After waving him off from the workstation and grabbing the leaves he’d harvested, Madam Madrid pushed him out into the greenhouse. “Work more on your magic plants. Also… make sure to take the bitey one? He’s already scared off too many people from my alley.”

  Roge chuckled at that, the dragon moving out to the alley and grabbing as many creeper vines into his inventory to experiment with later. Even though the names were the same, besides the rank number, he had some sense of *feeling* which plant was which, including an odd sensation from the biting one. It was almost like he could feel the plant moving through the air as it searched for food. ‘Great… Going to need bugs for that one…’

  Trying the harvest effect on the vine gave him an odd feeling, like his skill was hiccuping or something. Nothing showed up in his inventory, so he assumed the skill was trying to figure out what it should harvest from it. “I dunno buddy…” he sighed, wondering if the admin guy was going to interject again. “Better not…”

  “Who you talking to?” a voice chimed in, making Roge jump and his heart go wild. Turning around revealed the goblin alchemist Judson Marshall, his priest robe traded out for the classic shirt and pants look of the general populace.

  “Don’t sneak up on me man,” Roge wheezed out, trying for several deep breaths to calm his heart back down.

  “Sorry,” Judson chuckled, not looking sorry at all. “Didn’t know you scared that easily.”

  “When my skill is currently giving me a waiting feeling when I tried something with it, that is not the time when I’m focusing on my surroundings.” He regretted his sentence immediately, the goblin’s eyes shining as he leaned up towards the dragon.

  “Oh? What did you try with it? Putting the coins in yourself? No that shouldn’t do-“

  “Going to stop you right there,” Roge sputtered, pushing the *very* close goblin away from himself. “It’s a new skill. One I got from upgrading my gardener class.”

  “Oh even better! Now we just need you to get some kind of alchemist class…”

  “Maybe later,” the dragon muttered, ducking into the greenhouse and feeling a bit of dread as Judson followed him. “Need to get a handle on my current ones before I get a whole new one.”

  “Very fair. So! I assume from the missing plants, it gave you another hoard skill?”

  “Yup. This one manages and harvests plants for me. Don’t know what it does the more I get plants, but I want to make sure I’m not stealing all of Madam Madrid’s plants.”

  “Oh yeah. Don’t mess with her.” Judson shuddered at that, following Roge over to the workbench set near the shop entrance to the greenhouse. “So I have a few items I’d like you to take a look at…”

  “First things first, I’m doing the items I bought this morning. Man this is going to be a slog…”

  ~~~

  After filling out his color buffs and getting the inscribe buff, Roge felt pretty happy with himself. Especially when they all seemed to combine together, giving him something decently strong. ‘Makes sense. A buff from seventy coins is going to be better than ten.’

  He wasn’t sure what the last part meant until he tried to pull the screen closer to read it better. Instead, his action seemed to make the screen and font larger and easier to read. He couldn’t edit the already established words, but he could extend the boxes and add notes to them. He wished for a keyboard to write everything down with, but he supposed direct thought note taking worked better.

  Of course, Judson could see all of the boxes right away without Roge having to share them, though the goblin explained that Roge still needed to pull them up himself to get the process started. He could just grab the dragon’s screens and interact with them, sharing just giving a copy of his unabridged [Status] for them to poke through.

  “As one of your guardians, I don’t have complete control. That’d be absurd. For instance, if I did, I’d put some of your free points into strength. That is tragically low for a dragon.”

  Roge glanced at his attributes section, once again feeling odd about his characteristics being categorized like that.

  “I assume you also want me to do that so I can get strength skills?” Roge asked, having figured out that for every ten points he had in an attribute, he could have one skill linked to it.

  “Of course! When you start getting more classes, which normally have two to three skills each, if you don’t have a free slot it locks up your ability to get more classes. Level five also gives you another skill once you get to that point in either classes. Even with all your free slots, if you get one strength skill, it’ll lock up all of them.”

  Roge grumbled at that, putting three of his points into strength. “But if I have free points, can’t I just reserve them for when it does lock up? What if I get two charisma skills and I dumped all of my points into strength? I’d be locked until I get at least two level ups from either class.”

  “I mean… you could to it that way.” The goblin looked a bit disgusted at that. “But your attributes would be lower for your skills than if you did it my way.”

  “I’ll take that. Would rather be weaker than be bereft of choices.”

  Judson guffawed at that, slapping Roge’s arm once again. “Of course you’d say that. You can get get buffs in other ways. Speaking of…”

  “I’m not taking any attribute ingots from anyone,” Roge snorted.

  “I wasn’t going to suggest that. I was going to suggest you take them from monsters. It’s why I want you to take an alchemy class. It usually is a mix of crafting and combat.”

  That interrupted Roge’s thinking for a bit, his eyes narrowing as he realized the goblin was right. “Damn. And alchemy would work best since I could hoard as many reagents as I want.”

  “Exactly.” A pot thunked against the workstation to punctuate the word, Judson presumably pulling it from his inventory. “Take a look at this.”

  The plant was what looked to be a normal flower, though the petals moved even with no wind. Moving closer, Roge could see that the petals were actually made of flame somehow, prompting him to look at its [Inspect] screen.

  “I assume this thing looks useless because I have no alchemy classes?” Roge asked, the goblin giving him a dirty look.

  “Precisely. This plant’s petals are the main ingredient for fire bombs. It’s one of the simplest potions to make and this flower should help you get the class.”

  Roge grunted at that, taking the plant into his hoard and extracting an ability coin from it, feeling his mana take a hit to fuel the plant’s recovery.

  Roge frowned, looking to the alchemist with a questioning look as he pulled out the coin. “That… doesn’t make any sense. Why not use something with fire or explosions for a bomb?”

  “Because those are more advanced,” he smirked, Judson plonking more plants onto the table. “All these plants are used to make the lesser potions, as the more advanced ones require the class to be higher level.”

  “So… they just blow up when they shouldn’t?”

  “No. Your mana can help stabilize potions. It’s better to say your class *stops* them from normally blowing up.” The goblin sighed at that. “It’s a common thing younger people tend to think. That the system is sabotaging them. But the more accurate way of looking at it is the system rewards hard work. So the higher level an alchemy class is, the better they get at stabilizing complex potions. Or at least… that’s one of the benefits.”

  “That’s… fair I guess,” Roge chuckled, looking over the various plants in front of him. For some reason they were all various types of tulips. There was a light blue one with the [Icing] ability, a purple one with [Acid], and a yellow one with [Spark]. “So… I can already think of a couple things I could try with these abilities…” he mumbled.

  “And I’m happy to leave you to that,” Judson said, giving Roge one final pat on the arm before heading towards the alley entrance to the greenhouse. “I’ll be coming back tomorrow to see how they’re doing. And once you’re ready for alchemy, just let me know.”

  Roge watched the goblin walk down the alley and out of sight, humming to himself about the advice. While true that an alchemy class could fit quite naturally with his current ones, he was unsure if he should specialize more, or try to shore up his weaknesses. As the goblin said, his strength was abysmally low. The lowest of all his attributes. And he could feel and see it. A lanky body that only didn’t tire because of his Con score. ‘If I take a more martial class, it would behoove me to raise my strength. Then I could use alchemy in combat better, instead of just throwing bottles around and hoping for the best.’

  But as Roge thought more about the problem, putting the flowers into his hoard as he did, he couldn’t help but feel that he wouldn’t fit into a physical attacker. Putting aside the fact that his first two classes were very obviously not combat related, he never felt like he fit in with the gym bros in his everyday life. Going out and getting gains for pains was never something he could get behind. It also made him think of the fact that there might be a lot of physical attackers, meaning he wouldn’t be able to find a proper team. Taking trinkets from the monsters as he killed them didn’t sound appealing either. It would just be a distraction from a fight.

  Having no decision on that whatsoever, especially with his lack of knowledge on the subject, he pulled out the ‘Item Ranks for Dummies’ book and set it on the workbench. If he needed more knowledge, then he’d start there.

  ~~~

  Thankfully, the book was very easy to work through, Roge spending an hour going through the beginning chapters. What his [Status] didn’t tell him, and what he probably would have learned in public school, was that items came in ‘tiers’. Anything rank zero to nine was considered mundane and barely magical at all. Technically, people liked to put the zero ones into the ‘normal’ category, but as he’d seen with his [Color] coins, the rank zero items still had something to them. The book didn’t go into detail what that something was, but he could feel his mind working on a classification. After all, while he couldn’t edit the words, he could *add* words and classifications to things on his [Status] and [Identify] screens.

  Anything rank ten and above was considered to be *actual* magical items. Things that radiated magical energy and gave an effect that was at least *decently* powerful. He couldn’t get too far into the first section on magic items, what it called ‘Rank 10-19’, before he noticed the time. It was two o’clock, three hours before the normal rush at five that came when the adventurers all came back into town from trips. Thinking rapidly on that, he decided to leave the rest of the book for later and shoved it into his inventory. He’d need the relative peace and quiet for his next trip, feeling slightly anxious as he left through the alleyway.

  He knew snap decisions like that could bite him in the ass, the old ‘the quickest and easiest answer is usually wrong’ phrase coming to mind. But he knew one place where he could get more information about what class he should get, if he needed one at all. And Judson was right, he did need to go out and hunt monsters for attributes. The best place to get more information on that was, of course, the Adventurer’s League. The place where combat classes got quests to thin out the local monster population. ‘I just hope I don’t stick out…’