Full Immersion [for what it's worth]

>Louis: Check out your stats, and see if any of the skills or augments you have get a particular bonus or penalty from them.

If he gets a bonus from his natural stats, he should probably build that skill. If he gets a penalty for his physical abilities we might want to focus on portals. Or it might not even matter, in which case I'd say larger portals and whirlwind strike. Because that might mean he can do whirlwind portals.

> Get Dive Stab and the ability to open two portals at once. I think I see a potentially devastating combination here.

> Check to make sure you're not gonna take ludicrous amounts of fall damage while performing Dive Stab before going with Arg's suggestion.

I just realized something. Louis can double jump using portals. He can jump, make a portal right above the ground, then jump off the ground through the portal before it closes. This may have been mentioned before, but it's still awesome. Also, is there a range on portals, or are they pretty much to anywhere you can think of? Or is that a more late game thing?

Now I kind of want to do double portal and dive stab. Because that would basically make Louis a Mario jumping, ground pounding, portal samurai. Suddenly I need this, and vote for it emphatically.

Depends if he can jump that high really.

> Look for something that gives you better reaction time/slows down time for you so you can portal better.

Louis decides to take Dive Stab and Multiple Portals (two, in this case; higher levels will add more). When he takes both of these skills, another skill seems to spontaneously fade into place in the empty space between the augments and active skills!

"Hm?" The skill is called "Loop Stab", and is pre-learned. It involves picking a target, then going through the first portal to get fairly high up into the air, falling through a loop made using the second portal until the first portal closes, and then opening the first portal again to Dive Stab with that momentum directly onto a targeted opponent. There is a higher risk of the attack missing than a normal Dive Stab, but the momentum (hence, the damage) is greater than a normal jump from most heights would allow. "Sweet."

He also takes a moment to glance at a few of the other skills a little farther up the tree. There is a slightly more expensive augment called "Dual Purpose" that makes it so he can attack something and open a portal behind it with the same sword swipe, and an extremely expensive one, "Repeat", requiring both that and Multiple Portals. Repeat is basically time travel through portals, allowing for up to the number of possible portals of him to be present simultaneously for exactly the portal duration. The skill description ends with some kind of warning about witness determinism. Over on the active sword skill side of the tree, there is one called "Chain" which requires all three of the first active skills, and allows one to chain up to 3 "movements" together (more for higher levels of the skill) and then perform them in quick succession as if the whole chain were a single skill. Chain goes on to give a very long description of what constitutes a single movement, but makes it clear that a single active skill (other than Chain itself) is always a single movement.

He heads back to the grand tree in the middle of Haestros, climbs up and heads inside. The priest and warrior have apparently left. "Oh, hello," says Bark, looking up from another concoction. "Where's your companion?"
"Ah, I let her an' Root handle the supplies. They ain't back yet?"
"Not yet. The priest and his escort went out to get something to eat; they must be at the village edge by now."
"Ain't thinkin' of leavin' without us, are they?"
The chief pauses, looking up thoughtfully. "Hmm. I certainly hope not. Would you mind taking the salves I've prepared and going on to meet them, just in case?"
"No prob."

The old elf gestures at a "table" made out of more tree trunk, on which is a small collection of little vials and bottles, along with a piece of paper. "Don't lose the paper, it contains instructions for how to use those. I don't use anything extreme enough to actually be poisonous, but all the same it would be a shame if you drank something topical."
"Yeah." Louis picks up the paper and glances at it for a second or two before putting it in his inventory (wherever that is), and then picks up the bottles one to three at a time, stowing them as well.

"Well, I'mona go see if they're gettin' antsy. Point J--ah, Archimedia my way whenever she shows up."
"Certainly. And, thank you."
Louis stops, halfway out of the door. "Oh, ah, welcome."

---

Jarod sits, in his odd tattered clothes, watching the graveyard a little before midnight. A coffee shop owner (because it seems this world has those) was kind enough to hand him something to drink on her way out of the store as it closed for the night.

For a good hour, he sits there sipping the little metal mug of hot drink carefully, occasionally shaking or jittering from the caffeine--he isn't really used to that sort of substance--but at least staying awake. Then he actually sees another figure, indistinct in the darkness, walking up to a grave with a shovel.

He gets up, putting the mug down carefully, and then moves slightly closer. The figure is more clearly a man in a cloak wearing some sort of big pouch on one side. He's started digging up the grave, which makes him almost certainly the one Jacob's looking for. It sounds like he's panting, maybe even wheezing a bit from the effort.

The question now is how best to approach him.

>

SpoilerShow

I think the question of portal range may have been brought up before, but I'm not sure. At any rate, Louis' portals are sight-range first, "reasonable"-range second. Essentially, he can't make a portal to somewhere he doesn't have a fairly exact positional sense of the location of, and he can't make portals to the moon or out of the atmosphere or anything crazy like that even if he somehow does have an exact internal idea of how far away that is in which direction. For specific instances he has encoded into the knowledge of portal making a kind of intuitive sense of how far away is too far, and will instinctively place a portal at "not quite too far away" if he's doing it for something like fast travel in a single direction.