Despite his thoughts, (and wishes, honestly), the interrupted lesson was not immediately followed up on at Miss Bookel’s Library, nor was he allowed to nap in the Legendary Towelhole.

  Instead, he and the other boys were shuffled out in small camps, their parents helping to fell trees and dig out small shelters outside of the village.

  “We don’t know what all has settled and what hasn’t in the superstructure, so it’s best to get the kids out while the elders poke and prod at things,” Cop explained for his benefit, as he was included in the category of ‘kids’ for whatever reason.

  The upside was, he was given something very special for his trouble, when he had complained. A tiny, rat-sized copy of “The Generalist’s Best Practice for Self-Education”, apparently a book about…

  Well, from what he had been told, the book sounded like a primitive version of the scientific method, adapted to practical applications for magic and what felt like pseudoscience, but which Bookel had assured him was purely functional regular science.

  In this world, while anyone could learn spells from a book, just by memorizing the words, actually creating something new, for any profession, took a lot of time and tedious work.

  The spreadsheets of gibberish he had seen in the library weren’t unusual, most people quickly developed their own nonsensical shorthand in the process of dealing with the sheer volume of data they picked up.

  “Hey, vacate your cranium, cohort,” the nameless Elf child, daughter of He-Who-Weaves-Sandwiches commanded, prompting him to snap his tiny book shut.

  Apparently at her request, since she had ‘Made such strides in companionship, civilizing Homo Rodentia’, he was offered a spot in the Hewho campsite.

  He didn’t complain too much, because that sandwich he had bought was really good.

  “Father yet facilitates our fleeting domicile. I requisition your foreign lore. You, like Scheherazade, shall bemuse me,” she demanded, her little silk dress flopping as she thumped down next to him by the small campfire.

  Off to the side, Hewho used what looked like an air compressor, inflating a large bubble of leather, spread out like a puddle on a canvas tarp. Rather than hide, it acted like a thick swamp, swelling larger and larger.

  Once it was on the verge of popping, the Centaur cut off the air flow, and phased into the leather bubble with a long pole, popping it and letting it deflate and solidify over the wooden frame.

  “...Well, what do you even want to know?” he wondered. “Earth is a bit of a sh- …A poophole.”

  Despite his statement, the little Elf managed to wheedle more than enough details out of him, through increasingly verbose demands and requests.

  As he spoke, he learned more than she did. There were serious warps in this place’s culture, he easily noticed. Even more than he thought.

  She seemed unimpressed with guns. The moment he mentioned gunpowder, she rolled her eyes and called it ‘Overcomplicated Mundanus nonsense.’

  She seemed baffled by the population. Double, maybe even triple the level of baffled he would have expected.

  In this world, the population was low. Very low.

  He had a very skewed view initially, from his unfortunate loss in height, but the entirety of Sunnymeat had less than a thousand people living in it. It was closer to a tribe than a village, and according to her, even the capital of Labernth, the country they were in, held maybe a few thousand more.

  She had asked, ‘Is your world a city unto itself? Some labyrinthine globe of sardine-people?’

  Honestly, he couldn’t even fully refute it. This world didn’t even have roads. Not in the sense that it lacked asphalt.

  When he said as much, Hewho chimed in that it was used in a place called the “Nutrivat Sovereign Property”, but even that place, apparently some kind of magitek corporate hellscape, (a term he was rebuked for using), didn’t actually use roads for transit between its Hive-Suburbs.

  When his daughter cheerfully announced that they used self-derailing trains instead, he took it with a grain of salt.

  None of this was what made the culture feel warped, however. That was the weird reactions to him explaining his world’s government. Taxes, paperwork, legalese and bureaucracy.

  When he explained the hoops he had to go through to automate paying his bills with his stock market inheritance, the nameless Elf’s eyes widened, and her expression turned blank with awe.

  Then, the same slowly took over Hewho’s gaze as well, and Flowing, his apprentice who had been ignoring all of this, slowly mouthed “holy hamhock”.

  If he didn’t know any better, his story of the ever-escalating complexities that went into a working sales tax sounded to them like some halcyon dreamworld.

  The DMV actually made the little Elf girl’s eyes water as she was overwhelmed.

  Scurrying off, she returned with a massive cardboard box over her head, beaming like the sun.

  “L-like this?!” she shouted, practically throwing it down.

  It was a board game, labeled “Give them the Runaround,” and was apparently about preventing the other players from getting license plates for their trucks, using ever escalating tricks and sheets of toy-ified paperwork to send them around the board as many times as possible to all the different departments.

  Rhett could barely figure out the rules, but they were eerily on brand for his experience with the matter.

  “Okay, but surely you’re not seriously telling me that there are people who spend all day behind a desk, filling out spreadsheets right? I mean, maybe if the desk controlled some kind of golem, I’ve heard of Masterminds who use data to supercharge them, but isn’t your story a bit… Too fanciful?” Flowing dared to hope.

  The ambience of sheer focus on him was dizzying. Was paperwork like catnip to these people?

  He had no clue what to tell these crazy Elves, and found himself grateful when the Delinquents found the camp he was in, bursting in through the brush, covered with branches.

  “Oh great! There you are! It’s training time, New Kid!” Smacks exclaimed, arms akimbo. “We gotta get you caught up with the pack!” he growled cheerily, grabbing the rat-boy as if he was a rat-rat.

  The spell was broken, and Hewho smiled ruefully, shaking his head as Rhett let himself be carried off like a Tamagochi.

  –

  Training involved a lot more writing and staring than he remembered.

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  The others said he would have an easier time if he watched them train first, and he agreed. Monkey see, monkey do, after all.

  With him sat down on a stump with his little book, he watched the teens begin their practice.

  Grabby had a stick in his hand, and was doing things with it. He would feel the bark with a fingertip, smack it on his leg, try gently to bend it.

  And as he did, he babbled.

  “Whucrk, maybe?” he said. Setting it down after he had scrutinized it enough, the burly Orc held his hands in front of his chest, cupping something invisible as he did.

  With closed eyes, he uttered “Shwing”, and the heat-haze that had begun wafting from him sharpened, before turning into a visible, glowing ball.

  Next, a softly spoken “Whucrk” twisted the ball into a jagged, nonsensical shape, one that was vaguely longer than it was wide or thick.

  He frowned, and let the mana disperse into nothing. “Not quite. Whurkcrk, then. That sounds closer.”

  Repeating the process to get another visible ball of mana, he tried that word instead, and got a glowing spike for his trouble.

  With a hum, he took out a piece of parchment and pressed it against the stripped tree nearby, scrawling the word onto the sheet, along with a brief note about the shape.

  He repeated this process again and again, before finally sighing, and coming to a conclusion.

  Holding the branch to his ear, he slowly bent it, listening to its creaking before it finally snapped in two.

  “No ‘Whu’. It’s just Kuurk,” he mused, growing excited.

  Carefully, he spoke as clearly as he could to his Mana, and gave excited shouts when it formed into the shape of a wooden branch. Despite his otherwise terse nature, the teen seemed rather excited to be able to make a mana stick.

  He promptly performed several other simple tests. He tried to grab it, failing as the ethereal wood phased slightly through his hand, but was able to use another utterance to make it more solid, so he could bend and swing the length of thaumic lumber around.

  Rhett hummed as he watched the testing turn into play for the budding Wizard. He started swinging it at Smacks, who was moving through several slow movements, trying to mimic the swaying of the branches.

  He was having a better time of it, as with a pop from his elbow, he snapped his forearm down, dangling it to dodge the manaborne stick.

  As he did, a blood-red branch fell from his palm, and he snatched it out of the air, sword-fighting with his friend using what he announced with a shout was his ‘Ruined Forest Style: Broken Branch Elbow!’

  It was entertaining, Rhett would freely admit it, but this was the tail end of nearly an hour of work leading up to it, both of the boys having produced a variety of incoherent, or otherwise formless and vague effects in the process of discovering the two components.

  And these were merely components.

  Murdoom the Drow (NOT a Beach Elf, he insisted) explained as much, unable to begin his own practice, lacking the Argon Ampoule he had been waiting for his parents to get.

  “A stick is kind of useful, but not really. Those are Phonemes and Katas, by the way. Smacks called it a ‘Style’, but there’s no gods-damned way he has one of those yet,” he calmly explained, gazing out from his hooded hoodie.

  “They both use the same kind of magic, really. They have to get a variety of Phonemes and Katas by studying things. Then, they string them together, to make more complicated magic,” the teen explained.

  “The only difference is, Grabby is using the mana from his Soul, after it attunes to the air. It attunes into Thaumic Mana, and that kind of mana obeys noises it hears, and-”

  Smacks grabbed Murdoom’s face. “I trick my Ki into leaving my body!” he exclaims.

  He starts waving his arm in a circle. “Watch, new kid, I go in a circle… Over and over. My Bodily Energy gets into the pattern, and then…”

  He suddenly jerks his arm away, hard. Left behind, an ethereal arm continues the circling, red tangles flowing out from his flesh, surrounded with a blue membrane.

  “Bam!” he shouted. “Juke it out!”

  Slowly, the red veins of energy pull themselves back into him, like stuffing packed into a doll.

  “Get off!” Murdoom shouted, slapping away the hand.

  “Gmph,” the teen groused. “Yes. That’s how he does that.”

  The final member of the group, The-Endless-Blue-Water-Of-Skin, had his own practice to do, simpler, and harder by far.

  Standing near a bush, the elf was simply grabbing handfuls of leaves from it, casting them on the ground before staring intently through his rawhide blindfold.

  It rippled like water as he did, and he failed to notice anything around him as he tried to guess how many leaves there were.

  “Paragon. He’s trying to treat Flesh as if it were a clear lake,” Murdoom finished.

  “...What about you? You said you couldn’t do anything yet?” Rhett asked.

  Holding up a hand, Murdoom’s eyes narrowed, until a bleak flicker of silence sparked into his palm.

  “Occultist. Wizards command mana through what they speak. We have chosen, instead, to do so through the Silence in which we do not,” he intones.

  “He wants to whisper spells,” Grabby blandly answers. “He needs Argon for that, instead of Oxygen and Nitrogen.”

  Murdoom’s face reddens, but he does nod.

  Rhett was slowly figuring it out. His book made more sense, seeing the boys putting parts of it into practice. The book didn’t theorize why, it simply explained what, and how.

  The what was to derive insights from the world around them, and the how was through rigorous observation and experimentation.

  Smacks clapped his hands. “My blood’s tired. Orange Juice me!” he exclaimed, jabbing a thumb to the would-be-Occultist, who flicked his wrist and sent the silent spark in his hands sputtering into the Orc’s face.

  “ !   ,  !” Smacks didn’t say angrily, wiping his face of the bleak energies.

  Rhett did the job instead, still feeling a bit awkward around the others, unused to meatspace interactions with people.

  With less effort than he thought it might take, he fetched several sealed flasks of juice from the cooler next to the stump, handing the copper plated, bladder-lined containers to everyone, taking one for himself as well.

  Shaking the cold from his feet after having to stomp down into the ice chips filling the cooler, Rhett plopped down and lifted the proportionally gargantuan flask to his lips, sputtering at the alcoholic taste.

  Smacks gave him a sly look, while the rest of the boys looked exasperated.

  Moments later, Rhett was coughing, his stomach burning as he retched. What was in that orange juice?!

  To their credit, they moved into action like a single entity, Blue immediately plunging his hand into Rhett’s stomach, grabbing something literally gut wrenching and squeezing.

  Juice spewed out, and the Elf continued poking around in his insides, using gentle motions to push all of the liquid out of his throat and stomach. He heard Murdoom shouting at the two Orcs.

  “He has been here for less than a week, you damned fools. Did you seriously feed him wood alcohol?! He’s not a damned Orc, and he hasn’t had years to get used to it, either!” the elf shouted, slapping both of them on the top of their heads several times, chastising them.

  Blue smiled shyly. “Sorry. M-methanol is not to everyone’s tastes,” he joked in a quiet tone. “They didn’t know,” he promised, patting Rhett as he caught his breath.

  He felt better immediately, but Murdoom swept over to him, his flowing hoodie billowing as he did.

  “If you start having any troubles with your vision, or you remain ill, tell one of us immediately. Blue’s mother is a healer, and knows more than we do,” he said sternly.

  Finally, Rhett got ahold of his senses after the scare. “I’m fine, it was more surprising than anything,” he assured the others, who looked relieved. “Thank you for… Trying to include me?” he remarked.

  Smacks looked especially concerned, and couldn’t help but glance away nervously. “You gonna tell Mar?” he asked.

  Rhett shook his head. “No, uh, all’s well that ends well?” he answered, not wanting to annoy them.

  Murdoom gave him a searching look. “It’s your choice,” he finally said. “Smacks, make it up to him, immediately,” the Elf said, with no room for argument.

  “Uh, right. What do you need for your stuff, Rhett? I’ll call mine for today,” he conceded.

  “Uh… Let’s start with… Leaves and rocks? Different kinds?” he asked as nicely as he could.

  Smacks, to his credit, gave a salute, and dashed into the wilderness without so much as a thought.

  The Ratling thought about it.

  If he wanted to be a Ranger, the book said he needed a few things. He needed a bunch of different, interesting materials, a way to wear them all, and he needed to figure out the best way to actually find out what their ‘Passives’ were, their Essencia Maxims.

  Then, he needed to minmax the shit out of what he found.