I was sitting in Arden's study. A large book was sitting on the desk in front of me, and the old priest was sitting across from me. He’d pushed another desk against the back of mine weeks ago, which ended up making a pretty kick-ass tutoring setup. I watched as the candlelight flickered across his face while he read. We'd been studying for several hours, and my brain had long since given up, but the man still wanted to squeeze more out of me, even though my head was practically mush.

  “What is the name of the northernmost kingdom of Elysium?”

  “Huh?” I’d lost track at some point. Shit. “Chimaera?”

  His eyes lifted from the page in front of him and bored into mine. “The northernmost kingdom. The one the Dark Lord rose in during the fourth era?” So much sass.

  “Uh, Osreva?”

  “Alex…” He shut the book he was holding and stood.

  “Sorry.”

  I knew I wasn’t the best student, it was quite apparent. And he was an excellent teacher. I wasn’t worthy of his time.

  “Don’t do that to yourself.” His eyes bored into me again.

  “What?”

  “You’re being hard on yourself. Don’t.

  Tristan did that same thing. They always knew when I was beating myself up. “But—”

  “But nothing. I’m pushing you harder than most. It’s okay to drift from time to time.” He walked around the desk and put his hands on my shoulders. “I’m proud of your efforts.”

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  He chuckled, patted my cheek a couple of times, then walked away.

  I looked around the room. We’d been studying in a large study attached to the scriptorium. The old priest had a huge collection of books, many of which he'd shown me over the past few months. There was a stack of them on the desk right then. He'd taken it as his sworn mission to instruct me in the ways of this world, and, despite my thickheadedness, he was admittedly doing a great job. Plus, I could also tell he enjoyed my company.

  Beyond that, he said that, to live in this world, I needed to learn its history, culture, politics, and monsters. He also said that he had me reading as much as I was to help me graduate from the Commlish I’d developed to full Common.

  It was working.

  I could understand a fair bit of the native language now. At least nearly all the concrete ideas I interacted with from day to day. To be fair, I was doing less reading and more reading along, like a first grader, but it was working. I could understand way more than I did before.

  Once I’d gained a good amount of proficiency, Arden insisted that we only use the native tongue from that point on. That sucked at first. It made communication difficult, but I couldn’t argue with the method. I was growing quickly, mostly because he was an excellent teacher.

  "Translate this passage to me." The grey-haired almost George Clooney held up his copy of the text and pointed to a passage on the page we’d been reading.

  I followed his fingers and read, "Kaj la diino malsupreniris la landon kaj benis ?iujn per sia ora lumo."

  “What does that mean?”

  "Uhh..." I had no idea. Oro was gold, right? That made me think of the hunky elf with the golden eyes outside right now with sweet, sweet, Na-Ya. Oh, Na-Ya. I’d been crushing so hard. However, once I learned that Na-Ya was dating Ro-Saleh, the hot guy, I decided to get busy. I'd tripled my efforts to learn the language and get a footing in this world, mostly by studying with Arden in the daytime and Tristan in the evenings.

  I knew couldn't stay there forever, especially if it meant watching the two love birds play grab ass every day. They were always disgustingly loving with one another. It was so clear they were in love. I was happy for them. Truly. But screw them.

  I learned in my studies that Na-Ya was a member of a subgroup of elves called wood elves, common elves, or grove elves. They planted trees and lived in them or something. I didn’t know all the details, language barrier and all. Ro-Saleh was from a different group called the sun elves. They had something to do with the big tower, but I didn’t know much about that either.

  It was honestly all pretty complicated. All I knew was that they had different hair and eye colors, with sun elves having golden eyes and hair, and common elves having a variety of hair colors but nearly always deep blue eyes. It didn’t seem like much, but the differences were supposedly important, at least to the elves. Something about sun elves being the highest in status, but that didn’t seem to stop them from fraternizing with one another.

  I was pretty sure they’d have a baby on the way any day now. Made sense, too. The guy practically shone with charisma, and she was both sweet and gorgeous. How could they not? Also, the more I got to know him, the more I realized he was genuinely a good guy. We’d kind of become friends.

  What a prick.

  "Alex?" Arden caught me daydreaming. So much sass! He did that a lot.

  "Oh, yeah, sorry. Um…” Think, Alex. Oro… gold… Diino… Goddess? Ah! “I think it means that the Goddess descended onto the… something and gave some kind of golden light."

  "Very good!" He shot out of his chair and walked around the desk. Pointing at the page, he said, “She descended to the land.” He patted my shoulder again, then sat back down across from me. "You're doing well. This is one of our faith's children’s texts. You can now understand Common at something like a fifth-grade level, which is no easy feat considering you've only been awake for three months, and you’ve only been actively studying for two."

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  I hadn't told him I'd been getting supplemental tutoring from Tristan in exchange for stories from Earth. I’d thought about telling him, but I figured there was no need to take points away from myself. I deserved the praise. "What can I say? I'm a fast learner." I smirked at him.

  "I won't even check that ego of yours. You are doing quite well." He closed his book and pushed it to the side. I did the same. As I did, his face became serious. "What do you plan to do once you're fully healed?"

  “I…” What did I plan to do? My leg had been stubborn. While my arm had mostly healed, even if I couldn't feel all my fingers and I'd have permanent scarring, my leg was still stiff and painful. Lady Varga said that it shouldn't be much longer, but Renard told me that only hard work and discipline would fix me now. The man recommended I join them in their daily training, but Varga hadn't cleared me for that yet, and her word was the real law around here. "Once my leg is better, I kind of want to get out in the world and see what there is to do. Tristan keeps talking about his hometown, so I figured I'd walk over there once I could, maybe meet some people."

  "That's a good short-term goal.” Something in his eyes twisted when I mentioned Tristan. He did that when I talked about him a lot, but he would never tell me what he was thinking. The man was an iron trap when he wanted to be. “Are you considering joining Renard for training?"

  "Yeah, I am. I used to do stuff like that back home when I was younger, so I'd like to learn what I can." Well, I did want to learn what they could teach me, but that wasn’t all. I really wanted to make magical light come out of my hands like they did. That was way too awesome.

  “To what end?”

  I shook my head. “I dunno.”

  “Try.”

  I sighed. “It’s stupid.”

  “It’s never stupid to have a hope for your life. What do you want for your future?”

  I took a deep breath. “You said a while back that I could get strong here, and I kind of got it into my head that I could help people. I’ve always wanted to, but I was never strong enough. If I could be here, why not try?”

  He nodded. "That’s a worthy goal.”

  “It’s not stupid?”

  “Not even slightly.” Standing, he walked over to a tea table set against the wall. Pouring two cups, he carried them back and set them on either side of the desk. Picking his cup up and taking a sip, he said, “It’s never stupid to want to help others. That’s what makes the world go round, and I believe that that’s your truth.”

  I took another breath. It felt so silly in my head, but he was taking it all at face value. I appreciated that.

  "If I could make a suggestion?"

  His suggestions were more like things you should absolutely take to heart. He was rarely wrong about things. "Of course. What's up?"

  "Learn as much as you can while you're here. Then, plan to visit the capital. On foot, it's about a month to travel to the Camlonde from here, but I’m confident you'd learn a lot by seeing it, and that's where the most connections and opportunities can be found. If you're looking to gain strength and get established in this world, it's the best place for that. From there, you can choose whether you want to come back here or continue." He smiled and got a far-off look for a moment. "From Camlonde, you could easily get passage to Saern. Seeing the Tower up close is both impressive and completely worth it. "

  That did sound fantastic. "What about lodging, food? Is it hard to find a place there?"

  "Not really. The church is always taking people in, and we have contacts there, so you could easily stay with them. And, if you learn everything you can while you're here, you'll be of use to any branch of the church, even if you're not a priest. I'm just a scholar, but I'm welcome anywhere there's a church. You could do the same. You can travel as much as you want. Well, until you gain a certain amount of reputation. That's when people tend to get locked down more."

  It sounded like a good plan. "Then that’s what I’ll do."

  He smiled. "Good. It will take about a year for you to learn everything I have to teach you at the rate that you're learning, and, if you train every day, I believe it will take about the same amount of time to learn everything Renard can teach you. You'll pick up other things in the meantime as well.”

  “Tristan mentioned I should be able to gain classes. What goes into that?”

  He steepled his fingers. “You’ll certainly gain basic classes while you’re here, but, hopefully, just by doing what you’re doing, you'll unlock a heroic class, too. That would make your life far easier.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Classes are the main way to gain strength here. They grant skills, abilities, spells, and more.” He stood up and pulled out a quill, some ink, and paper. “It’s like this.” He wrote some words on the page. “I’m an American Human Scholar of the Tower. These are my skills.” He wrote a long list of entries on the page. “Each grants a passive ability and some number of active abilities. Rarer classes grant more and higher-level abilities, but their also harder to unlock. Each ability is arranged in what we call a circle, which determines its relative power and how much energy it takes to activate. The higher the circle, the more energy it takes.”

  That made sense. “When do you think I’ll earn a class?”

  “You should be able to unlock your heritage and racial talents soon, likely as soon as you learn to visualize the system’s status screen, but your racial class won't help you much. We humans have the worst racial class, but, as both outsiders and Americans, we do get some fairly useful abilities…” His face blanched, “...even if they’re a little… on the nose.”

  I looked at the words he wrote on the page in front of me. [Red Glare]? I pointed to that one. “Is that for real?”

  Arden shook his head. “Unfortunately, yes. Since we’re not from here, the Goddess’s system pulls on our memories and does the best it can to cobble together its best approximation of skills related to our culture. Thus, we have skills like [Land of the Free] and [Perfect Union].”

  “I don’t think I want to unlock my heritage.”

  “It’ll happen. You just have to accept it.”

  I sighed. “Okay, what else?”

  “Everyone gets access to the basics, like their race and heritage talents. Most people also gain a profession, and many people unlock their birth signs.”

  “Like Libra and all that?”

  “Yes, but no. The system doesn’t give us our old signs. It uses the ones found in this world. I used to be a Taurus. Now, I'm born of the Tower.”

  “Got it.” I wondered what mine would be?

  “Once you’ve unlocked those, you’re mostly capped out until you can unlock a class. Some people unlock several professions, but it’s extremely difficult to do two things well enough and with enough intensity for the system to recognize it, and the rewards for their efforts would be limited. Thus, most people strive to unlock their heroic classes instead.”

  “And how does one do that?”

  “The system takes notice of everything we do. Do something enough, and you get rewarded. For heroic classes, that means you have to do something great or something outside of what others would do. Only then will the system grant you a heroic class.”

  “Is there an easier way to do it? And can people be anything they want?”

  “Unfortunately, it’s not all clear. It’s at least partially based on our aptitudes. It also seems to factor in our temperaments. Ten different people could do the same thing, and only one would unlock a heroic class."

  "So it's random?"

  "No. It's just not known to us."

  "Isn't that the same thing?"

  "Not at all. It's simply that only the Goddess knows the particulars. That's why I want to expose you to as much as possible. You'll have the greatest chance of gaining aptitude in a variety of areas if you learn as much as you can, and that will increase your odds."

  Damn, that was a lot. I appreciated Arden more than ever at that moment. He really was looking out for me. “Anything else?”

  “Yes. Based on your skills and strengths, you’ll get granted quests. Take them. Every time you complete one, you get a reward. Outside of hard work and fighting monsters, that’s the only way you can level up as well, so take everything that comes your way.”

  "Level up?"

  "You get stronger."

  I nodded. "Then that's what I’ll do.”

  “I know you will. I have faith in you.”

  I couldn’t help but puff up at the praise. It felt good. I never got much from my real dad, asshole that he was, but Arden made it seem easy. I'd make you proud, father figure in another world. "I'm in. Let’s keep going. Teach me everything."