“That’s scary,” Lauren said. “If I hadn’t just leveled from practically nothing to level 2 just from one completely unexpected emergency, I’d say it didn’t sound very likely, but after last night? Scary.”

  Danielle dropped her voice a great deal, no longer projecting for the eavesdroppers. “Think how scary for me – I already was level 2 last night. If I’d gotten the killing blow, I might have been in real trouble,” she said. “Hence the Rangers going all authority figure on me about changing my absorption pointer. I recommend you do that yourself before you forget, because I’d like to think that neither of us was in danger of picking up that much mana again anytime soon, but I didn’t think I was in danger of seeing level 2 anytime soon either.”

  “Yeah. Give me a sec to do that, and then you can tell us about the Career thing,” Lauren said, already focusing on her System. “OK, done. It kind of stinks, though, I was thinking of leveling my base again before I went for my Class.”

  “I know what you’re saying,” Danielle said. “It beats getting stuck Outside with a – what was the proper name for it again? Heather, do you remember?”

  “Non-System trait, I think?” Heather said

  “Yeah, that – non-System mana trait. That’s the official term for a mutation that’s in the mana instead of in your genes,” Danielle said.

  “Um, thank you for the warning – sincerely! – but can you please, please get to the other part now?” Nathan asked.

  “I’m going to pretend not to be drawing conclusions from your mysterious fascination with the subject,” Danielle said with a poorly suppressed smirk, “and tell Lauren what she asked me to look into. This came mostly from Ranger Michael, the other Healer; he said there’s a certain book on the Room shelves that he recommended in spite of its pretentious-sounding title, and anyone feeling a little, aheh, lost, should read the book before they start the actual process of trying to get a new Career. It might go into more detail, I don’t know. The basics, though, are like this: first, you figure out what kind of Career you want, and prep to do a whole lot of whatever-it-is for a couple weeks. Ranger Flo said a lot of former Lost Boys show up to the Fall Fair as Fishers, for example. You also have to not do much related to your original Career, so I don’t know if this would even work for Survivors.”

  “Maybe not until things are a lot less uncertain,” Lauren agreed, “but maybe once you’ve got the basics covered and a big winter food stockpile, you could settle in and try to get, I don’t know, a crafting Career or something?”

  “Maybe. Anyway, the setup is important – you have to be able to do a lot of the new Career and not much of the old Career for a couple weeks. Once you’re ready, you just go to your System Status and ask it to ‘re-evaluate my Career.’ He said you’ll get a nothing message and it seems like nothing’s happening at first, but you just have to wait a week or two and follow the plan you set up with, and if all goes well, it’ll pick up on what kind of Career you’re going for and add it.”

  “Ah, so triggering the search is easy, but getting it to find what you want it to is hard work, huh?” Lauren summarized thoughtfully.

  “Sounds like,” Danielle agreed. “For the record, the Rangers said none of the stuff I told you this evening is secret, we have their permission to spread it around. If you know any really good gossips that are actually still finding time to gossip to people, feel free to tell them about the one level per month thing.”

  Lauren laughed. “I will! I know exactly who to tell.”

  “Good, because I, um, don’t.” Danielle admitted. “I never really got along with that crowd.”

  Lauren gave her a curious look, but didn’t actually ask a question, and Danielle didn’t elaborate. There was a bit of a lull in the conversation, but before it could get too awkward, Cynthia asked “So what are you drawing, Cassy? Are you immortalizing our campfire or something?”

  Cassy chuckled. “I’m not that good at art,” she said. “I’m a Basic Mana Caster, I’m working on a Class tool – a casting scroll. It’s almost finished. I really hope they get a lot faster to make, because they only get one use each, but this is my first one. I’m learning a lot with it, you know? So the next one probably will be faster.”

  “How’s it work?” Cynthia asked curiously.

  “Well, there’s a Class Trait that basically lets me bend mana into shapes – still sounds weird to say that, it’s like bending water into shapes. That’s how it works, though.” Cassy shrugged. “Then there’s a Class Skill that lets me attach a mana shape to a related drawing on a piece of paper. The System calls that “imbuing the scroll.” The imbuing can take a lot of mana, but once it’s stored on the scroll, it’ll last a while and as long as I use it before it decays, I only need one mana to active the scroll – or one mana per tier of the scroll, but obviously right now I’m only going to be making tier 1s.”

  “So you can make a variable-mana Skill on the scroll when you have mana for it, and then use it as a fixed-cost Skill later when you need it?” Dana said. “That sounds pretty cool. How do you know what the shapes are, though?”

  “Well, there’s a lore Skill that unlocks with the Class, and I’m saving up for it,” Cassy said. “You don’t have space for it at level 1, though – it’s not even an option to take it with the Class, you have to save up mana for it – but the normal ways for level 1 mana casters to learn them are from a book or from a teacher, and they did give us a book. The problem is, a lot of them are three dimensional, and I’m doing something wrong. I’d give a lot to find someone with an illusion Skill, but I don’t think that’s the kind of thing most people were looking for at the Dome, you know?”

  The rest of the SHAD party stared at Cassy, which almost immediately resulted in the Lemonade party staring at all of them, looking back and forth. “What?” Cassy asked defensively.

  “Show me this symbol you want an illusion of?” Danielle asked.

  “Well, it’s not that I need an illusion of the symbol,” Cassy explained uneasily, “it’s that it’s a symbol that illusions relate to, and I thought if I could see someone cast an illusion maybe I’d be able to figure out what I’m doing wrong. Because it’s a simple light symbol, and simple illusions are just lights, really, so – fine, look!” she exclaimed, since Danielle was still giving her a look.

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  “It’s this one in the middle – the four-pointed star-thing,” Cassy said somewhat unnecessarily, pointing to the largest symbol on her scroll. It was surrounded by a ring of smaller symbols, but they both ignored those for the moment. The symbol itself looked like a diamond where all the lines had been replaced by arcs, making the inside smaller and the points narrow. “The book says, the other dimension looks the same, it’s just rotated; but when I try to rotate it I don’t get the right – answer?” She cut off in confusion as Danielle manifested the symbol in the air between them in glowing yellow. Heather and Sadie burst out laughing at the look on Cassy’s face.

  “I’m almost sure I told you about my Youth Skill,” Danielle said dryly, making the symbol rotate.

  “Your Youth Skill is Illusions?” Cassy asked. “If you mentioned that, I definitely forgot about it.”

  “Yep, when I was a kid I loved to tell stories to other kids, and I’d gesture and stuff to set the scene; so the System decided I needed help doing visual aids for my stories,” Danielle explained. “Is this what you actually need, by the way?”

  “I, uh. Huh. I might need you to do it again,” Cassy admitted. “Um, this time, instead of just making the flat symbol like the drawing, and then making it rotate, can you try making it look like it’s three dimensional? The book says, you rotate it to the other dimension and connect the new points with more arcs. Technically, what I’m looking for is the shape of your mana while you start up the Skill, but I’m also interested to see what you think the 3D version should look like.”

  “OK, I can do that,” Danielle said, ending the Skill. “Starting again on the count of three: one, two, three.” This time, Danielle drew the star with six points, each aimed in a cardinal direction, including up and down, and all connected to each other with identical arcs. It felt – almost right, in an odd way. She focused, and made the arcs a bit deeper, trying to tighten up the sense of almost-rightness to a sense of true rightness. Cassy’s jaw was dropping again, but Danielle was distracted by the sensation of something just ever so slightly not right.

  “Did you see the thing?” Heather asked her.

  “I – yeah. But also, she’d doing the thing!” Cassy exclaimed. “I thought when it said ‘rotate it,’ it meant to make it look like a top; but not only is she drawing the illusion a lot closer to how it looked when she made the illusion, if she keeps this up she’ll actually have drawn the light symbol using mana shaped with the light – “

  Cassy cut off and everyone (even Danielle) shielded their eyes as Danielle’s illusion suddenly jumped in brightness. Danielle activated Sense Mana Source, but the illusion didn’t register as a source, so no matter how she squinted she couldn’t see what was really happening. Oh, she could see that the illusion of the symbol she’d been tweaking was now glowing very brightly, but nothing besides that.

  “Is it supposed to do that?” Dana asked, from the other side of the fire.

  “Well, that’s kind of what my scroll is supposed to do, yeah,” Cassy said. “I don’t know about the illusion!”

  “I’m cutting it off, if you’ve got what you needed, Cassy,” Danielle said.

  “I’m good!” Cassy replied quickly.

  Danielle ended her Skill, but to her astonishment, the illusionary light symbol didn’t immediately wink out; instead, it hung in the air, gradually dimming over the course of nearly ten seconds.

  “It’s never done that before,” Danielle said. “This is the first time I’ve used it since it leveled, but I wasn’t expecting extra duration, much less sudden and unexpected brightness. Do you know what happened?”

  “I think you just freecast the spell I’m trying to scroll-cast!” Cassy said in wonderment and frustration. “That’s not supposed to be possible.”

  “Um, that’s a little concerning?” Danielle said uneasily.

  “Well, I mean – it’s probably because you were using a Skill to produce the symbol the Skill already uses?” Cassy guessed. “I don’t think it’d happen if you drew any other symbol. It’s only because the illusion is already light, and the symbol was also light, so it, um, what’s the word. For when something is more than the sum of its parts? Synergy! I think your Skill and that symbol have synergy. Normally, you need Mana Shaping to freecast, but in this case, the Skill did the shaping for you, so it’s not exactly freecasting. It just, you know, looks unnervingly like freecasting. Let me see if I can duplicate your results!”

  Cassy held up her scroll, symbol side up, and Danielle felt her use a Skill. As usual, Detect Mana Source only showed her source sort of fluttering. Cassy’s face lit up with a grin though. “Yes!! That was it – six points, that was the trick. It worked! EEEEEE it worked I just made my first actual castable scroll!”

  “Wow, you’re like a wizard from a story,” Cynthia said with a giggle.

  Cassy laughed with her. “It’s a lame story where the wizard can only cast light,” she said. “I’m going to try it after it gets darker, though. It should last a lot longer than Danielle’s thing did!”

  “Can you make any Skill into a scroll, if you can figure out the right symbol?” Lauren asked.

  “Oh, no, not at all. A lot of Skills are way too complex,” Cassy said. “The tier of the scroll has to do with how complicated a mana shape it can anchor, and right now I can pretty much only do the simplest ideas – light, cold, hot, that kind of thing. Most Skills have tons of shapes and variations in them, and they’re hard to pick out. Even Danielle’s illusion had a whole burst of other symbols around it, but Light was the biggest, most dominant one, if that makes sense?”

  “I’ve got to get this proper Mana Sight,” Danielle said with a sigh. “I don’t know if I want Mana Caster as my next Class, but I definitely want Mana Sight now.”

  “You’re already thinking about another Class?” Dana asked. “Don’t you want to level your first one a couple times, first?”

  “I don’t know, I’m kind of regretting my choice of Class,” Danielle admitted. “I mean, Heather can close serious wounds, Sadie’s going to get lots of cool Skills to let her make things we need, Akari’s a better defender if we’re under attack, and my Class was kind of chosen for sneaking up on animals, but we’re not doing that. I’m trying to keep in mind that it’s still the first week, but I’m also kind of feeling like better choices exist, and I’m not sure I’m pulling my weight like I want to be. Besides, I’m already level 2 like Lauren, and I’m a little nervous about possible mana burst issues. The amount I got from the cougar would’ve leveled my Class in one go if I’d had the pointer there, and then where would I be?”

  “Oh, I forgot about that,” Dana said. “So you want it for safety from mana as much as anything else, huh?”

  “Yeah. I’m thinking it needs to be my first priority,” Danielle said. “I’m putting a few more points into Payment Plan starting today, and I want to go to the Access Point soon and see if I’ve unlocked anything good, so if and when I get enough mana in Payment Plan, I can choose right away.”

  “Hm. That makes a lot of sense,” Lauren said thoughtfully. “It seems like it could be a stressful trip to make just to check unlocks, though. Wasn’t it supposed to be four whole miles away?”

  “From the gate, they said, but only three from here,” Danielle said. “And the walk from the gate was two miles and bit, so it would be less than twice that far. It could be a day trip if we leave early enough in the morning. We’re working on getting far enough ahead on food that we can have enough to take with us and not have to hunt that day."

  “Hm. Interesting. We’re actually thinking of going for some bigger game, basically so we can have an off-day to work on other Skills, but I guess that would kind of count.” Lauren tapped her finger against her belt, thinking.

  “Something to think about,” Danielle said, “but we’re not exactly heading out tomorrow either. Hopefully sometime next week.”

  https://discord.gg/u5dtzpShv2