Jake’s mom was happy to see them and took Baxter, Billy, and Hildi in with no questions. When the two-pack plus started down the street, one of the men on watch whistled twice and Jake’s mom and dad came out from inside the house, both carrying crossbows.

“Hildi,” said Jake’s mom, ‘is that you?” Jake’s mom was a beautiful, older blond woman and his dad was a large, grizzled man with brown hair mixed with gray. Well, they seemed to give the impression of middle age but walked like people in their twenties. Hildi had known Jake’s family had five kids, Jake, his oldest brother Rex, his two sisters Sammy and Dato, and his youngest brother Jon Jon. She had been in school with Sammy and Dato. Sammy and she were friends. Kind of. The way Jake had broken up with her sister had made Hildi a little bit cautious around the two girls. The family was all good-looking. The girls took after their mother and the boys took after their father.

His family’s home was a large, older craftsman style, three-story home. It was on what used to be a rough street, with more cars on blocks than cars running. His parents painted it a very light mint-green with white accents on the window trim, shutters and the underside of the eves.

When they’d bought it, it had tarps on the roof instead of shingles and pretty much every wall’s plaster had water damage. The grass was waist-high where it existed and scrub oaks everywhere else. But the plot was four acres and his dad had looked at the house and said that ‘it has good bones.’ It also had a basement that his mom, pregnant with his oldest brother, thought was important. She had developed a fear of tornados and wanted to keep her babies safe. It was cheap too which was important at the time.

They moved in and for the next five years, his dad worked his two jobs, pipefitter and, emergency plumber, and then during whatever spare time he had leftover, he’d be working on the house. It became up a showpiece, but both of his parents had put in the time to get it that way. One of Jake’s earliest memories was painting a wall light mint green.

Baxter and Hildi’s first impression of the house when they arrived was people. There were people everywhere. But even allowing for Rex’s family, there were a lot of people present. She took a brief headcount and arrived at 20 or 21. Easy to do because it seemed as if almost everyone in the house had come outside onto the porch.

The people also seemed on edge and guarded the house. Men and women with crossbows and regular bows stood on the large wrap-around porch and kept watch, while the kids were not allowed in the yard. Judging from the noise, most of the kids were inside in the basement.

The garden, his mom’s, had a couple of teens out weeding and watering the plants by hand, filling the buckets of water from an old well that was on the property. Seeing that it was June, or was before the Apocalypse kicked off, some of the plants seemed bigger than they should be. Also different. The corn, for instance, had many ears on each stalk and seemed to be producing more when one was picked, the watermelons and the pumpkins already had what looked like edible fruits.

“Yes ma’am,” said Hildi. “This is Baxter. He’s a good dog.” Baxter stopped, looked up at the folks on the porch and then held a paw out as if to be shaken.

“Well, come on in. All three of you,” Jake’s mom said. “A few more won’t make a difference.” The house was surrounded by a low wooden fence that met with an arched brick entrance that had roses growing on it. Inside the entrance was a little metal gate that seemed cracked and a little broken, and now that she noticed it, the wooden fence seemed pieced back together with baling wire and replacement pickets.

She opened the gate and started to step in. Baxter let out a growl and from the back yard of the house next door, a giant, yellow coyote raced toward the three of them. “Billy, inside,” shouted Hildi and with one quick motion pulled the crossbow around, loaded it and fired. Billy stepped inside the arch, but then turned and fired what appeared to be a light-bluish bolt from his hand.

She wasn’t the first to fire though. Before the coyote had made it more than 2/3s of the way to them, it was hit with at least five more bolts and went down. Jake’s dad made certain though, putting another bolt in the coyote’s head as it lay there.

“How many’s that?” asked Jake’s mom.

“I think that’s the last of the pack,” said a young man that Hildi recognized as Rex, Jake’s oldest brother.

“Good,” she said. “Ok, skinners get on it.”

Two of the older people from the back of the crowd on the porch pushed their way through the crowd and started toward the body, getting ready to do something with it.

“Food,” said Jake’s mom to Hildi’s wondering look. His mom’s name, now that she thought about it was ‘Fernie’ although she just went by Fern to most people. “We’ve got a lot of folks to feed.”

“Good thing that you didn’t come from the other way,” said Rex. “You might have had some problems.”

Hildi smiled but didn’t agree with him. She had experienced Baxter’s full size and ferocity and wasn’t afraid of a single coyote, no matter how big.

‘For fuck’s sake. What the hell was that?” asked Jake’s dad, looking at Billy.

“Mana bolt,” he said, not looking at his sister.

Hildi looked up and saw that everyone on the porch was looking at her brother. For the most part with puzzled faces, but there were one or two that didn’t seem happy about it.

“It’s the first spell that you get for choosing the Mage class,” she said. “I guess every Mage gets it.”

“Class?” said Fern.

Hildi looked around and saw that nobody had any look of understanding on their faces. “Ok,” she said. “I’ve got a lot to tell you all and it’d be better if we did it all at once. Can you gather everybody up on the porch and that way I can tell everybody?”

Fern looked around and said “only Jeb’s missing. He’s watching the back. We’d better let him stay and catch him up later.” Her husband nodded in agreement and then the whole crowd’s focus moved back to Hildi.

She felt nervous and eighteen but powered through it. “Ok,” she began. “You guys know about the apocalypse. It happened. The world changed whether we wanted it to or not. But not like in the bible, it’s different. I don’t know why or how, but I do know it happened. Giant Coyotes are the least of it.”

She looked around, making eye contact with everyone.

“Now here’s the stuff you might not know. I want everybody to say, “Inventory.”

There was a loud murmur as everybody spoke at once and then a series of exclamations. The loudest was from Jake’s dad. “Holy fuck,” followed by an “oof” as he caught an elbow from his wife for cussing in front of the kids.

“Ok,” she said. “That’s the easy one. What happened is that somehow the world acquired a system or maybe the system acquired the world. I don’t know, but, how many of you here have played a video game like World of Warcraft?” She paused and quite a few hands were raised. Including some of the older folks which kind of surprised her.

“Ok,” she began, “like in video games, people can have levels, status attributes, classes, skills, and abilities.”

There was an explosion of voices at that, members of the crowd could be heard yelling things like “skill menu, status menu, attributes.”

“Hang on,” she said. “Before we get into all that, remember, this isn’t a game. The choices you make,” and here she looked at Billy who gazed back unrepentantly, “can have real consequences. Now, I’m going to tell you everything I know and then you all will have some choices to make. Ok? But please listen to me before you make those choices. I’m not trying to tell you what to do, just what I’ve figured out.”

And then began an afternoon-long session in which she explained classes, multi-classes, armor classes, the attributes, what the attributes did, damage, health, mana and mana points, qi, how to discover the mana, how to use the points, what a spell felt like to cast which she had Billy describe because she hadn’t done it yet, all of the things that she’d figured out, essentially today. She didn’t pretend to be an expert, but she taught them how to use their help files, how to call their status menus and last, but most importantly how to see the classes they were offered. It turned out that Jon Jon and her brother didn’t have the ability to gain a class yet. They were too young. Only when a person reached thirteen could they choose a class, but they could still use mana and Qi. But it looked like their pools were much smaller than an adults. Her little genius brother had figured out the mana bolt spell on his own.

One of the gotchas that developed was that nobody in the group seemed to have been presented with a class choice that used magic or that used Qi. She asked everyone to not select their class until she had a chance to think about it. She had her class awakening in a dungeon, so she didn’t think that her awakening was necessarily normal, but when she looked around and saw all the people there she figured that she had to be missing something. There should be at least one monk, one mage. Heck, Jake’s sister Dato had joined the same martial arts organization that she had. She was even a little higher ranked. Her little brother had been able to cast a spell so he had found his mana. She remembered Jake talking about mana and Qi as energies in her body and looked within and tried to see them. It wasn’t long before she got the following notification:

Congratulations, you’ve found your mana and Qi. Now, you need to figure out what to do with them. Experience gained.

At that point, she figured that they couldn’t get offered classes if they didn’t meet some of the prerequisites. You need to feel and use mana to be a mage, you need to feel and use Qi to be an alchemist or monk, she guessed. She really, really needed to study her classes after this!

Everyone was still on the porch, talking about the classes that they’d been offered. Jake’s dad and oldest brother were both offered the knight class. His mom was offered a class called archer. And another called, “Clan Leader.”

Hildi spoke out then and said, “I figured it out, at least I hope I did,” she said. “The problem is that you guys haven’t felt your mana or Qi. But I don’t think it’s that hard. You just have to look inside yourself and find them. Let me walk you through it, Ok?”

And then she did a guided meditation like she’d learned to do from the martial art’s instructors at what they called the center. She told them to sit down, get comfortable, focus on their breathing, letting go, calming down, then she had them focus on the area around and about 8 cm in from their belly buttons, trying to feel the golden energy. She looked inside herself and described what the energy looked like to her, how she felt it, what it was doing, where it was, keeping the people peaceful and on track. She asked that as they got a notification, that each person raise their hand, and then just be present with the energy. When most of the people had done so, she switched and took them through the same type of meditation for mana, an energy that swirled and pooled in the chest and at a spot between their eyebrows. Once again, after about 30 minutes, almost everyone had raised their hand. Mana all looked blue to her, she didn’t know if that was right. But it did. Everyone had raised their hand at least once, so they’d been able to discover at least one type of energy. Those that didn’t, she encouraged and told to keep working on it, to keep trying, that she didn’t think that anyone couldn’t access both, some might have a harder time.

She also got a notification:

Good job! Keep it up! Experience gained.

Skill Gained

Teaching

Elemental Sphere: All

Rank: Bronze

Level: 5

Range: Self/Students

Damage: na

Cool Down: na

Duration: Permanent

SP: 5 stamina point per 30 min instruction session.

Helps students learn better and faster by ten percent a level. Grants experience in the subject taught at the highest rate of your students.

After she got the notification, the remaining students who hadn’t discovered one or the other of the energies, rapidly did so.

Then she asked everyone to check their classes again and it turned out that she was right, people now had access to other classes, like mage, monk, alchemist, etc.

They quit then for dinner. Coyote and the last bit of a Giant Racoon. Coupled with the vegetables and herbs from the garden the meal was very tasty. Jake’s mom also had a 4 meter by 4 meter raised herb garden where she had a bunch of herbs, sage, rosemary, mint, basil, plus a few more exotic ones like oregano, parsley, cilantro, and thyme. She also had a small bed where she tried to grow native remedies, like echinacea, yarrow, passion fruit, but she liked cooking more than creating herbal remedies so the bed was quite a bit smaller.

Fern was pleased with the garden, especially after the apocalypse began. The plants grew like wildfire. The herbs filled their bed and had to be trimmed almost daily to prevent them from strangling out each other. Her garden was the same way. She told Hildi in passing that she thought she could practically see the cucumbers, zucchinis, acorn squashes, and the mush melons and cantaloupes waging war against each other. She trimmed out of necessity and so far the plants hadn’t started dying back from it. But the good news was that all this growth kept the people in the house fed. As more people showed, the garden just grew better!

After dinner, everyone sat around the porch and in the living room and talked, planning what the few gamers in the group told them were their “builds.” Hildi felt free of the stress that the group was under having already selected her classes and sat around and offered her opinion when she was asked. Baxter was a huge hit with the kids, of which there were a lot. Besides Jon Jon and Billy there were 9 others. Sadly, most of them were orphans.

Hildi felt safe and comfortable around these people. She knew it was an illusion, but it was one that she wanted to believe in. In the house, lit by candles and oil lamps she felt like she belonged, that maybe the world that had people like the guy that threatened and tried to rape her was the dream and this was the reality.

Of course, that image was blown by two whistles from the front porch and the sound of multiple crossbows going off. It turned out to be a giant possum. Also, unusually for a monster, after the first couple of hits on it by a crossbow, it turned and disappeared back into the night.

“You’re good luck!” Jake’s brother, Rex, said. “Normally by now, we’d have already fought off two or three monsters.”

Hildi smiled but thought it probably wasn’t luck. Baxter had liberally anointed the fence outside. ‘Not too many monsters want to take on a dungeon boss,’ she thought.

She and her brother were given floor space in the basement to sleep. It was all they had, the house was bursting at the seams.

The next morning came early. The oil lights had been turned off early to save oil and the sun rose early along with everyone in the household. Fresh melon for breakfast along with strawberries. They didn’t have any cream or eggs or bacon. But the melon was good. Three types: mush, cantaloupe, and watermelon. The strawberries were excellent, each one the size of a fist, but still tender.

Everyone was still thinking about their classes, talking about their builds. Hildi found Fern out in the garden, looking over the plants.

“Fern,” she said. “I have to tell you something.”