Nylah’s mother couldn't help but give her daughter a strange look. As she brought Nylah her porridge, she watched her daughter try to poke the air with her spoon.
“Sweetheart, what are you doing? You know you can't interact with your menus with any object other than your finger.” Her mother said gently not quite scolding her, but in a tone that Nylah recognized as her you are being silly tone.
“Trust me I know Mom I'm not trying to, well, sort of not I have a skill called Toolkit. It lets me store items I purchased using Catalog for some reason that's an active passive skill however, that works. But I was wondering if I could store other items in Toolkit other than ones I purchased. I'm not having much luck with it though. But from what I have discovered so far, and keep in mind I still need to do a bit more testing. Toolkit and Catalog are two halves of the same hole. Catalog is just a list of items that I can purchase using mana. Toolkit then stores those items and allows me to summon them whenever I like at the cost of a single point of mana. I can then return them for a single point of mana. I think I can purchase more than one, but I have to pay the price again. Because when I tried to summon a second shovel the one, I left in my bedroom just seemed to teleport to my hand. Though I still have the option to purchase a shovel despite already owning one, but I don't wanna waste the mana just yet to purchase another shovel to test it. If the price tag section of Catalog is correct, I can only currently purchase the cheapest items that cost 10 mana points and that is my entire mana pull at the moment.”
“Wait, you have a skill that lets you see your stats before you unlock the status sectioning your status screen!”
“Not exactly, I can only see mana. There's a little percentage next to the price section in the catalog and I have to have the catalog open to see how much mana I have. Then once I purchased the item, I still need mana to summon it. Meaning if I purchase something I have to wait until I regenerate a mana point to even use the skill and summon the item. Either way, it's not very intuitive or convenient I know there's a spell called inventory that lets you summon and store items for a mana cost, and at first, I thought this might just be a version of that but no. It seems Toolkit just appears to be a lesser version of inventory that only works with Catalog’s items.”
“Well let's have a look through it then. There might be some useful stuff in there.”
“I have, and I think it'll add more as I level it but for the time being at level 2 I can only buy basic things. Like shovels axes something called a survival knife. Uh, a utensil kit something called cans which I'm assuming is some type of food because it lists food alongside it like canned corn canned beef so on even soup. There's blankets and cots, the most expensive item is a tent for 100 MP. Um there's some weird clothes they don’t look very good though. Helmets basic pants both long and short. They only come in three colors though, brown, black, and green. There are a few more things but it's pretty basic stuff like my Lantern. There's even furniture in there but from what I understand it's more like what you'd have on a trip or March not like what you have in a house. Other than that, there isn't much to choose from so that's about it really.” Nylah sighed as she flipped through the list one more time not finding anything new but still enraptured by her new abilities.
“Now now I know you're curious about your new abilities, but you need to get ready to go meet up with the others. To practice and hopefully unlock a few more of them.” Her mother gently reminded her as she set to work cleaning off the table.
This reminder spurred Nylah into motion. She quickly gobbled down the last of her breakfast before darting off to the training yards outside of town where she found her friends already waiting.
The training grounds weren't much, a few targets if you practice weapons, and a storage shed for said practice arrows and weapons. There weren't but a few kids milling around, already playing with the practice weapons when Nylah arrived. However, it wasn't long before the rest of the kids from the ceremony showed up along with their instructor, the oldest elf in the village Gage.
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Gage had at one point been a soldier in the kingdom's army until one day he'd come home and found no one waiting for him. When he had finally tracked down his family. He’d found they had simply moved on without him. In the years that followed, he found himself bereft of meaning and as an elf, he still had a long life ahead of him. After a few years of moving around, he found himself without coin or purpose and with more debt than he was willing to admit to. He eventually joined up with a motley group of adventurers to earn the money he needed to pay off said debt. When they had settled down, he ended up more or less adopting the families that followed. While most of his old friends were gone now, he found a new purpose in looking after their grandkids and the village they founded.
As such he'd only picked up the teacher class in the past few years and, well, while he wasn't the highest level teacher in the village his weapons master class made him perfect for teaching the basics of classes, skills, and weapons to the kids.
He had paired the kids off into teams of two which there unfortunately wasn't enough for but they were close enough. He'd have to spar with one of the kids himself, but eh, it was not a big deal. But since there was only seven kids this year his choices in pairings weren't exactly the best. Nylah and a boy named Gregor were the hardest to place Gregor was a orc.
Orcs were tricky when it came to mixing with other races the orc part of them was always dominant. Meaning if you had orc in your blood it would always be there no matter how muddled it got if anyone had kids with true orcs they would be a true orc or an orc. True orcs were the Dumber bigger cousins to the orc. If you diluted the blood even more by mixing it with another race, usually humans you got half orcs, and in the case of elf’s high orcs, or in the case of the dwarf's dweller orcs. The list of subspecies went on and on. Basically, if there was an acknowledged race there was an orc sub species associated with it.
Nylah on the other hand was well there was no real good term for what she was. The least offensive term he'd ever heard was mixed multi racial. Though most people just referred to them as mutts they were usually the mixing of two or more of the mixed races. Problem was those usually had a harder time producing offspring of their own. That was why they never went on to produce enough of them to start up their own races. Nylah’s mother was a mix of half dwarf and half elf and since humans seem to have the easiest time mixing with the other races two half human races reproducing was not an uncommon occurrence. Her father on the other hand was a rare mix being half orc and half dragon kin. This meant Nylah was a unique mix of traits and features. It also meant she was unfortunately an only child despite how hard her parents had been trying to have more kids. Gage had to admit to himself if they succeeded even half as often as they had tried, she’d likely have a few dozen siblings running around and one of them was enough trouble as it is.
She was likely held together by a mix of orc dominant genes and humans near infamous ability to breed with just about anything even some things they really shouldn't have. Many scholars equating that very thing to the more humanoid and intelligent monster races.
She was a tiny thing most didn't bother looking close enough would mistake her for a child if not for her abundance of assets. She lacked the beard of the dwarfs but had enough of their stocky build that he'd almost feel sorry for anyone who thought they could knock her over. She had the pointy ears common with most elven adjacent’s. Her skin color had the faintest hints of the orc’s green tones but if you ever got her to open her mouth her orc heritage became a lot easier to spot. While she didn't have the tusks most orcs and high orcs had she had the very large pronounced canines they were known for. She had spines and spikes poking through her skin on various points on her body though she shed them often. More than once when she had gotten hurt scales had worked their way out from underneath the wound to seal it.
Orcs and dragon kin both had exceptional healing capabilities and Gage had watched her father regrow enough limbs to know just how powerful mixing that blood could be. The worse you hurt the girl the more spiked and armored she became only to shed it over the following weeks. She lacked the long powerful and dexterous tales of her more draconic heritage. Instead, she had a short stumpy tail only a bit longer than what you'd find on a cobalt. Still, it was long enough to reach the floor.
Though the most striking feature of the girl wasn't her long black hair streaked with almost bluish green discolorations. Or the fact that she'd likely be able to walk off being punted through a wall by someone nearly three times her size, no it was her eyes.
Her right one was a vibrant blue streaked with flakes of red and gold while her left was a vivid emerald green with much the same discoloration as her first. Her irises were an odd mix of the cat like pupils the elves were known for and the thin reptilian slits of Dragon Kin. But what was the most surprising of it was just how expressive the eyes were. True she had many of the characteristics and tells you'd find on the dragon kin with their tail or an elf with their twitching ears. But he had never seen a race they could say so much with just their eyes. In a rage, they would shrink to a thin slit enjoy they swell up to be almost ridiculously big. In the dark, they could see things even his elvin heritage struggled with and almost seemed to glow like a faint ember.
He sighed and figured most wouldn't notice so many details, but his skills made him a bit odd and being a level 49 painter didn't help. That said he’d have to see if he couldn’t bribe her into letting him make a painting with her friends for the town hall. Ha he’d put good gold on them being something special in the future and bragging about his students was always fun.
In the end, he ended up having to pair off the poor girl with Gregor who was quite literally three times her size. He just hoped he was right about her ability to survive being punted through a wall by someone of Gregory's size. She’d need that durability if she actually took a hit from the boy.
