Chapter 5: Pain

When I was done checking my new and improved self out, I selected complete, finalizing my changes. The instant I did, the cyan-colored holographic screen I had been using changed now displaying a list of traits with some being positive, some being negative, and a number of them that were a combination of the two.

[ Traits ]

2 Points Left To Spend

| Ambidextrous | Gain the ability to use both of your hands as if they were your dominant hand.

| Big Brained | Your brain increases in size, thereby increasing your intelligence attribute by 3 points, but to accommodate your big brain, your head is oddly shaped and most find it ugly and repulsive.

| Big Damage | +20% to damage dealt.

| Blind | Gain +2 to Perception. However, you'll lose your sight as a result.

| Built Like A Shit Brick House | Your strength, as well as your endurance attributes, are both increased by 2 but your Agility will suffer and will be reduced by 2.

| Carnivore | Gain twice as many benefits from eating meat but half as much from eating plants.

| Critter | Critical Chance is increased by 10%.

| Destroyer | +10% to critical chance, critical damage, and damage, but your weapons wear down twice as fast.

| Drug Resistant | The duration of drug effects and the chance of becoming addicted to them are halved.

| Early Bird Gets The Worm | Gain +1 to all attributes from 6 am to 12 pm but -1 to all attributes from 6 pm to 6 am.

| Eunuch | You lose your little buddy down below but gain a large increase in attributes 10 points to be exact. You will also experience infrequent bouts of rage due to the loss of your little buddy down below.

| Fast Metabolism | Digest and process food twice as fast and gain a +2 health regeneration.

| Fast Attacker | Attack speed is increased by 20% and stamina drain of weapon use is reduced by 20% this can include anything from just carrying the weapon to using it. But as a result of gaining those benefits, weapon accuracy is reduced by 20% across the board for you.

| Gifted | +2 to intelligence, +1 to all other attributes, and all skills are reduced by 10%.

| Glass Cannon | +35% to all damage done as well as received.

| Pacifist | All social skills are boosted by 15% but all combat skills get reduced by 15%.

| Heavy Hitter | Melee and unarmed attacks do 20% more damage.

| Herbivore | Gain twice as many benefits from eating plants but half as much from eating meat.

| Hoarder | +100 lbs to carry weight, but you must maintain a carry weight above 200 lbs to receive this effect.

| NEET | When inside, you gain +1 to all attributes, but when outside, you suffer the exact opposite -1 to all attributes stats.

| One Handed | You lose an arm. In exchange, the only arm you possess will be twice as strong as it should be. On top of that, +20% accuracy with all weapons and +100% to your arm's endurance.

| Pitch Machine | +30% to your throwing rate and you use 30% less stamina when throwing anything but your thrown weapon velocity is decreased by 20% thereby, shortening the distance from which you can hit a target.

| Rough Skin | Your skin becomes rough, calloused, and unattractive, but as a result of your skin thickening, your damage threshold is raised by 5, letting you tank heavier hits.

| Sex Appeal | Both your overall attractiveness as well as your sexual prowess are improved and members of the opposite sex will have a better first impression of you on average. This trait also makes it easier to barter with female merchants, resulting in more profit for you as long as you don't fumble the deal.

| Skilled | +10% to all of your skills but as a result of that increase you gain 10% fewer Experience Points.

| Slim Build | +1 Agility but your carry weight is reduced by 25 lbs and your limbs take 20% more damage.

| Stiff | Your body is stiff and because that is so your agility suffers, -1 to agility. However, as a tradeoff of having less agility, you have a much easier time controlling weapon recoil, +35% to weapon recoil reduction.

| Take Another | Gain another trait point at the cost of reducing 1 attribute of your choice by 1 point.

| Up All Night | +1 to all attributes from 6:00 PM to 6:00 AM, but -1 to all attributes from 6:00 AM to 6:00 PM.

| Volatile | When in combat your attacks have a chance to cause sudden explosions that deal 100% of your weapon's damage + whatever damage bonuses you may have. [DANGER] This trait is unpredictable and can result in possible harm to you or others.

I have quite a number of traits to choose from, yet there are some obvious traits that provide significantly more benefits than others, Gifted for example basically gives +1 to all attributes totaling 7 bonus attribute points for myself with the only negative being a -10% to skills as the penalty.

The Gifted penalty can also be converted to a more desirable -10% experience point gain with the trait Skilled. A negative I'd rather deal with instead of the -10% to all of my skills, since the Skilled trait's negative effect can be negated by adding 4 points to my intelligence attribute... Oh, and those extra attribute points provided by Gifted can be distributed freely into whatever attribute I want to put them in via the next menu, therefore negating the -10% experience point gain.

Yeah, that doesn't sound like too bad of an idea, so I'll go with that, but before I select them, let me give the traits another good look over.

...

Hmm, there is also the trait Sex Appeal that I want mainly for its boost in sexual prowess that will probably come in handy later down the road, not to mention the other positive effects it provides. So with that as it is, I'll need to get the trait. Take Another first before I select the other two traits I already have my sights set on.

Once I decided what traits I wanted, I selected Take Another first, reducing the attribute points that I'll be distributing after this by one. Following my selection of Take Another I had three trait points to spend, thus I selected Gifted, Sex Appeal, and Skilled, and right as I had all three selected I looked through the trait list one last time and locked in my selection swiftly bringing me to a new system screen.

| Attributes |

Attribute Points Left: 5

Strength: 7

Agility: 6

Endurance: 7

Intelligence: 7

Perception: 6

Charisma: 6

Luck: 6

Good, my stats are fairly similar to what they were in Wastelander 3, though both my strength and endurance are both 1 point higher than what they are supposed to be. I can't say for sure what caused the increase in them, but if I had to put my finger on it, I would say it there's a good chance it has something to do with the improvements I made to my muscles and my cardiovascular system.

Now that I've gotten to the attribute section of the character creation I need to think long and hard about what will give me the absolute best start here otherwise I could end up wasting valuable time on things that could've been easily achievable with better starting attribute distribution.

Starting things off, I know I need to put extra points into intelligence to make up for the decrease in my xp gain from the trait Skilled, so I'll use the 5 free points I have to increase intelligence to 12. That should negate the xp gain reduction by a decent bit.

With intelligence squared away, let's see what attribute I can take points away from... Well, I don't really need any points in strength since that is one of the attributes I should be able to raise relatively easily via working out, lifting progressively heavier weights, and proper cultivation of mass/eating a shit load of carbs and protein.

Oh, I could also utilize Vital-X Injectors as well for their ability to accelerate healing, which in theory should reduce the amount of recovery time my muscles require to repair themselves from the large amount of working out that I'll be doing in the future.

Adding onto that, if the recovery time is short enough I might be able to work out each muscle group in my body daily, and if that ends up being the situation I find myself in, my agility, endurance, and strength should rise at a pretty fast rate. But all of that is just my hopeful thinking for now, though I'll definitely test it out as soon as I can.

That's enough about that for the moment. Let me get back to what I was doing.

From there, I reduced my strength down to 1, freeing up 6 more points for me to spend and the very second I did that, I continued on to the next attribute.

Moving on from strength, I don't particularly need points in agility either because I'll be raising that through working out and agility-based exercises such as running and what not. So with that being as it is, I'll reduce that down to 1 too, bringing my total free attribute points up to 11.

Alright, now that I have a number of points freed up let me think about what makes the most sense to spend them on… Hmm, I'm going to need a ton of endurance for the various exercises I plan on doing so I'll increase that to 10, which will raise my stamina and health points by a not-so-small amount.

With endurance dealt with, it's time to move on to perception. I think I'll spend 4 attribute points to raise my perception all the way up to 10, since having a high perception should increase my hearing ability and vision to the point where I should be able to spot most dangers and enemies before they spot me.

It should also be plenty helpful when I'm doing very precise work in the future, especially so with crafting and lock picking, the latter of which did earn me a sizable chunk of exp in any of my playthroughs via getting quest objectives.

After giving it some thought it wasn't such a bad idea, so I dumped 4 attribute points into perception, raising it to 10, leaving me with 4 remaining points to distribute.

Perception is good now, let's have a look at charisma next. This attribute can be very useful in various situations that require leadership and the ability to convince people. But I don't think I'll be encountering very many situations like that early on in my new life. So it doesn't need to be all that high because by the time I start having to deal with situations of that nature, it should have raised to a decent level on its own, not to mention my leadership, speech, and trade skills.

Adding on further, my other attributes will increase my survivability, which charisma won't do unless I'm dealing with rational people that aren't that hostile and haven't already started shooting at me immediately upon spotting me. And seeing how a good portion of the world has been reduced to nothing but a radioactive wasteland via atomic fire, the odds of that being the case a majority of the time are not all that great unless I'm in an area that is under control of some faction or power.

Continuing with that line of thought, most of the wasteland isn't controlled by any major power and is more of a free for all between the many small groups and uncountable mutants that inhabit it, with many of the small groups consisting of hostile bandits.

Simply for those reasons, charisma won't be particularly useful to me early on when most of the situations I'll encounter out there will call for me to bury most beings six feet under. Can't really negotiate with cannibal chem fiend bandits and mutated wildlife that are really no different from wild animals ready to rip me apart and turn me into their next meal.

I also don't really need it at 6 either, so I'll decrease it by a point, putting it at 5, thereby freeing up another point that I can add elsewhere.

Finished making my adjustments to my charisma attribute, I continued on to the last remaining attribute luck.

Luck in the game did increase your odds of winning in gambling, increased your critical chance, and increased all skills by 1 for every point of luck the player had, all three of which are very good benefits to have.

However, since this isn't a game anymore, hopefully it will also work similarly to how luck does in reality or at least prevent me from encountering a situation that will send me off to an early grave. So with it providing quite a few benefits, I'll increase it to 10 just in case it also acts similar to real-life luck.

Now that I've finished dumping points into luck, I have 1 attribute point left to spend. Hmm, what should I spend it on... I guess I'll just throw it in endurance since that is probably the one attribute that I'll be utilizing the most and the one that will likely benefit me the most in the long run with it, giving me more stamina to get more things done.

As soon as I decided on where I wanted to put my last attribute point, I went ahead and placed it into endurance. Once I had done that, I looked at my attribute distribution to make sure I was happy with the distribution of my points.

| Attributes |

Strength: 1

Agility: 1

Endurance: 11

Intelligence: 11

Perception: 10

Charisma: 5

Luck: 10

Yeah, I believe that's as good as it can get it for my plans ahead. Time to finalize and lock in my distribution and move on to the next thing in the character creation, that being the skill distribution.

Content with my attribute distribution, I finalized my selection, causing the cyan-colored holographic screen to change again. Although this time it changed to display the skill distribution, which should be the last step in the character creation process for me before I officially get reincarnated and start my new life in Undercity 7.

[ Skills ]

Skill Talents Left: 3

Skill Points Left: 20

Ballistic Weapons: 42

Energy Weapons: 42

Explosives: 32

Heavy Weapons: 32

Leadership: 37

Lockpick: 30

Medicine: 32

Melee Weapons: 33

Piloting: 31

Repair: 32

Science: 32

Speech: 25

Stealth: 31

Survival: 31

Trade: 25

Unarmed: 33

Nice, everything appears to still be the same as it was in the game. Since that's the case, the skill talents should work exactly how they did in the game or at least similarly. And from what I recall, the 3 skills I select for the skills talents will receive an instantaneous boost of 10 skill points to their values and will increase at twice the speed they normally would.

Unfortunately, that last effect doesn't raise the amount the skill points the talent skills raise whenever I'm distributing skill points. It would've definitely been quite broken if I was able to turn my 20 skill points left to spend into 40 by just putting them into one of my 3 skill talents.

Alright, that's enough about that, let's see what skills would benefit me the most in the long run in my new life in the wasteland… Science is probably the first one I should take simply due to the fact that it'll make it far easier for me to achieve the various goals I've set for myself... Yeah, I'll take science first just so I'll have an easier time getting that robot army built.

One skill talent down, two more to go.

I'm going to need a combat skill and seeing as I have a tendency of using heavy weapons such as miniguns and other gatling styled weaponry in the Wastelander series of games due to them having huge ammo capacities and high damage per second, I should probably allocate a skill talent point to the heavy weapons skill.

That said, it's more of a specialized skill that only affects weapons categorized as heavy weapons whereas a skill such as ballistic weapons affects all ballistic-type weapons that fire non energy-based projectiles which can range from weapons like crossbows and pistols to weapons as powerful as gauss miniguns for instance.

...

Decisions, decisions… Ahh fuck it, I'll just go with the heavy weapons skill since training with heavier weapons will help out with my agility, endurance, and strength training. Though it'll be way more effective for both my endurance and strength than my agility.

One last skill talent to go.

With the second point allocated, I began looking over the list of skills again whilst thinking about what I should spend it on and after a certain point; I locked in on both medicine and repair.

Medicine and repair look like the best skills to take here, but I only have 1 point left, therefore I'll need to decide which one I would rather have over the other. This is very important so I'm going to have to contemplate about this for a few moments... If I take medicine I can probably progress faster in researching and making drugs that would be effective in increasing my attributes without side effects.

On the other hand, if I take repair, which also doubles as a sort of engineering skill along with science, my progress in the crafting and manufacturing area should increase by quite a substantial amount. Which will be useful for making the equipment that I'll be needing for both drug research and drug synthesis.

Continuing to add on further, the repair skill talent would also come in handy any time I want to make weapons, ammo, explosives, robots, and just about anything else I could think of. On top of that, it also pairs well with my existing science skill talent and will help out quite a lot when I venture out to go take over the Cyberdynamics Robotics Facility and repair the manufacturing machines housed in the facility.

...

I would like to take medicine, but repair just provides so many more benefits in comparison, which just makes it the obvious overall better choice in the end.

Coming to my decision to take repair over medicine as my third skill talent, I selected it from the holographic screen in front of me and locked it in. When I was done with selecting what skill talents I wanted, I began looking over the list of skills in front of me and thinking what skill or skills to dump my available skill points into.

What skill would be the most useful right out the gate in my situation, I won't be getting into any real combat situations until I leave the underground city that I'm going to be reborn in. Therefore, combat skills are pretty worthless at the moment. I'm also not going to need speech and charisma-related skills all that much initially with me being a newborn, hence those are out as well.

I suppose since I didn't select medicine as one of my skill talents, I can dump the skill points into it, thereby making my future Maxigen research project easier if the skills work the way I suspect they are going to.

If they do, it'll kind of make up for not taking it as a skill talent previously or at least for a short while until I actually start using my talent skills where in that case it'll be rapidly outpaced by their progress in no time at all unless I keep dumping skill points into it.

Not much point in doing that due to the reason that there are plenty of perks I want to get that have a number of different skill requirements that I'll need to meet if I want to get them. So dumping points into my medicine skill just to keep it inline with my talent skills is kind of pointless. I'll probably just end up picking up the perk Another Skill Talent at level 12 to make myself happy.

Going back to my previous line of thought before I got sidetracked, other than my future research projects. I could also see it being useful in producing other drugs like medstims, for instance, or some of the other numerous wasteland drugs that are constantly in demand.

I could definitely make a ton of wealth off of that idea and the wealth gained from that venture could then be used to acquire more resources for my goals… Something for me to really think about in the future.

Following that last idea, I placed the 20 skill points I had available into my medicine skill. And after I made sure that I was happy with the state of my skills, I finalized my selection, changing the cyan-colored holographic screen to display a brand new screen. This one being a status screen showing my current stats.

But before I could begin looking at my stats, my mind was overwhelmed and absolutely flooded by a massive amount of information, knowledge, and experience all related to the skills I just finished putting points into seconds prior.

*AAAAHHHHH…*

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