Despite not having something sneaking around and trying to kill her for once, Angela still found herself waking up just before dawn, unable to get back to sleep. Which sucked because she’d been more of a “wake up at the crack of noon” person back on Earth. Hopefully, it wasn’t a druid thing.

A pebble dinged off her forehead.

Hidden Trait Revealed: EARLY RISER

Sometimes it takes time to accept truths about yourself, but once you do, it becomes a foundational part of who you are. This is you now. You get up early. Hope you like being the one who makes coffee for everyone else!

Requirements: Druid, Self-discovery.

Benefit: You always wake up 10 minutes before dawn regardless of when you went to bed. Additionally, you are incapable of sleep for the first hour after dawn.

“You have got to be kidding me,” Angela muttered. Worst. Trait. Ever. At least she felt reasonably refreshed? Granted, that could just be the fact that sleeping on a bare hardwood floor was like a featherbed compared to the conditions she’d been used to for the last week.

With a resigned groan, Angela made her way downstairs. Briefly, she considered having a bath. Not that she needed one. She was arguably cleaner than when they’d plucked her off Earth—apparently when you got reincarnated, your funk didn’t get reincarnated with you. Which was nice. Besides, given the state of the tub after the rest of the family cleaned themselves off, she’d probably end up dirtier than when she got in. Soap was a high priority on their shopping list. If they ever got any money. Somehow, she suspected there wasn’t a lot of money to be made as a druid who didn’t want to leave the city.

God, I’m a druid now.

How did something that seemed so awesome on Earth end up so crappy on Arenia? Not to mention she’d thought her magic would get better when she got promoted. Instead, they’d taken away her one and only spell!

“Blargh,” she said, mustering as much eloquence as she could manage.

Rather than going into the kitchen where she could watch the sun rise over the river, Angela instead opted to go into the sitting room. Why? Because the whole reason she had this stupid alarm clock Trait was so that she could get up and worship the rising of the sun or some crap, and screw them for sticking her with such an annoying ability. Plus, it was called the sitting room. That’s where you went to sit, right?

Plunking herself down on the ground, Angela summoned her Tome and grabbed the Spells slate off the stack before plopping it into her lap.

Ugh, she thought, staring at the depressing piece of rock. Even a day later, she was just as annoyed as when she’d first looked at it.

SPELL LIST

Runic Capacity: 2/2

Spells: NONE

“Such bullshit,” she muttered. Tossing that slab off to the side, she pushed over the pile of stone sheets that made up her Tome and grabbed the one with “Runes” inscribed at the top.

RUNES

Anord

Beatha

Dhá Chumhacht

Ithreach

Four runes. With names. Runes with names. In another language. That she couldn’t read. And what’s more, while she remembered that she’d used the Goddess Rune, she couldn’t for the life of her remember what it looked like. It was as though it were erased from her memory.

“Fuck my life,” she muttered.

Clearly, she needed to combine the hexagonal runes to create an effect. The problem was, last time there had only been one rune. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Now there were four, and she had to combine them to create a result without actually knowing what that result might be. Suuuper easy. Four runes, each with 6-sides? How many combinations was that! For all she knew, she’d end up setting the house on fire if she shuffled them together the wrong way. Not to mention she had no idea what the material cost of the spell would be. The last thing she wanted to do was projectile vomit her duodenum onto the living room floor because she cast a spell without any components.

Oh well, she thought. Floors could be cleaned.

Just as she had done a dozen times last night, Angela materialized her stylus and a sheet of soft clay in her hands. Then, she tried drawing different combinations of Runes on the slab of her Tome. She’d actually gotten the Class Skill for Drawing when she’d first tried this, which made sense. It only unlocked at Level 13, but she couldn’t draw for shit so that wasn’t unexpected. If anything, it was a bit high, but the Raw Beginner tier was meant for children anyway. Her Tome had been very clear about that fact. Dick.

With a furrowed brow and the tip of her tongue sticking out, Angela concentrated carefully and made the lines of the runes sink into the soft clay.

When she’d first discovered this method, she had hoped that by eventually hitting on the right combination of runes, she could trigger some kind of response from the system and have a spell added to her Tome. That… had not worked. With each successive failure, she was forced to confront the possibility that her current strategy was doomed.

“Ugh,” she said, dropping her stylus and letting it vanish before hitting the ground.

It was time to admit defeat. In all likelihood, she wasn’t going to find out what her runes did until she used them on something outside of the Tome, but holy shit—she didn’t want to do that without knowing what the rune combo might do. There was a big difference between curing an upset tummy and blowing a huge fucking hole in someone’s torso.

No. There had to be a better way to work out this shit than simple trial and error.

Not for the first time, Angela’s eyes were drawn to two runes in particular. One of them was Anord. Something about it creeped her out so much that it made her hand itch. She didn’t even want to draw it, let alone include it in a spell. That contrasted sharply with Dhá Chumhacht, which looked far more promising. She was affectionately calling that one the “Power Rune.” Something about it seemed different… something in the weight of the two circles that stood apart from the rest of the features. Also, “Power Rune” sounded badass. But badass naming aside, she was almost sure this was the rune that powered her spells.

She poked at its entry in her Tome. “Yep, I’m calling you the Power Rune.”

A piece of her Tome broke off and flew straight up at her face, hitting her in the eye.

“Oww!” she said, rubbing her eye and blinking away the irritation. When her vision cleared, she looked down and discovered that not only had the stone unfolded into a small card shape, but the words in her Tome had changed as well.

Rune Meaning Uncovered:

Dhá Chumhacht – Power Rune 2

Look at you, working out runes all on your own! Aren’t you clever. Enjoy it, though, ’cause it ain’t gonna get easier. Oh yeah, and don’t go looking for a “Power Rune 1.” It doesn’t exist, for reasons that will become clear if you ever manage to progress your class.

“Yeah? And how the hell am I supposed to do that!”

It was hardly an idle question. Knowing how to advance your class seemed like a pretty damn important piece of information, but only having received a class less than a day ago, she hadn’t spent much time thinking about it. So what was the mechanism?

“Come on, Angela. You’re smart. Think about this.”

What did she know so far?

First, there were Base Attributes. Pretty clear how those worked: Use Attribute. Get more Attribute. Repeat.

Second was Renown. Get experience, earn Renown, and level up. Great for social standing, but it did dick-all for getting more powerful. But that was where all the XP went, so it had to double back into the other systems. She just needed to work out how.

Skills. Also pretty straightforward, with the kicker that you seemed to unlock stuff like Traits and Abilities at higher levels.

Which naturally led to Traits and Abilities. From what Angela could tell, they were fairly similar, except that Traits were passive and Abilities were active. Like how her Freediver Trait let her hold her breath like a badass, but the Druid Lore Ability needed to be consciously triggered. And thank god for that. It would really suck to get hit with a barrage of pebbles every time she looked at a flock of pigeons.

Which left Quests.

So far, Angela had been thinking of Quests as something off to the side. A little thing here to gain XP, a little thing there to show progress on a task. But that couldn’t be all there was to it. Arenia was game-like, but it was not a game. If the Quest system existed, it needed to have broader implications for the world, and so far as she could tell, there was only one option.

Class growth had to be quest-based.

She thought about it for a moment. That could be cool or not, depending on how challenging the quests were. Sure, there’d be some easy ones along the way, but the class advancement quests were likely on a whole different level. This being Arenia, she suspected they weren’t so much “Fetch 20 apples for Farmer McOlddude so he can make cider” as they were “Kill the Leviathan with a spork.”

“Except I don’t have any class advancement quests,” she grumbled. How was she supposed to move forward in her class if she didn’t know how to unlock—

She cut herself off.

There it was. The place where Renown re-entered the system. The quests to advance your class had to be Renown-gated. It was the only thing that made sense. If not, she’d clearly wasted hundreds of hours playing games.

Intelligence +1

Bite your tongue! I just took a look through your gameplay history, and some of those titles were awesome. Although you did spend a lot of time playing Mrs. Funtime’s Playroom Partytime. That game is for what, 8-year-olds? Not really an on-brand choice.

There was a chuckle from the doorway, and Angela looked over to discover her mom leaning against the doorframe, a gentle smile on her face.

“Someone doesn’t look very happy with their Tome,” she said, gesturing to the slate in Angela’s hand.

“Hey, mom,” Angela said.

“Hi, honey. You couldn’t sleep either?”

“Literally,” Angela said with a grimace. “Apparently, druids have a Trait called Early Riser that forces me to wake up 10 minutes before sunrise every day for the rest of my—hey, why are you laughing?”

“I’m not laughing,” her mom lied, unable to hold back a snort as she covered her face with her hand.

“It’s not that funny.”

“Oh, honey,” her mom said, shaking her head. “I’ve spent the last 15 years dragging you out of bed in the morning for school, swim practice, family outings… pretty much anything we wanted to do before 11 a.m. required physical intervention. It’s a little bit funny.”

She walked over and sat down, her chuckles dying down as she rubbed Angela’s back, just like when Angela was a kid.

They stared at the wall together, taking in the early morning silence.

“Mom?” Angela asked.

“Yes?”

“Yesterday, we were all trying to hold it together,” she said, “and I know I’m not supposed to swear, but now that we’re not struggling just to stay alive, you can admit that this whole situation is really fucked up, okay? You don’t need to pretend things are normal.”

For once, her mom didn’t get on her case about the swearing. Instead, she simply shook her head.

“I don’t like that word, but if ever there were an appropriate time to use it, this is it.”

Angela scooted around so that they were facing each other cross-legged. “Come on. Aren’t you guys freaking out? Yeah, I’ll miss my friends, sure, but I spent most of my time worrying about climate change destroying the planet. Now that’s gone, and I kinda hate to say it, but I’m glad I don’t need to think about it anymore. Like... HUGE weight off my shoulders. You guys, though? You had a life.”

“We did,” her mom said, “and yes, I’ll miss it. But you’re here. My family. If I’d come alone, I don’t know what I would have done. Laid down in the grass and died, most likely.”

Angela rolled her eyes. “You’re being melodramatic.”

Her mom shook her head. “Maybe if you have kids one day, you’ll understand a parent’s love for their child. It’s something you can’t describe. That love is here with me on this journey. Yes, it’s hard to leave behind everything we built, but I have you, your brother, and your father. And soon, hopefully, Grandpa Jack. That makes this awful situation tolerable.”

“And dad?” she asked. “How’s he taking it?”

To Angela’s surprise, her mom hesitated before answering.

“Having the family here is a double-edged sword,” she said. “He was very shaken up by what happened to me, and that’s the flip side of us all being here. More to love means more to lose.”

“What did happen?” Angela asked. “Mark said you nearly died?”

Her mom nodded, pulling off her jacket and passing it to Angela. There was a large hole, enough for her to put three fingers through, and it was covered in blood.

Angela’s heart began to race. “Mom, that’s a lot of blood.”

“I know,” she said. “We got into a fight with some goblins. I was stabbed in the back with a spear. Your father killed the one who did it—that’s when he hurt his arm—and then helped Eliza carry me for hours to get to a stash of hers that had a healing potion.”

Angela’s eyebrows rose. “Hang on—dad killed a goblin?”

Her mom grimaced. “Yes. He won’t talk about it, though.”

Holy shit. The idea of her dad killing another sentient being was hard to imagine. No wonder he didn’t want to talk about it.

“That’s a lot to take in,” Angela said. “Good thing you only ran into one goblin. In stories, they’re like, never alone.”

“Actually, there were four. Eliza killed the other three.”

Angela grinned. “Oh, I have to meet this woman. She sounds like a badass.”

“She really is,” her mom agreed. “She’ll be coming by later this morning to help us get set up in the city. Find work, that sort of thing. She knows we’re Legends—that’s what they call people like us—so we can talk freely around her. Same with that blacksmith family Mark befriended. Beyond that, though, don’t tell anyone what we are. Apparently, there’s a lot of people out there who would love to take advantage of our peculiar situation.”

Angela snorted out a laugh. “Uh, yeah mom. It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to work out that rich people would readily exploit a poor person who couldn’t die.”

Any further conversation was cut off by Angela’s dad’s voice echoing down the stairwell.

“Uh, ladies? Can you come up here for a sec?” He sounded uncertain of himself, causing Angela and her mom to look at each other in concern. They quickly rose to their feet and headed upstairs, eventually finding Angela’s dad and brother in “Grandpa Jack’s room” at the back of the house. Both men were staring out the window, neither of them turning around when the women walked in. Curious, Angela wandered over, her mind running through the various scenarios that might account for the slightly unhinged tone in her dad’s voice.

As it turned out, she was suffering from a lack of imagination.