“What’s the plan today?” I asked Jim as we gathered after the sun rose.

“I’m headed down to the ground today,” he said, “we aren’t going to get by with a small heat plate if other people show up. So I’ll drag a log up here I guess. Mostly I just can’t sit and wait. I’ve got a spare pot, so I’ll collect some honey on my way back up.”

We collected more of the seaweed, or pondweed I guess you’d call it. As well as the insects that Jim showed us. The pondweed didn’t fold or bend but cracked like twigs.

Mrs. Kine just chopped it up and put it into one of the bowls. On the hot plate she’d soften it up in water and then dump the water out.

The insets would be cooked headless by just tossing them on the hot plate and waiting until the inside bubbled up out of the hole where the head had connected.

I couldn’t power the hotplate without being able to push mana into it. Which I couldn’t do without learning to cycle mana, which was apparently like trying to teach blind men about colors. The discussion we’d had about it was short and blunt. She didn’t think she could help me. It had taken her almost a year to do it on her own, and her heartfelt advice was to find someone who could train me in it and pay them, at least until I could unlock the skill and know what it was supposed to feel like.

I couldn’t really hand fish unless the others bunched the fish up, and there was no wood to collect up here.

So I braided grass that would later have a rock set on top of it. When every someone else came up they’d find dry grass to burn.

Mrs. Kine cooked fish over the heater plate and added a bit of honey to it, then made a face.

“That good?” I asked.

“It’s not good at all,” she said missing my teasing.

We ate a big bowl of boiled pondweeds with fish chunks, fired insects, and the sliced white root she had collected. It was edible but not something I’d eat if there were other options.

“How do we move forward?” I asked, “Do we go somewhere where I apprentice as an Alchemist or do I just pick up some other trade? How do we survive? Will towns support us if we have no coin? I don’t know what destitute people do or how deep we are?”

“I can sew and everyone can clubs slimes and henkals. If need be we will live in a hovel while we each coin from monster parts. Then we will find what the town we are in is lacking and try to fill that need. It might be difficult for five or six years, but we will not starve.”

I nodded.

After a while we discussed what skills I could work on, which branched into what attributes were.

“No,” she said with a smile, “that would likely be dexterity as well.”

“What is agility then?”

“Dexterity is placing something, your hands or a needle or your feet in a dance!” She lifted her dress up and her feet moved in a quick pattern.

“Whoa,” I said, “skip the explanation and get back to the dancing.”

“Dancing like that,” she said with a blush, “is dexterity based, because it’s about following a pattern well and accurately. But dancing with a partner,” she said stepping into my personal space and then sort of holding still.

“Well,” she said as she stepped back, “when they move, you move, and it’s reacting and building off those moves, which they react to. That reaction is agility. Horse riding is agility because you react to the animal’s movements.”

“So dodging a punch is agility?”

“Yes and no. That is reacting, so it would be agility, except it is combat, so it would be a Class Skill which have no attribute bonuses and can’t level.”

“So dancing and horse back riding,” I said.

“Rope walking,” she said, but shook her head when I started to argue that it should be dexterity.

“Someone with perfect dexterity would not have to react as they ran across a rope. But even the slightly mistake would send the rope swaying. You need strength to run across it, and intelligence to know how to move, but the largest attribute is reacting to the unstable movements.”

“That makes sense,” I said slowly.

“This would all be much easier if you just believed me when I told you something.”

Her smile said she was joking. Maybe.

We talked a bit more. Intelligence made sense as she explained it as consciously learning, reasoning, and remembering. Also puzzles, jokes, and riddles, both the making of and the figuring out.

There were mana skills that were General Skills, and not Class Skills. Almost all of them were tied to intelligence.

Wisdom was a bit different, strategy, investigating, perception, and gossip were the big ones. Wisdom was sorting out why two people at a party weren’t speaking to each other, or that the stolen goat was likely lost instead. It was planning routes and making contingencies. It was study, rote memorization, and the bulk of learning, while intelligence seemed to be the Ah-Ha! moments.

Wisdom was reading body language of others or changing your body language to convey what you wanted. It was knowing how to bluff and when.

Many skills dealing with animals or the sick were wisdom based. Many of the gathering skills and skills used to preserve or prepare plants were wisdom based.

Likely wisdom was this body’s previous owner’s easiest skill to level up as an Alchemy Apprentice. Unless he had been truely gifted and was able to skip all the mundane stuff, which Mrs. Kine suspected he might have been.

She didn’t know the name of the skill but the manipulation of Living Glass was a tier five wisdom skill. Most craftsmen leveled that skill as manipulating a lump of glass as if it was putty was so useful in thousands of situations.

Unlike potions which could be created through condensation, living glass could only be created by alchemists and was one of the secrets restricted to Masters.

When she described what it was for me I wondered if the glass cube with rounded edges in the wagon had been more than a paper weight. Then again, maybe I was misremembering.

I’d gutted and dismantled every wagon in that train in one loop or another, but remembering things later that you didn’t think was important at the time was difficult. I saw the glass cube about the size of a softball, but I don’t remember which wagon it was in.

“What are you doing?” I asked

“What?” she said taking a twig out of her mouth and then looking at it.

“One of the cards you found allows me to eat trees and know their age,” she said, “which means I can eat it. It’s odd. It’s not bad exactly though my brain is telling me it is. The oddest part is chewing. You know how when you eat small birds you chew the bones?”

“No,” I said slowly, “I don’t know that.”

“You don’t eat birds?”

“We ate cooked birds but not the bones.”

She frowned.

“Bird bones are soft and hollow. With even two hundred strength people can chew them up without issue. The only thing is, there is a sort of, thought, blockage, you have to overcome. You have the strength to chew bones but the mental will is lacking for most. Same with this,” she gestured with the twig, “but when I decide I can eat it, I can chew it up without issues.”

“Can normal people digest wood? I thought you need gut bug to break the wood down?”

“Guy bugs?”

“My previous planet had insects that eat wood-”

“We have those.”

“Except the insects couldn’t really digest it. They had these much smaller living things inside them that ate the wood and pooped out waste that the insect could then digest. So the insect would eat the wood and then the bugs inside him would eat the wood. In fact how they killed those insects wasn’t to kill them at all. Instead they killed the gut bugs and the insects would eat wood, over and over but poop it out. Since nothing was eating it and giving them the waste they could use they would starve to death.”

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“That’s horrid,” she said.

I shrugged.

“I don’t know if it gives you gut bugs or how it works.”

We spent some time talking and then Mrs. Kine when back to braiding grasses. I walked around a bit.

There were Speckled Leafeaters, a type of bug that was a cross between a grasshopper and spider perhaps.

They didn’t really flee from us until you reached for them. I was able to catch several. Jim had held them and flicked their heads off with his thumb.

I got bit when I tried.

I used two hands to pull the heads off.

The bodies were slightly longer than my hand was wide. They had a chitin type body, more like a beetle without wings, but longer.

The six legs were like a grasshoppers with the back two being larger and allowing them to jump.

The heads were much larger, as least from my spotty memory of grasshoppers.

The heads were bigger around than the bodies. Had six tiny hard black eyes that encircled the head and a single big compound eye directly above the mouth that extended out a bit so it looked like a protruding bubble.

The mouth parts were powerful, likely able to eat thin bark.

I was in the middle of cutting into the third one when Mrs. Kine joined me.

“I don’t know if I mentioned it, but Braiding is a General Dexterity Skill, tier one.”

She held up the grass braid she was working on.

“You did not,” I said with a smile.

“What are you doing?”

“As a child we dissected insects and animals in school. A bug on my world had a heart that was like a tube. So it just pumped blood up and let it flow down over organs. If you turned it upside down, it would eventually die. I’m seeing how the heart works in these, or trying. I think I need a magnifying glass, though I don’t know if you have those here.”

“A magnifying glass?” she said. She repeated magnifying glass, slowly and I once again had that weird sensation where I heard the individual words that made up the compound word.

Magnifying glass was a view-closer-lens.

“There are spells that allow you to see from the point of a pin, it makes the world look very large,” she said, “is that similar?”

I nodded.

I didn’t know much about glass workings but I did know lens grinding had been a complex thing for a very long time.

I kept forgetting that they had magic solutions to many of the same problems we had invented mechanical solutions to. I wondered if they had microscopes and telescopes.

I wasn’t able to say the words so no, unless their versions were were compounded magical zoom lenses of some sort.

“Mostly I’m lost. I don’t know what any of these things do,” I said indicating the bug that was pinned open on the back of the wooden plate.

“I think this is the heart, but it looks like a tube with little bumps, so maybe multiple pumps along the same line. And this is the same sort of loop structure with the digestion where it works back up to the stomach from the colon.”

“So it can extract more mana,” she said with a nod.

“What?”

“The food you eat is processed first to make the body strong and then moves in a cycle until it is either fully waste or you eat more and your body needs to make room.”

“Make sure you clean my pins before you put them away,” she said.

I eyed the pins I had pressed through the outside of the insect’s flesh to keep the body splayed open.

“Oh. I’m sorry I should have asked first.”

“You should of, but there is no harm unless you lose them. They were my mothers.”

“Let me put them away. This isn’t important. We can braid until I get ten levels and then see if I can skill up from it.”

It was clear using the pins had bothered her.

Braiding was the same, there didn’t seem too much to it. It took me an hour before I asked for help.

“I’m not unlocking the skill,” I said.

“You have to try to improve the braid,” she said after some explanation, “not just braid over and over.”

“How?”

“Look at what you’ve done and then try to do it better.”

I watched her for a while. The biggest difference was that she twisted each bunch before curving it over to hold in place.

She also straightened the grasses and added a few new pieces of grass each time.

I undid the one I’d been working on and started over.

I got four twists in when I heard the voice announcing I received the Braiding Skill.

The voice was as strange as ever and made with shiver.

Sometimes, even as a grown man, I would walk into my bedroom to get something and see a monster that turned into a pile of clothes on a chair as soon as the light came on.

I got that same feeling of something unreal and dangerous from the voice as I did in that moment of seeing a pile of clothing look alien and deadly.

I didn’t get a voice when I skilled up. In fact I didn’t notice I’d skilled up at all until I looked.

We spoke for a while about that.

“Some people can set alerts. One woman I met had a tea pot whistle alert her when her skills changed. I never tired, nor do I know how to go about doing so.”

I would just have to keep checking.

“I’m already at eight in braiding,” I said. I had a pile of forty or so braids beside me.

She frowned and looked at my pile then at hers.

She had about half what I had, but hers were clearly higher quality than what I was producing.

She didn’t seem to have ends sticking out anywhere.

“How do you hide the ends? Tear them off when they go under a braid?”

“I insert grass into the center of the braid then bring it out, so the ends of the grasses are hidden within each strand. The tightness of the twist keeps everything in place.”

Eventually I checked again and I was at eleven.

I checked my attributes. My Dexterity had risen from four hundred and two, to found hundred and three.

“I see,” she said. My excitement must have shown on my face.

I didn’t expect to be this excited, but the more I thought about it the better I felt. I got to keep all the benefits of this body’s previous owner.

I’d get to train up all the easy skills for easy gains and increase my numbers even more.

And if attributes were the hidden requirements for Class Options I’d be better off than most.

“I earned a point in dexterity,” I told her. She smiled.

I paused.

It was the smile of someone genuinely happy for my happiness, not the smile of someone putting on a show or envious of my good fortune.

“Mrs. Kine,” I said, “I feel like dancing- with you,” I added in case I was unclear, “would you join me?”

I dusted myself off and offered her a hand.

She laughed and got to her own feet.

She had to teach me how to dance. I was horrible at it but she was patient.

“May I show you how we danced?” I asked.

She nodded. I held her close and counted, “One, two, three. One, two, three.”

“Then we spin. And now dip. Ouch! Ha ha ha-” I laughed and she joined me as my impromptu dip backward caused her to jerk forward and bump into me.

I spotted movement and turned a bit more before freezing.

There were people, I think they were people, beyond the edge of the ponds near where the tunnel and ramp began to descend.

They were wearing clothing, but had rust-red skin and horns. The one in front was pointing off to the side. The horns rose up from the temples and then swept back over the head, the far points being lost in the styles hair and colorful ribbons.

“Let’s help them set up,” she said when she followed my eyes.

“What are they,” I said when I caught up to here several steps later.

“What?” she asked, then she slowed and looked at me.

“These are the slaves. The Sendi.”

“I thought the Sendi were a different species,” I said.

“They are,” she said blushing, “interbreeding is impossible, they cannot be awakened, and they cannot earn skills.”

“This is why you didn’t want me to have my hat off?”

I had visible bumps where their horns were attached to their heads.

She blushed again.

I didn’t have a hat after the mine and more than half the men in Splitrock hadn’t worn a hat at all.”

It was odd.

They were people not beasts of burden or devils from the depths. Expressive eyes, spoke well, no slave-master oddness I was worried about. They just did things when Mrs. Kine instructed them to, but didn’t come to her with questions.

Small carts were being pulled up the ramps loaded down with goods. They would be unloaded before being taken back down.

Tents were being set up, as well as folding tables.

A stove was built out of heavy but flat sheet metal that slotted together and was held in place with pins until someone came by and ran their finger down all the edges sealing all the gaps.

Three other men where working together, or at least close together to shape the few remaining stone walls on the collapsed buildings at the other end of the Mesa.

People had poured up and out of the tunnel. Most had arm loads of belongings.

The children were corralled in a certain area while men and women headed back down to haul wood or other items up.

For the most part the Sendi and Tal, which was the sound I made when I said human, intermixed.

The ribbons in their hair or wrapped around their horns indicated who was responsible for them.

Mrs. Kine didn’t use the word, owned, but responsible, or more specifically duty-to-care-for, which was a stronger word than responsible.

As the day progressed into night I found I was more and more disturbed by the relationship.

I think, in a strange way, I would have been more comfortable with the Sendi in chains and being forced to work with whips. Then at least the good guys and bad guys would be well defined.

This was something else, more akin to the women raised in religious societies on earth who were never taught to read, and who were instead taught that their duty in life was to be a mother and wife.

That was legal and had been the way of life for millions or billions of women. Yet it too was a restriction and form of slavery.

Apparently there were Sendi tribes that had no households to serve. They were often diseased and sick and injured from in fighting.

Then again this explanation came from Mrs. Kine, who owned slaves her whole life.

Hell, I apparently owned slaves, or had, the might be dead.

Then again-

I paused, my spoon half way to my mouth.

What if some of the slaves I owned survived? The apprentice died, but he died in the revolt.

Did I have responsibilities I was shirking? Would someone else feed them? House them? Clothe them?

I forced the pondweed and fish into my mouth and chewed.

Mrs. Kine had told me to wait here while she spoke to some of the other women.

I’d watched at first as she approached a group of six older women. They’d ignored her while there were other people coming up to speak to them.

I hadn’t seen the slight in the action, thinking it was only that they were dealing with higher priority items first.

But when there were no others, the group turned in upon itself and did not speak to her, even as she stood there, mouth open and waiting.

Eventually one turned and spoke to her, just a few words, before turning back around.

It was clearly a dismissal of some sort.

Mrs. Kine was still standing there, waiting, for what I knew not.

I looked away from them again, sure any action on my part would cause issues, or worse, disappoint Mrs. Kine.

“Why did they make you wait?” I asked.

Mrs. Kine’s lips turned down. It wasn’t a frown exactly.

She glanced at me and then at the people around us. I’d whispered, but she didn’t respond.

I didn’t look around, but I did specifically notice when I moved that one of the women were looking our way.

Red Lightning arrived with little fanfare.

There were people constantly trying to talk to him, but it was clear, even from a hundred strides away, that he was sending them away.

He sat on too of his dimensional box, a small hat on his head, and was writing in a large open book on his lap.

By morning one of the stone buildings was repaired enough to block out the wind and house the contain the children. Rumors had spread through the night and we came together as a group just after sunrise.