Jump-touch focused on the wooden chair. Yaris was behind her, ready to swoop in if she fainted, and the other three were standing off to one side chatting quietly between themselves.

"Ok." She said in Given Tongue, more to give herself confidence than anything else, "chair. Become a part of my Heart."

She laid a hand on it, and a staggering, exhausting moment later, it was situated safely in her Heart, the backpack perched atop it, where she had told it to be.

Yaris touched her on the back as she wobbled, but she shrugged away from the touch.

"I'm fine, I'm fine. It wasn't-" she realised she was panting, "wasn't much worse than the coin I put in yesterday. I don't think size matters very much."

Ollie gestured to the lounger-chair, and she sat down, harder than she'd been intending to. It wasn't much worse, but it was worse.

"Ok." She stretched out her arms ahead of herself, muscles aching, "I can bring stuff out fine though, that doesn't tire me."

A second later the rucksack she'd stolen was in her hands, and as she considered the sensation of the action, Yaris took it from her, opening it up and nodding when everything inside was still intact.

"I think I could have left the stuff inside behind if I'd known what it was. If I'd touched it with my hands at some point."

"Well there goes our hope for you teleporting stuff out of locked chests," Shrike said, shaking his head a little. He was still sitting on the chair opposite her, but Ollie had stolen his cane and was now swinging it around in a slightly alarming manner. "No big deal though, such an ability would be very rare. That's going to be a very useful skill to have around."

He eyed up Ollie as he spoke, "are things preserved while they're in there? I know some [Pocket Zone]s have a temporal effect on the objects within. Food stored in them will never change in temperature, or never rot."

She thought about it. Her skill was meant for people, when it came down to it, so…

"I don't think so. But maybe it's like," she bit her lip, thinking about it. "It might be like the air at the top of th- a mountain, where things rot slower. So stuff in there shouldn't go bad very quickly."

"So it's very cold then?"

She shook her head, getting up from the chair and going to see what was so interesting about the papers. "It's not because it's cold, it's that things just don't rot well that high up. My-" she struggled for a word for Rat-tail, "my friend says that it's because there's tiny things that live in the air which cause things to rot, and there's not enough air up there for them to survive."

She let them think about that as she inspected the papers.

Dungeon Delve

Threat Level: Four

Mission: Bring back defeat records for six [Dire Rats]

Upgrade Mission

Threat level: Six

Mission: Reach level B3 and bring back proof in the form of a [Starlight Herb].

Please speak to your assigned guild associate before accepting this mission.

Collection Quest

Threat Level: One

Mission: Collect one hundred strands of [Roach Grass]

Please speak to your assigned guild associate for quest location. Those accepting this mission and then failing to return with the assigned reagents will incur a penalty equal to the value of those reagents.

"What's a re-agent?" she asked Yaris, who had come up to stand beside her.

"It's somebody who rules over a-"

"Shut up," said Yaris, giving Ollie an unreadable look, "they're herbs or powders, mostly used in the healing tinctures the guild reserves for the seriously injured. Some magic classes also need them to make their skills work, but that's rare."

Jump-touch nodded, looking back at the papers.

"That quest has a penalty," Yaris continued, "because the location is secret. If you take the quest and get the location and then either pick all the herbs, or sell the location to other groups, they'll fine you."

That made sense. Some years back one of the herbs in the Dip had become very popular for seasoning, and they'd also discovered they could trade it with the help of the Lower Village in return for a lot of stuff from the humans.

That had been fine, until the Guardian who kept the Dip safe had realised the herbs were growing back more slowly than they were being harvested, and that they weren't being allowed to go to seed. There was, he said, a real danger of the herb just no longer existing there in the future if they carried on how they were.

There had been a meeting of both villages, as they decided what to do, and it had been determined that the trade with the humans wasn't worth it if it meant losing the plants for themselves forever.

"I understand." She read the next one.

Dungeon Delve

Threat Level: Variable

Mission: Bring back three items of [Opal] or higher quality.

You will be allowed to keep the items.

Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

"That one's just to encourage people to go out and find stuff." Yaris pressed her hand against the paper, "anything that's brought back that's [Opal] or over is bound to be magic, and is therefore a boon to the city, even if you keep it yourself. It also encourages people to level, which drains exp from the Dungeon and helps keep it in line."

She drew her hand back, "do you have a ring, yet?"

"A ring?"

She could... Go back to the Lower Village and ask for one maybe?

Yaris waved her hand, and Jump-touch noticed a thin gold ring around one finger. It looked almost like the sort that the kobold collected, although he liked the ones that had little gems on more.

Shrike spoke up, "the guild will give you one, for a deferred fee. They're made of pure gold, and there's a diamond embedded on the inside, touching your skin. The guild has a level thirty [Ring Crafter] who makes them as her full-time job."

Yaris gave him a look, "Thanks for interrupting, nerd. Come on kid, if you're going to come walking with us later then you'll need one. Harmony should have a few left under the desk."

Pure gold? Wouldn't that dent and bend super easily? If anyone knew about gold, it was kobolds, and she had fished flecks of it out of the stream sometimes, saving them up in a jar in her bedroom.

She had been planning to have a kobold make her a little statue of Feather-paw, once she had enough. He had an eye for shiny things, and would often brave the cold with her in her hunt, he'd like it. It wasn't greed to have one or two things you liked.

She thought about it as Yaris dragged her back to the desk, Ollie following behind at a lazy pace. They were still holding the cane, and Shrike was alternating between shouting at them from back in the corner, and trying to convince Eim to retrieve it.

"Harmony!" Yaris shouted as they reached the desk, "get our new loot-hound here a ring."

Harmony, obviously in the middle of something, rolled her eyes. "That's a terrible thing to call your newest team member. But you've decided to keep her then, good. Do you need it today?"

"We're going to tackle the first-left later on, if we can get out within the next couple of hours."

"So yes," butted in Ollie, leaning their arms over Yaris' shoulders and trying to rest their chin on her head, despite being two heads shorter than her.

"Get off me you lump," she brushed them off, "and go give that stick back to Shrike before he has a heart attack, or injures himself again somehow."

"Glad you're all getting along," Harmony crouched down, rummaging the desk. A moment later she emerged with a locked box. "Here they are, show me your hands, kid."

Jump-touch pressed her hands to the desk, and a moment later a thin gold ring was slipped over one finger. "Smallest size I have, but fits like a glove, I don't know how she does it." Harmony smiled at Yaris. "I assume you'll explain to her how it works?"

"One of us touches the dead thing, or the thing we're collecting. Everyone else touches that person at the end. Use it to register the papers before you go out. Easy. I've been out before, Harmony."

"Only once though, and you didn't exactly-" she sighed, "never mind, new start."

She let go of Jump-touch's hand, much to her relief. She would have to wash it later.

"Try not to get the girl killed, I saw you all testing her Skill out, and it looks like a good one."

"Oh!" Jump-touch said, suddenly realising, "do you need your chair back?"

Harmony laughed, "sure. Let's see how the retrieval works with big things, why don't we. Try not to glitch it into the desk."

The word was unknown, but the sentiment was clear enough from context. She had never pulled anything out of her heart that she couldn't hold in her hands before… How…

A moment later the chair was in front of her, one of her hands lying on the seat. From behind her somebody clapped, and she grinned in relief.

"See," she tried to talk through what had just happened, "it doesn't tire me to retrieve stuff."

"That's interesting," Harmony nodded, leaning over to inspect the chair. "It's cleaner now, all the dust and dirt is gone."

"Oh," she thought about it, "yeah. I guess I don't want it to be dirty in there, so I left it behind? I hadn't really thought about it."

"You could use that to pan for gold," Ollie and Shrike walked over, Ollie nursing a bruised knee and Shrike leaning heavily on the cane, "or to filter water. It's a useful skill indeed."

"Should we go now?" Yaris turned to them, leaning back against the desk, "we can pick up our stuff from our rooms, pack some extra rations, and have our new pack-rat carry it all. Instead of you idiots dumping it all on me."

"Why are we the idiots," Eim caught up to the group, "we have a crippled mage-" Shrike shot him a look, "a receptionist, a literal child," he nodded at her, "and Ollie. You are in fact the only one in this party with any muscles, therefore you should carry everything."

She rolled her eyes. "Yes, and the moment we get attacked by anything, who's the one who has to divest themselves of all the crap you lot insist on bringing along, because none of you know which end of a knife to stab with."

I know how knives work, Jump-touch thought, but she didn't say anything.

They waved to Harmony, and as a group started heading towards a door at the back she hadn't noticed before.

"Well we've solved that issue." Eim put his hands behind his head as they walked, his red hair flashing as they walked past a window, "hey kid, whatever you said your name was. What happens to all the stuff if you die?"

She startled, "what?"

"Eim!" Shrike whacked him with the cane, staggering a little as he did, "she's a child, you can't say stuff like that."

"Hey, if she's old enough to go spelunking with us, she's old enough to- ow!"

Shrike whacked him again, holding onto the wall for balance, and Eim huffed out a sigh. "Fine fine. Let's get our stuff together and hope we never have to find out."

"I'll steal his cane for you when he next falls asleep," Ollie bared their teeth in a grin, "just wait."

Shrike sighed, nodding a thanks to Yaris who was holding the door open for him up ahead. Jump-touch followed him through, eyeing up Ollie and Eim, who were now bumping shoulders, each trying to knock the other over. She didn't understand the dynamics here at all.

It'll make me look weird though, if I ask. She toyed with the new ring, unused to having anything on her hands. They all know if they're fighting or not. It's only me who doesn't.

She looked around the corridor instead. Humans built such strange buildings. The front had been a big, rectangular room, and this long corridor, containing nothing but windows on both sides, seemed to have no other purpose than to connect it to a second building, set further back.

Why didn't they just walk outside, was the weather here so bad?

Still, it made the trip more interesting. One side of the corridor showed a back-street, cobbled and narrow, with a wall on the other side, behind which appeared to be houses. On the other, there looked to be some kind of garden. Grass covered the floor, interspersed with knee-high wooden- what a waste of good wood- boxes, filled with plants and herbs and flowers, only a few of which she recognised from this distance. There were a few humans walking about, inspecting the plants, and a few more sitting under trees or on the ground, or leaning against the raised boxes.

Shrike caught her looking, "that's where the guild grows the herbs and reagents they need to save our lives. If you mess with it, every adventurer in the guild will hunt you down and kill you."

Oof, okay. She eyed him slightly wildly, wasn't that a bit disproportionate?

"That seems like," she hesitated, "they would really?"

Shrike nodded. "Our lives depend on that garden. Don't fuck with it."

Well okay then. She was never going out there.