"Why's there a thing in my eyes?" she asked, and the others turned to look at her. Yaris's hands were scabbing over as Eim paid attention to them, and whatever had been causing the blood to soak through Ollie's sleeve had stilled, the cut on their face already closed up.

"Dust?" asked Eim, and she shook her head. "No, words."

There were starts, and then exclamations from the others.

"Me too," said Yaris.

Ollie nodded, no longer folded up like a newborn goat, but instead sat on the floor with their legs crossed, "and me!"

"Opal?" said Shrike, frowning at it.

"Buttercup," Yaris responded, and Ollie nodded in kind.

Eim shook his head, "Opal for me too. I guess it's something to do with the fire, and it downgraded because we were in relative safety?"

"Hey," Shrike sighed, leaning back, "opal is pretty fucking good."

Jump-touch frowned, summoning her book.

Even without the boon on, she could still read it.

This book belongs to:

[Jump-touch] || <>

[Level: 2]

[Cultural Background: Kobold]

[Class: Cultural Scholar [Unique Variant]]

Contents:

1. Classes

2. Stats

3. Skills

4. Achievements [2]

5. Notes

Oh, I levelled. Maybe that was why her ears felt strange and hot?

She flicked through to the Achievements page, but it didn't list what the new Achievement was. Maybe because she had to go to the Stone to redeem it? She thought she remembered something about that, but she wasn't sure.

So much of what had gone on in her first days in the city was an incomprehensible blur.

Around her, the others were doing the same, summoning papers and books into their hands and searching through them.

"Are we all level two now?" Eim asked with wide eyes, and Shrike grinned at him. "Not me, you slowp-"

He laughed as Eim whacked him with his book- or sheet? It looked different from hers. Instead, it was a tightly rolled piece of parchment, which he seemed able to infinitely unroll.

Yaris had a tiny pocket-book, bound in black leather, and Ollie seemed to have a piece of card, which they somehow read by rotating it, back and forth. Occasionally they flipped it side to side, but that was much rarer, and Jump-touch found herself, watching fascinated.

Why the difference? She wondered, but it didn't really matter. Everyone was different, and so their books were too.

Idly, she flipped to the Notes section of her own record, staring at the four pages of the dictionary she had started days ago- just words, written in Scratch. No organisation to it, simply words that she both knew, and felt like writing down at the time.

It looked so childish, now, days distant from that evening by the fire. Her handwriting was bad, and the letters blotchy. The phonetics wrong in at least one or two words, where she hadn't been thinking properly.

I want to see the library they talked about.

She sighed as she sent the book back to where it lived, which wasn't her Heart. She could send it there if she wanted, but she didn't have to. There was another Heart, or Liver, or hidden mental place where she could send the book.

But if she thought about it too much, she would end up sending it to her Heart. The trick only worked if she didn't think about it.

Another weirdness of human magic. She wondered if humans would ever fully make sense to her.

Well. That's what my job is supposed to help with, right?

The others were chatting quietly, their books and records already put away. Eim had gone back to healing Ollie, and Shrike was standing up straight, peering back up the slope.

"You three slid down that?" he caught her looking.

She nodded, and he grimaced. "Glad I missed that one."

He shot a glance towards Eim, who now had a hand pressed against Ollie's face, and then flicked his gaze away again, back to the top of the slope.

Far, far above them, the roaring of the fire was dying down, but smoke was still billowing upwards, and the area they were standing in was starting to darken as it blocked the crystal lights. That was a lot of smoke.

She hoped Ink-worm had gotten away okay, but she got the impression that they didn't move through the dungeon like humans did. They should be fine.

Yaris caught her gaze, looked up, and then around, massaging her wrist. "Alright. We need to move, before that catches up with us. We can't get back up that without… Without climbing experience none of us have, but we can't stay here."

"Why not?" Ollie asked, touching their face gently. The cut looked like an angry red scar now, but Jump-touch knew from experience that it would fade.

"It is not nice here," Yaris kicked at the rocks and rubble which littered the ground here. "We don't even know what level we're on. Do we?"

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

She looked at Eim, who shook his head, and then at Ollie, who gave her a blank look, staring up from their position on the ground.

"Well, you said-"

"I never went more than a half-mile from our entrance, you're gonna make me regret telling you!"

Shrike was staring at the slope thoughtfully. "Level two at least, maybe three, if we're unlucky. You're right, we can't get back up that. We're gonna have to look for stairs."

"At a certain level," Eim said slowly, "there are no more stairs. But that's six or below. We can't be anywhere near that deep. That would be insanity."

He took a deep breath, rubbing his hands together like they were cold. "If we're gone long enough, the guild will send somebody to look for us." He looked down at his hands, "well, I guess we're not delivering that thing. Should we leave it here? I know Harmony will shout at us, but..."

Jump-touch blinked, focusing on the box in her Heart. It was very large, she would be glad to be rid of it. Did it matter all that much where they left it?

Yaris shook her head, taking the decision out of her hands. "We'll take it with us. We don't wanna have to backtrack if we find a way up, and there was a massive fine for losing it or leaving it in the wrong place. Am I the only one who read the mission briefing?"

"It wouldn't be lost." Ollie accepted a hand from Eim, clambering to their feet, "we'd know where it was. We can always come back and get it."

Yaris rolled her eyes at them. "Sure. You're welcome to come back and get it when the guild tries to fine us ten gold for losing it."

"Ten gold?" Ollie coughed, "Stone's blessing, that's- that's too much! Ten? Really?"

"Ten." Yaris's face was smooth like stone. "Come on, let's-" she paused. "Huh. Which direction should we even go?"

****

They picked one at random in the end, Ollie deciding that "that way is probably back towards the city," and none of the others feeling like making a better argument. They had meant to buy something called a compass, whilst in town, but somewhere along the way they'd all forgotten.

Or it wouldn't work in the dungeon, Jump-touch wasn't sure. Her head was still spinning, her ears still feeling blocked, like she was waiting for an oncoming storm.

Is it too much magic? Is that why I feel all stuffy?

If it was, then why couldn't she put it into her Skill herself? That was all she was interested in upgrading, anyway, and she knew exactly what she wanted. She wanted the room to be bigger, and a water tank. As simple as that.

She knew how to make the walls shudder, all she had to do then was draw that magic, and focus it into the not-walls, right? That seemed sensible to her right now, the wall-shuddering must do something. Right?!

She focused on it as they walked, trying to direct the part of herself that couldn't think straight into making the not-walls further apart, or more wall-like, or- or anything really. Pushing them outwards, away from the box, trying to push the magic she knew she was carrying into making her Heart larger.

"It's not going to work," Shrike said, when she finally asked him. "People have been trying to manage their own level ups for a thousand years, and none have managed it. Our best- and only- bet, is to go back to town and use the Stone."

But the Stone was everywhere. It was always watching, as long as you were near the road or the city, it had told her so. So why could they only use it from that one specific place in town? It didn't make sense!

Shrike listened as she tried to get her point across, and then shook his head when she was done. "Something-something people in charge want it to be that way. If people could level up at any time, there would be no control over it. They couldn't charge you the correct amount for access, and they couldn't stop people from taking illegal skills.

Your skill is illegal, and they never managed to stop you. she thought to herself, but she didn't say anything out loud.

There was no way to do it yourself, that was what it came down to. Allowing people to level up anywhere would make it harder to charge coins, and humans were obsessed with coins beyond anything else. Already the side-discussion between Eim and Yaris had devolved into numbers, how they would afford the level up, and what the fees would be.

Well. There was one exception, and that was the Shard An-jel used, but the Stone had been very unhappy about that, as had My-he-kal.

Probably best not to mention it. Or, you know what, why not? Why shouldn't she mention it? just because the Stone had been upset, and My-he-kal, didn't mean that all humans would be upset about it.

"What's a Shard?" she asked Shrike, as they picked their way across the stony ground.

"It's a piece of rock," he answered, and then he frowned. "You really ought to put some shoes on."

"No I mean like, like the Stone. A Stone shard?"

He eyed her for a long moment. "Where did you hear about that?"

She shrugged, not meeting his eye. So it was something bad. She didn't want to get An-jel and My-he-kal in trouble. Already she regretted asking.

Shrike was quiet for a minute, and then he said, "it's something you shouldn't touch unless you're in very, very dire circumstances. If you find one, you can bring it to the politeía for a reward."

"Yeah, but what is it?"

He tapped his cane as they walked, knocking small rocks and bits of stone out of the way. "When a city dies, sometimes the Stone that's there is shattered. It's a part of that."

He looked ahead, thinking. "All Stone's are the same Stone, so it doesn't hurt the system as a whole, but it does hurt humanity. It gives us all one less access point. One less place we can access our own magic."

He sighed. "Eventually there may be no points left, if things carry on how they are."

Eim glanced back, face grim, "when Resper-" he sucked his lips in, and then shook his head, hard. "Never mind. I don't want to think about it."

"It happens because nobody is living there?"

"No," Shrike shook his head. "The royal authorities come in and break it, or if they don't, then somebody from the Temple will."

"Why do they do that?"

She didn't understand. Was there a way of making new access points? There had to be, right?

"They do it to stop people using it for free," Ollie said, looking back, and the others glared at them. "What? It's true. One of my cousin's works in the big library making paper, and they said they read that six, seven hundred years ago, there were no usage fees. That breaking a Stone would never be even considered. But now, we've lost eight in the last two hundred years."

There was a beat of silence.

"When we're somewhere safe, I have questions for you," Shrike stared at them.

Ollie grinned. "Good luck with that."

"Really? No usage fees?" Eim asked, and Ollie nodded at him. "Yeah, my cousin said..."

Jump-touch focused back on her Heart, as the conversation went back to being about money. Human numbers, coins upon coins, fees and taxes (whatever those were) and the cost of bread and cotton.

If the pulsing doesn't do anything, then what is the point of it? It seemed unthinkable that something so easy for her to do would achieve nothing. The Stone had created this skill for her from scratch, why would it add something that did nothing?

It was intensely frustrating. When she next spoke to the Stone, she had questions for it.

How can I level up on my own?

How can I make my Heart bigger?

Why do humans allow themselves to be so obsessed with coins?

What would happen to humanity if there were no Stones left?

The last one was a big one. Would they be cut off from magic forever? Shrike had told her they needed magic, to hold back the Dungeon, so if there were no humans with magic... Would the dungeon take over the world?

From what he was saying, that would happen anyway, eventually.

It was a sobering thought.

She didn't understand why they would break their only way to access magic, what sort of thought process could ever lead to that conclusion. It was the most un-kobold thing she had ever considered.

Maybe one day I'll understand.

She hoped not.