Oliveen called her first thing in the morning. The applications that Gemma had filled out had been accepted, and she and Skyler would be able to move into their new lodgings in two days. With that settled, Gemma decided to focus on her plan for leveling her Classes.

After going through the morning routine, she took Nellie to a local music shop, ready to initiate her plan on Class leveling.

The shop was filled with instruments familiar as well as unknown. It appeared there was an entire history and genre of music that was played underwater by the Dewaur. Gemma engaged the shopkeeper in a lively discussion before making her choices.

“I want that one too,” Gemma pointed to the violin.

Back on Earth, her instrument of choice was the piano. But pianos were expensive here in Travalar too, and the keyboards unwieldy. Gemma hoped to acquire one at a later date, but for now she figured that her Class might be able to help her learn another instrument or two.

The shopkeeper was happy to help her, and he showed her how to hold the first instrument, a violin, and coax notes out of it. The violin screeched a few times, disliking Gemma’s clumsy handling of it. But Gemma smiled, even at the harsh sounds.

She then had the shop keeper set her up with a brass instrument, quite unlike anything Gemma could recall seeing on Earth. It was called a gloxzine. It was a funny thing, producing only extremely high or very low ones.

Nellie clapped when Gemma played, even though there was no coherent song.

Gemma bowed towards Nellie while the shopkeeper wrapped up her purchases.

“Thank you, little lady,” Gemma said.

Nellie gave her a huge smile.

Gemma left the shop, humming.

The description of her Class indicated that the focus of it was that she perform before an audience, not just play. She hoped her plan worked because, even though they were cheaper than a piano was, the instruments were expensive. Gemma had a good amount of money, but if she spent it without thinking it would evaporate before she knew it.

She stopped on a busy street, and locked Nellie’s stroller. She gripped the violin and coaxed notes out at random, feeling the smoothness of the wood beneath her fingers, the weight of the bow.

Passerbyes ignored her, though a few shot her dirty looks when the violin made a particularly offensive noise. Gemma ignored them and continued playing, if it could be called that. After a while, Nellie grew impatient, sitting in her stroller, so Gemma put the instrument away.

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She had a car take her to the equivalent of a park. Since Dewaur and Velioran children had unique physiology, the nicer parks had mini streams and pools of water, as well as equipment that Velioran children could fly to and forth from.

“There you go, sweetie,” Gemma said as she set Nellie down to crawl around and explore.

With unabashed glee, Nellie went to splash in the streams. She was quite partial to water, Gemma had realized.

Gemma took out the gloxzine, and blew notes at random.

It was fun.

Gemma had forgotten the clumsiness that prevailed when she had begun learning piano. The frustrations and joys over the simplest notes being played correctly. Reliving that through the new instruments reminded her why she loved music so much to begin with.

She attracted a small crowd of children, feather covered, and scaled and also human. One had tiny curly horns, heritage from another world.

One child in particular gave her a nasty, intense glare, a little boy with seaweed hair and webbed fingers.

When she paused for a minute, the kid walked right up to her.

“You’re awful,” he said.

“I know,” Gemma said, “I play the piano, really.”

“Hmm,” he said, and tilted his head as he considered that bit of information, “then let me show you.”

Gemma acquiesced and handed him the instrument.

“This is Marion’s Lullaby. It’s really, really, really easy.”

The boy played a short, but charming piece. Then he handed the instrument back to Gemma and taught it to her.

“Not like that, no…” he said, and then when Gemma tried after several more attempts, he gave her a grin, “You got it!”

“Thank you,” Gemma said, smiling back, “I think this will help my Musician class a lot.”

Gemma put the gloxzine away and gathered up Nellie.

“Bye-bye,” she said to the kids.

A few said bye and waved at her.

The seaweed haired boy waved the longest.

Gemma checked her status screen on her phone and was sad to see her Musician class hadn’t leveled. Hopefully though, it was on the cusp of doing so, after her efforts.

She headed back to the hotel and spent the rest of the evening with Nellie.

As it grew late, Nellie’s temper grew short. Maybe it was because of the excitement of the day and the energy expended at the park, but she tantrumed.

It was awful, as bad as those first bewildering days in Travalar had been, if not even more so. Gemma felt bad for the people in the room adjacent to her, and hoped the sounds didn’t penetrate too badly.

“Shh, shh,” Gemma said, but nothing consoled her. Not the bottle, or toys, or cuddles.

After about two hours of tears and screams that grew hoarse, Nellie finally drifted off to sleep out of pure exhaustion.

“That was awful,” Gemma said, laying back on her bed.

She opened her phone and felt quite vindicated when she saw that Babysitter had leveled up. She just needed one more level to receive a Skill.