Eighteen years later-

Like all eighteen-year-olds, my childhood protection wore off today. Funny, to call it ‘protection’, when what it really was, was a crippling disability for the first eighteen years of your life.

Children were technically protected from monster swarms and ability use, but they could still starve, catch diseases, or get abused in perfectly normal ways by adults or each other.

Of course, a lot of children were protected in more normal ways, by parents and laws, but not street kids, not orphans. The ‘system’ to take care of those who were not born with a silver spoon up their ass was more of a dating app for predators to contact their victims or a prison sentence for those who were not lucky enough to win the adoption lottery.

Not that adults, even if they had a vocation, had a magical pass to survival, either. Just because you had a vocation didn’t mean you couldn’t be picked off by a stray monster during a wave, or that you could magically work and take advantage of even a basic vocation’s ability. The Twin Cities underpass, where I usually camped out, was full of people who had either physical or mental handicaps that prevented them from thriving. Some simply couldn’t keep a job, even in their vocation.

Of course, there were lots of criminals and those who couldn’t even find a vocation, too. Lacking a vocation didn’t necessarily mean you were useless, after all, before the silhouette came along humanity seemed to do just fine, and a healthy male adult could always find someone to keep them fed in exchange for certain...favors, but I didn’t want the life of a kept breeder. But when anyone could visit a free basic shrine and get a vocation, even beggars, well the ones that couldn’t find one were clearly sort of damaged.

Which was why I was standing in line like so many others at the city’s silhouette shrine. Most of the people were just… people. Predominantly female, of course, which had been the norm since the silhouette had arrived before I was born, and while I drew a few looks, I was sort of ragged and smelly and didn’t look particularly healthy.

The kind of female that would be interested in supporting a toy like me would not be the sort of woman anyone with a brain would be interested in attaching themselves to. Not unless you wanted to spend your life getting pimped out for cheap as a breeder.

I guess some guys might look at that as a dream job, especially since a male without a vocation could probably keep it up for the rest of his life, but to me, it smacked of slavery. I’d left the shelters to avoid being used as a sex toy, damned if I’d let that become my adult life. Even if I failed to attain a decent vocation, I’d find something else, anything else, even if it meant becoming an uninitiated wrangler or button-pusher.

Still, I had high hopes. Supposedly, your skills and interests played a huge part in the vocation you were offered, but even so, occasionally people wound up with vocations that they were utterly unsuited for, especially those of us who had to settle for basic vocations because we couldn’t afford more advanced ones.

Basic vocations, like gardener, stevedore, clerk, or guard, might be difficult to place, but they still had potential. Supposedly there were as many vocations out there as there were people, but in practice, jobs and skillsets tended to put vocations into categories.

The line slowly moved forward. The free, public terminal of the shrine couldn’t offer common or higher vocations, which meant a parade of people like me who couldn’t afford the ten grand surcharge for a common vocation, but not all of us were broke orphans… some parents just couldn’t spring for the cost, or were hardasses that demanded that their children start with a basic class and work their way up to more advanced vocations the hard way.

That wasn’t a bad plan. Some basic vocations offered a gold-circle rank ten traits that were worth the effort of trying to rank up through the class, that would be lost if you started at their common level instead of basic. Not all of them, of course, some just offered a minor boost that was overtaken by the later gifts, and the durability and healing bonuses of basic vocations, especially combat vocations, would help survival enormously in the early ranks.

Without childhood protections, death by swarm was a real possibility for a noncombat class. Honestly, I hoped I wasn’t offered one as a basic class. If I was, finding a job that didn’t require a fighting vocation and was someplace relatively safe would become a priority.

The line moved forward again as a crew of freshly adult girls was allowed into the shrine. The ones who were leaving had various expressions on their teenaged faces, from sorrow by those who failed to get a decent vocation or got one that they didn’t like, to joy from the few that received what they wanted.

None of the girls were dressed in designer stuff, but then again, we were in the Lower East Side… most of them probably had been working or in school since they were old enough to walk. The more education and experience you had going in, the better likelihood you had of getting a vocation that matched your education and expectations.

Like most common shrines, the buildings crowded close around it, especially small shops and street vendors. Drown your sorrows or grab a bite to celebrate your newfound success. Small local shrines like this one couldn’t support more than ten people at a time, thus the line of hard-bitten lower class on the morning of their eighteenth birthday.

No one wanted to be wandering around without protection if there was a wave, so the ones coming out without a combat vocation would probably hurry back to their protected job sites or family. Sure, like most shrines there were some armed and armored women wandering around that had combat classes to protect the newly-minted adults, but no one was perfect.

The lucky ones would get a vocation that matched what they were already doing, which ensured a smooth transition while they worked their way up to their maximum rank in their new class. A few would go on to common or maybe someday advanced classes, but advancing past a basic vocation often involved moving past bottlenecks that locked most people at their gold-circle mastery for basic. There was a reason they were called basic, but basic vocations were not necessarily weak, simply limited.

There were still some older people who refused vocations, but after three-quarters of the world’s population was destroyed, and the life-extending properties of more advanced vocations were discovered, the holdouts who refused to touch a shrine were rare enough that I never met one that wasn’t a mentally-damaged street dweller.

At least the street we were standing on was low traffic. Sure, most people moved to the fortified cities, once enough people had strong enough gifts to keep the cities fed because that was a lot safer than living on a farm until you got eaten. There were still some agricultural communities, but they usually sold specialized food and were set up more like old drug cartel farms before the crash, with a small staff and heavily armed guards that would shoot first, shoot second, and then maybe question the remains.

Finally, it was our turn. Eight girls, one little dumpling that looked like he had spent the last ten years in a basement playing video games, and me. We were escorted into the shrine.

From what I heard, the first years of the crash were horrifying. Over half of all women were killed inside the first year, from being warped into mutated monsters or smashed by monster waves, and the men lost almost ninety percent… both from their more risk-taking nature and higher demands. Suicide alone claimed a good chunk, and then it was discovered that for some reason, ninety percent of all male zygotes died after they were fertilized.

This didn’t have a huge effect on animal populations, but among humans? Well, men had always handled most infrastructure and logistical demands, and when they were gone, so had most of the older knowledge base for keeping an advanced society going. It wasn’t until people discovered shrines and vocations that even a vestige of a technical society could be maintained.

Lots of jobs, now, from producing necessities to all sorts of services that used to be provided by automation. Ironically, with less than a quarter of the prior population, labor, especially labor assisted by vocation traits, was suddenly incredibly valuable again. Even unskilled labor, from those who don’t have vocation traits, was somewhat valuable… as long as you were safe from stray monsters and were not protected status.

It was complicated, but nothing produced by a protected child could be re-sold. It would literally dissolve, and Silhouette was too stupid to realize that instead of protecting children from unfair labor, it simply set up a new kind of counterfeiting among the criminal element, which was still very much in existence despite the lost population.

Ironically enough, even missing a majority of males, female criminals were just as crooked and vicious as the old male-dominated criminal element. A total triumph of feminism, something I learned used to be a thing twenty years ago. The near lack of males, despite being somewhat compensated for by traits, kind of stomped all over the old fish and bicycle arguments of the past.

Just to put a cap on things, traits that enhanced physical traits, like heavy load, still benefited from physical aptitudes. A male stevedore could often lug upwards of a ton if they were in decent shape compared to females lugging several hundred pounds, and male combat classes were often exceptional, as if to compensate for the lack of men.

That’s why I was hoping for a combat class. If I got one, my future, assuming I could survive the lower ranks, would be potentially rosy. Riftbreakers and hunters could pull in madly valuable resources, although even a hauler or survivalist who helped a combat team could make a great profit.

The shrine building was decorated to resemble a Shinto shrine, with ten black panels set into the walls for people to view their opportunities, which my current group was approaching. No one knew where the shrines came from, any more than they understood where rifts or the silhouette itself came from, they were simply there the same evening that rifts appeared and started sending hordes of monsters boiling out into the world, monsters that seemed to ignore most weaponry and tore their way through the population like the hammer of God.

Me, I knew I was lucky. I was unborn in my mother’s womb after the rifts opened, and was one of the rare ten percent of male zygotes that survived the purging that caused so many stillbirths. From what I understood, the human population was slowly recovering, fighting its way back from the brink of extinction, but since rifts became more powerful in proximity to large masses of people, most former human cities became the domain of powerful individuals with rare classes that could help force back the tides of monsters that occasionally spawned from untamed rifts.

Aster City, for example, used to be called Appleton, Wisconsin. Now it was run by a woman named Aster Winthrop, a powerful support mage that supposedly had a gold-circle for a very rare class. She seldom showed her face for any but the worst tides, but when she did, she was the focal point for defense and protected the city from both swarms and other city lords trying to annex the territory. Remember what I said about criminals? Well, criminals can become powerful too, and the silhouette offered a huge number of benefits for controlling multiple settlements.

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

When I finally found a free screen, I placed my hands excitedly on the surface… Finally, I might get a decent combat vocation like warrior or guard, maybe even trapper or hunter. I was a little on the shrimpy side, both from regularly starving and just being runty in general.

***

Welcome to Silhouette, Thaniel Kushman Grimm. How may I assist you today?

The words just… appeared in my head. They weren’t in my sight, or anything like that, it was more like I imagine telepathy might feel if telepathy was based around words and text rather than voices.

I knew what to do. Hell, everyone knew what to do, since getting a vocation was discussed regularly while you were in protected status. I had no idea where my name came from, all I knew was that it was connected to me in the hospital. I had no idea who my mother was, and it was generally assumed that she had died by a wave or something while I was in the hospital.

I would like a vocation.

Calculating…

Please answer the following questions:

What the heck? I’d never heard anything about questions! Normally the silhouette wouldn’t let you do anything before you had awakened a vocation, and afterward, it was only useful for viewing and updating your advancement and receiving the rewards for the rare quest or closing a rift.

Questions answered by your subconscious. Thank you for your patience.

So, not only was it asking me questions, but I had no idea what they were, or what my answers were. That made zero sense. I mean, I had heard that in the end, the silhouette was a very basic AI, and as stupid as a bag of turds in an ice cream shop, but this was going past that.

Calculating…

You have chosen your vocation!

I chose it? I didn’t choose anything. Supposedly, more advanced vocations after the first could sometimes take several routes that could be chosen when your vocation evolved, but no one ‘chose’ anything. There was some argument as to whether Silhouette chose vocations based on aptitude or public needs, but no one chose anything.

Your new vocation is ‘Mender’. Your initial trait is ‘mend’. You possess an affinity.

That was not one I had heard of. It sounded a lot like a mechanical vocation, which could lead to things like architect or engineer. I liked fixing machines, and a repair trait could have a real future. But first I needed to be sure. And an affinity? I heard some people had an affinity that modified the way their traits worked, but all I really knew was that it sometimes changed your traits if you had an advanced vocation.

This was amazing! I almost released the screen in shock, which would end the session until I gained a rank, which would be bad. An affinity almost guaranteed the ability to evolve your vocation once you got it to gold circle.

Can you tell me what the mender vocation is?

Help Files accessing…

The mender vocation is the first step in the troubleshooter path. It gains the mend trait at initial rank, and its gold circle gift is the upgrade trait.

Wow! I lucked out. After a lifetime of bad luck, it looked like I finally had a decent break. I had to grasp it with both hands.

What is mend?

Mend is a special ability of the troubleshooter path. It allows you to deconstruct or repair nearly any object that is not completely destroyed on contact. Adequate education or frequent deconstruction is required to mend more complex objects.

Please note that your life affinity has modified the mend trait to include biological organisms.

What? Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. I reflexively let go of the control panel, cursing as I broke contact… I wouldn’t be able to access it again until I had ranked up, and I hadn’t even had a chance to check out my class progression. It probably ranked up by mending and repairing things and… umm… fixing living things.

This was bad. Very bad. I glared at the screen for a moment, I don’t even know why it was called a screen since it was a shrine contact point and didn’t display anything except in your head, and started to charge out of the shrine.

“Wait a moment, sir.” said a very powerfully built woman wearing green leather armor and a pair of some kind of metal gloves. Some kind of pugilist, I guessed, probably a common vocation, maybe a gold circle too. In short, she could kick my ass without breaking a sweat, or even noticing, probably.

“Wait what? Why?” I asked brilliantly. Yeah, I was stressing. This was a very bad thing. Not bad as in a repeat of the crash, but very bad for me.

“Proscribed vocations, mister… ahh… Grimm?” she said, looking at a clipboard that was hanging under an incense burner. “We have to ensure you didn’t receive a proscribed vocation.”

I relaxed a little, “No, I am a repairman. Unless that’s proscribed?”

She snorted a little, her ponytail bobbing. “That depends. Is that a fancy word for a fixer?”

I sighed, “I don’t know, ma’am. I fix things as long as I can understand them, but my vocation doesn’t seem to be about fixing situations, just uhh… stuff.”

She looked at her clipboard and put her hand on it. After a moment a girl that looked like an Asian version of Velma from the old scooby-doo cartoons joined me, followed by a blonde with a very Roman nose who would have looked like an elite if she wasn’t wearing ripped jeans and a baggy sweatshirt.

She eventually waved the two depressed-looking girls past, simply nodding at them, and then glanced at her board and waved through the rest as they broke contact with the shrine. She finally turned to look at me and waved me towards a side alcove away from the rapidly refilling terminals.

“Mender doesn’t sound like a proscribed class, but we need to investigate because it’s a title I haven’t heard before and isn’t on the approved list either.”

“Would it help if I used my trait? I mean, it’s a basic class, I don’t get another one until gold circle, right?” I asked, hopefully.

She nodded slowly, “How does it work?”

I shrugged, “According to silhouette, anything I touch that I can understand, I can fix.” I actually had been spending a lot of time at the library’s internet computers in my unfortunately copious free time, in between dumpster diving behind Green Kao’s after the dinner rush and begging at intersections.

I wondered if part of the reason that I got the vocation was because of the intersection with medicine from some of the intensive studies I’d done into trauma medicine… a medical gift, unlike something like natural healing, was not dangerous at all and would have probably won me a scholarship into a decent college before I could blink.

I also had knowledge of a lot of stuff that I probably shouldn’t have, but I had no idea what would prove useful for a vocation, and I hadn’t been locked into a school curriculum. Sometimes I would just start to read about something and the knowledge of it would just flood into me, like I remembered it from years of experience, even if I never encountered it before.

For instance, I knew how a heart was put together, including some surgical procedures like installing a stent or performing a lateral bypass. I didn’t even know why or how, but it was like I remembered the whole procedure, like I’d done it a hundred times, including what the inside of a healthy heart looked like. Honestly, it was a little creepy what had triggered it, but once I found the right trigger, knowledge would just flood into me.

The brawler looked at me closely, “Will it work on what I am wearing?”

I shrugged and repeated the first part of the message. “I quote, mend allows you to deconstruct or repair nearly any object that is not completely destroyed with physical contact. Adequate education or frequent deconstruction is required to mend more complex objects.”

I sighed, “What that means to me is that I can get a lot of use fixing stuff out of it, and I am going to have to buckle down on the mechanical education and probably get a couple of ranks before I can quickly repair anything as complex as like… an engine.”

She nodded, “That’s what it sounds like to me too, if your assessment was accurate. You don’t smell like you are intentionally trying to deceive me, but your fear smell is making me wonder what you are hiding.”

I shook my head, “Just thinking through the ramifications. I live in the Freeway Canyons. Being able to take a machine apart and put it back together fixed at a touch is the kind of thing that could draw the interest of the gangs, especially the Red Devil free bikers or the Transporters. Am I afraid? You bet your ass, I am absolutely terrified, and I will freely admit it. I didn’t get a combat class. If they find out what I can do they will take me, or kill me to keep me out of someone else’s hands, so right now I am trying to figure out how to stay safe.”

“So yes, I smell like fear, and I will keep on smelling like fear until I can get a job in a complex, get a protector, or get a job on a clearing team that needs a repairman.”

She looked me over carefully, “Get a protector? Like a first?”

I shook my head, “Hells, no. I am terrified of the free bikers, but I’d sell myself to the Axes long before I’d sell myself to a first. They would keep me as a working slave, but at least they wouldn’t sell my semen and pimp me out eternally.”

She nodded slowly, “I would tell you that that is NOT what a first is for, at least not usually, but this is the Lower East End, and based on your starved look you have lived for more than a few years under the spaghetti bowl. Maybe in your experience, that’s what a first can become, but outside of this dump of a neighborhood in an absolute shit-hole city like Appleton, things are often very different. Are you interested in a system contract?”

I shook my head, “No idea, what’s that?”

She raised an eyebrow, “What the fuck are they teaching… wait, you don’t know what a system contract is? What about a bond?”

I shrugged, “Never heard of that, is it like a slave contract?”

She shook her head and glanced back at the people linked to the terminals. “No, a system contract is a silhouette-registered document. A slave contract is enforced by contract magic. Slave contracts can be forced, by something like holding a knife to someone’s throat and forcing them to sign, but the contract is only forced by the contractor’s magic.”

“A slave contract is a curse, and can be broken by the right magic or even a powerful enough protection aura can interrupt its effects. A system contract, on the other hand, spells out the negative effects of breaking the contract, and silhouette itself enforces them. I don’t normally do this, but you are in really bad shape, and have a potentially extremely useful trait.”

She shrugged, “A system contract cannot be entered under duress, or under false pretenses. I am temporarily under an employment contract with the city lord, as a shrine guardian, until my delving team can heal and re-arm. If you walk out of here in the shape you are in, now that your child protection has worn off, the first gangster that scans or identifies you will snatch you up just out of curiosity about your non-standard trait. I doubt you would move more than a mile before someone had a knife at your throat demanding you sign a slave contract.”

I nodded, I had a similar thought, and with a slave contract they could force me to reveal my affinity, and if that happened, I doubted I would ever breathe free again. That’s why I was so terrified.

“What’s a delving team?”

She looked at me askance, “Seriously? A rifter team?”

I nodded, “Oh right, I know that… I didn’t know you were a rifter. I’ve never heard of it referred to as delving before. But you look like you are a combatant class, and if you are, you’d almost have to rift to advance as far as you have… common gold circle?”

She laughed, “Uncommon gold circle, actually. Damned close to rank one rare, but I have held off hitting an uncommon shrine because Aster doesn’t like rare vocations in her city, and she also charges a sick premium for using common or higher shrines. She loves being the biggest fish in this tiny polluted pond.”

I widened my eyes in surprise and re-assessed how quickly she could turn me into a pile of hamburger, uncomfortably. It also made me estimate her potential age upwards, she could be a grandmother even if she only looked late twenties.

“So what is it you want from me?”

She smiled slightly, “Your mend trait sounds incredibly open-ended. In exchange for being your protector for the next few months while my team recovers, getting you fed and healthy, and getting lots of practice to hopefully give you a few ranks in your new vocation, you will attempt to learn how and use your abilities to repair our gear and equipment.”

I looked at her distrustfully, “That sounds like I am getting a lot more out of the deal than you are. I mean, you literally could force me to sign a slave contract this minute.”

She shook her head, “No I can’t. My work contract means I cannot interfere with how Aster runs her city, and enslaving her citizens is interference. There’s also the fact that I am not a complete monster… Outside of Appleton, most cities discourage slavery, because it only works for third world economies and criminals and usually punishes the most useful sector of society.”

“A lot of our damaged gear is stage two or three, or enchanted. Your ability description didn’t mention any rank, essence, or magical restrictions, simply education. Getting the gear we can get repaired or replaced here will be insanely expensive or we might have to replace it with shitty local quality. Our magical gear? No chance of it getting replaced or repaired, since no decent enchanter would ever live close to a city where they could get forced into slavery just because they can’t beat a basic combat vocation in a fistfight.”

She looked at me more closely, “Not to mention that if you got cleaned up and filled out a little you’d be a very pretty boy. If you think that getting tagged by a local gang would be bad, you don’t want to know how Aster getting her hooks into you would likely end. You could be hugely useful, and Aster likes to break her toys.”

“No sex?”

She shook her head, “No involuntary sex or mandatory sperm donations. Like I said, though, if you get cleaned up, with a valuable trait, you might choose to profit off it yourself, or even meet a girl you might like. You’d likely be very… popular among breeders.”

“What about when it ends?”

She smiled, knowing she had won my interest. “When we are ready, we are planning on ditching this podunk. When we are gone, the contract is over, unless both you and we decide to renegotiate. That being said, though, if your trait is as open-ended as I hope it is, the girls and I will probably be desperate to get you to join the team as support. Delving support is the fastest and most effective way of ranking up and getting through advancement bottlenecks, and being able to mend gear on the fly would be a huge boost to our survivability.”

She smirked a little, “When we are healed and ready to go, you may be in the position to negotiate a lot more favorably. You would probably have us over a barrel, and in Lilah’s case, that’s probably exactly what she’d prefer.”

I was a little confused, “She’d prefer to negotiate from a position of weakness? That’s… odd. But your offer interests me. What should I do?”

She smirked again, and I had no idea what she was thinking. “How about you wait in this alcove? I will get you some rats and bug juice…” at my confused and slightly disgusted expression, she amended, “Rations, basically jerky, crackers, and dehydrated fruit, and bug juice is a fruit-flavored non-alcoholic drink with sugar and electrolytes, Basically generic Kool-aid.”

I nodded and she smiled, “Eat slowly.” she said, tugging a large plastic bottle of red juice and a thick paper wrapper out of a backpack sitting on the floor. “You look like you haven’t eaten anything you haven’t dug out of a trash can in a long time, and eating too fast can make you sick,” she added unnecessarily and pointed at a place on the floor. “I am on shift until noon when the birthdays slow down. After that, we can work out a fair contract over lunch.”

I nodded and sunk to the floor, my mouth already watering at the prospect of food that wasn’t half-rotten and a drink other than muddy water, emergency water bottles, or the dregs of whatever people had been drinking behind bars.