“Hey dad,” Roge grumbled, slipping his way past the larger [Dragonkin] to sit at a nearby table. The eating area of the inn was a bit busier than normal that night, though it wasn’t that noisy for him to miss his father’s words.

  “You’ve been avoiding me, Roge. Want to tell me why?” Sitting down at the chair opposite, Roge was practically the spitting image of his father, though the dark brown scale color set them apart by a lot for the reptilian man. Wearing the usual tan and brown shirt and pants combo made it even stranger, Roge having to look at his father’s muzzle to not get sidetracked.

  “I’d rather not if I’m being honest.” He bit back his next comment, feeling a sense of disappointment for living in his parents’ inn wash through him. “Have I been missing anything? Is rent due?”

  “No…” His dad leaned back at that, a suspicious look crossing his face. “Unless you count not buying out all of my drinks every night.”

  “Oh…” Roge mumbled, Fred apparently having missed that detail in his explanations. “Just haven’t been feeling up-“

  “Roge. Look at me.” He hadn’t even noticed he’d started looking off to the side, suddenly looking at his dad’s concerned face. Something in his own look must have confirmed something for the older dragon as he let out a sigh, brown particles of magic coming from his maw. “When did you get the class?”

  “Huh? What are you-”

  “I know you got a Draconic class. What is it?”

  This made Roge pause some more, having not expected for that to be the conclusion his father jumped to. “[Draconic Sorcerer].” ‘Honestly will put off the tougher question for later…’

  His dad let out a massive sigh at that, rubbing his eyes in a stressed and angry motion. “How long?”

  “Got it today, actually.”

  “Of all of the warnings I’ve given you…” His father seemed to cut himself off at that, a deep breath relaxing the stiffness in his shoulders. “You sure you want to go down this route? You can still disable it when you get it to rank ten.” The worry and kindness in his father’s eyes made him pause, Roge thinking over what the problem could be before deciding he didn’t have enough information.

  “Once I get it to rank ten… we’ll see,” he muttered, looking away from his dad to look at the people happily eating and drinking at the other tables. “It’s not something I’m willing to give up willy nilly.”

  “Okay son,” his dad sighed, getting up and patting him on the shoulder. “Your minder knows I assume?” His dad looked over the chipped scales on Roge’s face, the smaller dragon feeling uncomfortable at the scrutiny.

  “He seemed to freak out more over the Sorcerer part. Thought I rewrote my [Status] as the skill it gave had to be a spell, in his words.”

  “Well, considering I’ve never heard of it either…” His father once again patted his shoulder, moving off towards the kitchen door. “Just be careful.”

  “I will, dad,” Roge stated quietly, tears burning in his eyes as he tried not to think of how similar this father was to the previous. ‘But not the same…’

  ~~~

  The rest of the night went slowly for Roge, moving up to his room after eating a somewhat bland meal. ‘Dad really needs a cooking class…’ After brushing off that errant thought, he moved to his desk, tapping away at the wood as he looked over the various items. The desk wasn’t that big, but his ‘previous’ self had apparently been trying to stockpile a literal hoard of junk, the shelves reaching up to the ceiling. Half finished wooden figurines, cloth badly stitched together, and many other crafting materials lined the wooden shelves, some so cramped he could barely figure out what some things were. His eyes snagged on a set of paints, though.

  ‘He tried so many ways to get other classes.’ He knew it to be fruitless, though. He’d never had any *normal* creative skill, whether that be in art or other matters. The only creative skill he had was in his programming. ‘And now I can program objects…’ Pulling down the small jar of red paint, he pulled up the item description, frowning at how much information he received.

  He cocked his head to the side at that, confused as to how he could have a ‘specialty’ that was that broad. ‘Maybe other people get more descriptive info…?’ Looking back at the abilities the paint had, Roge smiled at the familiar Toxic one, understanding that drinking paint was a bad idea. The one he really wanted, though, was the Rank 1 [Pigment], focusing on it intently with no more information forthcoming.

  Shrugging his shoulder, and jostling his wings and bruised hip as he did, he tried pulling out the [Pigment] ability first, struggling for a moment to get in the right mindset before the coin immediately popped out. Before he could look at its description, the harm to the red paint startled him, as glowing black cracks spread through the liquid paint. Thankfully, he’d placed it on the table first, as he had no desire to touch the destructive energy, the paint condensing and quickly turning to ash.

  “Well that’s helpful,” he sarcastically muttered to himself, deciding to get rid of it in the laziest way possible by putting it in his inventory. Where, of course, the ash landed in what he was starting to think of as his hoard, the jar appearing relatively clean in his normal inventory.

  He thunked his head against the table at that, frustrated that his [Inspect] couldn’t get anything further out of it. ‘Makes sense I guess…’ he grumbled to himself, trying to focus more on the coin he still had in his hand. This one had what looked to be a brush on its face, the entire coin the exact shade of red the paint was, down to its opacity. Instead of looking like some kind of crystal, it more looked like someone took the paint he’d used and filled a coin mold with it.

  Simple enough to understand, or so Roge thought. ‘Put it in another object and it changes the color. Don’t know why it couldn’t just say that.’ Putting the coin into his inventory, he pulled down the rest of the paints, finding he had access to the primary colors, red, yellow, and blue, as well as black and white. From the palette stuffed behind them full of randomly mixed paints, Roge assumed that any color could be made by mixing the colors he had. ‘Could just breed the plants together to make other colors…’

  Pulling out the [Pigment] coin from all of the paints took him some time, his emotions occasionally coming in and ruining his focus. ‘Does dad suspect I don’t remember anything…?’ Pushing those thoughts off to the side wasn’t healthy, or at least he assumed so, but he needed to concentrate if he wanted the next day’s experiment to go well.

  Once he was done with the paints themselves, depositing the jars of ash into his inventory to clean them, he grabbed the palette itself, inspecting that to see what he could get off of it.

  Rubbing his head was going to become a regular thing for the dragon, he just knew it. ‘Need to stop by a library before work tomorrow or something…’ He didn’t know what a negative rank did to an object, as it clearly didn’t make the object more fragile when he tried to bend it. Leaving the mystery for another time, he tried this time to pull the [Color] ability out, leaving his claw and desk littered with ash.

  ‘Less helpful.’ This coin he decided to try to meditate upon, as that couldn’t be all there was to it. It had what looked to be a glob of paint, though this coin looked even stranger than the others. The main part of the coin was black, so black he was reminded of the ‘darkest black paint’ he’d heard about somewhere online. A black so dark that practically no light was reflected off of it. This coin was even stranger, Roge suspecting it reflect *no* light at all, as it looked practically one dimensional.

  The center design of the coin looked like a splotch of white paint, like someone took a dollop of the stuff and gently smacked it into the coin. Even that looked odd, however, like the white *reflected* all light into its purest form. With the fading sunlight, the white seemed to grow dim as well, Roge squinting his eyes as he focused on that thought. ‘It’s… affected by things?’ Looking at the black color, he shook his head, an idea he had on how it might work being confirmed when two popups showed up, followed quickly by a third.

  Cocking his head to the side, Roge tried to puzzle the confusing text box out. The contents made sense, as apparently he’d tried to get his [Inspect] skill to display things that it couldn’t translate. He still had the idea that had prompted the boxes, as he suspected the abilities in front of the [Color] Ability, [A1] and [A2], would determine its effect, [Ao]. It’s why the paint had [Color], [Drying], [Pigment] in that order. As soon as he’d seen that, it quickly reminded him of coding as he looked at the coin’s description. Name of the function followed by two variables that affect what the function would spit out. Thus binding them together. In the paint’s case, drying would cause the [Pigment] ability to activate, thus changing the color of a painting. It was a bit convoluted, but it made sense.

  But *why* whatever system ran the boxes *let* him put incompatible information in the [Inspect] box was another story. If something is going to cause an error, just hide it behind the [Unknown] tag he’d seen. Or don’t display it at all. Giving him access to how the box literally *crashed* made no sense.

  Pulling up the description for the coin once again, the same error occurred in the Uses category, though this time it didn’t show the second message. ‘This just makes me itch to rewrite this thing. You can’t have an error like that go out to the public.’ Shoving the coin into his inventory, Roge flopped back on his bed as his emotions stewed, too angry to go to sleep in that moment.

  ~~~

  After rubbing his eyes and trying to calm down, Roge gave up and went downstairs and out the back door, deciding some fresh air might help clear his head. The back garden of his family’s inn was more of a practical space than a backyard, the magical streetlights shining a dull orange glow over the picnic tables and fountain. It was more expensive to eat out in the garden, but you got a better view of not only the surroundings, but the city itself.

  With the sun having just set and still illuminating the west, Roge could get a good view of everything by leaning on the railing at the end of the garden. Since his dad’s inn was parked right on a hill at the edge of the city, anyone sitting there could look over and see practically everything. The clean cut cobble streets criss-crossing the area. Various buildings of stone and wood with multicolored signs hanging from some. But the most eye catching thing was the bay that all of those buildings and roads led to.

  The water hadn’t been there before the storm, Roge idly wondering why it had decided to divert a whole river to make one. The locals called it ‘The Wandering Bay’, whatever that meant. It was a beautiful sight for the dragon, at the very least, making him think of how big the world still was, even though he only occupied a small portion of it.

  The two buildings that stood out from the rest were his most and least favorite places in the city, his eyes drawn right to the sweeping towers of the local Church chapter. It was where he apparently had been forced to go to school when he was younger, glad he didn’t have access to those memories. With how Paul acted, he was scared of the person the storm had made up for his own ‘past’. Paul hadn’t been… that bad before, maybe a bit too full of himself. But that’s what Roge had liked about the gym nut, always working hard to look his best. ‘Even when he left me he looked so good…’

  With eyes once again burning with tears, he moved them to the other large building in his city. That one was more wide than it was tall, taking up a large footprint right next to the main square. He couldn’t see much with the fading lights and distance, but he knew the local Adventurer’s League had many training halls and fields to train up the combatants to fight the monsters in the wilds and dungeons. It was like a true RPG town, in that regard. Excitement always rushed through him when he looked at that building. ‘Maybe someday I could join. Go on adventures of my own. See more places.’ His mind stuttered when he tried to think of himself fighting, knowing he had no thirst for that part of adventuring. ‘Probably would need bodyguards…’

  With that slightly sour thought, he continued to look over the town as he tried to find some calm. The chilly air was just right for him, and the occasional blast of magic coming from both the Church and League popped like fireworks.

  ‘I’ll find my place here. Even if I have to make it myself.’