“Ugh. Great.” Groaning, Jojo slumps down against the tree. “So I screwed myself then?”

  Frankie sighs. “No, you didn’t. You’re honestly still is a really good place, I just didn’t want you to get carried away.”

  “But no magic,” Jojo huffs.

  Frankie sits a couple of feet away from Jojo, facing her, and looks her in the eye. “You can still use magic. You’ll just have to work for it.”

  “But I’m stuck with the novice stuff,” Jojo says.

  “Right, you don’t know. Jojo, skills don’t just level up forever. They have a maximum level, usually between 10 and 30, and once they hit that, two things can happen. Either their level changes to ‘MAX,’ at which point they’re as strong as they can get, or they evolve. The novice magic skills evolve at level 10.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning that you just have to get any magic skills you actually want to use to level 10, and they’ll turn into the regular magic skills that other classes start with,” Frankie explains. “It’s a real pain, but that’s the price you pay for your Job. You can technically do anything, you just have to work really, really hard for it.”

  “How hard? How long am I gonna have to work to get to the base level of everyone else?”

  “That’s… Hard to say.” Frankie purses her lips in thought. “Your bonuses don’t help in giving an estimate, but honestly, I just don’t know for sure. Nobody takes that Job. People joke about how you’d have to use up all your MP every day for ten years, but—”

  “Ten years!?”

  “BUT that’s just a joke! Nobody knows for sure! And even if it was true, your bonuses would turn that into, like, a month.”

  “A month I wouldn’t have to wait if I wasn’t so… Ugh.” Jojo thumps her head back against the tree in frustration. “Now what do I do?”

  “Do you want my opinion?”

  “I guess.”

  “Well, for one, I do actually think you’re in a very unique position to make use of this Job,” Frankie says. “I may not have recommended it, but it has such extreme downsides for a reason. Being able to learn any skill is powerful.”

  “You’re not just saying that to make me feel better, are you?”

  “Do I seem like that kind of person?” Frankie scoffs. “Like, okay, just off the top of my head, there’s a skill some classes get called Meditation that lets them focus themselves to restore their MP. That’s a very rare thing for skills to do, and if you learned it, you could reduce your time training a new kind of a magic from a month to a matter of days.”

  “Okay…” Jojo sighs and leans forward as her initial frustration fades. “Yeah, alright, I get it. So, how about advice for, like, now?”

  “Well, I think you should start training your life magic skill immediately.”

  “Why life?”

  “Because I was serious when I recommended you become a Cleric. It’s a fantastic career choice, and honestly, nobody will bat an eye at you focusing on non-magical adventuring for a month or so if you just say you want your healing to be more reliable before people are betting their lives on it.”

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

  “Hmm…” Jojo thinks on it for a minute, then nods her head. “Alright. Yeah, actually, I kinda like that. Healing people… It sounds nice. Plus, if I get super good at it, maybe people will see me as some kind of saint!”

  Frankie puts her head in her hands. “You’re lucky I’m not religious, or I’d slap you for that.”

  Jojo laughs. “Got it, got it. Alright, any idea how I can use my baby life magic?”

  Frankie shakes her head. “No idea, to be honest. Maybe try just… Growing some grass?”

  Jojo shrugs and glances around until she finds a particularly weak-looking piece of grass. It’s half-eaten by bugs and close to wilting, so she figures it could be a good way to test her powers.

  She leans down close to the blade, cups her hands around it, and focuses. She can feel the magic inside of her, can sense it swirling between her hands, almost a whirlwind of pure magical power that only she can feel, dousing the grass, swarming it, until…

  Nothing.

  Nothing happens to the grass. If anything, it twitches a bit, but that could just as well have been the wind.

  However, something does happen to Jojo:

  Jojo pumps a fist. “Yeah! Two levels!”

  “Good to hear,” Frankie says. “How’s your MP?”

  Jojo looks up into the air as she checks her stats. “Uhh, looks like I’m down to 90 out of 100.”

  Frankie nods. “Alright, so taking into account your spark from earlier, we can probably assume novice ‘spells’ cost 5 MP.”

  “Guess I better get to spending it,” Jojo says. She leans down to start casting more magic, then stops herself and looks back up at Frankie. “Uhh, I’m not gonna, like, die if I run out of MP, right?”

  “What? No, of course not. You just won’t be able to use magic anymore.”

  “Okay, good.”

  It doesn’t take long for Jojo to work through the rest of her MP. After about an hour of constant casting, she sits back, wipes her brow, and sighs.

  “Well, seems like that got me to level 5,” she says. “Not bad, I think.”

  “It only gets harder from here,” Frankie tells her, “and channeling magic into a blade of grass is going to start giving diminishing returns.”

  “What else can I do, though? I doubt I can actually heal anything.”

  Frankie shrugs. “Diminishing returns are still returns. I think you’ll just have to accept that it’ll take a while.”

  Jojo sighs. “Ugh. Alright, well, what about Meditation? Any clue how to do that?”

  “You could just try meditating,” Frankie says, “but if that doesn’t work, you’ll probably have to find somebody with the skill to teach you.”

  “Figures.” Jojo takes a deep breath, then pushes herself up and brushes her pants off. “Well, it’s about to get dark. Should we head back to town?”

  Frankie nods and joins her, and the two start the trek back to the gates.

  The sun sets, and faint, blue-ish moonlight settles on the world around them. The leaves of the sparse trees rustle in a gentle breeze. Faint voices drift over the town’s walls, but everything is otherwise quiet, peaceful.

  Eventually, Frankie stops and points into the sky. “Oh, right, look.”

  “Hm?” Jojo follows her finger and looks up.

  The night sky is beautiful, scattered with stars and painted with swirls of faint magical light. Blues and purples dominate, but faint splashes of greens and golds and reds can be made out here and there. Some highlight constellations that probably hold deep meaning somewhere in the world, while others are simply there, light and color existing simply for the sake of being there.

  To the East, above the forests, floats the moon—or, perhaps, the moons. It’s clear it was once one body in the sky, but somehow, it seems to have been cleft in two. The two halves of the moon stand together, slightly offset, with a ring of debris following the cut that tore it apart. Perpendicular to the ring of rock is another ring, much cleaner, of bright blue magic, lending the whole set the air of being barely held together.

  “The stories say the blue ring is a magic circle put there by the Goddess of Magic, Alara,” Frankie explains as Jojo stares into the sky. “I guess if she didn’t do anything, it would’ve crashed down onto us and, I don’t know, killed everybody or something.”

  “Why would somebody cut the moon in half, though?”

  Frankie shrugs. “Who knows. Maybe he was evil. Maybe he was just stupid.” She puts a hand on Jojo’s shoulder and makes sure she has her attention. “It’s why you have to be careful, though.”

  “I’m not gonna do something that dumb,” Jojo protests.

  “But you could. And people would kill you for that possibility.”

  “Yeah…” Jojo frowns and kicks the dirt at her feet. “I guess you’re right. Don’t worry, I’ll keep it a secret.”

  They’re silent for the rest of the walk back to town.

  Jojo never takes her eyes off of the moon.