Elias rolled out of his bunk with a low, tired groan. He staggered through the corridors of The Mamba and, moments later, his face flushed blue with the diffuse light from the terminal. The screen flickered and beeped as he booked his session with The Memorandum's martial arts simulations. As Elias massaged his sore muscles from the last two weeks of training, the display flicked to green: informing him that another hard day in the gym was successfully booked.

In Princess, there is no automatic character advancement like there has been in recent Society Games. Instead, the only way to advance your character's skills is through them actively working to improve them as part of a turnsheet action (see Downtime). You may only improve one skill each turn in this way, and you should not expect to receive a write-up for actions you spend this way. That being said, you don't have to sink all of your actions into advancing, and often things of greater value can be gained from that extra action.

It is also worth noting that, again unlike recent games, in Princess it is possible to both learn a new skill and use it in the same turn: i.e. spending one action learning it, and then your next action applying it however you need to. However, it is your responsibility to ensure that your actions can sensibly allow time for this to happen - for example “oh I need to learn piloting to escape the giant fireball that has engulfed the Fleet at the end of session” will not work. It should be assumed that any skill takes a week to learn (i.e. the same length of time as any other major action). GMs will not bend time to give you the benefit of the doubt on this - if it is not possible for you to learn a skill before trying to apply it, you will not. This will undoubtedly have excellent consequences.

As an example, if Frances wants to gain the General Investigation skill, she could spend an action reading up on detective methods by accessing the library ship The Memorandum or she might learn from another character who is willing to teach her. These - using The Memorandum, and learning from other players - represent the two ways of gaining new skills. If using the Memorandum, general skills can be learned over remote access (i.e. you and your ship can be elsewhere while you are learning, even in a different system), but specialisations require your physical presence on the Memorandum to use their specialised training rooms or access restricted information.

If you want to learn a skill from another player they must be willing to put in the effort to teach you: i.e. also a major action. People on the fleet have learned that using the advanced teaching methods of The Memorandum is a lot more efficient than trying to teach by hand.