The golem teacher was always so difficult to read. He looked and sounded plain and monotone, but that blankness could easily be read as sternness or annoyance.

After another ten minutes or so, other students began to shuffle in. Lukas was a tan cloak, but this class was almost entirely composed of sapphire cloaks - the next rank up from tan. The students kept eyeing him as they meandered to their seats, and he offered them a pleasant smile as they did so. He knew he was the topic of much gossip.

His smile only grew when a brother and sister snow inzi sat beside him. The boy, Atel, and the girl, Atsix, were very kind to him. He considered them friends. They were also stunning in their own right, with pale blue skin, small pointed ears, and mischievous, sparkling grey eyes. Blue scales dotted their cheeks and arms from what he could see. They were twins, and very talkative. It made him feel more comfortable, less overwhelmed.

“Lukas!” Atsix chirped, way too loud, garnering a glare from a few different students as she plopped down in a chair on his right, “Tell Atel that he’s being dumb.”

He chuckled, “What, no context?”

Atel huffed as he sat on Lukas’s left side, “She's just pissed at me because I didn’t know the answer to a stupid question!”

“You’re stupid, not the question!” she seethed, rolling her eyes.

They continued to bicker playfully with each other across Lukas, garnering absolutely no additional context, with nothing for him to say to stop them - not that he necessarily would have. It warmly reminded him of his sister he missed so much. The two only stopped once Rasdogir vas Gromin Wratu cleared his throat to call attention. They knew better than to talk over this teacher. He could be stern when he felt it was needed. A lesson they learned when Rasdogir popped a loud, bright spell between them when they kept getting too distracted.

The class was just a whole bunch of note-taking for Lukas. He had to work five times as hard to make sure he caught up to these blue-cloak peers. The class started with a lesson recap about aspects, but rather quickly moved the class outdoors.

It was lush and humid outside. Msavii was near the equator, so it wasn’t much of a surprise that the life-filled area was a little on the warm side. It was weather Lukas would have hated back home, but for whatever reason, this body was comfortable with every weather condition he had yet to see here. Even with this new appreciation for nature, however, he wasn’t as big of a fan of the bugs. The most annoying of which was one slim, deep purple, fly-like bug. It was tiny, the size of a gnat, but it really really liked the salt from sweat.

Lukas was a hunter, a great outdoorsman, but fuck were these little bastards annoying. He waved some away as Rasdogir explained the lesson.

“Today we’re going to start to find what you’re most aligned with,” he said, not looking at anyone in particular, “Aspects go from common to incredibly rare, and for most people, they are going to be better with certain ones than others. That’s not to say you can’t learn something that doesn’t click with you immediately, but we like to try to find what our students are talented with. That’s what our goal is.”

“This is something we’ll do over the next few weeks. Since you’re mostly Sapphire Cloaks, you’ll be choosing your focuses soon. We hope this will help with that decision,” he finished, looking at a tablet he brought out from his never-ending cloak. The teacher glanced around, “I have a list of aspects. Work your way down the list. Just try a simple spell, note the reaction, and move on. Try not to get hung up or stuck on one aspect. Now, go.”

The students spread out and sat, mostly in the greyish-toned grass. Lukas followed suit and sat near Atel and Atsix. They were already chittering about what aspects they’d be good at. Apparently different races tended to be good at specific aspects. For snow inzis like them, it was Ice, Water, and Death, naturally.

Lukas was a mix between a mercury dragon and a fae, as far as the school had been able to tell. Because of that, his likely aspects would be poison and life… but he was really curious what else would worm its way out of the woodwork, so to speak.

He tried to focus on the energy around him like he’d been taught, and make it focus into an orb in front of him. Then… it was time to go down the list! It was just the most common aspects; earth, fire, water, air, darkness, light, poison, healing, life, death. As far as he understood, it started with creating a ball of energy. Then, the idea was to imbue the energy with the chosen aspect. The system had a whole categorization of things, and aspects could get very specific and strange.

Other students were already creating balls of fire or ice. Lukas was struggling to maintain the simple energy orb. He didn’t have the beginning skills, since he somewhat skipped ahead, thanks to his strange situation. Usually, people learned more general magic skills first like and or whatever.

Even so, he managed it with a bit of effort.

The easiest for him was poison. The dragon part of himself was a mercury dragon, which sounded odd, and was obviously chrome in color, but apparently, it was named that not just for the color but for the poisonous nature. According to his skills, he had , , with a limitation that it had to be . That was a fae thing, hallucinations and illusions and whatever.

The energy took on a greenish hue, like a sickly swirling of speckled greens. It stayed like that for a moment before it lightened a couple of shades and settled there. Lukas smiled at his little accomplishment. He felt proud about himself. Doing something when you didn’t have the skill for it was quite hard. Adjusting the aspect of energy was difficult too.

The screen that appeared before him startled the hell out of him. He tossed the ball of energy up involuntarily, which made it dissipate into nothingness. Atel and Atsix looked at him with furrowed brows for a moment before Atel spoke up, “Oh! Did you get a skill??”

Atsix beamed, immediately curious, “Oh oh oh, what’d you get!?”

She leaned over, practically on top of Lukas. He scooched away an inch or two, “Ah, yeah. Yeah, I guess I did. I finally got . About time, too… it’s been a pain without it.”

Atsix snerked, “I still can’t believe you didn’t have that.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter that much if he’s just doing basic spells or whatever. It’s just… about having more control than that,” Atel shrugged.

“True, but it’s still weird.”

“Yeah, fair.”

“Should you tell Professor Rasdogir?”

“Oh my divine, please don’t say that too loud. You know how testy he gets about his name.”

Lukas tuned the twins out after a while and started playing with mana again. He made another ball of energy and noted how much easier it was to do when you had the right skill for it. He repeated what he had done before, creating an orb of poison aspected mana. It was practically simple compared to how it felt before. He could make the ball larger and it seemed more stable as well.

He stared at the sphere for a long while before he got startled again, this time by the professor. As per usual, the golem appeared from nowhere, seemingly aware of exactly what Lukas could and couldn’t detect. “Very good, Lukas. It is much harder to acquire a skill than to level it up the first few times. So your progress from here should be quite accelerated. If you would like, there are many texts in the library on faster methods to raise the level of basic mana skills once you have them. I would recommend checking them out after class and doing a thorough examination when you have time off.”

Lukas took a moment to calm his breathing, thankfully tossing the hallucinogenic poison ball into the ground this time. It struck a flower full of seemingly infinite off-white-pink petals that grew successively smaller, which proceeded to close suddenly as if it thought night had come. “Ah! Rasdogir! Er… Rasdogir vas Gromin Wratu. That sounds like a good idea, thank you. Are there any, in particular, you’d suggest?”

Rasdogir cleared his throat. “Professor Rasdogir vas Gromin Wratu. I have a few suggestions I will write down for you and get to you before class is out. But one thing to understand is that at such a basic level, there are many methods and techniques you can employ, a number of which are just as effective as each other, objectively speaking. It’s more about what works for you. Once you start getting into specific aspects, particular techniques matter more, but the direct management of energy itself is far more general. In fact, some even reject working with aspect skills and the like altogether for that very reason; there is nothing that mana cannot do, and to place specific restrictions on it makes certain tasks easier, but limits the mind and creativity. It is something to consider moving forward. It is my own preferred method, though, so I am biased.”