As the kid moved back over towards the SMITHING area to craft his arrowheads, I handed him a bronze ingot and asked, “Could you get the Arcepti to teach you to make some buckles? If you don’t mind working on some fiddly bits, anyway. I figure we might need something better than these ropes for belts, and maybe something a little better than these homespun excuses for shoes.” We both looked down at our footcoverings which were little more than tatters around our ankles at this point, after our mad dash through the woods. Thankfully, the ground inside and outside the CRAFTING area was either grass or thick with fallen leaves. The MINING area had been the only rocky part, so far, and thankfully our “shoes” had been in like-new condition for that. Sure, they’d renew once we slept—as they had for me inside the mine—but between now and then, they were pretty shot.

“Sure, I can do that. I’m one SKILL ahead of you, so maybe it’ll eat up the time that you’ll take in WOODWORKING so that we can do TAILORING together.” He gave me that mischievous grin I was starting to recognize and added, “we always have such a calm, relaxing time together, after all.”

I chuckled and moved on towards the WOODWORKING area. The trainer there was an Elf like the two guys we’d trained with, who were somehow different than the Elf girl, I figured, since I never saw them talking with each other. Maybe there was some kind of racism going on with them, like had plagued our own Human society for so long, maybe they were the same, but they thought they weren’t. Who knows? I wasn’t going to ask. Well, I wasn’t going to ask them anyway. I might pick it up in some other, less confrontational, way.

“Welcome to the WOODWORKING SKILL training area!” He greeted me. He was taller than me, which wasn’t hard, by a good head and shoulders. It would have been intimidating if I had let my lack of stature intimidate me, but I’d gotten over that in grade school. Besides, the elves were the tallest of all the races I’d seen so far, other than the Orcs.

“Go ahead and grab an axe and head over to that stand of saplings on the edge of the clearing,” he indicated the area where I’d seen the gnome guy chopping when I’d first arrived in the clearing what seemed like a lifetime ago. I wasn’t surprised not to see any stumps, I figured that the resources in a BEGINNER TUTORIAL must automatically refresh or they’d have to keep moving pretty regularly. Even as I thought it, a third group of trainees were moving into the area, a couple of the elf-looking ones like the trainer making a bee-line towards us.

When those two—a man and a woman—arrived, he continued his spiel. “Good to see you here. I know that the two of you, at least, already have many of the SKILLs that this section requires, but as you’ll learn, no matter what SKILLS or ABILITIES you had before, they must be recognized by the SCHEMA system before they’re official. It will take someone who has—had—the SKILLs less time, but it still must be done.

“We’ll start with the BASIC WOODSMAN ABILITY.” He didn’t blink an eye at the apparent sexism of the ABILITY’s name. I guess SCEMA wasn’t going to be politically correct. I didn’t know how I felt about that, but I also didn’t feel like taking on that particular war on my own. It wasn’t mine to take on, anyway. If the Elf woman wanted to speak up, I’d support her, but this wasn’t a man’s fight, it was a woman’s. If, as they claimed, and as I’d seen enough evidence of for my own personal satisfaction, they were able to handle anything a man could handle, then she didn’t need my help, anyway. I’d give support, but the fighting would be up to her.

She didn’t speak up, and he continued as if he hadn’t expected anything else. “Of course, there is much, much more involved if you choose WOODSMAN as a CLASS, but we’re only going for the BASIC ABILITY as it is a prerequisite for the WOODWORKING SKILL. I know you,” with a nod in my direction, “have already acquired HUNTING and GATHERING as part of your COOKING SKILL, so even if you don’t have any prior experience working with wood, that will help you more quickly gain the WOODSMAN ABILITY.

“So, as I was telling Tom, here, if everyone would take an axe and chop down three of those good-sized saplings over there, we can get this all started.”

Then, as the others moved quickly and confidently to comply, he added, looking directly at me, “Try and choose the straightest ones you can; it will make the rough MILLING that much easier. You need to get two ABILITIES: WOODSMAN and MILLER before you can earn the WOODWORKING SKILL. If you have any questions, ask me, but I’m sure my fellow Forest Shee (I learned later this was written Sidhe, go figure) will be happy to point out some good examples for you.”

I knew a dismissal when I heard one, so I grabbed up an axe and moved over towards the stand of saplings. I stopped a short way off from where the other two Sidhe were already chopping away and studied their choices. I saw right away that they’d chosen sections that had several similar trees to the ones they were working on and spotted one that looked pretty close that I would get started on.

Chopping wood is chopping wood. I hadn’t done a whole lot of it in my life, but I’d done enough in Scouts and in the military that I pretty much had a good idea about how to chop a tree. It used slightly different muscles than swinging a pick, but the main ones were the same, so, even before I started on the third sapling, I heard the DING of the notification for my WOODSMAN ability. I’d seen how the others had quickly trimmed the small branches off, leaving just the tapering cores of the trees themselves, so I moved on to that without needing to be told.

Apparently, I wasn’t going to get any more STRENGTH points, since this was probably the most muscle-intensive part of the SKILL. I’d probably maxed that out with everything that I’d already done. Maybe I’d add some other STAT points doing some of the other stuff, but I was starting to really see everyone’s point of those who had just earned one or two of the CRAFTING SKILLs and then moved on to where they could apply them and start leveling up.

When the kid and I had worked out that he was going to make some more arrowheads before we moved on, I’d agreed to make him some more arrow shafts as one of my projects. I also wanted to make a better sheath for the new knife I’d crafted for myself in the SMITHING section. I also wanted to craft some wooden soles for the boots I’d already started designing in my head. It was nice that while we didn’t have the required SKILLs or ABILITIES, we were imaginative enough to figure out what we wanted and in general how to go about getting it.

I already knew from what the kid told me from his own time in the WOODWORKING area that my thoughts of using the smaller branches for arrows was not doable. He told me that the trainer would show me how to split the saplings into sections and then trim them down for the shafts themselves. When I drug the last of my three sapling trunks back, I had to wait for the others to finish MILLING theirs. Since they already knew how to go about what they wanted to do, the trainer had lots of free time to help me plan out where I’d cut which piece and how to go about it.

“While you’re waiting,” he told me as soon as he’d helped me identify which trunks would work best for which of my planned applications, “Go on over to the creek where you got the clay for your partridges, and find a good smooth spot—you’ll probably need to smooth it out a bit more by hand—and put these shims around it like a picture frame. Make a good, deep footprint of your bare foot. Do one for each foot. Wet your feet real good before you do it so the clay won’t stick. Once you get that done, wave at me and I’ll come over and quick harden them so we can cut that section out for you to use to measure with. That’ll make the boot soles as comfortable as walking barefoot.”

It was amazing watching him hold a hand over the clay molds of my feet and seeing it harden slowly enough that they didn’t crack. When I cut the frames out, they were as hard as ceramic; I bet that if they’d had a POTTERY area, I could make the soles easier and quicker out of clay and they might even hold up just as well. Probably would, with magic.

The rest of the process was painstaking detail. After he’d shown me how to use a draw knife to de-bark the trunks, I split one of them into planks that I’d use for the sheath and the boot soles, and the other two into eighths that I’d whittle into the arrow shafts. Then, he taught me a spell to use to quick cure the wood so that it wouldn’t warp on us, later.

“You’ll want to buy this one as soon as you can if you expect to use this SKILL much when you go back. If you’ve got an extra year or two, depending on the type of wood, you can do it the natural way. The SKILL itself will let you know what you need to do. Your friend doesn’t have any magical abilities, so either he’s going to have to buy already cured wood, or do it that way. You can buy SPELLS through the SCEMA MARKET or learn it from a WOODSMAN as long as he’s reached MASTER rank in that SPELL. If you buy it, it shouldn’t be very expensive; I’m talking silvers, not anything near a gold, but it depends on your CHARISMA score,” He explained.

“Now, I grew up on a system planet,” he told me, “But I’ve talked to enough people to know how things worked before SCHEMA came along. None of this is going to be anything like how you had to do it. Without a lot of extra tools, jigs, and clamps, there’s not much chance of you being able to craft useable arrows. With SCHEMA, though, I’ve seen people take their eating knife and cut the branch off a tree and make arrows straight as can be while walking down the road.” If only!

SCHEMA seemed like its main goal was to smooth the way. I don’t know; I never believed in free gifts.

I used a set of calipers and straight edges to measure and then marked the outlines on all four sides, and then measured them again, and then had the trainer double check my first few attempts before I started my first cut. I used a coping saw to cut the negative spaces all around on every side, then a rasp, and finally different grits of sandpaper to smooth the finished shafts. The work wasn’t anything near fast, but it was absorbing, and before I knew it, I had a good quiver’s worth of shafts crafted.

I followed much the same steps, measuring and marking on the tops and sides of the planks I’d cut out for the boot soles. I’d cut all the negative space away, and hasped them down to a rough approximation, and was in the sanding phase of the process when I heard the DING that gave me my WOODWORKING SKILL.

That made crafting the knife sheath go that much faster, and when I’d got the two leaves for that finished and smoothed out, I looked up and saw that the kid had made it back from the SMITHING station and was notching the shafts for the fletching and the arrowheads. He’d have to shoot some birds for the feathers, but I could feel the knowledge of how to fit them in in the back of my own mind. I knew that FLETCHING was a separate ABILITY that would teach a person how to choose and cut the feathers to make the best arrows, but I could tell that if I had to, I knew at least enough on how to GATHER the right ingredients for a glue that would work and how to fit the feathers into the shaft.

Maybe SCHEMA was here to help?