“So,” Ernie said, hands on his hips cowboy pose again, “how basic do you want me to start?”

“All the way, please,” Hunter replied with a grin, trying to get comfortable in the awful chair that Fourex owned way too many copies of. “Maximum basic.”

“Well, back in ancient times, I think it was Aristotle who suggested, or at least made the idea popular, that everything was made up of some combination of fire, air, water, and earth.”

Hunter narrowed his eyes and mumbled, “Really, that’s where you’re starting?”

“Hold on, kid. It’ll make sense.”

“It better.”

“Sure, sure,” Ernie said, chuckling. “By the time I was your age-”

“So, slightly less ancient times?”

“Yes, back in the old days, when no one could cast magic spells, much like yourself, and we had to learn it all on our own, much like yourself. End of lesson.”

“Hey! Sorry, I’ll be good.”

“Quick aside, kid. How does your mother do this for a living?”

“I don’t know, I had a lot of trouble paying attention in school, Ernie.”

“Anyway,” Ernie continued as he flipped through his notebook. “When I was your age, we’d figured out all sorts of things about what the world was made of. Atoms, quarks, photons, etc. Except we didn’t know what was underneath all that, if there was anything specific. There were theories, but nobody’d done any real testing on it.”

“But now we know it’s essence, yeah? It wasn’t before, but it is now.”

“Right, exactly. Take the most basic unit of anything, matter or energy, break it down a few more times, and you get essence. Except, if that’s all it was, nothing would really be different now.”

“Except for electronics or whatever?”

“That’s a question with a much bigger answer, kid. Save that one for Pete next time you want to see him have a fit.”

“Yessir,” Hunter chuckled. He tried not to mess with Pete too much, but it was difficult to resist.

“Essence also comes out of nowhere, and yes before you interrupt, literally it’s from nowhere. There’s no pattern to where it spontaneously generates, except for the one Infra says there is. Essence apparently prefers, anthropomorphic emphasis not added by me, to appear in gravity wells populated by emergent phenomena. So, for the most part, planets with life on them.”

“That’s suspicious, right?”

“Well, sorta,” Ernie waggled a hand as he spoke. “Anthropic principle applies I guess. If essence mostly popped up in, say, stars, we wouldn’t have anything to do with it, and everything would be mostly the same as before, again.”

“You’re giving me an awful lot to look up later, for the basics. I know what at least one of those anthro- words means, but not both.”

“We’re almost there, you can hold on. So, all essence is the same. Mathematically, you can even make the case that all essence is literally the same essence. But forget that for now, because there are different types of essence.”

Hunter groaned and slumped back in the uncomfortable chair.

“Don’t be like that, kid. We’re just getting to the good part.”

“Oh?” Hunter asked as he sat back up. “We’re going to do magic?”

“No, I meant the good part of the basics.”

“Oh.” Hunter could tell, deep down, that his uncle was enjoying messing with him.

“Right. So first, there’s locked essence. That’s what you get way down at the bottom of atoms and energy and such. It’s busy, pretending to be spacetime, you can't do anything with it except for theoretically make some pretty spectacular explosions if you manage to let it out. And you know about raw essence. That’s what spontaneously appears and seeps up out of the Earth sometimes, that’s what Sources are made entirely out of, that’s what essence plants and animals and other monsters absolutely reek with. Everything wants it, including Infra, because it’s the best stuff to make reality out of, turning it into locked essence.”

“And we harvest it, and as a reward, Infra uses a little bit of it to make us better?”

“Pretty much, kid,” Ernie nodded and chuckled. “Better than the alternative, though. It’s incredibly difficult to actually get raw essence to do anything you want it to. Infra can do it, because it’s a giant computer, and sometimes you can coax a plant to grow a little differently with it, but other than that, you get monsters. Absorb too much raw essence without a regulator of some sort, and you just get all messed up. Strong, capable of going out and getting more of it, but messed up and incapable of doing much else.”

“That’s what comes outta the Slides, then?”

“For the most part, yeah. Essence monsters looking for more raw essence to absorb, either naturally or by devouring something or someone with it. The other thing you get when you try to process raw essence is crystallized essence. It’s mostly a failure state from trying to make matter, but it’s incredibly useful as a power source, to make exotic materials, all kinds of stuff, so useful that pretty much everyone on Infra uses it as a currency in one form or another.”

“So this armband thing,” Hunter said as he looked down suspiciously at the device, “is basically an essence monster that’s eventually gonna go crazy and try to eat me.”

“Yeah pretty much. You’ll be fine, though. Then, lastly, well not totally but for our purposes today, lastly there’s affinity. That’s a tiny bit of essence with a particular flavor that gets produced in and around anything living, or moving. The flavors, to bring things full circle, roughly correspond to fire, air, water, and earth.”

“No,” Hunter said, shaking his head. “No, it doesn’t work like that, it can’t. That’s, you know, dumb.”

“Would you believe they’re energy, gas, liquid, and solid? Or maybe a rough scale from high energy states to low ones? Now, you might be right, Infra might be a little cheeky about it, but when you first start out, your affinity will be for one of those four elements.”

“So weird, Uncle Ernie.”

“It can be, at times. Imagine learning all this at the same time the world is burning and you’re fighting for your life. It’s possibly even weirder. So when you do magic, you use your own portion of affinity to mimic raw essence processing in one form or another, and it’s easier to do it when what you’re making is closest to your own personal affinity. Basically, since it's so attuned to you, you can make very small changes in your local reality, which you can't do with actual raw essence. Like, hmm, this. My affinity’s fire, or at least it used to be.”

Ernie held his right arm out and it started to dissolve, growing more hazy for a moment, and then reappeared suddenly with his hand gripping a very large, very Infratech handgun. He pointed it at one of the training dummies lined up along the wall, and an instant later, a fireball the size of Hunter’s head, void black with crackling red edges, burst from the barrel of the gun. In an eyeblink it slammed into the dummy and exploded, burning with that same weird dark flame until Ernie waved his hand and made it vanish.

“That’s magic. I took some of my affinity, formed it into a very high energy state of protomatter, and shot it out. The gun’s just my mod, but you can do that with a spell too, if you’re careful.”

“Wow,” Hunter breathed. “You’re going to teach me that, right?”

“Short answer, no. Long answer, probably not. Sorry, kid.”

It turned out that learning magic was not nearly as fun for Hunter as watching other people do magic. The first step, Ernie had warned him, was to be able to access his affinity at all. Until he could do that, it was just a number that Infra helpfully tracked for him, and nothing much more. To that end, he had a few basic spells, exercises really, that would each work one of the primary affinity skills until Hunter got a feel for what was actually happening.

The first spell he picked was simply called [Cycling] and it was supposed to utilize the [Infusion] skill, a form of magic that kept one’s affinity close to the body, more of a self-improvement magic than a flashy one. The trick to it was to feel one’s affinity channels, pathways in the body that may or may not actually exist in reality, and to force the spare amount of essence in them to move, just a push at first, but eventually to spur the whole system into simultaneous motion, cycling it like the name.

Hunter had trouble on the first step, he couldn’t feel what he was supposed to be able to, no matter how often he tried to “flex the extrasensory organs” like Ernie’s notes said to do. It just didn’t make sense to him, which was unusual considering how straightforward all of his uncle’s earlier instructions had been. It felt like some sort of particularly confusing homework, where the point of it was to get him into a different headspace before he learned anything new, but he couldn’t find that space.

He was doing his morning exercises the next day and thinking about the problem when he came to a realization, or at least half of one. Ernie hadn’t learned any magic while he was still a beginner, he was pretty sure. Hunter thought he remembered that his uncle had levelled into it, picking an affinity-based class when he hit twenty-five, and like a lot of people back then, hadn’t even realized humans were capable of magic until Infra had basically told them. It did sound like it would have been a really big surprise, and Hunter chuckled a little to himself.

“Trips! Congratulations on reaching level twenty-five! Would you like to be a mage, instead of a scared beginner running away from everything vaguely menacing? It has been empirically proven that throwing fireballs into monsters’ faces has a high statistical likelihood of making them go away.”

He continued his poses, moving smoothly from one position to the next, and knew that he was going about things the wrong way. What the basics were for Ernie the brand-new mage, who was probably riding high on a neat, magic-specific class talent, might not be the basics for Hunter the beginner, but he had no real idea how to figure out how to personalize his own studies. Actually, he had one idea ugh, but he wasn’t counting it as a good one.

Hey, Infra, he thought. Is there a tutorial for affinity skills?

Only the integration tutorial is available at this time. Check back in v. 1375.27!

“Right, ok,” Hunter muttered. “Naturally. So, Trips, we’ve got a project. First principles for affinity. That shouldn’t be too hard, inventing magic by ourselves, right?”

The helperbot paused in the middle of one long stretch, a pretty good approximation of waiter bringing food, and bobbed its carapace in a shrug.

“Alright, second lesson,” Ernie clapped his hands together as he spoke. “It’s not my specialty, but I know enough to get you started. All set, kid?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be, I guess,” Hunter nodded from the floor, where he sat cross-legged on a mat, the plastic demon-chair shoved to a corner.

“Right, so a quick review. What are the four basic affinities?”

“Ernie, it was yesterday. Do we really need a review?” Hunter whined.

“Then it should be easy, Hunter.”

“Ugh, they’re fire, air, water, and earth.”

“So,” Ernie continued oh he’s in a mood, “what do those four elements all have in common?”

“Umm, they’re all stuff?” Hunter replied, face flat let him stew on that one.

“Right, exactly. They’re all stuff,” Ernie said, looking satisfied.

“Umm.”

“What if you want to do magic that isn’t stuff, Teach? That’s what you’re supposed to ask. You can call me Teach.”

“That doesn’t make sense, Ernie. Everything’s made out of essence, remember from yesterday? So everything’s the same, you know, stuff.”

“Right. Everything is stuff, sure. That’s one way to look at it. Can you name something that exists and isn’t stuff? Take your time, I’ll wait.”

Hunter blinked at him and then flopped back onto the mat, staring at the ceiling. This is worse than yesterday, he thought. Why does everything have to be such a-

“A hassle,” he muttered as he sat up. “A riddle. Whatever you’d call disowning your uncle.”

“Correct! Hurtful, but correct. You can’t affect concepts or ideas with affinity, because they aren’t stuff. You’ll never find a life mage, or a vengeance mage, or a riddle mage, even though that would be pretty sweet. But?”

“But you can have a life priest. So you can channel things that don’t actually exist with patron skills?”

“Not exactly,” Ernie said with a grin. “but you’re getting there. So, there’s another type of common essence. This one’s been called a lot of things in the last twenty years, things like push essence, channeling essence, etcetera, but I think everyone’s settled on extraplanar essence. I don’t mean essence from another boring dimension that crosses over into ours, either. This stuff is from way outside the manifolds, deep into the conceptual spaces that Infra exists in. You know how I told you that when you get better at physical skills, Infra starts to give you a little push that makes you faster?”

“Right. Oh, push essence, I get it.”

“Infra takes this pile of essence that isn’t good for anything else, we suppose, and uses it to create force, injects it into the conduits connected to your body, and you move more quickly. Or with more force, or you negate force, basically anything like that.”

“That sounds cool and all, Ernie,” Hunter was frowning as he spoke up, “but that’s not what priests do, right?”

“Nope, they work with the other big thing that uses extraplanar essence, and that’s a patron. Or an essence well if you don’t like the connotation of the word, but Infra uses patron.”

“Hey, I know the next question, Teach,” Hunter said with what he hoped was a sarcastic grin. “So these wells can use extraplanar essence to do spectacular things, I imagine, but in what circumstances would they do that?” He finished the sentence with his eyes as wide as he could open them.

“Ok kid, don’t call me Teach. I changed my mind. I don’t like it. But yes, that’s a very good point you’ve raised, and you are such a little clone of your mother. Did you know she got detention in high school more than me?”

“I’ve heard that first part. I don’t mind it.”

“So, the patrons are just massive pools of this extraplanar essence connected to what we think are pared-down copies of Infra. At least, Infra’s back end, with all the utility functions stripped out and replaced.”

“Hey, that’s dangerous. No utility functions? Dad says that’s how you get gray goo.”

“Ordinarily, sure. But they don’t replicate. In fact, all they seem to be interested in are ephemeralities, anything that’s not stuff. And they’re really interested in those.”

“So like, umm, one could really like riddles, and then that’s how you get riddle priests?”

“Yup, in fact, it’s usually that simple. A patron will pick, or find, or whatever its process is, a concept it embodies, and then contact anyone who has the right nature and temperament, and when they’re doing things it likes, or if they specifically ask, they’ll flood them and their general vicinity with extraplanar essence.”

“Alright, so my dad? He’s got a patron, the Ghosts of the Earth. They must like farming, or treating the dirt right, or something else Dad does, because they help him all the time. So he says like, ‘I want to do farmwork,’ and his patron says, ‘I approve of that,’ and then there’s a dozen spooky hands doing all the harvesting? Is that how it works for everyone?”

“Exactly, they do tend to be flashy like that, and have almost all given themselves those kinds of important sounding names. Guess you can do that sort of thing when you’re that loaded with essence.”

“Ok, Ernie, don’t get mad,” Hunter held up his hands. “But this is all nonsense, right? I mean, this is all a ‘best guess, it all fits, working theory’ sorta thing, yeah?”

Ernie just laughed. “It sort of sounds like that, doesn’t it? But no, some patrons are very talkative. They’re all pathed into Infra, and they’ll chat with their followers, give out quests for people to help each other, create spectacles on occasion. You know, make some statue talk in a real booming voice, telling people to go gather destruction, or beauty, or whatever it decided it likes. This is just how it works. They've said so, and there really isn't any reason to doubt them much.”

“So, how do I hook into this vast, transdimensional network of nonsense?”

Ernie’s teaching style, Hunter decided, was fun but flawed. It seemed to be a two-step process, first lecturing him about the why’s of a skill, and then sending him off with work to figure out the how’s by himself. He could see the reasoning, and mostly agreed with it, but he felt like he continued to get stuck on the transition, the what’s in between.

“This is a pretty neat book, though,” he mumbled, sitting on the edge of the roof and paging through another one of Ernie’s notebooks. This one was stuffed full of what his uncle said was the name, interest, and demeanor of as many patrons as he’d heard mentioned since the apocalypse came. It read more like an encounter manual than a reference book, though, like Ernie had actually written down what to do when something starts invoking their patron, and then excised the parts where he outlined how best to shoot them.

Hunter was supposed to think about what mattered most to him, and then somehow find a well in the jumble of notes that matched his goals. That was, apparently, the safest way to not get oneself saddled with a patron they didn’t agree with fully, who wouldn’t help when they needed it, whose abilities they’d never master. It still seemed backwards, or at the very least sideways, to him, but he couldn’t put his finger on exactly why.

You are sending a direct message to [Henry Schmidt].

[Hunter]: hey, Dad. how’s it going? got time to talk?

[Dad]: Of course, Hunter. Did I leave something there? Do I need to come back for my wallet?

[Hunter]: haha

[Hunter]: no, i’m just working on something Ernie gave me to do, and i’ve got questions?

[Dad]: Oh, and you want your dad’s help instead of the bump room?

[Dad]: It must be about optimal plant growth or classic rock. I'm kind of an expert at both.

[Dad]: Lay it on me.

[Hunter]: it’s actually about, umm, your ghosts. and how you got hooked up with them, i guess

[Dad]: Ok, I’m listening.

[Hunter]: it’s a multi-parter, so hang on

[Hunter]: 1/3 what’s their deal? what do they want from you, or from life

[Hunter]: 2/3 how much do you agree with their philosophy

[Hunter]: 3/3 what came first, the fact you needed help, or the stuff from 1 and 2

[Dad]: Deep stuff, young man. Give me a minute to think about it, ok?

[Hunter]: k

[Dad]: First, they’re really big on the ground, as a concept. I know it sounds dumb, but hear me out. They seem fascinated by the comparison of how we bury our dead and grow our food. They see both as equally meaningful rituals that people perform toward the actual soil. It’s like, the digging and burying are a rite that we enact for the things we care about, to them.

[Dad]: It didn’t make a lot of sense to me until I realized that they don’t have any of that. No death, no food, no dirt. But they saw what people do and came to their own conclusions, and decided that a wide expanse of ground was their favorite thing. So, to answer your second question, hmm.

[Dad]: I’d say mostly? In that I feel it’s important to bury the dead, to grow crops, to fill in holes that pests make, to wear paths and eventually roads into the countryside. I don’t think it’s possible to agree with them completely, just because their route to those thoughts is so beyond a person’s regular experience. No one sees the ground and decides to worship it, not really, but we do see the dirt and know what to do with it.

[Dad]: Lastly, I’d say the help came first. I didn’t know what I needed exactly, just that I needed something other than I had available. I was already doing the things they like, but it wasn’t until I needed the exchange that it was made. I’d say, if you’re trying to generalize this and not just asking your dad for stories, then that’s the important part.

[Dad]: You can do whatever you like, and it may line up with the interests of something like the Ghosts, but just doing it won’t make them react any more than appreciating it. Same as needing help probably won’t connect you to a well, either.

[Dad]: I figure you need both. I know that’s probably not a lot of help, but I hope it is.

[Hunter]: no, i, umm. actually think it is. thanks, Dad! love you

[Dad]: Love you too, son.

Hunter thought about his dad’s advice for a while, meditating, then snapped the book shut, mumbling, “Well, that’s two things I’ve got to do by myself.”

Pete “Walker” Cloud was a jerk. Everyone said it, including people who came into Fourex for his help and then said it to his face. But they kept coming, because even though he was a jerk, he was an awfully smart one. Hunter kind of liked that about him, though, because he could talk to him without worrying much.

Usually, Hunter tried to be polite for two main reasons, first because that’s how he was raised and he agreed that everyone being nice just made things work better. Secondly, he made sure to be polite with most people, even on days where he could barely stand to, because it felt like if he ever stopped, people would be twice as awful back. But with Pete, he honestly felt like he couldn’t get much more awful, so he never felt that pressure.

Pete had let him into his workshop on the one day he said he had a few hours free, grunted “Basic math and physics, right,” at him, and then set a half-built device down on one of the counters and told him to fix it. Hunter didn’t even know what it was or what it did, but he did know it was broken, because pushing the big, gray button on it did nothing. After about the half hour or so it took him to find any tools in the crowded workspace to start, he looked over at Pete and cleared his throat.

“Hey, so lemme ask you a question, Pete,” he called over.

“Sure, hit me,” was the reply, at least forty seconds later, without Pete even looking up.

“You guys are like, early four hundreds or so? Forming your transcendental natures, or whatever?”

“Yeah,” Pete set his tools down and looked over at him. Hunter looked back, keeping his face blank, trying a trick he’d learned from Kiki.

Pete was taller than Hunter, if not by much, but a lot wider. He’d have to be strong if he wanted to carry around some of the huge boxes with carrying straps affixed that Hunter saw lying around. He had kind of a coppery, dusky skin tone that the teen wondered was natural, from the sun, or maybe an accident with Infratech. Hunter had heard of worse, weirder things happening when someone didn’t get everything lined up. He was just about to start gauging the size of Pete’s strong, narrow nose in comparison to everyone else he’d ever met, when the trick worked, and Walker broke the silence first.

“I said yeah, kid. What’s it to ya? Also, that staring is creepy, knock it off.”

“Yessir. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about progression speed.”

“Should be thinking about how to fix that thing I gave ya.”

“Yeah, umm. Well I’ve been thinking about both. So my dad only hit a hundred a couple years ago, and said that many levels in that many years was awful slow.”

“He’s a farmer, right? It may be slow, but I guess non-combats worry more about steady. They get things set up so they keep earning, they don’t stop.”

“And then I was thinking about the history stuff Infra puts out. Apparently people started subliming in like 2007?” Hunter asked, trying for innocent curiosity.

“Right. The meatgrinders.”

“Wait, what?”

“Ah, right. They don’t talk about that much. Uhh, so say you’re an Order, way back in the day. Things have all gone completely sideways, and you’ve got yourself a whole two advantages. First you got a ton of people at a basic level of competence, and second you mighta found or taken yourself a really high level Source.”

“Umm, did that happen often?”

“All the time. Group comes in with a thousand swords, says shove off, says they’ll take care of it. Course, they don’t know what they’re doing any more than the rest of us. They just have the swords.”

“Oh.”

“So what they do, is they take a hundred of those swords, or a thousand if they’re bigger, or who knows how many, and they shove them all in the Source. We’re talking Divinity cusp Sources, here.”

“Wait, those really exist?” Hunter was getting more information than he bargained for, here.

“Maybe not anymore. People get real shady about em nowadays. Anyway, whoever walks out after you shove em in, they’re your elite now. Do it a few more times, and you’re bound to get some terrified kid with a lucky build to sublime eventually. Do it even more, and there’s your sublimed army.”

“That’s, umm, that’s kinda terrible, Pete.”

“Got that right, kid. If that’s what it takes to level up quickly, and the relatively sane life your old man’s got is what you get from going slow, then I’m pretty fine with being on the slow end. Now get back to work.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Hunter mumbled as he looked down at the gadget. He’d taken it all the way apart, but now he just had a mess that for sure didn’t work. Whatever parts Pete had managed to squeeze into the device, Hunter couldn’t tell what they were or which ones were broken. By the time he got kicked out of the workshop, he’d made a very small pile of ‘probably ok’ and just about no progress other than that.

“So, Trips,” Hunter said, one morning on the roof. “Why can’t we manage this? Well, you can’t do it because you’re just a little robot, but why can’t I do it? Any of it.”

He set his empty cereal bowl on the ledge next to him, which Trips helpfully grabbed and put somewhere less precarious, then rubbed at his temples.

“What do I need? That’s easier than magic spells and stupid tech. What do I need, Trips? For, umm, everybody to be safe, right? For no one to have to be like Miracle’s mom and work so hard and sacrifice themselves and miss out on what they were working for. For no one to have to be like Kiki and so miserable for so long, just wanting to go home. I dunno, for no one to be like me, maybe? Scared of what’s out there and running at it anyway because not running at it makes me even more scared, and what else can I do, Trips?

“What do I want? I dunno. That’s dumb, that’s really dumb. I should just be able to say what I want, it’s just you and me. Ok. I want to help. I want to be helpful. It’s selfish, sure. But, umm, if everyone was just fine tomorrow and no one needed any help, I’d be ok with it, yeah. But that’s not going to happen, so I want to help make it happen. Oh, and I want to be ‘Never get hit’ Schmidt. It sounds cool, and like, no one would have to worry about me. Mom’d be like, ‘Where’s Hunter?’ but Dad could say, ‘Doesn’t matter, he’ll be fine.’ I wouldn’t worry so much about me, either. More time to help people.

“What do I have? What’s the exchange, why am I worth helping out? Got too much energy and a smart mouth. Heard that a lot. Got a wizard stick, an awesome robot, and a cool hoodie. People I care about, that gave me all those things. A secret or two, and a plan to get more. Is that enough? Dad said he basically didn’t know he had what he needed, maybe it’s the same for everyone. Let’s try it, Trips.”

The way to connecting with a patron, at the end of the day, was simple. Ernie had said the best way to do it well was to be prepared, his dad said what probably mattered most was to be in need, but in either case the last step was easy, almost insultingly easy. Hunter agreed with both men, if he was feeling honest, but for different reasons. Ernie’s way made sense, because you really could find a patron that didn’t work well with you. Hunter was, for instance, sitting thirty feet up in the air and would feel really stupid if he connected to the Short Elf of Tall Places, or some kind of nonsense, just because he didn’t know what to focus on. His father’s way made sense too because you could apparently just fail, if you were on a lark and seeing what you could do, if you begged Infra for assistance you didn’t need, then you wouldn’t get it.

Hunter slipped off the ledge back onto the roof, got comfortable on his mat, and then thought, Hey, Infra. I need some extra help. I’m feeling lost and worried like usual. I know I’m not desperate or in immediate danger like most people, when they ask, but I hope that doesn’t matter. So, umm, you know, is there anything you can do for me? He only had to wait a few moments before a new window flashed up.

Searching… complete

An extraplanar entity, a [Patron], is attempting to contact you in response to your request. Do you accept? Y/N

Hunter nodded and thought, Yes, yes please.

There is a wolf in the woods menacing a child.

[Hunter]: umm, what?

There is a WOLF. In the WOODS. Menacing a CHILD. YOU are there. What do you DO?

[Hunter]: i grab the kid and run. can i, can i do that?

You have a stick. You can kill.

[Hunter]: umm, no. the kid needs to be out of the woods more than the wolf needs to be dead

[Hunter]: plus who knows what’d happen while i’m fighting. can't keep an eye on everything

You are in the WOODS. You SEEK. You EXPLORE. What do you FIND?

[Hunter]: i dunno. there’s a lot going on and no one knows why and i want to help when i can. a way out?

There is a clearing in the woods. There are fifty men, fifty stout sticks, and one wolf.

[Hunter]: umm?

Forty men pick up sticks and beat the wolf.

There is a CLEARING. In the WOODS. There are fifty MEN, fifty stout STICKS, and ten WOLVES.

[Hunter]: i’m sorry, i don’t know what you want

Twenty-five men pick up sticks and beat the wolves.

There is a clearing in the woods. There are fifty men, twenty-five stout sticks, and no wolves.

Twenty-five men pick up sticks and beat the men.

[Hunter]: ugh, why? what?

CLEARING. YOU. STICK. WOLF. DO.

[Hunter]: i do, i do nothing. the wolf lives there, it’s not menacing? they weren’t menacing the men either. i don’t get it. i’d try to go home

There is night in the woods menacing a child.

[Hunter]: i’d take the kid home, right

There is NIGHT. In the WOODS. Menacing a CHILD. You are a WOLF. With a STICK.

[Hunter]: wait, am i scaring the child?

WOLF. STICK. NIGHT.

[Hunter]: can i, umm. can i lead the kid home? without being scary? i don’t want to scare anyone

There is no clearing in the woods. There is only the woods. There are countless men, countless stout sticks, and you. It is night. Everything is menacing. The men have sticks. The men beat whatever is before them. The wolves live in the woods. The children do not BELONG in the woods.

[Hunter]: everyone just, just needs to go home. can i take them home, please?

There is a man with a stick in the woods. You are a wolf. You have killed. The man is menacing you.

[Hunter]: i can dodge. i can run. i can stop him, if i have to

It is night. The men have sticks and have become wolves. Everything is menacing. EVERYTHING is menacing. The woods are vast and no one can find their way out. It is night.

[Hunter]: i dunno. can i help? i dunno how. can you help?

I am WISP, the LIGHT in the WOODS you follow HOME. I can help. I would like to help.

[Hunter]: please

I will help you find a way out of the woods, and lead others out as well. I see conflict everywhere, and it troubles me, and yet I continue to look, unable to tear my gaze away. You are the same. There is a way out, for you, for the children lost in the woods, even for the men that have become wolves, but will not be obvious until the light burns brightly, until our light burns brightly, between the trees, visible to all who are still in the woods. We will help each other, and as many others as we can find, as we can lead.

The window disappeared as suddenly as it had popped up, and Hunter couldn’t even pull it up again like he could with an old message log. There were other screens flashing, though, so he checked those.

You have raised Guidance to one (1).

You have raised Protection to one (1).

You have unlocked your Patron base skill into [Follower of Wisp]!

You have learned two (2) spells! [A Light to Follow] Everyone needs a way out of the woods, but it can be hard to find. Ask Wisp for help and it will make the path easier to discern. (guidance) ten (10) affinity. one (1) hour duration, one (1) minute/level additional, +ten percent (10%), ten percent (10%) of guidance skill additional to awareness [Flickering Form] Wisp is easy to see, remarkably difficult to reach. Invoke that contradiction and gain some of its aspect. (protection) one (1) affinity. six (6) minute duration, one (1) round/level additional, +ten percent (10%), ten percent (10%) of protection skill additional to dodge

“Sounds like an old text adventure, kid,” Breaker said as he stretched. “My brother would have loved that.”

“Yeah?” Hunter glanced over from across the room as he warmed up as well. “What are those?”

“Old computer games he used to play. We never had a nice computer growing up, but he had this janky old machine with a tape deck up in our room. The game would type stuff at you, and you’d type back. Sounded exactly like that, too. ‘It is night. There is a vampire in the road. There is a stake on the ground,’ and you’d have to type in ‘get stake. stab vampire,’ really quick or you’d die.”

“Huh, weird,” he replied, summoning his staff and giving it a few practice swings. “You never talk about him much.”

“Try not to. He was a good kid. Got in over his head. Sure, we all did, but it was different with Mark.”

“Umm, do you mind, how?”

“Just do me a favor, kid. Don’t trust any new tricks you’ve got until you figure them out all the way. Marky was really good with tech, almost as good as Walker, if you can believe it. Taught me and your uncle everything we know about it, just about. He wanted a little extra oomph, though. Ernie had his magic, I’m a fighter, Walker’s a sneak, so he thought he’d branch out, too. Got himself a patron, said we made a real life adventuring party.”

“This was a while ago?”

“Yeah, you never met him, did you. Must have been oh-four or so. Anyway, we didn’t know enough back then to be careful, and even if we did who knows if we would have been. He got himself a patron, and it was a bad one, maybe not bad for some people, but bad for Mark. Long story short, it didn’t do what he wanted, he couldn’t do what it wanted, and things got pretty messed up until we lost him.”

“Gosh, Breaker,” Hunter mumbled. “I’m sorry, I’ll be careful.”

They sparred for a while, at a much slower pace than Hunter was usually capable of, because he couldn’t turtle up and counterattack to learn staff fighting. It was all sweeps, lunges and chops, with his defensive art toggled off. After a good, dedicated hour or so of practice that almost maxed his skill, the teen meditating back vigor the entire time, Breaker had to go to take care of other things.

“You know,” he said on his way out, “you’re kind of a natural at this. Must be the Hallahan genes.”

“That or all the Hallahan practice. I got this talent that, you know.”

“That what?”

“Makes me, umm, better at everything while I’m doing my mom’s exercises.”

“Everything? And you’re not doing them all the time, like when you got that meditating talent?” Breaker asked with one of his loud chuckles.

“Breaker, you’re a genius!”

Before he could try his new idea, however, Hunter had another tech “lesson” to go to, and somehow this one went worse than the first one. After at least an hour of tinkering with the pieces he’d taken apart, one of Ernie’s reference notebooks in his lap, he was no closer to even identifying anything, let alone working on it. Then, Pete must have gotten annoyed with him sitting there and grumbling, because he interrupted.

“Look, kid,” he said as he walked over. “It’s just a crystal charge tester. You’ve studied essence physics, Ernie said. You can do a phase diagram?”

“I’ve heard of them? I guess? I’m starting to think Mom’s theory books weren’t very detailed.”

“Here, I’ll send you what it’s supposed to look like, then you just put it together. That ought to work the skill,” Pete said, and then messaged him in Infra.

When Hunter looked at it, he threw up. Not immediately, there were a few queasy moments where the three-dimensional no gotta be four or five display shifted back and forth in his Infra screen and he desperately grabbed for the nearby trash can. He was still retching, bent over, when Ernie came in.

“Hey, Walker, come on man. What’d you do to the kid?”

“I just showed him the phase map for the charger I’ve got him working on, that’s all.”

“Too many colors,” Hunter moaned, trying to close the window in his Infra without looking at it and failing, then threw up into the can again.

“Hey, buddy,” Ernie said as he walked over, lightly patting Hunter’s back. “You gonna be ok there?”

“No,” Hunter spit as he talked, still hovering over the can. “Never gonna be ok again, Uncle Ernie.”

“Pete, send me that diagram? What could have gone wrong?”

“Got some ideas, but the kid’s not going to like them.”

“I want my mom.”

“So, this is pretty basic,” Ernie muttered to himself, glancing between Hunter and the pile of parts on the counter next to him. “What’s the problem, I wonder.”

After a quick, quiet conversation that Hunter couldn’t hear over his ears ringing, the two men convinced Trips to take the can out, far away, Ernie got Hunter cleaned up a little, and they sat him down on a chair, facing a whiteboard they’d set up. Pete spent a few minutes drawing on it, something that started relatively easy for Hunter to follow, then immediately became complicated after, with arrows and loops and asterisks leading to footnotes.

“Alright,” Pete said, gesturing to the board. “Here’s the crystallized essence. These lines are the pathways to the test lights. I’ve drawn a red circuit loop for each light, even though technically they’re all on the same line. Anything that’s the same color as a similar shape is a multiphasic pathway, got it?”

“Umm,” Hunter mumbled.

“The blue lines are the stabilizer pathways. They ground the essence that comes out of the crystal. Very important, don’t want to get blown up.”

“Ok, important. They’re the same shape though?”

“Right, which is why I marked the spin cadence of each individual pathway down at the bottom. That’s beginner level fundamental math, if I’m not mistaken. If you ever want to build anything, you’ll have to have the cadence integrations practically memorized.”

“Right, those, umm, integers.”

“Hey, kid,” Ernie said and squatted down next to him, pointing at a specific place on the board. “Say you put it together like that and turned it on. Where’s the essence going to go?”

“Left?” Hunter basically guessed. “Or, on the green?”

“Honestly,” Pete said, “the fact he managed to get even double digits in a tech skill is a mystery, Ernie. Kid doesn’t have the knack for it at all. Like, one bit.”

“Hey. But, robots? Umm, that’s not fair,” Hunter mumbled, practically to himself.

“He does like robots,” his uncle said, shaking his head. “You wanna see something weird, though, Walker?”

“Sure, weird’s good.”

Ernie turned to his nephew, put a hand on his shoulder, and said quietly, “You’ve seen Breaker’s gauntlets, right? What would you do if one of them got jammed?”

“Depends on the noise,” Hunter mumbled, rubbing at his temples. “If it’s a click-pop, he probably just got something stuck in the pistons, I guess? If it’s a whirr then stepping on gravel, he better toss em as far as he can. That’s the motor-thingy overcharging.”

“And how long did Jimmy let you mess around with those things?”

“Half hour maybe?”

“What a waste,” muttered Pete. “Got the macro down just fine, but the micro makes him puke. Can’t win em all, I guess.”

Ernie sat with Hunter while he recovered, and then for a while afterward, trying to console him.

“So, kid,” he started, “did you know most people only wind up unlocking two base skills, at most? You can get by on your primary and your levels, and plenty of people do it.”

“I’ve done three, huh,” Hunter replied with a frown. “That’s pretty good, I guess.”

“It’s really good. Besides, did you really expect you’d be good at everything I had you try?”

“Oh, umm,” he blushed as he spoke softly. “I guess not, huh. I thought it was all like, basic stuff though?”

“Right, but it’s basic reality-bending stuff, kid. It was completely worth trying, but I don’t think that not managing to do all of it really says anything about you.”

“So, umm, can I ask a question?”

“Well, yeah. Anything. That’s why you’re out here, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Hunter chuckled. “So I’ve been trying to cast cycling and sparkle for a while now, and the skills are going up, but nothing’s really happening. Does that mean I can’t do magic, either?”

“Not really, not exactly. Like, you know how you had to max a skill before you unlocked your style or your general?”

“Yeah, but then patron unlocked just by gaining the skills.”

“Right. Affinity and Infratech are a lot closer to the middle of that spectrum. They’d unlock when the skills really click with you, somewhere in between one and a hundred.”

“Ok, so,” Hunter trailed off for a moment before continuing, “I’ve got an idea. I was going to do it later, but can you watch, just in case? You know, umm, if anything goes wrong?”

“I sure can, as soon as you feel up to it.”

They just sat for a while together, the teen slowly getting his bearings, his uncle watching carefully. Finally, Hunter got up from his seat and pushed it out of the way, giving him enough room to do at least the smallest of his forms. Then, just to be sure, he checked the wording on a couple things in Infra.

Meditation: 102/200 Letting yourself be one with the circle of essence that runs through you and the rest of existence. (spirit) (toggle) +resource recovery, +recent skill gains [Family Tradition] Uncommon. You are the recipient of archaic combat knowledge handed down from a family member. +ten percent (10%) to all skill ratings while performing your inherited combat style (synergy)

He toggled on meditation, reflecting on how different that process was to before he was sixteen, when he actually had to sit and try to do it, then started his favorite, minimalist exercises. When his hands came together while doing oof my stomach, he really let his mind go, trying once more to cast the simplest affinity exercise, his cycling spell. There was affinity in him, twenty-three whole points of it, he knew because Infra said so, and because Wisp was happy to take it from him when he practiced his patron skills, even if he barely felt anything when he cast them.

Well, he thought, barely is better than nothing, and then cast A Light to Follow, concentrating on whatever sensation there was from his affinity leaving his body or my space manifold or whatever. Then, he really tried to focus on just feeling, closing his eyes, ignoring the sounds of the room, only paying attention to his body as he moved from position to position and trying to fully utilize the boost in awareness. He cast Flickering Form next, all the while attempting to cycle his essence, and he could immediately feel the extra ease of movement but not much else.

Hunter continued to move and to try, tamping down every emotion that dared to peek out of his meditative trance. He refused to be frustrated, to despair, to grow bored. He was calm, everything else drained away, just a perfectly placid river, the surface smooth and cool, while underneath he barely moved. He could almost imagine the feeling of his feet dipping into the river at home, the lazy current swirling around them, gentle and refreshing.

Then he felt the same feeling in his hands oh, and soon his arms and legs, everything perfectly relaxed as he moved, slow and powerful there it is. It was only when the sensation encompassed his entire body that he could tell it wasn’t inside him, nor was it outside. The cool, relaxing presence of the water was in another of those unfathomable Infra directions, but he could still track it as it cycled its way through him.

He stopped moving after an uncertain period of time, his dodge boost gone but awareness still up, and smiled over at Ernie when he noticed he had notifications.

“Hey, I think I got it.”

You have unlocked your Affinity base skill into [Water Affinity]!

You have earned one (1) achievement! [Four-fold Path] You have unlocked four (4) base skills. [INVALID] upgraded to [INVALID], more [INVALID] options available

“Oh no,” he mumbled invalid invalid invalid. “Ernie, I think I may have, umm, screwed something up.”

“I’ll get another trash can, hold on, kid.”

You have an incoming Transversal Message from [Overlord Crushes-Valiant].

What in the fsshsh krrrrrr shhhvv [untranslatable] seventh level of [Floating-Creative]’s trials is this? Please wait, I will fix whatever it is in a moment.

[Crushes-Valiant] is summoning you. Maintain a safe distance from other sapients and secure your loose belongings. 5… 4… 3…

Hunter quickly moved to the center of the room, waved off his uncle, said as fast as he could, “I gotta go I’ll be right back if I-” and vanished.