“Ok,” I said. “Then we break to cast/meditate/get spells until 5, then we do potions and debrief, then we work ‘til later, whatever we choose to do. We keep the same watch rotation and we see how long it takes us to get to Copper in both spells. I’m thinking it may take us probably through the end of next week. Don’t know. I’m thinking that it will probably be the little ones that are last to finish.”

They both looked at me with upset faces so I hurried to explain, “It’s not you, it’s just that you being classless really hurts your mana pool and your mana recovery. Both are probably about half what they would be if you had a class. But you can’t get a class until you are thirteen. So we’ll just have to bear with it, Ok girls?”

They nodded their heads, but looked disappointed anyway. “I figure that if you can cast and meditate eight hours a day, you’ll probably be done in about ten days.”

Big Mike said, “Really? You expect them to spend eight hours a day casting spells?”

“I don’t really expect that. I just did the math and that’s what it came out too, at least my rough estimate. I figure they probably have a mana pool of about 30, a standard mana regen of less than one, a meditation mana regen of about two and when you add those up, it comes to about 2100 points per eight hours. So 2100 points means it’s going to take four and a half to five days for each spell. However, there are some factors that I left out, they are going to get better at meditation, they’ll probably go up several levels and if they increase their Intelligence or Wisdom, they’ll get faster mana regens, but yeah, basically five days a spell.”

“Girls,” he said. “Are you up for it?”

They both nodded their heads.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“Dad,” said Amada in her little wise child voice, “What choice do we have?”

It was true and he knew it. I started to think about it. About what I could do to make it fun for these kids, what I could do to reward them for finishing early, but I was drawing a blank. I can’t make them stuff because I don’t have the tools or materials. I can’t reward them with anything, because basically, I don’t have anything to give them. God, it sucks to be a kid in the apocalypse. Well, I don’t know, magic vs action figures. I think I’d take magic, but I might be a little weird. I’d definitely take magic if I could get it without the monsters.

Before we broke, I had a brainstorm. I’d thought earlier that we needed to do a show and tell about the spells that we’d given to the newcomers last night, now seemed like a good time to do it. I asked and everybody agreed. We stood around in the courtyard and went over the spells that we’d shared with them. 17 spells, well 16 minus charm since nobody really wanted to have it cast on them, including Roxie. The mouse definitely understood us. She disappeared as soon as we mentioned maybe casting the spell on her. OK, I mentioned casting the spell on her. And then Janet beat on me some more. But it was interesting how fast she disappeared. Almost instantly gone. Something to think about. Maybe that was why she didn’t seem that worried when I caught her in the box eating my cheese in Maxes.

Anyway, we let everyone cast at least one of the spells. Amada got the Light spell, Baila got Shield spell. We attempted to talk about what it felt like, what the gestures meant to us, the kind of lame words, where we felt the mana moving, basically anything we could do to make the spell more real to the person trying to learn it. Plus the three newcomers got to describe their spells and do the same thing that we’d just done for them. All to try and help make the transfer of knowledge as easy as possible.

After the two hours we’d spent doing the knowledge share, we broke and the big Smith’s started trying to learn their new spells, while the little Smith’s started casting Force Bolt. Nobody wanted to be the weak link.

Before I got started and everybody besides the Smith’s took off to their practice areas, I asked Janet if she’d ever tried to get Force Bolt and a Shield spell. She said that when she tried to get Force Bolt, she wound up with Light Bolt. But she hadn’t tried to get a Shield spell. I started to call out the names of Cleric spells that I remembered.

It turned out Jake and surprisingly eGirl and Miranda had played D&D. Jake was also a big MMORPG player too so between the four of us we came up with quite a few spells for her to try to Invent? Discover? Create? Who knew that a bunch of ex-gamers with super memories are the equivalent of a google search. Bless, Shield of Faith, Detect Magic, Detect Evil or Good, Create Food or Drink, Revivify, Tongues, Regeneration, True Resurrection, you name it we came up with it. Tanya was into it too but didn’t have a lot of gaming experience to share. But basically, our conversation boiled down to Janet needed a shield spell. And some other attack spell. Everything else was gravy. And another hour and a half were gone, but the good news is that Jake brightened up a little bit during our discussion.

It was now about 3:00 pm. I was finally able to get started on my Casting/Mediation routine. Oh, and Yoga routine, Casting/Meditation/Yoga routine. It’s all about the points. Cast, then meditate. Cast, then meditate. I started with Force Bolt. I got my Force Bolt up to Late Stage just before five. Despite saying that I wasn’t going to spend the skill points, I decided to anyway. I spent five and brought my total up to 8998 level points. I made a mental note to check that everyone was only burning half their mana before meditating to get it back. Judging by the number of yellow Force Bolts I could see flashing into the air and the frequency, I’m pretty sure everybody remembered.

Everyone met outside at the campfire at around 5 pm and while we were talking realized that we were going to have to keep watch all day. We just got lucky today. Just because the sun was shining didn’t mean that the monsters disappeared. That meant we needed a 24-hour watch. We hadn’t had this problem before because we were basically all together, active and doing stuff during the day. If we were to get attacked, we’d all be there. This new training broke us apart, separated us, we’d need someone to alert us in case of attack. I suggested that we break up into a day watch and a night watch. The same crew that was keeping watch during the night would stay on duty at night, the three newcomers could take a day shift. The day crew would only have to be on watch from around 9:00 to 5, so about two and a half hours each. Nobody had any real objections, so we decided to go that route.

We had our potions and everybody settled in to talk. First thing was just a status check-in. The little girls had made some decent progress moving from Bronze 2 to Bronze 4. Big Mike and Consuelo had both been able to acquire all of the new spells and had done their version of the CMY routine but hadn’t gone up a level in the spells, still Bronze 5. Almost, but not quite.

The three newcomers hadn’t really had much time to get started. They’d been busy trying to add the spells we’d passed over to their repertoire. It’s not a spellbook, or a grimoire since it’s internal, I’m not sure what to call it. Mental space? Mage space? Spirit space? Spell Space? Maybe repertoire is fine. Something else to think about, I suppose. But in the couple of hours practice, they’d made some nice progress.

Janet had acquired a shield spell. She said that the brainstorming session we’d done had made a difference. She cast it and it looked like our spells did, except instead of glowing yellow, it glowed a green hue. She also said that she could cast it on others pretty easily. The biggest difference was that it didn’t seem to block damage at all, rather it healed the damage as it occurred. A similar result, just a different process. It was a life magic spell as opposed to our air magic spells. She’d been able to get it up to Bronze 2 in the time she’d had. The only downside is it didn’t totally eliminate the pain. Minimized it somewhat, but you still felt it.

Tanya had just concentrated on Force Bolt. Got in some practice time, but wasn’t able to advance the spell up to the peak of the Peak Stage. She was going to use the skill point trick that we’d discovered once she got it there.

After we took our potions, we talked about what we wanted to get done. I mentioned that I wanted to continue to work on my Force Bolt spell and to get my Shield Spell up to at least Iron rank and then I was going to work on some other spells. I also mentioned that I wanted to play with some of the spells that Jake had brought to us. I was really excited about the possibilities we had with his Create Block and Lumber spells and eGirl’s Cut and Inscribe spells.

I got a bunch of blank looks, so I said what I thought would be the magic word, “Crafting!” Jake got it, eGirl and Miranda, both big gamers got it too. The rest of them just looked a little puzzled. “Hang on,” I said. “Give us some time to practice and we’ll change your lives! Won’t we Jake! We’re going to rule the world!” He gave a small smile back. Better than the blank look he’d spent most of the day with. Little steps.

We broke up then, the Smiths going off to do family practice, eGirl and Miranda going off to their cabin, Tanya and Janet off to theirs. I sat down by the fire on one of the diorama log seats and Jake sat down with me on another. He didn’t say anything but started his own meditation/spell acquisition process. I hung out for about fifteen minutes to make sure Jake didn’t want to talk and then I took off for our cabin to get some sleep.

I had third watch tonight, followed by Big Mike. Janet had first with Tanya following. With my new Constitution, I didn’t need the eight to nine hours of sleep I used to try and get. I was fine with about five.

Tanya woke me up and my watch passed without anything happening. I woke up Big Mike for his shift and then sat by the fire to work on spells.

I still hadn’t reached the peak of Peak stage, so I had nothing to report in the morning. The same thing happened for pretty much everyone else. Since we quit pushing so hard and were trying to rest at night now, we didn’t have the huge gains that we’d grown used to seeing. It was a lot more realistic I guess.