For all that my life was apparently a game now, it didn't really change much at all. Mostly because it wasn't a full-fledged game. I had no status screen, no quest, no mini-map and no apparent experience system. I'd killed several garden gnomes to find out that last one.

What I did have, though, was a skill quantifier. I said quantifier because that was what it did. I did not gain skills from skill books, encounters, or anything of the sort. Neither did the fact I had the skill let me go any further beyond that what I'd learned. I had hesitated calling myself a gamer at all, but it was that or calling myself, 'The guy with a skill quantifying ability.'

But yeah, my gamer ability did one thing, and one thing only at the moment. And that was give me every single bit of information I could ever need on a particular learned skill. It quantified what I had, as mentioned before.

It was immensely useful. I had learned the fire sorcery skill after finding a place I could practice. The skill description provided me all with information I needed to improve the skill further. It told me of the highest temperature I could reach, how fine my control was, how much magic I needed for a particular usage, and so on.

From this I could extrapolate what I needed to work on to improve. As I said, very useful. I trained doggedly, focused to a point, occasionally glancing at the changes appearing in the skill.

From the outside perspective I was simply a young boy, hiding in his toy box and spitting out embers while reading invisible information from the air, but on the inside, I was a warrior of magic perfecting my craft so I could make my new parents proud enough to give me access to the library.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

I was the dragon.

-/-

I had enough mastery over my fire spitting abilities approximately a month later. It turned out that once you actually had the chance to practice, creating fire was really not an overly complicated piece of magic. Thermodynamics in general wasn't. It was simply controlling the movement of heat in one particular area to create or siphon it away. For a little bit of extra magic you could make the heat fancy by adding actual flames.

The time had ripened like a fruit, and now was the time to pluck it. Despite my parents never even indicating in the slightest that they were nervous about my lack of accidental magicks, I still knew that they would be happy to witness me shape our shared birthright to my will.

So a few days after having gained sufficient mastery of the skill, and it being the rare occasion that we were all present at the dinner table–father spent a lot of time in the ministry, and grandfather gossiping with his friends–I stood up on my raised chair and proclaimed, in very butchered Latin mind you,

"Ego draconis, audi me: et frendet."

And then proceeded to breathe a long stream of fire into the air above me. It wasn't much, the stream only being a foot wide and three long. But looking at the deliciously gobsmacked faces of my usually composed family made me feel like I'd just stolen fire from the gods.

The first one that to come out of the stupor was my grandfather, who simply blinked once slowly, said, "Meet me in my study once your parents are done congratulating you," then went back to reading his newspaper. Not the prophet, that horrible rag. But "Politically minded," a newspaper that contained mostly unbiased stories about the most important political occurrences in Britain and the mainland.

I was disrupted from any further thought along the line of unbiased reporting by my mother. Who, with the supreme grace of a noble lady, or that of a ninja (I was unsure), snuck behind me and lifted me up from my chair. Cuddling her face next to mine muttering something along the lines of, "My beautiful baby boy. Magic-something, control-that so proud."

My father didn't come over. He continued sitting where he was, with an unbelievably smug look on his face and a gaze that seemed to be looking beyond the physical surroundings an eye could normally perceive.

Suffice to say, everyone was very, very excited.