"You're kidding, right?"

Matt stood in front of a tree. A big tree. A big purple tree, with orange leaves and a bunch of blue seed pods that dangled from the end of some of the branches. A big purple tree that was easily three feet in diameter at the base of its trunk. In his right hand he held the small battery-operated chainsaw he'd brought back from the wreck of the Mrs. Dilligaf. Its nine-inch blade looked woefully inadequate for the task at hand.

"Dad," Olivia Albright said, giving him a Look. "We've been shipwrecked on an island full to the brim with giant monsters, we've been given magical powers, you have a talking sword for crying out loud… And this is where you balk?"

"Look, Liv," Matt said, glancing at his middle daughter. "All that magic stuff is… magic stuff. This?" He waved his free hand at the treetrunk. "This is stuff I know about. I mean, in the abstract. I've never felled a tree personally before, but I know the theory behind it. And the idea that this," he hefted the little chainsaw, "is going to be able to cut down, limb, and make planks out of this tree just because I cast some kind of magic spell on it? That's…"

"Just a mite hard to take, Livia," said Dinah from where she stood nearby, watching.

"Would you just activate the stupid ability already?" Olivia demanded, crossing her arms across her chest and glaring. "The scrolls said you could have been done by now if you'd just shut up and get it over with!"

"Better listen to her Dad," Bel called from where she was sorting through articles of clothing and other gear they'd rescued from the shipwreck. "You know how she gets."

"I do not get like anything, Godzilla," Liv shot back at her sister. "I am just apparently the only one with a thinking head on their shoulders this morning."

"Hey!" objected Lucas, looking up from where he and Alejandra were loading individual bullets into the magazines for their weapons near the campfire. "I've got a good head! I'm just using it for other things. Like figuring out what kind of boons we want to get!" The boy's features screwed up as he glared at Olivia. "What are you doing except being bossy, Liv?"

"I," Olivia said with an imperious sniff, "am trying to educate a fantasy luddite in the ways of the mystical and the magical and if he'd just activate the stupid Art already we could all get on with our day!"

Matt had to laugh. After the initial shock that had been the first week on this island, his kids were quickly returning to their norm of bickering and squabbling with each other like… Well, like family.

"Alright, alright," he said and took in a deep breath. "I'll give it a try. It's still hard for me to imagine, though."

He looked back at the tree and almost absently reached out and took the scroll a pair of small finch-like birds dropped into his hand before fluttering back into the jungle. He unrolled it and looked again at the description of the power he was about to unleash. As much as he talked about not believing it… He had to admit, the words on the scroll made it pretty clear what was supposed to happen.

Speed The Work (Aedilis Consul Power)

Increase worker production speed by 100% across the empire for a short time. This bonus is increased further for an individual work group if thou takest up a tool and join in the labor.

There were more words, but they were the mistranslations of words, probably talking about how often Matt could use the power per day had it still been connected to the old System and not powered by the Coins Matt and his family had been collecting for nearly a week now.

Speaking of which…

Matt reached out and took one of the coins from the Somewhere they were stored in and hefted it in his palm. Then, with another mental shrug, he reached out and connected the coin somehow to the Aedilis Art. It was done completely instinctual, and only worked because Matt didn't think about it too hard, he was quite sure. If he actually thought about what he was doing, it would fail utterly. The System was a strange mix like that, half knowledge of what it did, half pure instinct. He was always just a bit afraid that one day, when he really needed it, it wouldn't heed his call.

But this time it did, and he felt the now-familiar rush of power and golden light flash through his body. He sucked in a breath as something settled in him, and he got the sense of an invisible timer having started somewhere.

[Consul Arts: Speed The Work]

"Now cut the tree, Dad," Olivia said, pointing.

"Right."

Matt revved up the chainsaw, and then squawked in alarm as the tool suddenly moved without him consciously directing it. He stepped forward and the saw bit into the purple wood, slicing through it like butter. In an eyeblink, the tree started to topple. Matt's hands moved of their own accord, pushing against the trunk with more strength than he should have had, and guiding the falling trunk to crash to the earth away from the family where it wouldn't hinder or harm anything.

And then he was moving, his hands a blur, as he lopped off branches and skimmed off bark from the tree like he was Paul Bunyan performing the art for which he'd been born to do. He almost stopped and stared at his own limbs as they flew through the task.

Barely five minutes after he'd cast the art, a twenty-foot tree was on the forest floor, its limbs lopped off, its bark stripped, ready to be cut into sections for rendering down into planks.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

And that was when Matt stopped and stared.

"Woah!" said Lucas, who'd come to watch the show, along with the rest of the family.

He'd just done in five minutes what it would have taken an experienced woodsman at least an hour to do. And even as he had the thought, he felt the power fade from his limbs. Miracle of miracles, he didn't feel any worse for wear despite having worked like a machine on overdrive for the past five minutes. He was sweating lightly, and felt like he had just put in a good amount of work for, say, ten minutes on the construction site, but nothing like what he should have felt.

"Okay, I'd call that a good test," Olivia said, making a note in the notebook she'd pulled out. "Dad, can you tell how many coins you used?"

"Just the one," Matt said as the feeling of power faded away. "And when I spent it, I felt the timer start. I couldn't tell how long exactly I had, but…" he thought back to the feeling. "I could tell it would be enough for a single tree."

"Cool!" Olivia made another note. "Do you think you could do it again, but try more coins this time? I want to test something. Also, check your main scroll, see if the coin has been marked off?"

Matt did the second thing first, pulling his scroll from the Somewhere and glancing at the little coin counter that looked like it had been engraved onto one of the wooden handles.

[Margarine] remaining: 49

He reported the number to Olivia, who made yet another note. She was taking her duties as Fantasy Wikipedia seriously, it seemed, and was determined to document everything about their new powers because, as she put it, the scrolls themselves were a 'pain in the butt to read and were really stupid about giving specifics.' Which Toraline had put down to the fact that the system had decayed to the point where it simply had no information to impart in some areas.

"Okay, try it again, but do, like, five coins this time."

"And you think that will change… what, exactly?" Matt asked, raising an eyebrow.

"I dunno, there's some stuff in the scrolls that hints at different outcomes… Like, there isn't anything that talks about the coins directly, right? Because I don't think we're supposed to know about them. But there's stuff that talks about stuff that could talk about stuff the coins do. Get it?"

"Not even a little bit," Matt said cheerfully as he pulled out a larger coin, this one representing five of the base coins, from Somewhere and fed it into the mechanism. "But I'll take your word for it–Woah!"

Gold light flared again, and again power flowed, but this time it was different as the timer started.

"It's going to last longer," he said as his hands started to move again. "I can already tell. And not just because it's more coins, it's going to last longer than it would if I'd just fed five coins in one at a time."

"Hah! I knew it!" Olivia grinned and made more notes as Matt started to slice the tree up into roughly ten-foot sections that would be turned into planks that would eventually become part of the flooring in their new treehouse. The work was much, much rougher than anything that would have taken place in a modern sawmill, or even one from the last century back on earth.

He had made the decision on the walk back to the camp last night. He would have to eschew modern construction techniques and any thought of the rough-to-finish stick-and-panel framing. It was a decision that would have made his customers back on Earth spit blood and puke dollar coins, but there just wasn't any other practical choice.

It would be closer to what the pioneers of old had used in their treks from the thirteen colonies in the east into the untamed wildernesses of the western US. Like them, Matt didn't have the luxury of going down to Home Depot for a hundred 2x4's, eight hundred square feet of siding, and pre-fabricated dual-pane windows.

He was going to have to fell his own lumber like this tree here, process it into usable planks, and then utilize them in the construction of their new home. And like the pioneers, he didn't have access to a wood kiln to dry out the green lumber, nor three years to sit on his hands while waiting for it to cure naturally.

He'd read about the techniques the old homesteaders had used. It had been some of his favorite non-fiction reading, truth be told. He'd always been fascinated by the sheer inventiveness of the men and women who had conquered the American territories, and the skills they'd use to do so. And working with green lumber was something he'd studied in the same way a steel worker might research old-school blacksmithing techniques out of a sense of professional history and just sheer curiosity about how his craft had grown and evolved over the years. It was always good to know where you came from.

And in this case, it would turn out to be immensely useful for his family, as well.

He came out of his thoughts when the immediate job was finished. What had only minutes before been a tree was now six heavy planks, three from each fallen log. They were rough and ungainly compared to modern lumber, but considering he'd done it with a miniature chainsaw that shouldn't have been able to do any of what it had just done, he felt justifiably proud of his accomplishment. This time the work took about ten minutes, and Matt could feel that there was plenty of ability left in him to continue working at the same breakneck pace. But they'd need more than just six planks. A lot more. And even as he had the thought he felt himself starting to turn to the next purple tree in line.

He forced his hands to stop working, though, and they responded to his demand. The purpose of this exercise was not just to fell the lumber and prepare it for use, but to test out his powers, and to help Olivia gather her data. And by his reckoning, they'd managed that just fine. The power faded, and he felt some of the coins returned to him. Just a couple, though, not the full refund he'd been expecting. This too he reported to Olivia, who noted it down in her journal.

"Okay," she said, snapping her book closed. "That's a good test. We should do a few more, just to be safe, but here's what I've got so far. Somehow, they seem to work the opposite from the idea of diminishing returns. Instead of getting less and less the more you put in, you actually get more power out of spending more. I can't tell if it's exponential, logarithmic, or some other type of increase–"

"I almost understood what you said there," Lucas said, waggling a finger in his ear. "But then you got all nerdy and I noped out."

Harry, the large green alien wooly mammoth that was now Lucas's companion, pet, and mount, trumped softly in agreement. And further back in the clearing, the rustle of laughter came from Billy the Tree.

"Thank goodness I was not the only one," the big tree who was also a sapient child, sort of, said in his soft wind-rustling-the-leaves voice that somehow managed to carry to all of them clearly. "I was afraid the System's translation had decayed even further."

"Somehow I don't think even the System's decaying translation abilities would put out words like that," said Toraline from where she was again going through scrolls with the borrowed aid of Hoolio the owl.

"Okay, everyone shut up," Olivia growled. "Or I'm not going to share my brilliance with you anymore. As I was saying, it's probably functioning kinda like inertia. It's easier to keep a thing moving if it's already moving. So if you spend one coin, you get a burst of power. But if you spend five, there's that initial burst, then each subsequent push takes you a little bit farther than you'd go if you were starting from square one."

"Makes sense," Matt said, feeling the power pulsing in the back of his mind, not in an intrusive way, more in the same way you'd hear the hum of an engine at idle. "So what's next?"

"Well, now that we've got that at least nailed down," Olivia turned and jerked a thumb towards the sword and the owl. "I think we ought'a figure out what boons to get. We've got four more potentially game-changing items to get, and now that we're all fed and tested and stuff, it's time to get me my friggin' fireball staff."

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