The skill shop opens without ceremony.
Ori says the words, the interface shifts, and there it is: every node from the skill tree now displayed in a grid format with its unlock cost listed below its name. He scans through them the way he scanned the mission board, top to bottom, reading costs against his current balance of fifty-five Star Points.
The cheapest unlockable skill costs forty Star Points.
He has fifty-five.
He reads the forty-point entry: Basic Confidence Level 1. Reduces performance anxiety response in low-stakes social settings. Foundation node: required before adjacent skills become available.
He already unlocked this one this morning by leaving the room. He looks at the node in the tree. Gold. Done.
The next node on the Confidence branch costs sixty Star Points. He is five points short. He reads the adjacent branches.
Music branch, first node: Music Theory Fundamentals Level 1. Unlocks basic harmonic understanding, rhythm notation, and melodic structure recognition. Required for all subsequent Music branch nodes. Cost: 80 SP.
He is twenty-five points short of the cheapest music entry.
Performance branch, first node: Performance Presence Level 1. Unlocks through FLARE subquest completion. Cannot be purchased.
He reads this twice. Cannot be purchased. The system has decided that the first performance skill is not something he can study his way into. He has to earn it by standing on a stage.
He moves to the next branch.
Emotional Regulation Level 1. Reduces interference from acute emotional states during high-pressure tasks. Cost: 70 SP.
Fifteen points short.
He sits back and looks at the grid with the specific feeling of someone who has just understood that they are in an economy with very little currency and a great many things they need to buy. Fifty-five points. The cheapest available purchase costs sixty. He needs more points before he can unlock anything, which means he needs more tasks, which means he needs to open the task list and find what is available.
"Task list," he says.
Current available tasks:
Complete Music Theory Fundamentals Module, Part One. Reward: 30 SP. Estimated duration: two to three hours.
Conduct one hour of vocal warm-up exercises using provided guide. Reward: 20 SP.
Write a complete verse and chorus of original material. Reward: 25 SP.
Spend one hour in a public campus space without leaving early. Reward: 15 SP.
He reads the list twice. Four tasks. Ninety Star Points total if he completes all of them today, which would bring his balance to one hundred and forty-five, enough to unlock three nodes. He does the arithmetic with the focus of someone who has found a concrete problem and is grateful for the concreteness of it.
"Send me the Music Theory module," he says.
Opening module.
A new interface layer appears: structured, clean, divided into sections. Harmonic intervals. Rhythm notation. Time signatures. Key signatures. Scales. It has the organized density of something designed by someone who knows the material well and has not spent much time recently remembering what it was like not to know it.
Ori looks at Section One.
Section One is about intervals. It defines an interval as the distance between two pitches and then immediately asks him to identify the interval between C and G.
He looks at this question.
He does not know what the interval between C and G is. He knows that C and G are notes. He knows that notes exist on a scale. He does not know what the scale looks like in the precise and technical sense that the question requires him to know it.
He answers: five.
Incorrect. The interval between C and G is a Perfect Fifth. Review the interval chart before proceeding.
He reviews the interval chart.
He attempts the next question.
Incorrect.
And the next.
Incorrect.
He goes back to the interval chart. He reads it with the methodical attention he applies to lecture notes when he is determined to understand something rather than simply record it. He reads it again. He attempts the question a third time.
Correct.
He moves to the next question.
The module has forty-seven questions across eight sections. He works through them with the grinding persistence of someone who has decided that finishing is the only available exit. He is wrong more often than he is right in the first two sections. In the third section his accuracy improves to roughly half. By the fifth section he is getting two-thirds of the questions correct on the first attempt.
He is not learning quickly. He is learning.
At the end of Part One, the module displays his results: thirty-one out of forty-seven correct, sixty-six percent. A passage score is sixty percent.
Music Theory Fundamentals Level 1, Part One: Complete. 30 Star Points awarded. Total: 85 SP.
He looks at the skill tree. The first Music branch node shifts from dark grey to light grey. Not amber. Not gold. But closer.
He opens the vocal warm-up task. It provides a guide: a series of exercises with phonetic notation and pitch targets. He reads through it and understands approximately sixty percent of the notation, which is better than the zero percent he would have understood this morning before the theory module.
He stands up from the desk. He feels mildly self-conscious about what he is about to do, which is stand alone in his dormitory room and make sounds at specific pitches for an hour, and then he remembers that he registered for a national talent competition twenty-six days away with no performance experience and that self-consciousness about vocal exercises is perhaps not the most pressing concern available to him.
He begins.
The first exercise requires him to sustain a single pitch on an open vowel sound for four counts, rest, and repeat up a half step. He does this. The sound that comes out of him on the first attempt is functional in the way that an untrained thing is functional: it does what it is supposed to do technically without doing anything beyond that, present but characterless, a sound shaped like a note.
He does it again.
He does it again.
By the twenty-minute mark, something small has changed. Not dramatically. The sound is not better in any way he could describe to someone else. But it feels different from the inside, slightly more located, as though it has found a place in his body to come from rather than simply escaping.
He continues for the full hour.
Vocal Warm-Up Task: Complete. 20 Star Points awarded. Total: 105 SP.
He looks at the skill tree. The Confidence Level 2 node has shifted to amber. He has enough to unlock it.
He unlocks it.
Confidence Level 2 unlocked: Reduces avoidance response in moderately familiar social settings.
The node turns gold. The next node on the Confidence branch becomes amber, sitting there at its cost of eighty points, available but not yet reached. He has five points remaining.
He looks at the task list. Two tasks remaining: the original material writing and the campus public space task. He picks up his notebook.
He writes for forty-five minutes. The verse comes with less resistance than this morning's attempt, shaped by the theory module in ways he did not anticipate, the hours of interval and rhythm work sitting underneath the writing and organizing it without announcing themselves. The chorus takes longer. He writes four versions of it and uses parts of two of them.
He reads it back.
It is still not good. But it is more structured than this morning's draft, and the structure has given it something to rest on, a frame that the feeling can hang from instead of collapsing under its own weight.
Original Material Task: Complete. 25 Star Points awarded. Total: 30 SP.
He looks at the last task. One hour in a public campus space without leaving early.
He picks up his jacket.
He goes outside.