Zeroth Moment: My Cheat Skill Is Stupid, So I'll Just Ignore It

Topher had not slept in three days.

He had, he thought, prepared to tackle the mage spellbook very sensibly; he rested well, hydrated thoroughly, arranged for his meals to be delivered to his room, and summoned his Ledger to take copious notes on whatever brand of brain-twisting esotericism this particular tome would contain. After some light stretching, he sat down, opened the book to the first page, and lost his shit.

The book was almost insultingly straightforward. There wasn't even a title page or an introduction; page one of the book was literally just "Mage Shield" followed by the two runes required to cast it, the necessary visualization (described in both words and pictures!) and a brief note regarding how it cost nothing to cast, but rather drained MP proportionally to the force negated when absorbing an attack. That was it. There were no explanations of any kind, no theoretical foundations, not even an acknowledgement of the nature of the runes' relationships to each other (or that there were any other runes at all beyond those mentioned in that specific spell, for that matter). It was literally Beginner Magic For Dummies, and Topher was viscerally torn between A) feeling indignant that Varissian apparently thought that this was the main gear of his intellectual speed, B) feeling ecstatic that he finally had something useful instead of a confusing morass of epistemologically indistinguishable bullshit, and C) feeling depressed that B essentially proved A. Page two was "Mage Light" rendered in equally bald terms, except that it listed the Ehn -> Vahraj substitution without even mentioning Dahf, simply noting that this would make the light brighter but cost 1 MP instead of 0. It explained absolutely nothing of the logic or reason, nor did it even imply such things existed; it was the magical equivalent of instructions to pour water out of a boot written on the heel. And it continued, in exactly this fashion, for more than ninety thick, weighty pages; Topher was entranced.

Within an hour, he had managed to cast both Mage Hand and the long-coveted Magic Dart; they appeared in the expected fashion amongst his skill list with neither ceremony nor difficulty (although his Magic Dart was so pathetic that it couldn't even destroy the clay bottle he tested it out on). He gave Minor Illusion a try, failed miserably, and skipped it; screw illusions anyway, who even uses those.

After the initial five spells, things began to get more complicated; spells began taking up multiple pages, cautionary sidebars began warning that miscasting this spell or that might cause you to inconveniently explode, and so on. There were some spells Topher could tell at a glance he'd never be able to cast -- not because they were too difficult, but because they bore headers that unambiguously specified "this spell can only be cast by possessors of the so-and-so Class". Not that he minded; most of those looked boring, dangerous, or both, like the Heretic-only Spirit Binding spell or the Shaman-only Hex Catcher spell. Additionally, many of the spells beyond the first ten or so of the book listed explicit Level requirements, none of which Topher met and wouldn't anytime soon (Level 6 was quite a lot compared to Level 1, but not nearly so much compared to Level 35). Higher-Level spells also typically had such complex requirements and specifications that the vast majority of them ran to five pages or more -- the entire back half of the book was taken up by only a small number of higher-Level spells. Eventually, he confined his efforts entirely to the first ten pages; that left him Minor Illusion, which he had no plans whatsoever to learn, and five more spells with with either no Level requirement or a requirement of Level 5 or higher: Flame Jet (which he already knew), Frost Ray, Mending, Entangle, and Sleep.

Topher attempted to learn Sleep first (intending to cast it on himself more than anything else), but was disappointed beyond words to discover that although the spell was very easy to understand and attempt, casting it did nothing; it must be one of the ones the Clerk Class can't cast, like Cure Wounds, he thought to himself in despair. He managed Frost Ray within a few attempts, however, which made him feel a little better; not that it was of terribly great utility, since it was so weak at Rank F that the only thing he could really use it for was chilling a mug of beer. Mending, on the other hand, ruined him entirely.

Mending was even more complicated than Minor Illusion, with an eight-rune chant (in two parts!), a three-dimensional visualization (plus a time component!), and nearly two pages of charts and legalese explaining which runes to use for what sorts of items needing repair; the logic then divided even further based on the type of damage the item had suffered, with "cracks" being repaired with different runes than "burns" or "tears". Unfortunately, it was sufficiently useful that Topher still felt like it was important enough to learn; he made a small rip in one end of the corner of his blanket, then cleared his mind and held his hand over the tear. "Oiz Moxix Viak Teijuc," he intoned, visualizing the two halves rejoining. "Thuum Xat Zu Xegar." Naturally, nothing happened, and it took Topher several hours of tweaking his rune selections and his visualizations before he even got one stitch to repair itself; worse, even that progress cost him 1 MP. Still, even the barest hint of confirmation that the spell was at least castable by his Class made him redouble his efforts, and each failure seemed to be just that much closer to a successful casting; he quickly got stuck in a loop of just one more attempt, then I'll take a break and did not even notice when dawn came and went.

His first successful casting of Mending happened sometime around noon; he immediately tore the blanket again and started working to replicate his success, noting with a strange mix of satisfaction and frustration that the time of day also affected the casting in much the same way as it did with Mage Light. It took him another three hours to reliably be able to cast Mending on his blanket, but only for rips or tears; he then promptly set it on fire with Flame Jet (a decision which might have been somewhat excusable due to his current state of sleep-deprived hyperfocus), put it out, and set about trying to figure out how to mend that particular sort of damage. The spell was the first he'd seen that utilized High Runes and Grand Runes in its basic castings (rather than as extensions or substitutions), so it was perhaps inevitable that he'd get stuck on them; his mind was full of half-formed loops of geometry, inferences about looping recursive curves in fractal spaces, and all sorts of things Topher normally considered to be deeply and obnoxiously frivolous. He managed to un-singe his blanket, did it again to confirm a few hypotheses about experimental conditions, then moved on to trying to repair the clay bottle his Magic Dart had cracked; this one was particularly exciting because the target item had both shearing and thermal damage from the same simultaneous source, so repairing them would require a linear regression mapped onto the isomorphic time-series rune path of the visualization. He accomplished it around sunset on the third day, smiled triumphantly, and blacked out almost instantly.

He awoke to a rude banging on the door an unknown period of time later; Slaugh wanted to trade him three coppers to heat his bathwater, since apparently Varissian wasn't accepting requests on his honeymoon. Crawling in agony to his bed from the floor, Topher guzzled an entire container of water and shouted for Slaugh to "wait a goddamn minute, Christ" while he attempted to put the pieces of his skeleton back together. After obliging the orc's request, he staggered back to his bed and slept for another unknown stretch of black time; there were two uneaten meals outside his door (and he suspected Slaugh had stolen a third). He absent-mindedly blasted an ice-cold bowl of stew with a Flame Jet to kill off as much bacteria as he could manage (not that he had any confirmation bacteria existed in this world, but why risk it?) and then shoveled it blindly into his mouth as he read more about Mending. His Ledger was now half-full of crazy-looking loops and graphs; he was on the verge of something interesting, but it was still inchoate and half-formed. He puttered about his room for another day, alternately damaging and repairing his various possessions in various ways; he even attempted to hurt himself to see if he could use Mending to cover for his inability to cast Cure Wounds, which would have been an exceedingly obvious sign that he wasn't thinking clearly if he'd been thinking clearly enough to notice it. Finally, Gropp appeared and had a brief talk with Topher about "the banging and mumbling at all hours of the night upsetting everybody", which penetrated through his rune-addled haze enough for him to decide that he needed a break. He bathed, ate another meal, and tried to sleep, but it was no use; his sleep schedule was a crazed jumble of broken time, and he was stuffed to the brim with buzzing, curious ideas about math, of all things, which unnerved him and made sleep even more impossible. Eventually, he decided to go for a walk.

He staggered around the town for an hour or two, constantly astounded by how the motion of squirrels followed a sine wave as properly described by the derivatives of gravity over the time-series of a parabolic hop; he watched birds flutter through the air and had to stop himself from calculating the number of wing-beats required to maintain airspeeds. He was seriously contempating trying out Frost Ray on a chicken if he could get away with it when a gruff voice sounded out behind him, "Ain't nobody ever told you not to stand in the road? A fellow could get run over. Which, I'm told, is an even less pleasant experience than falling from a moving wagon."

Topher turned, and a huge smile spread across his face at the sight of a black-bearded dwarf wearing dark goggles. "Tok!" He ran forward, then stopped himself, unsure if he had been going to hug the dwarf and wondering why he had been going to do that, then dealing with some complicated intrapersonal feelings about the whole prospective sequence of events. Instead, he waved, a little awkwardly. "You've, uh, made it back this way already, huh?"

The dwarf nodded; Topher could detect a small smile on his bearded face. "Been a few months, like I said. Good to see you're still kicking."

"I'm Level 6, now; unlocked my Class, too." Topher had to resist the urge to puff his chest out and wondered crazily what was wrong with him. Was I expecting a pat on the head? I must be worse off than I thought. He crossed his arms, trying to look less insane. "Joined the Adventurer's Guild, too."

"Yeah?" The dwarf turned sideways in his seat and hopped down, soothing his horse and turning to examine Topher a little more critically. "What Class did ya end up with?"

"Clerk," answered Topher ruefully, shaking his head. "It's bad, but it could have been worse. Looks like I can cast low-level Mage and Priest spells, but only some of each; can't cast Sleep or Cure Wounds, and probably a few others I haven't found yet. I've been spending most of the last few months just trying to earn enough to buy beginner spellbooks and prayer scrolls."

Tok snorted. "Shoulda mentioned it. I had a couple in my stock I coulda given to you for ten gold; nobody buys that beginner stuff in Wanbourne and points distant."

Topher suppressed a desire to scream. "Yeah, well, you helped me out enough; I didn't want to make you think I was completely pathetic and incapable of doing stuff on my own." He shrugged, trying to hide his frustration behind a veneer of serenity. "Besides, I learned a lot going through all the stuff I did trying to make gold; to be honest, if I'd strutted out there with a head full of spells thinking I was hot shit on the first day, I almost certainly would have gotten killed fighting my first goblin."

"They do tend to surprise folks at first," the dwarf agreed. He looked Topher up and down, chewing on his beard. "What's next for you?"

Topher contemplated the question; it wasn't something he'd given a ton of thought to, but he was surprised to discover he actually did have an answer. "I'm going to finish learning all the spells I can at my current level, then clear out the local goblin camp; after that... well, I guess I'll have to move on. I'll out-Level this place pretty soon."

Tok cocked his head. "Got a plan?"

"A plan? Me?" Topher laughed and shook his head. "You must have me confused with somebody else. I'm the guy who wakes up in the back of wagons with no memory, remember?"

The dwarf chuckled. "No, I think I had it right. When I gave a Priest's Robe to a Level 2 two months ago, I didn't exactly expect I'd find 'em tripling their level in two months and learning spells that most folks take years to master... but I had a feeling." He hopped back up onto his wagon, rummaged around in a crate for a few moments, and came back with a short scroll that he tossed down to Topher. "Think you can manage this one?"

Taken aback, Topher unrolled the scroll to reveal a spell formulation for Create Food And Drink -- a Priest spell, by the looks of it. "Hmm. I'll try, I guess?"

Tok nodded. "I got another leg to Strathmore, but I'll be back in two weeks. I got the Forage Skill, bein' a Frontier Merchant and all, but it's not exactly pleasant to use; a Priest who could save me digging around in a forest for roots would be a good traveling companion." He paused, looking a little hesitant. "If you want, that is."

Topher's mouth dropped open. "Seriously? Me?" His mind whirled; he was shocked, he was excited, he was afraid, he was feeling a lot of feelings. "I, um... I think that'd be good. If everything works out, I guess."

Tok nodded. "Well, alright then. Be seeing you, Topher." He gave the reins a flick, and the horse plodded on, leaving Topher behind in the street, mouth agape. Aw, fuck, Topher realized, snapping his mouth shut and scowling. Apparently I gave myself a Quest.