The private pool was warm and quiet, and she was sat as far from the others as she could get, without leaving the water.

She thought about it, as she scrubbed herself with the provided soap and a flannel.

The others were in the water on the other side of the pool, leaning against the sides and chatting quietly between themselves as they washed.

They looked like different people with wet hair and no clothes. Would she recognise them on the street, if they looked like this?

She was being careful to keep her hair out of the water, although she had scrubbed her face until it felt hot and clean.

****

They left together a short time later, the ends of her hair dried by the same woman as last time. She had admired the braids, shooting unsure looks at the others.

The skill had made the little bows curl up, and she was trying to smooth them out as she walked, letting the day pass through her.

I wonder if I could dry myself by going into my Heart and back. That would be nice, for walking in the rain.

and then

They didn't betray you.

It was a relief. They had let her have her own end of the pool, and none of them had come near her with soap or cloths. They had all very carefully pretended they couldn't see her at all, and she had done the same in return, until it was time to leave.

"So we got a decent payout for the missions we did," Eim was saying, "checking the two stairwells, taking out the slimes, and taking down the Peck Peck all paid. We also got some money for the body, and the apples. And we still have the Opal Crystal in reserve."

They were walking slowly together, as Shrike had protested being carried.

"We're doing pretty well," Eim looked down at the paper in his hands. "From just one mission, we've got enough to pay room and board for the rest of the month, but if we don't go out again, then we're gonna be short for anything else."

He glanced at Jump-touch, then back at the paper with a nod, "okay. So we're going shopping tomorrow morning. If you need your hair doing more than once a week-"

"That's too often!" she protested.

"- or if we want to keep being able to use the private baths, then we're going to have to pick up some more jobs. Plus-"

He nodded at Yaris, who picked up the thread.

"Plus, none of us levelled. A few slimes isn't going to be enough to get any of us to level two."

"How do we know if we've levelled?" she'd been curious about that for a while.

"There's a sort of feeling you get," Shrike said, "it's like being overfull, and it doesn't go away until you go and confirm it with the Stone. It also updates in your book, it'll say [Level 2: Unconfirmed]"

"Oh. You feel full because you're carrying too much loose magic," she nodded, "that makes sense."

Shrike gave her a look.

"Something like that. I'm not sure anyone's ever actually confirmed it, or confirmed what happens if you don't go back to the Stone. Suspicions are that the experience you get for killing monsters just dissipates into the atmosphere."

Yaris yawned at him, wide and noisily, without covering her mouth, "anyway. None of us levelled, and we didn't find any loot other than the Opal Stone, which we're keeping for an emergency. We still have the mission booked for three [Opal] grade drops, and I've looked at the board. There's some others we can take, like…"

Jump-touch zoned out. Go touch a thing, kill some other things. It was all the same to her, all she had to do was carry the luggage and stay out of the way.

She blinked back into focus as Yaris said her human-name, "- Jump can carry it, then we can take that one too."

"Carry what, sorry?"

Yaris looked like an owl, she thought. Her hair was still damp and slicked back, and her green eyes were bright and wide, reflecting the fairy lights.

"There's an object the guild wants moving into the dungeon. It's large and very heavy, but if you can carry it in your [Pocket Zone], then we can do that job easily. It's been on the board for almost a month, because nobody else on the roster right now has the right skill."

She got so serious when she was trying to be in charge, her voice changed completely.

"Is everyone alright with that? Jump?"

Jump-touch nodded. "That's my job, right?"

Shrike and Eim nodded, and Ollie shrugged. "It's all new to me. I've barely had my class a week, so I'm in the same boat as Jump. If she can carry the heavy thing, then that sounds good?"

Yaris nodded. "We still need to sort out what's going on with your woman too," she glanced at Jump, "uh, okay that doesn' sound great when I say it like that. The woman who paid for your class, I mean."

It sounded fine to her? "Maybe she'll be at the guild when we get back? But it's not like I can pay her back yet anyway."

"Mm," Yaris gave her an unreadable look, "we'll see. People are strange sometimes."

Now that, that she could agree with.

The conversation trailed off until they were back at the guild, and she enjoyed the quiet walk. The smell of winter in the air, her feet cool on the stones.

Oh, whoops. She was meant to be wearing shoes, wasn't she.

She had sent her clothes to her Heart and back to clean them, but she'd completely forgotten she even owned the shoes.

On one hand, it would be nice, to have something to protect her feet from the floor, but on the other, they were uncomfortable and her feet were already dusty. Plus she was enjoying the sensation of the cobbles, each one a different shape.

****

That night, lying in her blanket mound, Jump-touch considered how fast everything moved here in the city. Kobolds took time with things. They lived by the seasons, sleeping with the dusk and waking with the dawn. Humans woke with the dawn and then pushed the dusk away, with lamps and fairy lights and talk.

Even now, below her, she could hear the muted chatter of the guild, and in the street, a clatter as a horse passed by.

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It would be light in only a few hours, and yet they'd all only just settled in to sleep. Hashing out missions, battle strategies, and very carefully not talking about what had happened in the dungeon, where Yaris had left. In the morning they would be off again, back into the dungeon, and the pace of it was making her head spin.

Were they just not going to talk about Yaris, forever? Wasn't it the job of a mediator to bring this sort of thing out into the open?

But then again, as long as nobody talked about it, it was like it hadn't happened, right? You didn't touch a healing wound, and you left old ones alone. That was advice she'd been given when she was very young, after she'd asked about the Peak one too many times.

She had never brought up the subject again, after that.

She also knew that every time Rat-tail had brought up an incident where she'd gotten lost or upset, the shame of it bit so deeply into her that she wished she could sink into the ground. Sometimes, when she lay awake at night, she could see herself and Feather-paw, perched there on the edge of the ravine.

Maybe Yaris was feeling something like that?

She drifted towards sleep. Neither My-he-kal nor Angel had turned up to the guild that evening, and they were all planning to leave in the morning. Their stuff was already packed away, contributing to her sleepiness. She would have to have a big breakfast...

With a thought, she could be in her heart, looking at all their stuff, but the strange object the guild needed them to move was taking nearly all the space. She would have to shunt it off to one side, and even then...

I wonder what's inside it, the thought drifted past.

Hopefully it wasn't anything bad. It had been too heavy for her to even contemplate lifting, and there had been a thick layer of dust on the top. Harmony had said they'd been trying to find somebody to move it for months.

I hope everything's alright at home.

I miss you.

Then sleep rolled in like the tide.

****

They weren't quite up with the dawn, but they weren't far off it.

"I need more sleep," Eim grumbled as they set out for what they were calling the 'shopping district', breakfast in hand. "Cut short last night, and again this morning, you guys are gonna kill me."

"You sound like my grandpa," Ollie had two breakfast wraps, one in each hand, and was taking an alternating bite from each.

Eim glared at them as he finished the last bite of his own wrap, dusting his hands off on his trousers, "you at least got a full night's sleep in the dungeon."

Shrike paused to poke him with his cane and Eim waved a hand at them, yawning, "maybe I'll get one of those mythical skills which lets you feel more awake with a single cast. I hear those are good."

Shrike shook his head, "you're a bit behind the times. I think the Stone stopped giving those out several hundred years ago. Too many people foregoing sleep entirely, and then going stark raving mad."

"I'd take madness right now," Eim said, at the same time as Yaris said "foregoing? What ancient books are you reading."

Jump-touch listened to them chatter, as she walked along, and tried to move the walls in her Heart.

She could push on them, she found, but it didn't seem to do much other than make them pulse to her heartbeat, and it stopped the moment she stopped focusing on it.

Is this how I make the space bigger?

"Maybe you being a weird variant will get you the awakening spell," Ollie mused at Eim, "or maybe it'll just mean you never gain any, like Shrike."

"You shut your mouth," Eim pointed at them, and Jump-touch had to resist a flinch. It wasn't confrontation, it was play-fighting. Humans did this.

Ollie laughed, "maybe," they directed their gaze towards Shrike, "maybe you'll get something wild when you hit level five. It's gotta be building up to something good right?"

Shrike sighed, "I just want the magic detection skill, that's all. If I get that then I'll have a job for the rest of my life. The guild will pay me to monitor the Spur and I'll be able to sit and read while it's working. There's variants that can transcribe data straight into the Notes section of your sheet. That would be the dream."

He sighed again, looking at the city around them, "but I don't-" he paused, pursing his lips, "never-mind."

The metal shoe of his cane tapped against the ground as they walked. Tap, tap, tap. Yaris had some sort of metal on the bottoms of her shoes too.

Eim scuffed as he walked, and Ollie was almost silent.

She looked down at her own feet. She'd decided to try the shoes again, padded with borrowed socks this time, and while they weren't chafing yet, they made her feel strangely claustrophobic.

Around them the city was waking up, people throwing open windows in preparation for a late winters day. It would be summer soon, when the days started to cool down and-

Something in her brain hitched.

Strange, that had happened twice now, that she had noticed.

I'll switch the skill off later and try working it out.

Maybe there was a weird translation problem, or her trying to think in Resper was throwing it off somehow.

"We're here," Eim tried to nudge her in the side, but she dodged away, "come on, Ollie knows where all the good shops are."

She blinked, oh. Yeah, they were going shopping! Time to spend coins on... Things.

"I get discounts too," Ollie grinned for a moment, and then their expression faded back into neutrality. "We're not going to my place though, my mam said to not come back until I hit level five, and I'm not gonna test her."

"Isn't that a bit harsh?" asked Shrike, and they shook their head.

"It's just how it's done. The guild covers food and board if you do enough quests, so why keep going home, eating everyone else's food and taking up a sleeping space that somebody else could be using. Once I hit level five, I'll be worth taking back in, but until then..."

Yaris gave them a look, but didn't say anything, and Jump-touch wondered what she was thinking.

It seemed like a good system, Jump-touch thought as she was led into a house. A bit like her own journey. A year away, five levels, there probably wasn't much of a difference between the two.

You're entering a shop, not a house, supplied her skill, you know this, and she had to stop a moment to let that process. A shop was 'a place where specific goods and services can be traded for coin.' A house was 'a building where people lived.'

There was more nuance she was missing, she thought. The home of the braider hadn't been a shop, because it was where the braider lived, but she had purchased her braids there. The Quarter House, the huge place where she'd had her token exchanged wasn't a shop, because it was… Too big?

"What's a shop?" she asked Shrike, looking around at piles and piles of neatly folded garments. "This is a shop, right?"

There was enough clothing in here to cover her whole village for a decade, if they had all been human-shaped anyway.

He froze for a second, blinking, "what?"

"What's a shop? My skill isn't explaining it well."

"It's a boon, not a skill," he said, his brain working through her question and his mouth moving on its own, "a shop is a place where you buy things for coin?"

"Then why isn't the Quarter House a shop? Why can't a house be a shop?"

He looked at her, and then back at Eim, Yaris and Ollie. As one, the three shrugged.

"You're the smart one, Shrike." Yaris broke off from the group, heading towards a pile of un-dyed shirts, "good luck."

"I," he paused, "I don't know, actually. It's just not? It's too big. Jump, it's too early in the morning for this."

She looked around, "that's what I thought too. That it's too big. But I don't understand why this is a shop and the [Braider]'s house isn't."

"It's not because she lives there, shops are places only for selling, not for living."

He touched his forehead and closed his eyes, like he was in pain. Is he okay?

"You can live above or behind a shop though," Ollie wandered up, a linen shirt in their hands. They held it up against Jump-touch, shook their head and then walked away with it again.

"Sure," she called after them, "but not in it? That's what makes it a home?"

Shrike scrunched up his face as he yawned, "I think it's short for workshop, a place where things are made. Over time language changes, and people shorten words," he picked up a pair of cloth trousers, squinted at them, and then carefully folded them back up, "people are lazy. So workshop becomes shop, and over time those words diverge. Now a workshop is a place where things are made, and a shop is a place where things are sold. Originally things were sold directly from workshops."

"But then why-"

She looked at his face, and even with her lack of practice at reading expressions, she could tell that he was in terrible pain.

"Never mind."

He sighed in relief.

She nudged her boon as she walked over to see what Eim was doing, but it offered nothing helpful.

I think Shrike was just making that up because he's tired. It doesn't make sense at all.

The idea that languages changed was interesting though. She'd known Lower Tongue did, but that was because it was a trade language. It had to change, right? And then there was the language of the Mud people which had changed almost every day, but that was because they were making it up on the fly.

But the idea that the language everyone spoke somehow changing?

If enough words shifted like that, then eventually it would become a whole new language.

Eim was talking to somebody, measuring a shirt against his arm, so she made her way back to Shrike.

"Shrike?"

"Jump?" He eyed her warily.

"Can a language change so much that it becomes a new language?"

He looked tired, "yes? It happens slowly, over hundreds of years, but that's how most languages are born. They were all one, once."

She chewed on that for a moment.

Given Tongue never changed. It had been the same for hundreds of years. Thousands, even.

Or did it, and the change was too gradual for her to notice? Would Lower Tongue one day become a real language rather than…

A pidgin, her Boon offered, and Jump-touch had to go sit down in a corner for a while.