They didn't stop running until they were away from the ravine and back into their morning camp, staying far, far back from the edge.

Ollie was slumped on the ground next to Eim and Shrike, and Yaris was standing with her hands on her knees, breathing heavily and looking a bit like she was about to throw up.

Jump-touch wasn't much better, her breath short and her body hot and sweaty. She only had short legs, she had to run twice as far as everyone else!

"We report it." Eim panted from his place on the ground, "there's a special form for it, I know where they're kept. It wasn't anywhere near a World Piece, but it was big enough that if it found it's way up, it would change the whole ranking of the area."

Jump-touch shook her head. Even her scalp was sweating, making her hair itchy and uncomfortable as it stuck to her face, "but it can't come up, right, because of magic?"

Shrike sat up, the least winded of any of them, "some monsters," he said, "the really big ones, they generate magic of their own. They raise the magic where they live simply by existing. But they very rarely come to the surface, because it's still uncomfortable for them. There's whole teams out there dedicated to either taking them down or moving them on. If it's big enough, then the guild will bring in high levels from bigger cities."

"It shouldn't be able to follow us in here though, right?" Ollie asked.

He shook his head. "I don't think it saw us," he looked to Yaris and got an exhausted nod in confirmation, "but best to leave. I didn't see it, but from your description of it blocking the river it must be huge. For it to bother with us would be like us going after ants."

Jump-touch had a sudden, vivid image of them murdering the pink slimes, for no reason other than that they were on a list, and that they ate too many apples.

Ok, they may have caused a problem in the future, but when the group had taken them down, they hadn't been capable of fighting back.

****

"The slimes merge together eventually," Shrike said, "a number of pinks become a green, a number of greens turn into a blue. It's been heavily studied, but I don't know much about it."

He tapped on the ground with his cane as he walked. "They're interesting, you know. Most monsters in the Dungeon conform to the achievement and item colours. White, then yellow, blue, red and then green. But Slimes are different, they don't match at all. Some researchers speculate that they were created separately from the rest of the Dungeon, either by somebody else, or that they're a sort of animal, which moved down here some time in the last millennia."

He halted for a moment, reaching down to rub his knee. "We don't have many records from back then so we don't know if they were around at the start. People think-"

"You're going to bore her to death, Shrike," Eim hung back for a moment until they'd caught up to him. "You can't just dump huge amounts of info on her like that and expect her to retain any of it."

"She has a scholar class!" He insisted, and Eim rolled his eyes. "That doesn't mean she's as much of a nerd as you are."

"No no, it's interesting!" Jump-touch interjected, "I started reading a book, when I was in An-jel's house. It was about a man from a… A long time ago?"

She struggled to dredge his name out of her memory. That morning lying on the wooden floor with the sun and the book seemed so long ago now, after days in the underground. "Ale? Ale-dock or something?"

"Who? And you're thinking of Alewharf," Shrike said.

Eim narrowed his eyes at Shrike, "Ale-who?"

He sighed, "even you should know this. We did a whole week on it in school. He was the first king, the first Hero. Children play as him in the playground! Did you never play Alewharf and the Ants?"

There was no response from Eim, and Shrike shook his head in resignation. "In the years after the first fall, it was Alewharf who united the western continent. His is one of the few good records we have left, every schoolhouse should have a copy of his life."

Eim shrugged. "I only trained in things receptionists need. Which forms you need to report monsters so big they're listed as terrain, where to send the injured, which chairs are wobbly and should be retired from the main room."

"Where forgotten bookcases live?"

Eim smiled a cat's smile. "There's a whole attic full of furniture that nobody knows about. I found it a few months back, and as far as I can tell, me and Ollie are the only people who know it exists."

Shrike blinked, then turned to look at Ollie. "how did you get it down the stairs, or ladder or whatever?"

Ollie grinned. "I didn't, I stole that one from Harmony's room."

"You didn't!" Eim shouted with a laugh, "I thought you got it from the upstairs!"

A moment later the the two of them were running ahead, as Shrike shook his head. "Kids, the lot of them, I swear."

They were firmly heading back now, the trip to the final staircase abandoned, and the familiar landscape was starting to bore her now.

She walked with Shrike, trying to get her head around the concept of a king. She had glossed over it when reading, but her skill kept suggesting terms like right to rule and monarchy, and without the ability to write it down and work it out, she was getting nowhere.

This human language had too many words. Words for everything. Words for different members of a family, for different kinds of leaders, for different looking variations of the same food. Words for different sizes of settlements and words for every job that could possibly be done by every person living within them.

She found the place in her head where the skill, the boon as they kept insisting it was called, lived and forcibly switched it off, reeling a little with nausea as her thoughts were suddenly once again her own.

She would learn this on her own, she decided. She would listen to each word and learn it, like a real normal human person.

"Tell me," she said to Shrike, after a moment of thinking about how to word it, "tell me names."

He side-eyed her. "Tell you names? Well," he paused, and she saw now that his cane had a pattern inlaid into the wood. She would have to ask if humans had a special term for that. They probably did.

"Well, Alewharf was the first King, nobody knows who —— him-" created, maybe? "-but he had a — named Haven, named so because-"

She listened to him speak for a while, letting the words wash over her, letting the cadence sink into her bones in a way the skill didn't allow.

Could she modulate it somehow, rather than just switch it off? Make it work only for words she hadn't heard before, and only a few times at that?

"Shrike," she interrupted him, switching the boon back on with a thought, "can I change my skill so that it doesn't… So that it doesn't work so well?"

He frowned, stopping his speech in the middle of a sentence. "You mean your [Pocket Zone]?"

"No no, the language one."

"Oh," he pursed his lips. "That's not a skill, it's a Boon, and I don't think you can change those. They're a modification to your mind, to how you think. You can't just mess about with that."

"I can switch it off, though, so why can't I make it work less well."

He tapped his cane as he walked. "You can switch it off? That's unusual. Normally when the stone grants a Boon it's permanent, irrevocable. It just becomes a part of you."

They walked together as he thought.

"If you go back to the Stone with the thought "I want to change my Boon" at the forefront of your mind, it may modify it for you, but be careful. The Stone is a creation of maths and numbers. It doesn't think, it merely gives what you've earnt, and that isn't always what's best for you. It can grant curses as easily as it can grant boons."

Jump-touch frowned. That wasn't how it had appeared to her, not at all. A being of only maths and numbers? She couldn't understand that at all.

Okay, yes, the Stone had warned her not to let others know it had spoken to her because 'they might get jealous', but it hadn't seemed like speaking to people was a particularly unusual thing. It had just seemed to her like a particularly weird kobold.

Which was most kobolds, when it came down to it. You didn't live to be that old without picking up some eccentricities.

Jump-touch didn't say anything more as they kept walking, nudging at the intruder in her mind like a loose tooth.

****

"What's your job, uh, your class I mean? If that's okay?" Jump-touch asked Shrike a bit later, mostly to distract him from the walk. He was sweating again, and he was clenching his jaw now, which he hadn't been doing earlier.

He didn't seem to hear her, and she watched his face as they moved, looking up at him.

"Do you want me to ask Yaris if we can stop?"

He shook his head. "I'm fine, and it's not a big secret. My class is [Mage], and a [Rare Variant] of it."

Eim looked back, and Shrike waved his free hand at him. With a shrug, Eim went back to talking to Ollie.

"Variants are really rare. Only one in a thousand people get offered one, if the numbers the politeía gives out are correct. Mage classes are even more so. The last mage chosen in Resper was almost forty years ago."

He let out a long, slow breath as he stumbled, and she looked up at him worriedly. Was he really okay?

She could see the sweat beading on his bare head.

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

It wouldn't take much for her to put air back into her Heart, was he sure he didn't want to rest? She could even cover the bird with a blanket!

Shrike ignored her when she questioned him, "I guess you wouldn't know this, but there's a cultural taboo on taking mage classes, too, so those who get offered them don't generally take them."

That was interesting! "So why'd you take it?"

"What kind of person would I be if I hadn't?" Shrike laughed. "A rare variant, and I get to play with magic like every day, it's every kid's dream. I get to shoot cold out of my hands, Jump! How awesome is that."

Eim turned around ahead of them, walking backwards for a moment, "sure, but you also didn't get any rewards for levels two and three, and you won't explain to us what's up with that." He looked at Jump-touch, "that's one of the reasons his old party ditched him, other than the bum knee, of course. If he's got some broken variant of a class, then he's never going to grow."

She frowned, "can the Stone do that, give out a broken class?"

"Some speculate it can," Eim walked back to them, "over the years there's always been people who get nothing for levelling, or who only get stat points. Some people think the Stone has a plan, a path in mind for everyone. Each person a thread in a tapestry only it can see, so if you don't follow your proper path, then it snips you. Snips you right out of the weaving."

He laid a hand on Shrike's shoulder, "once you're out, you can't be woven back in, and from then on it'll only give you stat points, and your levelling will slow down to nothing." A pause, "but I think that's a load of junk."

Eim winced, shaking his head at Shrike. "Take my class for example. I'm a [Rare Variant] [Medic], so I could get something great, or it could turn out that I'm only allowed to take skills which deal with one disease, which died out a thousand years ago, the last time somebody took this class."

"So all variants are [Rare]?" she asked, wondering why she was feigning ignorance. Her own was [Unique], after all, she knew this.

"Nah. Most are [Common], the weirder the class, the less likely it is to get messed around with."

He withdrew his hand, stepping into line beside the two of them. "Us two, we're probably the only people who've been offered [Rare Variants] and taken it within the last decade. That's one of the reasons we're partied together now."

"But," she didn't understand, "why wouldn't you pick it?"

Eim gave her a sudden, startled look. "Hey, how did you pay for your class, anyway?"

Oh, had she ever mentioned Angel? An-jel? before now? Whatever the human woman's name was. She kept passing it back and forth in her mind, depending on the language she was thinking in.

"An-jel, a woman I met, she paid for it, but I have to pay her back in the future. I didn't have coins, but, it's fine? She said it would be good a good job for earning money."

Eim let his hand rest on Shrike's wrist, a gentle touch. "Well, I don't know who that is, but that seems nice of her? Your class is uncommon?"

Jump-touch made a noise, then realised, after she'd made it, that she sounded a bit like Feather-paw when he wanted something, but refused to use proper language, lapsing into the baby-speak they'd used between themselves as small children.

She summoned her book into her hand, looking at its plain blue cover, then she bit her lip and handed it to Shrike.

"You shouldn't just give that to people!" Eim cut in, grabbing it out of his hand and passing it back to her hurriedly, almost knocking her over with the force of the move, "put that away!"

She looked down at her book, a little confused.

"But," she hesitated, "why? I tore bits out before because An-jel and, uh, somebody else said I should, but I've shown those bits to loads of people. Why can't I show it to Shrike?"

"It's bad! You can choose what you show to people when you 'tear bits out', but you can't choose if you just chuck the whole thing at them. What if somebody uses that information to hurt you!" Eim wasn't quite shouting, but his voice was louder than usual, and she found herself flinching back.

"If you have a weakness to your [Pocket Zone], like 'the zone will collapse if you store butter in it', or you have something illegal like a summoning skill, or if your zone is really a [Prison Zone], where if somebody found out and told the authorities, they'd lock you away! It's all dangerous!"

"But, I don't have any of those things!" She tried to puzzle it out, "and I just picked what was useful for living in the city. All the other jobs it offered me were bad except this one. Should I have taken a bad one? If I picked something useful, why would somebody try and hurt me because of it!"

Shrike touched Eim's hand, which had found its way back to his wrist, and he withdrew it, tucking it into his pocket.

"You registered, right?" Shrike asked.

She nodded, and next to him, Eim relaxed a touch.

"Then whatever you have probably isn't illegal or cursed, but you have no way of knowing that, because you seem to be ignorant of all human customs."

"The man who registered me didn't ask to see the descriptions, though…"

Eim's lips were flat. "You know what? I'm out of this conversation, I'm too high up on the chain to be dealing with this. If she does have something illegal, you two talk, and please don't tell me when you're done."

I still don't understand why they'd 'lock me away' though. What good would that do anyone?

But Eim was already walking away, back towards Ollie and Yaris, putting his hands on their shoulders and ushering them both ahead.

Shrike sighed as he left. "He's not wrong to be wary. An unedited book tells people your weaknesses, and once they know those, they can exploit you. They may try and blackmail money or labour out of you, or if you have an unusual class, then they might try and-" He paused, looking at her, "they might force you to work for them without paying you?"

She didn't get it. "I don't need paying anyway, and I came here to get and do a job?"

"You do need food though. You need clothing and shelter. You need water, warmth, and friends to explain things to you."

He took a deep breath, "here, let me try it this way. You want to go home, right?"

She nodded.

"What if your skill was so useful, that the city said you couldn't go home, that you had to stay here and keep using it forever."

Jump-touch felt her mind smooth over, like still pond, and she realised a time later that she'd stopped walking.

Shrike was still speaking, but she couldn't understand what he was saying. Couldn't hear the words over the roaring in her ears.

People could stop me from going home?

No. No, that wouldn't happen. If she didn't go home…

Sweep-claw would come find me. He would.

But would he?

Shrike was saying something else now, looking back at her with his stupid human face, so round and smooth.

She couldn't understand him. Didn't want to understand him.

Sweep-claw said he couldn't go near the road.

Could they take me so far away that even he wouldn't be able to find me?

Shrike was saying something to the others now, who were turning around and walking back, faces strange in the coppery light.

I want to be home.

The humans looked like the ghosts who haunted the fortress at the bottom of the Mountain. She had never been down there, but she had seen them from a far, far distance, once when she was young. Rat-tail said they were mad things, crafted from loss and pain, emotion given form, incapable of thought or feeling.

I have to go home.

She should go home. Right now. This place was dangerous. These people were dangerous, they weren't Kobold, they-

Yaris was suddenly in front of her, and she felt herself jerk backwards as the human reached out with her big pale human hands; a ghost, here to grab her and take her far away, so far away that she would never find her way home, so far that even Honey-sweet would never find her.

Sweep-claw would forget her, like she-

A lancing pain shot through her chest, and the humans were speaking to each other now.

Eim was shouting at Shrike, human things, human words, human emotions.

The sounds rolled past her, through her, causing no ripples.

I could hide in my Heart.

The thought came and went as fast as it had appeared, but it left calm in its wake.

They couldn't take her anywhere, she always had the option to hide.

They're not the ones who want to keep you here.

Then the rolling panic swept over her again.

Eim was angry when I joined.

He didn't like me, so why is he acting so differently now? Is it because of my skill? He works for the city, are they going to keep me here?

She was useful. Her skill was good. Too good. Was that why people didn't take the [Variant] classes?

Her being here meant Eim didn't have to do anything. Before she'd arrived, he had been in charge of supplies. With her around, he didn't have to think about what rations to leave behind, or if they could bring bedrolls, or even if they could take the big chicken home with them.

She was useful. She made everything easier, except when she insisted on things.

She looked at the bird in her Heart. Hanging, waiting. If they hadn't taken it, then Shrike could have ridden in her heart, organising the supplies and not slowing the group down. They wouldn't be having this conversation, Eim would be happy.

She blinked dry eyes. The humans were arguing now, in that way only humans seemed to, all posturing and bared chests and teeth, but no actual fighting. It never came to blows.

You can still hurt somebody with words.

It was a strange thought, one she had never needed to think before. Kobolds were literal, they would never lie to her, would never try and hurt her, with either blows or words.

But they weren't, were they. She had fooled herself.

You can lie to somebody their entire life, and that can hurt more than any beating.

She forced her boon back on, wincing as the words swam back into focus, making sense again in her brain.

"-you say!" Eim was up in Shrike's face now, staring down at him, arms held slightly behind himself, puffing his chest out, "if you-"

"Oi," Ollie was suddenly between them. Jump-touch hadn't even seen them move. "Eim, you're trying to start a fist-fight with a cripple," they waved a hand at Shrike to stop him saying anything, doing the thing with their chest, making themselves look big. "Shrike, you could kill him with one spell if you wanted to, and I'm glad you haven't but I can see you building it up."

Shrike blinked, and then looked down to where both his hands were gripping the cane.

"You were going to use your magic on me?" Eim took a step back, anger reddening his face.

Yaris had turned and walked away at some point, and Jump-touch could see her now, forehead pressed against one of the copper veins, her hands on the back of her hips, rolling her shoulders.

"I wasn't going to use my magic on you, you idiot," Shrike wasn't shouting, but it was close, "but when you get in my face and start-"

"Well maybe if you hadn't broken the kid we wouldn't be in this situation!"

This wasn't friendly play-fighting, they were truly mad at each other, she realised. They-

Eim moved, trying to duck around Ollie, but they were faster than him, and bigger with their arms outstretched.

They had been embroidering the little flowers onto their shirt, she noticed. Red and blue in trails up and down the seams.

"I said no. Back off, Eim."

He made a noise of frustration, throwing his arms up. "Why are you protecting him, you two don't even know each other. We talked about this only last night, and he already-"

Maybe turning her boon back on had been a mistake, Jump-touch considered, rubbing at the sore spot on her chest. The panic had left as quickly as it had come, snow held in the hand melting back into water.

It was always like this, but she hadn't had one that sudden in a long time. It had never caused people to fight before, either.

Should she go and join Yaris against the wall?

Oh, never mind! Jump-touch backed up a step as Yaris turned, her movement smooth, turning with one foot, the other already in place to run.

"Oh shit," Eim jumped sideways as she barrelled towards, and then past him, "what did I do you maniac! It was him that-"

Yaris span, concentration on her face as she swung a fist in his direction, "you want to fight, receptionist?" she shouted, "come on then. Fight me."

He dodged her second swing, but it was just hiding a third, and a moment later she was on top of him, driving her fists into his gut.

"Yaris!" Ollie shouted, trying to drag her off and succeeding at doing nothing more than tearing at her shirt, "Shrike, hit her with your magic or something."

"I'm not going to hit her with my magic, that might kill her!" He tried to ready the stick, but couldn't stand upright without it, staggering against the corridor wall.

"Hit her with your cane then," Ollie had their hands balled in Yaris's shirt and was trying to drag her back, "she'll bloody kill him!"

Eim had curled up as best he could, protecting his face, but as Yaris reared back for another hit, he moved one of his hands, hitting her in the forehead with the flat of his hand.

On top of him, Yaris froze, and then slowly fell sideways, panting and staring at the ceiling with wide eyes.

Eim curled back up around his stomach, blood streaming down his face, his arms a mess of scrapes.

Shrike sat down hard on the stone floor, pressing his head against his still-upright cane.

Ollie the only one left standing other than Jump-touch, stared down at Eim.

"What did you do to her?"

There was wonder in their voice, Jump-touch thought, from where she was pressed against the wall. When had she-?

"[Numb Pain]" he grunted from somewhere inside his egg. The scrapes on his arm were starting to fade, she noticed. "Turned it up to max. Figured it might stun her for long enough for me to get away."

"It certainly seems to have done that," they were staring down at the supine Yaris, eyes wide. "Yaris, love, you with us?"

Yaris was still staring at the cavern ceiling, panting, arms outstretched.

"That was my last cast for the day though," Eim had started to uncurl, his face a mess of blood but the swelling already going down, "I was saving it for later."

Shrike, his face still pressed against the cane and his eyes shut, said "probably best to let it be anyway, it was starting to lose effectiveness."

Eim grunted, before glancing over to Jump-touch.

"You back with us, then?"

She nodded, unsure what had just happened. It had all been so quick, why had Yaris got involved, what was going to happen now? Why had they been fighting in the first place?

Kobolds didn't fight much, but she could infer, from all the other peoples and animals she'd known, what would happen now.

The group would split, she knew. The boys going their separate ways, Yaris heading off on her own, probably with Ollie, and She… She didn't know what would happen to her. She would have to find a new team?

"Yeah, I'm alright, what... What just happened?"