Liam woke up the day after his first attempts at making a functional magic circle to create a bag of holding with satisfaction coursing through his veins (that is, the moment he took off his pendant). Oh, he was going to show them! He would create the best circle they’d ever seen! Muhahahahahaha!!!!
Ok, he should probably stop. Still, the point stood: he’d Leveled last night and gained some quite interesting Skills, chief among which was [Substance: Aspects of Paint]. If it did what he imagined it would do he’d be able to turn that hateful crystal jelly into something manageable!
With a pep in his step he opened the door to his room and stumbled face first into Amarie, who was standing there with her fist raised in the air to knock on his door. They stumbled a bit but luckily the woman managed to regain her balance by putting a foot up against the wall.
A moment later Sigmund peeked into the corridor having heard the mild swearing and, with a raised eyebrow and playful smile, asked: “Already at it this early in the morning? At least do your thing in the room.”
They both glared at him with so much heat that they probably gave him a sunburn (glareburn? Yeah, that sounded better), which only made him chuckle some more before he disappeared back into the kitchen, where the sound of sizzling and his whistling mixed together with the wonderful smell of spices and cooked meats. He was in a really good mood apparently.
Still, holding hands, the two lovers sat down at the table and ate, chatting easily about inconsequential things.
That is, until Amarie looked at Liam and, after a moment where she looked rather thoughtful, she asked him: “Yesterday while I was out I met Sir Neville. Do you remember him?”
Liam nodded as he immediately associated the name with the youthful [Knight], youngest of the unit, and smiled: “Yes, I remember him. What did you talk about?”
“Well, apparently my unit organized a dinner and the two of us are invited. Apparently that is also not up to discussion, we will come or they’ll send Giulia to drag us there.”
Both Liam and Sigmund frowned at that, but the former beat the latter to the punch and asked: “Why does that sound so ominous?”
“Because Giulia has the unnatural ability to get people to do what she wants every time, sometimes without even needing to speak a single word,” she chuckled, then shook her head as a snort escaped her lips too before adding: “We like to joke that the only reason she hasn’t become a [Queen] by now is that she just doesn’t want to. Again, that girl can be scary. Since you created the explosives she’s become even worse, and also somehow much more manageable.”
“...Is it normal for your unit to just menace people using a pyromaniac?”
“No. They only do that among themselves. They’d never abuse the power on anyone else. But that means that sometimes they use her against me. You cannot even begin to imagine how many times they tried to set me up for a date and asked Giulia to ‘convince’ me to go on them.”
They looked at each other, then chuckled amiably.
All the while Sigmund smiled at them and ate, enjoying the small talk more than the food. For a moment his eyes slid towards the windows, to the street outside already beginning to fill up with people. He dared to glance up at the sky peeking out from behind a building with a roof lower than the others, seeing a few rays of sunlight and a bright blue sky. He wondered if today would be the day, but his body answered for him by sending a shiver down his spine and his stomach twisting into knots as a single bead of sweat rolled down from the top of his head and down towards his tail. A clear no then.
He let the two lovebirds keep chatting for a few more minutes, gathering the dirty plates and placing them gently in the sink so as not to crack them. His hands moved steadily in small circles as he passed a sponge filled with soapy water over them to remove the grime and fat from the meat before he put them to dry on a nearby rack bolted to the wall with double the amount of screws necessary, all three inches longer than they ought to be, before placing three towels underneath to make sure that, if worse came to worst, they’d at least fall on something soft and not (all) break.
“Hoy Liam. Time to work!” he shouted before stepping out of the room and going for the stairs. His prosthetic leg creaked and he promised himself to check the wood, the screws, the enchantments and everything come evening because it was better to be safe than sorry: he wouldn’t want his leg to fail him while he was crafting items to sell in the shop or, gods forbid, experimenting. The former would mean a very probable injury, while the latter would be, well, not a death sentence, he had Skills to help him after all, but something too close for comfort.
He heard Liam step behind him as he said goodbye to his daughter and stepped down the stairs.
He smiled to himself, feeling truly happy for the first time in a while. If there was one thing he would say he missed most of all now that his wife was dead it was the noise. He missed the sounds of people talking, the small noises made by someone living over his head, be it the patter of feet or the clanking of pans and utensils being used to cook. He missed the gentle snoring beside him in his bed, the voice shouting for him to come eat lunch or dinner from the stairs that led down into his laboratory. He missed his daughter’s shrieking laughter mixed in with his wife’s lighthearted one when she decided to tickle her, or the gentle cooing when she helped her daughter get better from an illness or from a bad scrape she’d gotten while playing outside.
In a way, he also missed the sky. The bright… blue… endless expanse… hovering over his head……. immense.
No… yes… both. He missed it and he feared it. He could still remember going out into the city proper, to the marketplace, with his wife to buy things. He remembered talking to people outside their homes, going to bars to have a nice drink and a chat with the patrons and the proprietor.
But now she was gone, and he had nobody to anchor him to the ground, to make sure he wouldn’t fall into that endlessness over his head. He knew it didn’t make sense, he knew there was no way for him to float away from the earth beneath his feet up to the stars (there was a reason he’d never crafted even a single [Levitation] wand or [Flight] Scroll), but the rest of his mind and his entire body rebelled against that logic, shouting at him in terror that no, there was a chance, it could happen, why risk it?, it was better to stay inside, to stay tucked away in his warm home with a solid roof over his head, better yet if he was in his lab underground even further away from the sky.
He sighed internally as he felt anxiety grip at his insides and, as he released the air, felt the tension leave him with his breath. There was no place for anxiety and fear in his work.
He stepped down into his dark shop, the absence of natural light making him feel better, and saw Gaius, the dwarf, waiting at the counter patiently, a comb in his hand as he meticulously untangled his beard.
“Good morning Gaius,” greeted Sigmund.
“Good morning Gaius,” repeated Liam.
“And a good morning to both of you,” he answered back as he put his comb in his bag of holding.
“So, are we all ready?” asked Sigmund.
----------------------------------------
Liam sat on the floor and observed attentively the enormous and extremely complex magic circle. With a night’s rest behind him and the knowledge of his failures from yesterday he now understood just how big of a task this actually was.
Still, he felt confident he could do it this time.
Without hesitation he looked down at the bowl holding the gem goop and used his Skill: “[Substance: Aspects of Paint].”
Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.
Then he immersed the tip of the brush inside, ready to feel it slip inside without resistance… and found it just as ‘goopy’ as before. With a frown he took out the brush and watched as, like yesterday, the gemstuff clung to the bristles while also forming a line connecting it to the contents still inside. Had the Skill failed?
Apparently, yes.
But here’s the thing Liam didn’t know: sometimes Skills were more complex to use than just ‘saying them with the intent of using them’. Sometimes conditions had to be met: for example, an [Archer] with a [Airmish Arrow] would need to invoke the devils of Airm to ‘bless’ his shot, or make an obscene gesture that meant ‘I call devils upon you’; other times one had to specify what they wanted out of the Skill. This was one such case.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is usually the problem with high Level Skills: they actually require you to think when using them. And for a Class that was all about discovering new things and making seemingly impossible contraptions Skills like that abounded.
Looking into the goop Liam frowned and tried activating the Skill again. Again, nothing happened.
Why is it not working? Has the System gone on the fritz?
The System had not, in fact, ‘gone on the fritz, and as It observed him, It thought that, had It been able to feel emotions, right then and there a small part of It would’ve felt amusement.
What’s wrong? Is the gem goop too… I don’t know, dense?
That was not the problem here. It was, in fact, in the perfect state for the Skill to activate. Or rather, it would still be for another six minutes and forty five seconds.
Ok, let’s think this logically: the Skill says [Substance: Aspects of Paint]. Analytical thinking, go!
He waited for his mind to suddenly come up with the solution to the problem like in those Sherlock Holmes books he’d read as a child, but no improbable inspiration borne out of a series of seemingly unconnected clues came up from the swamp of his mind (or rather, he thought of it as a clear lake, but from the day he’d gotten his Red Skill it had changed slightly).
Yep, didn’t work out quite as I wanted.
So, let’s try this without hoping for some divine illumination. The Skill says [Substance: Aspects of Paint]. Substance first. What is classified as substance here? I hope it’s nothing related to the philosophical meaning of that word, ‘cause I don’t remember jackshit about my phil classes from high school. But in chemistry we count a substance as a single element… ok, element isn’t the right word for it, it’s not just a single element from the periodic table, but my professor isn’t here to correct me so I’ll go with that; anyways, it can be in any form, be it solid, liquid or gaseous. So the goop is made from many different gems, but mostly the difference comes from the mana inside, the molecular structure, or rather, the atoms used in their making should be somewhat similar? I hope. Gods I hate this.
So hopefully that’s not the problem. Although, should I maybe specify what substance I want to get the aspects of paint? Maybe? Certainly it cannot hurt.
Ok, let’s try it.
“[Gem Goop: Aspects of Paint].”
The System recognized the moniker ‘gem goop’, It had that much elasticity, but It still couldn’t activate the Skill for him. He had to be more specific.
Ok, that did nothing. Is it because of the name? Maybe gem goop isn’t recognized because that’s not their name? Should I use ‘Melted Mana Stones’?
He tried that, and again it didn’t work.
Why did I have to get the only Skill that requires figuring out what it does?
He had not, in fact, gotten the only one, nor the most difficult by a very, very, very, very, very, wide margin. For example, there was a Skill named [The Endless Road of the Grim Wanderer], which required the user to let a few drops of blood fall at a street crossing paved in bone marble (yes, that one specifically. And for your information, bone marble was excavated from the Tiurna Mountains and it came from the very same mountain that stories told had once been the tooth of a giant monster), all to access an apparently black endless road that could, in truth, lead you anywhere you desired if you were willing to walk in total darkness or only with the assistance of a Dawn Lantern, which ways of crafting had been long forgotten, or a Soul Lamp, which was a fancy name for a lantern made of black jade which cast darkness instead of light (and yes, the darkness it cast was actually less dark than the darkness of the Road), which, again, couldn’t be made anymore because the recipe had been lost. Also, some people had figured out that one could leave the road and even build things in the darkness away from it, so now there were also structures there. And the Collection. But that was another problem, and it was much too far from the Road to bother anyone.
So yes, there were much worse Skills Liam could’ve gotten.
Okay, well, I’ll just have to specify more stuff? I hope. And probably switch around between the names for the goop and see which one sticks. So, back to the analysis: the Skill also says [Aspects of Paint]. Aspects. Plural. Does that mean that I should specify what aspect of the paint I should be calling upon? But then, what should it be?
He looked down at the, he realized, rapidly hardening gem goop, and he frowned as he sighed and got up, moving towards the small forge near his working space.
Well, probably viscosity. So what, the Skill’s supposed to be… actually, let’s put this down and then test that. I’ve read too many stories about how stuff like this always ends, and I have no desire to clean up a mess.
He put the bowl down and , after he’d made sure to place the brush back inside, whispered the Skill: “[Melted Mana Stones: Aspects of Paint - Viscosity].”
That was a mouthful.
He looked back down at the bowl but nothing seemed to have changed. Nearly hesitantly he put his hand on the handle of the brush and took it out, his mind already seeing the line of gem goop extending from it to the liquid inside… only there was no line. There were, instead, several drops of goop falling down, as if the brush had been saturated with water. Or rather, paint.
With a gleeful smile Liam looked down at the bowl, immersing the brush inside and getting it out again, marveling at the fluidity of the goop (although calling it goop now wasn’t fitting at all).
Looking up at the diagram of the spell circle he set to work.
----------------------------------------
“I don’t know how, but you cheated,” said Sigmund as he stared in open disbelief at the perfect spell circle.
Liam put a hand to his heart in mock offense: “Me? Cheating? I would never.”
“I clearly heard you muttering to yourself for ten minutes before you got up, walked to the forge, thought better, then set down to work for exactly forty minutes without ever needing to get up to put the melted mana stones into the forge to turn them liquid again. So, out with it: what’s the Skill?”
Liam sighed. He should’ve known Sigmund would’ve figured it out: he’d just expected it would take him longer.
“Alright. It’s [Substance: Aspects of Paint]. I got it yesterday when I fell asleep.”
A strange expression appeared on the lizardman’s face, a mix of disbelief, jealousy and outrage that made the dwarf beside him chuckle.
Then he finally exploded: raising a fist up to the air he shouted: “DAMN YOU! WHY DID HE GET SUCH A SKILL ON HIS FIRST TRY AND I NEVER DID? FUCK YOU!”
And at that Gaius exploded into loud laughter.
When they both finally calmed down the dwarf spoke: “You got real lucky there boy. Among Common Skills ones that let you just… change the aspect of something are outright the best. Although I have no idea why, of all the things, you got paint.”
“...Maybe because I was thinking about what I was doing as a painting?”
The dwarf shrugged: “Maybe you’re right. Who can say? The System works in strange ways.”
Sigmund just grumbled something incomprehensible, then shook his head, huffed, and looked up: “Well, whatever, you did it and that’s all that matters. So congratulations. You get the rest of the day off because I still haven’t gotten ready the things I need to do the ritual. Go spend some time with my daughter or whatever. Ugh, some people get all the luck.”
Which, in a way, was hilarious, because Liam was indeed a [Lucky Soldier]. A Class that was revealing itself as being more and more useful, especially because there was no way to replenish the luck Liam was steadily losing just by existing on Rodar.
With quick steps he got out of the lab, took off his uniform and waltzed up to the first floor, where he found Amarie reading a book.
They spent the rest of the day wandering around the city.
----------------------------------------
[Painter Class Obtained!]
[Painter Level 2!]
[Skill - Clean Brush Obtained!]