakness.]
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I closed the window and leaned back. The cool stat was exactly what I thought it was, even if the weakness assessment perk that was part of the relic was currently integrated into the stat.
'That makes Intelligence, cool, and reflexes my priority. Maybe technical ability, too, and I can work on Strength on my own without spending points on that. If I would get points when I level up.' I grimaced at that thought. If this were a playthrough, I would have already shot the first enemy I saw to gain experience and level up, but now it was totally different. Killing and using a gun had a whole other meaning now, even if I knew I would have to kill at some point.
Pushing those grim thoughts aside, I pulled out the BD and the datashard for the programming lecture from my Inventory. I quickly wore the BD and plugged in the data shard into it.
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[Loading######...]
[Militech Techno Wreath loading complete.]
[Caliberating connection.]
[Multi lesson course detected.]
[Please select Lesson.]
[1. Programming and its basics]
[2. Algorithms]
[...]
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'Let's see if programming in this world is different from my previous life,' I thought as the light blinded me once again. I felt myself faze through the feelings of confusion before, once again, I was in another body. Hope and excitement filled me as I once again arrived in a similar classroom.
"Alright, gonks, listen up. Name's Tasha. I don't give a crap what you get up to, but interrupting is not allowed. I don't give a fuck who your padre is, just open your ears and listen, I won't repeat shit twice." The female lecturer had a different style than the two mellow professors had before. She was sitting on the desk, her legs swinging as fishnets covered her thighs.
"Programming is nothing more than the process of writing down instructions for a compiler to go through on how to perform specific tasks. If you don't know what a compiler is, read before coming to the next lesson. Now, before the existence of the Cybermodem or even the existence of the Net, programming was a lot more tame. It dealt with creating individual little packets of instructions that would allow a machine to work." There were no slides or anything associated with this lecture. She just talked, jumping about anything that came to her mind.
"After the Net came into existence, development began to ramp up. Everything began to increase in scale as the amount of data we had available began to go out of hand. Advancements were made in technologies that were so far evolved from just a simple set of instructions as the massive amounts of data allowed us to train and create AIs capable of writing code themselves. A programmer's meaning had evolved back then, and the word quickly became obsolete and merged with Netrunner..." Her tone had turned a little somber.
"Then datakrash happened, and we lost access to more than 80% of data. All the advancements made through the help of AIs and data mining had to be abandoned as the net itself came crashing down. Most of the servers that powered programs became obsolete, and humans once again had to write basic code and research most of the field of programming from the beginning. In this lecture, we'll start in the same situations the netrunners of 2020s faced after the crash." She stepped off the table, and the screen behind her lit up; several terms that were quite familiar to me were written on the screen.
"This is all we have to work with: the basics of variables, operators, conditional statements, some basic functions, and libraries of stored instructions. Now, I'll teach you how to recreate society with them. How much you can learn will be up to you..." After delivering that promise, she began speaking nonstop about each of the basic components and how the variables are nothing more than data storage banks. The Operators are functions that work on the data that is stored in variables, and then the conditional statements that would control the flow of a basic program.
The lecture covered the basic foundation of programming. Some basic functions, like if and else, were almost copied from my previous life; there were also some new functions, like the 'then' and 'thus' functions. The syntax was a lot different as well, with routines following a different pattern than the basic languages and being more similar to Javascript.
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As I emerged from the lecture feeling a little disoriented, I looked at the time and realized that this was the longest I had been in a braindance. The lecture lasted for over an hour and a half, and as I began evaluating the differences in the coding language, my desire to learn more took over. I clicked on the second lecture as I stared at the red message on my interface.
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[100 {Programming} EXP gained]
[{Programming} skill created at Level 0]
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AN: The netrunner arc begins. I won't get too technical about programming and will just explain broader terms like Aalgo, routines, and sub-routines before moving on to deamons and quickhacks.
