131 Chapter One Hundred and Thirty-One – Where’d the Math Come From, Anyway? (1/2)
”Haze, I have a question.” Mama Greta was seated outside, rocking in her favorite chair, shawl on as she watched the sun go down. Hazé would usually leave to go live-lining about this time, but they often watched the sun go down together before she did.
Hazé looked at Mama inquiringly. She never held anything back when showing things to Mama, which the older woman appreciated intensely. She knew she wasn't as powerful as Hazé and probably never would be, but that didn't mean she didn't have the right to be curious. ”Yes, Mama?”
”This... Assaying. The... rendering the world down to math.” Mama waved her hands. ”It is just so unbelievable. How did they do it?”
”Bored hyperintelligent Casters with too much time on their hands,” Hazé replied promptly. She winked. ”That shouldn't surprise you.”
”They actually came up with something useful, instead of an easy path to power and ruling the world?” Mama scoffed, waving her hand dismissively. ”How exactly did it begin?”
”Shards and clay targets,” Hazé nodded.
”Really?” Mama blinked. ”How so?”
”It's quite simple. Some bored Wizard decided he wanted to measure how much power individual Shards had. So, he made up a lot of clay targets he could reform with a wave of his hand, and shot them with hundreds and hundreds of Shards, recording all the results. Then he had his friends do the same, recording them, and then reviewed the differences.
”When he did, he found that Shards had exactly six different damage ranges. One hundred percent of the time, they would penetrate a target under a certain thickness. Five out of six times, they would penetrate a target slightly thicker. Four out of six times, a target that was the same amount thicker again, all the way up to six additions, where no single Shard would penetrate.
”Of course, there were differences. Some of his friends' Shards were weaker, their minimum thickness they could penetrate was lower, the maximum also. Some were the reverse, able to penetrate tougher targets. But all of them progressed the same way, five more additional base thicknesses, and then they couldn't penetrate at all.”
”So, every Shard was doing 1-6 points of damage... plus something?” Mama deduced alertly.
”Indeed, and they went looking for that something. That's when they found the differences between a Warcaster and a Tome Wizard.
”Certain of them simply had no bonuses, and the six different thicknesses totally reflected their Shards. But others, who focused on casting skill and control, did more damage. These people were always Wizards, and they compared Levels by Matrices to see if there were any differences. Very quickly, they realized that the extra points of damage matched up exactly to the fact that the higher-level Wizards all had more memorized spells then the others. Furthermore, they confirmed that whatever that factor was that restricted your Level and accomplishments, was the same one dealing out additional damage with Shards.
”Being too smart for their own good, they named this characteristic 'Intellect', and more accurate measurements followed.
”They found that this Intellect had two factors. One side affected your ability to memorize extra spells and the raw amount of practical knowledge you could learn, i.e. 'Skills'. The other side affected the extra damage with battle magic, and how good your memory was.
”One side became a bonus, and the other side a modifier.
”Just like that, they found that it required a minimum Intellect of +1 per Level to gain a Level. They assigned 10 as the human average, so a Ten Wizard needs to have a 20 Intellect to reach that Level. There's no way around it, it's a minimum.
”And what do you imagine they did then?”
”They went and saw if the same rules applied to others,” Mama said firmly.
Hazé nodded. ”Correct. With other spellcasters, it was easy.Each time you gain a Karmic Level, you gain access to new Slots or Valences. It was literally a matter of counting on your fingers and recording changes in the powers gained.
”Then, all you had to do was look at the Auras of others. Stand two people right next to one another, and you can measure the light of their souls through alignment-detecting magic quite easily. So, line up ten Wizards from One to Ten, match up visually against other Casters, confirm the rules are the same, and then go and apply the same rules to warriors and other non-Casters.
”Turns out strong souls all look equally powerful, and all break through the same Levels, all have Stat limitations, and the First and Second Ceilings are definitely a thing.
”So, what a basic Assay does is simply look for those indicators, the Six Stats that drive the system, measure them against a universal standard, and then render it down so it is easy to see.”
”But what about Skills? How does one measure such things?” Mama asked with a frown. ”Can you really measure how much someone knows?”
”Yes.” Hazé lifted her eyebrows. ”To measure, you must have a standard. They can measure Stats, so that eliminates one variable. So, they used apprentices again, added in people with improved levels of skill, and combined them with QL testing, making masterwork spellbooks and the like.
”Being able to remove Stats, they simply looked at success results for a while, and the results were all over the place... until the maker reached a certain level of skill where they could routinely hit the required standard, and they went from variable to absolute success.”
”Taking 10,” she immediately identified the principle. Where you were good enough that an average effort satisfied the requirements.