Jump-touch was sitting in a small room with a stone floor. Below her, the floor was black stone speckled with flecks of glitter, like that of the Road she had walked to reach the city.

She looked down at her hands. This place felt real. More so than the valley, more so than the city, it was perhaps the realest place she had ever been.

What a weird sensation, she thought, considering that. I've always been real, haven't I?

"This is your heart," came the voice of the Stone from behind her, although she knew nobody was there. "You will always be safe here. Nobody can hurt you here."

"Is somebody planning to hurt me?" Jump-touch got to her feet and inspected the area around her, not that there was very much of it. The room was a perfect square and around three good paces across each way. Small, but serviceable. There was light from… Somewhere above her, and no walls, the space just sort of ended.

"You can work on that later," the voice brought her back on task, and she realised she'd been staring into the void for a while, "for now, we need to do some bookkeeping. Things the humans will expect you to have, and that you need to be able to present on command."

There was a hitch in her brain, and something appeared in her hands. A book, the size of her palm, and thin at only a few pages. It was bound in the cheapest paper and held together with metal staples.

She turned it over in her hands a few times, before opening it to the first page.

This book belongs to:

[Jump-touch]

[Level: 1]

[Race: Human]

[Class: Cultural Scholar] [Unique Variant]

Contents:

1. Classes

2. Stats

3. Skills

4. Notes

She skimmed through it. Yep, there was her class, along with the brief description she'd been given. Under Skills it listed her safe place as a "[Pocket Zone]", which she didn't entirely understand the meaning of.

The stats page read all zeroes, so she ignored it. Whatever that was, she was sure it would be explained later, and in excruciating detail.

After skimming through she ended up back on the first page, where the main problem lay.

"Can I change this? Because it's all wrong."

She thought she heard the Stone blink, although they no longer seemed to have a physical form, and a blink should be silent.

"It looks good to me?" There was a hitch in her voice.

"It says I'm human, for one thing. I don't want that there, I want kobold."

"Are you… Sure?" it sounded hesitant, "that might get you in trouble with the humans. As a [Cultural Scho-"

"I'm sure. I'm not ashamed of where I'm from."

She wasn't going to have human on her sheet. She had been around humans for less than two days now and she was already sick of them. They never slowed down, never gave her a minute to think, everything had to happen now.

Jump-touch ignored the fact that it was her that had pushed to come to the Stone now, and that An-jel had wanted to wait.

"I'm sure, please change it."

"Well," it still seemed hesitant, "if you insist, but this is highly irregular. There will be questions."

"It's what I want."

"I can't change it later. I can only do this now because it's your first time here. There may be unintended consequences in the future."

She looked down at her stupid human hands again. "Please."

There was a sigh, and the book shifted in her hands, the cover going from a muted blue to a stone grey, and the line under changing from "Race: Human" to "Cultural Background: Kobold"

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

"I'd been meaning to update that for a while anyway, it was getting problematic," the Stone sounded thoughtful but distant. Smaller somehow.

"Ok next problem. What's a [Pocket Zone]?"

"You wouldn't gain anything from changing that. It's a standardised term, by seeing it, other humans will know you have a place you can store objects. It'll make you very useful to traders and such, they'll be willing to pay a lot for your services. They won't know what else it can do unless you let them see the full description."

The Stone was slowly coming back to her previous volume, but there was something different in the inflection now.

She hummed. "Stats?"

"Humans are like kobolds, they like to collect things. But the thing they like to collect the most is numbers. As they get better, stronger and more in tune with the magic they've been granted, they get given numbers, and it makes them feel good about themselves."

"I don't-"

"I know you now, I see your memories. Do you remember Tall-grass?"

She did. "You can see my memories?"

"He would collect the first red leaf he saw every year. He had a whole book of them."

Jump-touch nodded uncertainly and the voice continued.

"Those leaves meant nothing to anyone else, they were just leaves, but he liked to look at them and see them as progress, to him they meant he'd lived another year, and he could count them to know how many years he'd lived. Humans are like that, but the thing they collect is numbers. Money is merely numbers given form. Stats, levels, number of monsters killed, amount of magic brought back; these are numbers I give to humans, to keep them happy."

She sort of got it. "At least it's not something real, I suppose," she hedged, "like that kobold from the Lower Village who's obsessed with rings. He has so many he can't even wear them. He decorates his house with them and spends his time making new ones he can trade away. Humans are like that but with... Coins and imaginary numbers?"

"Mm." The voice seemed to nod.

Jump-touch sat for a time. She mostly got it, if she thought really hard about it. If she imagined to herself "I have been to the Valley eight times. I have..." she struggled to come up with something. She couldn't count things she owned, like rings, because all she had was what was in her backpack.

There was a certain sense of accomplishment she knew she could find if she kept looking, but training and culture made her shy away from it. That was greed, and greed was what killed kobolds.

She shook herself away from the dangerous thoughts, trying to focus back on the topic at hand.

"I'll get more skills, and classes, then? The book seems to think so."

"If you want them, but you'll be taking power away from your main one. I wouldn't recommend it for a while yet."

"Okay. Level?"

"More numbers for humans. The short of it is; if you kill, or help certain monsters be killed- and note I said monsters, not people- you will absorb a little of their magic. When you come back to me I can take that magic and use it to help improve both you and others in the future. How much help you've earned is represented by a level."

"Human numbers."

"Human numbers," the Stone agreed. "On which note, there should be one more page."

Jump-touch looked down at the book again. Should there? Oh.

Where 'notes' had been there was now an extra section. Achievements.

"More human things, I'm afraid. When you do something particularly noteworthy, you can come here and sometimes I'll give you a reward for it. It gives people a reason to leave their houses and do unusual things, stops them stagnating. The descriptions also tend to be a little more personal than the other stuff."

Jump-touch stared down at the page.

[Leave Home]

[You have left your home and people behind, throwing yourself headfirst towards a new race and culture. Eventually, you may go home, but for now…]

[Colour: White]

[Reward: One token]

"May?" She was absolutely going home, and no stupid description was going to stop her.

As she read, a small coin appeared in her lap, made of a dull white metal and embossed with the spire on one side, and a human face on the other.

"The token is a currency I've worked out with the city officials, and it's the only thing I can give you right now. You'll be able to trade it in for food and clothing and enough human coins to live for a while. Come back again in the future and we'll discuss better rewards. I know you now."

She frowned, "why use tokens, when humans already have coins?"

The Stone made the sound of a shrug. "Complicated economic reasons, and more human number things. You'll work it out on your own."

She looked down at the book again.

This book belongs to:

[Jump-touch] || <>

[Level: 1]

[Cultural Background: Kobold]

[Class: Cultural Scholar [Unique Variant]]

Contents:

1. Classes

2. Stats

3. Skills

4. Achievements [1]

5. Notes

Her name was written in the kobold scratch now, then a wrong-looking human translation was written next to it, all of the nuance lost. She disliked that the rest of the book was written in human language, but she could deal with it.

Resper, something in the back of her mind whispered, and she took a second to examine the thought. The book is written in Resper, which is only one of many human languages.

Jump-touch stood and looked around the empty space. Her Heart.

She was alone here now, and it was time to go.

****

Outside, Michael turned to his mother, who was sat by his side in the long grass, watching the sunset.

"You did tell her to only pick a common class, right?"