Tilly's memories were... erratic, thoughts barely stood still for a second so he had to sit down for a while to get them in order. As it turns out that was a very efficient way of gathering information, everything she had said over dinner was accompanied by a whole host of other information that she didn't say. As it turns out there has been quite the power struggle between the bigger clans as of late, since the system arrived a lot of people had a big boost in power and that threw things off, a fair number of the big shots had been killed by the first monsters and a lot of the most powerful mages were busy holding back the monsters which left a gap in the leadership of some of the clans. The lack of communication technology too was holding a lot of this back as the only people capable of sending long-distance communication were air mages, all of which that were capable were high up on the clan leadership and as you can expect clans didn't want to tell each other about their weaknesses so a lot of the general public didn't know about it.

The only reason Tilly knew about it was that although she was a pretty strong geomancer, she was quite quirky. Even more so than usual for gnomes, which led to her being only brought in when the clan needed extra help with the monsters and it had been explained to her why she was needed and considering it hadn't been overpowered yet it was safe to assume that the situation was similar elsewhere. She had found out about the city as apparently some of the farmers and travellers that were far enough away hadn't been taken with the city and a lot had passed by her on their way to another town to tell them about it.

He had managed to piece together approximately what this world was like, there were 3 large land masses, The smallest being the size of Afro-Eurasia, the next largest was about 20% larger than the smallest and the largest was about twice the size of the smallest. The population of Gnomes was approximately 4 billion with the majority of them being on the smallest landmass and predominantly in extremely large cities, most of which had between 60-80 million gnomes and the larger ones having 100-200 million gnomes, with the use of magic the issue of feeding this many people was practically non-existent and construction was a simple affair between earth and metal mages. This meant that when the monsters arrived the areas that needed to be protected was much much smaller than on earth so they were able to hold them off. There were usually small towns springing up around cities, usually as places for gnomes that were either unusually anti-social or needed places to perform more dangerous magical experiments.

After sifting through those memories John decided to try out this new magic, it was an odd feeling, almost like having an arm that you've always had but had never noticed. He gestured with one of his hands whilst flexing this new invisible muscle and tried lifting as much rock as he could out of the floor, a ball about the size of a small car lifted out of the floor, leaving a sizeable hole but his mana was drained prodigiously, he managed to hold it in the air for about 10 seconds before his mana was almost completely drained and he filled the whole back in. In those 10 seconds, he had felt that the rock was almost like a ball of cold gum. He could have stretched and moulded it, split pieces off etc but it would take a fair amount of concentration and effort.

His next skill, however, was different, he didn't actually know any spells nor did he know how to figure out spells. His memories from Tilly also didn't help much as she didn't actually think about spells in the time he had gotten memories from and she had only used earth manipulation. He decided to search the house but it didn't appear that she had any books. From a few scraps of her memories he learns from her cursing about them internally mid-sentence, it seems that books on magic were for the most part controlled by the clans and it was rare for an individual to have any, he had been hopeful there might be one somewhere but unfortunately not. Deciding that he could figure this out at a later date he was pretty happy that earth manipulation was didn't need that.

Deciding to take inventory, John looked through what he had. He no longer had his rifle or shotgun, he had lost one of the flashlights but had found the baton and body armour in his room, the only food he had was the cat leg, he still had a bunch of police equipment and plenty of clothes though they would probably make him stand out more. He decided to shift into the form of Tilly as this house was clearly designed with someone of her stature in mind and it made it much more comfortable and while he figured to try out his ability to change his form. Looking into a full-length mirror in Tilly's room he found that he could change her hair colour to be slightly varied shades of pink, he could change his height and weight by a small amount and was capable of growing claws similar to in his Doppelgänger form but much shorter and not quite as sharp.

Notice Skill [Shift] has reached level 3

After the skill had reached level 3 he found that he could change things slightly more, he spent a while in front of the mirror shifting between forms and changing as much as he could about them.

Notice Skill [Shift] has reached level 4 Notice Skill [Shift] has reached level 5 Notice Skill [Shift] has reached level 6

He then proceeded to loot the house, he found a pouch that seemed to be full of inert crystals as well as a second one that was about half filled with full ones, both of which he put in his inventory. Inspect told him that each crystal held about 50 mana but he had no idea what that was worth in terms of trading goods, at the least he had about 500 mana in crystals if he was in a pinch, he put all of the softest furs into his inventory as well as a bunch of gnome sized clothes and since the sun was just starting to peak above the horizon and he still felt pretty rested he decided to look around outside. By the time he had reached level 6 his progression from this had grown to a crawl but he had managed to get to a point where he could change Tilly's hair from a bright pink to a more subdued red-brown colour and could subtly shift her features enough that whilst she looked like a relative of Tilly's any close inspection would uncover that she certainly wasn't the same gnome. Figuring this was good enough for the day as his stomach began to growl he made his way into the kitchen and gorged rooted through her food stores. The pickings were definitely not rich and his appetite had grown significantly since becoming a Doppelgänger so he pretty much demolished the entirety of the food that was in her stores including the leftovers from yesterday's meal. Still, he wasn't quite full but he figured it would do, for now. He didn't want to be completely without food. so he hadn't eaten the cat leg.