Oooh, it's smart enough to recognize that those are both the same type of object! Or else it's going off his impressions of what counts. He's going to want to test that later, but it'll require a second person to hand him things without him knowing what they are. For now, can he take the rocks out of his inventory by grabbing at the images of them?

If he pokes the image it will appear in his hand, but unless he expects that it will probably fall right out of it because pointing is not an ideal gripping position. If he reaches through the window for the rock his hand will disappear through the window and feel the rock under his fingers to be grabbed and pulling his hand back he will have the rock.

Bruce does some trial and error before settling on reach-in-and-grab as the best way to retrieve things. Also, there's his backpack! It's covered in dust, and the apple that was in it is a write-off, but the rest of his stuff is basically intact. He puts the whole backpack in his inventory, except for his wallet in case something goes wrong with this.

The inventory stores every item in the backpack and the backpack itself separately. If he wants to bring things out he has to do them one at a time now. But it does stack similar items together. All his socks are in a single stack for example.

You know what, this is still a win--now his stuff won't take up space on a bus seat, and it can't get lost or stolen. He keeps his wallet in his pocket, since it might decide all his cards are different things, and anyway, he doesn't want to be obviously pulling it out of the air in front of him.

What happens if he tries to remove a single sock from his inventory, first by reaching in and grabbing just the topmost sock, and later with various voice commands?

Reaching in while expecting to only grab a single sock makes him feel only a single sock in there to pull out, expecting the whole stack means he can feel the whole stack in there but can still just grab one if he wants to.

Asking for a sock gets the last sock he put in, asking for a particular sock like the second to last sock he put in or a blue sock as compared to any other colour of sock he owns gets him the specific one he asked for, it appears right into his hand. when using voice commands he doesn't need to reach in to grab them. If he asks for multiple socks in a vague way nothing happens. If he specifies how many socks he wants he will get that many socks in his hand.

The voice commands all follow the "Remove X from inventory" format.

The grabbing seems to work by expectation, and the voice commands seem pretty good at distinguishing what to get based on criteria given.

Well, if he can get stuff to appear in his hand whole his hand's in his pocket then he'll put his wallet in there too. Worst case seems to be that he'll have to take out all the things in it one at a time and reassemble them. Once he's either done that or established that he won't have to, he checks out "Achievements".

Once he puts his wallet in everything gets sorted separately and he will have to take everything separately out if he wants those items. Except for the money bills and coins. what happens to those is that a "money" textbox appears under his character image with the exact amount he had in his wallet under it and a "withdraw" button is under that.


When he gets to the achievements page it's pretty empty.

Achievements:

|Trigger Event: you have become a Parahuman! the scientific name for those with extraordinary abilities, capes, supers. You get the idea.|

No hint as to what any other achievements might be. Just the one achievement he was already notified about. But he can admire the fact he is recognized as a cape by a mysterious text box whenever he wants on this menu.

He ends up leaving everything from his wallet in his inventory, once he verifies that he can remove things even by speaking very quietly.

The Achievements menu is singularly uninteresting; maybe "Map" will be better. Even a perfectly ordinary zoomed-out world map displayed on the interface would be pretty neat.

It is a photorealistic map of the few blocks surrounding Bruce, with a blue dot showing his position. It even shows all the buildings that were crushed as crushed so it's more accurate than an in-car GPS unit is. there is a + and - button that when pressed zoom in or out. He can zoom in until it is literally just showing the roof above him in a metre by metre square, or zoom out until it is a world map.

If he taps somewhere on the map a red line will go from Bruce's position to wherever that point is showing the quickest path. It is like the best GPS you could have! what a useful interface.

This map is his new favorite thing. He loves his map so much. Does it have other people on it, or just buildings? If he goes outside so he can zoom all the way in on the ground he's standing on, is it accurate and detailed on the level of random pieces of rubble?

If he zooms into where he is outside he can see himself! updates live apparently, he can wave to himself on the map view if he wants. If anyone else is around he could spot them on the map but they aren't highlighted the way Bruce is by a blue dot, and people can be hard to pick out just visually from a birds-eye view sometimes if he isn't zoomed pretty far in. But, the map IS always centered on Bruce with no apparent way to pan around, so if he zooms out too far he can't spot anyone because they would be too tiny.

It's not a fully general remote viewing power, but it can probably be muchkined into something with a lot of the same utility. Awesome.

He plays around with the pathfinding tool for a while. Is it smart enough to know that the best route from here to Boston is via an airport? What about the best route from here to Singapore, does it assume he can swim the Pacific? For that matter, does it have him start swimming at an actual port?

(Maybe he shouldn't be making assumptions about what he can and can't swim to. This power is so multifaceted he would be only moderately surprised if it contained some way to get to Singapore without a plane.)

Nope, the pathing to Boston is entirely by land, the map is not assuming he is paying for airline tickets. The route from here to Singapore takes him to a port first where presumably he either swims or takes a boat. The pathing will follow optimal currents by sea though so it isn't a straight line over the ocean, will avoid islands and storms too if Bruce can spot a storm big enough on the global view to confirm that is what the interface is doing.

There are currently no nautical themed skills unlocked so the assumption of not being able to swim the Pacific is a safe one, for now...

He's going to be on an airplane in a few days, assuming the busses to Vancouver haven't been too disrupted by Behemoth, and he can't wait to see what it thinks the optimal path to places is when he starts ten thousand feet in the air.

More mundanely, he should go to the bus station and find out how robust his plan to get to Vancouver is. And bring all his stuff in case the answer is "we're packing everybody into busses and there's a space on the next one."

In between cleaning out the last of his things from his hostel into his inventory, he checks out the "Options" menu.

Options:

-Graphics
-Audio
-Interface

No Save, Load or Exit Game buttons for obvious reasons, otherwise looks like a normal videogame options menu.

"Save" and "Load" would have been awesome, but "Exit Game" would have been terrifying. "Interface" sounds promising, what's in there?

Interface:

The Interface menu has a ton of options. He can choose window size, window colour, text font, if notifications should display in combat or not, where the popups appear instead of right in the center of his vision, how transparent the windows can be. He can change the vocal commands to open Menus, he can set the commands to be activated via hand signal instead. He can set them to be activated via eye movements if he wants.

Pretty much any way he can think to customize how things display or are activated he can do it, ease of use and customization so he can get it exactly the way he wants seems to be the theme of the interface menu.

What fun! Bruce spends the whole walk to the bus station optimizing the interface. The first thing he does is set up as much stuff to be controlled by a mix of staring and blinking, so he won't have to mutter at nothing in front of people. He doesn't exactly have a secret identity, in that he doesn't have a cape identity, but nothing good is likely to come of random people seeing something weird about him (beyond the pre-existing "he's a total nerd").

Once all the commands are as subtle as he can make them without being likely to go off accidentally, and everything is in a nice blue and white color scheme and a very readable font, and notifications during combat are firmly disabled, he arrives at the bus station. It turns out that there's still enough of a semblance of order going on that they want Bruce to take the bus he has a ticket for, so he has one more night in the left half of the hostel before he can get to Vancouver. While following the delightful map's route back there, he looks in "Audio" and "Graphics".

Graphics:

FOV: |=======[]=======| 
Depth of Field: OFF/ON
Motion Blur: OFF/ON
Saturation: |=======[]=======| 
Contrast: |=======[]=======| 
Brightness: |=======[]=======| 

---

Audio:

Master Volume: |=======[]=======| 
Music: |[]==============| 
External Voices: |=======[]=======| 
Team Chat: |=======[]=======| 
Notification text to speech: OFF/ON
Subtitles: OFF/ON

A bunch of sliders and on/off toggles. Some for options even new games from Earth Aleph in the cutting edge of 2001 don't have.

Woah. Some of these have . . . Implications. He tries out the full range of each of the graphics sliders one at a time, first noting the starting position of each.

Messing with Field Of View, Depth Of Field, and Motion Blur instantly makes bruce incredibly nauseous, humans were not meant to see everything with a horrid after image effect or the whole world out of focus. Moving the FOV slider down seems to actually shrink his peripheral perception even though his brain is telling him things always look like this, and he gets an immediate splitting headache when he moves the slider up past halfway but for the few seconds he can handle the pain it's like he can see from the sides of his head as well as from the front.


The contrast slider just makes the contrast really high, it's a bit gross looking but not enough to make him as sick as the other options.
Increasing the saturation makes it look like what movies think being on drugs is like, it's very psychedelic and colourful, lowering the saturation makes everything grayscale.
Raising the brightness slider seems to just make everything brighter uniformly, so he isn't actually seeing more detail on anything and anything too well lit is blinding at its highest settings, might help when it is actually dark though. Lowering the brightness just makes everything darker like wearing sunglasses, might be useful if he goes to Arizona or something.

He stopped walking as soon as he confirmed his suspicion that the graphics settings did in fact affect his entire vision and not just the game display. In spite of this, Motion Blur causes him to trip on his own foot and sprawl on the sidewalk. He finishes investigating the graphics options from a sitting position with his back to the wall of a mostly-intact building, and declares everything except the brightness slider to be Nope. Then he just sits with his eyes half-closed for a minute, waiting for the headache and nausea to fade. 

Is he ready to try out the audio options? Not really, no. He's ready to haul himself to his feet and walk the rest of the way "home" and sit down in an actual chair in the quiet common room. Then he will carefully, slowly, turn up the master volume, trying to experience super hearing without giving himself another splitting headache.

Everything is just louder, it's not too bad. But hearing his own breathing and heartbeat that loudly is a little freaky, not nausea-inducing freaky just not something one would be used to. He could probably get a similar effect listening to a spy microphone pinned to him on loud volume on earphones but it wouldn't have the actual directionality of having an ear on each side of his head.

Super hearing is handled fine by Bruce as long as no very loud noises happen. Wouldn't want to use this in combat in case of gunshots or flashbangs.

Well, if he ever needs to eavesdrop on someone in another room, he can put up with hearing his own heartbeat. After confirming that turning the master volume down makes him deafer, and resolving to use it to sleep on the airplane, he puts that back and tries out "music". Just a little bit, in case it's awful music. If it's at all bearable, he leaves it on (quietly) in the hopes that it would turn scary if anything dangerous was about to happen and give him some warning. 

Does "External Voices" apply to his own voice, or the voices of people clearing away rubble outside, or both? Similarly, what do the subtitles subtitle? Notification text to speech is probably what it says on the tin.