Mila wandered over to eat lunch eventually, sitting with her stewing thoughts and her unstewed rabbit and potatoes. Everyone except for the two silent pollies complimented Naw-Naw on the meal and she was not one to sit that out, but otherwise she stayed quiet, giving a grunt or hummed ‘mhm’ as needed and prompted.

The Scienceland part of her had lamented the lack of a System, capital S. A supremely useful tool within many of the fictions she liked to read, it helped quantify power, gamify a character’s growth, and let the math nerds really sink their fangs into it.

Bonus points for eating up word counts and adding pages and pages of cute blue boxes.

The protagonists of these stories would, of course, either carefully control their growth or haphazardly smack things together on the fly, but no matter what, they tended to exploit aspects of the system to grow faster than they ‘should’. And that was what Mila had grouched at most, when she had gotten into those thoughts in the shower. Sure, the hard quantification would be nifty, but she had played far too many strategies games published by Nintendo to not want to exploit a system when it was laid out before her.

So, what was she supposed to do if this was a System, but hidden away from her? Should she be looking into books on the topic, or should she be trying to look for a breaking point on her own? Assuming, even, that this idea was correct at all?

Like, sure, it felt right to Mila. But maybe she just had litRPG brain worms from all that reading in Scienceland.

That was tough to chew on, that this might all just be a fool’s errand. The rabbit, a bit zippy but also a warm, floral taste to it, was very much not tough to chew on, nor were the potatoes. Each perfectly cooked cube went down the hatch with ease, even for the pollies whose beak-mouths did not seem great for eating much of anything. For Mila’s set of razors, there was no resistance at all.

But then, how much of that was because of how it was cooked, and how much was ‘practice’ on her part? Was it truly practice that mattered, or did killing things factor in, experience points to fuel the furnace?

The former felt suspiciously similar to cultivation. She did not have the best grounding in that sub-genre - too many of its common tropes sharply disagreed with her. But things did not feel right; what she knew of those stories had physical power and wealth accumulating together in folks that held large swathes of power within their corrupt societies. And, yeah, she had qualms with Rat-Hate and where she grew up and most all of the cities they passed through, but none of it was quite that bad, was it?

And for all her dislike of the aldermen that had sent them on this job for the wrong reasons, Mila was pretty sure they were not retired adventurers, nor that they had the skills to back up any kind of direct might-makes-right challenge of authority. Maybe it was that way elsewhere, but not at home.

Things did not feel right for any kind of killing-based experience leveling either. People did not wander out into the in-between places and become walking ecological disasters, in part because there was no benefit to that kind of nonsense - if folks got stronger from killing, killing would be done aplenty. And again, you would probably see ‘xp farm’ type things arise, which would also funnel physical power towards those with monetary or political power. And surely she would have heard about killing farms too, even ignoring that, again, she did not know of anyone at the tops of society being all that impressively superhuman.

No, the only thing connecting great personal power to anything else that she knew of, here, was dracomorphosis. And if you knew what was good for you, you put such madness well out of mind, which Mila promptly did.

The bread was indeed still soft and fresh, and the jam was delicious as Mila nibbled at it, warmed by everyone else breaking into soft chuckling at some joke Aluca had made. The cause of her speed actually being practice felt so fucking weird too, though. It was not like she was going to quit her morning trainings or anything. But just putting in the hours to achieve superhuman speed or strength or the ability to perfectly measure things out was weird, because she and everyone else did way more than just what they were particular good at.

Worse, folks practiced at harmful things all the time. She had dived into the hungry riptides of depression on both sides of reality, so did she have to worry about some fucking kind of super-depression, downward spirals reinforced to unfathomable strength by her own practice dragging herself down?

That was, quite frankly, worrying as all hell. It was absolutely something to watch out for. But the fact that she was considering those pretty evenhandedly and not turning into a scaled lump on a log who wanted to cease existing suggested that it just was not the case. That she was in the clear from super depression.

And that did not jive with it being ‘just practice’.

Fucking soft magic systems, even when it was not (explicitly) magic, apparently. Or, alternatively, folks had just never worked to try to maximize efficiency in getting stronger by ‘practice’. That felt foolish to assume, there was surely billions or trillions of people on earth, present and past, so assuming nobody had figured to test felt presumptuous.

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

But at the same time, somebody had to invent the wheel, however obvious it might have been after. And Mila had never really thought on the matter before, it was only her Scienceland thoughts that jarred it out of here. Even that was two or three weeks in the making.

If she was going to be metaphorically inventing the wheel here, organically uncovering the System, implied as it might be, she needed a game plan. A big experimental setup, double blind or whatnot, was too much to ask for - she had neither the time nor the patience for such, and was not quite sure how she would set up the parameters there even if she had the first two elements. She could do an experiment of one, namely herself, but Mila still needed metrics. A baseline of her now, and then take those same benchmarks later, after she had gone through whatever training she would be trying out.

As it was, she was not comfortable just sallying forth and exterminating every sign of life they came across. But out here, off to wander into unknown lands with unknown threats, was when she was going to be put in a situation where something had to die if it was going to happen. So on their current trip would be the best time to check if killing was a factor.

She could take her current benchmarks, and take them again after this job. She could keep up her morning exercises as normal, and whenever they did get into any scuffles - at least one thing or another seemed to pop up on any long trip for them - she would try to be the one to land any finishing blows. Mila would not leave the others vulnerable, their lives were more important than her little test, but if she had to go out of her way a little bit, that was fine.

Once they got back, she could then spend the same number of days doing just her normal exercises, and then take a third set of benchmarks. Another stint of that same duration would be meditation and her practice, just in case. The final set of measurements, and she could then compare the different periods’ increases against each other. That felt pretty robust in its categories, with the outer two experimental conditions being compared to the middle, ‘control’ condition. Or as control as she was gonna get - doing nothing at all would probably be best, for the science, but she was not going to be doing that.

She had finally gotten to starting her brainstorming on what was actually the best way to measure her progress, when she realized that their lunch was actually wrapping up. She had stayed on the periphery of the conversation, but now Naw-Naw was getting to cleaning and putting away her hefty pot and Rora had began the length process of the two groups parting ways.

“We’re not always in town, of course, but if you’re ever in Moussehof, please stop by the Wander Inn and see if we’re there. We would love to share another meal with you, and you should see what our chef can do with a full kitchen!” Rora managed to say the name of Darimash’s establishment with both ‘n’s mysteriously enunciated, and she meant every word she said.

“And we do not go to cities often, but. The food and company was delightful. It would make a journey through the settlement… worthwhile. We often fry our own food, but it is rarely so well-crafted,” said Cold-Creek-Water, nodding his thanks deeply.

The other polly cut in with a soft cackle-laugh. “We often fry our food, but it is *never* so well made,” he corrected, shaking his head. He had a small pan handle poking out of his own pack, so he was likely the one doing the actual cooking. That his partner had made sure not to talk down about his cooking, even in regards to how it stacked up to Naw-Naw’s, pulled a smile from Mila.

Naw-Naw was not about to have anyone talk bad about anyone’s cooking however, not even themselves, although who could say if it was religiously motivated or personally. “Don’t go bad-mouthin’ nobody cookin’ for other folk, much less their own kin. Only reason ‘m good as I am is ‘cause I put m’ soul into it, always have.” Their hard gaze stole the eyes of both pollies, and the almost-predatory intensity seemed to unsettle the younger two, but the spell was broken soon enough. “‘Alf my recipes are the Goddess’s, an’way. Can get most of ‘em from any town, if’n ya ask around a bit.”

There was a large shrug and Naw-Naw went back to cleaning the cookware, working at a scrap of potato skin that had left its potato and gotten a bit burnt onto the iron.

“And you only get good at something by being kinda bad at it first,” Mila finally added with a shrug, misquoting a piece of Adventure Time that was one of many tidbits that had stuck with her over the years, and smushing it together with what Rora had said to Grant over dinner, a few days past.

Her input did seem to put the tiniest bit of a twinkle in Wind-Through-Leaves‘s eyes as he mulled over the words before eventually bobbing his head. “And I would even say I am good,” he puts forward a bit uncomfortably. Talking about himself specifically was clearly kind of on the spot for the fellow. “Naw-Naw has simply made it clear how much further there is to go.”

“I sure as ain’t no pinnacle myself. Cookin’s a part of who ya are, an’ I ain’t ever done bein’ me. I like to reckon most folk ain’t.”

That was its own fantastic piece of wisdom, and Mila sat on it. She was not the only one, either - while the pleasantries continued, everyone seemed just a little bit preoccupied, save for Naw-Naw themself, who was indeed busy being them.

After a while, what felt like almost as long as the lunch itself, it was time to actually part ways proper, now that all bags were packed and goodbyes were said. It was only as the adventurers were continuing up the road and the pollies crossing it to perhaps push into the tree line that Mila caught a new voice, just barely at the edge of her hearing.

“They were nice,” came a soft, feminine voice that felt like a large smooth stone that had been heated up under the sun over the course of a long day. But for all that Sun-Warmed-Stone’s voice was pleasant, Mila could also distinctly feel hints of Rora’s voice weaved into the comforting sound of a voice that was still distinctly not Rora’s.

A glance at the others showed that Naw-Naw and Hughestace had apparently heard it too, along with the following sharp shushing by one of the young woman’s fathers. And Rora… Rora did a very poor job at hiding a massive grin behind a hand, pleased as punch and extremely flattered that the polly had desired to interpret the kobold’s voice into the young woman’s own.