Outside the dungeon the air was cool and fresh, as it only ever seems to be at four in the morning. Somewhere in the distance, the birds were starting to awaken, letting out the first practice notes of the oncoming dawn chorus.

The two guards at the entrance startled as Jump-touch and Eim appeared, but quickly calmed as they realised they weren't under attack.

"Couldn't you have stayed in there 'til we weren't at pants-shitting-o-clock!" one of them said, laughing. It was probably a joke, Jump-touch thought as they walked across the grassland, back towards the city proper.

She had turned her boon off and was now trying to work through a sentence Eim had given her, without its help.

It was slow going, doubled by the fact she was half-asleep on sore legs.

She yawned, trying to ignore her grumbling stomach. Had he said tomorrow or today, the words swam together in her mind. She'd have to get him to repeat it.

I need real food, not only jerky and dried fruit.

I hope there's still somewhere to sleep back at the guild.

She yawned again, stumbling on the rough ground.

She had been promised a bed, but she'd also been gone for days. What if somebody else had claimed it already?

I can take my bed with me always now, she mused.

Was that greed?

And if it was, does it matter?

It didn't, not really. And now nobody could take-

No.

She shook herself hard, suddenly awake. That was bad thinking. That was how it got you. Her Heart was supposed to be a place of safety, not somewhere to hoard things. She would keep what she needed to live there and no more. She wouldn't fall into that trap.

A blanket, food, water. She wouldn't collect stuff until it weighed her down and drove her mad; until she started attacking the people around her in fear of the loss of it.

She wouldn't, she wouldn't.

"Are you okay?" Eim asked, his eyes half shut.

"I'm fine," she said, unwilling to elaborate with her limited vocabulary.

She took a while to construct her next sentence, "Shrike said that the Stone could curse you. I think my Skill is a curse."

He yawned, one hand over his mouth, blinking down at her with tired eyes, "oh?"

"It makes me want." She started, wishing she knew how to construct the sentence better, "it makes me want to hold stuff all the time. To not let anything go."

"It's —something— your mind?"

"No," she took it from context, "but it could."

He thought about it, as grassland slowly turned to city, and as they walked through empty streets.

"No," he said finally, "I don't get it."

"Because you're human," she rubbed her eyes, she had been dozing, "you don't understand-" greed. She was too tired to translate the word; if it could be translated at all.

"Mm," Eim made a non-committal noise. "I guess I don't."

****

The guild was lit by the embered ceiling, looking warm and inviting from the street, even with the windows shut and shuttered. One of the doors was still propped open as they approached.

"Can you explain-" he tried to make what she assumed was the sound of greed, a long drawn-out note, ending in a sudden stop. He almost managed it, too.

She repeated the sound for him properly and tried to muddle through it in Resper. "It's when you want things so much, so much things that it drives you mad?"

That sounded correct, but the expression on his face indicated that she hadn't got it quite right.

"Try again tomorrow?" she offered as they passed through the doors, out of the early morning chill and into the warmth of the guild, and he nodded.

"Sure."

She sat on the seat she'd tried to send to her Heart only a few days before and watched Eim chat with the only other person in the room. It felt even larger now, in the dim light of the morning, with only the three of them there.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

The ceiling was the remains of the fire after everyone had fallen asleep, and the furniture cast long shadows. The city noise she'd gotten used to was dulled by the closed windows and the early hour of the morning.

It was strange to think that all those rooms above her had people sleeping in them, people she would sleep only a short distance from, but might never meet.

"Ready to go?" Eim waved her over, and a few minutes later, they were both upstairs and asleep.

****

She awoke the next morning safe and warm, wrapped in her rabbit-skin blanket. She didn't remember going to bed, or summoning the blanket, but she must have done both at some point.

Her eyes were still bitty from interrupted sleep, but the air smelt of food and there was a comforting murmur of voices from below. Weak early-morning light was filtering in through the window, and across from her Eim was sitting on a bed, eating.

He looked as bad as she felt.

"Want one?" he gestured to the plate beside him, "we gotta get going soon, but I can go on my own if you want. I know where Yaris is like to be, and I want to catch her before she scarpers into the woods."

Jump-touch struggled up and took the plate, retreating back into her blanket mound with it. The meal was some sort of meat and vegetable mix, all wrapped in bread.

Her stomach growled like a bear as she bit into it. The last week or so had been lean. The food with Sweep-claw hadn't been fantastic, and all she'd eaten since then was meat, dried meat or boiled dried meat, and at irregular intervals too.

That, combined with the cost of using her skill…

The wrap was salty and lacked spices, but it tasted amazing.

"I'll come with you."

Eim nodded as she licked her fingers. "We'll go now then. I'll apologise, and then we can take the bird to butcher's row and see what we'll get for it. The guild has a guy who'll take the apples, but he won't be around until this afternoon.

"That sounds good," she wished there had been twice as much food, but she could deal with it, the relief of having anything was palpable, "let's go then?"

****

Ablutions done and hands washed, the two of them set out. They kept their toilets indoors here. She could only assume they had a [Toilet Cleaner] somewhere whose job it was to keep it spotless.

"I don't know Yaris too well," Eim admitted as they left the guild. "She was in a party with Ollie, and I was meant to party with Shrike, so we didn't have much to do with each other. We went to school together, but we were in different classes."

He sighed, tilting his head back to look at the retreating guild-house, "I was meant to take [Receptionist], get boosted to level five and then never have to worry about it again. I was never trained for the dungeon beyond that."

Jump-touch considered that, "but it's different now?"

"Yeah, I picked a healer class, they want me to get to twenty. They expect it to take a decade, if I work hard at it."

He sighed, "I could level it by setting up a clinic in town, but it's much, much slower, and the guild won't fund that. So dungeons it is."

She'd been meaning to ask for a while, but this was the first proper chance she'd gotten, "does everyone go into the dungeon to level?"

"Very few, actually." Eim pointed down a side street and they turned together, "maybe five percent of people. Most people can level their classes by doing everyday things, like tailoring for tailors or baking for bakers. They don't mind that it's slow, or that they never get beyond level ten. It's just that the dungeon is much faster and the rewards are good.

Some of the cobbles were missing here, she noted, stepping around the gaps.

"But some people can't level up in any other way. Shrike for instance. He has a combat-type class. He has to hit things with his spell to gain anything. The few non-combat things he could do with his spell, he wouldn't be hired for. There's people out there with more specialised skills that employers would rather have."

He yawned, jumping over a gap in the road, "I have a healing spell, and that means if I heal somebody who's in combat then I get a share of the experience at the end. Yaris is a [Warrior] which means she thrives on violence, but also means the only way she can gain experience is through combat."

He winced, "I mean, she could level it up to two or three by training, but probably not past that. [Warrior] is the most common class for delving though, I'd say probably half the people in the guild are that or a sub-type."

Jump-touch nodded. She had given up trying to keep her boon off and was now listening instead. Humans were so organised.

"Ollie is an apprentice tailor, but-" he shrugged, "family problems, I think, plus they're tied to Yaris at the hip. I think the family shop is failing, and they need somebody with levels to keep it going, so it's 'get to level 5 and don't come home before that.'."

Jump-touch made a noise to indicate she was listening.

"As for you, you're maybe the worst off with us, although it's still the fastest way. You could level up easily enough by sitting in a library and writing and talking to people, but your skill is so useful you may as well come with us." he looked at her, "or another team. If you decide you want to join another team, they'd look after you too."

Do I want looking after?

She had never been much of a hunter, or all that interested in fighting, but shouldn't she do her share?

"Do you think I could learn to fight?"

He pointed down an alleyway, barely the width of her arms outstretched, and the two continued down it.

"I dunno, you're awfully small. If you hadn't gotten a class then I'd think you were aged eight or nine at most. Maybe it would work if you had a good weapon and some armour, or if we found a spell-granting Card for you, so you could learn something like Shrike's frost bolt, but those are vanishingly rare. If we did find one, Shrike or Ollie might be better off with it, too."

"I never had to fight back home," she touched both walls with the tips of her fingers as they walked, "that was the job of uh, other people."

Eim nodded, "you might grow bigger as you get older, and being small doesn't stop you from being tough, but you don't have the muscle to put behind it right now. You also have no experience with a weapon?" that was phrased as a question, "and you don't have a combat class to bulk it out either."

"You do?"

"Somewhat. All healers are technically Combat Classes, so we get a bonus when we pick it, that helps us think more clearly in a fight. But yours will be missing that."

He pointed at a dilapidated house, one in a row of many others, and they walked towards it. There weren't even gardens here, the houses simply fronted onto the road, each one barely a door and a window wide.

Unless they had two front doors each, but that would be a bit weird. It could be a religious thing? Enter through one door, exit through the other? She had seen stranger things.

"She should be here," Eim banged on the door, and Jump-touch tried to smooth down her hair. Oh yeah!

"Eim?"

"Yeah?"

"Are there humans with the skills to fix hair?"

He glanced down, his own red hair bordering his face. "I guess? What do you need?"

She was about to try and explain, when the door opened.