Once we were on the move I tried to look around at the scenery and really soak in the wonders of this strange new world. They were… not terribly exciting, for the most part. The trees and grass all looked perfectly mundane, even if all the trees appeared to be evergreen variations. A few foresty critters darted away as we went by, but none exciting enough to write home about. I was never one to spend much time in nature so seeing animals I didn’t recognize wasn’t a new experience. There were bugs that pretty much looked like bugs; something that looked kind of like a squirrel; something that looked kind of like a rabbit; and an assortment of birds. My initial excitement died off pretty quick so I went back to hunting the sky for signs of Earris’s massive ring system. It had disappeared by then, but the day side of the ring was just starting to peek over the horizon behind the rising sun ahead of us.

We followed a trail so thin it might have been an animal track. To our left was a dark, old growth forest, to our right a shallow creek followed by an open field of wild grass. I could see a distant mountain range towering out beyond the forest, but in the other direction it was flat all the way to the horizon with only a second, smaller forest on the other side of the field. The grassy field turned out to be far more interesting to watch, as there was a massive herd of some kind of deer-like creature passing by. They looked bigger than real deer, but had a similar bone structure, with thin legs. The antlers on their head looked like the sort of massive curvy things I would expect to see on mountain goats. Their fur was an unremarkable brown. When I asked Ferrith about them he just called them “stags” in a disinterested tone.

The clean air was nice, but when the novelty of my new surroundings wore off and we were still traveling I realized I still had some things I was curious to learn. Since Ferrith seemed content to travel in silence I decided to get the conversation flowing on my own. He was jogging, but his breathing wasn’t coming in heavy so I figured he could handle some talking. “So,” I called out, “how does magic work in this world exactly?”

Ferrith briefly glanced over his shoulder at me, then turned back to focus on the trail in front of him. Just when I thought he was just going to ignore me he said between breaths, “Use a Skill, spend MP.”

“Em Pee?” I sounded out.

“The energy that powers magic,” Ferrith said.

“What does it stand for? Mana… points? Like from video games?”

“Dunno,” Ferrith answered with blunt honesty. “Translation, remember? You’re hearing whatever makes sense to you.”

“Oh,” I said. That made a bit more sense. If Ferrith’s words were being magically translated and I heard “MP” that had to mean however the stuff functioned, it was similar enough to how that resource was managed in some of the games I played back home that the term “MP” was the best fit. “So you must run out of MP if you use too many Skills, right?”

“Obviously,” Ferrith said. He didn’t elaborate, seemingly comfortable with the conversation ending right there so he could focus on the path ahead.

“So where does MP come from?” I asked next. Ferrith’s reluctance to answer my questions wasn’t about to stop me from asking them. I had nothing better to do.

“Sleep,” Ferrith panted.

“That’s it? You just sleep and it recharges? Is it like a time thing, or is the actual act of sleeping important?”

“Sleep,” Ferrith repeated. This time he elaborated slightly more. “Use too much MP and you fall asleep.”

He was being a little sparse on details. I tried to keep in mind he was just an adventurer. If someone tried to ask me how an iPhone worked I probably wouldn’t be able to explain any of the underlying mechanics either. “Does that mean my Skill might not be to sleep?” I asked. “Is it possible it just requires more MP than I have so when I try to use it, it knocks me out?”

Ferrith’s armor flexed as he shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t ask me about your Skill,” he said.

“Right. Sorry,” I said. I figured I’d just have to accept that I wasn’t going to know everything about my own Skill right away. He’d said the night before that there were ways to identify them, so that’s what I’d have to do when we got to this nearby town I kept hearing about. Maybe I’d get a pleasant surprise that my Skill could do a little more than help me sleep at night. I wasn’t particularly partial to surprises with the way they usually seemed to manifest in my life, but I couldn’t stop a tiny corner of my mind from hoping for more. I told it to shut up and be realistic. If I got a surprise about my Skill it was probably going to be something terrible, like that using it accelerated my cancer’s growth.

“So how much, uh, MP do Skills cost?” I asked Ferrith.

“Depends,” he said. “They’re all different. I can use mine four times.”

“That’s it?”

“If I get a good night’s sleep,” he continued, “I can do five. But then I pass out.” Four ogres a day. Considering the ogres he summoned were permanent, that actually seemed pretty good. If not for how difficult they became for him to control in larger numbers he could build up a whole army of ogres. It seemed like he must’ve built up two or three days’ worth of summons to storm that harpy nest from yesterday.

“What about that fireball thing you did?” I asked.

Ferrith shrugged again. “Thirteen or fourteen,” he said. “But ogres are more useful. They last.”

“And they use the same resource? MP?”

“Yeah.”

I thought about that. Those Brands Ferrith had mentioned the other day didn’t seem nearly as powerful with this new information. They just granted a Skill, not MP. No matter how many Brands someone had, they only had so much MP to use before they passed out. I was about to ask about alternate ways to recover MP when Ferrith held up a hand and brought our group to a halt. Both the ogres were breathing hard and seemed happy for the break.

“Something wrong?” I asked.

He pointed to the side of the trail, toward the forest. The trunks of several of the trees had been shredded by claws. It looked to me like the kind of thing bears might do, though I doubted this world had animals exactly like bears. “We’re going to be going into some dangerous territory from here,” Ferrith said. “It might be best if you wait here. I can come back for you when I’m done.”

“Dangerous how?” I asked.

“Monsters,” was all Ferrith said.

“And these monsters… are they the ones that did that to the trees over there?”

“It’s how they mark their territory,” Ferrith explained.

“And they’re more dangerous than harpies?” That was just a guess. Harpies didn’t seem like they could carve such deep gouges into tree trunks, and anything that could do that to a tree seemed like it would probably do a lot worse to a person.

“Significantly more,” Ferrith answered.

I glanced at the sun to get a crude estimate of the time. Still early in the day. “How long would you be gone?” I asked.

“1.89 hours. Maybe longer.”

I tried to ignore why he didn’t just say “two hours” and thought about what it’d be like to wait out here by myself for that long. It’s not like I could call him on his cell if he was late getting back. “If I’m right on the edge of their territory, might one of these monsters come by and find me anyway?”

“It’s not as likely.”

“As likely?” I pressed. “How likely do you think it is to run into one of these things?”

Ferrith looked back at me and scrunched up his face while he considered that. “One of them? Probably fifty-fifty, but I can usually handle one.”

That was an easy calculation to run. If there was even a ten percent chance one of these unnamed monsters happened to come by while I was waiting on the side of this trail alone I was as good as dead. At least with Ferrith around I would have a chance. I shook my head. “I think I’d rather come with you,” I said.

“If you come, you’ll have to keep your mouth shut from here on out,” Ferrith warned. I was kind of surprised he didn’t try to talk me into staying behind.

I tried not to glare suspiciously at him for that comment. It occurred to me that maybe this whole thing was just an excuse to stop me from pestering him with more questions. “I can be quiet,” I said, “if you tell me why.”

Ferrith closed his eyes and tapped his brow with a gauntleted hand. “You need me to explain why monsters are dangerous? Don’t they have monsters in your world?”

“We have bears,” I supplied. There were plenty of other predators around the world, but the most dangerous thing I’d ever seen outside of a zoo was a grizzly bear. It was a long tome ago on a family vacation and from the safety of a car, but the image of it was still something I would always remember. The largest predators that lived near my house were probably coyotes, and they weren’t very dangerous.

Ferrith actually laughed. “Is that all?” he asked. “We have those too. The monsters I’m worried about hunt bears. Why don’t you just keep your mouth shut and let me worry about the monsters. If you see any movement, tell me, otherwise I don’t want to hear a peep out of you. Got it?”