Jump-touch led the battered party through the tunnels, to the only nice place she'd found during her exploration. The kitchens.

Humans had a dedicated word for a room to cook food in, how neat was that! She'd never even considered the concept much before, most kobold houses were single-room.

Some in the lower village were bigger, but it wasn't something that came up much, the naming of rooms. It was either "this room", or "that room", and if somebody wasn't in one, you went and looked for them in the other.

Having a separate kitchen was a great idea though; stop the smoke and grease coating everything by keeping it out of the way, but still have the ability to cook when the weather outside was inhospitable.

Jump-touch looked back at the group. Shrike, being supported by Ollie, and Yaris by Eim, all of them looking somewhat worse-for-wear after several days in the dungeon and several difficult fights. She had been thinking of them as the humans a lot less lately. When had that happened?

As they set up their bedrolls and camping stuff in a corner of the kitchen, Jump-touch sat on a stone counter, watching and thinking.

Shrike looked exhausted, more so than she'd ever seen him before. While her magic knocked her down sometimes, and always made her hungry, it never made her tired. It never staggered her for more than a minute, it simply made her stomach growl and her legs feel heavy until she ate.

Eim's seemed to make him antsy, as far as she could tell, it never knocked him down, it just stopped working.

Did different sorts of magic affect the user differently? She would have to ask Shrike, when he looked less dead.

She slipped down off the counter and handed him a flask of water from her Heart, and he took it gratefully, his eyes half shut. "Casting takes it out of me, Jump."

She nodded, and then went to help the others.

Ollie was half in, half out of some sort of stove-box muttering something about ventilation and blockages. The other two were watching with concern.

"You need me to look?" She was much smaller than everyone else and had an easier time getting into small places.

There was a muffled "nope" from somewhere inside the box, and then a grubby Ollie emerged, looking satisfied. "I got it. We should be able to fire this thing up now, if we have fuel, and then we can cook. Jump, can you clean the tarnish off one of the pots? I don't know where this ventilates too, but it goes somewhere, and that somewhere is not here."

She blinked, and then touched one of the saucepans gingerly.

A jolt and it was in her Heart, still looking as corroded as when it had been outside. She was surprised it had stayed in one piece, to be honest, the stuff in this room seemed a little more sturdy than in the rest of the complex.

Jump-touch shook her head, trying to get more information about it, trying to untangle the strange bundle of sensations that sending things to her Heart gave her. It wasn't words, but she tried to translate what it had told her anyway. "The copper is part of it, I can't make it go away. They're one thing?"

Ollie nodded, still happy about whatever they'd done with the firebox. "Oh well, that makes sense. Give us the normal frying pan and we'll make do."

She did so, and then watched with interest as Yaris, who had taken the frying pan away from Ollie after they somehow managed to almost set it on fire, managed to once again turn jerky into something almost resembling a meal. If only they had salt. And spices. And vegetables that weren't shredded and dehydrated.

"There's people who have cooking classes," Eim suggested, standing next to her and watching Yaris work. "It guides their hand every step of the process, so every meal they make comes out perfect. They have their own guild, and their own secret cooking techniques."

"Huh."

But why are they secret? Are they dangerous?

Then, I wonder if whoever cooked for An-jel had a skill like that.

The food there had been pretty good, she was willing to admit now, she just hadn't been in the mood for praise at the time. She wanted to eat the little green vegetables again, and she somewhat regretted the mess she'd made of that poor fish. Hopefully whoever had eaten the leftovers hadn't been too upset.

"There's other jobs out there too," Eim continued. "All sorts of interesting things. People who cook, people who clean, people who fix the roads and keep the fairy lights alive."

Ollie spoke up, still hovering like they wanted to take over the cooking, but being held back by a strategically placed elbow, "I have an uncle who's a [Hatmaker], his whole job is completely focused on making hats and nothing else. No scarves, or shoes, or shirts. Just hats."

"My dad-" Shrike said quietly, and Jump-touch hadn't even realised he'd gotten up to join them, "my dad is a [Horologer]. A [Clockmaker], but at the highest level, where the names turn to gibberish. I was meant to be too, working up from [Apprentice] all the way to the top. I was going to inherit the shop."

He looked down at his hands, leaning heavily against the big stone table that took up the centre of the room. "I really messed up, taking this class."

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

Ollie nodded. "My uncle is actually a [Milliner], whatever that means. Archaic words we've forgotten the meanings of, except they still get classes named after them sometimes."

They turned to Jump-touch, "you'll find that interesting, right? It's the languge changing thing you were talking about with Shrike, you don't see those words anywhere else anymore, apart from in class names. Nobody even knows what language they're from, they're so old."

Shrike rapped his cane on the ground with a gentle knock. "That's the sort of thing you would have been translating, if you'd taken the language class. Even if we never learnt the names of the languages you were translating, we would at least have had translations."

"Dust." Ollie leant back against the kitchen wall. "Dust and ashes, civilisations dead a thousand years. Plus what if they gave her [Milliner] and her translation jumbo just spat back 'hat maker', how funny would that be."

"Longer than a thousand," Shrike said quietly, and the conversation faded into silence.

****

They ate, sat, and then all slept for several hours, exhausted by the day. The next morning they all slowly came-to over breakfast; the last of their vegetables, mixed into a weak sauce of last night's jerky-fry and water.

Mountain, she missed salt.

As they were finishing off their quiet meal, a trumpeting sounded from above. Three long notes, a call to attention.

"That'll be for us," Yaris handed her plate to Jump-touch, who sent it back to her Heart, minus the grease, "time to move out."

Even with that definitive statement, it took them all a while to get going. Shrike was still stiff and grumpy, and Eim and Ollie had forced Yaris to accept a sling for her arm, strapping it tightly to her body.

"It doesn't even hurt anymore," she grumbled as Ollie fussed with it and Eim insisted at poking her with his magic, "you two are treating me like a kid."

She had let them do it though, even if she had looked deeply unhappy about the process, letting them flit around her, like busy parents nursing a fledgling, as they walked through the dusty grey halls.

Nobody seemed worried about the horns, even as they got closer to the exit, they just kept talking about the rules, about the fight yesterday, about the ogre, as they were calling it. Maybe they'd been idle too long? She wasn't quite following it.

Up top, the gates to the arena were thrown open but- and this was different- so were the doors to the outside. Where yesterday there had been a shimmering barrier, now there was a wide-open set of double doors.

The barrier was still there, between the newly-added doors, but it looked different, somehow, and some part of her knew, as she looked at it, that they would be able to pass through it and return to the outside if they wanted.

On the other side, the green looked bright and inviting, and apart from a few scuffs on the ground, there was no sign of the rampaging monster they had left there last night.

"We're free." Eim said, matter of factly. "As much as I'd enjoy watching you guys in the arena again, or getting a shot at it myself, we can go, so let's go."

He started to walk towards the exit, only to slow and look back, as he realised none of the others were following. Yaris and Shrike were hovering back, near the portal to the pit, and Ollie was standing between them. Jump-touch had started to follow, but slowed as she realised nobody else was moving.

"We talked about it overnight," Yaris said, one hand fiddling with the sling, "we think we can do the next round. Either me, Shrike and you, or me, Shrike and Ollie."

Eim shook his head emphatically "no, we talked about it in theory. We talked about what we would do if we had to fight. We don't have to fight, we're leaving."

He frowned, taking a deep breath. "You two almost got yourselves killed once. You don't think it's going to happen again? The fights aren't going to get easier, Yaris. You-"

"Shrike never got touched, he just overdid his magic a bit, and I was fine. It was only-"

"Your arm was broke in several different places!" Eim took a step forward, not quite shouting, but almost there, and Jump-touch found herself shrinking back. "I have a diagnosis skill, Yaris, you can barely move the damn thing. If you take another hit on that arm before the day is out, I might not be able to heal it at all, ever!"

He took a step backwards, towards the veil, waving his hands. Somewhere in the distance the horns sounded again, and Jump-touch could hear the roaring of a crowd now, muffled, but audible on the wind.

"It's either now or never," Yaris shook her head, tearing at the sling, trying to look between both Eim and the arena behind her. "You didn't see it, Eim. There were crowds. They were cheering us, it was magic, it-"

"There were no crowds, Yaris. This place is fucking with your head. Ollie, please talk some sense ito her."

Jump-touch turned to look up at Ollie, expecting them to be as incensed as Eim, but their face was clouded, confused.

"I don't know," they said slowly. "We talked about it for a while last night, and the rewards do get better, the more rounds you do, right? The rules said that. If we leave now..."

They trailed off, staring into the pit, clenching their fists open and closed.

"You don't even have a weapon!"

Jump-touch wished, suddenly, that she hadn't wandered off. That she had read over the rules with them. It would be good to know right now what exactly they said. She just… Hadn't been interested. She wasn't going out there and fighting, so what did it matter if she listened or not?

That was a mistake, thinking like that was the wrong way to think. She was a member of the team, she should be thinking like one. She was supposed to be human, wasn't she?

They're your friends. Start acting like it.

The thought hit her like a lightning bolt.

It wasn't wrong. She kept thinking of herself as other, because she looked different, because she was small, because she wasn't-

She skittered backwards as Eim went from static and fidgety, to all of a sudden motion; as he threw himself at Yaris, shoes scuffing up the stone behind him, arms outstretched. "Jump!" he shouted as he moved, and she wasn't sure if it was her name or a command.

She took it to mean both and ducked closer to the two even as Eim impacted Yaris, who had been staring so hard into the arena that she barely had time to turn her head before he hit her. There was a loud noise of impact as he hit her in the side, and then she was holding him against her, confusion on her face.

Then her expression darkened.

"You're trying to use your skill on me again," her words were a little slurred, and she staggered to one side, almost losing her footing on the smooth floor. "Shrike, shtop him!"

Eim wasn't to be stopped. "Jump! Send her to your Heart!"

Well, that wasn't possible. "I can't!"

"Why not! Just do it, listen to me!"

There were a multitude of reasons why not! For one thing, the box was still in there, taking up all the space, and Yaris was bigger than Shrike. For another, she was pretty sure she couldn't just kidnap people who actively didn't want to be kidnapped. It didn't work like that. That would be- That would be the prison skill Shrike had spoken to her about!

"I just can't!" she shouted, skipping backwards as Yaris swung her free arm wildly. "Why are you all fighting!"

Then Shrike threw himself into the back of the two of them, and all three of them were suddenly a tangle of limbs and shouting, as they crashed through the exit of the Drop, back into the area outside.