The body of the goat turned into glittering ash a few minutes later, as Yaris sat on the ground, Eim fussing over her.

"It fucked your hands up good and proper," he was saying, "but I can fix it. We're lucky nothing's broken, because I have no idea how to deal with bones. It's gonna hurt though, I'm out of numbing."

One of the horns had been very hot, and the other very cold, and neither of those two were good for the skin, Jump-touch was learning. Yaris's armour was ruined too, the leather cracked from the heat and the metal buckles partially melted. It had taken Jump-touch a liberal application of her skill to get her out of it at all.

"Useful skill that," Yaris had sighed as it disappeared, stretching in her undershirt and holding her hands palm-up for Eim, "I wonder if we can mend it."

"I'll look at it later," Ollie sounded distracted. "No mending that spear, though."

They were inspecting the charred stump of wood which had, only a few minutes before, been a full-sized, fully-functional spear. "I liked that one, too. Was that our last?"

Yaris nodded, and Ollie looked mournfully at the wreck of their weapon. "Well that sucks."

Jump-touch had watched as the body glittered away, leaving behind a chunk of metal slag she assumed had been the spearhead, and a small, square object.

"There's a thing here," she called out, and Ollie squinted down at it. "I think that's the remains of my spear. Rest in peace, you did good work."

"Not that," Jump-touch huffed at them. "The other thing!"

They were already leaning down to pick it up, and they shot her a grin as they did. "I think it's a card. Aren't we lucky! If it's good, it might even pay for new weapons for all of us!"

The card seemed to expand in their hand as they drew it up, until it was the size of a playing card, and then the size of a small book. The texture shimmered like white ivory, or like pearl, Jump-touch couldn't decide. Opalescent.

"What's a card?" Jump-touch asked, even as the term itched in her mind. They'd talked about these before, right? Something to do with what Shrike was looking for?

Ollie waved it at her. "It's a cool thing, look!"

They placed it flat in the palm of their hand, bringing it down to her height, and oh-! There on the surface was an image. But it wasn't a picture, flat and painted like she'd expected. Instead, it was real.

She stared at it, tilting her head from side to side. That was the goat they'd just killed, and it looked like it was actually there, moving, shorting, pawing at the ground. It looked like it was behind a window, waiting for the glass to break, so it could charge out and murder her.

She took a step back, and Ollie laughed. "It's just a picture, kiddo. It can't hurt you. If you watch for long enough, they loop. They showed us one in school once, when I was a kid."

They flipped the card over in their hand, as the other three walked up to see.

"What does it do?" asked Shrike, peering at it.

"Something the nerd doesn't know!" said Ollie, and he rolled his eyes at them.

"I'm not a- Just read the damn thing."

Ollie laughed again. "It says it will protect you from fire, if you slot it into a pair of gloves."

He blinked. "That's useful."

Ollie nodded, "now we just gotta find gloves that'll take it."

"We could sell that to the guild," Eim mused. "Is it full body protection? Does it say how much fire?"

Ollie squinted at the card for a moment, before nodding. "Pretty sure it is full-body. Nice."

"Any blacksmith would like it," Shrike said. "Or firefighters."

"It doesn't say immunity, just protection."

Shrike shrugged. "Some is better than none."

Jump-touch reached up, and Ollie handed her the card, still grinning.

The card was cool in her hand, and the texture oddly smooth, like nothing she'd ever touched before. It felt bendy, but she knew, on an instinctive level, that no matter how hard she tried, she wouldn't be able to bend it.

"We could also trade it to the Stone for unlocking extra skills, maybe," Eim's voice was quiet. "Get you something better than Mend, get Shrike something that's not horrendously illegal."

There was silence across the group, and then a head shake from Yaris, who was still inspecting her palms, her face looking like she'd spent a day in the sun. "We'll think about that later. Jump, store that. We're moving on."

The others blinked at her.

"What? Already? But we only just-"

"Did it drop anything else?"

"No but-" Eim protested.

"Then we move. In fact, just put it in your pocket for now, Jump. Store it later. We don't know how many more of those things are living around here, or how the storing will hit you. We also don't know the respawn timer. For all we know, it could be minutes."

"Wouldn't it be better to go back to where we fell?" she asked, even as the group pulled themselves back together. "It was less steep there, there might've been stairs we missed?"

She hadn't even considered that there might be more than one of the goats, it felt like there shouldn't be space here for more than one. How could there be two such terrible monsters in one area!

"No," Yaris shook her head, already starting to move along the narrow path. "We've come this far, we keep going. Keep following the slope, it can't go on forever, and we'll stay on the path for now."

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

"What happened to going through the grass," Jump-touch heard Eim mutter, but a look from Yaris shut him up.

There were complaints from the others too, but she was already leaving, Jump-touch scurrying after her, feeling like a mouse, hemmed in as she was by the tall grass on one side and the cliff on the other.

"How much do you think we'll get for it?" Shrike was asking Eim, a few minutes later. "It's gotta be gold, right?"

"I'd hope so," Shrike sounded more wary. "But I wouldn't count on it. Getting the gloves to go with it is gonna be hard, and whoever wants it is going to need both."

Jump-touch hung back until they caught up. "What did you mean, gloves? What does that mean?"

"Sometimes monsters drop cards, as you saw, and sometimes they drop things you can wear. Hats, gloves, armour. Sometimes not always, those wearables have a space within them, where you can put the card. Most cards don't work without a piece of magical equipment to put it in."

"Only very rare ones," Eim nodded. "I've heard high level crafters can make magical clothing you can put cards into, but you'd have to ask Ollie about that."

"Cards get stronger, the higher level of thing you put it in," Shrike continued. "This one for example, in an Opal pair of gloves might make you able to pass your hand through a fire safely. But slotted into a Jade pair- which I have to clarify, are so rare we'll probably never see a pair within our lifetimes- with the card in a Jade pair, you could probably walk through a whole buildings worth of fire and come out the other side unscathed."

"Magical gear breaks down over time, if not cared for." Eim followed up on what Shrike had started, "and when it breaks, the card disappears too. So there's always demand. The higher level the magical gear, the slower it breaks, though."

"If you tried to walk through a house-fire with this card in a pair of Opal gloves, it might burn them up there and then," Shrike nodded. "Push them too much, drain all the magic out until they break. At which point you're suddenly in the middle of a burning building."

Jump-touch felt her head swim as she processed all that, working through it with only minimal help from the boon.

Beside her, the cliff was transitioning away from the grey of granite and slate and into white limestone, and on the other side the brush was slowly turning to jungle; trees growing up, vines wrapping around the grasses, strangling them out.

Human society was weird. There was none of this back home. Clothing was complicated, sure, Kobolds came in all different shapes and sizes, but the most she'd ever had to think about was if she was outgrowing her shirts or not.

It was weird, but it was also kinda neat? There was none of this back home, but they could do it with it. Ok, maybe they didn't need a pair of gloves which made you immune to fire, enough Kobolds could deal with heat that it wasn't an issue, but there must be other things that cards could do, right? One that stopped you from getting damp in the rain, or one that let you see colours.

"What other cards are there?" She asked, thinking about that.

Shrike gave her a long, tired look, and Eim spoke up instead.

"The slimes supposedly drop one which, when placed in a hairpiece, makes you a little more resistant to damage. But hairpieces are exceedingly rare. I've never even seen one."

If he hadn't seen one, spending his life in the guild, then she would take his word for it on the rarity.

"Shoes are the most common. There's also trousers, gloves, different pieces of armour and clothing that covers the chest. Bracers to cover your wrists…"

He started listing out various body parts, and she felt her ears glaze over.

"But what if it doesn't fit?" she interrupted them, as Shrike started to describe different earrings he'd read about. "What if you get shoes and they're- what if they're too small? Like, sized only for a baby or something?"

Shrike stopped mid-sentence, paused, and rattled his cane against the ground. "Hmm. It's not really a problem. You saw how the card got bigger? Magical clothing does that too, it resizes to fit whoever's wearing it."

Interesting.

"What if you can't wear shoes, though?"

He frowned at her, "why wouldn't you be able to wear shoes? Are you talking about people who've lost their feet to an accident"

"Maybe, or if you have, uh, really long toenails, or your feet are a weird shape?"

He kept frowning.

"If you like, wanted to put the shoes on your favourite dog, or something."

"You can't-" he was tapping his cane again, "you can't put magical items on a dog, Jump. They don't have the internal magical reservoirs to sustain it, or the conscious thought to make it work. The thing would just break."

That didn't seem right to her, and apparently it didn't sound right to Ollie either.

"Hey, what about Barko?"

Shrike swiped at them with the cane, only stumbling slightly. "Barko is a myth. Don't tell me you-"

"Barko is not a myth!" Ollie insisted, turning around. "Barko was a Hero!"

"There's no evidence-"

Eim butted in, "I went to a museum exhibit once where they showed-"

"We all went to that exhibit, Eim. We live in a backwater." Shrike turned on him, "there is no substantial evidence that-"

Jump-touch stared at the card in her hand as they argued, all smiling and talking faster than she could even begin to follow. The pawing goat looked so real. If she tilted the card, she could see its sides, like she was holding a tiny box in her palm.

She touched a finger to the front, and it felt like touching glass. Had they trapped the soul of the goat within the card, somehow? Did it want to be free?

The thought bothered her, so she turned the object over carefully. If she held it above her head, would the goat fall onto the surface?

It didn't, but she did get a strange look from Ollie, who was now reciting some sort of story about Barko, whoever Barko had been.

The back of the card was covered in tiny kobold scratch, and it made her eyes swim to look at it. She knew she could read it, should be able to read it, but it was doing something magic to her brain.

Oh, it wasn't really scratch, it was something like her boon, translating from something that was neither kobold nor human.

I don't want that right now.

She slipped the card into her pocket as Yaris addressed her.

"Jump, do we have another spear? I didn't think so, but I figured I'd ask."

She shook her head. "You could make one with the flints, if we had wood? Maybe from the jungle? Knap a new tip?"

"Like cave-people," Yaris muttered, whatever that meant. Then louder- "that might be our only option, depending on how long we're stuck here."

Knapping. Knapped. Resper was starting to grow on her. So many fun and interesting words.

The people were growing on her too, if she was being honest. A little bit of her still resented them for being human, for being the reason she'd had to leave home, but that part shrank more every day. Every time Shrike sighed and then answered her question with a hundred more words than she needed. Yaris, whom she didn't really understand at all, and Ollie with their constant grin and relaxed body language. Then there was Eim, who had taken her to get her hair braided, and was therefore officially her favourite human.

She touched one of the braids. Even after all this time in the underground, they were still perfect. Magic really was something else.

She couldn't say the same for her fancy new skirt, it had barely lasted more than a couple of days before she'd had to retire it. The trousers were holding up, mostly, but both it and her shirt were starting to show the dirt. She didn't enjoy that at all.

Could she get magic clothes, slotted with a card to repel dirt? That would be amazing.

She touched the one in her pocket, looking around as Yaris upped their pace. Her face was still red and the palms of her hands were a bright shiny pink, but she seemed focused and happy as she urged them onwards.

"If another one of those attacks," said Eim from behind her, one hand on Shrike's arm, "then I'm done. I'm not sure I even have enough left for that."

Yaris nodded but didn't look back.

Ollie did, casting them both a worried glance.

"Wouldn't you rather go into Jump's room?"

Shrike shook his head. "I don't need to be jammed between machinery and bookcase." He took a deep breath, "I can keep going for now. A bit of pain and embarrassment if I fall is better than being eaten by a monster."

Eim and Ollie caught eyes for a moment, and then Ollie turned back to the front, still looking unhappy.

It would be so much easier for him if he didn't have to walk.

She felt bad about it, like it was a personal failing that her Heart wasn't bigger. The Stone had promised that it would be big enough to protect everyone she cared about, and it was barely big enough for one crate and one human.

I should keep pushing on the walls, maybe if I keep doing it, eventually it'll work...