“No,” said Janet. “I just put three into constitution to bring it up to 20, two into strength to bring it up to eighteen and seven into perception to bring it up to eighteen. Other than luck and dexterity, those were my lowest. And I can’t do anything about luck.”

“I did about the same,” said Tanya. “I threw seven into constitution, one into vitality, three into dexterity and one into strength.”

“You’re a mage, right?” I asked.

“I know,” she said. “But if we can’t respawn, I want to be Wonder Woman. I saw those rats chewing on you. I want to survive if they’d gotten to me. Besides, I figure I’m smarter than Einstein now! How much smarter do I need to be?” Both she and Janet laughed then. Pretty much exactly what I had been thinking.

“Anyone play with the skill’s plus sign?” I asked.

“I did,” said Janet. “So did I,” said Tanya.

“When you click that plus sign, it looks like you can spend skill points on skills, spells, or Qi abilities. But you can’t get new ones there. But one thing that I did notice is a plus sign in all three areas,” said Janet. “When you click it it brings up a small list of skills, or spells or Qi abilities depending on where you clicked the + sign. They seemed just OK, kind of based around what you already have and really, both not that different from what’s already there and probably easy to get. Remember how easy Stick It was to get? I thought that maybe our points might be better to use raising spells or whatever we already have. So I didn’t select any. Plus, if it shows you a spell, I bet we can figure out how to get it, don’t you think? And save the points?”

I nodded and so did Tanya. Out of curiosity, I opened my status menu and looked at it again.

Status

Name

Maysoon Alacrity Seebring

“Monsoon”, “Chief”

Level

7

Class(es)

Monk, Mage

Experience: (+25%)

21645

Titles: Eager Beaver; Firstish Mage; Bruce Lee You’re Not!; Unsteady At The Helm; Dadda. President for Life!; Risk Taker!

Attributes

0

Skill Points +

63

Strength

39

Intelligence

45

Dexterity

35

Wisdom

46

Agility

42

Perception

35

Constitution

35

Charisma

35

Vitality

42

Luck

28

AC

8

Health:

185

Mana:

153

Qi:

152

Stamina:

151

The plus sign was still there next to the Skill Points, so I clicked it. It showed the following list:

Spells

Light Heal – Bronze, Level 1, 4/25 + Create Water –Bronze, Level 1, 4/25 + Light – Bronze, Level 2, 32/100 + Force Bolt – Bronze, Level 2, 27/100 + Stick It – Bronze, Level 1, 4/25 +

Qi

Jade Lotus Touch - Bronze, Level 1, 4/25 +

Skills

Leadership – Bronze, Level 3, 106/200 + Management – Bronze, Level 3, 106/200 + Collaboration – Bronze, Level 3, 102/200 + Critical Thinking – Bronze, Level 3, 101/200 + Cooking – Bronze, Level 2, 52/100 + Meditation – Bronze, Level 9. 6560/1000 +

‘Interesting,’ I thought. I wondered about acquiring other skills and raising them. Sweet!

Then I opened my spells window. I was surprised by the presence of the last two and the first spell on my list.

Spells All spells possible. +

Light Heal.

Rank: Bronze

Casting Time: 2 seconds

Somatic: Touching the injured person

Verbal: Be Healed

Range: Touch.

Duration: Permanent.

Spell Resistance: No, except on undead

MP: 10

Once cast, a light heal spell heals 15 points of damage.

Level 1, 4/25 Create Water

Rank: Bronze

Casting Time: 20 seconds

Somatic: Bringing all fingers together into an upward pyramid, then turning it over

Verbal: Water

Range: 1 meter plus 1 meter per level.

Duration: Permanent

Cool Down: 15 min.

Spell Resistance: None

MP: 10

Once cast, the create water spell creates up to 25 liters of water per stage. It may be cool or warm at lower levels. As the user grows in skill, the amount of water created and the temperature of the water can change.

Level 1, 4/25 Light

Rank: Bronze

Casting Time: 2 seconds

Range: 4 meters plus one meter per level.

Somatic: Making a sun shape, then pointing where/at you want the light

Verbal: Be lit

Duration: 1 hour.

Cool Down: none.

Spell Resistance: No, except on undead

MP: 10

Once cast, a light spell casts the equivalent of 10 candles. Increasing levels gains different colors, increased number of lights, and brighter lights (greater control).

Level 2, 32/100 Force Bolt

Rank: Bronze

Casting Time: 2 seconds

Somatic: Pointing at target

Verbal: Zap

Duration: Instant

Range: 12 meters + 2 meters per level

Damage: 2-7 (+1 per level) per bolt

Cool Down: none

Spell Resistance: No, except on undead

MP: 10

Once cast, a force bolt, unless blocked, always hits. For every three levels, the spell gets another bolt.

Level 1, 2/100 Stick It

Rank: Bronze

Casting Time: Instant

Somatic: Bringing two objects together

Verbal: Sticky! Sticky

Duration: Permanent (until broken)

Range: Objects touching

Damage: 0

Cool Down: none

Spell Resistance: No

MP: 2

Once cast, the spell glues two objects together. It is permanent; however, it is always slightly less strong than the weakest of the two materials glued together. In other words, if forced, the spell will break before the materials it glues will.

Level 1, 4/25 Identify

Rank: Bronze

Casting Time: Instant

Somatic: Look intently at the object you wish to identify

Verbal: Identify

Duration: Permanent (until broken)

Range: Must be visible, must be within 25 meters (+ 10 Meters Per level)

Damage: 0

Cool Down: none

Spell Resistance: No, may not work on higher leveled sapients.

MP: 1

Once cast successfully, the spell will grant additional information about the object of the spell. As the spell grows in level, more information becomes available.

Level 1, 4/25

I’d forgotten I had those and hadn’t mentioned them to the girls when I told them the spells that I had. Oh well. No harm, no foul. Since I was checking things out, I clicked the + button on the menu. It opened yet another blue screen. This one only had two spells on it:

Spells

Fog + Detect Magic +

Detect Magic sounded pretty good. I could see where Fog could be useful too. Especially if it only affected my opponents. I wasn’t sure about what Janet meant now by “just OK.” I went ahead and grabbed them both by clicking on the plus sign. The blue screen now showed this.

Spells

Check back after you have achieved the next rank.

I checked my status screen and the Skill Points number had dropped to 61. I asked to see just the new spells and it worked.

Fog

Rank: Bronze

Elemental Sphere: Water

Casting Time: 2 seconds

Somatic: Covering your eyes

Verbal: Fog

Duration: Up to one hour, or dispelled or broken

Range: 8-meter diameter circle either around the caster or a point that the caster selects

Damage: 0

Cool Down: none

Spell Resistance: No

MP: 10

Once cast, the sphere of fog fills every space available to it. However, the space must be open to it. A strong breeze, 15 km per hour or more will break down the fog. It can also be dispelled. As the rank of the spell grows, so does the area it covers and the speed of the wind that it can withstand. It might, at high enough levels it may also incorporate other weather phenomena, such as rain.

Level 1, 4/25 Detect Magic

Rank: Bronze

Elemental Sphere: Life

Casting Time: Instant

Somatic: Look at the object or area to be evaluated

Verbal: Detect Magic

Duration: 20 minutes per level.

Range: Self, 10 meters at 1st level. 5 meters each additional level.

Damage: 0

Cool Down: none

Spell Resistance: None; however, higher level sapients or objects may be able to hide their magic.

MP: 10

For the duration of the spell, magic is visible as a glow. The stronger the glow, the stronger the magic: The glow is colored in the color of the Realm of the magic. At higher levels, other information may be available.

Level 1, 4/25

Cool!,’ I thought. OK, it’s official. I think or say cool way too often. From now on my new word will be…

“Earth or new-Earth to Monsoon. New-Earth to Monsoon. Come in Monsoon!” I heard Janet saying.

“Sorry,” I said, waking back up. “I was checking out my new spells. I bought the spells They were offering: ‘Detect Magi’ and ‘Fog’.”

“Huh!” said Janet. “That’s not what I got offered. Mine were much lamer than those: Commune and Remove Warts.”

“Really?” I laughed. “There’s a spell for removing warts?”

“Evidently,” she said.

“What does Commune do?” I think it is like a clerics version of identify only it can only be used on items and it tells the backstory of the item, I think. I asked my imu and it said, ‘Only usable on items and gives the item’s history including who owned it last, where it was created and some of the powers of the item. Of course, it only works on items at the rank of the spell or below.’ I assumed that meant the Bronze, Copper, Iron thing?”

“Yeah, probably,” I said. “Still, that’s pretty cool. Especially at high levels. I’d probably buy that one, at least. What did you get offered, Tanya?”

“I got offered two spells: “Shield” and “Fire Bolt.” Shield blocks damage up to however many points you put into it, but you can only put 25 points in at level one. And fire bolt is like forcebolt but does fire damage instead of force damage. I guess that would be elemental damage instead of kinetic? Anyway, I bought them.”

“Did you get the message to “Check back after you have achieved next rank.”? I asked.

“Yes,” she replied. “You too?”

“Yep.” Janet looked questioningly at both of us, so I continued, “after I bought the two spells offered, the System showed that message. I guess They really want us to discover the world on our own. Which is weird after giving us all these titles. It’s like it’s schizophrenic or something. Some of the time it wants to be helpful, some of the time it wants to be an a-hole, and the rest of the time it’s just a mechanical intelligence.”

“How about this, Janet. Don’t buy the warts spell, but you might as well buy the other one and start leveling it. In addition, let’s all three try to create a spell called ‘Cure Warts.’ First, to see how easy it is to research spells, maybe develop a methodology for research, and secondly, to see if after we develop it, the option changes on your blue screen? What do you both think about that? Oh, and we can also see how easy it is to transfer spells between us. I know we all got identify, but we all developed that on our own. I think that was pretty much a System gimme. This would be a real, admittedly lame, spell though. We should get an idea of how complex the process is.”

They both looked at each other and kind of shook their heads. “I understood that,” said Janet. “I really am getting smarter.” Both girls laughed.

“OK, how do you want to do this?” asked Tanya.

“Well, every spell so far has had three components: mana, a verbal or what the description calls a somatic piece and a gestural part. There may be a fourth part like runes or icons or patterns needing to be drawn, but none of the spells that we’ve discovered have required it yet. Doesn’t mean that on more complicated spells this won’t happen, but I’m guessing that at the bronze rank, we won’t need it. So, when I was developing the Light Heal spell, I did it by meditating on the spell and then following what felt natural for both the words and the gestures while trying to incorporate the mana. You following?” I asked.

“So what you're saying is you made it up and it worked?” said Janet.

“Well, yeah, but I felt my way into it and I started with some ideas of both how I wanted the spell to work and how I thought it could work,” I said.

“So you took an educated guess, tested it, and then, created the spell from your guess,” asked Tanya.

“Well, I used the scientific method:“

“Step 1: I asked a question. How would it be possible to create a magic spell to heal my leg?”

“Step 2: Do background research. Well, I kind of blew past this step because frankly, I didn’t have anything to research in or on at that point, but I did stop and consider everything that I knew. I knew mana was real and spells were possible because I’d just gotten a title that told me so. I knew that if spells were real, then there was a large chance that at least one of them could be used to heal. So, therefore, this was a stretch, but not to great of one, it should be possible to cast a healing spell and that based on my previous research, ok reading fantasy stories, that spells might be created by using any or all of the following components:

a gesture, a spoken part and someway to invest them with mana. maybe a picture, drawing or rune maybe materials such as a turkey wing

“Step 3: Construct a hypothesis. So, I thought, spells exist, someone must have created them, I am someone, therefore I can create a spell. A bit of a leap there, I know. I just needed to learn how to do it. So, my hypothesis was that It is possible for me to create and cast a healing spell using some or all of the components.”

“Step 4: Test your hypothesis by doing an experiment. This I tried by first just using the ‘Be healed’ approach.“

Both girls started laughing at this point and Tanya said, “Yes, we were there, we saw.”

“And you saw me try Latin too?”

Tanya said, “Yes we did. I wouldn’t be too proud of that if I were you!”

“But then you didn’t see me step outside and try with just mana, then mana with a gesture (I touched my leg), and then mana, the spoken ‘Be healed” and the gesture which finally worked.

Since then we’ve got a bigger sample size to analyze if we look at our spell screen we can …”

“Step 5: Analyze the data and draw a conclusion. When we look at all of the spell descriptions they all so far have those three elements. So we can hypothesize that any new spells are going to have those three elements. And maybe those three elements are not set in stone.”

“And finally, Step 6: Share your results. Well, that’s what I’m doing now.”

Tanya asked, “What did you mean when you said, “maybe those three elements are not set in stone.”

“I started thinking about spells. And it seemed as if there was a lot of play in the system. For instance, I say “Be Healed” because it’s funny and because I learned it drunk-watching faith healers on TV. We’d play a game, drink every time they said Satan, but that’s another story. Anyway, is that the best phrase? Maybe if it were said in Chinese or Klingon, it might be better? Or maybe different words? I just kind of ran my hands above the area I wanted the spell to target, maybe there’s a specific gesture that would work better? Maybe doing both the better gesture and the better words would cost less mana or heal more points? I don’t know. But we’ve got a spell that works. And I have a hard time believing that I just so happened to hit the precise words and gestures that our new Gods, I hate using that word for something that I can talk to and talks back, by the way, defined as a heal spell. I think it’s far more likely that they set up minimum and maximum requirements and said if they come within these targets, let the spell work.”

“Wow,” said Janet. “That’s pretty deep.” She paused for a second and then said, “I’m going to try saying ‘Wart B Gone!’”

I laughed, and then said, “I’ll try ‘Wart Away’ and snapping my fingers!”

Tanya laughed too and said, “I’m going for ‘System Heal This Wart” and then slapping the person in the forehead.

Janet said, “I’m going to clap my hands afterward.”

“Just one thing,” I said. They both looked at me. “Does anyone have any warts? Cause I don’t.”