We win wars. It was a powerful statement. Wars were terrible things. A single man couldn’t determine the outcome of a war. Not easily. The puffer and I stared at my father, and he coughed.

“What I mean by this is that members of my family usually work with the rulers or government of a city. In a military capacity. You see, it’s true that scribers can inscribe symbols, but for some organisations the more important job is for scribers to work out what concept a symbol represents.”

“Our family has always had great pride in being able to decode symbols that are brought to us. The number of symbol variations are limitless, and a really creative person can warp a symbol so much that it’s unrecognisable. That’s where we come in. Whether it’s symbol traps littering ancient ruins or symbols blocking communications and secret weapons made by enemy armies, we work out what they do.”

Wait. Is my father part of a spy family?

It sounded like he was. I looked at him with renewed interest. I’d assumed the system made everything easier for people, and that studying or getting experience for jobs wouldn’t be necessary. I was wrong. Just learning the symbols on the wall and their combinations would probably take years.

“Of course, that’s just my family.” My father put away the inscriber.

“Scribers, sometimes formally called inscribers, are best known for making inscribed items. There are two types of inscribed items. The first require mana to activate and use, and are known as magic items, or regents. Others require no mana, or absorb it passively instead of being activated, and these are called onze.”

My hand reached up to him at the mention of magic items. This was the real part of inscribing I wanted to learn. Magic items were a dream come true. A magic wand, a mask that raised the dead, a flying carpet. Kids all over the world had dreams of magic items back on Earth.

I would live that dream.

“This is a complicated subject.” He put his hands out in front of me. “The left one is regents. The right is onze. Which would you like to learn about?”

I smacked his left hand. I was ready.

“Heh. That’s what they all say.” My dad grinned. “The first thing people will ask you when they hear you inscribe regents is whether you’re rich. That’s because regents are huge money makers. They are often limited in uses and have to be custom made for individuals to suit their skills. This means that you could have a customer for life if you sell a single regent, and that customer will keep coming back with buckets of money.”

I grinned. This was more like it.

“Opposingly, onze are cheaper to maintain and will never run out, but their effects are subtle because they don’t use magic. Understanding them is also difficult for scribers because our society is so intrinsically linked with mana. Some scribers don’t even believe onze are real, they say they are either using magic in another way, or that they are unknown magics. It is tough to imagine a manaless object capable of doing the same feats as a magic item.”

My father still snuck in the onze lesson. I saw what he was doing, the sneaky man. Then I thought over his explanation. He didn’t have mana, and yet he could use the inscriber. That meant the inscriber was an onze, not a regent.

Maybe onze were more useful than I was giving them credit for.

“Inscribed regents are a backbone of our society.” My father continued. “That living wall that Zodiac has is one giant regent. It can be refilled and controlled by several magicians, and it’s not the biggest I’ve seen. A house might have a couple of inscribed items, powered by their mana, but replacing them every few years would get expensive. The swords and armour you saw the knights using are also made by scribers.”

He was right. I’d run into a lot of inscribed items without realising it. I’d thought they were skills used by the individuals. Those people couldn’t create their own regents, and that left a huge market. That raised a simple question.

Why didn’t we have magic items? My father could make them.

I gestured at my dad towards the floor and the door. I pointed to the inscriber, and then to him. I hoped I got the meaning of my words across to him. He looked at my charade and his smile faded.

“Neither your mother nor I can use mana. There’s nobody to power regents in our home.” My father explained. “And the creation of onze requires more resources than we have.” Then his smile returned. “But now we have you, champ. It might be time for me to start filling this place with some regents. Who knows, maybe you’ll be able to add your own to the house. When you’re grown up.”

That sounded nice. I could imagine working day and night with my father to fill the house with magical items. A roof that never leaked, maybe a fridge or something similar, and definitely a magic wand that shot fireballs. That was probably a house’ most important feature.

My dad flourished his hand. “Wait, if everyone knows that regents are a great way to make money, why don’t they do it for a living? After all, there’s nothing stopping them from learning inscribing.”

He wasn’t looking for an answer. But the question did make me think.

“Good question.” My father complimented himself.

“The answer is simple. Life, money, and survival. The same problems we always face in life become three times harder when someone wants to be an inscriber.”

“Life is first. Your early life will suck if you’re a scriber. This is because inscribing takes time. It’s not a small amount of time. You will eventually go to school and instead of making friends you’ll be inscribing all day. And all night. Skipping parties… and dates.” I sensed that my father had firsthand experience with this problem. “Even if you somehow skip school, it will never stop. New symbols, new variations, the field is always growing. Then there’s the time you need to actually inscribe items. When you add it all together, it’s extremely rare for someone to abandon their job to learn inscribing.”

“You have a huge advantage in this area.” My father looked me in the eye. “You’re a baby. You don’t have a social life. Or friends.”

Ouch. Way to hit me below the diaper.

“My father would’ve sacrificed his legs and hair to be able to teach us at such a young age. He still lost his hair.” My father smiled. “It will still require hard work on your part, but with the free time you have now, you could leave others in the dust by the time you’re a teenager.”

Then he shook his head. “However, you don’t have to do that. I know it sounds exciting and easy now, later on you’ll realise how difficult it is. That’s when you'll truly decide whether you want to be a scriber or not.

“I promise you that if you do stick with it, I will be by your side the whole time. Teaching you will never be a burden, and I will answer any questions you have.”

The offer wasn’t as distasteful as my father thought it was. I’d lived a lifetime previously, but I hadn’t put in the early work to get a good education and job experience. That meant I had to work the runt of the litter jobs.

I’d even had to work in tech support.

I would sacrifice years of my life if it meant I didn’t have to do one of those jobs again. I can’t even imagine what magic tech support is like. Probably filled with people asking for refunds.

Had they even tried turning their regents on and off again? Who knows where they got things stuck?

The thought terrified me.

A specialised education from the moment I was born sounded like a dream come true to me. I didn’t even have to leave my cot. And I clap my hands together to show my father my approval. This was exactly what I wanted.

“The second issue that scribers face is money.” My father frowned. “This is where we’re going to have the most trouble. There are two things scribers need to pay for. The first is symbols. It’s difficult to find symbols by yourself, it takes a lot of trial and error and materials. You could go through entire forests of paper drawing lines and not find a single symbol. If you got lucky and found one, you wouldn’t know what that symbol does once you do find it.”

“Luckily, you have more than enough symbols to learn here. I also decode for Zodiac. That means that it’s my job to look at and learn new symbols that are being developed by different people around the world. The real issue is the second cost that inscribers have. Materials.”

My father brought the paper back out, but then he grabbed something else. A sheet of thin stone. “What's the difference between these two materials? The answer for scribers is the technique needed to put symbols onto them. A paper can have symbols written on it; stone needs to have the symbols etched into it for the best impact. They both have the same result, a symbol that turns the material into an inscribed item, but the method to do this is completely different for both.”

“A scriber needs to know how to work with every material, no matter how difficult it is. Different metals, different types of stone, each one needs to be practised on hundreds of times. Thousands. Every material has different feels and kinks, and inscribed items only work if each line of a symbol is done perfectly. Money is the biggest reason that people fail, even if they know their symbols like the back of their hand.”

“That doesn’t even consider the amount of money needed to study and create variations. There’s a reason that kind of expense is only taken on by countries and empires.”

My face paled at every word that my father said. I hadn’t considered that at all. We were already lacking in money, how was I going to find a way to pay for the materials I need to practice?

Could I create them using my skill? I didn’t have metal creation.

“Then there’s the third and final trial.” My father was hitting me with the reality of the situation. “Survival. I’ve said that inscribed items won’t work if a line is incorrect. More accidents can happen than that. This problem is the least talked about, but it is also the most important for a true scriber. If you are working on a sword that spews fire, you don’t want it exploding in your face because you didn’t connect the symbols properly. If you make an armour harden and shut all openings, then you don’t want to be testing it when you realise you can’t turn off the effect.”

He clapped his hands together and my concentration broke.

“I’ve given you more than enough information. That’s all for today.”

My father stood up and walked to my cot.

“There's a reason I started with the bad stuff, champ.” My father gave my head a pat. “You’re smart. Take your time and think about this properly. If you still want to learn then you know where I am.”

My father left the room and I laid back down. I heard a rustling sound; the puffer was rummaging through the dirt.

Was it drawing something?

I sighed. The facts my father had given me made me think. Time, money, danger, it wasn’t all glory to learn inscribing. Luckily, I had an awesome father that could help me.

That begged a different question. I looked up at the wooden ceiling, mouldy and splintering. According to my father, inscribing items and turning them into regents would earn a lot of money.

If he was a nobody without any talent it would explain our situation, but his words suggested the opposite, and if my father and his family were so important, why did we live like this?

What had happened?