CHAPTER 112 ROOMMATE

The rest of my week passed by uneventfully. I had gained plenty of levels in skills from that little spar I’d had and plenty from training my other skills during the week.

‘Ping’ [Identify] Has leveled 33 > 40

There were a lot of people to identify around, and that only increased as we got closer to the start of the training period where a bunch of newer people would apparently come in. It was really starting to make me think of a school, but I guess a closer term would be boot camp.

‘Ping’ [Rest] Has leveled 10 > 25

‘Ping’ [Mana Sense] Has leveled 42 > 33

‘Ping’ [Electric Sense] Has leveled 47 > 53

‘Ping’ [Sword Expert] Has leveled 1 > 10

‘Ping’ [Martial Technique] Has leveled 23 > 41

‘Ping’ [Dagger Apprentice] Has leveled 26 > 43

‘Ping’ [Wood Manipulation] Has leveled 43 > 73

‘Ping’ [Electric Manipulation] Has leveled 33 > 23

‘Ping’ [Accelerated Thoughts] Has leveled 50 > 93

‘Ping’ [Parallel Minds] Has leveled 25 > 43

‘Ping’ [Fruit Production] Has leveled 22 > 42

‘Ping’ [Plant Production] Has leveled 20 > 39

‘Ping’ [Vegetable Production] Has leveled 5 > 32

‘Ping’ [Fatigue Resistance] Has leveled 49 > 223

I also spent more time reading through the dreaded textbooks I’d been given. I wanted a head start just so that I knew what I was getting into. For example, even if people didn’t have a firm grasp on all of history, the people living here surely picked up on some of it so they had an idea of what had happened.

That was an advantage I didn’t have, so any little bit of knowledge was a step towards achieving adequacy in the topic.

I also managed to get a hold of some of the papers that we’d be using. It wasn’t anything like what we had back on Earth, it was more akin to something like parchment. Rather thick, but it had a pleasant texture to it. I rather liked it. I spent the next six hours trying to replicate it with my wood manipulation skills.

It took a lot of effort but I eventually managed to do so, which would be extremely useful. I could even use my manipulation skill to engrave words on the parchment if I wanted to, but I’d also been given a... What were they called again? A thinnel? I didn’t know if I liked them. If I could, I wanted to learn enchanting and just make something similar to a pencil or a pen.

Oh well, I’ll see about that in the future.

I practiced my writing ‘cause it was nice to actually see that I could write really neatly. Like a printer. Before, my handwriting used to be atrocious. Mainly because I didn’t care about how it looked. High dexterity changed that, it was probably the main reason my handwriting looked as nice as it did.

‘Ping’ [Calligraphy] Has leveled 1 > 7

Also, my [Calligraphy] skill helped with it.

I also did some basic work filling out various math equations that I remembered just to get some practice in there as well.

‘Ping’ [Mathematic Calculation] Has leveled 1 > 6

It was very therapeutic to see numbers going up like this. I was never a fan of math growing up as a kid, even if I was fairly decent at it. Lots of people kept trying to tell me that I would use a lot of math later on in life and just wouldn’t know it…

They weren’t right on that front. They weren’t wrong either, though. But I was not using the upper ends of calculus or physics at any point in the 8 years since I had graduated from high school.

Maybe I used some geometry and a little bit of algebra for various problem-solving in games or whatnot. However, I was not solving high-end quadratic equations. The only reason I was interested in trying to solve them now was because I actually gained something tangible out of it.

In the same way, I gained something tangible by practicing my writing. As long as I got something out of what I was doing, I’d be completely happy to do it. I think that’s something a lot of people didn’t understand about what I was trying to say back then.

It wasn’t that I didn’t see the value in the schoolwork they were trying to get me to do, the problem was that I didn’t receive something at the moment for whenever I completed it, it felt pointless and a lot of it ended up being pointless later on in my life.

I haven’t used roughly 85% of what I learned in school. I used reading, writing, and counting. And that was pretty much it. I went into music education in college. Which was nothing even remotely similar to what they teach you as part of a general education.

I let out a sigh of mild annoyance. There wasn’t much I could do about that now, so I might as well not worry about it at this point.

Regardless, the week passed without further incident. People were more than happy to gather and collect the different fruits and veggies I made. I even got some requests for specific ones that I accommodated. Some people tried to pay me, but I wasn’t really interested in accepting money for it.

I probably could’ve made a lot of money easily, but… I don’t know. I’d always been told I was a generous person, but I didn’t fully agree with that belief.

I believed that being a respectable person was an obligation, a duty everyone should be expected to uphold. Treating your fellow person with respect and dignity should be given freely until they give you a reason not to give it. The way this manifests to me is that if someone is struggling and I have the capacity to help, I should help because I have the ability to do so.

That’s just the way I view things. Obviously, there’s a limit to this though. If you have a friend constantly asking you for money to help pay bills and they just keep trying to mooch off of you, you should cut them off. Don’t subsidize their entire life for them.

People need to learn how to be accountable, and if that means you have to stop helping them so they can learn how to get on their own two feet then that’s what you need to do. Sometimes what people need in terms of help is not assistance, but rather a stern talking to. But that’s a fine line to walk, and there’s a difference between someone who is just trying to take advantage of you and someone who is just genuinely down on their luck and struggling with their lot in life.

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All in all, people are strange.

Case and point, my new roommate.

“HiI’mAdriannicetomeetyouwhat’syourname?”

I blinked and tilted my head slightly as if that would make me hear what he said better.

“Try that again, but slower,” I said in lieu of a response.

He rubbed the back of his head and had a sheepish grin on his face.

“Uh, sorry about that. My name’s Adrian.”

I nodded, “Better. I’m Alex.”

Adrian had short red hair and striking blue eyes that constantly snapped everywhere as if he was experiencing a sugar high. I wasn’t sure that he wasn’t currently. His nose was a little crooked like it had been broken and set back into place a time or two before.

“Have you claimed a side already?” He asked as he stepped into the room letting the door close behind him.

I nodded,” I’ve been here for a while, The far side is yours.”

“Excellent!” He said with a cheery grin and marched his way over there and dropped his stuff on the bed unceremoniously.

“So why have you been here for a while? I thought they didn’t allow people in early.”

“I wouldn’t say they let me in early, I’ve been here about a week now. I was involved in some circumstances and ended up being scouted. I took the offer and they put me here while I waited for everyone else to show up.”

[Level 223]

Not a bad level, his third class is probably still in the second tier if I had to make a guess though.

“Huh, they came to you with an offer instead? That’s pretty rare. Or I’m assuming it is, I guess I wouldn’t really know actually.”

I chuckled lightly, “Yeah, I wouldn’t know either. If anyone else has been, I haven’t heard about it in the short time that I’ve been here.”

He unpacked clothes and put them away into the dresser. After that, he unpacked a bunch of bits and baubles. Most of which looked like they held sentimental value rather than monetary.

I personally wouldn’t have felt comfortable bringing out things of monetary value in front of someone I had just met myself after all. I probably wouldn’t have brought anything valuable with me in the first place if I could help it. That was just asking for someone to steal your stuff.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to worry about that if only because I didn’t have anything worth stealing other than my clothes, and I wore those. Kind of hard to steal the clothes off someone’s back after all.

After a minute he got everything situated the way he wanted to and turned back to look at me.

“So, you’re an elf then? Can’t say I’ve ever seen one before.”

“Get in line.”

“Fair enough, so whaddya know about this place? They didn’t exactly give any of us a tour before they told us where our rooms were. Hell, they didn’t even tell us which building our rooms were in. I guess there’s something to be said about making sure your recruits are resourceful and all that.”

I shrugged, “Not a whole besides the obvious. Several different areas for training for several different types of training. Big sparring fields out back with smaller ones inside the building next door. Surprisingly these rooms are pretty sound-proof so I haven’t heard anything through the walls despite the fact that I know people are using those fields all through the night.”

He raised a hand and stroked his chin, he didn’t have a beard to fully complete the look and didn’t look like he could grow one. Not that I had much room to talk, I hadn’t grown so much as a single whisker on my chin after I had been turned into an elf.

Not like I had grown all that much before when I was still a human. For whatever reason I just didn’t grow a lot of facial hair.

“That’s good to know, well you wanna go ahead and give me the run-down? Seems like you know your way around the place.”

I took a minute to think, I hadn’t really had all that much planned for today other than going and training through all my skills again.

Ever since I’d gotten asked to join Ran and the rest of them, no one had struck me up with an offer, so I’d mostly been off by myself.

“Why not,” I replied, pushing myself off the wall from where I’d been leaning, “come on, we’ll start with the cafeteria since it’s in the same building.”

From there I took him around the various buildings, the cafeteria occupied a section of the first floor of the dorm building. The dorm itself was split up into two major sections, split between the two genders.

Men on one side, and women on the other. A tried and true system that most cultures seemed to replicate.

On the first floor, it was more of the same except it only occupied a portion of the building that it did on the second floor. This was because it shared the room with the cafeteria which took up a large portion of the building. Half the reason it was so large was because it needed to fit a large number of people in it at any time.

There were… at least several thousand people in the area and room for a lot more. I was probably lowballing that number, but I was never good at guesstimating the number of people in a given area like this.

Maybe if they were all outside on the grass I could get an accurate grasp of how many people there were, but most of them were inside, out of sight of nature. Thus I wasn’t able to see them either.

It did how it do.

From there I led him to the training rooms/classrooms. I showed him around the inside of the building detailing where the training rooms cut off and where the classrooms started. I wasn’t entirely sure if there was something special you needed to do to actually be allowed to use one of the training rooms.

I hadn’t ever bothered to find out, I just preferred to go outside and sit in the grass. It worked better for me considering my nature abilities.

I also explained the room numbering system to him, he’d never heard of it before so I wasn’t sure if it was a commonly used system here or not, or something the people who built these buildings had come up with as a way to make it easier to navigate the rooms themselves.

Either way, he caught on pretty quickly.

It wasn’t long before we had gone through most of the buildings and ended up on the other side of the compound at what I was calling the admin building. I wasn’t sure if it had a more formal name, but that’s essentially what it was.

It was where all the bigwigs sat and did whatever it was they did.

“And that’s pretty much it, not much else to see as far as I’m aware.”

“Huh, well that’s got me pretty worn out. I’m planning on heading back to the cafeteria and getting something to eat. Wanna join me?”

I shook my head, “I don’t eat at the cafeteria, and would rather not spend the money when I can just hold onto it instead.”

Adrian frowned, “Then where do you eat?”

Instead of answering him verbally I just crouched down by the ground and let an apple sprout up and plucked it up before tossing it to him.

“I just make my own food instead.”

He looked at the apple in awe for a moment, like most people did when they saw me do this trick for the first time.

Surely nature mages weren’t that rare? There had to be plenty of people that did exactly what I just did except on a much larger scale. If they didn’t, they were missing out on an easily profitable market.

Adrian bit into the apple, tasting it. His eyes widened in surprise as he took another couple of quick bites.

“‘Is ish dewicioush!” He said happily around a mouthful.

I just gave him an amused look while raising an eyebrow, “Well, like I tell everyone else. I’m usually out grinding my skills from shortly after noon till dark. Some of that involves creating fruits, veggies, and various plants that can be used as seasoning. I can’t eat all of it so I give the excess away for free… Of which there is a lot. So you’re always free to come down and take some.

“Although I’m not exactly sure if I’ll be out there as much in the next few days given that classes are getting ready to start.”

Adrian took a moment to swallow what he was eating before speaking this time, thankfully.

“Well, if you are, I just might have to come down and take a gander. This is some seriously good stuff, I can see why you don’t care to go eat at the cafeteria if you can just magic up whatever you want to eat. What manner of food even is this? I’ve never seen one before.”

“It’s an apple, a type of fruit fairly common where I come from,” telling the truth without telling the truth. My favorite kind of truth.

“There are tons of different types, this is just the most common variation that people tend to think of when they think of apples, but there are green ones which are almost the polar opposites of these red ones. The red ones are fairly sweet, and the green ones are pretty tart. I was never a fan of sour flavors, but lots of other people like them.”

“Huh,” Adrian took a moment to marvel at the apple before taking another bite out of it and chewing it thoughtfully, “Well, it’s pretty tasty. If you’re planning on making other types I’ll have to try them. And whatever else you make, I’m sure it’ll be just as good.”

I just smiled, “You’ll probably have a better chance of trying them than most?”

He looked at me with surprise evident on his face, “Why is that?”

“You’re my roommate.”

Realization dawned across his face at my words.

“Ooooohhhhh yeah!” He smiled brightly, “I kind of forgot about that after getting caught up in the tour and all that.”

I just chuckled while shaking my head.

“Glad I could remind you, let’s get you back to the cafeteria so you can have a real meal though.”