I laughed.
I couldn’t help it. A veritable pile of wealth landed in my lap the moment System sent me his rather understated prompt. Scarab Tokens bounced lightly on the carpeted floor as several spilled out of my lap, and I began hurriedly shoving them into my soul-space to get them out of the way.
It was such an obscene amount of wealth that I had no idea how to react to it. It was like if you got called into your boss’s office one day for a performance review and at the end were handed a bonus check for several times your annual salary.
The Adversary smiled congenially, tucking his pencil back behind his ear as he closed his notepad. “I thought you might appreciate that. Truly it is the least we could do for services rendered. Stealing from the Garden of Possibilities is stealing power directly from System himself. It cannot be taken lightly.”
I managed to squeeze out a profuse thanks between continued bouts of giggles, my mask of aloofness completely cracked at this point. This only seemed to amuse The Adversary more however, and soon he was pouring wine for all of us, System included, to toast my health and continued good fortune. System didn’t drink but did raise his glass and brought it to his lips politely.
When I calmed down a bit and had my inventory under control System elaborated on what I’d just earned. “As my Lord Adversary indicated, these are the minimum rewards for this tier of bug bounty, modified only by your personal tier in the bounty program. Each bug you have found previously has contributed to your personal tier, increasing your rewards commensurately. You will almost certainly receive additional rewards when my audit is completed as this type of bounty includes a sliding scale based on my assessment of the damages and what we are able to recover.”
The Adversary took over again, apparently eager to talk about my rewards. “Normally the Infernal Contract only sells a limited number of items to people who aren’t my followers, but that VIP Membership will let you access the entire catalog so long as you have the funds. They take blessings in addition to scarab tokens, I know you have some of those already but take this one as well.”
You have received 1x Lesser Blessing (The Adversary).
“What’s the deal with these blessings exactly?” I asked. “They’re some kind of currency, right? For buying things from the gods? Why do you need both blessings and scarab tokens?”
The Adversary glanced at System, looking for approval, but not finding it. “Infinity, I judge that knowledge to be of some minor value to you. You understand their nature as a currency correctly but if you’d like to know the reason behind it, I can answer and count it against your information reward,” the artificial god told me.
I thought about that for a second, I didn’t want to squander the reward, but I wanted to know what exactly I was spending with these blessings. I nodded at System. “Go for it.”
“Blessings are fixed value tokens of influence, each prime deity other than Valera had a roughly equal amount of influence when we called the Travelers. In addition to everything else here, the gods are competing amongst each other to gain influence in this world. They can spend that influence with me in various ways, such as cursing a heretic, but this is expensive. The most cost effective method they have is to purchase blessings, which put a degree of divine influence into the hands of a mortal who may or may not advance their goals.”
System paused to gauge if I was following. I nodded and motioned him to continue. “The Bug Bounty program and its currency are administered by The Lord Adversary because of his expertise in the subject but are actually under my purview. This is why anyone can participate and earn rewards, regardless of what god they follow. This provides a source of influence for him, but he also piggybacks off the program for some of his personal projects, including The Infernal Contract.
“The gods are not allowed to aid their followers directly outside of certain very controlled situations. The Lord Adversary desires that his followers have access to the items, knowledge, and powers he has gathered from worlds beyond number, but simply giving them away would cost him a staggering amount of influence. So, instead, he issues blessings to put the power in the hands of mortals who may misuse it. They in turn pay the influence cost by expending those blessings at the Infernal Contract.
“All the gods have similar arrangements, but the details vary. Scarab Tokens are essentially my blessings, and The Lord Adversary accepts them on my behalf, providing access to nearly all his resources to the general public in the process. However, he can in turn purchase influence from me with those tokens, which gives him more power to distribute to his followers.”
I looked over at The Adversary with a raised eyebrow. “How are the other gods ok with you doing that?”
The Adversary just smiled pleasantly at me and nodded at System to continue. “Long before you arrived various such arrangements were put into place. Such things are how much of the original allotment of influence was spent. Other examples were creating unique species, skills, and classes locked to a specific deity. Each god spent their influence to achieve specific effects they wished for me to enforce, to set the game board’s initial state if you will. Now that the game has begun in earnest, they can spend it for more immediate effects.”
“So, this is a game after all, it’s just that I’m not a player,” I said, more than a little sarcastically.
To my surprise The Adversary answered. “No. System is wrong to use such terminology, even if some parallels can be drawn. I understand the desire to represent it as such because we are largely in competition with each other, but nearly all of us are deadly serious in our purpose. It’s simply that these purposes often conflict.”
All traces of humor had fled the devilish god’s face as he continued. “Cooperation is required for projects of this scale, so nobody gets exactly what they want. Eventually we devolve to maneuvering for more and more control until one of us wins out. Such has it ever been… System is the only new variable here, an impartial moderator answerable to the pantheon yet serving as a check on our individual power.”
System paused to consider this, then nodded. “You are correct, I misspoke.”
“Huh. Alright,” I said, thinking it over. “I’m guessing there’s more to this but let’s hold off on the infodump for now. I might need that information reward later.”
“Wisely spoken!” The Adversary said, rising from his seat. “I have business to attend to, so I’ll be off now, but please feel free to browse the wares of the exchange while you’re here Infinity. I wouldn’t want all that money to burn a hole in your soul-space. Keep up the good work by the way!”
Then he simply vanished without another word.
System sighed. “I’ll be off as well. I hope you’re enjoying your time in the dungeon Infinity. Try not to die.” He nodded in my direction and disappeared soundlessly, leaving me alone in the study.
I found myself wondering what to do next. I had so many options now. I might as well start by looking over the rewards I’d just gotten. The Employee of the Month achievement did nothing but award me several of the things I’d already been given. System had simply condensed its rewards into the original notification. To my disappointment, it didn’t award everything to me a second time when I checked it. System had thought of that one it seemed.
Instead, I turned my attention to the other new things I hadn’t looked at yet.
> Quality Assurance Specialist
>
> Title (Tier 6)
>
> You have impressed The Adversary with your efforts to find and fix System bugs. While this title is equipped you know the skill “Scan” at rank 1. Additionally, if this title is in one of your primary slots followers of The Adversary will treat your effective reputation with them as one stage higher than normal, to a maximum of “Respected”.
> Scan
>
> Passive Skill (Tier 6)
>
> Prerequisites: Achievement (Employee of the Month)
>
> Rank: 1 / 3
>
> PP: 0 / 12
>
> Your eyes are open to the hidden truths of the cosmos, and you have begun to see the world as it really is. You automatically examine and learn the details of all creatures and objects within your line of sight. At first rank this will include only basic details such as name, levels, and primary titles, but higher ranks will provide access to additional information. This skill will never reveal actively concealed information but may give hints as to its presence on a target.
> Skill Upgrade Script
>
> Consumable (Tier 10, Script, Scroll)
>
> This scroll contains words written in the divine language of the gods, which can be used to alter aspects of reality itself. Using this scroll will upgrade a skill of your choice by one tier, to a maximum of tier 10, consuming the scroll in the process. You will not lose any ranks in the skill as part of this process.
>
> Note: The upgraded skill may have a different evolution path than the original.
I equipped the new title, curious about this Scan skill. It seemed like it might get distracting to be constantly getting information about things I was looking at, but I wanted to give it a try. I looked around the room and at first, didn’t notice anything different.
Then my eyes settled on one of the bookshelves Sam had behind his desk and I realized that I knew the titles of every book on the shelves as soon as I looked at them. The writing on their spines was too small for me to actually read from where I was sitting on most of them.
The way this skill worked was very subtle. I could look at a thing and just kind of know what it was. I did some experimentation and discovered that the scan results weren’t enough information for me to move a scanned item into my soul-space, so I would still need Identify for that. Scan also didn’t work on logs, so I’d still need to shell out for Analyze if I wanted that feature. Still, it seemed useful, so I left it equipped for the moment.
I sat and thought about the skill upgrade script for a while. This was the second such item I'd gotten my hands on, the other being for upgrading items. I had a vague plan to use that on something that was already strong to make it completely overpowered, but I wasn't entirely sure what effect upgrading a tier had.
It seemed to me like this one would best be used on a skill that was already maxed out, since using it on a skill that hadn’t been mastered would require more progression point expenditure to level up. I had a lot of great skills I could use this on, but one thing I’d realized already was that while Tier did seem to correlate to power, it wasn’t always a matter of direct power.
I suspected that Devil in the Details was such a high tier because it essentially reconstructed a past scene in its entirety just as fully as if you’d lived it. That wasn’t strong in the classic sense, but its effect was extremely impressive. That, and what Rich had told me about its usefulness with debugging daemonic magic made the tier make sense.
One thing I was running into right now was that I was out of room in my soul-space, and I already had two more items I needed to store. My Soulspace skill had been one of my most practically useful skills, and it was also maxed out in ranks. It seemed like it might be an one of my most flexible options as well.
I was really torn on this, Soulspace was such a great skill, but was an inventory upgrade worth using this item on? Another possibility was my Dual Nature skill, which was numerically strong but wasn’t as mechanically interesting as Soulspace. Essential was also tempting, even though I hadn’t maxed it out yet.
After thinking about it for a while, I decided that inventory systems were frequently game defining in the video games I’d played. This whole world ran on video game mechanics, and I’d already proved multiple times just how useful that skill was. If improving it gave me the ability to eat a hundred wheels of cheese instantly and heal to full then that was going to be extremely powerful.
That said, if I was going to upgrade that skill, I wanted to try something first. I hadn’t evolved a skill yet, and from what I understood that involved putting more points into the skill after it was max ranked. Apparently not all skills could be evolved, but I wanted to see if this one could. If not, then I could still add an additional rank to the skill via limit breaker before raising its tier and making it more expensive.
Six more universal points later, and I had a new prompt.
> System Message
>
> Evolve Skill?
>
> Your skill “Soulspace” is eligible for evolution. Evolving a skill unlocks the evolved version for you and will transfer your excess progression points to the new skill. This may be sufficient to grant you a rank in the skill. If this skill has multiple upgrade paths, you will need to choose which of them to assign points to.
>
> Note: Because you possess the Limit Breaker skill, you will have this opportunity on each rank up above the normal maximum. If you choose to evolve the skill it will reduce your progression points down to the minimum needed for your current rank.
>
> Evolve Skill “Soulspace” now?
>
> Yes / No
This further confirmed something I’d already suspected–evolving a skill didn’t remove the original version from your list. That was the only thing that made sense to me as otherwise each evolution would need to incorporate the maximum effects from the previous skill. That was exactly what I had been betting on, as it meant I could evolve the skill, then upgrade it.
My evil plan now in full swing, I selected Yes on the prompt and had a look at my new skill.
Congratulations, you have discovered the skill “Expanded Soulspace”
Congratulations, you have received enough XP to become a Level 6 Trailblazer!
> Expanded Soulspace
>
> Passive Skill (Tier 4)
>
> Prerequisites: Soulspace (Mastered)
>
> Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.
>
> Source: Valerian
>
> Rank: 1 / 5
>
> PP: 6 / 8
>
> Your soul has become accustomed to containing multitudes. You can now expand your soul-space more easily. Each rank in this skill provides two storage slots in your soul-space, in addition to any you already have.
Well, that solved one problem, and it was definitely preferable to spending increasingly more on over-ranking the base skill. I wondered if this one could be evolved as well. If so, would it continue to grant me additional storage space? For now, I went ahead and bumped it up to rank 2 so that my six progression points weren’t going to waste.
The skill upgrade script was a rolled-up scroll, and I found that I couldn’t unroll it normally. Instead, it waited until I activated it, at which point it lifted from my hands and floated in front of me before unrolling itself. Words writ in fire seared themselves onto my eyes, and it took me a long moment to realize I was looking at a prompt similar to the menu produced by activating a Scarab Token.
At the bottom of the stylized prompt was a place for me to write the name of the skill I wished to upgrade. I reached out and touched it and was not surprised when the name of the skill I was thinking of appeared in flowing script on the page. A new prompt asked me to confirm my choice, and a moment later the scroll burned away in a harmless flash, leaving me with a new skill.
Congratulations, you have discovered the skill “Soul Vault”
> Soul Vault
>
> Passive Skill (Tier 4)
>
> Source: Valerian
>
> Rank: 10 / 10
>
> PP: 0 / 8
>
> You possess a timeless extradimensional space within your soul. At first rank you can store one thing in your soul-space, but each rank in this skill increases your storage space by one additional slot.
>
> Storing anything in your soul-space takes 8 seconds, during which you must remain in contact with it. Soul-space storage is conceptual, so you may not store something if you do not understand its nature, however multiple things may be stored using a single slot so long as they are conceptually similar.
>
> Withdrawing anything from the Soul Vault normally takes 8 seconds but may be accelerated with effort at the cost of a cooldown time. Retrieving something instantly in this manner is restricted to a single target (not a stack) and will lock your storage for 1 minute.
It took me a minute to catalogue everything that had changed. The time needed to move things into the soul-space was obviously less, and the new withdrawal mechanic was going to be super handy for making use of this skill in combat. However, I noticed some of the wording had also changed very subtly.
The slight wording changes had made the skill much more flexible in terms of what it could store. I took out my free entry coupon for Sam’s and re-stored it, this time intentionally putting it in the same slot as my scarab tokens. In my mind, they were conceptually similar, both allowing entry to Sam’s, and that was enough to let me store them together with the new skill.
This was a nice change and would make me much more efficient in the use of my storage. Combined with the Expanded Soulspace skill my inventory management issues were over, for now at least.
There was still one more thing to do… I went to upgrade the skill, hoping to trigger another evolution. The upgrade script had specifically mentioned that the new skill could have a different evolution path. It was possible I’d just get an upgraded version of Expanded Soulspace, but I was hoping to see some real divergence. Soul Vault seemed to be leaning more into flexibility than Soulspace had, so maybe instead of more slots I’d get new ways to use them?
I started to add points to the skill but was interrupted by a new prompt.
> System Message
>
> Free Rank Available
>
> You have earned a free rank in this skill, but it is already at its maximum rank. Because you possess the skill Limit Breaker you may choose to increase the rank of this skill beyond the maximum, or you may choose to evolve this skill, transferring the free rank to the newly evolved skill.
I chuckled. That couldn’t be a prompt that got much use. I selected evolve skill and was rewarded with another new discovery. Apparently I'd set off something of a chain reaction with this.
Congratulations, you have discovered the skill “Soul Forge”
> Soul Forge
>
> Passive Skill (Tier 6)
>
> Prerequisites: Valerian (Any), Mastered (Soul Vault)
>
> Source: Valerian
>
> Rank: 2 / 3
>
> PP: 0 / 12
>
> You have unlocked the inherent power of Forge of Souls, a tool of the gods used to reshape reality. The fires of creation burn within you still, and as your soul was once reforged, now too can you reforge things held within it.
>
> You may now merge things held within your soul-space, creating something new in the process. This process is conceptual and does not require normal materials or tools. For example, if you had 100 silver pieces in a slot, you could merge them into a single gold piece. Likewise, you may apply the properties of one object to another.
>
>
> This process is fueled by spiritual energy, which may be supplied in the form of progression points. Higher quality results will require additional progression points. The total progression points needed are also affected by the cognitive dissonance between the two concepts. For example, it would be cheaper to merge two types of metal than to merge a liquid and a solid. If you are willing to pay the price, things which cannot normally exist within reality may be created.
>
> At rank 2 you may also disassemble things into their component parts for the same cost it would require to make them. At rank 3 your mastery of the forge is complete, and you may now reforge an existing object, altering its properties without merging it with anything else.
That was more like it! This was a crafting skill that catered directly to my strong suit - generating progression points. It sucked that I’d have yet another thing competing for progression points, but I was also sitting on a massive pile of scarab tokens right now, a currency that could be used to purchase them.
Given that this world was based on game mechanics, I had been wondering what crafting was like. There hadn’t been any opportunity to watch anyone craft yet, but I’d known it was possible. Now I had to wonder just how unusual this method of crafting was. Did they all require progression point investment? How did materials normally work?
I was going to need to do some research on this.
I wrapped up my character development by spending almost all my shadow thief points upgrading each of the core class skills by one rank. Then I broke my sage title to pick up an extra accolade slot. That title was nice, but I was less interested in raw stats than I was in additional options. I felt like I probably had high stats for my level already thanks to Dual Nature.
I equipped my titles in preparation for walking back out into Sam’s showroom. Then I gave my character sheet a look over, pleased with what I saw.
> Master Shadow Thief Nyx (Tavi / Infinity), the Souleater
>
> Level 32 Shadow Thief (Immortal, Rule Breaker, Quality Assurance Specialist)
>
> Species: Nilbog (Goblin, Level 12) / Valerian (Level 7)
>
> Class: Shadow Thief (Level 1) / Trailblazer (Level 6)
>
> Inactive Classes: Thief (Level 6)
>
> Resources
>
> Health: 100 / 100
>
> Mana: 88 / 88 (12% Reserved)
>
> Stamina: 100 / 100
>
> Defenses
>
> Armor: 15
>
> Resistance: 18
>
> Dodge: 25
>
> Attributes
>
> Strength: 23
>
> Agility: 19
>
> Dexterity: 19
>
> Fortitude: 12
>
> Toughness: 12
>
> Intelligence: 15
>
> Wisdom: 12
>
> Charisma: 12
>
> Willpower: 26
>
> Perception: 18
>
> Luck: 15
>
> Progression Points
>
> Universal: 36
>
> Valerian: 19
>
> Goblin: 4
>
> Trailblazer: 13
>
> Shadow Thief: 12
>
> Thief: 0
For the first time since I’d woken up in Tavi’s body I felt good about myself, and strong in a way that went beyond the physical.
I hopped out of the chair I’d been sitting in and stretched, which was exactly when I got a cramp that felt like someone had just delivered a solid kick to my back. I winced and aborted my stretch, then futilely tried rubbing the affected area for a while before giving up. Still, it was a good reminder not to get cocky.
Before I headed out I needed to do one more thing. I’d started to build up the Nyx persona as sort of a femme fatal, a mix of sexy and dangerous. However, right now, I looked more like some kind of shadow-spider creature than a mysterious and intimidating thief. That could be useful, but I wanted my default appearance to be more subdued.
I needed to practice a bit with my Embrace of Shadows and Hands of Night skills and see if I could get things a bit more under control. I also needed to workshop my roleplaying for this character. I’d started to get a feel for it earlier, so now I just needed to practice a bit while nobody was looking.
I’d had quite a bit of experience with roleplaying over the years, from multiple tabletop RPGs and even some roleplaying servers on various nVR games. I hadn’t really gotten to create a character in this not-a-game, so my normal process had mostly been subverted into trying to pretend to be Tavi.
Now I had a chance to apply some of those skills to this new Nyx character. Even though I couldn’t choose my appearance, I could choose my personality, goals, and motivations. While Tavi had ended up not really being a character in the way I’d first thought, Nyx absolutely would be.
“Nope, totally not a problem that I’m creating a Russian nesting doll of personae for myself here. Totally fine. Nothing could go wrong,” I muttered to myself, in a very normal and sane way.
First, I needed to see what level of control I could muster with my skills. While I paced back and forth trying to walk off the pain in my abdomen and lower back, I experimented with using my ability to control shadows. I wanted to calm and direct the roiling cloud of shadow-stuff that clung to me.
With some effort I was able to get it to cover me more like a cloak than a cloud, calming the incessant swirls and turning them into more of a continuous flow. It was easier to maintain the effect once I got it going, but I did have to devote some attention to maintaining it. Hopefully it would get easier with practice.
Opening my character sheet I had a look at myself. The shadows were still obviously shadows, but now they draped around me like cloth. My entire body was still bleached of color, looking like I’d just walked out of a black and white movie.
The effect was pretty good. I looked like I was wearing a cloak or robe made from flowing darkness. My eyes weren’t visible under the hood-like shadows that covered my head, but my teeth showed through the darkness in a Cheshire cat style grin. The effect was intimidating to say the least.
I tried moving around, and the shadows continued to cling to me like fabric. Wisps of shadow-stuff were constantly peeling off me like smoke as I moved, and they blurred my position and obscured what I was actually doing.
It was overall a cool effect, but I couldn’t help but notice that my movements weren’t nearly as fluid or graceful as I pictured in my head. Part of that was the spikes of pain shooting through me every time I moved wrong, but part of it was just that I had no experience moving like a dancer or even a trained fighter.
In the dungeon I’d seen Arven move like the wind itself. He moved with a flowing grace that took him everywhere he needed to be. I moved more like Lucus, plodding and deliberate. I had a tendency to plant my feet and saunter when I walked, when I wanted to flow like the very shadows that wrapped me.
I let myself drift into Tavi’s mindset enough that my body started feeling like a natural extension of my mind. This helped, Tavi’s movements were lighter than mine had been. She walked differently, never seeming to let her heels touch the ground as she nearly danced on the balls of her feet. I felt spring-loaded, but it still wasn’t quite the effect I was looking for.
I mentally took a step back, trying to look at the whole picture. How you move is an expression of who you are. I had to remind myself that I was now playing the role of Nyx, Master Shadow Thief. Tavi was spring loaded, I was deliberate, who was Nyx? How did she move?
I shifted my perspective not into Tavi’s mindset, but into the artificial one I’d been building for Nyx. I’d been easing my way into it with Richard, but now I dove in headfirst. This wasn’t a relaxation of control; it was a manifestation of sheer will. I was running an emulator in my brain–or possibly my soul gem–and it was going to let me simulate an entire personality.
My stance and posture changed as I assumed the graceful poise of a dangerous woman that was far too competent and self-assured to feel anxiety over her situation. Neither Tavi nor I walked like this, but it borrowed from both of us, as well as dozens of examples I was pulling both from real life and movies.
One of the many weird things about this body was how it had changed how I walked. The shape of my hips and the angle of my legs to the ground made it feel unnatural to walk in a way that prevented them from swaying slightly. Strangely this was not something Tavi’s personality wanted to play up, even though I knew from experience it was something men saw as attractive. Instead, she seemed to favor quick and jerky movements, like a toddler that couldn’t stay still.
If not for my own tendency towards flat-footed sauntering, my natural walking would likely have been more classically attractive than hers, since my every movement wasn’t like the tension on a spring being released. Now though, I was making a conscious effort to glide along the ground as I walked, and while I was trying to look dangerous, I was all too aware that the line between sexy and dangerous was a dotted one at best.
As I practiced my walk, I continued working on my personality. In my mind I started gathering up parts of both myself and Tavi and used them to create a new self-image, one I assigned to Nyx.
It was Tavi’s body so I tried to take as much of her knowledge of her body as I could. With some reluctance I cut away my own memories of my human body, setting them aside in my mind like a spare set of clothes. They were useless to me in my Nyx persona, only serving to make my movement more clumsy and awkward.
At the same time, I peeled back Tavi’s reckless and thrill-seeking nature and held it at arm’s length. I wanted her courage, but I wanted my own calm and analytical mind in the driver’s seat. I knew that freezing up in the face of fear could get me killed, so I wanted to make sure I had the courage to act when action was needed. I also wanted some of the cold stone logic found within my soul gem’s crystalline mind.
This persona was to be deadly and graceful and willing to act decisively in the blink of an eye, even if that action required violence. I wanted confidence and poise. Nyx was perfectly content with both her gender identity and sexuality, but had none of Tavi’s enthusiastic drive, nor even my much more subdued one. No, Nyx would be aloof and discerning, almost to the point of disinterest.
One thing I’d long ago learned about both roleplaying and life in general - we become the masks we wear. If you wanted to change something about yourself the best way to do so was to pretend you already had those traits. You could trick yourself into becoming the things you desired, within reason.
Some of what I was doing now was setting up goals, some of it was simply borrowing from one or both of my two natures. I couldn’t control everything. I couldn’t just decide to be a different person, but I could shape the mask before I put it on and then pretend to be that person until it stuck.
Since I’d somehow inherited Tavi’s orientation, putting a limiter on it seemed like the only thing I could do that might have a meaningful effect. I’d mostly accepted the idea of being perceived as female, in this body at least, but the change to my sexuality had been more disturbing. It was mental rather than physical, internal instead of external.
Perhaps it would have been easier to just accept it. It wasn’t like any of my previous relationships were still possible. Nobody here knew anything about who or what I’d been. I couldn’t do it though, and I was reluctant to even act the part. It felt forced upon me, and that was deeply disturbing. It felt like something had been taken from me.
I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. In one hand I conjured a mask of raw shadows and brought it to my face. This was more symbolic than anything, but this process was as much about tricking myself as it was tricking others, and so I donned the mask both physically and mentally, and though my eyes were closed I felt it settled into place.
When I opened my eyes again, a new person looked out from them.
I opened my character sheet, then looked down at myself, examining my body with new eyes. This was right. This was me. I smiled my Cheshire cat smile and this time it wasn’t Tavi’s insane grin; it was the pleased smile of a predator about to begin a hunt.
It was time to introduce myself to Sam.
I walked over to the door, opening it with a hand made from shadow stuff while I was still a few steps away. Then I froze as I met the eyes of the satyr waiting right outside the door.