Peter stared at his daughter, her arm still raised in the air. “You realize this isn’t a movie, right, kiddo?”

She dropped her arm. “Yeah, but if we were in a movie, this is totally when the training montage would happen.”

“She’s not wrong,” Mark noted.

“Okay, you’re probably right,” Peter admitted, “but since this isn’t a movie we’ll have to have to do this the old-fashioned way.”

“There’s an old-fashioned way to update your Skills and power-level?” Angela said. “Wow, you’ve acclimated to this place better than I expected.”

Peter responded with a sardonic look as he grabbed a second sweet pastry and lowered his large body gingerly to the ground. His legs screamed at him every step of the way—a painful reminder that it was only two days ago that he’d helped carry Beth through the forest—but did his best not to show his discomfort. Based on the pointed looks he was getting from his family, nobody was buying it.

“Alright, let’s start by sharing where we’re all at. Tomes out, everyone!” he said.

The rest of the family followed his example and sat on the ground, arranging themselves in a circle and summoning their Tomes. Beth took the lead, pointing emphatically at the small diary that made up her Tome. “The first Skill everyone needs to get is Writing. That’s the highest one I’ve unlocked since we got here, so it’s a good place to start.”

“I already have it,” Mark said.

“I don’t,” Peter said. “How did you get something to write with?”

“Just find a blank page and think about it,” she answered.

Peter did as she suggested, and to his surprise, a stick with a burnt nub appeared in his hand. “This is what I’m supposed to write with?”

“Yeah, it starts crappy but gets better as you level the Skill,” Mark said. “That’s what mine did, at least.”

Shaking his head, Peter put the burnt stick to the page and wrote The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

A page immediately appeared in the air.

NEW GENERAL SKILL LEARNED!

Writing – Skill Level 26 (Tier-II)

Really? You went with “the quick brown fox?” That’s some bleeding-edge creativity you got going on there.

Tier-I Bonus: Decreased chance of writing being misunderstood.

Tier-II Bonus: Unlocks writing prerequisite for occupations that aren’t writing-primary (e.g. Guard Captain, Shift Boss, etc.). Required Skill Level varies by occupation.

*Since this Skill predates your arrival in Arenia, it has been set at a level commensurate with the practical ability you already possess.

4,950 XP Earned (cumulative)

RENOWN LEVEL UP!

Level 7 Achieved

RENOWN LEVEL UP!

Level 8 Achieved

XP: 10,500

XP to next Renown: 3,100

“Oh, wow, you weren’t kidding,” he said. “I just went up two levels. My Renown is at Level 8 now.”

His charred stick had also changed into a run-of-the-mill click pen, which was much better.

The sound of Mark’s laughter caused Peter to look up. His son was looking at Angela, who was holding a hammer and chisel for some reason.

“You have got to be kidding me!” Angela said, glaring at her Tome.

Beth, ever the peacemaker, tsked loudly. “Now, now, Mark. That’s not nice. I’m sure she just needs to write something, and it will get better.” Despite his wife’s best efforts, the impact of her words was somewhat watered down by her own struggles to hold back laughter.

“Ugh. Fine,” Angela grumbled. She slid over one of her slabs and started banging away on it. It took a long time for her to inscribe enough words to trigger the Skill, but when it did, her hammer and chisel vanished, replaced by something with a woody appearance that was roughly the size of a pen but without the taper at one end. Something about it tickled a memory in Peter’s brain.

“Skill unlocked!” Angela said. “And at Level 23 too. That’s enough to get my Renown to Level 9—one more to double-digits.” She elbowed her brother. “I’m coming for ya, bro.”

“You can try, but good luck using that thing to write,” he said, pointing at the wooden implement in her hand.

As Angela raised the tool to poke her brother, Peter’s memory triggered, dredging up something from a long-ago university course.

“Could I see that?” he asked.

“Sure,” Angela said. She tried to pass it to him, only for it to disappear as soon as he touched it. Neither of them were particularly surprised at that outcome, though, so Angela simply summoned another one and held it up for his inspection.

As soon as he looked at it, he let out a chuckle. “That’s a reed stylus. It’s what ancient Mesopotamians used to write cuneiform.”

He winked at his wife, who was already looking skyward in resignation. With a grin, he said, “And you said my archeology minor would never have a real-world application.”

“I didn’t think we would get abducted and sent to a completely different planet!” she said, throwing up her hands.

“And yet…” he said, gesturing around the room in an exaggerated manner. “I don’t care how improbable the situation. I’m taking the win.”

Angela loudly cleared her throat. “As cool as it is to watch your parents flirt, how do I use a reed to write on stone?”

Peter nodded at the slab in his daughter’s lap. “In cuneiform writing, they would use styluses like that to make impressions in soft clay. I imagine you’ll get a similar effect by pressing the end of it into your Tome.”

Angela nodded and pressed the reed into the face of the stone slab. Sure enough, the moment her stylus made contact, it turned into soft clay. “Way to go, dad! And it even… whoah. Weird.”

“What?”

His daughter cocked her head. “I’m trying to write normally, but instead, my hand is doing this weird line script. Then, when I stop, the words change back to normal text.”

“Hmm…” Peter mused. “Maybe not so surprising. You’d have a hard time using a stylus to write normal English, so whatever magic our Tomes use must be converting your motions into a writing style more suited to the tool you’ve been given. In fact, I bet levelling up your Writing Skill will cause your stylus to become wedge-shaped, like how my charcoal nub became a pen. Wedges were essentially the height of cuneiform technology.”

Angela considered his words. “I guess that’s kind of cool. Even though the Tome guy is being a dick about it.”

“Maybe it’s a Tome woman?” Mark said. “You don’t know.”

Angela punched her brother in the shoulder hard enough to knock him over. “Not possible. Women are delicate flowers.”

“Oww…” Mark groaned. “Help! I need healing!”

“Don’t be a jerk,” she snapped, her response holding more heat than Peter would have expected. He looked back and forth between the two. For some reason, Mark looked contrite about the exchange.

“What’s going on?” Beth asked, clearly picking up on the same thing Peter was.

His daughter fiddled with her stylus in response. “I lost my only druid spell when I got my class,” she said resignedly. “I got more runes as compensation, but I don’t know what they do. I’ll need to play around with them to work out what’s what, but I don’t want to risk blowing up the house or something.”

Peter’s mind immediately went to Eliza’s story about how the Chance district came into being. “Please don’t.” He looked pointedly at Mark. “And don’t taunt your sister about her class difficulties. At least she’s got a plan about how to advance her class—you’d do well to take a page out of her book.”

Mark raised his eyebrows at him. “Seriously?”

“Of course I am,” Peter said. Why wouldn’t he be? “Whatever your class is, it sounds like your Tome gave it to you as a joke. In case you hadn’t noticed, nothing about this experience so far is a laughing matter. These are our lives now. We need to get serious about it.”

“Gee, dad. I totally hadn’t thought about that,” Mark snapped. “Here’s an idea: Maybe if you hadn’t gotten a private escort all the way to Palmyre, you’d have a class to plan for as well.”

“You think we had an easy go of it?” Peter said incredulously. He held up his bandaged arm. “Where do you think I got this from? Falling off a party bus?”

“You two!” Beth snapped. “We do not eat ourselves in this family. Not on Earth, not here, not ever. Do you understand?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Now, focus. We need to get our Renown up if we ever want to leave this house.”

Peter sighed and rubbed his unbandaged hand across his face. She was right.

He nodded to Mark. “Sorry. This has been a lot to take in and I haven’t fully adjusted.”

Surprisingly, Mark shook his head and let out a small laugh. “Dad. If you’d gotten used to this already, it would mean something was wrong with you.” Peter respected the olive branch and opened his mouth to agree, but Mark cut him off. “Hang on, I’m not done,” he said, his tone serious. “Here’s the deal: You have to lay off. This isn’t Earth anymore. All of those things we’ve butted heads over in the past? They’ve literally ceased to exist. No more university, no more medication, no more farm… all of it is gone. If we’re ever going to have a fresh start, this is it. But we’re only going to get one chance.”

Peter’s gut reaction was to scowl, or complain, or point out the times when Mark had backed down instead of rising to a challenge, but he recognized those reflexes for what they were: Habit. The truth was, his son was right. Their relationship had devolved badly back on Earth thanks to Mark’s willingness to blame his epilepsy for every unhappiness he encountered, even after he got his seizures medically controlled. This truly was an opportunity to reset their relationship, one that would never have come about otherwise, and he’d be a pretty bad father not to take it.

“When’d you get so smart,” he said, tousling Mark’s hair like he had when he was a little boy. Surprisingly, Mark didn’t pull away.

“I’d say I don’t know, but I did pick up a point of Intelligence for not scaring Darius into killing me when I stumbled across Gavin in the woods, so maybe then?”

Peter laughed. “Well then, why don’t we all put those Intelligence points to use and see what Skills we can unlock?”

“Hell yeah, let’s do this!” Angela blurted, bulldozing the awkwardness with her own enthusiasm.

The next couple of hours devolved into a spectacle that would probably have looked ridiculous to any outsider observer. They started by comparing their existing Skills, trying to unlock anything the others had but which they lacked, before moving onto the Skills that were as of yet undiscovered. Some of those were successes, like Writing, while others were impossible to test, such as Angela’s Swimming Skill. Then there were the edge cases, where the rules were unclear about what constituted a Skill in the first place. For instance, why were Fists considered a Weapons Skill, but feet weren’t? And why wasn’t there a Reading Skill? Granted, they definitely tried some things that nobody really expected was an actual Skill, as Angela demonstrated so clearly over a period of five agonizing minutes spent bouncing around the house on one foot. Granted, she did gain a Luck point when she managed to avoid breaking her neck after falling down the stairwell during her antics, so it wasn’t a complete loss. They also discovered that some of the Skills seemed to have a situation-dependent component to unlocking them. For instance, they couldn’t unlock the Sense Danger Skill simply by surprise-attacking each other. Ultimately, it proved to be an opaque system with more going on under the hood than they initially suspected, but they did their best regardless.

In the end, though, the big surprise was Beth.

“Hey, sexy lady,” Peter said, grinning.

“Stop it,” she said, blushing.

“Did sexy momma say something?” Angela shouted from down the hallway. She’d spent the last ten minutes trying to pickpocket her brother to no success.

“Stop it!” Beth shouted, going an even brighter red.

Peter just laughed. During the family’s struggle to find Skills that would raise their Renown in a meaningful way, someone had suggested trying to unlock performer-centric Skills. As it so happened, Beth had harboured dreams of being an actress when she was younger, and while that career had gone nowhere on Earth, on Arenia it unexpectedly produced a swath of experience when she unlocked Skills for Acting, Singing, Improv, and Obfuscation—all of them at Tier-II level. That opened up a Profession Quest opportunity to become a Performer, which she held off on accepting since nobody understood the ramifications of such a thing. But that wasn’t the funny part. The real humour came when she unlocked the Dancer Skill, also at Tier-II, and was offered a Profession Quest for Exotic Dancer.

“Dad, is mom doing sexy things in the kitchen?” Mark shouted. “Tell her to stop, the neighbours might see.”

Beth glared at her husband, whacking him on the shoulder. “You didn’t have to tell the kids, you know.”

“And miss out on this? Hell no. Besides, you already got your revenge.”

She squinted at him. “How did I get my revenge?”

He grinned at her. “By turning down the quest, obviously.”

She stared at him, eventually laughing and rolling her eyes as she sidled over to lean against him. “You’re a turd, did you know that?”

“Hey, you married me.”

“Ugh. You’re going to keep holding that against me, aren’t you.”

He gave the woman he loved a wide smile. "Absolutely."