Skills, of the RPG variety, had always been – to Sarah’s way of thinking – the most magical part of any story that had them. Never mind Fireballs and Ice Spikes, those were obviously an extraordinary fantasy to begin with.

The true magic was taking something utterly mundane, like mining or carpentry, baking or dancing, and turning it into something extraordinary and fantastical. To be gifted, upon receipt of a Skill, with the knowledge – and ability to employ said knowledge – of, say, the footwork, balance, and spacial awareness of a trained and experienced swordsman; to have poured into one’s mind and muscles, at the proverbial snap of one’s fingers, the sort of expertise that otherwise could only result from thousands of hours of dedicated practice, repetition, and study…well, that was magical indeed.

Perhaps, Sarah considered, it was a matter of perspective and her particular way of looking at the world that gave her this somewhat unusual appreciation for Skills rather than more traditional “magic”. Or maybe it wasn’t unusual; she had no way of knowing, now that she couldn’t hop onto social media and pose such a discussion topic to her fellow LitRPG nerds. She was basing her conclusion on the trend she’d observed within her preferred genres of fiction, in that every protagonist from a normal (aka non-magical) world who found him or herself in a System-based magical world seemed – without exception – to desire “magic” and to treat Skills as somehow less exciting and important than juggling balls of fire.

Yes, Sarah had been very excited about the possibility of real magic when she first saw the Skills menu during the pre-Tutorial grey-space; that much she would not deny, not even to herself, but it had been more about the idea of magic actually being a thing than a desire to make the elements ignore the laws of physics.

As far as Sarah was concerned, the traditional protagonist’s approach to magic and Skills was backwards; yes, magic was cool, but Skills were magic. Again, Sarah suspected it was a matter of perspective and life experience.

For example, in Sarah’s reality, both past and present, “magic” – in the classic fantasy sense – was nothing more than a figment of imagination; she could imagine what it might be like to spin a ball of fire from the air and launch it at an enemy with nothing more than force of will, but she couldn’t really conceptualize how that act might change depending on whether one gained the ability to perform it through study and practice, or through gaining a Skill.

It was all one and the same, for, in Sarah’s reality, classical fantasy magic was simply impossible, no ifs, ands, or buts; therefore, the idea of gaining magic lacked a certain weight of psychological import, though it was certainly a nice little dream, especially that one time when she’d flopped onto the floor amidst a sea of boxes and blanket-wrapped furniture and pondered how a touch of self-sorting dimensional storage and teleportation magic could revolutionize the moving industry.

That particular pity-fest had led her to the contemplation that she would just as happily settle for a little Gene-Roddenberry-inspired technology, so long as it meant she didn’t have to trudge load after load of heavy boxes and furniture up and down multiple flights of stairs the next time she changed apartments.

She’d actually read somewhere that scientists had succeeded in “beaming” something from one place to another, the only catch being they couldn’t yet do it with more than one atom…or was it one electron?...something very small, anyway. Apparently it was one thing to transport matter via a beam of energy, but it was another thing entirely to make that beam of energy smart enough to disassemble something on one end and correctly reassemble it on the other end. However it actually worked, it had been clear that humanity was a long way from that halcyon future envisioned by the eminent Mr. Roddenberry.

Now, Sarah supposed, humanity was even further away from reaching that future of starships and replicators. Or maybe they were closer? It all depended on how the Builders felt about sharing and/or repressing technological advancements, she suspected.

Anyway, what had she been thinking about? Oh, right, magic and Skills. So, on the one hand, and with the grudgingly admitted exception of a few of the more physical-labour-reduction-type schools of hypothetical abilities, classical fantasy magic seemed to Sarah to be little more than a child’s dream.

On the other hand, the idea of gaining Skills to improve one’s existing, mundane, real-word skills, well, that was a different dream entirely. Sarah might be able to imagine casting a Fireball spell but she had no notion of how challenging such a thing might actually be or what kind of effect such a thing would truly have.

She did, however, know exactly how hard it was to do things like learn a new language, become physically fit, or gain proficiency at any sort of occupation or craft; therefore, she could fully understand and appreciate how much of an incredible, impossible cheat it was to have a Skill that made her better at something with only a fraction of the effort and at a rate otherwise not humanly possible. It was, in a word, magical.

Her [Household Cooking] Skill – level 15 as of this afternoon – was a perfect example. Before the Tutorial, Sarah’s cooking skills had been acceptable, inasmuch as she could keep herself fed without chopping off a hand or setting the building on fire. Her mom had tried hard, but far too few of the older woman’s lessons had taken up permanent residence in Sarah’s mind. She simply enjoyed the consumption of delicious food much, much more than the preparation of meals, so Sarah was a decent enough cook to not starve or get scurvy, but she considered “eating out” to be one of her primary luxuries.

Now, as she chopped the local equivalent of onions for the evening stew (lime-green, instead of yellow, white, or purple, but otherwise identical to Earth onions in every observable way), she could feel the Skill guiding her knife hand, making her cuts a little bit smoother, a little bit swifter, and a lot safer. With a few more levels under her belt, she’d be good enough to go on one of those cooking shows (had such a thing still existed of course) with that famously angry British chef and not get yelled at for her knife skills. That degree of improvement in only…uh…wait, wait, she’d done this math, with the help of [Household Cooking]’s timekeeping aspect, which had prompted her most recent level-up and led to the acquisition of the appropriately named general Skill, [Timekeeping], which she’d immediately pushed to Level 2 with her fierce bout of mental number crunching.

So, her initial guess about the length of days on the planet represented by the Tutorial – which she’d decided to simply call ‘Sanctuary’ – was that each day-night cycle was roughly four to six hours longer than the Earth equivalent. That guess had been remarkably accurate. Each Sanctuary day was thirty hours long, plus or minus a few minutes that would have sent a proper scientist or mathematician spinning but made no difference to Sarah’s rough calculations.

She’d arrived in the forest sometime in the late morning or early afternoon on the first day of the week. It was now late afternoon on the ninth day of the week (Sanctuary weeks being ten days long). If she counted both today and the day of her arrival as half days, that meant she had been in the Tutorial – and learning and practicing basic cooking – for roughly eight local days. Call it seven local days, since she didn’t start helping with chores until part way through day two. Seven Sanctuary days, at thirty hours per day, was two-hundred and ten hours, which was the equivalent of eight and three-quarter days on Earth.

In just under nine Earth days she had improved her cooking skill from “good enough to not burn water” to “almost good enough to not get yelled at by a celebrity chef”. True, Cantorians had six meals a day instead of three, so she’d had a lot more opportunities to practice, but even so, Sarah had spent significant portions of those days doing things other than cooking, and none of her instructors (two small children and an overworked farmer) had been seasoned chefs.

Under those conditions, to say the rate of her improvement was impressive would have been a gross understatement. Her meteoric, nay, her magical rate of progression would probably be enough to set Mr. Angry British Chef – or any other kitchen professional – frothing at the mouth at the unfairness of it all. And that was only one of her Skills.

It had been about a day and a half, no, more like a day and a quarter, since the System had finally caught up with Sarah’s efforts and awarded her a flood of Skills and levels. In that time she had revelled in finally experiencing the sort of instant gratification and affirmation that came from levelling up System-based Skills…as opposed to the mundane, old-fashioned, non-magical sort of affirmation that came from constantly reminding herself that “practice makes perfect”, and suffering through weeks, months, or even years of effort before the truth of the old saw became evident.

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Magical Systems were da bomb! Did people even say that anymore? Meh. And it really wasn’t a “magical” System, per se – she’d had that mental discussion with herself a few times already – but it also wasn’t technology such as she’d known it on Earth.

Builder tech was advanced so far beyond Earth tech that it really was, essentially, “indistinguishable from magic,” which made it…what? Magic-level tech? There was already a word for that in the fantasy genre wasn’t there? Sure, “magitech” traditionally referred to technology that was fused with magic, or at least powered by it, but that didn’t mean Sarah couldn’t adapt the term.

Besides, it seemed like “Builder Work” was the commonly used phrase among the Cantorians (and presumably the other peoples of Sanctuary as well) so she’d probably use either that term or “Builder Tech” when talking to anyone else. That meant her appropriation of the word “magitech” would be limited to use within her internal monologue. Just like with anachronistic slang, what happened in the internal monologue, stayed in the internal monologue…er…mostly.

Besides, even if she slipped, only other humans and the Builders might call her on it; the latter certainly had far more appropriate things to do, and of the former, only some would even be aware of the term’s venerable history, not all of humanity having been connoisseurs of the fantasy genre prior to world’s end.

Sarah wasn’t sure where that particular train of thought had been taking her, since she’d allowed her mind and thoughts to drift while [Household Cooking] guided her hands, so it was without a shred of regret that she dropped the mental topic as a now-familiar warm tingle bloomed briefly in her mind.

The sensation seemed to be an indication from the Skill that her task, or the current stage of it, was satisfactorily completed. In this case, the [Beefalo] meat had been carefully seared in a frying pan, and now that it and the last of the chopped veggies had been added to a large pot of broth, there was nothing more to do for the time being but maintain the heat of the cook fire and let the whole savoury mix simmer for an hour or two.

Trusting the guidance of her Skill, Sarah left the nascent stew to its cooking and moved about the small kitchen, cleaning up the remnants of her prep work, and washing the knives and other utensils she’d dirtied. Then, satisfied that all was once again put right in her little domain, Sarah dried her hands on her apron and brushed a loose lock of hair back from her slightly sweaty forehead.

“Alright, Little One, what shall we make for dessert, eh?”

She looked around the empty farmhouse and her face fell as she remembered that her trusty little helper had abandoned her.

From the beginning of her stay with the family, every meal Sarah had cooked had been made with the assistance of the cute little Cantorian girl. Sometimes that “assistance” had taken the form of nothing more than cheerful chatter but neither member of the small kitchen team had minded.

Watching the small girl one day, standing on a stool beside the table, industriously stirring a bowl of ingredients with a large wooden spoon, her body fairly encased in an adult-sized apron that had been folded, tucked, and wrapped many times to fit her tiny frame, Sarah had been reminded of time spent in the kitchen with her mother, before she realized her general disinterest in cooking, back when Sarah had been the tiny child swimming in her mother’s apron and needing a stool to reach the counter.

It had seemed that a bond was forming between the two, the human woman and the Cantorian child, but something had recently changed. She didn’t know what had happened to snap the early hints of that bond, but Sarah could trace the change to a very specific time: the System glitch.

The System had caught up to her, or gotten her caught up, late yesterday morning, between the second and third meals of the day, which she had taken to calling brunch and lunch. Little One had helped her make breakfast and brunch, but not lunch, not afternoon tea, not dinner, and not supper. Nor had she helped with any of today’s meals. Not only that, the child’s whole attitude toward Sarah had shifted, becoming more distant and formal.

If the boy and the farmer had also changed their behaviours toward her, Sarah might have assumed she committed some egregious social faux pas. Instead, the other two Cantorians behaved as if nothing had changed, which made Sarah wonder if the System had reprogrammed the whole family after the glitch, but everything about the three aliens had, until now, been so incredibly lifelike that Sarah couldn’t quite make herself believe that the Builder’s System would do something so crude as reprogram active, ongoing relationships. The Skills and Stats parts of the System might still need some kinks ironed out, but the rest of the Builders’ VR simulation was beautifully, breathtakingly, complex, so much so that there was nothing Sarah could point to that broke immersion, that was clearly artificial. No, whatever had happened, it wasn’t some ham-handed tinkering by an inept programmer.

If Little One had been an adult human, Sarah would have already approached her directly and asked what had changed. Sarah knew there were some humans – whole cultures of humans, in fact – who were so conflict-averse as to be horrified at such a direct approach. Or maybe they weren’t conflict-averse so much as they had an entirely different concept of what was, and was not, rude? Regardless, Sarah had been raised in a culture that didn’t mind occasionally getting into each other’s faces to solve issues.

True, there were cases when the differences were irreconcilable, and continuing to hash those out beyond what was necessary for simple recognition of the issues – and confirmation of their inability to be reconciled – was rarely beneficial for anyone involved; but issues of that severity were actually less common than one might think, from the preponderance of feuds and social chaos in literature.

It was the other type of interpersonal conflict – the simple misunderstanding – that Sarah believed could, and should, be dealt with swiftly and directly. That preference for conflict resolution, instead of conflict avoidance, led Sarah to develop a not-insignificant level of frustration with a certain type of fictional narrative that seemed to thrive on conflict aversion.

She thought it utterly ridiculous when entire story arcs, filled with chaos, confusion, and conundrums, could be rendered moot if the characters involved would have simply sat down and had a conversation instead of repeatedly ignoring the obvious. Sarah had always felt that such an approach held the flavour of lazy storytelling, but enough stories involved such elements that they obviously appealed to someone, somewhere. She concluded that her inability to appreciate such a narrative must be a matter of culture, or perhaps culture combined with personality.

Either way, Sarah had zero interest in participating in a live re-enactment of that particular narrative trope, so – as previously mentioned – if Little One had been an adult human, the issue would have already been broached, if not outright solved. The problem was, the farmer’s daughter was neither a human, nor an adult; she was a child, and a young one at that.

Young children of the human variety – and Sarah suspected the Cantorian variety were not much different in this regard – did not typically have enough maturity or, uh, what was that word...oh yes, emotional intelligence to fully understand how they felt, much less why they felt that way. That meant that an upset child and an upset adult each had to be approached differently.

If that had been the only issue, Sarah might still have already sat the girl down and had a conversation. The reason she hadn’t yet done so was down to the second factor: Little One wasn’t human, and Sarah still had only a surface understanding of Cantorian culture. For all she knew, coming right out and asking the girl what was wrong might make things worse.

Besides, ever since lunch the day before, every time Sarah’s conversations with the children started to veer towards anything not strictly related to the day-to-day tasks of the household and farm, Little One would quickly come up with an excuse to be elsewhere.

After the first few times it happened, Sarah had grown concerned and asked Young One and Farmer if anything was wrong. Both male Cantorians had assured her the girl was fine, but neither of them would elaborate.

It was frustrating, but Sarah hadn’t pushed because she was wary of creating a serious cultural clash. Even if the people she was interacting with here in the Tutorial weren’t “real” people, she was starting to suspect that her actions and choices in the virtual world would be carried over, in one fashion or another, to the real world. The Builders hadn’t explicitly said as much, but the way the System dealt with having Sarah come up with a human-compatible name for the Cantorians certainly suggested the Tutorial wasn’t entirely a closed system.

She remembered well the pre-Tutorial System message that said the residents of the Tutorial would “respond to stimuli and situations based on the customs and norms of the people they represent[ed]”; she didn’t want to do something that would make real-world Cantorians upset with her. And even if actions within the Tutorial didn’t spill over into the real world, she didn’t want to jeopardize her Meat and Mead bond and the associated benefits.

She didn’t think having a simple conversation with the family members about interpersonal relationships could constitute “committing some great crime or betrayal”, no matter the cultural considerations might be, but it was a worry.

An unnecessary worry, Sarah finally decided as she settled on a recipe for dessert. She got to work, putting together a pudding using some leftover – and now slightly stale – bread from earlier in the week.

If Cantorian society were as prickly as all that, it would have been obvious by now, she concluded, chastising herself for getting so tied up in mental knots. It was time she had that conversation, and she knew exactly when to do it.

Tomorrow was market day, the farmer had informed her earlier, and the entire household would gather up the produce and make the trip to town, which meant Little One would have nowhere to go to run away from Sarah, and with both Young One and their father present, she could hopefully avoid any additional misunderstandings that might make things worse.

As plans went, it wasn’t very complex, but it would do.