“So anyway,” Gabri was saying, chewing a piece of jerky that was longer than his entire body, “You’re pretty lucky to have Scholar as your first class. The Core must have liked you to give you such a rare class.”

“Really?” Eli asked, squirting a bit of mustard onto his sandwich. “I thought it was just because I was a student.”

“Nope? Maybe? I don’t know?” Gabri answered. “Who knows, maybe I’m wrong and the system will be spitting out thousands of Scholar classes in the coming days as it spreads through this fledgling world. But it’s one of the one percent classes, that’s for certain. At least, for a first class. It’s more common for a mage to unlock scholar accidentally while trying for a more elusive secondary class like Sage. But lucky you, you get all the benefits of being a scholar without having to focus on offensive magic just for the sake of leveling.”

“Okay, so that actually sounds like a downside,” Eli said, finishing his sandwich. With his mouth full of his first bite, he asked “Are you saying that I won’t have much offense?”

“If a party’s scholar is doing damage directly then it’s already raining piss,” Gabri explained, “But the good news is that a scholar is the party’s meteorologist, so it’s their job to predict piss storms and give everyone the umbrellas they need in order to keep the scholar on the back lines where they’re safe.”

“Okay. So not a front line fighter. That’s good to know,” Eli said, chewing. “I’m still enchanting my baseball bat.”

“Oh, yeah, do that,” Gabri agreed. “Make your weapon as strong as you possibly can. You’ll want to make all of your gear as fancy and as strong as you can. That way when you transfer your enchantments to your party, they’ll be as empowered as you can make them.”

Eli paused his eating. “Wait, what?”

“You didn’t know? That’s like, the class’s entire job,” Gabri said, chewing the jerky greedily. “You’re a...what’s the word you like to use? Buff? You’re a buff warehouse. Or that’s one of the things you are at least. You’ll see once you actually get into the dungeon. You should already have Transference, or you’ll unlock it through your enchantment before you start. It’s always a low leveled skill, although I don’t know if it’s level one or not. You might have to help kill a few things, but I don’t think so.”

Eli continued chewing. “Okay,” he said, pausing to take another bite. “So I’m a back-lines support character. That’s good to know.”

“What is up with the terms you use?” the fairy asked impatiently.

“I don’t have time to explain video game culture to you, Gabri,” he said. He sighed and pulled up a website on his phone. “Here, read that,” he said after finding one forum that defined common terms for noobs.

He went off to watch his mother, who was practicing Tai Chi in the back yard. Except that when she struck, he could sense a bit of literal energy coming from her fists. He swallowed the mouthful of sandwich, grateful that she wasn’t suggesting that they try her new strength in a sparring match.

“So do you believe me yet?” he asked.

She stopped her exercise and turned to him, her face an expression of stubborn consternation. “I’m not certain what I believe,” she admitted. “But I hope you don’t think that you’re going to be some sort of revolutionary in this new world.”

“No. Just one party leader out of millions I think,” Eli answered.

“What makes you think you’re cut out to be this sort of a leader at all?” his mother asked.

“I don’t know,” Eli said. He calmly reflected for a moment, his silence making it clear that he was giving the question further thought rather than simply ignoring it. “When the system started talking to you, what did you think, Mom?”

“That I was going crazy,” she answered honestly. “And I’m still not convinced that those thoughts were wrong.”

“Yeah, well, my first thought was ‘okay, so what do I do if I’m not hallucinating?’ I knew that if it was fake then the evidence would present itself in short order, so I just rode it out. But then I went home and found out that I had abs, and I always miscount when they make me do sit ups in gym, so there’s only one way that could have happened,” Eli admitted.

His mother grinned, flexing her own biceps. “Yeah. The physicality of the changes makes it harder to deny.”

“Just curious, but what is your strength rating?” Eli asked his mother.

“Ten,” she said.

“Huh. So it’s a baseline for the individual rather than a unified measurement,” he said, frowning.

“What?”

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

“Nothing, just theorycrafting,” he said. “So, the good news as far as you’re concerned is that my class isn’t like yours. I’m a back line supporter. I’m not sure how exactly my class works yet, but it seems that I support the front lines with buffs and maybe healing? I’ve got to study my grimoire a bit more and talk to Gabri and figure out how things work through trial and error.”

“So you stand in back while meatheads like me do the hard work?” she asked.

“It sounds like there’s more to it than that, but basically, yeah,” he admitted.

“Well that’s reassuring for my sanity at least. I’m not sure I’d be so calm if you were a warrior like me,” she confessed. “Your … um, faerie thing. He helps you fight?”

“Right now he’s just helping me figure out what to do, and he’s been extremely helpful despite the amount of snark I have to put up with,” Eli admitted.

“I heard that!” Gabri shouted from in the kitchen.

“Take it as a compliment!” Eli shouted back.

“I did!”

“So anyway,” Eli continued, “I think my class is pretty complicated really. I’m going to be counting on you, and my friends, and everyone else, while I figure things out. That doesn’t mean that I’m not going to be helping, but when people think of mages they think of people who throw fireballs and lightning. That doesn’t sound like a thing that a scholar does.”

“Okay,” Matilda Mathews said. Then she hugged her son. “I don’t care. Whatever is happening, and I’m not convinced that your version of events is correct yet, I’ll support you, Elias.”

“Mom,” the teen complained, but he uncomfortably returned the hug.

Then they went back to their various forms of preparation. Eli continued working on enchanting his gear from the mall with nothing but a marker, rubber cement, and various other items left over in the room where he had done arts and crafts when he was younger. Not so long ago, really.

He felt it when his first successful enchantment clicked into place and sucked out a bit of his mana. He frowned, because that meant that the last six enchantments were failures. He went back and began examining them closely, looking for where the error in the logic chain that made the enchantment work lay.

He fell asleep after successfully completing two enchantments. One on the bat, and one on the boots.

~~~~~~~~

He woke up to his phone. He frowned, not recognizing the ring tone, before he remembered that the phone was new and a lot of his settings hadn’t been saved.

He also frowned when he saw that it was from an unknown number. He answered it anyway. “Who is this?”

“Hello Runekeeper,” the Webmaster said. “I thought we should keep in contact. Don’t worry about us being traced, if you were. After last night’s news, I doubt that the government thinks it can contain this thing anymore. I saw my cousin a few hours ago.”

“What news is that?” Eli asked, pulling the blankets aside and getting out of bed.

“Even in China and the other nations which locked down hard after the arrival of the obelisks—”

“They’re Core Stones, Webmaster. Dungeon Core Stones,” Eli said.

“...the governments who locked down hardest after the arrival of the core stones apparently didn’t go far enough. They’re estimating that about thirty percent of the population is affected as of today, and they expect that number to reach one hundred percent in a few days. Now they’re playing this off as a cold, predicting a one hundred percent survival rate and urging people to stay at home and be ready for a period of mandatory rest, as once it hits them they’ll be unconscious for a few hours.”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah. I figured you might not know yet, since it’s morning where you are.”

“You know where I live?”

“I’m a webmaster. You visit my websites without any sort of proxy or VPN. I haven’t looked into your identity, but if I wanted to, I could,” the man said flatly. “In fact, let’s talk about that. I’m going to send you some things about securing your digital footprint, if you intend on sharing more data with the world like you shared with me yesterday.”

“Yeah, okay, whatever,” Eli said. “I never had any reason to hide online before. I’m still not certain that what I have to say will be that upsetting to anyone who can do anything about it.”

“Even so, it’s better to be safe,” the webmaster said. “So. I’m in the process of setting up a website for people like you. Who have the system. It’s basically facebook with a looking for group function built into it. People will be able to list their classes and explain their abilities, and hook up with people who are looking to delve dungeons. And of course share information on dungeoneering and other such things.”

“Okay,” Eli said. “Is that all?”

“I’ll send you the link. I don’t have the system yet, so I’m mostly guessing,” the webmaster said.

“Okay,” Eli said. “I’ll look at it after I brush my teeth and get out of the shower.”

“Ah, I woke you. Well, this phone number is safe to call or text or whatever. I’ll keep an eye out for your messages.”

“Okay,” Eli said, a real conversationalist this early in the morning. “Oh, and Webmaster? You should know, you’re going to have the system, if you saw your cousin. It’s probably going to hit you the next time you go to sleep.”

“I figured as much,” the webmaster said. “Go do your morning routine, Runekeeper. Don’t let me keep you.”