Rowan heads back to his own Hearth toward the end of June. He turns 14 on the 26th of June and thinks he has done all the preparing he can do, and wants to spend his naming day with his family. My party goes along with him to Talgarth, even if we can’t actually go inside the Hearth itself. There is nowhere on Tempest that is so far away that you can’t get there in a few days even on foot.
After the party with his family in the Hearth, he comes out to Talgarth’s guest house for a second pary with us. Even if he didn’t make Elite, someone’s apprentice class is still a huge milestone.
“[Apprentice Guardian],” Rowan says. “I will be guarding you from all the ridiculous things you do.”
“We don’t do that many ridiculous things,” I protest.
“I cannot protect you from cleaning your room,” Rowan says. “But you are not nearly as skilled as you think you are in the workshop. You are fortunate that you have Hearthkeepers who can make healing food.”
“Nobody will teach me metalworking yet,” I pout.
Once we return to Corwen, the vacation is over and it’s back to more lessons. We’re all working on different skills, but there’s only so many children in the village so we’re basically just all in the building whenever we’re not working on skills that require equipment or being outside.
I spend July inside the village, except for the Summer Festival. Nothing tragic happens at the Summer Festival. I set up a sportsball net there and get everyone in the nearby villages to throw things at Rowan. I do not remember the actual rules to any Earth sports, but that doesn’t stop children from making up whatever rules they feel like. Competitive sports are a good way to earn low-risk Deeds that still require effort. After seeing the demonstration, several of the other nearby Hearths decide to set up their own teams and have a real tournament next year.
I don’t want to define my life by battle, but I know I’m not going to be able to get out of fighting for my entire existence. It would be best if I were able to do that effectively when I have to. At least well enough to avoid dying from something stupid before Rowan and whoever else is in my party can pull me out of the fire.
“You know, when I became an [Apprentice Guardian], I wasn’t expecting to be leveling up skills by guarding a net,” Rowan says wryly. “But this has actually been surprisingly effective.”
“You’re probably getting even more bonuses than the switch from being a generic [Child] to being a child with an adjective attached to your class,” I say. “I started getting skills faster when I hit 7, too.”
“Yeah, I suppose I would have, too,” Rowan says. “But I barely remember being under 7 and didn’t exactly learn much in that time.”
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I decide to turn off the auto-translator now and then and actually try to learn Common. The younger kids find this hilarious for some reason, and they decide to help me learn, quite tickled over them teaching me something for once. And I’m using various psychic powers in the process to help. I still need to relearn everyone’s names. I kind of wish I’d done this to begin with. I turn it on as a crutch when I actually need to understand or communicate something, which probably slows down learning, but I still make progress.
I could probably actually just do what the auto-translator does with reading people’s… “thoughts” isn’t quite accurate, but that’s basically it. [Empathy] reads emotions, but Clairvoyance can also read plenty of other things about a person. Actual thoughts and speech are just much more complicated than many of the things I have already learned to analyze. It’s easy to tell that someone is angry, but harder to tell why they’re angry. I keep at it, but expect no results instantly. There’s still something I’m missing but I’m not willing to push into past-life memories when I don’t have to. This will just take more practice and skill levels.
Skills increased: Language (Common), Clairvoyance (Telepathy), Clairvoyance (Empathy), Clairvoyance (Aspect Analysis)
I practice repairing things as well. I help mend some clothes while using [Psychometry] to try to determine who they belong to and how they became damaged. I can identify a Corwen from a non-Corwen at a glance now, but picking out the aura signature of specific individuals is taking a bit more work. People are complicated.
Once I really figure out [Psychometry], that would mean Griffin won’t be able to get away with all the things he gets into constantly. Everywhere someone has been should be smeared all over someone’s clothes, but it will take quite a bit of practice to be able to piece together all the details.
Skill acquired: Maintenance (Mending) Skill acquired: The ability to patch up and repair items made of fabric and similar materials.
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Grandma Laurel isn’t here to tell me that it’s time to learn to ride a devil-goat and unlock Persuasion (Animal Handling) and Athletics (Riding). I still feel that I need to do so anyway, so I imagine her here encouraging me in her particular manner.
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Obviously, my great-grandmother was not the only person in the village who knew how to handle the devil-goats. As they’re a fixture of the village, every Hearthkeeper and anyone even slightly inclined toward animals or monsters learns to handle them at some point. Even for adventurers, they’re a good way to study a monster that isn’t going to actually hurt you. Our devil-goats are well-behaved. You just have to get past the [Fear Aura].
“Why does Corwen have to spawn baby devil-goats?” I wonder. “Why can’t they reproduce like people?”
“They could,” Aunt Magnolia says. “But their purely animal counterpart would just be a large, black goat. As monsters, they can have features that wouldn’t work with normal biology, like their fire breath, aura, and even the unnatural strength of their wool. That wool, as you will shortly notice, is difficult to groom because of that.”
Aether cores are not technically gods, but they’re kind of a “quacks like a duck” situation. They create matter from nothing, including the very people they spawned. They provide for their people. They reward their people for doing things the core wants them to do. They punish those who commit crimes against their people with exile or worse. If they’re not gods, then I don’t know what a god is. I was never a proponent of faith without evidence.
It takes me a few weeks to manage it, but I eventually successfully groom a young devil-goat while keeping it calm myself. I’m not ready to tackle one of the adults yet.
Congratulations! You have successfully groomed a Basic livestock. Skills increased: Discipline (Fear Resistance), Tending (Animal Husbandry), Knowledge (Zoology) Skill acquired: Persuasion (Animal Handling) Skill acquired: The ability to pacify, coax, and train animals to perform desired actions.
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My magic acorn has since sprouted into a healthy oak sapling. I visit it and water it and tend to it to make sure more of my essence gets layered into it.
Most people who get rewards of fruit and nuts from dungeons don’t see their potential. They just eat them and move on. Our apple orchards are here because someone planted those apples. Liz, at least, saw their potential. Even if her Clairvoyance skills may not have been high enough to see their Potential aspect.
I read some books on plants and actually try to learn the information this time and not just skim things in an attempt to quickly raise skills. As it turns out, the system is not fooled by being lazy.
I take a book about plants to my tiny oak tree and read aloud the section on oak trees while carefully watching our vis and essence. I can’t deliberately use my vis to do magic yet, but everything I do still uses it passively as it’s constantly being let off into the aura like body heat.
Skills increased: Knowledge (Speed Reading), Enhanced Mind (Mental Library) Skill acquired: Knowledge (Botany) Description: The academic knowledge of the characteristics, life cycle, and uses of plants.
I’m still learning about the different phases of magic. At first, I’d thought of vis, aether, essence, and experience as equivalent to water, air, earth, and fire, but now I’m reassessing my assessment. Vis and aether correspond to life and death. Essence and experience correspond to order and chaos. Or perhaps stasis and change. Experience is a short-lived burst that alters a person and makes them stronger. I think.
Vis is a living concept. Aether is a dead concept. Essence is a concept that has made something that sticks around. Experience is a fleeting concept that alters something. Life/Death/Order/Chaos. I should really write a book about my insights. They don’t exist in Corwen’s library, at any rate. Maybe they do at Crux Academy. I consider asking one of the students for a favor to see if she can find any books for me and copy down the information, but I think I’ll hold off on that unless they ask for a favor of me. I’ll be able to just go look myself in a few years, anyway.
Still, it can’t hurt to start writing things down. Heck, I’ll probably get a skill or two for it. While I’m frustrated at the lack of good books to explain this stuff, I’m sure I’ll probably get more experience from it if I figure it out myself. That seems to be how it works, at least.
Everyone lets off a complex array of vis that I’ve only finally thanks to my new class been able to progress at viewing through increasingly finer analysis. For [Empathy], I’ve been able to pick out the moderately complex emotional state or simple thoughts like greetings or apologies.
I think by the time I’m able to build my own skyship, I will be able to speak with her. In a way. Plants don’t emit concepts as complex as those of people. I hadn’t been able to detect the concepts in tools and stone until I learned to detect essence as well as vis. They don’t create their own magic, but they absorb the concepts others were emitting around them. Rocks are imprinted with the concept of “rock” because sapients looked at them and determined they were rocks. In essence, being observed by sapients gives things identity. Interacting with sapients gives them psychic substance. Psychometry is ultimately the art of sensing what people were thinking about when they were interacting with an object.
Rowan looks over my shoulder at what I’m writing. “I don’t even know what half those words mean.”
“Could you not do that, please?” I say.
“Sorry,” Rowan says. “You were so intent and I was wondering what you were doing.”
“I’d just write these notes in my room, but Griffin is even nosier than you,” I say. “Anyway, I don’t know half those words, either. Turning on and off auto-translation has been giving me a headache and I didn’t just want to write this in English.”
“Sadly, I don’t think my protection skills extend to guarding you from headaches.”
“Yet,” I say. “Your protection skills don’t extend to guarding me from headaches yet.”
“I would probably need to reach Elite first,” Rowan says. “I need to run more dungeons. Anise said she wanted to do a full tour next year once the little ones turn 7, but we should be able to get in a few more runs this year. I’m tired of sitting around the village having people throw stuff at me and studying.”