Life Hacks/Adjust Your Attributes
The only real problem with making use of this thing is that you are altering real people. As that realization hits you, your fingers and mind freeze for a moment.
Well, you could get one of your siblings to test this out on, but you are not quite sure how you would get them to go along with this. "here, I want to try using this world hacking program a Norse god gave me to change your body and personality." Yeah, that will go over well. Not to mention you wouldn't know what to do with yourself if you screwed up Bastian or one of your sisters. Realistically, you could quite easily alter yourself and it would remove a lot of the challenges but you are still a little nervous about changing something about yourself.
Well so long as it is all things toward the positive, you should probably be alright. You noticed while going through the interface that a lot of the skills and other things seem to be dependent on your attributes, so you should probably start there.
You see there is no option to max all of your attributes at once, but fortunately attributes seem to be the shortest list of all of them. You hesitate for a moment at the hubris of maxing out all of your attributes, effectively making you a perfect human. Do you really want that? Well, why wouldn’t you? Of course you want to be the best. You feel your heart skip a beat as you click the first sub-option for physical attributes and begin sliding the sliders one by one. First on the list is physical strength, which you flick straight to the top and nearly drop the rubber duck on the ground as your emaciated body suddenly and explosively grows from one extreme to the other in bulk. You hear the thing squeak as your hand gives an involuntary squeeze in response to the alteration. You try to move against your newly expanded muscles and find it is hard to even move your arms or torso at all. You strain, fighting against your own body, reaching for the next slider. “flexibility.” You’ve got to reach flexibility. You slide flexibility all the way to the top as well. You feel your bulky muscles decrease in size exchanging their bulky mass for lean wiry muscle mass, and you watch in the mirror as you physically grow a few inches taller in order to account for the extra length your muscles need to have in order to have this level of strength coincide with your newly improved excellent flexibility.
Actually, you are a bit surprised by just HOW much your muscles decrease in size from their previously ballooned up state. You certainly do look buff, but it is somewhere between a strong Buddhist fighting monk, and a skinny lumber jack. Certainly nothing like the Gerald Swartzhauzer you were a second ago. On that subject, you begin looking over your shirt for any rips. You do not recall hearing the sound of fabric ripping while you were bulked up, but it would not surprise you at all if that had happened. You do not find any skin exposed where it shouldn’t be and are a bit surprised. How did your shirt survive that experience? That Loki guy had said something about other “lifies” remembering you as having always been this way, does that mean the physical objects an altered person interacts with change to fit them as well? Well, you guess that is convenient.
(4th wall note: Xander currently has the musculature of Bruce Lee. See images of Bruce Lee for reference.
https://www.google.com/search?q=bruce+lee+muscles&espv=2&biw=1301&bih=654&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&sqi=2&ved=0ahUKEwiG5PLiqqDQAhVUImMKHXFECvEQ_AUIBigB)
Your heart is hammering in your chest at this point. It is so loud it is like someone is using your skull for a drum. The human mind is not meant to deal with that kind of sudden change. You wonder whether other people would have the same reaction to being changed as you are having right now. You start taking deep breaths as you look back to the interface. For a moment, you have doubts as to whether or not you should continue with this. Well, these two are probably going to be the most dramatic changes. You decide to continue on. You reach the slider for your eyesight and after flicking it to max you are actually surprised that it does not change your need for glasses before remembering that you saw your myopia in the traits menu. You certainly are making out some details more sharply than you were before, but as you remove your glasses you notice that distant objects become as blurry as they were before. You have increased your potential for good eyesight, probably increased the neural proliferation in your retina, but you are still just as near-sighted as ever.
As you increase your pathogen and environmental immunity, you notice you can breathe a lot easier. As you increase your kinesthetic awareness, you notice you are a lot more conscious of the space around you. How much sharper sensory information is coming to your ears, your nose, how much more you can feel the weight of your body on the floor, you can even feel the vibrations of people moving through other parts of the house due to your now enhanced sense of touch. But, although you can feel them a lot more clearly, you are not really able to pin-point the direction or distance that the vibrations came from, so it is really more a distraction than anything. Near the bottom of the list, you find an interesting entry for "fertility." This is amusing at first, then as you hover your finger over it you hesitate for a moment. What would it mean to have a maxed out fertility? Would you really want that? Perhaps having it lower would be more to your benefit. It seems kind of on the low side already at 73, although you don't have much of a reference to tell what would be normal. That number is actually a fair bit higher than some of your other physical stats have been, which isn't saying much. At least, it seems to be above the average for YOUR physical attributes. In the end, you decide to just go with it and flick that to maximum like the rest.
Once you are finished there, you move in to mental attributes. As you slide these up, you are instantly aware of how much more clear your thoughts are becoming, which in turn points out how clouded they were by contrast a second ago. As you increase your mental stability, you find that you are suddenly not quite as shaken by everything that is going on. You realize just how much you were freaking out from all of this, but now somehow you can just deal with it better. You notice another one, “reticular focus.” What the hell is that? Well, you figure it shouldn’t hurt to boost that one. You increase it, and you find that you are now able to tune out all the extra sounds and vibrations you are picking up from the rest of the house. So, this “reticular focus” has something to do with the ability to tune out unnecessary stimuli.
You proceed on to max the rest of your mental attributes and then move on to social. These do not produce such an obvious or immediately noticeable result here without another person for you to interact with, but after all of what has happened so far you figure that is a good thing. You will just enjoy the benefits later. Now for appearance. The sliders for appearance seem to max out at 120 instead of 200. You wonder for a moment why this is, but you don’t pay it much mind. You have come this far, having started with the worst of it, so you might as well finish this whole thing off. You slide all the appearance sliders to 120 and watch as your face and skin change.
This whole experience has been quite strange. Now that you have finished all of this, you admire the end results in the mirror. It is hard to describe. You are still you, but… it is like you are more you. It is not just the clearer skin and the healthier stronger body. There is just something… intangible. Some kind of new magnetism that makes your face, your chest, your… abs if you press your shirt to your body... it is all so fascinating to look at. As weird and stressful as the whole thing was, you are also feeling kind of… good now.
What's next?
