“Drake, are you alright?” asks Burdock. “I heard you got in a big fight.”

Burdock is 11 now, almost 12, and his cat-monster familiar, Mipsy, is at his side. Now the size of a bobcat, a normal almost-6-year-old would probably find her intimidating. She blinks up at me with three glowing green eyes, and two of her four ears tilt toward me.

“Yeah,” I say. “I’m… I’m still kind of stunned about everything that’s happened. I didn’t get hurt, but I was luckier than some.”

“Drake,” Aunt Heather says, approaching. “Your mother told us about what happened. I want to try scrying into the caverns and I’d like your help with it. I will need to navigate the tunnels and you’ve been down there more frequently.”

“Of course,” I say, and follow her back to her room. Grandma Laurel also joins us there.

Aunt Heather sets up her scrying Invocation with her magic mirror and conjures forth a mystical eye linked to the mirror above the village. It makes me think she’s just jumping through hoops because she doesn’t have Clairvoyance. I have nowhere nearly this range yet, of course, but this strikes me as something I should be able to do once I level up more, and without needing a mirror for it.

The invisible magical surveillance drone flies down toward the surface and skims along above the treetops in the direction of the cavern entrance near Grubwick. It moves at a dizzying speed until it locates the opening and darts inside.

“Alright, here’s Grubwick,” Aunt Heather says. “Now which way is the swamp village from here?”

I give her directions, and the mirror’s view smoothly flies down through the tunnels and eventually emerges at the underswamps. I am grateful that this little “trip” is being done in the safety and warmth of my Hearth and doesn’t involve almost stepping in leeches a dozen times.

At the edges of the swamp, several outposts have been set up from crude materials. Packs of goblins systematically gather materials from the swamp and haul them back to Usk Village, where they’re being made into equipment and consumables.

“They definitely look busy,” Grandma Laurels says.

“Can you guide me to the place where you were attacked?” Aunt Heather asks.

I give her directions, and the arcane eye shoots off down the tunnels again. Here and there, it picks up on more outposts dotting the caverns. One has been set up in the hot spring, though it’s hard to tell what they’re doing there and we don’t stick around to watch for long. Aunt Heather’s Inspiration meter is astronomical but not infinite.

The mirror’s view finally displays Splott Lake. The battle is long over by now, but the shores are littered with camps full of goblins dressed in the swamp furs of Usk. The piles of stone blocks are covered in blood. In the center of the lake, Splott Village is safe enough, but besieged on all sides. Usk war parties litter the shores densely enough to prevent the Splotts from landing a kayak anywhere on the lake.

“Things don’t look good for your friendly lake goblins,” Grandma Laurel says.

“They’ll be alright, I hope,” I say. “The Splottfish will keep them from starving. The Usks will need to leave when swarm season arrives, if nothing else. I hope the crafters I was working with made it back to the island safely.”

“I’m not seeing any corpses, but they were probably already taken care of by now,” Aunt Heather says. “Are there any other notable places you know if that I should check?”

I shake my head.

“I’ll burn the remainder of my Inspiration exploring before my arcane eye fizzles out, then,” Aunt Heather says. “Let’s see if I can spot anything else of interest.”

The mirror displays random exploration of the caverns, revealing even more goblin outposts. Some of them still have the look of Usks, but after a bit, a pack of goblins wearing pink furs comes into view. These goblins have slightly yellower skin than the others.

“A different group of goblins?” I muse. “I haven’t run into these before. I wonder what their disposition is?”

Before the eye fades, it catches a glimpse of what looks like a meeting between Usk goblins and whatever the pink-loving tribe is. The view winks out before we can see the outcome, and Aunt Heather’s magic eye spell doesn’t have a magic ear on it anyway.

“Well, that was an interesting tour,” Grandma Laurel says.

“What are you going to do?” I ask.

She shrugs. “Nothing. I mean, I could go down there and kill every single unfriendly goblin, but it would be a waste. I won’t get anything out of slaughtering Basics and Elites, so unless it’s absolutely necessary, best to leave it to the people who can get experience for it. We’ve got some lower level parties that will be thrilled at the news of a goblin war. Participating in events like this can garner some rare Deeds.”

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

I suppose that’s one way of looking at it. If this were a game, I might be annoyed if some high level player came in and ruined everything. And while this isn’t a game (I don’t think, at any rate), it still bears many of the mechanics of one. The system awards power for doing risky and difficult things.

“You should stay in the village next year,” Grandma Laurel says. “Get a chance to learn some more skills before you turn 7. I’m sure you’ve been having a lot of fun, up until everything was trying to kill you at any rate, but you’ll get a lot more experience in your chosen field once you get your class, and child-rank skills are limited to level 5. Once you turn 7, your skill cap will increase to level 25. What’s your highest skill?”

“[Aura Sight] at level 5,” I say.

Grandma Laurel nods. “And you’ve been using it continuously for your entire life, haven’t you?”

“What’s your highest skill?” I wonder.

She chuckles. “Adult classes have a skill cap of level 100 at Basic rank. Higher ranks give a multiplier to your skill cap. Elite is doubled, Heroic is quadrupled, and so forth. The skill cap for a Legendary-ranked adult is level 1600. I have five skills at that level.”

“… oh.”

“Don’t feel bad that you have a long way to go. You’ve made some good gains so far. I don’t know if spending so much time with goblins was the best way to learn them, but I hope you had fun and got some good Deeds out of it before things went Voidwards.”

“How did you get so much experience but you know even less about what’s under the surface than I do?” I wonder.

“We’ve done a good deal of traveling in other domains, but we tend to stick to actual dungeons,” Grandma Laurel says. “We came back shortly before you were born, planning to spend a decade or so here before we head off on a long trip. There’s many systems out there to explore and we reached Legendary young.”

“My sister is going to die of old age and there’s nothing I can do about it,” Aunt Heather says with a sigh. “She has no way of making Epic rank anytime soon and it’s too late for it to extend her lifespan much anymore anyway. Her health is failing, and I mean to spend her last few years here with her, and then your Grandma Laurel and I are going out adventuring to distant systems.”

“What do you suggest I do now?” I ask.

“Go to school and spend time with your sister and cousins,” Aunt Heather says. “Someday soon you will all be able to go on adventures together. Next summer, you can take a trip to the Hedge Maze with them, if I don’t detect any hostile goblins in the area.”

They let me go. I head to the guest house to meet up with Rowan, who returned to Corwen with me and is sitting by the fire staring distantly into a cup of tea.

“Hey, Rowan,” I say, sliding in beside him. “How are you holding up?”

Rowan is quiet for a long moment before finally saying, “I have no idea what to think about what just happened.”

“Fair,” I say. “What are you going to do now? Are you going to stay here for now, or go back to Talgarth?”

“Milo disbanded his party and dismissed me,” Rowan says, then drops to one knee toward me. “I, Rowan Talgarth Tempest Tiganna, formally request to join your party.”

“I accept, and please don’t kneel at me,” I say. “For the moment, though, we’re just going to be doing training.”

“That’s fine,” Rowan says. “Training is good.”

“How old are you, anyway?” I ask.

“I turn twelve in June,” Rowan says. “That little adventure back there made me realize doubly so how badly unprepared I am. First falling into a pit and getting hurt, and then… so many goblins. I don’t think I even managed to kill a single one.”

“We certainly didn’t see that coming,” I say with a sigh. “Should we have, though?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know about trying to get to Elite before I turn 14. I suppose I’ll try again next year, after I’ve done a lot more training. I wish it were more obvious what you need to do to rank up and how far off you are.”

“I suppose there’s a reason why the system doesn’t want us to know,” I say. “We’d probably be even more obsessed with numbers than we already are.”

Rowan chuckles. “True. Well, I’ll stay the summer here and practice hard. Maybe the fall and winter too.”

I head for the school. Juniper, Willow, and Griffin are in the play room for the small children trying to put together one of my puzzles.

“Drake!” Juniper exclaims, puzzle forgotten as she notices me and runs over to give me a hug. “You’re home!”

“Where have you been?” Willow asks. “You’ve been away for so long!”

“You missed our naming days,” Griffin says grumpily. “We’re all four now!”

And at some point they started speaking in complete sentences.

“Sorry,” I say. “I had some things I wanted to do. But I’ll be around a lot more for a while. How about I make it up to you with making you guys some extra presents?”

“Yay!” Griffin says, throwing his hands in the air and immediately forgetting his grumpiness.

Juniper is cute. Willow is cute. Griffin is cute. I must appreciate that everyone is cute. Because they will not be cute for long. Ten years from now, they will be little pains in the rear, having obsessed over getting to Elite before turning 14 like everyone else around here seems to.

Since I can’t get my skills over level 5 yet, and I seem to be having good luck at least getting that first level, I decide to try and get a few more unlocked. I don’t have [Tailoring] yet, so I go to see Aunt Dahlia for a few lessons.

In between those lessons, I work on making a couple of board games for the four-year-olds. I make little wooden game pieces painted to look vaguely like them, and paint a board with snakes and ladders. (We do not have a playground with a slide and the only chute is for garbage in the kitchen, so putting slides would be nonsensical. Even more nonsensical than sliding down snakes, I suppose. They do know what snakes are.)

You have crafted a Poor quality toy. Your Crafting (Painting) skill has increased to level 2.

I don’t think my skills are up to making properly balanced dice, but at least dice are something we’re not short on. The six-sided ones, anyway. I haven’t seen any polyhedral dice around here yet. I’ll have to rectify that situation once my skills get higher, but at least making games like this doesn’t require much precision.

The kids are delighted at the game, but it’s not really one that would help much with critical thinking skills. I have plenty more ideas, though.

And yet things are so peaceful inside the village that I keep expecting someone to burst through the door saying something terrible has happened. But I have two Legendary-ranked adventurers nearby still, and if anything happens that they can’t take care of, then we’re all screwed.