The statue of a dwarven woman stands on a raised stone platform. Her carven beard is braided and her stone dress is gray like the rest of her, but I'm imagining it as purple. To one side, a pedestal displays words and numbers, along with a lever waiting to be pulled, because that's what levers are for.

On the platform around the statue, we set up a variety of drinking vessels made of copper, wood, stone, and clay. Into them, we pour several samples of Hearthkeeper Garnet's finest wine. By which I mean she'd never made wine before, only ale, and these are her various attempts. Some are gritty, some chunky, and they're all various shades of blue, purple, a brown. We are, thankfully, not required to actually drink them.

At the front of the statue, I lay a notebook with writing in English, Common, and Goblin, just to make sure she starts off with some basic useful skills. On top of it, Garnet places a basket of fresh magenta grapes. The color of the weird life-aspected fruit still looks wrong to my eyes. Finally, we add a couple samples of beer from Nefern and whiskey from Flux, for variety. (And samples of actually decent booze.)

Spawning Platform Spawned creature Dwarven Brewer Aspects connection, life Essence available 12,302 Required essence 10,000 Make sure only intended items are on the platform. Pull lever to activate.

"So who are we getting?" Basalt wonders.

"Looks like a woman from Rome, back from when there was an empire," I say, looking up the information. "It says she worked at a vineyard."

We're not getting a glamorous princess or whatever, just someone who worked for a living, who costs a lot less essence than a princess and will also likely be a lot more helpful to have around. This long-dead (and regularly reincarnated) Roman knows things about grapes that we do not.

Basalt pulls the lever. The drinking vessels and notebook all sublimate into a shower of sparks that swirl up around the statue. They sink into the gray stone, color blooming across the surface as her hair becomes brown, her skin pink, and her dress a slightly different shade of purple from what I'd imagined. The new dwarf blinks her violet eyes and takes her first breath in this life.

"Hello, yes, I'm here, am I late?" the youngest dwarf babbles. "Everyone's looking at me, hello, hello. I've been given the name Amethyst. Nice name. I like it."

"Welcome to your new home, Amethyst Hebron," Aunt Rosemary says, a warm smile crinkling her aged face. "I am Rosemary Corwen, the [Tutorial Teacher], here to guide and assist."

"And I'm Basalt, [Dwarven Dad]," Basalt says.

"You got 'Dad' as your class?" Amethyst says with a laugh.

"I'm Drake Corwen. You know about classes already?"

"Of course. You didn't think I'd memory-blocked myself to only ever remember being a Roman peasant? Nah, I let the specifics fade as none of that matters but I didn't see any need to forget about the system. Sorry, [Tutorial Teacher]. I don't need a tutorial."

"Let's get you up to speed on where you are, then," Aunt Rosemary says.

Basalt holds up a half-empty jug of something that if one were to call it 'vinegar', it would be an insult to salad dressing. "Hebron has life-aspected magical grapes and needs someone who knows how to make things with it better than this. I have no idea how Garnet managed to turn this blue."

Amethyst takes one whiff from two meters away and scrunches up her beard. "I see, and smell, why I was needed. I would dearly like to meet this Garnet and tell them what they did wrong, but I'd like a tour of the Hearth first and hopefully no further rooms smelling like cat pee."

"No promises on the lack of cat pee," Basalt says. "We've got kittens."

Amethyst amends, "I will accept smells of cat pee only if they originated from a cat and not a grape. And hopefully I will also have access to cleaning equipment. Can I see the grapes? And what sort of equipment and staff am I working with?"

"Right, follow me and I will show you," Aunt Rosemary says, taking the overenthusiastic young dwarf in stride.

Aunt Rosemary leads the way through halls covered in relief carvings of dwarves, grapes, and elephants, in various combinations and stages of trampling one another.

"Nice... decor?" Amethyst says, beard twitching as she pauses to look at a vaguely fractal grape carving depicting ever-smaller grapes. "You didn't carve this, did you?"

"No way," Basalt says with a laugh. "The ancient Hebrons did that. They got wiped out in the Safari Apocalypse of 100 because they spent more time carving and drinking grapes than making sure they could stop an invasion of monsters shaped like exotic animals."

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I add, "Last year, I discovered the ruins by accident after getting separated from my family during a vacation. I found the core room and decided to put the spawning platform to use in reviving the hold."

We arrive at Hebron's subterranean vineyard. Which sounds far more majestic than it actually is. Leafless purple-black vines cling to four stone trellises stretching a few meters long. Only the left one has grapes ready to harvest, while the other three show varying stages of growth. A sign at the end of each row identifies each vine.

"What's this?" Amethyst wonders.

"I was experimenting with essence quantities in plants that produce fruit in different periods of time," I say. "The ones at the left regrow fast but have minimal essence accumulation. The others have a longer regrowth rate but might manage to be stronger or more magically potent."

"I see!" Amethyst plucks a grape from the fast-growing vine and pops it into her mouth. "Hmm, sweet but not excessively so, with some subtle notes of… ah, don't mind me. I can work with this."

We move on through the workshops, with Amethyst staring at everything along the way and already muttering notes aloud to herself. When she spots the next dwarf, she goes over and introduces herself.

"Ah, you're her! I'm Copper Hebron, [Dwarven Metalworker]. I heard they were spawning you today but didn't want to crowd. Some people find it embarrassing to come into a new life and everyone's staring at you."

Amethyst laughs. "I'm fine. Rosemary's just giving me the tour and I'm taking stock of what sort of equipment and resources we'll have available."

"There's a nearby low level copper mine dungeon, so we basically have access to all the copper we want. Our adventurer friends discovered a tin dungeon, but it's in orc territory. And I'm working on laying the groundwork for a forge to be ready for bronze once we get our hands on more of it."

"Also, we have a skyboat," I put in. "So if there's something specific you want, we can take a trip to the City and see if we can find someone selling it."

"Flying boats and a City with an audible capital letter?" Amethyst says. "You got a floating Rome here?"

"I think it's more of a floating London, but yeah," I say. "Well. I don't know what Londinium might have been like in your time, but in my time it was more like Britain's Rome, I suppose."

"Either way, I look forward to seeing it and am grateful that I don't have to live in it."

We continue the tour, ending at the hearth in an animated conversation with Garnet that I don't feel like eavesdropping on and don't have enough levels in [Cooking] and [Brewing] to follow anyway. Aunt Rosemary awkwardly hovers near them, ready to interject with a tutorial.

"Ugh, I said I didn't want a tutorial," Amethyst snaps.

Aunt Rosemary apologizes and withdraws, her face impassive but her aura dripping with sadness. I'm sure my own aura is scowling as I step forward.

"So, what do you know about classes?" I ask.

"Well, I know you get more experience for doing things in line with the class," Amethyst says. "The details vary but the general idea is that if you really want to get stronger, you ought to do things in line with the class you picked."

"You picked it?" I ask.

"Yes?" Amethyst laughs. "I specifically requested to be spawned as a [Dwarven Brewer] with access to magical ingredients of some sort."

"Oh," I say. "Well. How do you think a [Tutorial Teacher] gets experience? She's close to a rank-up and this is literally her one job."

Amethyst looks over to Aunt Rosemary and sighs. "Fine, but it probably wouldn't even count things I already know."

"There's still plenty you don't know," Basalt says. "If nothing else, the local geography and history."

An alarm rings out through the halls, interrupting our dialogue.

"Are we under attack?" Amethyst asks.

I summon a [Ghostly Watcher] and send him out to see what we're dealing with. "Monsters, a lot of them," I say once my ghost reports back telepathically. "Mostly Basics and Elites, but there's multiple Heroics in there too."

Basalt grabs his bronze battle axe. "And of course this happens while all our high level friends are somewhere else."

"Rosemary," Amethyst says. "Why don't you tell me about the local geography? Quickly."

Aunt Rosemary happily lets loose an info dump as we make our way to the front door. "We're in the skymote of Tiganna, at the edge of the Crystalline Heavens. Tiganna has nine domains…"

I bring my latest magical focus to hand: a half-meter long copper rod with a snake wrapped around it and an orange topaz set in the tip.

Rowan runs past the hallway full of traps and meets up with us on the near side of our giant centipede pit. He pulls a lever on the wall and a click on the dropaway floor indicates that it is no longer safe to run across it. (Of course, our giant centipedes are distressingly friendly to us even if they will happily rip apart any invaders.)

"It's those spicy salamanders," Rowan says. "They must be mad that we find them delicious. Hello, you must be the new dwarf. I'm Rowan Talgarth, and I will be your [Apprentice Bodyguard] for this incursion."

"A pleasure," Amethyst says.

"It seems Tempest wants to test you right away," Rowan says. "There's spare weapons in that nook. Take your pick and see if you can hit anything that makes it through."

The sounds of giant amphibians being messily slaughtered by traps echoes through the hall for a couple minutes before there's movement around the corner. A Heroic salamander the size of an SUV, its skin mottled red-orange colors. Once in line of sight, it raises its head to us and opens its mouth.

Before it can do anything, Anise throws a fire bolt into its face, but it doesn't even blink. I point my copper wand and send lightning magic through it. My electrical attack stuns it, buying us a moment of reprieve from whatever it was about to breathe at us. Basalt follows up with a frigid blast from a frost wand, freezing the fiery amphibian before it can even get unstunned.

It's only the first head to make it through the trapped corridor. There's only so many monsters the traps can handle before breaking, even low level ones. An Elite makes it through, then another Heroic. This last pauses to open its mouth and spit a nasty orange glob at us. Basalt doesn't dodge fast enough and catches it in one eye.

"Ahhh! Holy capsaicin!" Basalt yells.

I aim my wand at him and push life energy through to help his body recover from the attack. The first Heroic tries to spit as well, but Anise knocks it back with a gust of sorcerous wind.

"It's a good thing I've been learning skills that don't involve setting things on fire," Anise says.

"There are too many of them," I say, relaying information from my watching ghost outside. "The traps are the only reason we haven't already been overwhelmed. Tempest certainly did decide to test us today."

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