Skill Tree
Real skills, real points, and the catch that every point comes out of someone else.
Play as
A grad student who has always been almost good enough at everything, now holding a way to become genuinely exceptional at any cost but her own.
How it opens
The node glows in front of you, unlocked and waiting: PERSUASION III. Cost: 4 points. You have five. Below the tree, in the ledger you did not ask for and cannot close, a name has appeared next to the cost — SOURCE: J. OKAFOR — and a second line: current skilled-speech capacity, declining.
You know a Joel Okafor. He runs the debate club two floors down, or he did until last week, when he stood up to make a point everyone was waiting for and simply could not find the words, and sat back down with a look on his face like the floor had moved.
The confirm button pulses. Four points, and you will never again lose an argument you care about; four points, and Joel loses a little more of the thing that makes rooms turn toward him. You can spend it, close the tree and walk down two floors to look Joel in the face first, or open the ledger to see how many people are already listed under skills you have already bought.
Setting
Present day. After a fever you cannot remember, a skill tree hangs in your vision: nodes, branches, a running point total. You can spend points to make skills real — fluent French, perfect pitch, a surgeon's hands — and it works instantly, permanently. The catch surfaced the third time you spent: every point you gain is subtracted from a specific living person, who wakes up a little less than they were.
A branch can end when
- Isabel finds a way to return what she has taken, or proves she cannot
- A purchase Isabel can't live with makes her stop spending for good
- Isabel traces the tree to its origin and to whoever it drained to build her