As Rusty mentioned, the dwelling Acacia got assigned was far from the height of luxury. It was made out of Barren-dust compressed magically into smooth grey walls, floor, and ceiling. The whole space was a single room, with a mattress in one corner, and a small table with a chair in another. Acacia couldn't identify what any of the three pieces of furniture were made out of, so Rusty explained they were some sort of recycled composite material. Both the furniture and the door where white instead of grey, which was about as much variety as could be expected from the "minimum to survive" Citadel provided.

"Before I leave you be for today, what do you use for sustenance? And what type of waste do you produce?" Rusty asked. "While you appear organic, it is never good to assume such things."

"Well, I actually haven't eaten anything except whatever substitutes sunlight here, and nutrients from some kind of weird giant bug I killed on the way here. I haven't really pooped, either. I get a feeling I can either do sunlight or normal food for organics, and I need water, too."

"The bug would most likely be a dust mite. One of the very few species that can thrive in the Barren. They hibernate underground until they sense something approaching, then hunt it down. They sometimes work together, hence the stampede I mentioned."

"So that's food covered, I guess. How do you get water? I had to search deep in the ground for it."

"Waste recycling, scavenging, but mostly deep drilling. There are big water deposits around, and we have the technology to find them. Though water runs are the second most dangerous job you can get. Mites like to lay eggs in the water."

"The first most dangerous being scavenging?"

"Correct. Rift outputs are by their nature unpredictable, especially with the bigger rifts. And since the bigger the rift, the bigger the ripple in space time it causes, those are usually the ones the screening teams detect and send people to."

"Sounds like a perfect job for a newbie like me, then." Acacia commented sarcastically.

"There are benefits." Rusty defended herself. "More challenge means quicker levelling, and the hazard pay is good. Plus I heard the scrappers let you keep some of the spoils if you ask nicely.

"But you won't be allowed to even apply for a job before you spend a bit more time acclimating yourself. You'll get a teacher, in your case someone good with magic, unless you ask for something else."

"Nope, magic's perfect."

"Very well, then. I'll be back tomorrow to give you your documents and to introduce your teacher."

"Uh, one more question." Acacia called out to the robot. "Can I get some clothes? I get that nudity isn't a problem here, but in my former life, covering up your privates was mandated, and I'll feel better if my wooden balls aren't out in the open."

"I can bring some loin coverings tomorrow, but it will take away most of your starting funds. Is that okay?"

"Most of my thousand credit fund for a loin cloth?!"

"Fabric is expensive. There aren't many plants nor domesticated animals to provide strands to weave, and synthesizing them requires rarer materials. If you really want to cover yourself, I suggest you use your shape changing abilities and grow leaves over the body parts you feel need covering."

Acacia blinked. "I'm so dumb sometimes." She grumbled.

--

Acacia was laying on her bed, staring up at the smooth ceiling of her house. She was long done growing her leaf clothing, feeling like a biblical illustration of the first humans in the garden of Eden. Now, she was waiting for the ten hours that defined a day here to pass, so she could finally get to learning magic. What she could do already was miraculous, of course, she had always wanted to be able to shapeshift, but now that the possibilities were endless, she couldn't wait to explore the many avenues to power.

And it was power she was after. She always felt powerless in her former life. Her greatest moments were always when she felt she had wrestled control over herself from the clutches of fate, god, the rich, or whatever it was that she was blaming at the time. Point was, the feeling of control was accompanying all of her accomplishments. And now, she could learn to control reality itself. Impose her own will onto the world. She had literally told a tree to make a new body for her!

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

But right now, there it was once again. Boredom. The ceiling was smooth, so there wasn't even any grooves or cracks she could follow with her eyes.

"Fuck it, might as well check out the neighborhood." She grumbled as she stood up from the mattress. She walked out the door and locked it - she didn't have anything to steal, but it's the principle of privacy that mattered here - and his the key in a groove she made in her arm. If she couldn't get pockets, she would be the pocket.

Her new neighborhood, Outskirts Sector 5-B, consisted of copy-paste replicas of her own dwelling. Grey boxes of stone raised via earth magic on an infuriatingly even grid. She could swear the distances between the houses and their dimensions were identical to a nanometer. All roads where the same grey compressed dust, and could accommodate two people her size walking next to each other. Since almost no one here owned a vehicle, and the public transport was a bit sparse - the precious few maglev streets were the only disruption to the fractal monotony of the sector - it was enough space for most.

Most being the operative word, as she observed with some trepidation a bus-sized, centipede-like creature traverse the flat roofs, carrying a large metal crate in their mandibles.

She waved nervously to them - this gesture was apparently universal - as they passed. They stopped for a moment, and waved back with one of their front legs, before continuing on their way.

"I'm so fucking good at socialising," she thought.

After a few minutes of wandering around, she stumbled on a building that was white instead of grey, and took up the space of two dwellings. She obviously couldn't pass on investigating the most interesting structure in the near vicinity.

The doorway had no door, and the noises of conversation inside further invited her in.

It was a restaurant, or rather, the food dispensary. While there were some dishes to buy, the primary purpose here was to grab the free nutrient slab, glass of water, and maybe talk to others during the meal.

The nice thing was that you could have as much slabs of packed nourishment and as much water as you wished. There was no daily allotment or anything. If you were hungry or thirsty, you could walk up to the counter and get another portion.

The not-nice thing was that the meals seemed intricately designed to be as bland as physically possible. As Acacia took a bite out of her slab, she was seriously wondering if the meals weren't magically treated to remove any flavour. The texture wasn't even unpleasant enough to cause disgust. It was supposed to prevent you from starvation. Nothing more, nothing less.

"A new face, I see." A person said, sitting down at Acacia's table as she slowly consumed her meal.

She looked up from the plate, seeing a bulky humanoid whose body was covered in chitin, their head that of an ant, or perhaps a termite.

Scalpel, he/him, scavenger living in Sector 5-B.

She blinked. How the hell did she know those thing about him?

"You can push a bit of mana into your ID, and it emits a cognitive effect on everyone that's focusing on you. Handy for introductions. Though I'm guessing you don't have an ID yet." Scalpel explained as he saw her surprise.

"How'd you know I'm new here?" She asked.

"I hang out here a lot, I know by now how everyone in the sector looks." He raised a single clawed finger.

"You still look in wonder at all the different people, because you're used to one body type." He raised a second finger.

"But most telling," he raised a third, "you eat your slab with wide eyes. Because you're still getting used to how utterly bland these things are. This is the only stimulation you're getting from this shit, by the way. The wonder of how something so devoid of experience can exist. Well, welcome to the fucking Barren."

Acacia swallowed another bite. "They are magically siphoning flavour from this shit, right?"

"The other way around, actually. They imbue the concept of blandness into the slurry before it's compressed into bars. The alchemist on my team actually uses it to stabilise some magichemical reactions. The food is so bland it stabilised reality."

Acacia laughed. For the first time since breaking out of the dead tree, she laughed.

"That's amazing. I'm Acacia, by the way. Just got my house. Though not my home, if you catch my meaning."

Scalpel smirked. She thought he did, at least. His mouth was obscured by his mandibles, but apparently, as she got used to speaking in oldspeak, she learned to translate body language as well. "Yeah, the boxes are shit. They aren't magically boring, thankfully, so decorating is still something you can do. I splurged on some paint recently, got a nice mural going. You can come to my place and see, if you like."

Acacia pulled her head back a bit, raising her eyebrow. "Are you hitting on me?"

The sly instect man leaned back in his chair. "I sure am. Always worth shooting your shot, I always say."

She shook her head, though a smile was sneaking its way onto her face. "Is proposing sex in the first conversation a Citadel thing, or a Scalpel thing?"

He shrugged. "A bit of both. Once you spend some time here, you begin appreciating features you wouldn't have before. Though some people come in horny for wild anatomy differences from the get-go."

"Back home we'd call them monsterfuckers." Acacia threw in.

"Ha! I like that. Though most wouldn't appreciate being called monsters, so watch where you say it."

"That's the neat thing, actually. The whole subculture was about loving the creatures from horror stories and fairy tales to scare children. The abominations, those considered horrible, they too were being loved, not despite their unusual features, but because of them. Then again, none of these things were actually real, so who knows how that would pan out."

He nodded. "In that case, I'd gladly be your monster."

She chuckled again. "Let's see what we're working with, then..."

Acacia proceeded to blarantly check Scalpel out, making a show of standing up and walking around to see him from all the angles. Finally, she sat back down.

"Alright. Let me finish my slab and let's see that mural."