“Why am I at a default minimum?” I asked, ignoring the fact that my Fairy Godmother seemed to be having an argument with their pen.

Intelligence +1

“Health is your Strength plus your Constitution times your level,” my Fairy Godmother answered. “Mana is Intelligence plus Will times your level. And since your level is still zero, that kind of negates whatever other stats you have.”

“That’s stupid,” I muttered only to myself, but ignored it. Stupid was a normal pet peeve of mine. Seeing my intelligence at a measly five had me fuming and it was hard enough to fight that insult down. I could have wailed on for hours but who knew how long this guide would stay. It had been stupid of me to waste the time they’d given me so far. I needed information. I grabbed onto that sliver of sanity and pushed away the tears that still leaked out of my eyes.

“You said I could have a class,” I rushed on, so they didn’t roll their eyes again.

Will +1

“Yes!” Both the quill and Fairy Godmother perked up. “What do you want?”

“What do you have?” I countered.

“It’s not a menu,” they said, spreading their hands out. “You’ll have to think of something on your own.”

“Fine.” I shook my head. “Do you have a cook class?”

“That’s a profession,” they said.

“Omnipotent God,” I suggested.

“Be serious.” The quill actually quivered at me. The quill didn’t talk. When I say they, I mean that the Fairy Godmother said stuff, not that the quill and the Fairy Godmother said things together. They were maybe like a comic set of magicians I couldn’t afford to go see. Just imagine the quill as the little one that didn’t say anything.

“Bulwark Operator?” I proposed.

“No,” they said, eyebrows coming together. “How would one operate a wall?”

“College Professor?”

“No,” they answered. “There aren’t colleges here.”

“Thank God for that,” I muttered. “Poppyseed farmer?”

“What? No! That would be a profession anyway and a subset of farmer.”

“So, there is a list? A menu?” I challenged. I often found that when people said there wasn’t a menu of options that they really didn’t mean that. No one wanted you to be able to pick and choose anything out of the air. Especially not me. I was never going to guess any standard answers. My mind didn’t think that way. Standard answers were traps for the unimaginative. I didn’t do well on multiple choice tests.

“Yes, but no, No!” they sputtered. “I can’t help you choose what you want to be in this world. It’s against the rules.”

“Rules I can’t sit down and leisurely read for a few days because someone is coming to kill me,” I quipped, still a little creeped out at the thought of a dozen quill lawyers editing me. “But they’re rules I have to follow as assuredly as there is a list of classes for me to choose from. I’m just supposed to sit here and guess what’s on that list?”

“Uh, no.” They shook their head a bit. I have that effect on people. “Yes? Maybe? But not like…”

I ignored the spluttering. “Obviously, Bard is on that list as a class, as my idiotic ex-boyfriend was always going to pick that right off.”

“Yes.” They nodded quickly. “You could be a Bard. Is that what you want?”

“Not on your life,” I asserted. “Can I have more than one class?”

“You can’t figure out a single class and you already want more of them?” Their wings fluttered. Could a quill roll its feathers?

“I want to know the rules!” I pointed out emphatically. “If I’m going to be stuck with this one class for the rest of my life here, I don’t want to get stuck with something that’s going to make me miserable! Or worse, make me lose to that gigolo Beau.”

Intelligence +1

Will +1

“Not a Bard?” They weren’t keeping up, but I could see that they were trying to be helpful. “A Bard is very versatile.”

“A Bard,” I mused sweetly, “like the travelling gigolos who swing their…” and I swung my arms like swaying elephant trunks, “charisma around like it has more brains than they do? Who stroll around mutating real stories into something the masses want to hear, slap an earwig tune onto it and pass it off as entertainment? That kind of Bard?”

“You could be any kind of Bard you want,” they hemmed.

“Really?” I asked, sarcastically. “Could I? And how do they get experience and level?”

“Performing and it’s boosted by fame,” they hawed.

“What are their dominant stats?”

“Charm and Luck, basically, though Dexterity, Beauty and Perception help,” they hemmed.

“And what would be their fighting style? How could I be ‘defeated’ as a Bard?”

“I couldn’t say,” they hawed, getting suspicious, though at the time I didn’t understand why.

“You see, Beau’s a good musician and an even better seducer, not that he was ever really that good once he got a woman in bed, but I digress,” I found myself ranting, getting up off the bed to treat the meager space between it and the door as my stage. “I can see it now. He’d challenge me to dueling banjos with the winner crowned by the biggest applause. Then all my dreams of my daughter coming here would be -poof- gone and dead. Would I get another chance? Ever?”

“Um, no,” my Fairy Godmonster admitted, confusion warring with suppressed knowledge of the rules on his face. Even the quill had stilled in what I interpreted to be an ominous way.

“Yeah, I didn’t think so,” I said, plopping back onto the bed next to them. “Oh, I’m a good story-teller. I can spin a yarn. I can write a darn good poem. But, sadly, poetry is the art of fools, and the fodder of pigs in any culture. At least they are until some charismatic twit croons them out of their pie holes to crowds of squealing fans that are more interested in hip gyrations than the lyrics they will mutate at their next karaoke night. People don’t want what I can do, and I don’t lie well enough to spin the greatest yarns that Beau would have no compunction having tripping off his… tongue just for the joy of having all eyes on him.”

Skill Learned: Pontification

Charm +1

“So, what else ya got?” I wheedled at a stunned… “What do you want to be called anyway?”

“Sammi,” they said, on automatic. It was going to have to be Sammi and “quill” because the quill remained silent.

“So, Sammi.” I looked them squarely in the eyes. “What else ya got on that list I can’t see?”

“I dunno,” they responded, with a rather helpless shrug.

“Sammi.” I placed a hand on their shoulder, trying to be comforting. “Somehow, I have to not only bring my entire family here, at the painfully slow pace of one at a time, by defeating not only Beau the Butthead but also the next poor schmuck that gets pulled through as MY nemesis.” My eyes widened at the implications my mind suddenly forced me to consider. “Wait! Do I choose my nemesis? Did Beau choose me?”

Intimidation +1

“No,” they stated, tone flat, as they tried to dissect what I was saying, the direction my mind was going, and trying to remember what they could and could not tell me according to rules they knew, and I couldn’t know yet. Ah, ha! My evil plan was working. Not.

“Come on, Sammi,” I urged, snapping my fingers in front of their face. I needed my guide sharp and paying attention. They were my only source of the pure data my mind needed to find sanity, logic, and the almighty loophole. “Keep up. I’ve had this stuff swirling around in my brain this fast all day long and you made fun of me for being collapsed in a heap of pathetic sobs when you found me. Now that I can have one or two answers, you’ve got to keep up.”

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Intelligence +5 (now shut up and give me a minute)

“Want a tissue?” I pointed toward my precious supply hidden behind my friend the stool. I thought about that and gave Sammi a minute.

Sanity -1 (now shut up or I’ll figure out how to make that a real stat penalty)

In my mind, I sat myself on that bench my mother used to put me on when I put that look on her face. I swung my feet back and forth like it was a swing that could lift me high into the air and back again. It took a few minutes, but I’ll give them credit, Sammi didn’t just disappear like I figured they could have. I knew I could be annoying once my mind started pouring copiously out of my mouth.

I distracted myself with a conversation with the stool. Yeah, I needed my family, but barring that, I would settle for my cat…. And a cat box…full of litter, and cat food, but not a cat box full of litter and food, so I’d need a food dish but that could just be a bowl from downstairs… I read an old children’s book to my stool buddy about a mouse and a small round dessert. At which point, my mind transitioned into how to use the ingredients downstairs in a cookie recipe. I hadn’t seen eggs yet.

“Okay, look,” Sammi finally piped up. “You have to choose a class and I can’t help you do that.”

I opened my mouth to speak but Sammi glared at me, and I snapped it shut. You need to use your imagination about the quill. I just don’t have the base talent to describe how it flitted in concert with Sammi’s words. How does one describe how a quill could quiver with a scold, or swoosh so eloquently with a wave of approval?

Charm +1

Okay, I could get the hang of this.

Charm -1 (one should not be rewarded for insincere flattery)

Right.

“One,” Sammi insisted, ticking it off on their hand, “you have to pick a class.”

I nodded mutely, pretending studiousness as if I was in a lecture hall with just as much enthusiasm. Sammi was one of those general education professors who repeated themselves for the slow students in the back. Only my daughter wasn’t there to stop my eyeballs from rolling up into the back of my head from sheer boredom.

“Two, you have to complete the Nemesis Quest without my help in order to bring your family, any of them, here.”

I blinked back tears that threatened to reemerge and blur out my momentary detour into humor. That was probably not a bottomless supply of marvelously soft tissues in that box, and I suspected there were many tearful nights in my future.

“I’m only here to get you out of a stuck spot and onto the path of one and two.”

It’s not like I could have stopped my mind from scampering back into a childish shell. It was just what happened to me anytime I got really stressed. I was pretty good at hiding it under normal stress conditions, but this had long since passed that point.

“I think I qualify as stuck,” I admitted slowly and carefully, though my tone of voice was a higher pitch than I would have liked.

“Agreed.” Sammi nodded. “Pick. A. Class.”

“Not Bard,” I asserted firmly.

“Okay, that’s a start, but it’s not a class,” Sammi said with careful encouragement.

It felt like trying to write a resume for something when you don’t know the job title or description. I was picking my own switch (and I don’t mean the video game console – I mean that mean little piece of stick they used to hit kids – like me – who annoyed adults with very little imagination). I was certain that no matter what I picked, I’d be struck with it and trapped in some box they could then assert was of my own making.

“Jack of All Trades?” I suggested.

“Subset of Bard,” Sammi answered.

“Librarian’s Fourth Assistant, Twice Removed,” I spat out with frustration.

“The Nemesis Quest confrontation requires that you epically and personally defeat your opponent or lose the ability to ever see your loved ones from home again,” their voice was gentle, but the words were a slap of truth that I just didn’t want to face. “You could learn swordsmanship but, as a Bard, he could charm others to defend him. There is a balance between the classes that makes the final confrontation as fair as possible. As long as you are the same level, the odds should be relatively even no matter what class you choose.”

I was hearing a lot of “should” and “relatively.” The terms made me very squeamish. My mind didn’t work the way normal people’s minds worked. It took me twice as much effort to even look normal than it did for a normal-er-ish person. I needed every advantage I could get just to keep the playing field from being stacked against me. If the system didn’t let me in enough to pick through the rules for some loophole or something, I was totally doomed into making some mistake that a normal-er-ish person would never consider.

“There’s a menu,” I muttered, defeated and out of humor. “And it’s in a language I can’t read. You wouldn’t happen to have a disability resource center for the handicapped here, would you?”

“What? No.”

“Not that they’d be any help,” I mumbled to my stool, trying to get a touch of humor back through sarcasm. My husband would have understood and that didn’t help right then. “They’d probably just make me go to twice as many meetings and then slap me with a Code of Conduct violation when they couldn’t comply with the law, and I dared to ask for something not on the menu.”

“What?” Sammi asked.

“Nothing,” I sang, sending a knowing look at my stool and then promptly changing the subject. I didn’t think my husband would be jealous of a stool, but I gave a stern nod to it to set the correct tone for our relationship. “What kind of rogue classes do you have?”

“Nevermind,” I cut Sammi off. The stool had wisely reminded me of classic medieval punishments for thievery and I liked my hands, especially now that they were mostly smooth and young and rather pretty. I was fully aware that the stool was an inanimate object, but I was also determined to believe, however thinly, that it was a very sympathetic familiar. Familiar? “Magic User?”

“Could you be more specific?” Sammi prodded.

“One with a familiar?” I asked hopefully. Beau could call me a gamer-girlfriend all he wanted. I’d sat and played, and drunk a lot of champagne, and rolled dice, and drunk shots. It was good fun until he wanted to pass me around to the virgins in the group. Then I stopped drinking and it wasn’t nearly as fun.

“That narrows it down a little,” they flipped a few pages on their sheets. “What about Druid?”

I flinched visibly and their hopeful look turned into a full-blown head-thrown back eye roll. Still, I couldn’t help myself. “A Druid? Like, sleep in the woods and commune with the trees? Talk to the animals and play Dr. Doolitttle? Maybe I could send a forest’s worth of the tiny animals that I’d rather throw in a stew pot at Beau and his merry band of fiddle players and doe-eyed groupies? Would his doe-eyed groupies count as deer I could mesmerize onto my side?”

“You are a very negative person, you know that?”

“Yes, I do, though most people consider me an optimist until at least a few months of knowing me.” I hung my head dramatically. “Comedian?”

“Subset of Bard,” Sammi shrugged. “Bard still seems to be your fallback. Not all Bards are men. Some are women without swinging ‘charisma,’ you know.” He mimicked my elephant arms from before. “You could be one of those.”

“Women have swinging charisma too,” I gave him a look over my pretend-glasses. “They just wear theirs higher.” And I pushed up my boobs, which are still none of your business, and swung them at Sammi in a very non-sexual way. “And I’m not that good at sex. And my husband would kill me for sleeping with enough people to out-entourage Beau. I’m telling you that I can’t beat him at his game.”

My husband wouldn’t kill me. He would kill them. All of them. In their sleep. Slowly. Somehow. Then where would I be? Without an entourage, what was a musician? You could crack open your instrument case and play for the subway, but it wasn’t a living. I shook myself. I was one bottle of whiskey away from village idiot. I had to focus.

“If I choose something broad like Mage, could I maybe branch out and be a Jack of All Trades kind of mage that could do a little healing and a little familiar-making and a little fireballing his ass?”

“You are pretty stuck on this familiar thing,” Sammi commented.

“I miss my cat,” I admitted, crumpling again into blathering. “She was this sweet little ball of grey and white striped fur, and the first pet I ever had that liked me enough to cuddle with me every night.”

Sammi sifted through pages, scanning things.

“This place is very lonely, and I can’t imagine being able to fall asleep in how quiet it all is here,” I went on, almost to myself. “She’s got the softest little meow, but she’s afraid of just about everything. I suppose she wouldn’t make a good familiar, but I love her. I know I can’t have my family yet, but Terra is small…and soft… and just wonderful in every way.”

“Healing… and a familiar,” they muttered. “And fireball?”

You have accepted the class of Mage-ish.

“Wait!?!?!” I jumped from the bed and paced. “Is that final? I didn’t say I specifically wanted to be a Mage. What are the limitations? What have you done!? You said you couldn’t choose for me!”

“Just kidding,” Sammi snarked at me. “But at least it got you to stop talking about that cat.”

I sank back onto the bed with a sigh. “You joke, but I suffered through twenty-four years of three different cats and two dogs that all hated my guts before Terra came along. All I wanted was a pet that would cuddle with me at night while I read a book. Only Terra did it… finally. I still took care of all the rest, but Terra was the first non-black cat I got and the only one I ever felt truly got me.”

Sammi rolled their eyes, but I wasn’t done.

“This whole place is more than overwhelming,” I insisted. “I’m autistic – on the scale or whatever they’re calling it this year! I cover it well and look all normal and everything (most of the time), but my mind just doesn’t work the way people want it to. That cat, just a little tabby, stole my heart. She’s a piece of normal. A huge piece of normal. I need just one stupid little piece of normal or I’m going to start acting like the village idiot on …”

“Start?” Sammi huffed.

I pushed against their massive shoulder like it was going to budge anything. “You don’t understand.”

“I’ll give you the cat if you choose a class,” Sammi threw out to me. “Just like Mage-ish. Nice and broad and general and you can…”

My mind jumped for joy, dodged, backflipped, and then crumpled in a heap.

“You’re cruel,” I sobbed out, in a reversal that had even the quill spinning.

“What?” they pulled back. Yes, it is a little like whiplash to talk to me when I’m stressed.

“She’d be dead in a second in this world.” I realized I was hysterical, but I couldn’t stop my mind. It was my mind. This is what it did. I’m all over that spectrum and back again, seesawing like it’s Sunday at the park. Every day. Every way. “She’d be tossed in the stew pot. Eaten by the not-pigs out back, stomped on by a drunk, or … or…or… she’d have what? Two health points? I wasn’t thinking. I take it back. Don’t kill my little Terra. Pleeeease.”

“Wait!” Sammi took my shoulders and shook just a little, then a little more… or well, what was a little to a person like them? It was that. “It’ll be fine. She might start off a little low, but you can make her your familiar. She’ll follow you around and people here know what a familiar is like. They wouldn’t … well, Beau might… but look, you’d have a heal spell that would affect just her, and her health points would go up with yours, and she’d get abilities?”

“Could you turn her black?” I asked, a sniffle and a gulp later.

“You could turn her black,” Sammi told me.

“I’ll be that!” I jumped at it before my mind took another detour.

“Just to be clear.” Sammi held my shoulders tight and looked seriously into my eyes. “You want to be a…?”

“Mage-ish?” I asked in a squeak.

They nodded and gave me a pointed look.

“I want to be a Mage-ish,” I stated firmly.

You have chosen the class Mage-ish. (for real this time)