"What are you all doing standing around for?" Gormán said to the five of us. "We need to make our first tier of tools."
"How?" Sé asked. He rested his hand on a dagger at his side.
"Oh, that's simple. There's a standard formula for tools in any game," Gormán said with exuberance. Blánaid paid rapt attention to him as Torcán looked off towards the middle distance. "You always need rocks and sticks, but in this case you also need to make rudimentary twine, which you can get from plant fibers."
That sounded like a lot of work.
"Tier one materials to make a tier one tool. But I'm guessing it will give us the basics for what we need in order to start gathering higher tier resources to make even better tools," He said. "I'm going to chop down a tree. You should make your own tools, and join me!" The old elf walked off with his makeshift axe towards the tree line.
"I wonder..." I said as I brought up my menu and saw my empty active ability list. I didn't have anything slotted in yet, but I saw an option to create abilities from skills so I opened that up. I had a fair few options even with only being low level. The abilities available from Conjuration caught my eye.
[ Conjuration: Tier Two
Conjure the elements with the power of magic. Pull creations from other planes to do your bidding.
Ability options unlocked:
1: Basic Form, Conjure Trinket
2: Shaped Form, Conjure Tool
3+: Locked. ]
[ Conjure Tool: Tier Two Conjuration
Prerequisite: One of the following Traits(Non-Combatant, ...)
When all you have are hammers, everything looks like a nail. Create a hand tool from mana. Can conjure up to Conjuration skill tier of material.
Range: Touch
Concentration ]
Blánaid watched me with silent intensity as the rest of the party walked off to collect sticks and rocks.
"W-What?" I glanced up from my menus.
"I don't know." She shrugged. "You seem like you have a plan."
I smiled nervously at her as I added Conjure Tool to my active abilities. I had to pick a specific form before I could slot it in, but I could have multiple different variations across different slots. I grabbed Conjure Axe, Conjure Shovel, and Conjure Knife. I knew I should go through the rest of my skills and add the rest of my initial abilities, but I wanted to see what would be needed first.
"I think I got something." I held out my hand and said, "[Conjure Axe]."
Mana coalesced through my body, it felt like nothing I'd experienced before. Both burning hot yearning to be free, and icy cold laying claim to everything that it touched. It danced along my nerves as mana rushed through my arms to my hand and left through my fingers, it swirled around creating a runic mandala in the air, then ripped through reality and pulled forth an axe with a rough wooden handle and a sharpened flint head.
There was a small tendril of mana from me to the axe, it sustained the spell continuing to give the axe form.
"Son of a bitch!" Gormán shouted as his axe fell apart. "Damn useless tier one piece of crap."
I walked over to him and handed him my conjured axe. "Try this. It's tier two, and I think it will hold together well enough."
"Dude," Sé said from my side, "you gotta say something cool when you're giving out a magical item."
"What? Why would I need to make a saying of it? I'm just giving him what he needs."
The rogue made an overexaggerated dramatic pose. "It's dangerous to go alone... Take this!" He dropped back to his normal tone, "See, like that. Who cares if you don't need to say it, but we're in a game world. That means we have to lean into doing cool reincarnation stuff."
"Ignore him, lass." Gormán shook his head with disappointment. "Some people have to make a fool of themselves to cope with reality. You don't have to stoop to his level." He took a moment to appraise the axe, feeling the haft and checking the strength and sharpness. "This is nice. Let's see how well it works.
"Got any more of those?" Blánaid batted her eyelashes at me as she made puppy dog eyes at me.
"Maybe?" I wasn't sure how many I could maintain. I had the Concentration skill at tier two, so I checked my stats to see what I could do.
[ Concentration: You can sustain up to your concentration tier number of spells simultaneously. Mana cost to sustain a spell is relative to your base mana regen, tier of the spell being cast, and your concentration tier level. ]
[ Mana: 18/21
Mana Regen: 3.05 Per Minute. ]
My eyes went wide. My mana regen would be back to full in a minute. But wait, I was already concentrating on a spell. What changed if I dropped the concentration?
[ Mana: 19/21
Mana Regen: 11.55 Per Minute. ]
"HEY!" Gormán shouted as the axe vanished from his hand. "I was usin' that!"
"Sorry," I said. "I'm trying to figure out my spell mechanics."
"You just got to make a better one yourself, old man," Torcán beamed as he walked back to the clearing with his own flint headed axe. It looked stronger than the makeshift tier one axe Gormán had made.
"What? How do you have a tier two axe already?" The older world elf gapped at Torcán.
The middle age world elf beamed. "My Woodworking started at tier two."
"Lad, you have to make me one." Gormán clapped Torcán on the shoulder.
"But then you won't level your skill, make your own tools and get better while you do it." Torcán matched Gormán with a one handed grab on his shoulder. "You'll hate me now, but you'll thank me later." He patted him twice on the shoulder and then pushed past to start felling a tree.
Gormán grumbled a bit, kicked a rock, and came back pouting to me. "Can I have another axe?" He looked down at me, looking like a kicked puppy. "Please."
I couldn't help but laugh. He looked ancient, and he was coming to me with his figurative tail between his legs for a conjured magical axe. I could get used to this.
"[Conjure Axe]," I said again to cast the ability, but this time I tried to limit how much mana I gave it. Concentration said the cost was dependent on the spell tier, so what would happen if I downcast it to tier one instead of tier two.
The feeling in my body was the same. Conjure Tool was a tier two spell, and that meant it would always be tier two. "Huh," I said. "I only have enough mana to sustain one tier two spell without draining my mana."
"Lass, let me axe you a question." Gormán grinned at his bad joke, "What do you think resources are for?"
"To be used?"
"Darn right! Resources unspent may have never been collected. Spend 'em if you've got 'em."
I nodded. "[Conjure Axe]. [Conjure Axe]." My mana trickled down, and kept draining as I maintained my maximum number of concentration spells. I lost about 4 mana a minute and was down to 14 in my pool. "I can hold this for three minutes, then I'll need a break."
"Then what are we waiting for? Let's go!" Gormán took the tier two axe, held it above his head like a raider, and ran off to chop a tree down.
I hefted the second axe I'd conjured over my shoulder and nodded to Blánaid. "Want to trade off with me? My stamina is garbage, so I don't think I'll be able to go for long sprints."
She nodded and we went to make our mark on a nearby tree. I hacked away, each strike breaking out a voxel sized chunk out of the tree as the wood chips scattered in a consistent animation on the ground before vanishing. I drained my stamina pool in a minute before I was panting, and out of breath. All my physical stats were at one, and it showed. So I handed over the axe before I collapsed from exhaustion.
I took the time to look through the rest of my skills, so I could figure out the rest of my starting abilities.
I started with the foil for Conjuration magic.
[ Manipulation: Tier Two
Manipulate the elements with the power of magic, turn them into the shapes you desire, and make them conform to your will.
Ability options unlocked:
1: Extrude Element, Clean
2: Retract Element, Repair
3+: Locked. ]
It didn't seem like I could do a lot with that. But I guessed that it would get more and more powerful as I unlocked higher tiers of the skill. Not to mention, I would be able to add metamagic to lower tier spells to turn them into higher tier ones. I could see even Extrude Element being something insanely powerful at a higher tier where I could increase its range, area of effect, conditional activations, speed, or add alternative concentration conditions.
With Basic Elements, it looked like my skill with casting those is also tied to the various elemental mana channeling skills in my mana stat. There was a different skill for each of the basic elements, Earth, Fire, Water, Wind, and Wood. Focusing on a single element would mean that I could develop that one faster. While going wide would mean more options, but at the cost of each taking longer to level. I guessed I was probably going wide, but slotting in an ability required an active choice in an element. So I decided to think about what abilities I would use.
Next I looked at Divination.
[ Divination: Tier Two
Divine the secrets of the universe. You can detect and understand more than what is visible.
1: Sense, Enhanced Neural Link
2: Identify, Repository
3+: Locked. ]
Finally, I looked at the last school I could reasonably access since both Destruction and Purification were forbidden to me as a Non-Combatant and they were both at tier zero.
[ Amplification: Tier One
Amplify the effects on others, whether for weal or for woe. Bring their power to the fore, or deplete it into oblivion.
1: Add Basic Element, Static Illusion
2+: Locked. ]
Blánaid dropped the axe as she burned through her stamina pool and I finished reading through my basic options. My stamina had refilled so I traded off, and I finished felling the tree we'd both started on. It crashed down in a seemingly random direction.
"Oh no," I exclaimed as the tree crashed into another tree, and then bounced back towards us as physics decided that a tree falling on our heads would be funny.
"Move!" Blánaid shouted as she pulled me out of the way and the tree crashed to the forest floor.
We looked at the tree, to each other, and back to the tree and burst out laughing. I don't know why it was funny, but I guessed the sheer happenstance of a near death experience hit a morbid sense of amusement. "Now what?" I asked.
"I think we need to cut it up into beams to be usable," she said as she plopped her back against another tree.
I nodded, and got to work chopping the branches from the fallen tree. Once my stamina pool was once again depleted, shortly followed by my mana. I let our axe vanish while I kept sustaining Gormán's since he seemed to be a dedicated crafter.
While I waited for my mana to regeneration, I chose my final set of starting abilities:
1: Conjure Axe
2: Conjure Shovel
3: Conjure Knife
4: Extrude Wood
5: Retract Earth
6: Conjure Basic Fire
7: Conjure Shaped Water
8: Sense Monsters
9: Identify
10: Add Wind Element
Since I didn't know what I was going to need, I went for a diverse starting skillset. I hadn't had a chance to delve too deeply into the metamagic system, so I hadn't added any of it to the spells -- leaving everything at its base tier. I made sure I had at least one spell of each of the four schools I had access to, that way I could practice each of them. Though I leaned into Conjuration more than any of the others. It felt like the right call when we didn't have anything real yet, having more options to make stuff would help supplement our early game.
I looked off into the jungle thinking about how nice it would be to be able to create a simple life with magic here. Howls in the distance interrupted my chain of thought as I was starkly reminded that monsters lived in this world. We needed to hurry up and build some fortifications.