After getting a confused receptionist’s permission, Fred seemed more than happy to use his higher dexterity to grab a limb for Roge. “You made my armor suck less, of course I’m doing it for you dude.”

  Coaching him on how long of a branch the dragon needed, it took a minute or so for the [Scout] to come back down. In his hand was as straight of a stick as he could get, Fred already having taken off the leaves and extra bits to make it easier to work with. With a simple thought, Roge put the pink ink into one of the empty jars he still had cluttering up his inventory and started on the process of making a crude ‘wand’.

  “It doesn’t need to be perfect. Just magical enough for the system to recognize that you made a bonded item,” Hops said. The rest of the group decided to take the experimentation to one of the outside training areas out the back of the main building, guiding the dragon as he did his work.

  The quartz dust had a bit of a pink look to it, though his inspect window called it ‘clear quartz’. Chalking it up to a magical difference, he filled his empty bottle with the dust after putting the bag in his inventory. He wasn’t sure how else to get the dust in, and it was the best way to only fill it up to only a half-inch below where the neck expanded into the base of the bottle. He knew just putting the stick in and hoping for the best wouldn’t work, as it’d most likely fall out. So once they got to the private training area, with straw dummies all over the place, Roge looked over the two items he was trying to turn into one.

  Nodding at both descriptions, and kinda glad the branch wasn’t completely dead, Roge blew out a [Nature Magic] fueled breath, causing the others watching to gasp. The hard part was controlling the mana after it’d escaped his mouth, having not done it to that fine of an extent. He even got a rank up on his [Draconic Breath] ability, though he ignore it as he felt the magic slowly doing as he wanted. Placing the stick in the bottle like a cork, he commanded it to start growing into the bottle to help fuse the two together. It didn’t gain any extra mass, simply started reshaping itself into the bottle. Once the stick was thin enough to touch the quartz dust, he commanded it to get thicker until it filled up the rest of the body and neck of the bottle, the end now too big to easily fall out. He even had the stick grow along the lip on the outside of the bottle, securing it even better.

  Even though it only felt like a few minutes sitting there shaping the branch, when he looked at his clock he noticed a half hour had passed, both Sean and Marge practicing their skills against the dummies. Sean moved around and slammed his shield into his dummy, the straw that flew off at his hits seeming to magically reshape after each one. Marge’s dummy had been riddled with arrows, her eyes concentrated as she aimed.

  “That’s incredible!” Hops exclaimed, making Roge jump at the sudden noise. “What kind of skill was that?”

  “It’s not a skill. Just…” Roge tried to think of how to explain it while looking at the wand, feeling okay with the blue and pink design of it. “My [Draconic Breath] ability allows me to put [Nature Magic] into plant life. I simply told the branch what to do with that energy.” He felt like he should be sweating after the exertion though, the beginnings of a headache pounding in the background.

  “Fascinating. Your intelligence must be super high,” the elf commented, looking over the ‘wand’ that Roge had made. “Got any popups?”

  “Just one for the breath ability. I think…” He trailed off as an idea came to him, the dragon blowing his mana once again into the stick. This time, with the headache feeling stronger with the effort, he had the mana flow up and out the top of the stick, hoping it saturated the quartz dust before spilling out.

  The item suddenly started flickering with blue flames, the pink dust shining in the bottle as Roge could almost hear a *thunk* noise as something settled into place.

  With barely a thought and a large smile on his face, Roge accepted the class as an active one before looking at its description, giving a low whistle at what he saw.

  “You got it?” Hops asked, barely hiding his excitement as Roge nodded. He didn’t pay much attention to the elf’s mutterings, pulling up the skill descriptions, as well as the item description, so he knew what he was working with.

  Roge sighed as he saw the simple descriptions, glad for once to get a class that *didn’t* make him go through paragraphs of reading. He turned back to Hops, finding the elf a little too close as he looked at Roge’s new wand. It still looked *mostly* the same as before he pushed his mana through it, one of the main differences being that the powder now glowed with a dull, pink light. The other was the fact that the *entire* wand now felt like how the bottle felt before. In fact, Roge felt an even deeper connection to it, as it was bonded to him with two classes.

  “You both having fun there?” Sean called out, causing both of them to lean back from the wand with embarrassment. “I assume you gained the class Roge?”

  “Yup!” he responded jumping up from his sitting position and walking over to the grinning lion. “Watch this!” Roge exclaimed, reaching out with the oddly shaped wand and pushing mana through it. Floating through the air like little specks of light, the healing magic sunk into Sean’s chest, the lion jolting as all signs of fatigue started slowly fading away.

  “That can heal exhaustion?!” Marge cried out, suddenly right next to the dragon and making him jump to the side. This, of course, stopped the healing for the lion, who still looked slightly tired from the workout he’d done.

  “Uh… yeah it can…” Roge mumbled, causing the deer woman to grin.

  “Me next, then!” she requested, Roge immediately complying as he used up the same amount of mana to heal her.

  “Too bad you ended up with a healing item first. Means you don’t have any attacking items for a good bit,” Hops commented, Roge’s frown quickly flipping to an excited grin. With a thought, he swapped out the [Healing] ability with the [Flame] ability he had in his hoard, the glow at the end of the wand changing to a bright orange. It almost looked like the dust inside was on fire, all three party members jerking away from the sudden flame.

  “What the hell?!” Sean cried out, pushing the other two away from the maniacally grinning dragon.

  Looking over at one of the combat dummies, Roge pointed the wand at it, an effect almost like a flamethrower coming out the end instead of healing particles. Since the target was a few yards away, and his flamethrower only reached about a foot in front of the wand, Roge frowned as he cut off the mana supply. Ignoring his new friends’ shocked looks, Roge pulled up his [Status] to see if he could do anything else, immediately noticing a new section right below his attributes.

  “Hey uh… Hops? Why is my mana now showing on my [Status]?” Roge called out, half listening to the elf’s response as he looked through the rest of his [Status].

  “Any class that gets some form of manipulation skill gets the stat for it,” he responded, the words coming out a bit slowly. “Health and exhaustion are the two others I know off the top of my head…”

  “Stamina is also one,” Sean commented, his voice more high pitched than normal.

  Roge didn’t listen to anything else they had to say as he found something he could use in that moment.

  Pushing mana once again into the wand, Roge focused on keeping the fire contained. Solid. The fire raced to follow his command, forming a ball in front of the wand instead of spewing out. He only let ten points of mana fuel it, watching the clock as a total of fifteen seconds passed before he hit the mark. He shoved his will at it then, feeling another point drain out of him as he hoped the compacted mana worked like he wanted. Sure enough, the ball of fire flew a few yards, though gravity quickly pulled it to the ground where it exploded in a ring of fire a few feet short of hitting his target.

  “This is… going to take some practice,” he muttered, looking at the wand with [Inspect] to see why it was taking so long to charge.

  Nodding his head at the straightforward relationship between the rank of the ability and the flow restriction, Roge pulled out his [Spark] coin, looking at it for the first time. It looked like it was made of copper, practically the most normal coin he’d gotten so far. The face on either side showed a simple lightning bolt, though Roge thought it was a shame it didn’t show a storm cloud as well. ‘Guess that’s for the storm ability or something…’ Without a second though, he deposited the coin into the wand, not expecting the blue flames to come back for a few seconds as the bottle portion changed. Instead of just flickering like a normal flame, the now orange and yellow flame seemed to be arcing towards the edges of the bottle. It reminded him so vividly of the static balls that every science teacher would have in their class, excitement flowing through him as he checked the description again.

  As he charged up another ball of the stuff, barely aware of the world around him, Roge noted that it took a little less than eight seconds that time to charge it up with ten points of mana. This ball looked a bit more wild, though, the orange/yellow arcs coiling and churning in his control taking a bit more concentration. Just for the fun of it, though, halfway through he changed the flaming lightning to the color blue, his smile making his face ache at that point.

  This time, instead of just pointing the wand and firing, Roge pulling back his arm and flicked the wand forward, adding much more momentum to the ball than before. He nearly dropped that wand, as the end was much heavier than the stick portion, but the ball flew much farther than last time. He completely missed that time, though, the ball flying at an angle and hitting the wall behind the target with a large CRACK. The electricity spread out about a foot from the impact site, though most of the scorching of the wall was centered at where he hit.

  “Definitely going to need more practice,” he stated, turning to the three adventurers and shrinking back at their focused looks. Hops looked like he wanted to dissect the dragon apart, scribbling in a book so quickly that Roge was surprised the book wasn’t catching on fire. Marge grinned as she held her quiver, apparently having waited for Roge to glance her way as she moved forward and pushed it into his hands.

  Sean, meanwhile, looked at Roge with a curious smile, his eyes practically shining with pride. The dragon had to look away at that, nearly dropping the quiver as he looked to Marge.

  “Can you improve my arrows?!”