After his sister explained the whole class thing to the group and Hildi’s brother Billy had figured out that he was too young to get one, he felt disappointed. Throughout his whole life, he had been consumed with the idea of gaining magic. He was the dungeon master in his family’s D&D games, but only because if he wasn’t, nobody would play. It’s not like he wanted to be a DM, he really wanted to be a wizard. He lived for the idea of some weedy little nebbish throwing the raw power of creation from his hands and soul. He knew it was an overreaction to his poor health and asthma, but so what if it was! And now, he was in a world where magic was real. He was in heaven. He called up his status menu:

Status

Name

Billy Brown

Level

8

Class(es)

na

Titles:

Attributes

0

Skill Points

10

Strength

12

Intelligence

19

Dexterity

13

Wisdom

15

Agility

15

Perception

17

Constitution

9

Charisma

16

Vitality

9

Luck

12

AC

4

Health:

39

Mana:

35

Qi:

35

Stamina:

29

He looked at his mana and thought that as soon as he turned 13, he was going to take the mage class and the amount shown would double or even triple. He couldn’t wait. He also wanted a Title. His sister’s Title had made a huge difference in her stats. She was only Level 7, but with the +2 stat points she gained per level, each of her stats shot through the roof. He pitied the poor guy that tried to roll over her based on her level. She was at least quadruple her stats from what a standard Level 7 should be.

But he was fine with that, heck he was happy for her, he just wanted one too.

It was currently Quietus, the eighth day after the event. His sister was out acting as a guard for one of the salvage teams and he was down in the basement with the other kids. They ranged from age five to twelve. There were four younger kids, but they stayed with their parents upstairs. Or stayed with Mama Fern and the other women. He’d started calling her that inside his head because she mothered everybody. Not like an old woman bringing you tea, but kind of like he figured mother nature would do. She wanted the best for you but wasn’t afraid to let you know if you weren’t stacking up. He could already see her looking at some of the adults in the group. He wouldn’t want to be them.

Most of the kids he was with were shell-shocked. They’d either seen or had run away from a monster killing their parents. They were all a mess. Although when he thought about it, he had no idea if his parents were still alive. He tried to lock that thought away, them being dead but thought it was likely. He looked around the basement. He was in a corner where he and his sister had slept last night. If he leaned out, he could see past the stairs and storage boxes he was hidden behind. He could see the other kids, but he didn’t want to talk to them. He wanted to do magic.

When he’d cast the spell, Mana Bolt, it had just happened. After Hildi had told him about mana and Qi and how to recognize them, he’d tried to feel them inside his chest and head. The whole walk from their old house to the Silvestre’s, he’d been only barely paying attention to his surroundings. Especially after Baxter tore into the skink. He figured the dog was going to keep them safe. And if it couldn’t, there was nothing he could do to save himself anyway.

Finally, as they started up the big hill and they could see the Silvestre' house, he felt them both, shining inside his chest and head, right where and how Hildi had described them. He’d read a lot of web fiction. He had a lot of favorites, but the ones that he liked the best talked about the process of using the Qi or the mana. Talking about Qi or Mana pools, pulling it from the dantian and circulating it through his body. The way the person directed the mana or Qi by reaching inside and directing it. He was doing that when the coyote came out of the backyard of the house next door and he just told it to attack! He didn’t really know what he was doing, he wanted that coyote dead.

Fortunately, his mana bolt wasn’t the only thing that hit the coyote. Will and Rex and Hildi all three hit it with crossbows. There were even a couple of more people that did so the coyote was going down, regardless. But he hit it! He did damage! For the first time in this mixed-up world, he felt like he wasn’t waiting for something to eat him!

He looked around and nobody was paying attention to him so he decided to try to feel his mana again. After about ten minutes of trying he saw the energies, the gold of Qi and the blue of mana. He was psyched. He patiently observed them for about ten minutes, but then he started getting a little itchy.

“What did Qi do? What could he use it for? Could it make his skin harder? Make wind blades? Could he fly? And mana what could it do besides fire a bolt spell? Did it have to be a bolt that size? Could he make it smaller? Maybe by spending less mana? What? What? What?

He was so excited that he felt like his mind was on fire. He felt that familiar feeling in his chest of his asthma and started trying to calm down. He started humming then, a song his mom used to sing to him when he was younger and having an attack, “Lullaby” by a group called the Dixie Chicks. “How long do you want to be loved? Is forever enough because I’m never never giving you up.” It helped him to calm down and sometimes that helped him avoid the attacks.

His sister had asked him to put all his attribute points into his constitution and vitality stats and he had, mostly. He’d put one into both Intelligence and Wisdom. He had to, just to see if it made any difference in his mana pool. It had, but only two points. He felt the attack subsiding and felt a huge feeling of relief. He thought that the six points he’d split between Constitution and Vitality had made a difference. For the first time, he felt like he might be on the way to healing, to health. He wished his mom was here. He wanted to share the news.

He packed that thought away in the way he’d learned early on to pack away things too painful to think about and turned back to magic. ‘Being a quasi invalid meant you had to have skills in redirection and ignoration,’ he thought. ‘Is ignoration a word? No, but it should be. Magic!’ But before he got started again, he reached into his inventory and pulled out the box that he’d put his D&D books into.

He turned to the section on Wizard spells and there literally were hundreds of spells that he could attempt to cast. Some of them were probably outside of his ability. He noticed that when he’d cast the Mana Bolt spell, it had pretty much taken his whole mana pool to cast it. He needed to either increase his mana pool or decrease the mana points he used to cast it. Of course, he could always get Baxter to party up with him and kill some monsters, but he didn’t see his sister allowing that to happen. She was in charge. His mom had made sure that he took a solemn pinky swear that he’d listen to her. He was a little old for pinky swears but didn’t want to tell his mom that, especially since she was leaving on the first vacation she and his dad had together in at least ten years. It was hard for her to have a kid with serious asthma.

He read through the list and thought that he should probably only choose first or second level spells. Maybe third level, but he thought fireball and lightning bolt would be really pushing it. Even if the world allowed you to cast any level spell, you still had to have the mana for it, and with his measly 35 mana points, he was sure he didn’t. He could barely cast Mana Bolt!

He looked through his D&D book for a moment and then came to the spell Magic Missile.

Magic Missile

1st-level evocation

Casting Time: 1 action

Range: 120 feet

Components: V, S

Duration: Instantaneous

You create three glowing darts of magical force. Each dart hits a creature of your choice that you can see within range. A dart deals 1d4 + 1 force damage to its target. The darts all strike simultaneously, and you can direct them to hit one creature or several.

At Higher Levels. When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 2nd level or higher, the spell creates one more dart for each slot level above 1st.

Then he called up the Mana Bolt spell from his Spells page:

Force Bolt

Elemental Sphere: Air

Casting Time: 2 seconds

Gestures: Pointing at target

Verbal: Zap

Duration: Instant

Range: 10 meters + 3m per level

Damage: 1-6 (+1 per level) per bolt

Cool Down: none

Spell Resistance: No

MP: 20

Once cast, a force bolt, unless blocked, always hits. For every three levels, the spell gets another bolt.

The first thing he noticed was the name was different. Somehow, the spell had renamed itself. He didn’t care though. He compared the two spells. Both had durations. The D&D spell required materials, which his spell didn’t. His spell did less damage at first level than Magic Missile did, but grew a lot quicker. Also D&D typed spells, like this one was an Evocation but his spell wasn’t broken down like that. Although his spell had something called an Elemental Sphere. Judging by the “Air” that followed, it was probably one of the four elements: air, earth, water, or fire or the expanded set if it included dark, light, life and death. Or even the superset if the Bobs had included Space, Time, Gravity, or EMF. He made a note to try and look it up in his help files later. Plus, his spell had a much smaller range at first but it grew rapidly. He assumed that his spell only hit things that he could see, but didn’t know. How do you target something you don’t know is there? And finally, his spell could be blocked, he guessed by a magic shield of some type.

So he now had a basic template for spells he wondered how to use it? Did he need to fill it in and somehow the spell would be created? Is that how this works, he wondered.

Something like this:

>

Elemental Sphere: ?

Casting Time: ?

Gestures: ?

Verbal: ?

Duration: ?

Range: ?

Damage: ?

Cool Down: ?

Spell Resistance: ?

MP: ?

?

And then he’d fill in the variables and then try to make it work, maybe by meditating on it? Trying to cast it? Could that be all there was to it? Was there any danger to creating a spell? Could he share spells? Hildi had shared her Title with everyone, maybe he could do the same thing with spells? Maybe sharing would enable casting the spell? So many questions.

His first thought though was could he reduce the spells cost? According to what he’d overheard from Hildi and others the number of times you did a skill, increased your ability in performing the skill. He wondered if he could reduce the spells mana points? If he could, he could cast it more often and level it up easier. Would it become a different weaker spell? Or a weaker version of the same spell? Argh! So many things to think about!

First things first, he wanted to gain the skill Meditation. He’d been present when Hildi had talked everyone through discovering their mana and Qi. Some of the people had gotten the Meditation skill as well as felt the two energies. He had been watching though, not trying so he hadn’t gained the skill. According to the people that had received it, it helped recover stamina, mana, health and Qi regeneration.

He sat down and tried to repeat the actions that the people who had received the skill said they’d done. “Get calm, try to avoid thinking about anything, focus on your breath and inhale and exhale. That’s all you have to do, inhale and exhale, and when you notice your mind drifting, bring it back to your breath, inhale and exhale.” That was pretty much what they all agreed they were doing when they got the skill. Some of them had practiced before the event and got it almost immediately, others took longer.

Billy sat down and leaned back against the wall. He was sitting cross-legged so he put his hands on his knees. He wasn’t sure if he should try to arrange his fingers in any way or not. In the stories, he’d read the finger positions were called mudras but he didn’t know any so he left his hands in loosely curled up fists. He closed his eyes and focused on his breath, on his diaphragm and breathed in and out.

It was harder than he thought it would be. He kept wanting to think about anything, the kids in the room, Baxter, how his sister was doing, but he kept powering on, trying to envision his breath like a tide running into his chest and then running out. After a while he almost fell asleep, the peace of his chest movements almost lulling him into slumber. But eventually, he got the notification that he was looking for:

Way to go! Experience gained.

Skill gained.

Meditation

Elemental Sphere: Earth

Rank: Bronze

Level: 1

Range: self

Damage: variable

Cool Down: none

Duration: Permanent

SP: 2 per 30 minutes, seated meditation.

Helps boost stamina regeneration, mana regeneration, heath and Qi regeneration by:

(Rank +((Level/2)*(1.0 + .1* Rank))).

So that meant at Rank 1, Level 1 he got a 1.55 per minute bonus to mana, health, qi and stamina regeneration while meditating. Of course, he also spent stamina too. But that regenerated at about half a stamina point a minute and the cost of the skill was just two mana per thirty minutes which meant that he made a net improvement to stamina regeneration of about six stamina points per 30 minute period. Plus meditating was peaceful. His mind turned off and it seemed when he quit that his mind was calmer. He felt more in control. He still worried about his sister, his folks, but didn’t feel as bad.

‘Kinda a no brainer,’ he thought. ‘You get hurt, meditate, get tired, meditate, get low on mana, meditate, exhaust your Qi, meditate.’ He saw lots of meditation in his future. The only downside was the skill seemed to really focus your mind. He didn’t recall hearing, or smelling or even feeling anything when he used the skill. He hoped if he was attacked, it would break him out of it, but he didn’t know.

He looked out at the room again and none of the other kids seemed to be paying attention. He was behind the stairs so he thought that nobody would know.

He thought hard about casting the spell, thinking that he wanted to do less damage and spend less mana. For some reason, it felt like he might be able to do it, but only at certain ratios. For instance, if he took the damage down to 1-5 (+1 per level) he only needed to spend 15 mana points to cast it, 1-4 (+1 per level) 10 mana points, 1-3 (+1 per level) 10 mana points, 1-2 (+1 per level) which made the cost 5 mana points. He thought that there was one more step down, but it would take some additional time as well, one point for two mana. He also sensed that the range of the spell dropped drastically too. He wasn’t quite sure how much, but he felt that at five points he’d be lucky to make it across the room, the two-point cast would probably only make it about twice his arm’s length.

He peered out from behind the stairs again and nobody was looking at him. He pulled back and waited a few moments to make sure that nobody was paying him any attention. He tried casting the one point spell at the floor underneath the stairs, between his legs. He draped a blanket from his bedding over his head and shoulders to try to make sure no noise or light escaped. The spell flashed a very pale blue and made the tiniest of hissing noises. The impact on the floor slightly damaged the paint but that was it. It looked like someone lightly burned it by flicking their Bic lighter.

He pulled the blanket down and pretended to be asleep. He pretended for about five minutes, listening for any change in the room, and it seemed like absolutely no one had caught on, no one was paying any attention. The kids playing Life kept spinning the wheel, the two playing Old Maids kept dealing cards, nobody said anything.

‘I did magic!’ he thought. His face almost splitting with the huge smile he felt on it. He wanted to stand up and yell and dance but calmed himself down before he went too far. ‘Magic! Magic!’ he thought. ‘I did it!’

He carefully covered himself again and tried casting the spell again. And again. He did it 9 more times before he got the notification he was expecting:

Way to go! Experience gained.

Level gained.

Force Bolt

Elemental Sphere: Earth

Rank: Bronze

Level: 2

Then he thought why not meditate. He did. He closed his eyes and started the skill, focusing on his breathing, in and out. He’d just started meditating when the blanket was pulled off his head. He opened his eyes, blinking at the sudden light from the lantern in the room.

Brian Loucks, the oldest kid in the room, twelve years old, sat on his knees right in front of him with all the other kids gathered around behind him. All of them were looking down at the patch of the floor where he’d been directing the spell. It looked pretty brown, almost black and there might have been the beginning of a pit forming there too.

“You got something you want to tell us?” he said.