“Me?” Zaphar asked nervously. “What about me?”

The green man examined the thief closely. “Yes, yes, I can work with this. Not too much in the way. As a consolation prize, he will do.”

“I don’t mean to tell you your business,” Kelsey drawled, “But if you operated somewhere people lived, you might get more action.”

“Valid,” the green man agreed. “But there are other considerations. People are so annoying.”

“True enough,” Kelsey admitted. “Present company excluded, of course.”

The stranger laughed. “Indeed! Present company very much excluded.”

He turned back to the bedraggled thief.

“Now you… you have no grand dreams, no important mission. A shame. But you are young yet! Still seeking. On the cusp of your third Tier, but holding back for a better class. I approve!”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Zaphar said.

“Why should you?” the green man asked. “You should be able to understand this, though: You want a better class.”

“Doesn’t everyone?” Zaphar asked, shifting uneasily on his seat.

“There are some that are happy with what life brings them,” the green man replied.

“Maybe rich folk and nobles are happy with the classes they get, but everyone I know had to settle for a rotten Common class.”

“How tragic,” the green man said, without any emotion. “I can offer you better.”

“A class? You can do that?” Zaphar asked incredulously.

“Indeed! There is very little that I cannot do,” the green man said proudly. “Here, then, is the deal I propose. I will help you on your path, and you will show me where I need to go.”

There was a weight to the words when he said them, that made Anton jump. He looked over at Kelsey, reminded of when she had first spoken to him.

I was delirious at the time, but did she sound like that?

Noticing that he was looking at her, Kelsey shrugged.

“That’s what it’s like when you do it properly,” she said, explaining nothing.

Zaphar was just as confused. “I don’t know what that means,” he objected. “How am I supposed to do that?”

“Don’t worry about it,” the green man said. “Just stick with these three, and you’ll get where you’re going. Is that fine with you?” he asked Kelsey.

“Sure,” she said lazily. “Glad to have you on board.”

Anton wanted to warn Zaphar about accepting vague deals, but he was stopped by Kelsey’s earlier warning, as well as her relaxed attitude. Looking back, was he really upset by what the deal had brought him? Kelsey had shackled him, true, but she had dragged him out of a dark place. She’d earned a little of his trust.

“Does this mean that you’ll be coming with us?” Zaphar asked.

“Oh no no no,” the green man said. “My colleague rightly chides me for my isolation, but I can monitor your progress from here.”

“I’m not sure I like the sound of that,” Zaphar muttered. “Can you at least tell me what class I’d get? Will it be Fine? or Rare?”

“That, I can’t say,” the green man said. “Only that it will be acceptable to you.”

“How can you know that if you don’t know what it is?”

“I don’t select the class,” the green man replied. “But if it wasn’t acceptable to you, the deal would be imbalanced and wouldn’t be accepted.”

“And why say it like that? Why not just say you’ll get me a new class?”

“You may need some additional help along the way,” the green man admitted. “The phrasing gives me some latitude to help you as needed.”

“I guess I can’t say no to a better class, whatever the price,” Zaphar said. He looked over at Kelsey. “You were talking about getting me a better class…”

Kelsey held up her hands. “Hey, we’ll do what we can, regardless of how this turns out. But you should know that anything I can do is going to be strictly inferior to what this guy can do.”

“Quite so,” the green man preened. “So, do I have your answer?”

“Yes,” Zaphar said. Anton felt a sizzle in the air somewhere. Then Zaphar gasped.

“It’s Unique!” he exclaimed.

“Take it,” the green man purred.

If you knew the moment, you could see when someone took a new class. The difference was almost imperceptible, but it was there. Anton used Delver’s Discernment.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Zaphar Alpashan, Level 16, Fae-touched Rogue, Thief/Burglar/Fae-touched Rogue, S: 4 T: 17 A: 24 D: 27 P: 17 W: 10 C: 7

“Welcome to the third Tier,” the green man said. “And with that, our business is concluded.”

He snapped his fingers, and everything went black. Anton couldn’t see the sea, the boat, or even his companions. Just as he was starting to panic, the blackness disappeared and they were on the sea once more.

The sea was there, the sky was there, but it was an entirely different coastline that loomed ahead of them. Anton could just make out the tallest towers of what must be a coastal city.

“That went well, don’t you think?” Kelsey asked.

----------------------------------------

Kelsey hadn’t wanted to just sail right into the harbour like any other boat, and Anton had agreed. Her main concern had been about showing off her technology, but Anton’s concern was that, sooner or later, word would come from Rused about a small, strange boat that had tried to sink the Admiral’s flagship. Kelsey might have disappeared the boat by then, but it would still be a trail that the military could follow.

Kelsey’s next idea had been to find a ship out on the water, hijack it, and then sail that ship into the harbour. Anton had vetoed that plan. Kelsey had argued, but Anton wasn’t willing to execute a crew of fishermen just to eliminate witnesses. He might have felt better about a military patrol ship, but that seemed like he would be biting off more than he could chew.

“In any case, none of us know how to sail a boat or crew a galley, so the whole idea is flawed,” he’d said, and that was the end of it.

That left landing in some uninhabited place on the coast, and walking to the city.

“This would be a lot easier at night,” Kelsey complained. “Instant travel is so inconvenient.”

Anton just shook his head. With Kelsey’s spyglasses, it wasn’t that hard to find an unoccupied beach. They may have been noticed by other ships coming in, but their strange craft was quite low to the water and moved quickly. No one, Anton thought, came close enough to identify them.

Anton had wondered about how they were going to land. Regular ships needed to tie up to a dock. Kelsey just ran the boat up onto the beach, timing it so that they rode a wave most of the way in.

“Whoo! Let’s go back and do it again!” she cried when they’d stopped moving.

“No,” Anton said. He pointed at the boat, now resting on the sand. “Are you going to dispose of that?”

“Yeah, let’s give that a go,” Kelsey said. She unscrewed something on the side and there was a hiss as the boat started to shrink and collapse on itself. They all watched in fascination as the structure that had supported them in the water turned into a complicated blanket.

Kelsey picked up the engine and made it go away. “Just fold this up as best you can,” she said. “We need to squeeze it into as small a volume as we can.”

It wasn’t as easy as she made it sound. The boat wasn’t completely deflated. Pushing in on one part made another swell up. Trying to get the whole thing within an invisible box of uncertain dimensions was a challenge that tested the patience of all four of them.

Finally, they managed it. The mess disappeared with a slight pop, and everybody cheered.

“Right!” Kelsey said. “Who wants some dry clothes?”

With barely a flicker, she took her own advice and replaced the clothes she was wearing with something similar. The top this time was an eye-searing blue.

Zaphar gaped in surprise. “Did you—were you just—” he said. He clammed up and looked embarrassed when Kelsey looked at him.

“Can we get some privacy before changing?” Aris asked.

Kelsey looked at her scornfully. “Don’t be ashamed of that body, Aris! Glory in it!”

“I’ll pass, thank you,” Aris said. “Our clothes are just a little damp, they’ll dry on the way. I’d rather change clothes after a bath. A proper bath,” she added, forstalling Kelsey. “Not one on a beach.”

“Fine!” Kelsey said.

“Ah, actually, I’d like some new clothes,” Zaphar said. They all turned to look at him and he took a step back nervously. “Unless it’s going to cost me my soul or something.”

“No soul required!” Kelsey said brightly. “Consider it a gift.”

She paused and then brought out a bundle. “See how that goes,” she said. “I’ve been trying some Elitran fashion with the fabric I bought in Rused.”

“Thanks. I, uh, don’t mind undressing on the beach, but do you all have to watch?”

“No,” Anton said. Taking Kelsey by the shoulders, he turned her around. She didn’t resist, but she did pout at him. He followed suit, and Aris did as well. “Just let us know when you’re done.”

It felt strange, standing on the sand with the only sounds being the wind, the waves and the rustle of clothing.

“I’m done,” Zaphar said. They all turned around to see what looked like a normal Elitran.

“Huh,” Anton said. “I felt sure that she’d do something weird.”

Kelsey snorted. “I dressed the both of you, and you don’t look weird!” she said. “If you want to dress like me, you have to ask nicely.”

“I’m glad that I’ll never need to know what that entails,” Anton said seriously. “Do you want to think, maybe, about dressing more normally in this town?”

“I’ll think about it,” Kelsey said. “I get that you’re worried about word spreading, but… I just gotta be me, you know?”

“I had gotten that impression, yeah,” Anton said wryly. “Aris and I might want to see about dressing to fit in too. The only armour I’ve seen so far was on soldiers, but there must be a style that suits the local adventurers.”

“The style’s wrong, but you look like foreigners anyway,” Zaphar told them. “You might as well dress like one.”

They started talking about clothing options as they set off towards the city, with Aris and Zaphar holding the conversation up. It mostly went over Anton’s head, and Kelsey got shot down whenever she made a suggestion.

“Have you a plan for entering the city?” Zaphar asked after they’d been walking a while. Unoccupied beaches were not to be found near the city.

“Do we need papers or something?” Kelsey said.

“I can’t think of any other somethings that would do,” Zaphar said. “We need papers.”

“You don’t have any papers,” Anton said.

“Yes, I had no right to leave Rused,” Zaphar told them. “Under normal circumstances, I’d have to get papers if I wanted to go somewhere by ship. It would have been expensive.”

“What would have happened if we arrived by boat?” Kelsey asked. “Just pay to go in, like it was at Rused?”

“Rused is on the frontier, travellers are expected,” Zaphar said. “I don’t know what the rules are, here.”

He looked forward, to the city walls rising up ahead of them. “I don’t even know where we are.”

“I’m not one hundred percent sure,” Kelsey said, “So I’ll leave off guessing until we find out. All we really know is that it’s the city where Cheia ended up.”

Zaphar didn’t say anything for a long moment. “It seems,” he finally said, “Like a lot of trouble to go to for one captured villager.”

Kelsey grinned. “Try telling that to her sister,” she said, pointing out the glare that Aris was giving him.

“Ah, sorry, sorry, I didn’t know,” Zaphar said quickly.

“But it’s not just Cheia,” Kelsey continued. “There were a bunch of these guy’s friends in that other boat. A bunch more with Cheia, when we find her.”

She clapped Anton on the back.

“And now we’ve got ourselves a Heroic Liberator!” she crowed. “Gonna be freeing slaves left and right! Yessiree!”

“You made Tier Three?” Aris gasped.

“You’re a Hero?” Zaphar exclaimed.

Kelsey ignored them both. “It’s too bad, though, that we went for Cheia first, I would have preferred to pick up the ones earmarked for fighter school. I’m worried that this lot are all going to be dead weight for the next stage.”