“I never thought I’d be happy going to school in the summer,” Basalt comments. “Is this a one-room schoolhouse?”
“Nah,” I say. “It has a lecture room, library, office, and a playroom. Plus a hallway, if you count that as a room.”
We head inside to the playroom, where Aunt Rosemary is supervising my sister and several of my younger cousins. Willow and Griffin are having a raucous game involving mahjong tiles that is definitely not any version of mahjong I’m familiar with.
I gesture to the teacher. “Basalt, this is my Aunt Rosemary, Corwen’s [Tutorial Teacher].”
“I’m getting a more thorough tutorial after the quick one back in the ruins?” Basalt asks.
Aunt Rosemary’s aura lights up in elation like she just got a major quest. “Absolutely. I will need to draw up a lesson plan for you. I haven’t had to deal with a student who has access to enhancement skills before getting a balanced foundation of general skills as a child and novice. Come back in the morning and I’ll have something ready for you.”
“No prob,” Basalt says. “I’ll just take a tour of the village first and then get some sleep.”
“Be sure to stop by the barn next,” Aunt Rosemary says. “Drake, I’d like to speak with you for a moment.”
I part ways with Basalt, who goes to continue his tour by himself, and follow the teacher into her office.
“What is it that you couldn’t say in front of the others?” I ask.
“I have a concern. For discovering a lost dungeon and reviving a dead Hearth, you should normally have attained Elite rank.”
“I should have? So why didn’t I, then?”
“Generally, someone would have received a quest either from their own core or from the dungeon itself,” Aunt Rosemary says. “For example, your Uncle Hawk’s conquest of Muckburrow. You don’t receive quests, so you did not receive that reward.”
“… oh,” I say. “It’s not just quests, is it, though? Milo reached Elite just from us building things.”
“He would have received a Deed for setting up a major improvement to his Hearth. He also may have received quests from other cores that he couldn’t see. He may have even received more experience for everything you did for Grubwick than you did.”
“So without receiving quests from Corwen, I will need to rely on Deeds to rank up? Shouldn’t subjugating a dungeon have been a significant Deed even if I didn’t have a quest for it?”
“Due to the extremely low difficulty of the dungeon as it was, the Deed for finding the core room and subjugating the core would have given minimal experience. You probably got more for finding the Hedge Maze’s core room, as that at least has puzzles you have to solve even if it makes getting in easier because you’re a Corwen.”
“I feel vaguely cheated,” I say. “What about Basalt? I made a statue and turned him to life!”
“Sadly, giving birth is not, in itself, sufficient to advance to Elite.”
“Dammit, I’m too young to be a parent,” I grumble. “And a hairy adult man the same size as me doesn’t really count as a child. This all seems epic to me, though. Reviving a lost civilization should be the sort of Deed that would propel me up the ranks.”
“It has not been fully revived yet. That process has only just begun.”
“And whatever subsequently comes of it will be divided among everyone else involved and not just go to me.”
“Correct,” Aunt Rosemary says consolingly. “I have confidence in you, though. It is likely that, at some point, you will qualify for a related Deed if you continue to make significant contributions.”
It had not really occurred to me, given how fast I feel like I’ve been leveling, just how important a source of experience quests are. It might entail free will, but also a handicap. It will actually be much more difficult for me to level than someone receiving a generous number of quests.
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I head outside to find Basalt staring at the black goats the size of draft horses. They gaze back at him with burning eyes, and he freezes in mid-step.
Basalt says in a trembling voice, “Those… are…”
“Terrifying?” I suggest.
“Awesome,” Basalt finishes. “Can you ride them? They’d make for a hell of a mount.”
He approaches, pausing occasionally as the [Fear Aura] of the devil-goats flares up, but pushing past it.
Uncle Winter is an unimposing man, the old Epic-rank [Infernal Stablemaster]. You would not imagine how powerful he is just from looking at his stick-thin body topped with snow-white hair. As we approach, he’s quietly teaching and encouraging a couple of my cousins in taking care of the devil-goats, but he turns to look at us as we arrive. I introduce the dwarf to them.
“Hmm,” Uncle Winter hmms, then turns to one of my cousins. “Basil, you can go back to the Hearth. Don’t need two people with similar names when working around monsters.”
Weird. Somehow, whatever system is involved with translation made their names in Common similar too. Or perhaps it chose ‘Basalt’ as a translation because it knew I had a cousin named Basil? Ugh. As always, the auto-translator hurts my brain. I really should just turn it off and force myself to learn Common properly already. Either that or just accept it and let it go.
The old man introduces the young dwarf to the devil-goats: Snookums, Fluffles, Pookie, Mitsi, Sippy, and Doomlord. (We ate Fluffles for Hearth Day last December, but they’re monsters so they come back. I don’t mention this bit to Basalt yet. It takes a bit of getting used to.)
We continue the tour after a bit, strolling past the pond where one of my aunts is having an amorous tryst with a traveler in the bushes near the village wall. I drag Basalt on before anyone can get further embarrassed about stumbling across them.
Circling around the Hearth, we come to a small open-air alchemy workshop where blind Uncle Yew is slowly stirring a cauldron that’s letting off enough fumes that I quickly understand why he’s doing it in a well-ventilated area. We move on without distracting him and enter the main workshop. I show Basalt around the areas where I often work on crafting.
“I imagine I’ll be spending a lot of time here in the near future,” Basalt says. “You’ve got everything in one place here. Though there doesn’t seem to be much of a forge.”
“There aren’t any sources of metal on the Topside that I know of,” I say. “Our metal tools and weapons mostly come from dungeons. There must be copper and tin around the second layer of the In-Between though.”
Basalt nods thoughtfully as we move on to the store. The store front opens onto the village square, but we come in by the back from the direction of the workshop. Corwen’s store (not named anything more creative than “Corwen Adventure Store”) offers both supplies for adventuring and junk we got on adventures that we don’t need.
“Looks like a good place to get equipped,” Basalt says, examining a pair of boots. “Or at least it would be if they have anything dwarf-sized. And what’s this currency? Copper, silver, and gold? That’s awfully generic.”
I nod and show him a few of my coins. “It all comes from dungeons and they each put their own stamp on it. So far as I know, nobody actually mints coins and there’s no mines accessible from the surface. Maybe there are in the lower layers.”
Basalt holds a copper coin from the Hedge Maze up to an eye and nods. “I’m starting to get an idea of how things work around here.” He returns the coins to me.
Our final stop is the guest house, where the Mundane innkeeper, Goldie, takes him off my hands to show him to a bathroom and bedroom.
Come morning, I meet Basalt in the guest house’s hearth and greet him with, “Good morning. Did you sleep well?”
“Much better, at least,” Basalt says. “I’ve been having trouble sleeping out under a sky that stays yellow all ‘night’. At least here I was able to push a wardrobe in front of the window.”
“Ah, yeah, that definitely takes some getting used to.”
We head for the school house to see what Aunt Rosemary has cooked up (figuratively) for Basalt’s lesson plan. I don’t really need to follow along with everything, but I’ve got a lot of study and practice to get done myself.
For starters, I need to replace most of the books in my [Mental Library] that I’ve already read five times. It’s already annoying having to read them first and then just be left to re-reading them when out delving. It was a good stopgap measure but I need a better solution to Inspiration regen when I can’t see the sky. For the moment, I’m just going to dump all the fiction and replace it with reference books.
I wish I could just shove these books straight into my Knowledge skills, but at least the system seems to appreciate me making an effort to read and keep track of information. Once I’m done with that, I leave the library and return to the classroom to see how Basalt is doing.
“It’s important to remember that your class does not only affect the skills it is based on,” the Aunt Rosemary is saying. “Any skills used in conjunction with them will also receive bonus experience. For instance, if you’re using Search (Measurement) and Enhanced Mind (Calculator) to assist in crafting, even though your class description doesn’t mention those categories.”
Basalt nods. “Got it. What sort of skills would be useful to try to learn while I’m working on handyman stuff? I don’t even know what all skills exist.”
“As a vassal of Corwen Hearth, you are permitted to read the Hearth’s skill books,” Aunt Rosemary says. “These list all the skills learned by members of the Hearth who have died, along with notes on how to unlock and best use them. It’s far from every skill in existence, of course. Many Hearths have their own secret arts, and there may be dwarf skills you will stumble upon that we don’t know about.”
”Great,” Basalt says, eying the massive tome. “I’ll... probably not read this entire book.”
Once Aunt Rosemary is done with Basalt’s tutorial, she says, “Please let me know when Hebron starts producing more dwarves. I will go there to help train its newspawns. They, too, will be very confused and need guidance.”