Of Earth and Wind (Water, too!)

As John tapped the quest and the completion window came up, a shock ran through his head. It felt as if someone had poured ice water directly onto his brain. The periodic table, atomic structures, electron valence shells, all the information which would have comprised years of chemistry education was carved into his brain in an instant.

As quickly as the rush of sensations had come, most of it left, though a feeling of brain freeze remained. John blinked to clear his eyes, his vision blurry and filled with splotches of color. He noted a new progress bar out of the corner of his eye. A discreet tap provided the information that his powers were receiving significant changes and would be unavailable for some time.

’Whew. Hope it won’t be that wonky all the time.’

History was generally a very interesting subject to John, and one in which he would have usually diligently paid attention, but today he struggled just to keep up the appearance of following along. He’d been stripped of his powers for the majority of the class, and the wait for them to return had been driving him mad.

’It's not a big deal, John, come on. You woke up with magic powers, day one patches are an easy tradeoff.’ He tapped his feet rapidly, then he shifted in his seat and checked the clock on the wall.

’Also, games update… that takes time. This is probably normal.’

Eh, hopefully not.

’Wha-’

John’s reaction was cut off as his vision blurred for a moment.

When it came back, he noticed that he seemed to have a much more detailed HUD now, with his health and mana bars locked to the top left of his vision; A small, white plus sign labeled “add to party” floated below them. Buttons for his inventory and character sheet were locked to the top right. Joining those were also tabs for notifications, settings, and a codex. A purple bar that John determined measured experience ran across the bottom of his vision.

The settings and codex were both grayed out, but there was a red pip in the corner of the notifications icon. Anything John wasn’t trying to focus on seemed to fade away after a few seconds, freeing up his peripheral vision.

'Huh. Very cool.’

John didn’t have time to fully explore all the changes his update had brought before the bell rang, signaling the end of history. He shelved his curiosity until he could leave the room. John had never managed to shake the feeling that Mrs. Wentworth was eyeing him extra closely today, and he wanted to get out of her sight as fast as possible.

The Gamer swore he could feel her eyes boring through his skull as he hastily departed the room, but he succeeded in his escape nonetheless. He couldn’t think of any history assignments he might have missed over the break that she’d want to hound him for.

John did, eventually, perk up though, realizing his next class was art. Art was something John was naturally gifted at, which helped his opinion of the class of course, but what made it such a highlight of each day was the teacher, June Summers. She was undoubtedly the hottest teacher at the school, and, in John’s opinion, must have been one of the most attractive women in the world. She had perfect curves from top to bottom, and was never shy about showing off.

John snapped himself out of his daydreaming about his art teacher and started checking his notifications as he walked to the art room. The Gamer opened his inventory to search for his quest reward, tapping on it and being rewarded with two nested windows.

’Hmm… I guess that’s a part of alchemy… suppose it must just be a starting point,’ The Gamer pondered, reading through the information he had been presented with. ’Probably some interesting stuff to do with this.

’It’s certainly something though. The cost is a little high, but I guess it is level one.

’What substances count as “infused with magic” as well? You wouldn’t happen to have a spreadsheet somewhere lying around that might clarify, would you, Mrs. Voice in my head?’

The silence was his only answer.

’Yeah… that was probably wishful thinking.’

The gem itself was odd, a strange spherical shape, with crystalline reds, blues, and greens swirled together. John couldn’t see any separation where one ended and the other began, as if they were all the same stone. It was almost confusing to parse visually. A single band of metal wrapped around the middle. Shaking his head, John returned the thing to his inventory and moved on.

As he continued on his way to class, John took note that he also had a “common” skill gem for [Observe] in his inventory, though he wasn’t quite sure what it did. This one was a simple gray crystal, though it had been carved to look like an eye, with a pupil of silver-steel embedded in the center.

Quickly checking the corridor around him and finding it empty for the moment, John reasoned he was well enough alone to try a quick test of his new skill. He held up a hand, guarded in front of him. The Gamer realized that he already had the inherent knowledge about how to draw his mana out for the spell, as if the practice of doing it a few times was already in his brain.

’I guess maybe that’s what unlocking it did? Showed me how?’

As he willed [Reshape Matter] into action, he could feel a fuzzy sensation in his palm, almost like static - the gathering of mana he assumed. Inspection revealed no external change.

’Yeah… it's almost like I’ve done this before.’

He held a single finger up in front of himself.

’Tingly. Not in a bad way though…’

As John finished the skill’s cast, he realized that there were dozens of elements around him. He was suddenly aware of the flowing of nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, and so many other gasses in the air around him. The previously consumed chemistry material came back to him, and John realized that air was a mixture, not a pure substance.

The Gamer decided to settle on oxygen as a test for now, since it seemed a key enough component to deal with. John could feel the mana between the particles in the air now. He flexed his finger and willed a brief swirl of air to whirl around it.

The Gamer felt a shot of pure adrenaline rush through him as the mana left his finger. It was little more than a small breeze around his finger, but, to John, this was exhilarating. There was something so special to him about something even so simple.

’It’s more real, feeling it like that…’

John smiled, but cut the spell off as quickly as he’d started it. Despite his whimsy, he knew he had other things to be doing. He sighed with contentment, and moved on to further notifications.

’Talent point?’ John wondered to himself. ’And, uh, a focus? Like wizard gear?’

As John was opening his inventory to find his quest reward item, he arrived at the art room. As he walked to the door, a pretty Korean girl came storming out, nearly bowling him over as she did so. She paid him no heed and John was mostly too distracted to care, but he threw an [Observe] at her as she passed.

’Hurry much? Sheesh! Watch where you’re going,’ John reasoned. ’I’ll take that XP though.’

John left the results of his [Observe] off to the side for the time being, distracted by June Summers sauntering about the room. She was always stunning, but today she was exceedingly so. The small black dress she was wearing was barely long enough to be considered decent, straining around her considerable assets, front and back. It rode up in a very lewd manner every time she bent slightly to pick something up around the room.

She was setting up sculpting stations for what John assumed was some kind of project with clay. He took a seat and reopened his notifications, keeping half of his vision filled with June as she began distributing clay and explaining their freeform sculpting goals.

June was John’s favorite teacher, and not just because of her unbelievable body; she was probably the only teacher on campus that he genuinely thought was always looking out for him, at least in some way. She was full of energy about her subject as well, and few other teachers matched such enthusiasm. June was the young kind of teacher who must have been just out of university, insisting on being called by her first name rather than by any title. Her natural charisma was mesmerizing to all.

As June came by his desk, she set down a portion of clay and gave him a curious look, then smiled. He sheepishly tried to return her smile, shrinking in his seat.

She winked and walked away. June was such an enigma to John; he never could read her. The Gamer threw an [Observe] at her as well, adding it to the list of many things he had to read. John decided to try and figure out what had happened with his powers first.. He did his best to try and sculpt while he did so, for June’s sake.

Of all of the things John had received since his last class, the Magic Focus was perhaps the only one that John really seemed to fully understand. It seemed a simple enough item. Similar to the wizard item from Dungeons and Dragons, the focus helped increase John’s ability to cast. Useful, if plain, The Gamer figured.

As the description said, it looked to be a model of an atom, with pieces of metal connecting brightly colored dots representing the different particles. John was pretty sure it was an oxygen atom, which made him smile a bit. After he’d read about what it was, he had tried discreetly to mess with equipping the thing. He was sure he looked really goofy hunched over his bag, pretending that he hadn’t just materialized a model atom from nowhere.

The focus didn’t appear tremendously practical at first, since it seemed like John would either have to carry it around the entire time he wanted it or waste time digging it from his inventory and equipping it each time. Thinking about common systems in games though, The Gamer had scoured his equipment page for a time before discovering that he had two sets of “weapon slots.”

He had then set his focus in the inactive set and practiced swapping back and forth for a bit - something he could do with a thought. While convenient, the ten max mana he gained started empty, so there was no potential cheese in equipping and unequipping it. At least it seemed as though nobody noticed when his magic focus accidentally appeared on the desk next to him.

He was more careful after the first time.

Following his reading on his powers, John had checked out his two [Observe] results. Both were surprising, but in different ways. The first terrified him a bit.

Apparently the girl who had fled the room was another of his quest objectives. John wondered somewhat if it was only coincidence that all these magically gifted students were hot women, inexplicably in his daily path already, or if something further was afoot. He wasn’t going to complain about cute girls being on a crash course with him though.

The results were somewhat worrying, being that she was even more powerful than the student council president had been, but, for the sake of what little mental energy he had left, he tried not to think about it too much. Despite the magic he now had, John knew he’d always been far more outmatched than he’d ever imagined.

’It’s fine, John,’ he thought, reassuring himself. ’Just don’t go getting anyone mad and you’ll be fine. Keep your head down and be a nobody, you’re good at that!’

John smiled wryly and moved on.

[Observe] had leveled up between the two casts, so he had a more detailed relationship value for June. The results of the said [Observe] would have been insane to John the previous day, but, considering the events of the rest of his morning, calling basically anything unbelievable anymore was a bit of a laughable concept. Besides, he was certainly willing to take a W.

The Gamer didn’t quite know the max scale of the Relationship values, but June Summers’ score was surely the highest he’d seen, aside from his mother’s. She really did like him! She’d also been eyeing him a lot today, and he couldn’t quite figure out why. On one hand, he quite enjoyed having her eyes on him as much as his eyes were usually on her, but, on the other, it was starting to make him a little worried that he’d accidentally unequipped his pants or something.

The final thing John had done with the first half of his art class was to figure out what the Talent Point he’d gotten actually did. By tapping on the place where the point had appeared on his character sheet, The Gamer had opened up a screen with a menu of slots and skills.

It seemed that he could essentially “socket” his skill gems into a set of slots he had. The Gamer had two for now, but he had no idea what had generated that number. Doing so allowed him to access skill upgrades for each ability he had, which is how he could make use of his Talent Points.

Notably, Gamer’s Body and Gamer’s Spirit had their own dedicated slots, but both were grayed out with a lock symbol over them.

He had experimented by slotting his [Observe] gem into one of the slots, and was rewarded with a list of upgrades, which offered things that John was sure were useful, but which he had no idea how to effectively take advantage of.

’How much protection do I actually need to get through though?’ he wondered. ’Do I actually care about any of this yet?’

Struck with the worry that he would waste his point, John had elected to leave well enough alone and had just closed his skill page after socketting his [Reshape Matter] skill into the other free space.

For the second half of the class, John had realized that he could try and sneak in some power leveling while sculpting. Rather than just using his hands to sculpt, he could supplement his normal skills with [Reshape Matter] to drastically improve the detail. He’d been redlining his mana since then while working on a sculpture that was somewhere between June and Ela.

John had been trying to mix his favorite traits from both, but he just couldn’t make it work. It wasn’t easy, even with magic, to make the clay form exactly how he wanted. He was clumsy and imprecise despite the new tool he had. The Gamer supposed both his artistic and magical skills needed some practice on realism - he’d always been better at painting anyway.

Regardless of his artistic success, or lack thereof, he was quite pleased with the free time to try and gain a level on his skills. It was also simply cathartic to set aside the business of the day and do something relaxing like art. Trading zoned-out repetition for xp growth was nothing if not The Gamer’s zone.

“The grind really never stops.” John chuckled to himself as the bell for lunch began to ring. He closed his windows, moving to store his sculpture on a rack for the following day. Once he was done, John packed up his things and prepared to leave, one of the only members of his class to clean up before departure.

As he was leaving, he was stopped by his art teacher.

“Happy belated birthday,” she said with a grin.

John flushed.

“Oh... Umm… Thank you,” he replied, quieter than he’d meant. “Uh. Have a nice day, J-June.”

“You too, John.” His teacher smiled, leaning back on the desk behind her.

He smiled back at her once more, then left the art room.