"Our cows sound just like your cows to me!  There's a project underway to breed cows that don't set off 『Qualia』-detectors, but they haven't got the amount down to zero.  Which, you know, is also worth noting because it shows that not everybody in our world is the slave-owning type.  There's enough good people to run whole projects like that.  And I want to dig down further into whether 『Qualia』 means 'ability to focus attention' or what, but I suspect it's not the top of your own list of urgent questions."

"Kinda isn't, yeah. It's really reassuring to know that not everyone is the slave-owning type. Uh, ballpark how long does it tend to be between summoned hero arrival and final cratery showdown?"

"...I'm sorry, I'd have to check a history book for that.  My specialty isn't Summoned Heroes.  You definitely have longer than a month, you definitely have less than ten years."

"Where exactly are we going, and where is it in relation to all these people you know?"

"I've never spent a lot of time in Relis - to me it's just a waypoint between Pigbridge, where my family lives, and Cowcorn, which is the academy I attend.  I was on my way from my family home to the academy, and we're four days from the academy and a week from my family home.  If you wanted to talk to Professor Nightstar right away - or Magister Sting, she's the wacky but knowledgeable one - we could keep heading to my academy instead of turning back.  But you don't have to rush there on my behalf, they're reasonable people and will accept excuses like bandit attacks.  And your stuff is more important than my education, anyways."

"Thanks. I do think your school might be a good place to head generally toward at least until I have a better idea."

They locate the change of clothes. Bella inspects the various fasteners before stepping into the now corpseless carriage and shutting the door to change into them. Then she sticks her head out. "How bad are the shoes and backpack, notability-wise?"

"Shoes... are unusual but not interdimensionally so."  Haroun glances at what an Earth person would call the 'zipper'.  "I have no idea how you're opening and closing the seams in that backpack using those metal tags, so maybe don't do that part where other people can see.  I mean, most people aren't expecting to meet a Summoned Hero, to be clear, and there's a lot of weird artifacts in the world.  You just have to avoid... wearing weird clothes and asking how many silver to the gold."

"I have already forgotten the conversion factor. Twenty-something? My world has had objectively more confusing currency systems but I grew up with a hundred pennies to the dollar and intermediate coinage of five ten and twenty-five."

"Seventeen silver to the gold, twenty-nine copper to the silver.  If you can get Skills at all, you should only have to practice conversions a couple of dozen times before it becomes instinctive.  How does your world deal with that kind of thing without Skills?  Wait, never mind, probably not top of your own priorities list."

Bella finishes tying her shoes back into place and hops out of the carriage. "I mean, I've got something doing the language and the balance problem cure, I just don't know whether they're technically skills. If I like... tell you how my currency system works, as I just did, you don't get a skill about it, do you?"

"I've already got skills for understanding base ten, but if it was a base I'd never heard of I'd have to do a few arithmetic problems before I could stop thinking about it."

They start loading bodies back into the carriage.  The fact that they're taking with the whole bandits, and not just their armor and their heads, is going to slow down the carriage some.  Haroun considers raising this topic with Bella, and decides against it.  Haroun doesn't really want to cut off heads and strip off armor and bury bodies where they won't attract monsters, and he's guessing that neither does Bella.  They should still make Relis before nightfall, even with the extra weight.

"If you learn a new word does that increment some skill counter in the background?" she wonders, after she's done holding her breath against the smell of bodies. "- more importantly what do we do with these guys once we're at civilization, is there a morgue we can drop them off at or something -"

"No, it's more - using words in sentences, learning the grammar to put things together.  After you get the Lvl 1 skill for that language, you can use the words you do know in sentences, and conjugate them and so on, but you still have to learn individual words.  I imagine learning languages would be slower without Skills, but it's not instant with them.  The bandits - get turned in at the Adventurer's Guild for the standard bounty, I forget the exact amount.  I know it's not much of a bounty, if you're not a Guild member, and if there isn't a posted bounty for that specific bandit.  The Guild doesn't want to offer enough that unlicensed people will start killing random bystanders and turn them in with used bandit armor.  Marussa and Aralin - go to the Adventurer's Guild."  A thought occurs to Haroun, though it doesn't come with much hope attached.  "I remember hearing you saying 'Heal' and 'Resurrect', before, though it didn't do anything.  I don't suppose - you just need a little more time to figure out whatever it was you were trying to do?"

"It was a super wild guess. Tea guy said something about chant shortening as a thing I could learn so I was attempting to guess what a not-shortened chant might look like in case it worked. On entirely the wrong track, obviously, but if it would have worked and I'd just been too sheepish to try..."

"Yeah.  Thank you.  It - says something about what kind of Summoned Hero you are, that you tried."  Haroun braces himself mentally, and continues.  "Chant shortening is advanced stuff, at least the way normal wizards have to do it.  Like, when you get good enough at a spell, maxing out the Skill and then some, you can just say 『Eval Firebolt』 instead of the entire incantation.  I will try not to go completely mad on the spot if it turns out you can already say 『Eval Flash』 and have that work for you."

"Is that going to be really hard on my mana situation, I don't have a sense of how far 'tired for a second' is from 'falling over' or how fast it comes back when spent."

"I'd expect your mana to have regenerated by now, after all the time that's passed between?  If you're no longer feeling a little tired, probably most or all of your mana is back... though I guess there's other things about this situation that could lead to you feeling tired right now."  Then Haroun thinks about Bella's exact words for a second, noticing a slight sense of dissonance with his expectations.  "Wait, you say you only felt 'tired for a second' originally?  That is odd, I'd expect noticeable mana exhaustion to take longer to wear off.  Maybe you have low mana but normal regen?  That doesn't make any sense to me, but that doesn't make it false."

"It wore off fast, yeah. Being low on mana feels like being tired the entire time you are low on mana, normally?"

"It's not much different from being physically tired that way.  There's exercises novice wizards get led through so they'll get the Skill for assessing their own mana levels numerically, but the usual way of doing that involves some equipment I don't have.  Like, you repeatedly guess how much mana you have, based on how tired you feel, and then there's an artifact that tells you how much you actually had.  When you get good enough at that, you obtain Mana Self-Assessment Lvl 1.  After that it's not hard to learn to tell the difference between physical fatigue and low mana; they feel different, and you can sort out what's what once you have numbers to look at."

"Might wanna borrow one of those artifacts later, then, but I'll have to make do for now. I'm actually surprisingly untired. I wouldn't usually walk this far back home. Although I suppose that the fact that normally if I tried walking this far I'd have fallen over a bunch of times might confound how bad I expect to feel about it? Anyway sounds like 『Eval Flash』would be safe to try, yes?"

"Sounds like it to me."  Haroun stops himself from adding another three sentences of disclaimers about how much of a senior specialist he is not.  He knows more than Bella, so guessing what's safe is his responsibility, and trying to deny that responsibility won't help with the bad day she's having.

She squints preemptively. "Eval Flash."

Flash!

"Heh." Okay so she's tired but how tired -

About as tired as staying up an hour past her bedtime, or maybe as tired as walking-too-far-and-wanting-to-sit-down in a non-muscley way.  It doesn't feel like it would be hard to learn to tell the difference between that and ordinary physical fatigue, if she was paying attention.

The feeling only lasts a few seconds and then she's back to normal.