Emma sat down at the table across from Zoe, summoning a pile of various items on top of Zoe’s papers. Fennel jumped up from Zoe’s feet and meowed at the sudden sound.

  “What do I do with all this?" Emma asked.

  Zoe shrugged. “I dunno. What is it?"

  “Dungeon rewards. So many items. What do I do with it all? How do I get somebody to tell me what they do?" Emma asked.

  “Ah. Yeah, I’ve just been ignoring them for the most part. They’re cool, but you just get so many of them and they’re never really good, I find. Maybe a storage item now and then.” Zoe answered.

  “Where do you go to do that?” Emma asked. “I’ve heard people talk about the dungeoneering guild doing it, but people say they can take a while so what do you recommend?"

  Zoe shrugged again, rummaging through the pile of items. There were some fabrics, some rings and bracelets. Various gloves and boots with mana swirling through them. “Dungeoneering guild’s fine, I say.”

  “Alright. I’ll try them out then. You get anything cool in your time here yet?" Emma sat down, petting Fennel on the floor.

  Zoe summoned the coin she got from her first dungeon. “This was the first thing I got. Took two months, I think? I can’t remember, honestly. I just found it at home one day, I guess they slipped it under the door and I missed it? Kicked it around a bunch. I dunno.”

  “What’s it do?" Emma asked.

  “Guess.” Zoe smiled.

  Emma took the coin and looked at it. “Flip it, and if it lands on the laughing face something good happens, and if it lands on the skull then something bad happens?"

  Zoe chuckled. “Yeah that’s about what I expected it to be, too.”

  “But it’s not?” Emma asked.

  “Nope. Far more boring. It just always lands on the laughing face.” Zoe took the coin and flipped it in the air and it spun, flinging over itself again and again with just the slightest variations in speed each time, pushing it to land on the face side. It landed on the table and bounced up, spinning a couple more times and then settled down with the laughing face pointing up.

  “That’s it?” Emma asked. “That’s so boring.”

  “Yeah.” Zoe said. “Most of the items I got were pretty boring. At least from the dungeons here. I just stopped taking them, honestly. They fill up your storage item and none of it’s all that great?"

  “Alright. Well, I’ll get this stuff identified and then if there’s nothing interesting I’ll leave it behind too. Not really in it for the items anyway, I just want to see a bunch of dungeons.” Emma laughed.

  “Fair enough.” Zoe shrugged.

  “So, get anything cool so far?" Emma put away the pile of items and rummaged through Zoe’s diagrams. ”None of this makes any sense, you know?"

  “It does to me.” Zoe said. “Lots of sense.”

  Emma nodded. “Anything good happen?"

  Zoe grinned. “Sure did. I got my first skill.”

  “Ooh! Which one?" Emma asked.

  “A familiar.” Zoe said. “I got the cosmic familiar general skill just a few minutes ago.”

  “Nice! That’s awesome. So just two more before you can finally take those cool classes and show all the new stuff you get?" Emma asked.

  “Mhm.” Zoe hummed.

  “Sweet. I’ll leave you to it then. Good luck!" Emma stepped forward towards the table, vanishing and appearing at the front entrance downstairs. She waved upstairs and headed out.

  Zoe went through the pile of papers on the table in front of her and sorted them all out again. Most of them were various diagrams she was using to keep track of the mana in her skill — useless to her now, though she liked to keep them stored back home at Foizo just in case they’d ever come in handy. She put them away in her Storage skill and crossed off ‘Familiar’ from her list of skills to get.

  Then she summoned a near two inch thick notebook and went through ripping out each page, one by one. The next skill she wanted to work on was her Sender of Words skill, and she’d need an enormous pile of letters prepared so she could cast the skill hundreds if not thousands of times, watching as the mana ripped the letter from space and set it to whoever she was sending it to.

  She looked at the pile of torn papers in front of her and sighed. Writing thousands of letters was going to be painful for her wrist — writing out all the diagrams and notes she needed to take on the skill alone was repetitive and straining enough, let alone the skill itself requiring her to write so much.

  Though, for that matter, were the words even that necessary? She grabbed an empty sheet of paper and pushed mana into her Words of Power skill, creating black wispy text on the surface of the page.

  Hey Joe, I’m testing a skill. All’s well. Sorry.

  She pushed mana into her Sender of Words skill to send the letter to Joe, but nothing happened. The letter remained in her hand, with the black wispy text left where it was.

  “Damn.” Zoe said to Fennel. “You’d think the class’ skills would work together, at least. That’s annoying.”

  Zoe sighed again, summoning a comfortable piece of wood to her hand and enchanted it with Bearer of Ink to turn it into a perfect pen for writing and wrote out thousands of letters on small slips of paper. Each time she finished, she added it to a growing tower of letters next to her, and each minute that passed she kept trying to find new ways to shorten the letter she was writing without losing the information she thought to be important.

  This Zoe. Testing skill. Thanks. Sorry.

  The mana of the skill was simple, but precise. There was no mana bouncing through time, and hardly any mana even skipping through space as she cast it. The vast majority of the mana Zoe watched for the skill seemed to be whatever the system’s wrapping of mana was supposed to be for, with the actual mana that did anything being a very minor part of the skill.

  This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Boiled down to its basics, their seemed to be three different parts to the mana. The first washed over the letter — to read the contents of the letter, Zoe assumed. The second seemed to be some kind of definition — recipient, Zoe wondered? It didn’t seem to do anything on its own, but it got mixed up into everything else all the same. And the third part destroyed the letter, shunting it off through a tiny hole carved out in space to wherever her letters were being stored.

  Zoe wondered if that aspect of it was even necessary at all. If the first part of the skill was reading the contents of the letter, then there was no reason that the letter had to be destroyed. So maybe the first part was doing something else. Verification, of some kind? To ensure that it was a letter that would qualify for the skill? But why would it even need to verify anything?

  And none of it seemed to be related to whatever would happen when the letter was received by the receiver. Would Zoe need to replicate that as well, or would the system do that for her when she successfully recreated the rest of the skill? She wasn’t sure, but if it came down to that then she’d have Emma stick around for a while to study what happened when somebody received a letter.

  The pile of letters grew smaller and smaller as the days passed, each one only a single paltry attempt at studying the skill’s pattern of mana. Another pile of papers grew next to it, filled with notes and diagrams she was keeping on the skill, bits crossed off as she realized her mistakes and other bits circled with exaggerated question marks where she was confused.

  She tried to send the letters to different people, to spread them out so no one person would be annoyed too much but the sheer quantity of letters she needed to send was probably just annoying everybody a lot, she imagined. Every hour, Joe, Eliza, Peter and Lauren would all receive several of the same letters. Would it wake them up if they were sleeping? Zoe hoped it wouldn’t.

  Whenever she was back in Foizo she made a note to remember to apologize. Maybe make them a nice dinner, or take them out on an adventure. Or ask them what they wanted. That was probably best. She’d do something, though.

  The skill itself was simple, but it was so quick and precise that Zoe could only even focus on a tiny fraction of it at a time. Bit by bit her diagrams grew, and she felt confident enough to make her first attempt.

  She held one of the last letters she’d prepared in her hand and took a deep breath. Mana rushed out of her, coating the letter and forming the definition of one of her friends. Joe’s, if she was right about it being a definition. More mana rushed out from her hand and wrapped up the rest, shunting it away into a tiny hole in space.

  *Ding* You have unlocked the Sending skill.

  “Nice.” Zoe said to herself as she grabbed four more sheets of paper to write four final letters on.

  Dear friend, I’m sorry for the enormous number of letters I’ve written you in the last few days. Next time we see, I’ll repay you however I can. Thank you for being a friend, and I’m sorry if I’ve annoyed you. Hopefully the system allowed you to ignore my letters without too much hassle. I got the skill I was working on, so the swarm of letters will stop now.

  She held onto each one, one by one and pushed mana into her new Sending skill, shunting them off through space to her friends.

  “That was an easy one, buddy.” Zoe said to Oliver laying on the floor a few feet away from her. “Last one doesn’t even require me to annoy my friends. I probably should have found some people who would be okay with it and paid them to let me send letters, in hindsight. Hopefully they’re not too annoyed.”

  Zoe reorganized the papers on her desk, putting all the diagrams she’d made away with her Cosmic Familiar skill and burning away the remaining prewritten letters. She crossed off Sender of Words and leaned back in her chair.

  With how complicated the cosmic skills were to get, Zoe had forgotten how simple the less complex skills tended to be. Light was less than a day. Sender of Words was completely new and even that only took a few days. Words of Power might only take a few days, and it raised the question of whether or not she should add Bearer of Ink to her list of necessary skills.

  On the one hand, she could just carry a pencil around with her. But on the other hand, not carrying a pencil around had been rather convenient since she’d taken the class.

  “What do you think, buddy?" Zoe asked Fennel who was sitting on a window sill staring out at the people down below on the street.

  He meowed back.

  “Yeah. You’re right. This is a really bad class, I don’t wanna take it again. I’ll just get Bearer of Ink too.” Zoe nodded.

  Fennel meowed again.

  “Y’know, one day somebody might make a way for us to understand you. That would be pretty cool. I bet you’d mostly just be saying you’re hungry or that you want attention, though.” Zoe said.

  Fennel turned back to the window, watching all the people walk by.

  Words of Power was another simple mana pattern — Zoe supposed most would be now that she’d gotten used to the mana jumping through the cosmos. And without requiring writing out thousands of letters was far simpler to study. The definitions of the words themselves were quite complicated, and if she changed which words were being written or where they were written, or really anything about how the words appeared at all, the entire pattern of mana seemed to change.

  But she only needed to cast the skill once for the system to give it to her, and then she could study it all she wanted without the class. She settled on a simple word appearing on the ceiling above her.

  Hair

  And within a day, she managed to break down the mess of mana and recreate it herself.

  *Ding* You have unlocked the Distant Scribe skill.

  Bearer of Ink was the most complicated of her Bearer of Words class skills by far, at least of the ones that she decided to study. The mana twisted and churned, flowing over itself as it formed an inkwell and quill — similar to the elemental creation patterns in some ways, but very different in other ways.

  But after a week of studying the pattern, of breaking it down into its core components, Zoe had a fully finished diagram written out in front of her. It seemed almost like two skills combined into a single skill. One half of it was dedicated almost entirely to creating the inkwell itself, and the other half was for creating the quill. There was a connection between the two, but it almost seemed superfluous to Zoe’s eye.

  She kept working at the diagram, piecing apart the system’s mana and isolating both halves of the skill for another week, and when she was done she tried casting just the part for creating an inkwell.

  *Ding* You have unlocked the Portable Inkwell skill.

  “Huh.” Zoe hummed, as she tried repeating the process for just the quill part of the skill.

  *Ding* You have unlocked the Portable Quill skill.

  *Ding* The skills Portable Inkwell and Portable Quill have been combined into the Bearer of Ink skill.

  “Well, would you look at that, buddy?” Zoe said to Oliver. “Bearer of Ink is just a shortcut for two skills. I wonder how many other skills work like that? I guess that the Elemental skills work similarly, huh? Think we could add more writing implements into it?”

  Oliver looked over at Zoe and yawned.

  “Yeah. Me too buddy.” Zoe smiled.

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