Hey,

Same quality skills can be changed with same quality ones for free. If you happen to change from a high quality skill, for example from Y+2 to +1, you'll lose the progress. Of course you c*e skill books to upgrade your skills till +2 for example and then change them manually too. Here is a helpful gif as well :

https://gyazo.com/9237eea30243f49e3ca4bc86a2015d85

If you happen to have any other questions, feel free to let me know.

Okay, I might have explained that wrong. My question is, will buying up to a Gold level skill on the normal skill unlock the mutation's gold skill as well, or will I have to rely on Experimentation Vials to unlock those?

There's a blue box that says "Select Skill" right next to where you click to "experiment" in "Skill Trials" tab. I'm assuming you have never tried clicking that because if you had, you wouldn't have started this thread in the first place :P

And Angel DID answer your question, you just failed at reading.

In my defense, that censor thing is hella distracting; at the time I finally figured out what was going on as I've seen "c*e" multiple times on the forum without understanding what the heck was that all about... and in regards to THAT line of thought, you could use... well, COULD USE, instead of can, so as to not trip the censor asterisk.

Yeap, the censorship in some regular words does happen and I forget myself sometimes. Yeap ''could use'' instead of ''c@n use'' and some other words replacements as well are needed to avoid it