It was like floating atop the surface of some sweltering swamp, mud clinging to her skin and clothes, threatening to drag her down into its depths. Morgana drifted in and out of consciousness, vaguely aware of the words being spoken near her.

"You got caught?" an unfamiliar, masculine voice hissed. "What do you mean you got caught? And who the hell is that?"

"Relax. Just spent a short stint in jail. This was my neighbor. She helped me escape."

"Jail?"

"And, uh, to get it out of the way," Vesper said, coughing awkwardly. "Had to attack a guard. Um. A Whitestone one. So our plans to skip town might've been moved up. To like. Tonight."

Silence stretched for several long moments. "Please tell me you're joking."

"At least I made a friend," Vesper replied cheerfully. Morgana was vaguely aware of being jostled in her sleep. Was she being held in Vesper's arms? Her thoughts were too delirious to make sense of everything she was feeling and hearing. "She's a [Mage] that's not a [Mage]. It's pretty cool."

"Vesper."

"Flint."

"Why is it always like this, with you?"

"Ain't ever been a somebody who didn't get into trouble, if you think about it. You ought to take a page from my book."

Another short pause in the conversation, in which Morgana could imagine Flint—the unknown man—glaring at Vesper. They were clearly friends. Or something.

"Right," Vesper coughed. "Too soon for jokes? Sorry. But yeah, we need to get going. I don't think this is something they'll let slide. Might even send trackers after us."

Flint groaned. "We're still several weeks away from having enough." Then, with even more emphasis, he said, "We were only a few weeks away."

"I know. Sorry."

Morgana finally succumbed to the darkness, the conversation abruptly cutting off.

She woke many hours later—or so it felt—to being shaken by the shoulder. Morgana's eyes fluttered open to Vesper's face leaning over her, seeming concerned.

"Oh. You look better. Just needed some beauty sleep, huh?"

Vesper was right. Morgana's head pounded, her mouth was dry, and there was a persistent ache through her whole body—especially on her elbow, which she had fallen onto several times—but honestly, she felt much better. Going from 'struggling to stand and stay conscious' to 'merely feverish' was like being born a new woman.

Morgana pushed herself up into a sitting position, looking around at the space she found herself in.

It was a small, cramped room…and probably not a 'room' at all. The ground beneath her bumped intermittently. They were inside a moving wagon. Boxes and crates filled the area, with a small area freed up for Morgana, Vesper, and a third passenger. Cramped, but with enough space to move around.

A third passenger. Flint? Someone Vesper knew? The boy watched her impassively, dark hair, dark expression, but dressed surprisingly well. He had the same green eyes as Vesper, and Morgana wondered suddenly whether he wasn't her friend, but perhaps a relation of hers. Brother? The similarity was striking.

Vesper was also dressed well. Out of the ragged clothing she'd been wearing in the jail they'd met in. She looked cleaned-up, like she'd taken a shower.

How much time had passed?

"Wait," Morgana said. "What happened? How did we get out? I don't remember."

Vesper raised her eyebrows. "Yeah. About that. You, uh, complicated things a bit."

"I did?" Morgana tried to remember what had happened. "I…passed out."

"Pulled down a coat rack with you. Woke the guard up."

Morgana paled. "But things worked out?"

"Sort of. The city doesn't take prison breaks lightly, much less violent ones." Vesper idly rubbed her knuckles; Morgana noticed there were bruises there. It'd obviously been a fight. Morgana mentally chided herself for not having kept control for a little while longer.

"Anyway, that's beside the point," Vesper said. "We decided it was time to skip town. That's been our plan for a while."

"Oh?" Morgana asked, still trying to orient herself. "It was?"

"There's a dungeon that opened up a few towns over," Vesper said. "And if there's a place to get lost in, where no one looks twice at new arrivals, that'll be it." Vesper laughed. "Couldn't have asked for a better time to get in trouble with the law, I guess."

"Would've preferred not to have to look over our shoulders," Flint grumbled, arms crossed and his eyes now closed as he leaned against the wagon wall. "To start over fresh. No complications." His eye cracked open as he looked at Morgana. "And we had to pay someone to carry you in this wagon. Would've walked otherwise. So even less funds to go around." He sighed. "But yes, things could be worse."

"Ah, Flint's just a complainer, don't mind him," Vesper said. "If not for you, I'd still be locked up. Maybe waiting for the gallows." She shivered. "So, yeah. We're definitely even."

Morgana thought she was patching together an idea of what was going on.

Though there were still several questions she had.

Several?

More like a thousand.

As much as who Vesper was—what crime she had committed to be imprisoned in the first place, or, for that matter, how Morgana had ended up in jail too—and who Flint was, Morgana latched to the far less mundane.

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"What is a dungeon?" she asked.

Flint paused, then cracked an eye back open.

"Huh," Vesper said. "You still scrambled—" She coughed and corrected what she'd been about to say. "You don't got all your memories, still?"

Morgana frowned at her. "As I said, I'm perfectly lucid. As I was previously." Well, maybe not perfectly lucid. She'd been in a pretty dire state. Her head was a bit foggy even now. "And my memories are intact. I don't know how it happened, but I suspect I've been transported a…great distance. To an unfamiliar place."

Perhaps, even, across dimensional lines.

That was one of Morgana's primary subjects of study at the Institute. But she didn't remember performing any dangerous experiments. She had simply woken up inside that jail cell with no idea how she'd arrived.

"Regardless, humor me," Morgana said. "I'm trying to understand what's going on."

Vesper and Flint shared a look. Flint shook his head in exasperation and gestured at Morgana, then promptly closed his eyes and crossed his arms again. It didn't take familiarity with the man to read what he meant: 'She's your problem, not mine.'

"Dungeons are, uh, places you kill monsters, I guess," Vesper said, obviously not entirely sure how to explain. Morgana could intuit that natives of this place simply understood what they were. Dungeons were fixtures to this world. Morgana might have given an equally clumsy response when asked about something that they should have taken for granted. "Adventurers explore them. They're filled with goodies."

"And ways to die," Flint grunted.

"Those too," Vesper said. "But we're headed there because they're easy tickets to fame and fortune."

"Easy?" Flint asked. "Gotta figure half of everyone dies in one of those things. Or loses an arm, at least."

"Only if you're an idiot. Just don't suck."

"And if they have the proper gear. And team. Which we won't, because we had to leave early," Flint said. "Because somebody wanted to pick pockets in Whitestone. So now we don't have the money we need."

Well, there was an answer to Vesper's illicit behavior. Pick pockets. Common thieves. Morgana internally sighed in relief that she hadn't made impromptu allies with, say, a murderer.

Though Morgana hadn't expected that. She'd gotten an immediate impression that Vesper was—while perhaps rough around the edges—not someone with bad intent. Or at least bad intent spawned by even worse circumstances. It'd been why Morgana had trusted her so quickly.

That and the dire situation. She'd been lacking other options. But Vesper had seemed genuinely worried for Morgana's health, for no reason besides worrying about a sick person in the cell over. That quality in someone who obviously hadn't led an easy life was something that had made Morgana doubly trust her.

It'd been a good intuition, obviously. How many other prisoners would have committed to saving Morgana, despite having collapsed and woken the guards? What had that been like, having to drag her unconscious body from the jailhouse and all the way to safety? How had she even managed it?

Despite being responsible for breaking them free, Morgana nonetheless felt she owed this woman a debt. That they weren't even, as Vesper had claimed.

At a minimum, she had proved herself an ally.

As for the explanation behind 'dungeons'.

"I see," Morgana said. "And what are classes?"

"Classes?"

"Earlier, you said that I wasn't a mage, that I didn't have 'any class at all'. Or something along those lines."

"Oh." Vesper blinked. "Well…yeah. Classed people can recognize other Classed. Not what level they are, but whether they have one in general."

"That's not an explanation."

Vesper pursed her lips. "People…who are good at what they do…" she said slowly, figuring out how to explain it. "Get classes. Those classes come with skills. Abilities that make them even better. Doing things related to your class makes you level up, and you get more skills, becoming even stronger. And so on."

"They're not always good at what they do," Flint commented. "Some people just get one."

"Giving her the simple rundown," Vesper shot back. "It's complicated," she told Morgana. "But mostly classes go to people who deserve them. A trained blacksmith will probably become a [Blacksmith] at some point."

"Eh," Flint said. "Kind of."

"I see," Morgana repeated, though honestly, she didn't. It sounded like a very strange system to be standard to these people's life. It also confirmed Morgana's theory. She was definitely in some foreign world.

Which was a pretty staggering realization, even if she'd suspected it earlier. Surely, her unexplained and sudden transmigration had to be related to her studies at the Institute. She was one of only a handful of mages interested in the dimensional element. It'd been why Archmage Leonel had accepted her as an apprentice. But when she tried to remember how she'd ended up in this scenario—any experiments she had been working on—she pulled only blanks.

"And some people become [Mages]?" Morgana asked.

"It's pretty rare," Vesper said. "And it's why Flint said sometimes people 'just get a class'. Because how could someone be a good mage before becoming a [Mage]? You can't cast spells without a class. It's literally not possible." She stared at Morgana. "Except for you, I guess."

Flint cracked an eye open, suddenly interested.

Morgana pursed her lips. "Why would it be impossible?"

"Because you need mana. I guess. I don't know, do I look like someone who knows how magic works? But everyone knows you can't cast spells without having a class for it."

"Hm," Morgana said.

Clearly, these people were deeply ignorant on how magic at a fundamental level worked. While a complicated field, designing and casting spells certainly did not require some 'class system' to handle it for you. All that was needed was a proper spell formula, training on the process of invocation, and mana. And conductive ink, she guessed.

Mana being, admittedly, the hardest part. She supposed if a society never learned how to harvest mana—and it was a rather difficult process, at least in terms of knowledge requirements—then they might never have gained access to the arcane in general.

Blood, of course, was the accessible alternative. Accessible only in the sense of availability, though. Even most trained mages at the Institute couldn't tap into the essence inside their veins. It was a niche, extremely difficult skill to learn. And required an extremely high level of magic sensing. Something a mage would gain access to over years of practicing.

So…yeah. Morgana supposed it was plausible that some societies would fail to gain access to the arcane. While fundamental to every part of modern life in Morgana's world, and thus deeply strange to her, it was logically easy to see how such a situation might come about. It was rather contested, historically speaking, how the first mana harvesting designs were even created.

Fascinating.

"Yes, you need mana," Morgana said. "But if you're trained properly, human blood can be used. Because humans are inherently magical beings."

"They are?"

Morgana blinked in surprise. "Of course they are. What other creature can feel, think, and speak?"

For what Morgana suspected wasn't going to be the last time, Vesper looked at her oddly. Like she thought she was crazy. "Uh. Beastkin. Golems. Elves. The rest of the damn world." Vesper hesitated. "Or, sorry, do you just mean all of us are 'inherently magical'? So them too?"

Morgana stared at her.

There were other sapient races besides humans?

Right.

Morgana needed to come to terms with that later. She was already dealing with too much.

"W-Well, regardless," Morgana stammered. "Some blood is magical, and can be used as mana." Would the blood of those other races work? Did golems have blood? She reminded herself to stay focused. "What mana are you talking about? That 'comes with a class'?"

"It's like, something you have. And it recharges over time." Vesper shrugged, then laughed. "Again, I'm not the person to be asking. I'm not a [Mage]."

Hm.

"You said anyone who's good at what they do will get a class?"

"Yeah, basically. Sort of. Lots of exceptions. Again, it's complicated."

Then Morgana was curious about something.

Because if skill mattered toward earning a class, then unless this world was teeming with genuine archmages, why hadn't she? Because she was a foreigner?

"Does it take time?" Morgana asked. "Will I get one?"

"I mean, over time. But yeah, probably, seeing how you can—"

Vesper's sentence cut off. She paled.

"H-Hey. You do have one! When did that happen? I know you didn't earlier."

Oh?

"She does?" Flint asked, now fully invested in the conversation. "What is it?"

"How do I check?" Morgana asked.

"Just, uh, ask," Vesper said. "Like, inwardly. Think about it. I don't know, it's weird."

Just think about it?

With everything else being so strange, Morgana accepted the explanation at face value. She did as she'd been told.

What is my class? she thought.

***

Morgana Lafenne

Archmage

Level 1

***