Alex stood just on the edge of the tree line north of Scottstown. He’d gotten up early, so it was still pre-dawn. He cast Radio 50 feet away to fuel the Parrot and draw it away from him, then he cast Parrot passing in the Radio’s mana output as the Parrot’s mana input and the Pigeon for DrainHP followed by the Pigeon for ThrottleHPDrain.

The effects were … less than spectacular.

He could see, slightly glowing, a wisp which indicated Radio’s terminal point just inside the treeline bobbing up and down. Then he completed the cast for Parrot and a beautiful red-breasted pygmy parrot appeared mid-air in front of his pointing hand and immediately flopped to the ground where its upper-facing eye stared balefully at Alex as it began to try to drag itself along the ground towards the wisp.

Alex face-palmed.

Well, now I’ve got a … limpness … problem. Maybe an energy issue? A problem getting it up? Regardless, I’m somewhat embarrassed. I knew after that session with Victoria that Polly needed a bit more energy but I didn’t feed it to her spell when I cast it just now. It looks like it’ll take her till next week before she makes it to the wisp – but when she gets there, she’s highly likely to explode.

I’m not carrying a limp parrot package of nitroglycerin 50 feet when it could drop at any time.

However, I have no clue how to stop a spell before it’s cast.

Alex stood there, uncomfortably considering what to do as Polly continued to balefully glare at him and drag herself ever so slightly nearer to her goal. Her wings were now spread, dangling awkwardly behind her as her claws pulled her bottom-first towards the treeline.

Okay, if I get outside of 50 feet, the connection to the Radio wisp will diffuse and that spell will disperse, according to my conversation with Victoria earlier. While I won’t suffer any backlash from that spell, Polly will either explode, give me backlash for not tying in the input correctly, or … something else. The worst-case scenario is exploding, so I want to be far away from Polly before getting too far from the wisp.

So, Alex walked away from his poor, pooped Parrot and in a line closer to his wisp, heading towards his left and the tree line. Once he got to the tree line, he was further from Polly than from the wisp. So, considering himself relatively safe he turned left and continued along the tree line.

A short time later, he exited the radius around the Radio wisp where he could maintain his connection and it fizzled out, slowly losing its luminescence until it disappeared completely. A moment later, Alex heard a “squawk” and, almost instantly, was bowled off his feet as the force of an explosion knocked him forwards. Getting up, he looked back towards where Polly had blown up and saw a wide crater in the soft earth of the field as well as a circle of flattened plants.

He stood and made his way back, wondering at the energy that came from such a tiny spell cast.

No fucking wonder that people consider spell-creation an insane person’s habit. It’s astounding that there have even been enough people successful enough to make a skill of the knowledge they had. I mean – boom. No more mage, right?

A few seconds later and one of the night guards came around the West side of the city. She asked, “Everything okay over here? What caused the explosion?” to which Alex replied “Ah … I’m trying out a new spell. I had a mistake in it and … well, it blew up.”

Her eyebrows rose up, which Alex could barely see due to the lack of light, but she replied “Maybe take it a little bit further west? Over that hill is a small gully which should muffle some of the sounds so that you don’t wake anyone up?”

“Yeah, sorry. I genuinely didn’t know the blast would be that bad or I’d have gone further. I’ll head past the gully so that the embankment on the other side can turn back the sound but it won’t escape down the dip closer to town.”

Great, the guard thought, It turns out that spending time with Victoria did turn this one a little bit crazy. It’s a good thing that we know. I’ll be able to warn others off from the nut-job. Sex and children are one thing, getting blown up is another altogether. Poor Erin. Hopefully, he’ll leave so that she’ll survive.

So, Alex headed out a few hundred yards over the small gully and past the rise on the other side where he found himself still inside a field and positioned himself a hundred feet away from the treeline.

This time, I’ll use two Radios chained together so that I can hopefully keep from being bowled over by the blast when Polly inevitably gets her cracker. Oh, god. That’s the worst pun I’ve ever made.

Alex winced, then started casting. With one Radio set up 50 feet away, he then tried to place the next one 100 feet away, but the spell backfired and gave him a minor headache.

Apparently, 50 feet is also the initial casting range, Alex thought as he walked to the first wisp and re-cast the second one. Now with two wisps, Alex jogged back to his original distance and considered Parrot.

With Polly costing 10 mana just to create, I’ll over-pump her and give her 50 additional mana. Surely that will be enough to give her the energy to at least hop over there instead of … limping her way over.

So, Alex cast Parrot, passing in the input of the further wisp and the Pigeon of the health debuff pair of spells. Polly appeared directly in front of his hand and flapped madly, flying far faster than she should have been able to from a standstill, crossing the entire 100 feet in 4 seconds and blasting Alex with a puff of wind as she left.

She settled down on the ground just below the wisp and began chanting the Xigun for the spells. Alex listened carefully and heard that she made it all the way through the DrainHP spell before he saw parts of her start to dissipate and, then, she exploded only partially through the ThrottleHPDrain spell. Alex felt the blast front pass him and the noise was much louder than previously, but that just meant that the town was probably not able to hear him anymore.

Well, it seems like it’s going to be a long morning, Alex thought, but at least I’ve got a head start on where the bugs are – the interaction between the two spells is probably at fault because the first spell completed without an explosion.

Trial and error, here we come. Sorry, Polly.

What’s that make? 21? Yeah, 21.

“Well, Polly,” Alex said to the dissipating remains of his 21st attempt to remotely cast his HP drain debuff, “It seems like all the bugs are out because you’re not exploding anymore but you still basically instantly die. I wonder: why?” He chugged another mana potion to keep his pool full as he considered.

Alex face-palmed.

Of course, the spell construct doesn’t have any health. I can probably successfully cast the mana drain spell with Parrot, but not the other two.

So, attempt number 22 began. The first few explosions, 12 of them, were due to a couple of bugs that Alex let slip through the cracks as he attempted to connect the disparate pieces of Pigeon he’d tried to chain together.

Luckily, his Spell Language rose to 5 off the backs of his increased understanding and a couple of levels in Spell Language Dictionary due to his increased knowledge about connecting inputs with storage locations using specific glyphs. These combined increases of knowledge allowed him to correct all the bugs and stop Parrot from exploding.

The last 9 failures, though, were Polly just appearing, chanting the spell, and instantly starting to dissipate as different parts of her body would be consumed. The part that worried Alex was that each time the parrot would roll around and scratch at her head as she died – he was pretty sure she was suffering from backlash from casting a spell incorrectly, but he couldn’t figure out what was wrong until just now.

So, reasonably confident that finally it’d work, Alex cast Parrot passing it the updated Pigeon for the mana drain debuff and ensuring that he gave Polly a few extra points of mana to have a pool beyond what she required to be mobile; he’d discovered 15 mana was enough for Polly to fly and chant at a reasonable speed, vastly lowering his cost to cast.

This time, after arriving at the further wisp, Polly chanted both spells then just stood there. Eventually, she disappeared in a plume of smoke.

Alex did a little victory dance for his first relatively successful cast of the paired new debuff spells. Now, at least, he knew he wouldn’t get killed by a volatile puff of feathered cuteness. Well, at least he wouldn’t be killed today by Polly. She certainly looked like she wanted vengeance the first few times he under-powered her spell.

I’ll have to set the casting cost of the spell to 15 so that no one gets eaten by their spell research. Heh. “Yes, Miss Smith, Tommy really did get eaten by his spell research parrot and, as such, will not be turning in his homework – or returning to class.” What an excuse!

So, Alex cast the combined spells through Polly directly next to him and kept the mana input open so that he could examine the DrainMP spell form on Polly. Victoria told him that such forms should slightly glow when active, just like spell forms cast in mid-air.

After Polly finished chanting the DrainMP spell form, it immediately disappeared. It was gone before she even finished the first syllable for the ThrottleMPDrain cast. Alex thought about this as he fed just 1 mana into the input for the spell so that Polly could finish the spell and not have spell backlash.

… and he face-palmed again.

The DrainMP spell doesn’t receive any input while Polly casts the ThrottleMPDrain spell, so it dissipates immediately. I’ll have to put a short delay in so that the spell doesn’t check until enough time has passed to call the throttling spell.

With that, Alex quickly made his final adjustment and had Polly cast the paired spells at 100 feet, then examined her by casting it a second time directly and found everything to appear to be working. Not only would the spell continue to drain as he fed her, but it deactivated appropriately too when he stopped providing mana through the input which had effectively acted as mana regeneration for Polly.

So, he finished modifying the other two versions of the spell forms and defined all seven spells using Xigun’s definition form, giving them the names he’d already decided upon. Now, he could easily cast the 6 spells he needed to maximize growth of his base stats.

So, he immediately cast the HP drain version.

His HP fell immediately. He lost 10 HP and both spells faded out of existence.

Well … apparently 1 MP = 10 HP when using a draining effect on yourself. Also, I definitely need to pass far smaller portions of MP to the Drain spells or I’ll never get the granularity I want.

So, Alex made the change to his spells so that it would try to pass 0.001 mana at a minimum per tick which he remembered was a single millisecond. He redefined the spells and, just in case, had Polly cast the mana drain both remotely and up close again before he went ahead.

With his new spells, he found that his HP drained immediately (well, faster than he could process) down to almost exactly the threshold that he wanted, then hovered there constantly. He checked his MP drain to see how much the spell was using … and found that he was actually still regaining MP from his MP regen.

So, he quickly took a potion for MP and got it up to maximum, then cast both the SP debuff and, once his MP regenerated, the MP debuff.

The birds had started singing long ago and he realized that it was getting bright enough to be considered the end of twilight so he headed back into town to start identifying everything he could see.

He had a quick breakfast with Erin, where she talked some more about her past and Alex mainly listened. He liked getting to know her more deeply, though he knew that she’d remain here when he adventured outside the city.

Eventually, I’ll have to find someone else to … hold off the goddesses’ spell. Before I leave the city, but after I’ve gotten a bit more of a handle on a sustainable lifestyle. I can just barely generate enough potions to be able to earn some cash – wait, I haven’t actually asked – bah, I can do the math myself:

75 potions in 5 hours at 5 small copper each. That’s 375 small copper for an afternoon’s work if I can sell all the potions. That’s a whole week of rent paid at the inn if I gather all the herbs myself. There would even be some extra left over afterward. I’m definitely going to have to talk to Mother Edith about how much the herbs cost and see if I can start getting paid tomorrow.

I should pay Erin back for the Inn before … 3 more days? … something like that. Anyway, the day after tomorrow I can pay off most of it if the herbs don’t cost too much. As for the 5 small silver from Mother Edith for my second pair of clothes, that will take me just two of those sessions, if the overhead isn’t too bad.

So … if overhead isn’t too bad, then I’ve gotten a fair start to supporting myself for the future financially. Well, at least for room and board. With that, I’ve got to get a good start on defending myself from monsters, and a bunch more spells, then I’ll feel like I can head off in relative safety.

So, he spoke with Erin about the cost of various things and found that generally speaking, real property cost the most money. Food was ridiculously cheap because people could set up a farm and grow their own food literally overnight if prices rose too high. Similarly, almost everything that was renewable was relatively cheap.

The economy was based more around second-tier, or above, production. Sure, anyone could work for a while and grow a literal field of turnips in a week or so – but then they’d also have to learn a cooking skill to be able to make decent food from the turnips. And that second level added just enough inconvenience that processed items formed the foundation for the economy.

His shirt and pants, which on Earth might cost just as much as 2 meals, cost around 45 meals here on Marin. A good weapon without any enchantments might cost 10-12 large gold … which was a shit-ton of meals, but not nearly so many pairs of clothes as a weapon would be worth on Earth. Land, when it could be bought, would go for many large elementium.

On the other hand, prices for these kinds of things varied widely from what you’d find on Earth. That good weapon was about the same cost as a horse-drawn cart would fetch. You could also buy a pretty good set of cookware for camping – a deep pan, a bowl and plate, a spoon and small knife, as well as an enchanted heat stone for the same 10 large gold.

Prices just weren’t what an earthling would expect. But it made sense on Marin because the only value here, really, was the time required to produce a good. If it took a person a shorter amount of time to learn the skill and level it up to the point where they could produce an item than it took them to earn the money to buy the item, they could just bypass a merchant entirely.

So, Alex was glad, finally, that Phoebe placed him near Scottstown. Here he could buy food for ridiculously cheap prices because the woman who farmed was so high level that she provided all the plants for the town single-handedly and the Wardens killed enough game while scouting to maintain an excess there as well.

Sighing, Alex got up to start the day. While their conversation had been fun and enlightening, he had work to do.

Alex had visited two weapon-smiths, three armorers, a scribe who made paper and ink, two scribes who specialized in making spell scrolls, a couple of clothiers, a woodworker, and even a small library that the town had invested in to help educate the children.

On his trip, he ran into quite a few idle villagers and began to realize that people would have vastly more free time once they had a skill up to a high enough level that they could make a living. Their skill would only grow in that area, giving them more and more of an edge over any possible competition but they, themselves, would have to spend noticeably less time producing quality goods as they grew stronger.

Most of the adults in the town were basically idle for the vast majority of the day. They whiled away the hours learning new skills, visiting, or simply entertaining by playing games and eating.

The owners of shops and the Wardens were notable exceptions. They all worked regularly to keep up with the high demand placed upon their services by the majority of the folks who didn’t contribute nearly as much day-to-day value as these hard workers.

Not only did he receive enough experience to get his Identify ability up to level 25, and his Identify skill up to level 13, but he learned a very important detail about Marin’s society: very few people worked hard when given the gift of knowledge from the system. Instead, they seemed to find an equilibrium where they had to do a minimal amount of work to satisfy their desires … then they totally quit trying to improve themselves.

He had wondered how the highest level in the village could only be in the 20s … and now he had a pretty good idea: either they couldn’t find the right quality of support or items to progress, or they stopped altogether to enjoy life instead of gathering strength.

Some of this – hell, most of this – might be because of the goddesses’ spell, Alex thought, as he entered the Wardens’ building with his lunch. With such a high sex-drive and small proportion of the population, the men of Marin are almost completely sequestered away into villages and towns. The population is trying to produce enough males to continue the next generation which rewards women who try to get pregnant at every possible opportunity.

Then, due to the increase in production from skills fed by self-renewing mana, not many workers are needed to actually support a large population. So people are rewarded for being in a town far more than they are for going out and trying to tame the problems that are cropping up across their world.

They’ve got a large potential production and safety increase if they managed their time better, but convincing people that there’s a problem and that they would be better off risking themselves to try to fix it could be a real challenge.

Alex shifted gears as he sat at a table with Sam, the Wardens’ leader, and Helen, their tactician and began to eat his lunch. He showed them the effects he’d achieved yesterday with his rough scripts and found a quick visual alarm to plug into the interface – as each timer expired, a small bell would appear in the upper-left of the person’s vision. One could think alarm and a window would appear with text the user had entered earlier to remind them what the alarm was for.

They tried out different kinds of interface changes and eventually built up a few scripts which would allow multiple alarms to run at the same time while consolidating all alerts under the one image of a bell. A summary text would be shown beside the bell when an alarm went off so that the user need not open up the full text if they were in a critical situation.

Alex hadn’t figured out how to use sound yet, so the alarm was purely visual.

The ladies were excited nonetheless and happily gave him 10 small silver. Alex’s jaw dropped.

“This is too much!”

Sam replied, “I feel bad just paying you this much. This is going to make our parties’ cohesion skyrocket and there’s really not a high enough price for such a thing. We would have happily paid platinum for this if it came from a caravan merchant. If you can figure out how to add sound to the alerts, the Wardens will pay you 10 more small silver.”

“Besides, having just one decent pair of clothes, it must be a pain to keep clean. Get yourself a good pair of boots and a second pair of clothes – you should have about 2 silver left to have some fun with!”

“Thanks, Sam!” Alex said as he hopped up and came around the table to give her a huge hug. He hugged Helen next and then plopped down in his chair again. Though Alex didn’t notice, Helen blushed fully pink from the contact and turned her head away from him so that her hair would hide her face.

“About the rat dungeon,” Alex segued, “What should I expect?”

“Oh, it’s just a single level dungeon,” Sam replied, “No one’s ever met the hidden condition to unlock the lower levels so all you’ll run into are various numbers of level 1 rats. To get there, exit the West Gate, then head North around town. Follow the first gravel path you see, and you’ll arrive at the entrance.”

“Once you get inside, the entrance room has a single hall leading away from it directly opposite you. On your left and right will be five dead-end rooms before the first turn in the path. These rooms have between one and three rats in each room. I’d recommend you kill these until you get at least to level 5. That will give you a bit of a health boost from your natural regeneration raising your base stats.”

“Make sure you’ve got at least 250 health before you go any further. Also, make sure you’ve got tons of health potions.”

Sam paused and looked at him to make sure he’d heard her so Alex nodded and repeated: “At least 250 health and tons of HP potions before going past the turn.” Sam nodded back.

“It’s rare, but people do sometimes die inside the dungeon. It’s just got masses of rats, but the damage adds up and you can find yourself overwhelmed pretty quickly without armor or the right amount of potions. Make sure you kill all but one of the rats in the first rooms and let the last one chew on you a bit before you progress as well. You need to be ready for the pain and to understand how much damage they can do when they get to you.”

“After the first turn, the dungeon becomes a massive spiral curl to the right. The floor stays pretty even, but rooms filled with anywhere between 10 and 30 rats will be along the path. They all dead-end off of the single path forward and there’s no boss monster. It’s just tons and tons and tons of rats.”

Alex replied “That second portion really ramps up in difficulty. From a minimum of twice as many rats as you’d previously fought to a maximum of six times as many. And the first room could contain six times as many with no warning. Ouch.”

Helen agreed, “Dungeons are a great place to train up skills because the monsters continually respawn giving you an always-available opportunity to be practicing, but they are all dangerous. Some of the Warden’s texts suggest that before the goddesses’ spell and whatever then affected the dungeons, some people had communicated with dungeon cores and discovered that the dungeons were alive and earned their mana from the deaths of those who fell in the dungeon.”

“A dungeon core?”, Alex interjected.

“Ah, at the end of every dungeon, there’s a crystal like the monster cores that occasionally drop from monsters. It’s far bigger than your average monster core: typically large enough that it could barely fit in your hand. If someone takes a dungeon core from the dungeon, the dungeon dies. Whether or not the dungeon core is alive, I’m not sure. Our local dungeons are far too dangerous past the first level for anyone to try to defeat them.”

“I’m inclined to believe that the dungeons are alive though. It would explain what happened after the goddesses’ spell – some sickness spread and affected large numbers of dungeons. The rat dungeon, notably, probably wasn’t affected because whatever sickness couldn’t get past the first floor of the dungeon to the dungeon core where it could cause problems.”

“Regardless, make sure you take plenty of potions. Going through 10, or even 20, potions for each of health, mana, and stamina isn’t uncommon for people pushing through a dungeon for the first time.”

Alex blushed then saying, “I actually don’t have any potions. I kept making them, then selling them immediately to Mother Edith until the rush started on potions yesterday. I had kept a few of my best mana potions for myself, but I ran through them this morning. Then, I didn’t make any more since we talked about entering the dungeon.”

“Ah,” Sam said, “don’t worry about it this time. We’ve got a number of old potions kept for emergencies that are about to go bad. They won’t have lasted another 3 days, but it’s unlikely that an emergency will pop up with the slimes killing everything on the south side of town. I’ll go get you 20 of each of the basic potions.”

“Uh, when can I pay you back?”, Alex replied. Sam tsk’d and said, “You can donate the next emergency supply after you get to level 10.”

So, Alex and Helen sat and chatted about the people he’d met in town and how his first few days had gone. When Helen asked how he'd used his mana potions this morning, he explained about the Parrot explosions and Helen got to laughing pretty hard and attracted quite a bit of attention. Before Sam returned, Alex had recounted parts of the story three times and had most of the Wardens present for lunch in hysterics.

Polly was now infamous and Alex eventually caved and cast a Blade through Polly so that everyone could see her. He got quite a bit of appreciation for her colors and how cute she was due to her tiny size. When she spoke everyone reacted differently, but the shock was apparent as gasps and laughter rang out.

Sam had returned by this time and handed Alex a small belt. It had 6 potions accessible in small tight pouches that would make them easy to reach and draw out. There was a second, large, pouch on the side and a third pouch with a cover on the other side. Sam demonstrated that you could remove one of the six potions from the pouches on the front and another of the same type would instantly appear in the same slot. The empty potion bottles and cork caps could be dropped into the lidless pouch and would be moved from there to inside the pouch with the cover.

The covered pouch held the remainder of the 60 potions even though it appeared far larger on the inside than it was on the outside. When Sam dropped an empty vial and cork she’d brought along for this purpose into the empty pouch, they appeared in the covered pouch in one of the slots on the side, the cork in the vial. Nothing would be broken and you’d always have access to all your potions using this bag.

“Wow,” said Alex, “This has got to be worth a lot of money. How can I pay you back?”

Sam and Helen both giggled a bit, then Helen replied, “They’re very common drops from monsters. You could find a 100 slot belt in the rat dungeon on a bad day pretty easily. That one is probably just one of the ones we keep for training purposes for new Wardens, right Sam?”

“Definitely. Don’t worry about paying for it, just give it back sometime over the next few days once you get a better one from the rats.”

“Thanks!”, Alex replied.

So, Alex left to the sounds of laughter and his exploits from just this morning being retold to new passersby … Helen and Victoria both watched from different points inside the common room as he left, each hoping for his success for different reasons.

Alex's current status: Spoiler Name Alexander Carpenter Level 5 Title Health 234 Mana 238 Stamina 234 Constitution 11 Intelligence 12 Endurance 11 HP regen 1.53 MP regen 2.39 SP regen 1.53 Vitality 12 Wisdom 15 Metabolism 12 Skill Level Cartography 1 Force spells 1 Healing spells 1 Herbalism 1 Interface 1 Language Basics 1 Potions 10 Reading 1 Spell language 5 Survivalist 1 Identify 13 Ability Governing skill Level Mapping Cartography 1 Map Cartography 1 Blade Force spells 1 Push Force spells 1 Heal Healing spells 1 Detect herbs Herbalism 1 Spell language dictionary Spell language 3 Detect water Survivalist 1 Identify Identify 25 Healthy ingredients Potions 4