[Identification]: - Rachel Collins - Threat: 10 - Properties: None

I stared at the notification for far too long. We still had people on the street. A quick discussion selected Kyle to be next to climb up. Much like Felicia, he jumped halfway there before scrambling up the ladder.

By then, the zombies were on the guys downstairs. I tried to give them what support I could, but [Improved Blind] seemed ineffective. It masked their heads in darkness just fine, but it didn’t seem to impede the zombies in combat at all.

“Zombies use other senses, you know that,” Kyle said, looking down from the window with me. “Next!” he called down.

“It was worth a try,” I said defensively. “These are different from your regular undead.”

“Get back from the window and pull the ladder up!” Cloridan called down from below.

“Hey! You’re not going to leave them down there are you?” Rachel shouted as we complied.

“It’s fine ma’am, they’re just going to show off a little,” Kyle said.

I blinked in surprise. Kyle could understand her?

Cloridan jumped up to the windowsill from a standing start, startling the hell out of Rachel, but I was still processing the language thing. Rachel looked like an American, but she wasn’t speaking English. The kobolds and goblins from the previous floor hadn’t spoken English or German, but some other language that the others weren’t familiar with.

But Rachel was speaking Latorran. Not the local language of this region, but the language that every member of this party spoke. That couldn’t be a coincidence, surely?

Borys was the next to jump up to the window, leaving a pile of cut-up zombies below. To my disgust, the remaining ones began to eat their fallen brethren.

“You guys sure are kitted out, aren’t you?” Rachel said, causing everyone to look at her with varying degrees of confusion.

“Thanks for the assist, uh, ma’am,” Borys said. “How long have you been down here for?”

“Down? I’ve been living in Lorraine my entire life,” Rachel replied.

“Use [Identify] on her,” I said. From the blinks and startled looks, we were at least on the same page, now.

“How?” Felicia asked. “Why does that—are you a monster, Rachel?”

Rachel laughed, and Felicia looked mortified. “After five years living like this, I sure do feel like one sometimes. Come on, I’ll take you to meet the others.”

She led us out of the room, which I now noted was a dormitory-style bedroom with two beds. Past the doorway was a large living room with multiple couches and numerous other doors leading off. Through a large doorway, I could see a landing and some stairs heading down. There was also a pole.

“You can take the stairs if you want, but I’d advise finding your fun where you can,” Rachel said. She grabbed a hold of the pole and slid down to the level below.

“Oh, it’s a firehouse,” Borys said, about half a second before me. He followed Rachel down the pole. Everyone else looked at me for an explanation.

“In my world, it’s pretty common to fund groups to specialise in taking care of fires that break out,” I explained. “They live in the firehouse and rush out whenever a fire is reported. Since speed is of the essence, they make a big deal of getting ready and out the door fast.”

I gestured at the pole. “Poles are supposed to be faster than stairs, so most firehouses have something like it.”

“I guess that makes sense,” Kyle said.

“I’m not sure that it does,” Felicia countered. “Couldn’t they just jump down? It’s only one floor.”

“No enhanced Abilities,” I said, moving over to the hole in the floor. I had been a bit nervous about using a firepole, but Felicia’s comment reminded me that I could just jump down without injury. The floor was even padded.

Shrugging, I slid down the pole, not even using my hands to slow me down. I just let [Jump] absorb the impact. Easy. I quickly stepped away so that the others could follow me.

“Fun, right?” Rachel said. I shrugged. Once the others were down, she led us all into what must have been the main dispatch area.

“Hey guys!” she called out. “New arrivals!”

The first of the rag-tag group of survivors to come over was a nervous-looking college-age girl with red hair tied back in a ponytail. Rachel introduced her as Jenna Carpenter. She seemed to latch on to Felicia right away, possibly because of her age.

“You guys are really decked out,” she said admiringly. “Were you at a Ren-Faire when it started or something?”

Stolen story; please report.

“Something like that,” I said cautiously. “We travelled a long way to get here, and you won’t get far without the right equipment.”

She nodded in response and we turned to the next to arrive. I decided not to wait for Rachel.

[Identification]: - Evan Blake - Threat: 10 - Properties: None

“You’ve got a pretty nice setup here,” Borys told the young man. He was in his late twenties, slightly built and had messy blond hair. He was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt.

“Uh, I wouldn’t know anything about that, I didn’t pick it,” Evan said. “All of the bad picks, though, they didn’t last long.”

“Strong walls, no ground-floor windows,” said another man as he approached.

[Identification]: - Travis Masters - Threat: 12 - Properties: None

“Kitchen, living quarters and storage tanks for water,” he continued. “Yeah, it’s pretty good.”

He looked us over. “Name’s Trigg,” he said. “You know how to use all that gear?”

“Better than anyone,” Borys assured him.

Travis had dark hair, tattoos on his arms and squinty eyes. “Reckon you must,” he agreed sourly.

The last person to show up was an older woman, past fifty, but not yet entirely grey-haired.

“This here is Marta,” Rachel said, and the System agreed.

[Identification]: - Marta Hernandez - Threat: 10 - Properties: None

“It’s nice to see fresh faces,” she said. “I thought I heard a scuffle outside… but I didn’t hear any guns?”

“We didn’t want to attract more of them,” Borys said, and she nodded in agreement.

“Lotta folks here relied on them,” she said. “But it just brought more, and they ran out of bullets before the zombies ran out of bodies.”

“That’s everyone!” Rachel said brightly. “‘Cept for me, and you know who I am… wait.”

She pointed at Felicia. “You used my name, but I never got around to telling it to you. Where’d you know me from?”

“I used [Identify],” Felicia said. “It’s not supposed to work on people, but it worked on you. I don’t know why.”

Everyone—well, all the locals— stared at Felicia.

“What do you mean, Identify?” Rachel asked. “What’s that when it’s at home?”

“It’s a… Skill?” Felicia said hesitantly. “A pretty common one?”

“They don’t have Skills, Felicia,” I said. The words weighed heavily on me, but I had to say them. “Monsters with skills have an entry for it in their [Identify] windows. These don’t.”

“But they’re—” Felicia started, but she was interrupted by Travis.

“Watch what you say, stranger,” he said. “We may be all together against the zombies, but that doesn’t mean you can mouth off on us as you like.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I mean it more as a technical term than anything else… You see, there’s a reason we’re dressed like this. What do you know about magic?”

“Rabbits out of hats, sawing a woman in half, that sort of thing?” he asked. “Haven’t seen a show in eight years, but I remember it well enough.”

“Sawing a woman in half?” Felicia exclaimed, but I waved her to silence.

“That’s what I thought,” I said, and I cast [Water Ball].

Everyone stared at the floating sphere of water. It was a pretty useless spell—unless you happened to want to move a small amount of water somewhere, in which case it was pretty useful—but it was a spell I could cast without giving away my combat abilities. I nudged it a little closer to the group of survivors, so they could look, and even touch, it.

“What the hell is that?” Travis asked bluntly.

“Magic,” I said. “Well, really, it’s just water. It’s being held in place by magic.”

Evan was the first to touch it. Well, try and touch it. His fingers went right through the magic holding it in place and got wet as they entered the ball. Then he jerked them back and they were dry again.

“That’s crazy,” he breathed, looking at his fingers.

One by one, all the others tried touching it, until it came to Travis’s turn. He tried to destroy it, swiping through it with his battered combat knife. It didn’t work. It took a bit of concentration to keep it all together, but I managed. It looked pretty cool too. All the water splashed out from his cut, but quickly reversed course and congealed back into a ball again.

“It’s just a party trick,” I said, not mentioning the time I’d killed a monster with it. “I take it you haven’t seen anything like it?”

“Course we haven’t,” Travis snapped. “So how’d you do it?”

“We come from a magic land,” I said. “So we can do magic.”

“Oh!” Evan said. “Like a portal from another world?”

“One was involved,” I said wryly. “But not exactly. This is our world.”

“Hell it is,” Travis said. “We don’t got no magic.”

I pointed at the ball and he scowled. “You brought that with you,” he said sourly.”

“Anyway,” I continued. “In this, our world, there are things called dungeons, and they—”

“Kandis!” Felicia interrupted. “Don’t say it—it would just be cruel.”

“They need to know where they stand,” I said. “Where we stand.”

“But they’re people!” she protested.

“Are they?” I asked. “Because if that’s true, then Axel can make people.”

Felicia didn’t have an immediate answer to that, which allowed Travis to get a word in.

“What the hell you talking about?” he asked irritably. “Who the hell is Axel, and where the hell do you think we stand if it ain’t right here?”

I looked at him, but I didn’t answer his question. Instead, I turned back to Felicia.

“It was the same with the goblins on the last floor,” I said. “Some of them, some of the time, it seemed like they broke from the script. Or the script didn’t control them all the time. Like they were real. I made deals with them as if they were real people.”

“Monsters aren’t people,” Felicia said earnestly. “They just… kill. That’s all they do.”

“I know,” I said. “So are these guys monsters… or people?”

Felicia looked at the group. I could tell that she was using [Identify] on them.

Just to make sure, I used [Identify] on her. Maybe it was just that the rules were different here.

They weren’t.

The rest of my party looked troubled, but none of them spoke up. Like me, they were waiting for Felica to come to a decision.

“I… don’t know,” she admitted. “But even so, why do you want to tell them?”

I sighed. “Basic honesty?” I tried. “I don’t think I want to pretend they’re people if I think they’re monsters. And… there’s also a chance that the knowledge gets erased after I tell them, which will make it a lot easier to pick what they are.”

“That and the fact that I will just damn kill you if you don’t make with the explanations,” Travis said grimly.

I giggled. I couldn’t help it. I’d never felt less threatened.

“Fine,” I said, suppressing a smile. “As I was saying, in our world, there are dungeons. And dungeons make monsters. Beasts that just kill, without fear, thought or morality.”

“Sounds rough,” Travis said.

“We have a skill, a kind of magic, that helps us figure out what kind of monster we’re facing,” I said. “It doesn’t work on humans. It works on you.”

“So what does that mean?” Travis asked, but his face said he’d figured it out.

“It means that we’re in a dungeon. It made you.”