Most days, the pervasive presence of the B15-Terran system through out the capital of New Port City was only visible from the tap points littered on every third block corner and interface glasses worn by the well-off citizens. On a dreary day of smoggy rain like this one though, the drizzle falling through the system's influence refracted the digital signals, forcing them into the visual spectrum on small sparks of electric toned colors. As if loose pixels were breaking free of the VR, feebly grasping at becoming reality.

Terra wondered if that particular quirk of light would have been possible if the droplets hadn't been polluted with who knew how many chemicals. She would rather be thinking about that as she stared through the glass front of the tattoo parlor she worked in, than listen to what her boss's client was saying while he tattooed her bare shoulders. Unfortunately, willful disregard couldn't stop the words of a frequent client's voice from reaching her ears in the unusual quiet of the mostly empty parlor. Ajax had called out sick and her own client was starting to look like a no show.

"Did you hear the bounty on the Administrator's son went up again?" Daisy asked.

Drew grunted inarticulately while he switched out needles and colors. "Doesn't have anything to do with our crowd. Not unless that seduction talent of yours got turned into a tracking one somehow."

The indifference of the scrawny, inked up man towards the politics of the system administrator's family was just one reason Terra could kiss him. Not that she would have. Besides his face having distressingly few areas clear of piercings or scruffy beard that never grew in as anything more than thin patches of wispy hairs, he was an honest employer who had made it clear the day he offered her the job that he didn't expect or accept favors from his artists. Which was just another reason she had chosen to work for him.

"Oh, screw you, Drew." Daisy laughed. She managed the action without shifting her shoulders too much as he brought the needle back down on her back. "Who's to say I couldn't seduce the wayward prince back to his parents?"

Drew shrugged with unconcern.

"I'd have thought the fact that he ran away immediately after that engagement to one of the pretty admin daughters of Y12-Gaia would make that pretty clear." Terra said, pushing off of the wall she had been leaning against. She went to her station where her sketchbook was laying open to give herself something more productive to work on than staring out the window for a client that probably wasn't going to make his appointment. Watching for him hadn't been enough of a distraction to keep her ears or mouth shut. Then again, remaining too quiet when she was normally the one that chatted the most with the clients might have seemed more suspicious.

The canvas clicked her tongue against her teeth with disappointment. "Fair point. But it's not every day a contract for a million creds is put out. Unless it's for someone's head."

"Good reason not to bother." Drew said with his usual ruthless practicality. "The real bounty hunters aren't going to hand a contract like that to a novice."

His words sent a hot itch of dread rolling down Terra's spine and shoulders. "What would you even do with a million credits, Daise?" She asked, trying to turn the subject.

Daisy turned her head on her crossed arms to grin over at Terra. "Get more of your ink in my skin, gorgeous." She teased salaciously. The words were accompanied by the gentle press of power and a sweet scent that warned Terra that the woman was invoking her talent.

Daisy's ability to entice people with pheromones was not a particularly rare one. It wasn't even that insidious since it was only as effective as certain perfumes one could acquire. They wouldn't even have to dip into the black market to find them. However, if Terra hadn't had that sixth sense for when talents were being expressed, it would have been a lot harder for her to notice what was being done. Or resist it.

"If you keep that up, I'll slip Drew a skunk tattoo for your lower back next time." Terra warned. The threat was an empty one though, which Daisy knew.

A glossy lip stuck out in a dramatic pout from Daisy's pretty face as she played along. "You're no fun."

"Nope." Terra agreed cheerily without looking up from her sketchpad. She had been laying out the rough shape of a rose, her go to subject to draw when she was stressed. She etched in the ghost of an open book behind the blossom, letting it appear to be cradled between the pages. It occurred to her that if Drew looked over, he'd realize right away that she wasn't feeling as at ease as her languid pose and banter implied. Not when she was drawing one emotional escape inside of another.

Lucky for her, Drew wasn't easily distracted from his work.

Daisy sighed, then began to brainstorm out loud what she would really do with a windfall of credits. Her priorities seemed to be on more ink, more piercings, and a wild spree at the local stripper joints. She was shamelessly crude in exactly what strange kinks she'd be the most ready to drop credits to try out. Terra would have expected nothing less from the woman currently getting a pin-up girl across her shoulders. The woman in the tattoo was wearing a retro-space helmet, ray-blaster belt, leather boots, and not a stitch more. The design had been done by Terra, but Drew was the only one allowed to ink up Daisy. The woman had a history of causing trouble with his artists.

The droning of hedonistic daydreaming finally allowed Terra to tune the client out, but her mind didn't obediently turn away from the worries the beginning of the conversation had stirred up. She worked heavy shading into the heart of the petals on the page in front of her while her mind wheeled around her father's apparent unwillingness to just let her go. A bounty like that was just as likely to get her killed as it was to get her turned over without harm. Not because the bounty hunters wouldn't do their best to adhere to the details of the contract to get the full payout, but because she would never go back without fighting to the bitter end.

Being trained up to be her father's heir meant she wasn't without physical training. Even if her Brawn hadn't been higher than her Brains- which she was fairly certain was the case now, despite her avid avoidance of any system interactions providing her no hard numbers within the last 12 years- she would have been required to push her physical stats. Anyone slated to take over the role of system administrator on any world had to push all their stats into the upper range of mortal capabilities before reaching the age of 25, when their minds completed developing and made the intense administration bond to a system possible.

Even growing up with her own personal trainers, she hadn't been taught to fight. Her father had seen no point in that. He believed physical violence was ungenteel. Nor did the admin believe anyone would dare touch his son while they stood on "his" planet.

'Unless he sends them himself with a million reasons not to let me go. They're sure to think returning my body would be better for them than returning nothing.' Terra thought to herself as she added a few long, sharp thorns to a stem running down the crevice between the pages. She wanted to believe she'd be able to fight to the death, rather than the much more likely outcome that they'd rough her up, knock her unconscious somehow, and return her mostly alive.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

She wasn't sure what her father would do to control her once he had her back, but she knew he wouldn't let her go again. Maybe he'd drug her or use one of those VR collars that trapped a person in their own version of reality to control them. Whatever he did, it wouldn't be illegal. Not for him. There might be higher powers when it came to management of the planet these days, but the admin would always be the ultimate authority on B15-Terra. Because he who controlled the system controlled the world.

Not for the first time, Terra wondered if she should have done more to hide. Run farther or changed her name or appearance more drastically. As always, she came to the same conclusions.

Leaving the city would have been what was expected of her. It was also much harder to do undetected than laying low in the underbelly. Something no one would expect a runaway noble with no skills or talents to be able to manage.

As for her name, Terra was painfully common. As if it wasn't bad enough that half of all human administrated planets were named things like New Earth, Terra, and Gaia, the latter two were some of the most common girls names among the human race across the whole universe.

Much like her name, Terra's golden tan skin, grey eyes, and cinnamon brown hair were none of them remarkable or unusual. She'd grown the hair out to her shoulders the night she left and stopped hiding the freckles her father had hated so much under concealer. She'd gotten various tattoos and piercings as well in the two years she'd been gone.

No one should have any reason to suspect that Terran Starmer XI, the system administrator's wayward, talentless, spoiled son, and Terra Baker, the book loving tattoo artist girl with an obscure talent to expel ink from her skin, were one and the same person.

"What about you, Ter?" Daisy asked, interrupting Terra's wandering thoughts.

"Huh?" Terra asked, jerking her head up from her sketch.

"What would you do with a million credits?"

"Oh." Terra sighed. "I might buy a bigger apartment to hold more books. Maybe with room to set up a little art studio." She shrugged, unable to think of much more than that. She'd never really had to want for much in her life, materially speaking. Even after running away, she'd buckled down and found herself a job she could do well enough at that she could afford the basics of comfort an a new book every few weeks.

"That's it?" Daisy asked skeptically. "No running off to have grand adventures or moving to a better part of town?"

"No." Terra agreed without elaborating. She'd had her fill of living in the upper city and as for adventure... well even if she managed to leave New Port City without going through a system screening, she wouldn't be able to get in anywhere else without having one. Either boarding a shuttle to leave the planet or entering a new city would require a screening. As soon as that happened, she'd be flagged for capture and sent right back to the life that had suffocated her for twenty-two years.

There hadn't been any singular terrible thing in her old life. There had just been cushiony lies that had closed in on her over the years like so many pillows until she couldn't breathe anymore. Her interests weren't to her father's tastes, so she couldn't exhibit her skills among her peers. The way she looked and moved was displeasing to him, too much like her mother, so she'd had to disguise herself and act constantly.

When she'd been young, she had balked against the leash of responsibility she was destined for, expressing to anyone who would listen- which wasn't very many- that she didn't want to become the eleventh administrator of her homeworld. By the time she was old enough to attend functions, she'd learned to put on a mask over that as well. Privately, she had still dreaded taking over the position. She didn't want to be responsible for an entire planet's worth of people and their interactions with the system that would make or break them. Worse than the work though, she feared becoming her father. Indifferent to the power he had except in so far as it could benefit him.

In her father's eyes, the fact that she was unwilling to bend to the yoke he had raised her for wasn't her worst failing, maddeningly enough. Instead, her greatest crime was that she had dared to come out as a girl despite her parents' careful genetic screening process they had used to ensure the embryo they kept would be another great Terran of the unbroken line. They denied it and tried to force her to be what they wanted, which was original Earth levels of bigotry that she found far more unbecoming of their family's legacy than that she was who she was.

When her talent for shapeshifting had emerged from her desires to confirm her gender in a way her parents would never grant her medically, she had hidden it from them. Which meant that on top of appearing to have no meaningful skills, she had also failed to manifest a talent. That alone would have solved all her troubles by making her an unmarriageable prospect for any decent administration family- which was the only kind of family her proud father would have been willing to marry in- if it hadn't been for her horrible system screening at 12 years old.

When she'd gone through her first assessment to determine her base stats, she'd actually pleased her father for once in her life. Not with anything she had managed to achieve. All her useful stats had been perfectly average at 5. Except for her Capacity. That had been a 10, the highest level possible without a system bond of some kind.

Capacity was an unusual stat in that it didn't represent some inherent capabilities a person had, but rather their ability to gather potential for and be enhanced by a system. That meant that unless a person was bonded to a system, Capacity was useless. It was also very rarely the highest stat a person had. It was usually capped by whichever other stat was the highest. In cases where a person did have Capacity as their highest stat, like Terra, they were almost always presented with a system seed by their system. The strange offspring of the reality warper race that would bond to someone as a familair in hopes of seeding their own planet.

Terra's father would have never allowed that of course, she was his heir, not her own person, but that kind of distinction had salvaged her reputation at least as far as her use as breeding stock had gone. She supposed she should have been grateful for the ridiculous stat. Her father had been too concerned that another screening would reveal the first rating to have been a mistake to put her through another screening at 18. He'd just had the system copy over the results from her first screening. No improvement through her whole adolescence was far and away preferable to him over any chance for her one valuable stat to have dropped by even a point.

To Terra, the bitterness of having her accomplishments once more swept under the rug had been preferable to her parents realizing she really did have a talent. One that allowed her to actually be herself in every moment that she had not been under their direct scrutiny. One that had given her the chance to escape them.

She'd made the decision the night she met Angia Bellet, second daughter of the administrator of newly settled Y12-Gaia. Terra didn't run away from bitterness that her fiancée's family had no issues allowing their administration heir to be a daughter. At least, that hadn't been the deciding factor. That had been the fact that this woman her parents were going to make her marry and produce heirs with had disdained everything about her.

Angia had taken one look at Terra's system records and thought she'd known just what sort of worthless wash-up Terran XI was. She'd decided to make it clear to her fiancé the night they met that she would be marrying out of loyalty to her family and for the good of their future children. That she had no intention of getting to know her soon-to-be spouse as a person and would expect to be left alone whenever they didn't have to be seen together. She hadn't even let Terra get a word in edgewise.

While Angia might have been willing to live that kind of fake life out of duty to her family, Terra wasn't. She couldn't look at every lie she had lived up until that point and stand the thought of living that way for the rest of her life. A life that would be elongated significantly if she became the administrator.

"Terra to Terra, are you there?"

"What?" Terra asked, looking up from her sketch again. She hadn't added even a smudge of shading to it in a few minutes as she stewed over things she couldn't change except by staying away from them.

"I asked what you're drawing." Daisy repeated. She sounded exasperated. As if she had asked a couple times. Which she probably had.

"Oh, sorry. Rain's got me down." Terra said, making the excuse before she lifted her sketchbook, just in case Drew decided to look too. She knew what he'd see if he looked at the sketched out rose in a book.

So of course he did. He then glanced sharply to Terra's face with the sort of concerned expression that told her clearer than words she wasn't getting out of here without answering a few questions. Sometimes, Drew cared about his employees too much.

Luckily for Terra, the client who she had been watching for earlier finally showed up. He came through the door in the glass-front, dripping water all over the floor. He apologized for getting caught in the weather. Terra assured him that she didn't mind while she went to the back to get a towel and a mop. It made a convenient excuse for her to pretend she hadn't seen Drew's look.

Even if pretending would only put off the inevitable questions for a few hours.