Billy looked up. All of the kids were staring at him. Brian in the front and then Mary beside him with the other eight crammed in a semi-circle all pushing and trying to view the spot on the floor where he’d been casting. ‘Ok, that answers that question,' he thought. 'If you get disturbed while meditating you wake up.’

He was well and truly caught. He didn’t know how he felt about that. On the one hand, having magic this early made him special. But on the other, he was looking at a group of survivors that he could help.

“Well?” said Brian.

“Back up,” said Billy. “Let me out. And we’ll talk in the room.”

Everyone did, backing out of the little alcove formed by the stairs and the low ceiling of the basement. It was made even more cave-like by the dim light of the single kerosene lantern on the shelf on the wall of the main basement. When they got out and back into the room, Billy sat on the stairs and the group formed a semi-circle around him. It was a little eerie. The flickering gas lantern made the shadows of their eye sockets look bigger, hiding their eyes.

He looked around at the pre-teens. Brian was the oldest at twelve. There were only two girls, Mary nine and Ethel seven. All the rest were boys: Ian, Jay, William, Jose, Michael, James and Richard. Three Latins, and the rest were white, but all were kids. Just like him. The youngest boy Michael was five.

“Ok,” he said. “I was doing magic.”

There was a small sound almost a sigh that went around the room then. Everybody in the semi-circle looked at each other and then looked back at Billy, their eyes hungry.

“Magic?” said Brian who had somehow been appointed the group’s spokesman.

“Yep, but it’s not all that powerful and we can’t get classes until we’re thirteen which is when you can start getting powerful.”

“But magic,” said Brian.

“One spell, that’s all I’ve got. Force Bolt. It shoots a bolt that does a single point of damage, well, it could do more but it drains my mana pool.”

“Can it bring my mom back?” asked Ethel, the youngest girl. She was seven. She looked like she knew the answer, but asked the question anyway. She was a little blond girl with pale skin and a brush of freckles and green eyes. She was small for her age but looked smart. She was wearing shorts and a dirty Frozen T-shirt. Both of her knees were scabbed from where she’d fallen recently running.

Billy thought about that for a second. He knew that first rank spells were going to be not that powerful, but in his D&D books, they talked about spells that could raise the dead. Of course, he didn’t know if the spells actually existed. Maybe the only spell that existed was force bolt. He hadn’t had any time to figure anything out. He’d just cast his only spell for the second time this morning. “I don’t know. I don’t think so,” he finally answered. It was the best answer that he could come up with.

Another sigh came from the group then. They were all orphans except for Billy and Jon Jon. The younger orphans and Conrad, the three-year-old whose parents were still alive, were upstairs being taken care of by the adults.

“Can you teach us?” asked Brian. There was a dim fire burning in the back of his eyes. The same as with all the kids surrounding Billy. They had lost their parents, lost their brothers and sisters and wanted to be safe and wanted revenge on the monsters that had orphaned them.

Billy looked around. He thought about whether he should teach them. He wasn’t really concerned with being able to teach them. The world seemed to want humans to use magic. Given how easy the adults upstairs had learned to find their magic and their Qi, he was almost positive that he could teach them, at least get them started.

But, he thought about teaching and what it meant for him. He’d be responsible for these kids' actions. If they got depressed and hurt themselves with a spell, or in a fight and hurt someone else, or turned on the group and hurt Fern or his sister, he'd need to own that. They could be, well evil, and he would have given them the power. And if they tackled some monster they weren’t strong enough for and died, that’d be on him too.

His mom used to call him, her little man. She said he was a thirty-year-old in a seven-year-olds body. He felt older today. This was his first real adult decision. Should he? Or shouldn’t he? He looked around again. Michael was five; he and William were ten; Ethel, Jon Jon, and James were seven; Ian was eight; Jay, Mary, and Richard were nine; Brian was twelve. He tried to picture what his sister would do, what Fern would do, but it kept coming back to him. It didn’t matter what they would do, what matters is what he was going to do and right then he knew he was going to do it. The time of being a kid was over. They had to be able to protect themselves. Adults couldn’t protect them anymore.

“Ok,” he said. “I’ll do it. But I have some conditions!”

“What?” asked Brian still acting as the spokesman.

“First, you’ve got to take a vow to the heavens that you’ll never ever use what I’m going to teach you for evil! And second, you’ve got to take a vow to protect each other. You are all going to be family from now on and family protects each other. Will you do it?” Billy asked.

The group looked around then. They had been staying in the basement except at mealtimes for pretty much the last week. They all lost their folks and had been worrying about what they’d do if the adults upstairs didn’t care. They had bonded. Quietly they had begun to take care of each other. When Mary couldn’t sleep, William cuddled with her. When Brian woke up swinging from nightmares, they calmed him down and slept around him like a litter of puppies. Billy’s request just made it real. They’d be a family again. They all nodded.

“Ok,” said Billy. He thought for a minute and then said, “Repeat after me:

I promise to the heavens that I will protect my brothers and sisters here. I will not use the magic and the Qi that I have discovered for evil, but for good.

The sky darkened above the house when Michael, the last kid, finished repeating the vow. A vortex formed using the clouds that had appeared out of nowhere. It happened almost in an instant. A white glow formed in the center of the vortex. The group of kids felt as if the world paused as if for one brief second they were being judged, inspected, scrutinized. Then the feeling passed and the light flashed down and covered them, rolling over them and just as rapidly left, pulling itself in one long train back up to the glowing point that spawned it and vanished.

“Ow!” yelled all the kids at once.

The smell of burned flesh covered the room for a couple of seconds and then vanished. Each of the kids had a small diamond-shaped mark with a character inside it on the inside of their wrists. The character looked somewhat like a Chinese ideograph but somehow the kids knew its meaning. It meant family and good. It was branded on them. For a brief moment, it stayed visible, golden and red, then faded into their wrists. Each of the kids looked up then and somehow knew where the other kids were. Not an exact position. Not like GPS coordinates, but like a sense of themselves, a sense of home.

They all smiled then and as they felt the others’ smiles, a collective feeling of peace and belonging rolled over them. The littlest kids started crying then, finally feeling that they belonged again.

The door at the top of the stairs crashed open and Dianna Caldwell, one of the single adults that had made herself responsible for them stood in the doorway looking down at the kids.

“Are ya’ll alright?” she asked.

Everyone looked up at her standing there looking down at them. The group looked at Billy who turned back and looked up and said, “Yeah, why? What happened?”

She paused then, looking down at the circle of kids in puzzlement. “Nothing,” she finally said. “We just got a light show up here and I wanted to check on you all. You’re sure ya’ll are doing alright?” She looked at the littlest one, Michael who had been crying. “Michael, are you alright?” she asked.

Michael nodded and then the group nodded as one. She watched them for a second but then turned back toward the upstairs where she could hear the other adults talking and yelling.

“Ok,” she said. “Don’t worry about it. It was probably nothing, Ok? Dinner’s in about three hours. It’d be nice if ya’ll were ready?

“Yes, Ms. Caldwell,” they chorused back.

She smiled at them and then shut the door and they could hear her asking what the hell was going on.

The group sat there waiting for about another ten minutes to make sure everything was calming down upstairs. Eventually, it seemed to do so. The adults were puzzled by the events but didn’t connect it to the kids in the basement.

Finally, the upstairs settled down again and the adults quit moving around. The noise of footsteps stopped and the sound of doors opening and closing quit.

“Holy shit!” said Brian. “Did you know that would happen?” he asked looking straight at Billy.

Billy shook his head, his eyes huge. “No way! I got the idea of a vow from my sister. She said that she made one with Jake, Fern’s dungeon son. But she didn’t talk about a light show or anything. She said she got a menu and made a selection from it.”

“Wow!” said Mary. “That was intense and so cool!”

“Yeah,” said Billy. “I guess anymore when you invoke the heavens, they listen. Let’s not do that again.”

The whole group shook their heads in agreement while rubbing their wrists.

“Does that mean that we’re family now,” asked Ethel, the youngest girl, just 7-years-old.

Billy looked down at his wrist and tried to feel the mark. After a brief bit of concentration, it reappeared on his skin. Golden red, glowing on his wrist. It spoke to him of family and goodness.

He held it up and said, “I think so! I think as long as we have this mark, we are family. I still have my sister, but now I have you all too. Family grows when you let it. Ours just grew a whole lot bigger.” He looked around, smiling and saw everyone was smiling back. “We’re family now and we are going to do good!”

Everyone smiled. Billy gestured to them. “Everybody sit down against the wall and get comfortable and I’ll start telling you how to find your mana and Qi and stuff. And also, what we need to do to level up our spells and everything I know. Ok?”

The group shuffled around the basement, leaning up against the walls. The basement wasn’t that large, it was four meters by five meters. The stairs came down into the room from the southeast corner and ended about midway toward the southwest wall. The floor was filled with board games, bedrolls, and kids. Each of the kids took a space along the western and northern walls. Billy sat down on the bottom two steps where he could see everybody.

“Ok,” he said. “Before we get into the mana and Qi, I’ll like everybody to have the skill of meditation. It helps recover your health, stamina, Qi, and mana faster. Has everybody seen their status window yet?”

Only a couple of the kids raised their hand, but from the way that they did so, Billy wasn’t sure if they had done so.

“Ok,” he said. “Before I tell you how to access them, I want you to know how to close them, Ok? Remember you are in control. To close your status menu you say or think ‘Close Status’. Everybody with me?”

Everybody nodded their heads.

“To open your status menu you say, ‘Open Status’, Ok?”

As soon as he said the words, every kid said, “Open Status”.

Some of the kids looked a little frightened, others looked awed by the menu.

“Say ‘Close Status’,” Billy yelled quickly. “Now say ‘Open Status’,” he said. “Now say ‘Close Status’. Ok, everybody Ok with that? Remember it’s totally in your control.”

He decided to teach them that way after he heard from Hildi about Baxter’s conniption fit about the status menus. He didn’t want any of the younger kids frightened or crying. Baxter had told Hildi that he didn’t like the Status menu. He didn’t want it in his head. And then told her that Jake had saved him from it.

Michael said, “But what does it say? I can only read my name.” Michael was the five-year-old. He’d only learned how to spell his name and could only count to one hundred. His parents had been young and had been working two jobs each and didn’t have a lot of time to work with their son.

‘Huh,’ thought Billy. ‘There must be some other way of getting the information on a status menu. I mean not even every adult can read. The System must have allowed for that.

He looked at Michael and said, “Give me a minute, Ok?”

He started thinking about how could the status menus give their information to people that didn’t read. He thought about saying ‘Read Status Menu’, but thought ‘that’s stupid, I mean if you don’t know how to read, would you necessarily even have the concept of reading? I mean if you were from some lost tribe in the Amazon that hadn’t invented writing, what would you do when faced with a blue screen. Besides panic?’ He thought some more, ‘what did people do that didn’t read? Pray? Beseech? Ask someone else? He could ask Michael to share his status menu, but that just meant that Michael would be asking him all the time. Somehow he didn’t think the System depended on that.’ He called up his status menu and looked at it. It hung there in his vision. He could still see through it and when he focused on the world still visible behind it, it went dim and eventually vanished. ‘Why do we even need the ‘Close Status Window’ command then?’ he thought. ‘If you ignore it, it goes away?’

He had a thought, ‘What if you don’t ignore it? What if you try to absorb it? What if you try to bring it inside yourself? Merge with it? Make it a part of you? What would happen then?’

He tried it. He called his status menu up and focused on it. At first, he read it, over and over. But then he tried to pull it inside his head. He tried to submerge his head in it, push it into his brain.

He must have looked funny trying to push his head forward into the menu because Michael and a couple of the others started giggling. But he didn’t care because he succeeded. Now he knew. Without having to call the menu up, he knew his strength was twelve, his intelligence was nineteen, he had 35 mana points total of which one was spent and regenerating even now. Not knowing like remembering. But a certainty. He knew everything that was on his menu. And just in case the numbers didn’t mean anything, he felt weak because his constitution was below average, smart because his intelligence was so high. He could feel his numbers. He felt healthy and not tired. He felt uncovered because he had no armor just clothes on. He felt like he was relatively good looking and not really that lucky. He knew himself in a way that the numbers alone didn’t tell him.

He looked up and said, “Ok, you’ve got the first part of it, now the second part of it. Some of you might have seen me shoving my head forward, it must have looked pretty funny right?

Some of the kids giggled, especially Michael.

“Ok, what I was doing was trying to bring the status menu inside,” he said. “I wanted to know the information, not just read it. So what I did was I called up my status menu and then I let it flow over me. Sorry, I don’t know, like I swallowed it or it swallowed me or something. Anyway, now my status menu is inside my head. I don’t have to call it up, I just know it. You guys try it.”

He looked around and Michael was right. It was pretty funny. The kids were all making faces, some of them were swallowing, opening their mouths really wide and gulping something down, others were closing their eyes and ramming their heads into an invisible object, some were making faces like someone was stretching Saran Wrap across their faces and they were trying to push through. It was hilarious, he had to bite his lip to keep from laughing at them. But regardless, he could see the moment on all their faces when they succeeded.

It was like they were more aware of or they had settled in more firmly into their bodies. The knowledge they received made them certain in their place in the world.

“Michael,” he asked. “What’s your strength?”

“It’s six!” Michael answered.

“Ok,” he said. “Is that good or is that bad?” He wasn’t sure about this question. Asking a five-year-old to rate his strength was probably a little bit of a stretch, but he had felt that knowledge, his health was crap and he knew it.

“It’s good,” answered Michael. “At least for my age. I’m weak compared to you and compared to an adult, I’m really weak, but compared to my age, it’s good!”

“Way to go buddy!” he said and held out his hand for a high five! Michael slapped his hand hard.

“Everybody succeeded right?” he said.

The whole group nodded and smiled at each other. They knew what their stats were and had a good idea of how to interpret them.

“Now, probably none of you have any mana or Qi right?” He waited until they all nodded. “That’s Ok,” he said. “Until you find them, nothing shows up on your status menu. But, let me tell you something. The amount of mana and Qi you’ll get will be lame! For some reason, the System penalizes those that don’t have a class and we can’t get a class until we’re thirteen. That means that until you reach thirteen the number of spells you can learn and the amount of mana you get will be tiny. So, it kind of bites to be a kid in this new world. But we can learn a few things, spells, Qi abilities or skills.”

“I think you get the first spell automatically. It’s called Force Bolt. It’s like the magic missile spell from D&D. It shoots a bolt of force that does damage. It is pretty cool. It was what I was casting when y'all caught me. After I’d leveled it up some, I was going to try to learn some other spells. I think I can learn three spells total! Which kinda sucks! I want to be a wizard. You can’t be a wizard with only three spells!"

“What’s Qi do?” asked one of the Latin kids named William.

“I don’t know,” answered Billy. “If it’s like in the web novels I used to read, it is basically mana but more body-based. You can do all kinds of stuff, but you don’t use spells, you use abilities or skills. You might cause a wind blade to appear and use it to cut a monster in half. You could do the same thing probably using mana, but you’d do it with a spell. Similar but different sources. Also, Qi probably takes more meditation or stuff to do than magic. But I don’t know for sure. But I’m going to find out! We all are.”

“Why are we going to learn meditation before we discover our Qi and mana,” asked Mary.

“Because you need meditation to help recover your mana and Qi. I’m not kidding. Your mana pool and Qi pool are probably going to be tiny. Like one spell or one Qi use tiny! Anything that can speed your regeneration is OP to the max. You need this skill!” he said.

“What’s OP mean?” asked William, another one of the Latin kids.

“Over Powered” said James another of the kids. He had been a big Fortnite player and knew a lot of gamer slang.

“But also for another reason,” Billy said after giving everybody a chance to pay attention again. “I want you to have it because y’all are barely hanging on. I don’t know if my mom and dad are still alive. I hope so, but I don’t know. Probably not though. But I still have hope. Y’all don’t even have that. You’ve got a new family now, but you still have got a lot of pain inside. When I meditated, I felt better. I want you all to feel better. That’s the two reasons I’m teaching you all meditating before I help you find your mana and Qi. Ok?”

He looked around and everybody's eyes were shiny, but nobody broke down. They’d all become a lot tougher in the past week. They had all survived. They all nodded.

“Ok,” he said. “Now, everybody relax into your body. Focus on your breath…”

After about 30 minutes, the last person got the skill. It was surprisingly Brian, the oldest kid in the room. Billy could see a lot of tension leave Bian’s body. His shoulders relaxed, the skin on his face smoothed out, the little knot that had been present on his forehead between his eyebrows relaxed. He’d asked that as everybody got the skill notification, they accept it and then try to use the skill. Just quietly sit and meditate.

He dealt with the notification he’d received:

Good job! You keep it up little man! Experience gained.

Skill Gained

Teaching

Elemental Sphere: All

Rank: Bronze

Level: 1

Range: Self/Students

Damage: na

Cool Down: na

Duration: Permanent

SP: 25 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.

He began meditating then too and thought ‘I’ll give them thirty minutes to calm down and center themselves before we try to find their mana and Qi. They need a little peace inside right now.’

After 30 minutes, he quietly said, “Ok, everybody, focus on me!”

He waited until everybody was looking at him and then continued.

“Ok, is everybody ready to learn how to use their magic and Qi?” he asked.

“Yes!” they all said. All of them excited, some of them yelled, others still recovering from the meditation session a lot, spoke softer.

“Here’s what you need to do, breath in, breath out. When you discover your Qi, raise your hand and then stay meditating until everyone has discovered it. I’ll tell you then to focus on me. Do not attempt to use it! Let me repeat that, don't use it. Now, focus your mind on an area just below your belly button,...”

This time it went a lot quicker than it did for the adults upstairs. He didn’t know if it was the fact that everybody was calm after meditating, or his new teaching skill or what, but within 15 minutes everyone had discovered their Qi, so he just called everyone back from meditating and tried to have them discover their mana. Same process as before. Once again, they were faster than the adults were. It was only ten minutes tops before the last kid discovered their mana. Both times, it was Ethel, the littlest girl. He didn’t know why she’d had problems, but she still beat most of the adults. So it wasn’t that big a deal.

He ended their final meditation and everybody started smiling. They began dancing around the room, very quietly though, high fiving each other. Somebody started doing an Indian war dance and they all started doing it circling the room, waving their imaginary hatchets. But quietly. Nobody wanted the adults to know what they'd been up to. After a while, they settled back down into their places against the wall and looked at him again.

“Ok,” he said. “You should have a spells menu. It should have a Force Bolt spell on it. If you can’t read it, try to do the same thing that you did with the status menu. Absorb it into you. Can everybody understand it? Stop! Stop!” he yelled a Brian who had actually started to point his finger at the wall like he was going to cast the spell.

“Are you trying to get us in trouble?” he shout-whispered. “That spell makes noise! And when it hits the wall, it makes even more noise. Plus I’m pretty sure Fern would be upset if you damaged her wall!”

Brian looked sorry, but said, “How are we going to practice then?”

Billy said, “First off, we need some rules in place. There’s a bunch of us down here and I don’t want anybody getting hurt.”

“First rule everybody shoots only at a target,” he said. “We’ll have to set up something, but everybody will have a target, Ok?”

Everybody nodded.

“The second rule, nobody steps between the target and somebody else, Ok?”

Everybody nodded again.

“Third rule, nobody fires a full-strength Force Bolt!” he said.

“What?” asked every kid down there.

“I just learned this myself. You don’t have to spend the full amount of mana, you can weaken the spell. You can spend less mana on it. Michael, what’s your mana pool?”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“The number of your mana points. I called it mana pool,” answered Billy.

“Oh. It’s 30,” he answered.

“That means that you could cast that spell one time,” Billy said. “It’s kind of hard to practice spells when you can only cast them one time before you have to wait until your mana returns, isn’t it?”

Everybody nodded. Everybody’s mana pool was about the same since they all had no classes selected. And they couldn’t select a class.

“I just started thinking about the spell. How much mana it cost and how little I had. And I started wondering if there was a better way, you know something that could reduce the mana cost. Because casting it once every 30 minutes would suck, you know. It would take forever to get better at it. So I thought how could I cast it more often. Sure meditation lets you gain your mana back quicker, but not that much quicker. So I tried thinking hard about putting less mana in the spell and at the same time, expecting the spell to do less, less damage, go less far, that kind of stuff. You guys with me so far?”

Everyone nodded.

“So after I thought about it for a while, it seemed like I could reduce the spell. Only about five times, and each time it made the spell weaker. For only 15 mana, the spell only did 1-5(+1 per level) damage, for ten mana it’d only do 1-4 (+1 per level) damage. I was able to sense that I could change this spell all the way down to one point of damage for two mana. And that’s what I cast when you guys caught me. It wasn’t very loud was it?”

“No,” said Brian.

“It sounded like pew!” said Michael, pursing his lips and making a soft, breathy noise.

“Yeah,” said everyone, making the same noise. Although whether they were imitating Michael or the sound his spell had made, Billy wasn’t sure.

“But it was quiet in here and when you did it a bunch of times, we all heard it and wondered what was going on,” said Mary.

“That makes sense,” said Billy. “I shouldn’t have done it a bunch of times in a row. But I’m glad that I did,” he said looking around at his new family.

“So everybody needs to sit down and try to figure out how to reduce the mana cost of the spell. I just thought about it and it came to me. It should come to you the same way, right?” Billy said.

The group of kids leaned back against the walls and closed their eyes. It looked like some of them were meditating, some just thinking hard, but after a little bit, the whole group said they’d figured out how to do it too. That they could cast the two mana bolt version of the spell.

Ethel said, “But it won’t go very far? Will it? I get the feeling it might just go about twice my arm’s length.”

“Yeah,” said Billy. “That’s what I thought too.”

“But how are we going to set up a target that we can all hit?” she asked.

“It’s really not about hitting the target,” Billy said. “It more about not hitting each other. If we are all aiming at the same spot, nobody that doesn’t go there will get hit, right?”

Everybody nodded.

“Plus, if we don’t hit the target, we don’t damage anything so if Ms. Caldwell comes down, we don’t have to explain why the target has got holes in it.”

Everybody nodded again. It seemed like a pretty good plan.

They looked around for something that they could use as a target then. The basement had shelves in it. It also had a bunch of stuffed deer’s heads on one of the higher shelves. Each head was mounted on a plaque and labeled like, Jake’s First Deer and then the date, or something similar. The deer heads hadn’t been packed up and probably weren’t going to be either. The group pulled one of them off the shelf and set it on the floor in the midst of the half circle.

“That’ll be our target, Ok?” said Billy.

“It’s a little bit scary,” said Ethel.

Looking a little cobwebby, the stuffed head’s nose was cracked and one of the eyes pointed kind of off to the side from where the other one was pointing. It looked more sad than scary in Billy’s opinion.

“But so are monsters,” said Willaim. “And we’re practicing to kill monsters.”

The whole group nodded then. Some of them looked really determined.

“So how are we going to do this?” asked Brian. “Are we all going to do it at once? Would that be loud?”

“I bet it would be,” said Mary. “Maybe we should take turns? Go around the circle?”

“That sounds good to me. I gained a level in the spell when I cast it about 13 times. I bet the next level takes more times to cast, so I will probably run out of mana before I gain another level. Why don’t we go around the circle ‘til you all gain a level or you reach two points or less mana and then we’ll stop and meditate for 30 minutes?” Billy said. “If you run low on mana, then when it’s your turn just wave your hand, Ok? Don’t use up all your mana, stop at two. I don’t know what happens if you run your mana out, but you’ll probably at least get an ice cream headache and it will last until your mana comes back. so don’t do it, OK? Stop before you run out!”

The group nodded. Some of them looking a little uneasy when they thought about the ice cream headache.

“Remember, it’s easy. You point like Brian did at the head, say the word, “Zap,” and think about adding the two mana points to the spell and it happens. That’s all there is to it. Y’all ready.” He looked around and everybody was nodding again.

“Ok, then I’ll go first,” and he whispered “Zap,” while pointing at the deer head and thinking about the mana and a light blue bolt shot from his finger, out about a meter and a half before it fizzled out and disappeared.

The whole group sighed then. There were a couple of excited giggles. After all, this was magic. And they could do it.

Brian was sitting closest to Billy so he pointed at the deer head, said “Zap” slightly louder than Billy had and a blue bolt shot from his finger. Then Mary, then William, then the whole group had done it. There were no problems, no accidents, it went off smoothly. Michael might have yelled the word, but none of the adults heard and came to see what was going on.

Billy grinned and the whole group grinned back fiercely. They had just done magic.

Billy did it again and then the whole group followed, none of them again having any problems. They kept doing it until the first kid waved off his turn and then Billy stopped it when it came around to him again.

“How’s everybody feeling?” Billy asked.

Jay, the kid who had waved away his turn because of low mana said, “I got down to three mana points and my head is starting to hurt. Not really bad, but if I’d done it the last time, I would have been hurting.”

“Yeah,” said William, another boy who’d waved away his turn. “My head hurts. Not as bad as a brain freeze, but pretty bad.”

“Ok,” said Billy. “That cinches it. Nobody should run out of mana! It hurts! Next time we go around the circle, we’ll only go five times and then meditate for 15 minutes, Ok? It’s the same as before and there’s no risk of getting a headache?”

Everybody nodded. Nobody wanted to feel bad for no reason. They had only cast the spell eleven times so nobody leveled it, but it was Ok. They were all staying together. They were a family. It was a little weird saying that but it felt true. Looking around the room, they didn’t see strangers. They were all connected.

They started meditating then, trying to get their mana back. It had been about an hour and forty minutes since Ms. Caldwell had told them to be ready for dinner. They still had time for one thirty-minute and two fifteen-minute meditation sessions and then they should stop and put the deer head back on the shelf and get ready.

The first time they started back around the circle, after two times everyone except William and Jay got the level notification. After the next time around the circle, William and Jay leveled their spell as well. They kept going until they reached five times. After meditating fifteen minutes, they did another session of ten spells. And followed that with another 15-minute meditation session. They only had half their mana back, but they could just let it come back naturally. No need to worry about it.

They put up the deer head then and started a game of Old Maid, which barely got started before Ms. Caldwell opened the door and said, ‘Dinner’s ready. Come on up!”