Jump-touch woke up the next morning feeling safe and warm. She was curled up in a little cushioned basket she'd found in the corner of the living room, with Teb-sie snuggled beside her. At some point she had wrapped her arms around him, and he had wedged his head under her chin.
As she drifted out of sleep, it felt like home.
The fire had long gone cold, but the air was still and warm, and the early morning sun was peeking through almost-closed curtains, dust motes glittering in the slim beam of light. There was the faint smell of last night's dinner in the air, almost gone, and somebody had taken the plates away while she slept.
She really had just passed out, huh.
She could see more of the room now, from her limited position in the corner, one eye pressed into the soft cushion. Ahead of her little ceramic ornaments decorated the mantelpiece, figures of humans and horses in various poses. There were two cosy chairs by the fireplace, and off to one side, a whole three shelves full of books. Hunting trophies decorated the walls, and there was wood, wood everywhere.
Jump-touch moved her roving gaze back to the books. She had never seen so many in one place, and so beautifully bound. Each one was wrapped in dark leather with inlaid gold lettering on the spines, each matching its neighbour.
Her fingers itched to paw through them, and the little bit of kobold within her told her that one or two sent to her Heart wouldn't be missed. The village would appreciate them more than the humans who lived here.
There were only a few books up on the Mountain, for multiple reasons. The first was that they simply didn't get traded often, and the people trading them often wanted insane prices. The second was that few, if any, of the kobolds could read the human language.
"Inconsistent," Rat-tail had called it, squinting through their one human-language book, Resper she knew now. "No proper writing system at all."
So there was that, but stacked atop it was the fact that only a few people could even write Given Tongue, making the few books they did have rare and precious. They were bedtime stories she had never grown out of, and she knew each one by heart.
But she could read human- Resper, now, or at least she thought she could, and that meant she could teach the others. Plus, if she stored the books in her heart then they would never be ruined or damaged by rough weather or handling. They wouldn't have to be left behind to weather the summer storms or suffer through weeks of rough handling on the March.
Teb-sie kicked in his sleep, and Jump-touch took that as her cue to get up, stretching and padding towards the shelves.
****
She had at some point thrown open the curtains and liberated her blanket from the dog, and by the time An-jel appeared, she was already halfway through her first human book.
The sun was warm on her back, and she was learning a lot.
The book was a biography, which meant 'a life written down', and this biography was dedicated to a human male named King Alewharf. Ale-wharf, she was thinking of him as, a nice sensible name. Ale was a sort of alcoholic drink, and a wharf was a place where ships stopped to trade, whatever a ship was. A big cart that floated on water for whatever reason was what she had decided. The King part was a title, like Leader Poison-eye or Guardian Sweep-claw.
Leader Ale-wharf.
She was halfway through now, and during that time Leader Ale-wharf, who was not yet a leader, despite the title on the cover, had been born, grown up, and just joined the military, which was, as far as she understood it, a collection of humans banding together to do the job of a single Guardian because there were no Guardians available to their village.
Together he and his group were planning to go and find other villages, who'd been cut off by some sort of disaster before he was born. Once he'd found them, she assumed they would help each other out with supplies and Guardians, glad to no longer be alone in the world.
She was getting quite into it, and, she felt, learning a lot about human culture.
"Enjoying your new Boon?" a voice asked, and she looked up from the book, blinking at the tall woman.
She shrugged, feeling shy all of a sudden, as if she'd been caught doing something disappointing.
"Yeah! The book is interesting, but they leave a lot out."
"Mm." An-jel- Anjel as one word, if the naming conventions in the book were anything to go by- tilted her head to look at the spine. "Ah. Alewharf, one of our first true leaders. Before him humanity only consisted of disparate tribes, but under him the entirety of the Western Continent came together as one."
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
She offered a hand, but Jump-touch shook her head, climbing to her feet on her own and taking care not to damage the book.
"Didn't do him, or us, much good, mind. Especially once the true nature of what we'd done was discovered, but the thought was there, and it's still one of the best histories of the time we have."
Spoilers, but she didn't really mind. Jump-touch had spent her life reading the same books over and over again, helping transcribe them to new parchment when the old became too worn to still read.
Humans sucked, but they had nice, deft hands, perfect for writing, even in Scratch.
"Did he live a long time ago?" she asked, slotting the book back into the shelf.
"Over a thousand years now, if our record keeping is correct."
That was quite a while back. Even the oldest kobold she knew, a Guardian in the form of a crocodile, who spent his life guarding the swamp at the end of the Valley, wasn't that old.
"There's breakfast ready in the dining room, if you haven't eaten yet." Anjel spent a moment staring at the bookshelf, "then it's time to get you to the officials. After that- Hmm. You said last night you had a token?"
At her nod, Angel continued. "That's good. We'll get you clean, and then get your token traded in for some clothes. Then we can take you down to the guild and find you a group to work with. There's always kids looking to get their first levels, they shouldn't mind you tagging along."
Jump-touch nodded again, gathering up her blanket and backpack, that all sounded very sensible. After a moment's thought, she sent both of the objects to her Heart, the blanket disappearing into a very light cloud of dust.
The jolt didn't hit her as hard as it had last night, and she could see them there now, neatly placed in the 'corner' of the room.
Perfect. She'd always hated having to wear a backpack.
****
Breakfast was an oat-based porridge with both fresh and dry fruits mixed in. Angel ate sitting at the high table, and Jump-touch ate sitting on the floor, trying to protect her bowl from a very enthusiastic Teb-sie.
So this is why they have so many chairs.
"It'll make you sick," she told the dog, holding her bowl above her head, "it's too sweet. You wouldn't like it!"
Teb-sie panted, trying to lure her breakfast away from her with a combination of paw-shakes and hopeful looks. That was fair enough, she'd never been great at lying in Other.
"They give you your own food right?" she asked him later, as he licked her empty bowl, "they don't starve you?"
He was a dog, so he didn't answer apart from acknowledging he'd heard her with a wag of his tail, but that was fine. He looked well enough, with no ribs sticking out or visible sores. Maybe he just didn't get treats as often as he should. She would have to find him some nice jerky, once she had some coins of her own to spend.
****
The sun had hidden itself away behind a veil of clouds while they ate, and there was the scent of rain in the air as the two of them set off towards what An-jel was calling the Chapter House.
"You don't have to show them your whole book," the human was coaching her as they hurried along. She'd put on a long, black, shiny coat and a matching hat, and Jump-touch couldn't help but admire how both were reflecting the sky. "But you do have to show them your Skill names, your Class, that's your job- and its rank. You have to let them see your achievements- to prove you earnt the token yourself- and then you have to listen to the Stat Warning."
"What happens if I don't want to?"
"Then they'll have somebody with the Skill to do so forcibly scan you, and they'll charge you the cost anyway. Or they'll charge me the cost, more likely, since I'm bringing you in. Don't worry about the stat warning, we all have to listen to it at least once."
She kept mentioning 'cost'. Cost this, coins that, money money money. Was it really such a high-value trade she'd embarked on? Wasn't it a net positive for the city, for her to work here? She couldn't understand it at all. Was it something to do with the magical cost? The Stone had said the class was a highly-dense magical class. Was it because she had to pay the magic back somehow, by killing monsters or whatever it had suggested to it?
Maybe they thought it would take her more than a year to pay it back, or they knew that it would, and that was why they were demanding additional trade.
It was giving her a headache.
She would have to work extra hard to make up for what this was probably going to cost. Could she lie somehow about the rarity? An-jel seemed to think that an [Uncommon] class would be a less valuable trade than the [Unique Variant] she'd taken.
She fiddled with her book as they walked, running her fingers over the pages. It felt like real paper, and it tore like real paper, but the pages never ran out. When she was done tearing she would have what she wanted in her hand, and the page underneath would be the same as the one she'd just destroyed.
"If you tear out too many you'll run it out of magic," Angel warned, glancing back at her, "and it won't stop working, you'll just feel like shit for a few days. I wouldn't recommend it."
"Can I… Lie about the class rarity?" Jump-touch hedged, to narrowed eyes. Did that mean she was upset, or was the human squinting at the sun, she wasn't quite sure.
"You told me it was [Uncommon]."
Ah, upset then.
"No. You decided it was uncommon." She looked away towards the passing houses. They were smaller here, and their gardens wilder things, greenery covering the front of each one, leaving only small paths to the front doors and tiny gaps for the windows.
Angel huffed out through her nose. "There's enough strangeness with your sheet that if it was an option, I'd have you not do this at all, but it's the law, and the politeía know you were at the Stone last night. Stone bless us, we maybe could have snuck you in if my idiot child..." She sighed out her whole breath, "we'll just have to manage, and you'll pay me back the coin it costs later."
That would work. What difference did it make if she paid An-jel the coin or the city, it would work out the same either way.
As for her, she would work extra hard! She would scholar so many cultures they wouldn't know what to do with her and they'd run out of work. She would read all of their books, no matter how many shelves there were, and she would even learn SHRIEK properly. Not just the trade greetings, but all the swears too.
There were a lot of them, and they were each nuanced in their own special way.
She would work hard, but she wouldn't regret her choice of job. Couldn't regret it, the Stone had said it wasn't a choice she could take back, and either way, she couldn't imagine being an apprentice, or collecting firewood for the rest of her life. She'd always wanted to be a trader, to help her village get the things it needed to survive another year. To speak to different people and learn what made them, well, them.
Plus, if something truly went wrong, she could always go home.
The Mountain would always protect her.