Niall thought fast. He had been in Gwilliant for less than a day. If he thought about it properly, he really did not know very much about Devon. Then again, the man had fought off an attacker and taken him into his home. His instincts were that Devon was a good man. If he couldn't trust Devon then who could he trust in this world?

“Honestly Pobble, I’ve known you for less time than I’ve known Devon and I’ve allowed you to take up residence in my mind. I’m going to go with my gut with this one.”

“That is why Pobble likes Niall so much. He is naïve and trusting. With an attitude like that, Pobble is looking forward to an exciting, albeit very short, time with Niall before he does something terminally foolish.”

“You know, I could quickly get quite annoyed with you.”

“Yet again, Niall is wrong. Pobble is always a delight to be around.”

Niall realised that Devon was stood next to him with a polite, but quizzical look on his face. He had been left without an answer while Niall had his mental exchange with Pobble. He winced. Ignoring questions and staring blankly into the middle distance was not the way to impress the man who had saved his life.

Niall cleared his throat before speaking. “OK. So, it’s like this. Basically, my shard already has the beginnings of a personality of their own.”

“Beginnings? Beginnings?”

“L’Mor didn’t seem too happy about it, but they couldn’t do anything about it once the decision had been made. As far as I can tell, they do the same job as yours in terms of processing Spirit – whatever that means – but I get a side helping of snark to go alongside it.”

Devon shook his head. “I have no idea how common having a sentient shard is, but I would urge you to be careful. Patrick spent a lot of time with the L’Fae and shared some of his thoughts about them with me. While they won’t outright lie to you, they have their own projects. What you hear is what they want you to hear.”

“That is exceptionally sound advice. Niall should listen to Devon.” Pobble’s words were tinged with a sense of seriousness that Niall had not experienced from the Fae shard before.

“So now you know,” Niall said. “But, all of that still doesn’t explain what’s going on with this character sheet I seem to have got?”

Devon took off his thick leather apron and led Niall out of his forge. The two of them took a seat on the table outside the cottage. The cool autumnal breeze was welcome after the heat of the smithy.

“So first up,” said Devon, “it’s not a character sheet, it’s your Testimony. Secondly, I’m not sure I understand the question. What do you want to know?”

“People aren’t characters; we don’t have stats or skills.”

“Don’t we? What do you bench press? How quickly can you run 100m? Do you have a certificate from when you learned the violin as a child?”

“It was a flute but that’s not the point. That’s not how the world works.”

“Actually, that’s exactly how the world works, always has, both this one and ours. One of the effects of Spirit in this place is that it makes measuring those things more explicit, and a little more standardised.”

“You say that but apparently I can read minds now. That’s not something that I could do on Earth.”

Devon gave him a strange look. “You can read minds? You know what I’m thinking right now.”

Niall felt himself blushing. “Well, no. To be honest I don’t know how to make it work yet. I literally only have two skills. One of them is Telepathy.”

Devon blinked. “I’ve never heard of anything like that before. I mean there are scryers that can read other people’s Testimonies, but that’s very limited. Otherwise, it’s just the L’Fae that can talk in people’s minds. In any case, skills aren’t something that you activate in most cases. They are just something that you know how to do.”

Niall felt a trickle of excitement. If he had a unique skill, maybe it would give him an edge in this new world. Everything that he had experienced so far had led him to feel like this was a dangerous place for people like him. Telepathy may just be what he needed to balance the scales.

“Well, if it’s something that I know already, do you mind if I try on you.”

Devon sat for a moment then nodded. “Go ahead. I’m not sure that I can do anything to stop you. If you feel like you’re getting to something private please pull back.”

“Of course.”

With that Niall turned to face Devon. If this was something that he already knew then he would just have to do it. He closed his eyes and tried to feel Devon’s mind with his. Nothing happened.

“Try imagining the number between one and ten,” Niall said. “The skill is Telepathy 1 so maybe at a low level it needs something specific to focus on.”

Niall squeezed his eyes and concentrated harder. He had a sense of something. Yes. It was definitely there.

He opened his eyes. “Five. You were thinking of the number five weren’t you.”

Devon shook his head. “It was three actually.”

“Wait, wait. Try again.” Niall shut his eyes and concentrated.

“What is Niall doing?”

“Not now Pobble. This is important.”

“It looks like fun. Can Pobble join in?”

“If you must know I’m working out how to use my Telepathy skill.”

“That is interesting. What, exactly, does Niall think a Telepathy skill does at level 1?”

“I don’t know. I guess it allows you to read peoples…”

“Yes?”

“It just allows me to talk to you doesn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“That’s it isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Can you help me to get it to a higher level so I can use it with other people?”

“No.”

Niall opened his eyes and cleared his throat. “So, I just had a talk with Pobble. It is going to take a little more work before I can really get to grips with it.”

Devon looked at him for a moment. “Ah well. Let me know if you want to try again. Anyway, let’s get a sense of what your Attributes look like – we call them attributes here rather than stats – when I came from Earth I needed to do a little work to get them up to par for this planet. What’s your Strength Attribute?

Niall quickly swiped to check. “Three”

“Oh.”

“What do you mean, ‘Oh’?”

“Three. Wow.”

“Will you stop that?”

“Sorry. Are all of your Attributes like that?”

“Well, yes. Two or three, except for this Will thing that’s at zero.”

Devon scratched his head. “Well, I hate to say it, but Pobble was right.”

“Of course Pobble was right.”

Niall ignored Pobble as Devon continued. “I mean, what, you’re like twenty-two, twenty-three right?”

“Twenty-five, actually.”

Devon carried on. “Twenty-five, OK. So, if I may be blunt, your Strength is like a child’s. Not even a teenager, a young child. To put it into context, an average adult has like a minimum of, say, twenty to thirty in most of their Attributes. One or two of them will be maybe double that depending on what they do for work. With a strength of three honestly, a strong breeze would blow you over. No wonder you were knocked out just from tripping over in the woods.”

“Look, there’s no need to be rude. I worked in an office. I was more about the cerebral and creative side of things. Where are the stats for that?”

“Well, to be fair, Intelligence, Wisdom or whatever doesn’t have an Attribute associated with it. I guess it’s not something that can be increased in the same way.”

“Fine. If I’m so weak, then how do I increase my numbers?”

“Two ways. The first is just like you would do on Earth. If you want to get stronger, you lift heavy things. You want to have more endurance? Go for a run. Agility? Stretch. Without being rude, your attributes are terrifying. I mean in a bad way. They are terrifyingly bad. The good news is that they are so low you can increase them really quickly. All it’ll take is a little fresh air, exercise, regular sleep and good, healthy food.”

Niall was painfully aware that his life up to that point had involved almost none of those things, but pushed on “And the other way?”

“Ah, well that’s unique to this place. The normal way will only take your attributes to around ten or so, maybe a little higher, if you really work at it. Beyond that, you learn Skills. The more you use a Skill, or practice with it, the higher the Skill level gets. Over time, a bunch of skills should coalesce around a Class. Depending on the Class you’ll get additional attribute points.”

“Right. Well that all makes perfect sense.” Niall tried his best to keep the disbelief out of his voice.

Devon gave Niall a look. “Sceptic, huh? Why don’t we just do this for real. I don’t think that I believed it myself until I saw it. Have you ever chopped wood.”

Niall gestured at himself. “Chopped wood? Me? Really?”

“Yeah, I guess not. Well, it’s about time you learned.”

Devon walked to a store on the side of his forge and emerged with an axe. Niall tensed. The memory of Devon standing over the body of his Bulvine attacker with a bloody axe was still fresh in his mind. The past day had gone some of the way to soften that image, but he realised that he should never make the mistake of thinking that Devon was not dangerous.

Niall looked at the axe more closely then relaxed a little. This was not the weapon that Devon had wielded yesterday. This only had a single blade rather than two and was substantially smaller.

“Come on,” said Devon. “Follow me.”

The two men walked over to a pile of split logs. Devon picked one up and placed it end up on a flat tree stump. The multiple scars showed that the stump had clearly been used to chop wood many times in the past. He raised the axe and let it fall onto the log to cleanly carve it in two. He then picked up one of the halves and split it again. He held the pieces of the quartered log up to Niall.

“This is what we are aiming for. Now you try. The key is to let the axe and gravity do the hard work.”

Niall took the proffered axe and almost stumbled. It was heavier than he had expected. The negligent ease with which Devon had swung it was deceptive. He looked at it closely. An axe was not something that was part of his day-to-day experience. It looked well maintained at least as far as Niall could tell. The edge of the axe was sharp without any nicks or blemishes, while the smooth blade itself was gleamed.

He placed the other half of the log on the stump, picked up the axe and swung at the log with all his strength. The axe swept through the air and embedded itself in the grassy earth next to the stump. Niall looked over to Devon, red faced.

Devon shrugged. “It could have been worse. At least you didn’t swing it into your leg.”

Devon spent the next quarter of an hour giving Niall pointers and corrections on his wood cutting technique. By the end of that time, Niall had managed to split one of the logs into pieces that Devon deemed to be acceptable.

“Right,” said Devon. “I need to get on. I’ll leave you to it.”

Niall leant on the axe that rested on the ground. He was already out of breath. “And what? When I’ve chopped all of these logs I’ll be a lumberjack and my stats will go up?”

Devon laughed. “Not stats, Attributes. And, of course not. It will take a lot more that just chopping a few logs to get a lumberjack class. This is to get you the woodcutter skill. And to get it to a reasonable level you’re going to have to chop that tree over there into logs. Think of these as your training wheels.”

Niall looked over to where Devon was pointing. A large tree, maybe thirty metres in length was lying to one side. "All of it?"

"Every inch."

Niall looked at Devon’s face, he felt that there was something a little sadistic in the grin that was plastered across it.

It was going to be a long day.