Vittorio went back to his former home the next day but found little of interest, other than some documents showing his parents had been in debt to someone and slowly paying it off. Vittorio wasn't great at maths but the interest looked pretty high - not that it mattered to him. He took the money his parents had put away which wasn't much, and left everything else. He told Celeste to let everyone take what they wanted from the store and that he left the building in her care, though people might come to claim it. If not she was free to do what she wanted with it. When she protested he told her he was sorry to dump it all on her, but as he had no interest in the building or the goods he felt someone should still keep an eye on it until there was someone who needed it. Maybe one of the teens would get a mercantile class, or just need somewhere to live.

While Gloria liked seeing her mother again, she was also eager to get back to adventuring so she and Vittorio set off barely a day after arriving. Walking in the summer heat was unpleasant, as expected, but they got surprise relief when Vittorio formed a pact with {Absence and Abundance}.

Class: Pactmaker Passive skills Class Attributes Mentality, Personality Gain experience in the class when using Traits associated with an Attribute. Class Traits Adaptability, Learning: Experience, Magical attacks: Ranged, Resistance: Physical, Sense: Vision The natural rating of traits are set at a minimum of Adequate. Gain experience in the class when using the Traits. Class Activities Combat, Create light or darkness, Negotiate Gain experience in the class when engaged in the Activities. Pact Passive skills Antipathy

All your skills come in two forms. You are in Abundance in light environments and Absence in dark environments. If your environment is perfectly balanced between the two, you are in neither.

Sympathy

Your form becomes increasingly insubstantial in areas of bright light or darkness, increasing the effect of your Resistance: Physical trait. Additionally, your vision is perfectly adapted to the brightness of your current environment, degrading based on difference.

Absence: You tend towards a being of heat. The effect of your Resistance: Heat trait is increased.

Abundance: You tend towards a being of cold. The effect of your Resistance: Cold trait is increased.

Active skills Absorb

Consume light or darkness around you for a short duration. This alters your environment. Your next use of Reverse the Wick has additional effects based on the amount absorbed. Absorbed light or dark, and the effect on your surroundings, lasts a short duration after Absorb ends. You may use this ability often.

Abundance: The orb's size is increased, and upon impact partially explodes into a cloud of darkness. The cloud deals ongoing low cold damage and lasts a short duration.

Absence: The beam chains to other nearby enemies, each foe taking less damage than the one before it. When a foe takes no damage, the chain ends.

Equality is Identity

Teleport to a nearby location of equal brightness to your surroundings. How often you can use this ability depends on distance traveled. You take damage if there are areas of differing light levels between your origin and destination.

Absence: Upon arrival, release a burst of light, dealing low heat damage to enemies with a very short distance.

Abundance: Upon arrival, become invisible for a very short duration.

Reverse the Wick

Launch a magical attack at enemies at range. You may use this ability at any time.

Absence: Fire a beam of bright light. Targets take increasing heat damage the longer the beam hits them, initially negligible scaling up to moderate.

Abundance: Launch an orb of darkness. The orb sticks to surfaces, dealing low cold damage to any living thing touching it. The orb lasts a short duration.

There was a lot to read and digest, but the immediate result was this: In the bright sun of early afternoon, Vittorio became one of the coldest things in a hundred miles. So cold, in fact, that Gloria wouldn't go too near him. He was barely below freezing, but to someone who only knew of ice as something conjured by magic, it was terribly, terribly cold. Vittorio was comfortable as he was, and Gloria soon found a distance where he just provided a nice cooling effect on the hot day. His insubstantiality was notable, but he was still easily seen - it was just that you could make out vague shapes and colours behind him. It also did not affect his clothing or his interacting with things.

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As they had several hours of walking to look forward to, Vittorio experimented with his abilities. Equality is Identity thankfully came with a solid instinctual understanding of where he could and could not go, and was easy to activate. He teleported down the road a bit and turned invisible, but the two of them agreed that the invisibility was mostly just to hide where he went - it lasted all of three seconds, and he still radiated cold so he wasn't that hard to track down.

Reverse the Wick was going to be a challenge to use in Abundance. He took out his wand and aimed it at some rocks off the road, but the so-called orb was more of a blob and fell short of his target. Magical attacks that arced weren't unheard of by any means but they were, naturally, harder to aim than something that just went straight. The blob itself was a thing of complete darkness, about half the size of Vittorio's fist and as it hit the ground it had sort of rippled and jiggled a little. He kind of wanted to play with it. That feeling mostly, but not entirely, went away when the blob dissipated and revealed a circle of dead grass.

It didn't take too long for him to start to get a feel for it, even if precision was well beyond him and aiming at a moving target would be extremely difficult. That, however, was not a critical problem. As part of his experimentation, Vittorio fired it at the ground and promptly stepped in the blob and found that a large portion was now stuck to his foot. It hurt like Xaas themselves were gnawing on it but it only lasted for a few seconds. With even a miss having the potential to hurt his enemy, they tentatively settled on a tactic of him just casting it as much as he could and hoping for the best. With the way the blob dropped he could also, in theory, attack from behind Gloria by aiming very high up. It wouldn't be much use indoors and had the potential of hitting her in the back of the head, but still seemed like a useful option.

Absorb was by far the most bizarre skill Vittorio had used so far from any pact. As he activated it, the light within about a meter of him faded. Once it had finished he jogged a few steps and turned to see the effect: In the middle of a road lit by the sun high in the sky, was a dim bubble. It was like the opposite of a torch in darkness. When the skill ended a few moments later, the dim light grew brighter until you couldn't tell anything had been different.

He waited until it was available again, made another bubble of dim light, and launched a blob. This time it was over twice the size, and on impact - on the road behind them, as they knew it to be empty - it burst, creating a bubble of complete darkness about ten meters across. Vittorio tried sticking his head into it, which hurt a fair bit, and was pleased to see that Sympathy activated immediately and let him see just fine in the darkness. It also made him blind to everything outside it, which just looked white to his eyes much as the bubble looked black from the outside. He withdrew his head and rubbed his face to get some warmth back into it.

The sight part of Sympathy reacting immediately felt like a really big deal. They started brainstorming times when it would be super useful and ran out pretty quickly, but the uses it did have were good. It also felt like a bit of a cheat compared to the Adopt Ancestry Talent where the dwarf option gave partial darkvision - but there was a surprise waiting for him in the Talent list.

Adopt Ancestry: Gain a lesser version of a racial trait you do not possess. You may choose this Talent only once.

* Anura: Gain increased friction on fingers and toes.

* Dwarf: Gain limited vision in darkness. slightly improved vision in lighting different from current surroundings.

* Elf: Gain a limited sense of magical energies.

* Mikhuq: Gain greatly strengthened nails and teeth.

Vittorio hadn't realized Talents would shift to accommodate such things - the favoured Traits of different tags hadn't, and he had Adaptability from both his class and Transformation. It might have something to do with pacts or the way Sympathy changed his sight? Impossible to say, really. Another question for Master Kahe.

Finally, he turned to the ever-important, ever-confusing price: "Unbalance something". He really should get the Talent to get more information on the prices, he thought. Gloria graciously consented to having him shove her to test it out. They started with her standing normally and him pushing her back. That did nothing, and they hadn't expected it to. He shoved harder, making her stumble and there was something there he felt. They kept trying.

Eventually, Gloria stood on one foot, arms out to the side, balanced and steady. Vittorio forcefully started shoving her shoulders as she fought to stay where she was. She'd been practicing footwork and her balance as part of her training so it took a shockingly long time to Vittorio before she stumbled. The feeling he got from the pact was that it was the right idea but not enough. Again, he hadn't expected it to. Just like with {The Still Wind}, paying the price meant doing something big or many small things. As they started moving again, he would occasionally kick Gloria's foot to make her stumble. Even though she fully allowed him to he still felt like a bully.

Kicking her feet did a little bit, especially when she fell once, but the real breakthrough came when they took a break. Vittorio started balancing rocks on each other and then tipped it over - that helped a lot. For the next half an hour anyone passing by would have seen two armed adults playing with rocks in the ditch by the road. They moved on.

During the course of the evening they concluded that while Absence made Vittorio noticeably hot, it was perfectly manageable. The shift from cold to hot was gradual and happened earlier than they'd expected - it seemed dim evening light was dark enough for Antipathy. That night they left the inn, with Vittorio leading Gloria out of the village and back down the road a bit to where they'd seen some rocks on the way in.

Equality is Identity remained easy to use, though this time Gloria was unhappy about the effect: The flash of light was dazzling in the dark of the night, hurting her eyes. Using it in the dark would need careful consideration, though hopefully, it would be worse for any enemies. Vittorio's eyes shifted from dark to bright light to dark immediately with no problems.

Reverse the Wick was, thankfully, less intense, the beam cutting through the dark like a knife through a ripe avocado. It moved with his aim practically instantaneously, which was something he'd been a bit worried about as he needed to keep it on a single target to ramp up the damage. The light was concentrated and didn't light up the surroundings at all, not even where it hit the rock Vittorio was aiming at.

It looked wholly unnatural, though far less so than Absorb. Using that left a bubble of dim, sourceless light. It looked eerie and about as sinister as the bubble of dark in the day - it was easy to imagine it as a lure by some monster. Reverse the Wick did not consider other rocks his foes, or else it didn't deal any damage to the rock, because it didn't chain. The idea was clear in Vittorio's mind though: When he struck an enemy with an Absorb-boosted beam it would deal damage to that target, then a weaker beam would emerge from them and automatically hit another enemy, and so on.

They returned to the inn, not wanting to be out in the dark, and discussed the skills. The big drawback, they agreed, was how obvious they all were. The beam version of Reverse the Wick seemed better than the blob, but it made it painfully obvious where it was coming from and who was doing it. The difference compared to Wind Weaponry from {The Still Wind} which even Vittorio couldn't tell what it was doing was staggering.

Still, this seemed like a good tool in his arsenal. The strength of [Pactmaker] lay not in any one pact - each of which could be outdone by lots of classes - but in being able to switch and face many different challenges. For now, he would keep {The Still Wind} as his standard, go-to pact as he liked the utility it brought, but {Absence and Abundance} would probably see frequent use. He also needed to train with {Strength of Weakness} as he was expecting a lot of value out of its supporting and buffing skills once they reached tier 1 and could start looking for a team. Being the only tier 0's in Pogna had serious drawbacks, though a monopoly on the most basic quests was nice.

Ruminating on the different pacts reminded him of what one of the entities when he first made contact had said:

> The mind affected will have been. The mind will wait. {This} touch accepted will have.

Disregarding the unpleasant idea that they know what is going to happen to him, he would have thought the possession would have been what it was talking about - but it seemed not. Vittorio feared what else could be in store for him.