Our traveling is pretty much done for the year as the red season looms before us. The Hearth fills up with returning relatives and the guest house with friends and travelers who are spending the winter with us, and Milo returns to Grubwick.
“I’ve been doing some thinking about what I was doing wrong with that first painting,” Meadow says. “Valerian had those paintings of the Wisteria Garden done up ahead of time and was already familiar with and connected to them. He’d seen the place as it was when he was painting it. I was just using my imagination in the first painting, and it could have been anywhere.”
I nod. “So if you painted something ahead of time, you could restore it if it got damaged.”
“I’d just need to carry around a painting of our party at all times,” Meadow says with a grin. “A little vis in the right spot and maybe I could close a wound.”
“You’ll forgive me if I’d rather test this on an inanimate object instead of injuring myself.”
Meadow finds a stick outside and paints a picture of it. She then snaps it and lays it back on the ground, then starts pouring vis into the painting. The stick wiggles and slowly starts pulling itself together, but she runs out of Inspiration before it’s fully mended.
“Well,” Meadow says, rubbing her head and taking a drink out of her bottle of tea. “At least that was a good demonstration that it will work. I just need more practice. Let me refill my Inspiration meter and I think I can finish it.”
It takes some more effort, but finally the stick snaps back together whole.
“Fantastic!” Meadow exclaims. “That unlocked True Art (Restoration).”
“Now you just need to start carrying around an art book like Wizards do a spellbook,” I say.
Meadow gapes at me. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
“You don’t like books very much,” I say with a shrug.
“Yeah, yeah. That would be so much more convenient than hauling paintings around,” Meadow says. “I’ll switch to colored pencils, too. They’d be more convenient for traveling, in case I do have to make a picture in the field. It’s not like I’m better with painting than drawing. I unlocked several art-related skills and was equally bland at all of them. I just took the painting equipment to the Wisteria Garden because Valerian is a known painter.”
“I’m not sure how much of an art critic the system is,” I say. “I’d bet it looks at things differently than a human would.”
“I’m going to practice my new skill on some different inanimate objects and see if I can get a few more skill levels. Next time we head out, I’ll do pictures of whoever’s in my party in whatever they’re currently wearing.”
----------------------------------------
I approach Aunt Heather when the sky turns red.
“How does your Divination work?” I ask. “Can I see what you do to determine what monsters come out each year?”
“By all means,” Aunt Heather says. “I’m glad to see someone taking interest in it. Too many of our relatives dismiss it for not being flashy and yet rely on its results all the same.”
She shows me to her room. I’m surprised that a Legendary Oracle lives in a room exactly the same size as the one I share with Burdock and Griffin, but I suppose all the living chambers in the Hearth are the same size. At least she gets her own room.
An ornate full-length mirror stands in one corner of the room. A simple desk is cluttered up with cards and doohickeys I cannot begin to guess the function of. None of them produce vis, but I’m starting to realize my system is perfectly capable of detecting aether even if I’m not. How else would it have been able to identify the aspect of that stone? I have a computer made of aether in my head. I carefully examine the mirror, step back in my mind and lean on the system.
Category Item Type Mirror Quality Excellent Rank Legendary Aspect Sight
Congratulations! You have identified a Legendary magic item. Skill acquired: Crafting (Appraisal) Your Perception has increased to 5.
I’m starting to realize that the status boxes aren’t unique to Clairvoyance. They’re a system function, probably accessible to anyone with enough knowledge to know what they’re looking at. I’ve been reading a lot about magic items lately, and apparently the system has decided that knowledge is sufficient even though I haven’t actually unlocked a Knowledge skill for it yet.
“Did you get a skill level just from looking at that?” Aunt Heather says with a small grin. “You have that look in your face.”
Stolen novel; please report.
“I got Crafting (Appraisal) and a point of Perception. Where did you even get this mirror?”
“Someone made it for me,” Aunt Heather says. “A Legendary crafter from another Hearth. Amber Trimsaran is her name. She left Tiganna decades ago, but if you’re fortunate you might be able to meet her sometime.”
There’s two chairs in the room, and she positions one facing the mirror and out of the way so I can watch. I sit down and try to focus on what she’s doing with her vis.
“I start in with Divination (Mirrors) to establish a connection with the item,” Aunt Heather says. “I use this one frequently and it’s attuned to me, so this doesn’t take much effort. I could do this with a mundane hand mirror if I had to, though, but it would take considerably more vis and the results would be less precise.”
The mirror, which had started off reflecting us and the room like a normal mirror, clouds up to display only swirling fog.
“Divination (Eye in the Sky),” she goes on. “This creates a magical construct overhead, like an eye made of vis.”
The mirror clears, and an overhead view of Tempest Domain appears within the glass, sharper and clearer than any map.
“Now for Divination (Detect Monsters).”
Red dots of varying size and brightness appear all over the map. Waving a hand at the mirror, the view zooms in on them one by one. Pale centipedes the size of dogs crawl out of holes in the ground. Large ravens with glowing purple eyes take to the air. A three meter tall furry biped gazes to the blood red sky and lets out a roar.
“The centipedes and ravens aren’t too dangerous,” Aunt Heather says. “Basic and Elite at most. And that was a Legendary Sasquatch.”
After cycling through several more of the various results and just getting more ravens and centipedes, Aunt Heather determines that if she’s missed anything, there’s too few of them and they’re too weak to notice. The Legendary Sasquatch stands out like a shining bright dot on the overhead map, impossible to miss. It’s like if Google’s satellites had actually found Bigfoot.
She made the whole thing look easy, but I can tell she burned a lot of Inspiration on the effort. With a wave of her hand, she breaks the connection to the mirror and it returns to reflecting only what’s in front of it again. We head to the hearth where she informs everyone gathered there of what she found.
“The only fliers this year are the dusk ravens, and they are not dangerous,” Aunt Heather says. “Don’t leave anything shiny in open view. They might steal things, but are unlikely to attack unless provoked. You are welcome to hunt centipedes near the village, but don’t stray too far and retreat immediately at any sign of a Legendary Sasquatch approaching. You will hear it long before you see it.”
With that, we settle in for another fall cooped up in the village. Not that I don’t have plenty of things to do in the meantime. I have yet to read every book in the village, plus there are crafting skills to practice. Oh, and spending time with my family, I suppose.
My sister and young cousins are almost two and a half years old now. They’re at the stage where they’re running all over the place and saying words that make sense. Maybe if I’d spent more time with them when they were younger, I might have unlocked Language (Baby Talk) or something.
I hang out in the young children’s room at the school as I’m working on my drawing skills. My Crafting (Drafting) skill still needs work before I can make accurate diagrams of anything complicated.
“What’s brother doing?” Juniper asks, peering over the edge of my kiddie desk.
“Drawing a building,” I say.
“I want to draw too!”
“Okay.”
I set her up with some paper and pencils at one of the low tables for the toddlers too small to use the actual desks yet. She plops down next to me, and I show her how to hold a pencil properly.
“Wow,” Juniper says, shifting her grip on the pencil and staring at her hands. “Fingers are neat!”
“They are!” I agree with a smile.
She wiggles her fingers in front of her and experiments with twirling the pencil around, dropping it a few times before remembering that she wanted to learn to draw. Putting the pencil to paper, she doodles a few haphazard lines.
“How you make lines like that?” she asks, pointing to the perfectly straight lines of my hypothetical building.
“With this,” I say, showing her the 20 centimeter ruler I’ve been using. I put it to the paper and demonstrate drawing a line next to it. “This is a ruler. It’s for drawing straight lines, and telling how long something is. See these lines on it? Do you know your numbers yet?”
“Brother is very smart!” Juniper says.
Several of the purple-eyed raven monsters show up in the village looking for shiny things to steal, occasionally making off with something but never really causing any serious trouble. They’re also capable of speaking Common, but don’t have much of interest to say. Mostly just “Mine!” “Shiny!” and various insults.
After spending a (relatively) quiet October and November working on skills and bonding with my family, I finally reach another milestone, celebrated with sweets and gifts.
You are now 5 years old. All physical attributes have increased by 1.
Only two more until I get my first real class and I can’t wait.
I receive a scribbly drawing of me (allegedly) from Juniper, some new clothes from Aunt Dahlia, and a nice solid steel hammer from my mom. Giving a five year old a hammer for their naming day gets a few odd looks from some of my relatives, but everyone knows I’m a reincarnator and interested in crafting.
In preparation for Hearth Day, I make gifts for my sister and cousins with [Woodworking]. I make one of those toys with wooden shapes and holes to fit them through, plus a knockoff kiddie Scrabble variant to help them learn to read and put words together. As the dark season passes, I’m rewarded for my various efforts with some skill levels.
Your Crafting (Drafting) skill has increased to level 2. Your Crafting (Woodworking) skill has increased to level 3. Your Tending (Teaching) skill has increased to level 3.
The Hearthkeepers prepare another Hearth Day feast of goat and holiday foods, with absolutely none of the giant centipede meat we’ve been eating all fall. The worst part of swarm season is having to eat whatever monsters the domain decides to spew out. No, actually, the worst part is getting used to centipede meat and finding it kind of tasty.
At New Year, we sing around the decorated tree and watch the lights streak into the sky as the Great Orb gradually turns violet.
It is now Year 735 of the Age of the Green Fox.
I wonder what this year will bring.