4 Where's the instruction manual?
Helmut awoke to a loud banging on the door and an obnoxiously self-important voice full of authority.
Flustered and confused after blacking out for god knows how long (or short), he pulls himself up, only to be greeted with a muffled 'crack' from under his shoe. Poor, beaten, battered glasses that served him for years finally met their inglorious demise.
Knocking and shouting became more aggressive and threatening, making Barker cuss under his breath.
"I don't remember owing money to the triad? Oh just shut it already, it's not like can understand...you...oh."
With a sudden inspiration dawning on him, Helmut pulled out his book. He remembered correctly, there indeed were language skills shyly tucked at the bottom. Deciding to give it a go he poured evolution points into Chinese. In just a couple seconds it changed from 'basic' to 'proficient'.
The sudden influx of knowledge left an extremely pleasant feeling, but before he could melt in the pleasant revelry, he suddenly remembered what the voice said, now fully understanding the underlining meaning behind the angry barking.
"Oh shit, the cops!"
Now that he knew the possible owner of the voice and remembering how p o l i t e policemen can be, let alone asian ones, Barker didn't pause for a second to clumsily rush at the door and fling it open after disengaging the lock.
Which led to a tad awkward situation.
WHOOSH
A pudgy aging policeman who got tired of waiting for the possible perp to give himself in, cooked up a great plan to flex before his young female colleague by bashing in the door with a flying tackle. A marvelous scheme indeed which would've definitely proved his alpha manliness to m'lady if only he didn't fly through the opened door and faceplanted into the wall, effectively knocking himself (and a couple of his teeth) out.
"..."
"..."
Helmut and Sera-*cough* and the police girl wordlessly look at one another.
With his mind racing a mile a minute, crafty bugger once again showed his talent as a conman and came up with a way to make him look as harmless as possible.
Joining his hands together, he made a light bow towards the girl.
"Amitabha, benefactor. Forgive this poor travelling monk for making respected police wait, I was a little out of it today. Please, step inside and be my guests. Although it's not much, I can at least entertain you with some tea."
The initial mistrust vanished after she noticed his thin complexion, "shaved" head and the sheer squalor of the room. Little things like lack of usual monk apparel of robes and prayer beads didn't even have a chance of entering her mind as she was whisked away and drowned in never-ending chatter of the big bad wolf who fully seized the momentum. With how things were going, her first day on the job had a very real possibility of ending up in the suspect's boudoir with her undergarments chilling out on the ceiling fan but thankfully - or sadly - it was not meant to be, as the already thoroughly forgotten police fatty made himself known.
"Having fun there, rookie?"
Police girl froze up like a child caught with her hand in a cookie jar. To be more precise, she was caught with her hand in the suspect's pants.
Shamefully putting her overcoat back on she scurried a step behind her superior, trying her best to make a show of professionalism. Which was admittedly a very hard thing to pull off, considering her smeared lipstick and wrinkled uniform.
"We are leaving. Sorry to waste your time, reverend."
"No need, no need~"
As the two turned their backs on one another, the world turned into black void with only the policeman and Helmut - who were enveloped in blue and red hue respectively - left, as dramatic music played in the background. If one peered long enough into the darkness, they might notice eyes of a god of death staring right back at them, unblinking.
"(There is absolutely no way he is our perp. After masterfully pretending to be a bumbling moron and feigning losing consciousness, I carefully observed his every move. The facial composite looks nothing like him and his chinese is nearly perfect unlike the assailant's. He's not even black, so we have no reason to bag him. This lead is a bust, time to exfiltrate.)"
"(Kukuku... Everything went according to keikaku.) [translator's note: keikaku means plan] (You absolute FOOL, it was I all along! My machinations lay undetected for years, for I am a master of deception! Forty seconds have passed, now it's time for you to leave this stage forever. Goodbye, officer.)"
Policeman came to a sudden halt, grasping his chest. Ignoring his worried partner, he took out his prescription nitroglycerin, only to have his hand grasped by Helmut.
"Brother, don't. These pills are long expired, use mine instead."
Shoving it down his gullet and accepting water that Helmut passed him, aging man felt much better.
Both sides parted amicably.
Because of thin walls, muffled "Hey, how did he know they were expired? The date is stamped at the bottom of the bottle, he couldn't have seen it." could be heard.
"Indeed, how the hell did I know that?" Helmut mumbled.
Opening his medkit he opened all the containers and started saying out loud what he thought were expiration dates of the drugs. After checking it turned out that most of his predictions were correct, with an error margin of a couple days.
Having a hunch he licked one of the pills and proceeded naming its composition and numerical count of the ingredients used in a trance-like state. Once again, everything was correct but a couple ingredients got left out, showing that the list was imperfect.
Next he flipped through the same medical book he read in the Dust World. Just a cursory glance gave him far more insight about the contents than what over an hour of concentrated reading gave him before.
Calling out for his papery partner he flipped to the stats page. The first time he was emotionally unstable, the second he had no time to dawdle and had a very specific goal in mind. It would only be prudent to find out all ins and outs now that the dust has settled and no one is trying to bash the door down.
...
Results weren't much, he found out only two things:
1) his physical stats were trash, some serious training montage was in order. The Eye of the Tiger one, no messing around.
2) the book was surprisingly stingy with explanations; despite being very sassy and descriptive in the battle log section, the only thing explained in stat page was the Special Skill(s?).
tl;dr - he didn't learn jack
Although the skills seemed very plain and straightforward from their naming, it was clear there should be some hidden undercurrents. You'd think that Pharmacology would only help with research or with giving out prescriptions, but apparently there were more magical applications to the skill too. Guessing the effects of a medicine you never seen just by looking it... Helmut could swear there wasn't a single doctor or chemist on the planet who could pull something like that off, no matter how much of a genius they were. And yet here we are.
As for stats, Barker decided to mentally divide them into "trainable" and "untrainable" for now, before this little theory was either proven or sent into the trash bin.
Why waste precious points on something like Muscle attribute when you could invest them in something which is decided during birth and remains mostly unchanged for entire life like Intuition? Helmut had zero doubts that getting swole wouldn't help much in a situation where you got surrounded by a couple hundred flesh-eating monstrosities that were hiding in the woodworks, waiting to pounce oblivious passersbys.
Instead of immediately dropping on the floor and performing crunches, Helmut put on his shoes and left the motel. After badgering the locals he finally got good directions towards both of his targets.
First he went to the optometrist to get some contact lenses, lamenting at the amount of money that went down the drain, considering that he planned to get his eyesight to at least 20/20 in the matter of a month with evolution points.
Leaving the clinic he left for the second destination. As he peered at the 'building' he marveled at how butt-ugly yet vaguely intriguing the construction was. Best way to describe it would be "fire department's nightmare".
A perfect square-shaped perimeter of several buildings merged together in an unholy symbiosis over what seemed a dozen different replannings and reconstructions, clearly not coordinated with municipality.
The only way inside was a small-ish gate that a minivan would find it hard to squeeze through, showing a spacious patio inside, choke full with stalls, peddlers and customers. As if to piss him off even further, the gate wasn't even symmetrical, instead it was off-center. He couldn't explain why, but everything about this place just got on his nerves on a subconscious level.
Helmut only sighed and shook his head as he passed through the gates of the unnamed Farmer's Market.
"If I didn't need a boatload of cheap-o meat to buy before I start training seriously, I would've never-"
As he was ranting to himself, passing through rows of cabbages and whatnot, Helmut noticed a strange little combination shop that peddled both poultry, meat and fish in one place against any sanitary norms. Most of them alive and caged or swimming in murky tanks that haven't been cleaned from algae for Lord knows how long.
The old shop-owner lady dragged a hen from the cage, unceremoniously plopped it on the counter and decapitated it right there on the spot with zero fucks given.
Unknown to Helmut, a twisted, dastardly grin slowly adorned his face as his eyes squinted in a foxy way.
He got an idea.
An awful idea.
Helmut got a wonderful, awful idea.
