“Wait, you yourself are level 2?!” the boy that had spoken up about the general Skill unlocks asked, still from his position in the center of the Systemist gathering.

  “Yyyeah, I kind of leveled up with a Deadly Defender,” Danielle admitted. “Then I was involved in a fight with a wild animal, after which the Rangers were called in to heal some of the other people involved. That’s why the Rangers were both allowed to talk to me, and worried that I would have problems if they didn’t warn me about the double-leveling mutation problem. Once I knew, though, I figured that was information everyone else also needed to know. The Rangers said I was free to share it, so here I am, sharing it.”

  “Well, there you have it then,” one of the other two boys in the center said loudly. “She may not be our senior in the System by very much, but she crossed the boundary before us, and has honorably shared news of the next boundary with those who may approach it, reading the names of the holy Skills directly from the System, as is right. All honor to the senior.”

  “All honor to the senior,” everyone in the group said; obviously another call-and-response thing. Danielle fervently hoped there wasn’t a second line she was supposed to say.

  She settled on, “Thank you. If that’s everything you need from me right now, I did come out here to work on cooking, food purification, and thermal vision Skills, so I’ll get back to that.”

  “Of course. Thank you for your contribution,” the girl said, and started back into her spiel about the importance of using tools to gain Skills, ‘like our slight senior,’ and not ‘settling’ for tools alone.

  Danielle hurried the rest of the way up to the fire, and stuck her spoon into the flames, muttering “sterilize the tool first, or it’ll just contaminate the food I want to purify, right?”

  Sadie gave her the side-eye. “Since when are you working on Purify Food?” she asked.

  “Since you spent your whole day’s mana production on it,” Danielle said, and moved on to stirring the food. “Cooking is good enough for fresh stuff, but it’s pretty obvious at this point that Purify is also amazing for helping preserved food stay preserved. It might be the kind of thing I’ll be wanting to use my other Skill with, you know?”

  “How are you planning to work on thermal vision by cooking?” Akari asked, sounding amused.

  “By staring into the fire and trying to identify the hotter and cooler spots,” Danielle said. “You’re supposed to be able to tell by color with actual flames, right?”

  The fire-tender closest to them snorted. “You don’t have to pretend you’re working on Skills, Belle’s not going to let anyone interrupt her again,” he said. “Trust me, she was one of the student leaders of our interest group at school, and without an adult to shut her up, she’ll go for hours.”

  “Um, thanks, but I really do need those Skills,” Danielle said. “Well, want more than need in the case of thermal vision, maybe, but seriously, I’m trying everything I can think of for that.” She sighed. “I have a list of wanted Skills longer than my arm, really. Actually prioritizing the mana is going to be hard, but I’d rather have a hard choice than a lack of choice.”

  “I can agree with that,” the fire-tender said. “Besides, my elder came to visit us during family-meetings time before we left, and he said you should always strive to unlock Skills even if you don’t know how to pay for them, because if the System would gift you a Skill in time of need, it will be an unlocked Skill.”

  “Huh. That’s – that’s a very good point,” Danielle said. “It’s kind of related to something I learned from my level-up right after the fight, actually; when you level up unexpectedly like that, you might not have time to stop and read all your messages in detail, so it’s a very good idea to have a plan for emergency leveling, even if you hope you’ll have plenty of time and safety to read things and think them through when it happens. Like a contingency plan you hope you won’t be forced to use.”

  “Oh. That is also a good point,” the fire-tender said. “Thank you for sharing it with me.”

  “You’re welcome,” Danielle said.

  “How does it relate to what the elder told us during family-and-friends?” the next fire-tender down asked.

  “Oh – because the contingency leveling plan also requires Skills and Traits that you’ve already unlocked,” Danielle said. “You can’t plan for what you don’t have yet. I forgot about this when I was talking to the group a minute ago – it came up in a different part of the conversation, closer to when they were talking about the whole ‘how to avoid attracting wildcats to your camp’ thing – but the Rangers actually told me it’s worth a trip to the Access Point before you level up, or finish saving up the Payment Plan mana for a Skill or whatever. It’s the same principle: Payment Plan will let you take a Skill without going to the Access Point, but only if it’s already unlocked.”

  “How many Skills do you have unlocked so far?” the second fire-tender asked.

  “I don’t know, I haven’t exactly counted them,” Danielle said.

  “Haven’t counted – oh, right,” the first fire-tender said, sounding disappointed, “you aren’t actually a believer, are you?”

  “I believe that the System is a very important tool for protecting us from the ravages of uncontrolled mana,” Danielle said, “but no, I don’t believe it’s actually divine.”

  “How can you not?” the other fire-tender asked. “It’s literally the source of all magic!”

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “I believe that if it was divine, it would have always been here,” Danielle said. “I don’t honestly want to argue the subject in the middle of the meeting, though. Which part of the fire do you think is really hotter – the orange part near the base of the flame, or the weirdly clear part underneath it, that you can see on little flames like candles?”

  “What? Is that invisible fire? I thought it was a spot where fire couldn’t, um, form or whatever,” the fire-tender across the fire from them said.

  Danielle stirred the food again. “I guess I’m not positive it counts as fire, but something has to be there, and it has a temperature,” Danielle said. “I know orange fire is hotter than the redder flames, and yellow is hotter than orange, but I don’t know if the spot with nothing to see is a hot spot or a cool spot. It’ll be interesting to see if Infravision gives it a color, or if it’s still empty-looking.”

  “You’re that sure you’ll get it, huh?” the first fire-tender asked, giving in to the change of subject.

  “I’m that determined to get it,” Danielle said. “I don’t like being blind in the dark. Human body heat might not be a bright source of infrared, but it’d be something – a light that can’t just go out on me if there’s a power outage, you know?”

  “Don’t even joke about that,” one of the people roasting things on sticks said. “Can you imagine these Rooms without power?”

  “I can, and thus I’m determined to get infravision,” Danielle said. “It might be useful for cooking, too. In home skills class, they wanted us to use meat thermometers. Well that’s a tool we’re not going to get any time soon! If you could literally just see how hot something was, though? That’d solve that problem.”

  “Is that really how infravision works, though?” Akari asked. “I mean, I know color goes with temperature in a fire, but does it always match up?”

  “Oh, I guess I don’t really know that,” Danielle said. “Well, actually, there has to be some way for something to be infravision colored without being hot, because the enhancing book said gemstones can be those colors.”

  “Do you really think you can unlock it by staring at fires a lot?” asked the fire-tender across the way.

  “Well, I’m not just doing this,” Danielle said, staring into the fire. “I’m looking at fire because I know it has to be putting out the colors I want to be able to see, but I also practice trying to see things when there’s not much light to work with and stuff like that.”

  “Showing the System your commitment to gaining the Skill,” the fire-tender said.

  “Yeah. I don’t know how your elders would put it,” Akari said, “but my parents taught me that the System looks at what you’re doing, or trying to do, and helps you do it better. If we want Skills to see in the dark, we have to be looking at things in the dark. If we want Skills to identify plants, we have to be trying to identify plants. If we want Skills to help others, we have to be helping others.”

  “That’s true. Even Classes, which allow you to choose your Skills, first have to be unlocked by doing things related to the Class,” the fire-tender agreed. “That’s why so many of us ended up as Basic Fighters – the Sending Authority makes sure we all practice with weapons enough to unlock their Skills, so when Sendings happen, none of the Sent are truly helpless. Maybe in high school they do some other stuff, too, but for most of us? We’ve done school and not much else since we became youths, so unless something about our youth Skills or our Sending preparations stands out, it’s basically scholar or fighter.”

  “I’m sure Basic Healer is one of those ‘preparations that stand out’ options – people who really focused on bringing medicines and stuff,” Danielle said. “I wonder what unlocks things like Mana Caster or Element Shaper, though?”

  “That’s not for you to know, denier,” someone down and across the fire said; Danielle couldn’t actually see them well from her position, crouched next to the pot.

  “Hey now, is that the way your elders taught you to talk to people?” the fire-tender directly across from her asked. “She’s been polite and spoken respectfully and provided us information we deserved to hear when our elders couldn’t. It’s not like she’s asking for information ahead of her boundary, either. We have level 1 Basic Element Shapers with Skills for all six elements over there, after all. It undeniably is a level 1 unlockable Class.”

  “You don’t have to tell me if it’s controversial,” Danielle said.

  “No, it’s fine,” the fire-tender across from her said. “Basic Mana Caster unlocks for anyone who has mana-related Youth or Youth-Career Skills, or who puts a lot of effort into adjusting their Interface in certain ways or areas – I wasn’t clear on that part. Obviously, because I didn’t unlock it. Anyway, Basic Element Shaper unlocks for anyone who has Youth or Career Skills that shape any of the greater or subordinate elements. Our Most Elevated Element Shaper Lithios managed to get a sand control Skill (because his grandfather is a real elder Element Shaper and taught him) and also did something that isn’t common knowledge – meaning, I know there’s a thing but I don’t know what it is – anyway, he’s actually a Stone Shaper, no ‘basic,’ which is why he’s currently our most-elevated.”

  “And a good thing, too,” the fire-tender next to Danielle said. “Belle’s devout and all, but she likes the sound of her own voice a little too much. If there wasn’t someone over her, life would be unbearable.”

  “Lithios is the only person I know who really seems unreservedly glad to be out here,” someone commented.

  “He’s glad to be out of the shadow of his family, I think,” one of the other fire-tenders said. “They’re really determined to make him follow in their footsteps – I mean, they named him after rock, they trained him to shape rock, they give him rocks for solstice presents. I never got the impression he didn’t want to get there in the end, but I kind of think he’s glad not to have them hammering him with the ‘all rocks, all the time’ thing.”

  “If he’s already got the good Class, he’s probably feeling pretty accomplished too,” Akari commented. “Most of us don’t know what it’ll be like the next time we see our families, but it sounds like he can be pretty sure they’ll be proud of him.”

  “Oh, yeah, for sure,” the nearest fire-tender said. “All he has to do is survive and Return and he’s set for life.”

  “Only that,” Akari said ironically, shaking her head. “No big deal, right?”

  “Well, it’s nothing we’re not all trying to do anyway, right?” the fire-tender replied.

  “True,” Akari agreed.

  “I don’t know if it feels the same, though,” Danielle said. “I mean, it seems like it might be different if you’re struggling to survive because you just want to live your life, vs. if you’re struggling to survive because you know you’re carrying some precious treasure of the System that the Inside desperately wants you to bring in to them.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe,” said the person who had called her a ‘denier.’

  “I don’t believe the System is a god; I do believe it offers us some real treasures sometimes,” Danielle said.

  “Did the Rangers tell you something about that?” the nearest fire-tender asked.

  “Eh, they might’ve given me an earful about high-value Skills,” Danielle said. “Stuff that’s hard to unlock Inside, or that no one’s sure what all its prerequisites are; stuff that they want their Skill Sharers to get access to, or stuff that has massive value to the Inside like Skill Sharer itself.”

  “Oh, yeah,” the near fire-tender said, “Lithios is carrying the hopes and expectations of his family and the believers in their city; but anyone who gets Skill Sharer is a treasure of the whole state! Talk about being set for life!”

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