Jump-touch stared down into her bowl as the group sat around the campfire, eating dinner.

That's what they kept calling it, anyway. Ollie had thrown some of the jerky and dried vegetables in a pot of water, and then had the audacity to call it "soup", and for some reason, the others were congratulating them on their feat of cooking.

"Man it's good," Eim took another ladle from the pot, filling his bowl for a second time, "how did you learn to cook anyway, I thought your family lived off street food?"

Ollie shrugged as if the compliment didn't matter to them, but their face was proud like a cat. "I just picked up a bit of it here and there," they flicked their brown hair over their shoulder, but it was short enough that it settled back to where it had been before a moment later.

Yaris was staring glumly down into her bowl. "My ma always cooked. On weekends she'd bake bread, and we'd have warm bread with butter and cold meat for dinner."

The others sighed in… Sympathy? Jump-touch wasn't sure. It sounded like a fine meal, if a bit boring to have every whatever-a-weekend-was. She had always liked it when they got flour in the trades, and some of the kobolds would cook flat-breads over the fire, but to have it every few days?

She stirred her soup, wondering what would happen if she went back and fed it to the little pink slime. Was this what passed for food amongst most humans?

She tried to distract herself from her homesickness as she ate. She needed to add a pestle and mortar to her Heart, and a big drying box she could collect herbs into as they travelled. Copper was poisonous to humans, so she wasn't sure anything here would be edible, but maybe once they'd travelled a bit further out?

Jump-touch took another mouthful of soup. Think of it as bitty water or a drink, it's fine. Maybe the salt-traders didn't come through Resper very often?

She needed flour too, she could pick up a bag of it in town. She could make flat breads in the big frying pan and the flour would never go damp or spoil if she kept it in her Heart.

Only, humans didn't provide anything if you didn't have something to trade, and as far as she could tell, the thing you needed most was coins.

She drank another mouthful of soup.

"How do I get coins?"

The four humans stopped talking and looked at her.

"What?" Ollie asked.

"I need coins. So I can buy flour, and a-" she looked for a translation, "a pestle and a mortar, for grinding spices. I need-" she chewed on the inside of her cheek-, "for that I need coins. That's what people keep telling me."

"Where the hell are you- Ow, you maniac," Eim shut up as Shrike poked him in the shoulder with his cane, "you should be thankful I don't go to the guild about your behaviour, this is abuse!"

"You've never needed coins before?" There was something in Ollie's voice, but she couldn't place what it was.

"My village traded spices, goat skins, labour. We never needed coins? They used to use them in… The, uh, other village, but only to trade with outsiders."

Ollie was wide-eyed now, shuffling a little closer around the fire, "I didn't know places like that still existed. What happens if you can't… If you don't have goat skins, or you can't find enough spices to trade for food?"

Jump-touch frowned at them. "Well then we'd cull the goats, or somebody goes hunting, or we ask the other village for help? I don't think it ever happened, though."

"Never?"

"That we couldn't find enough food for everyone?"

She tried to think it through, as the others watched. What would happen?

"I guess we'd move?" she said finally. "If the other village couldn't help because no traders were coming through, and… The places we got food from were ruined somehow, and there were no goats left?"

It was giving her a headache. Moving would be difficult, as there were other factors in play too. The kobold reluctance to move, the Mountain itself. The fact that for it to happen the traders would have to stop coming, the Dip would have to be exhausted, and the Valley would have to-

She flinched back from a touch on her arm, Eim.

"Are you okay?" he asked, concern in his voice.

"Yeah I just never thought about it before. I don't-" she huffed out, giving up.

Ollie leant back, sitting on their hands and staring up at the ceiling of the cavern. It was firmly night now, her internal clock told her, but the light from the ceiling hadn't changed, "Wow."

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"There's some… Small places like that," Yaris hedged. "The caravan I was supposed to apprentice with travels through them sometimes. Hidden places, forgotten by the rest of humanity."

Eim looked over at her, "I've never heard of that. Why didn't you go?"

She shrugged, sitting with her back very straight and her hands on her knees, "they decided in the end that they didn't want somebody with a common class. They'd been hoping I'd be able to skip [Warrior] entirely, that I'd end up with something fancier. But then I didn't even get a rare skill. The three points in Brawn weren't enough, they laughed me out of the hall."

There were winces from the group.

"Weren't you offered anything better?" Jump-touch asked, and the others looked at her.

"You don't ask what people were offered." Ollie said, extracting their hands and waving them in the air.

"Why not?"

"It's just not done. It's rude!" They seemed troubled. "They didn't have coins or even a Stone where you were from, not even a broken one?"

She shook her head, drinking the last of her soup-water and grimacing as she chewed on a bit of gristle from the bottom.

"That's why they sent me to the hu- to here. To, uh. Resper?" she looked around for confirmation and received a couple of nods in return. It was so weird that their place and language both shared the same name. "So I could touch the Stone and get a job."

The others finished their soup in silence, Yaris finishing off the dregs from the bottom.

"We'll sell the Opal Crystal," Shrike had laid his cane across his knees and was now feeding far too much wood into the fire, "and we'll give you a fair split. Or if you don't understand money, then we can buy you the things you want."

"I was training to be a trader," Jump-touch protested, "I can handle coins. Just, come with me the first time?"

He nodded, and she resisted the urge to pull his hand away from the wood pile, shuffling back a bit. It would be rude to say anything, probably. Maybe other humans simply felt the cold more than she did?

"That sounds fine. Eim, don't give her cash until she knows the value of things, the first merchant she comes to is going to take the lot."

I'm an adult, she wanted to say, but it was a sensible precaution. If she'd had a goat to trade then she'd know how much it was worth in flour or spices, but coins were arbitrary, she had no idea.

The group fell back into quiet companionship, Yaris and Ollie shuffling closer together, Shrike backing away from the fire as it started to grow, and Eim staring hard into the flames the same colour as his hair. Shrike was sitting with his hands on knees, his eyes shut and his back straight, the light reflecting off his bald head.

I'm not sleepy. But I am bored.

There was a notes section in her book, could she write in there?

That seemed like a plan, and a minute later she had her book and the writing set in her hands.

A moment later, Shrike opened his eyes and pulled himself around the fire, to see what she was doing.

"My class is about writing things," she said to him, sorting everything out, "so I'm going to write down all the words I know, and then when I learn more words, I'm going to write those down too."

He hummed. "In your Class Book?"

She looked at it, "is that bad?"

"It's not, but. Hmm. Some people use it a lot, they dictate their whole lives in there, but most people never touch it at all."

He leant over and touched the wooden body of the pen. "If you have a 'writing based' class, then it might change how your Book appears, and functions. It might become harder to carry, but I guess that doesn't matter with your skill."

A voice cut in, "how did a kid from a place with no Stone, from a place which didn't even have money, gain a writing class anyway. Did you even know how to read before the Stone gave you your Boon?" Eim shuffled around to the other side of her.

"Of course. We had," she counted in her head, "six books in the village, and my, uh, friend taught me how to read all of them."

"Six whole books, huh." He sounded impressed, or at least she hoped she was reading that right. "And you could read them, but not speak Resper?"

"They weren't in your stupid language," she had set up the writing case and was focused on grinding the ink now, a familiar ritual. In a village where there were only six books, there wasn't much use for pre-ground ink.

Both boys watched her as she worked.

"Can I look through your book?" Eim asked finally, and she shot him a glance.

"No."

He shrugged, leaning back, "worth a try. That's the problem with writing in notes, it's hard to give it to other people to read, unless you're okay with them reading everything else about you."

"I can always copy it. That's what we did, when the books wore out. We copied them onto new pages and rebound them. It used to be my job, because my hands were good for it."

Shrike knocked one end of his cane against the ground as if he was about to speak, but when she looked at him, he shook his head.

A moment later Eim said, "the book you're thinking of is called a Dictionary. It's a book which lists all the words in a known language."

She stared at him, pausing with her hand over the pen. "There's a word for that?"

Eim smiled, "of course there is. And- It's in the dictionary!"

He dodged as Shrike made a half-hearted swipe at him with the stick, before laughing and getting to his feet. "Show me your dictionary when it's done, kiddo, I'm curious. Shrike, I'll do a perimeter check for re-gens, give me a shout if you need anything."

He nodded, and across the fire, Yaris and Ollie looked up.

"In an hour or so we should try and sleep," Yaris said as he walked off, "it'll be hard, with the light, but we'll just have to get used to it."

She kept staring at his back, and her next words were much quieter, "is it just me, or has he been snippy today?"

Shrike shrugged, "he's not great with new people, and we were all in different teams what, a week ago? He'll get over it."

"Mm," Yaris started to feed another piece of wood into the fire, paused, and then changed her mind, putting it back. "I thought it would be easier than this, leading I mean. How did your old team…?"

Shrike shook his head, looking away to where Eim had slipped off into the trees, and Yaris drew silent too, staring into the flames.

As for her, her ink was ready, she'd worked out how to use the pen, and she was ready to write.

****

She was three pages into her dictionary when Eim reappeared, his arms full of silvery apples.

"Thought you lot would be asleep by now, isn't it like twenty-two hundred already?"

He dumped the apples by the fire and then moved around to peek at her work.

"No looking," she clutched the book to her chest.

He grinned, "I'll trade you an apple for a look."

She eyed him.

"Two apples."

He flopped down beside her and reached out his long arms to the pile, grabbing two apples, "deal."

"He's scamming you, you know," said Yaris, "what're you writing anyway?"

"I'm writing a dictionary, for my job. I'm writing down all the words I know and then when I learn new words, I'm going to write them down too."

She blinked. "That's gonna take an awful long time. Those things are like a thousand pages long, even when written in skill-tiny font!"

"Wait, how long?"