“These 4 abilities are interesting. Force Shield creates magic floating translucent shield that protects the caster. It is a Tier 1 spell. Remind you of anything? Wait, don’t answer, that’s rhetorical.”

  “Moving on, we have the ability Identify. It should remind you of the spell of the same name from that game we all play. This is also a Tier 1 ability. We are still missing detect magic and some others, but we’re getting there.”

  “This brings us to our Money ability, Gold Dust. It creates a small area of affect cloud of gold dust. Coats everything in it. This essentially negates camo, invisibility, and similar. It also forces anyone in the gold dust cloud to resist status of sneezing fit. It is Tier 2.”

  Lastly, we have the real gem: the ability of Mana Reinforcement 1. It is the first tier of increasing your mana pool. It only adds 1 Mana to your pool, but in the abilities’ description it is the prerequisite to all the higher tier versions. This is clearly one way beings increase their mana totals. It is considered a Tier 3 passive ability. It is permanent. It is the first concrete example of passive ongoing abilities existing that aren’t tied to a class ability. This makes me believe that there are a host of abilities that are out there that are passives, but we just haven’t encountered them.” She sounded excited. She had a few extra pieces to this massive puzzle revealed. This allowed her to draw at least one more conclusion. This gave her half a dozen more hypotheses to test.

  “Nora, who do we give the extra mana to? I am sure you have feelings on this.” I was curious to see if she had a whole line of reasoning.

  “It should go to you. Assess and Identify are game changers, so it seems silly not to give the person who can use them as much mana as possible. FYI, to ever learn the version above that you will apparently need to raise your intelligence. 5 is the minimum for tier 3.”

  How did she figure that out? Actually, why am I questioning that? She is the one with nearly a 10 in intelligence. Well, at least she figured it out. “Thanks for your vote in my favor of taking the mana token.”

  Dennis looked saddened by the whole conversation. “Why shouldn’t I be takin’ it. It’d put me 1 closer to havin’ the necessary mana to use my ability an extra time a day.”

  Nora countered, “and how much mana do you have now?”

  “I have 8 mana.”

  Nora looked unimpressed. “and how much mana will you have at the top end of your class?”

  Dennis visibly started counting with his fingers. He took his time at the theatrics of it. He licked a finger briefly like he was wetting the tip of an ancient ink pen. “Eleven, or thirteen if’n I put my two stats from human into the appropriate stuff.”

  “So, you have a fair amount of stat growth ahead of you. Excellent. Then I am confident you will be where you need to be by the time it really matters. By the way, what is your charisma going to be by the time you reach level 10?”

  “7.”

  “That right there gets you two additional uses of the ability from that. I hope that with 7 uses a day, we should all have full ability slots. You will be able to start adding more ability tokens to the overall mix for the United States. Eventually you will be able to make a business of this with fantastic profits. Not to mention, by level 10, you should be taking all of a creature’s abilities in one go. You will start taking class tokens as well. We aren’t sure what is after that, but whatever it is, you will get it.”

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  “Business?” His response was a poor attempt to hide his desires. He probably always wanted to make money off of this. I don’t doubt he has been annoyed or worse about lost profits.

  I finally had to interrupt. “Dennis. I appreciate that it could go to you in theory, but do you even have the necessary intelligence?” He shook his head. I continued, “When you do, then we should absolutely get you one of them. That would be valuable, but for now Nora, Billy, and I are probably the only ones in the group that even qualify. I am going to use the 2 tokens set aside for me. Nora can have the Force Shield ability, and Billy gets the Gold Dust ability. With your thievery affinity, I imagine at least a few of the possible stuff we get from the wolfmen scouts should be viable.”

  Nora got a little sheepish, “the camouflage ability has the thievery affinity.” Dennis and I both stopped speaking at that point. I shouldn’t be shocked; camo seemed perfectly under the thievery umbrella. Nora continued, “now that Frank is all healed up, we should all get out of here. It’s gonna start stinking really bad in here.”

  Getting back across the street was a lot quicker than the trip to the Stack Shack. I found myself on a bench outside McDonalds. Time to call grandpa. I pulled the iPhone out of my pocket. The time glared back at me in failure: 11:34am. We had no hope of getting past Hermanville, and on to Interstate 70, much less the 80 miles till we got close enough to switch interstates down to Fenton before noon. That ship had sailed long before we raided the Stack Shack here outside Hermanville. I would call grandpa just as soon as I finished gaining these abilities.

  I held the Identify token firmly in my hands and closed my eyes. The system properly identified the ability token as Identify. And it wanted to know if I wanted to learn it, after selecting yes I figured I should at least read through the description.

  Identify-Tier 1-Arcane, Divination, Knowledge, Academic.

  By means of this spell the caster may identify the name and qualities of a magic item. Lower tier items are identified automatically, higher tier items require use of the skill knowledge-arcane. This use would be done with significant bonuses to help identify the item. With the identification of an item such things as trigger words, instructions, and similar would also be known. Certain very powerful items as well as intelligent items have the ability to resist Identify.

  The fact that it won’t automatically identify all magic items of all power and rarity levels suggests that there is probably a higher tier ability that handles those types of items. I not worried about any of that yet. Simply having a way to identify magic items will be useful. We still need to have something to detect magic items though. Some won’t need detect magic, as their nature will be fairly obvious. Others won’t be nearly so easy to detect. Regardless, I’ll take the win. I proceeded to add my extra mana ability as well.

  Mana Reinforcement 1- Tier 3-Arcane, Divine, Mana, Intelligence, Constitution

  This is a passive ability. This permanently gives 1 additional mana to the user’s maximum mana capacity. It does not directly affect mana related skills. It is also the prerequisite to all higher tiers of mana reinforcement.

  There seems to be things that this ability tells us beneath the surface, but without additional abilities to reference I felt unqualified to determine what they were. However, I loved that I now had 11 total mana. I was also recovering 3 mana every 2 hours, with the hope that I can continue to improve it even more. While on a larger level, humanity wasn’t in any better position over all, this little corner was better off. Our prospects had improved. With that in mind I stepped into the McDonalds to plan our next steps.

  Neal Cassland    Human

  Level: 2        39% to next level

  Affinities: Intelligence, Charisma, Knowledge, Law, Politics

  Current Class: Legislative Aide      Lvl 2/5

  Str 3; Agi 3; Con 4; Int 5; Wis 3; Cha 5; Health 27; Mana 11

  Abilites: (2/5) Identify; Mana Reinforcement 1 Class Ability- Assess

  Skills of Note: Pistols 2; Rifles 2; Running 4; Hunting 3; Fishing 2; History 3; Public Speaking 3; Law 4; Persuasion 4; Command 1; Mana-Recovery 1