…Right. Yeah. Because I’m totally powerful enough to destroy something like the laser-monster.

“I need to equip you, Pearl.”

“Of course!” She shakes a little to inch herself towards me. “Ooh, what kind of bonuses do I give? Am I a weapon? Do you get spells from me?”

I palm her shell with one hand and open my Class Card with the other. “You give me plus one to any stat I want.”

“...And?”

“That’s it.” I say with a shrug. “For now at least. It says I’ll get more stuff from you as we advance in your quest.”

“They’re weakening me? Wow. They must be really scared of my power.” Pearl shakes her head. “So what stat are you choosing? Mind and Body are pretty good for everyone, but–ooh, are you a magic class? I used to know a bunch of spells, but I don’t have access to them since I lost everything. B-but I still have the one I promised you!”

The screen flickers once when I bring Pearl close to it. Without me having to say anything at all, an image of her shell appears overlaid on top of the shark-dog’s corpse. I try to move it to an empty square with a flick of my finger, but after she passes over the other white-bordered square, her image stops moving completely.

I turn my head a little with a frown. “Pearl, how much do you know about all this ‘Class’ and system stuff?”

“A whole lot! I had to study it to fight it, after all.” She says with pride. “Like how it was–”

A piercing tone cuts through her voice. I grimace and almost drop her when I raise my hands to my ears, but no matter what I do, I can’t make the noise stop. It drones on and on for what feels like minutes, until it just… stops.

Mind stat far too low for that information.

Do not attempt to learn it again.

You have been warned.

“Shelby? Are you okay?” Pearl asks with concern. “You’re shaking. Was it something I said?”

“Technically, yeah.” I groan. “Don’t… don’t try to tell me anything about the system. I don’t have the Mind to hear what you just said.”

Pearl hums in thought, but doesn’t say anything else. I take it to mean that she understands, but there’s also a little… something in her voice. Hopefully it’s not malicious, or else I just gave her a way to incapacitate me whenever she wants. Just by freaking speaking.

It’s not a pleasant thought, so I try not to linger on it too long. I move the shark-dog’s corpse out of the white-bordered square and place the image of Pearl in that specific square, and this time, it takes instantly. A brand new popup obscures my vision in a flash of gold.

Select the stat you would like to be boosted.

Body / Mind / Soul / Fate

I press ‘Fate’ without a second thought. The text glows gold as the other three stats fade away, then disappears completely a moment later. I look down at my hands, trying to see some kind of actual change. If there is one, I can’t see it.

“You chose Fate?” Pearl says incredulously. “That’s… the one stat that won’t help you fight the machine. You must be really confident in your skills!”

“Nope. Just fully aware that one stat point won’t be enough to make a huge change.” I say with a glance down at her shell. “Can you move on your own? Or do you want me to carry you in my backpack?”

“I can easily move on my own, but I have a better idea. A much cooler idea. Just give me a second to get ready.”

Pearl’s shell starts to vibrate. It starts off slow, like the rumble of a car with good suspension on a clean road, but ramps up as quickly as driving off the asphalt and onto the rough. I almost drop her a few times through the ordeal. Actually, to be more accurate, she almost vibrates out of my hand.

She swivels around so the opening of the shell points towards me. From within I see two pinpricks of colour, shining brightly and intelligently as they grow closer and closer to the open air. A mass of black dotted with tiny bits of every colour imaginable emerges from the inside of the shell, oozes onto my arm, then picks itself up and shapes itself into… something.

“Hello!” Pearl waves an arm-like tendril of goo towards my face. “Now I can just attach myself to your hair, and you won’t even have to worry about me!”

Her ‘body’ looks slightly gelatinous–like a jellyfish–but she’s got recognizable facial features and two limbs poking out with her. I gently reach down and poke her back, which gets a little giggle out of her and a swat from an arm-tendril. She feels unfathomably solid compared to what she looks like.

If I have to compare her to anything, she’s like a wingless fairy mixed with a jellyfish and a JRPG slime. All stuck inside of a seashell and not really constrained to any single shape.

“What are you?”

“I’m a shellraiser, silly.” She giggles. “Oh, and don’t worry about me being heavy. I can alter my weight so you don’t even notice me. Upsy-daisy!”

In a blur of motion, Pearl pulls herself up my arm and onto my head. I barely catch a glimpse of the entire action, and before I know it, I feel her seeping into my hair and latching onto the side of my head. I reach up and feel her shell, locked in place right above my ear, and then she’s gone.

Well, not gone gone, since I can still feel her with my hand, but gone in the sense that she isn’t a burden at all. She weighs nothing, doesn’t pull on my hair, and doesn’t even give off a single sense of touch to my head. It’s honestly a little strange, since I was expecting to have to get used to something. Now I have to get used to not having anything to get used to.

Which is somehow harder to get used to than having something to get used to. Weird, I know.

“Okay, I’m all set!” She says, her voice somehow feeding directly into my mind instead of hitting my eardrums. “Do you want the spell now?”

“Yes.”

“Here you go, then!”

A multicoloured glow hits the side of my right eye before my system screen pops up with the notification.

Spell Learned: Shoreline Risemutation.

Convert something into its equivalent in; ghost quarters.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

“Sorry it’s not much, but it’s the only one I can give away right now.” Pearl apologizes as I read through the small description. “If you level it up a bunch, I promise it gets really powerful.”

Honestly, I think it’s pretty damn powerful right now. As long as it works the way I want it to. But I’m not willing to spare a single Worth until I know how to actually get more of it, so the spell stays on the ‘test it out later’ list for now.

“Quick question; can you see my screen here?”

“Yep.”

“Good to know.”

I close my Class Card and send it away. That’s one thing done here–and another that I haven’t really made any progress on. The monster–no, the shellraiser construct–is still out there somewhere. I know a little more about it thanks to Pearl, but it’s still nowhere near enough to actually imagine fighting it. Then I’ve got Coinbound Shield to play around with, Projectile to try and evolve, and a rotting corpse that I need to sell.

Okay, actually looking at it now, it doesn’t seem like I’ve made any headway at all. Just the opposite–I’ve actually increased my load of unknowns. With that pleasant thought, I set to exploring the rest of the destroyed trading post for any other clues. Most of it’s just wood, shell bits, and tar-like black substance. The rare other thing looks like it’s just some kind of merchandise that got destroyed instead of sold.

…Actually, now that I think of it, if that thing was a shellraiser construct, then it would probably leave behind destruction that looked just like this. Shell chunks and all.

“Pearl, what are your automatons made of?”

“Constructs. They’re constructs, not automatons.” She corrects me with a little ‘tut’ in her voice. “They’re made of glass, shells, and everdriftwood. And magic, obviously. It looks like one of them ran havoc through this place, too.”

No piercing shriek for that information. That’s a good sign.

“Could one of them have gone rogue and turned you into a quest item?”

She thinks for a second, then shakes her head. Or… gives off the sensation that she’s shaking her head. This whole ‘directly into my mind’ thing is weird.

“Definitely not. They don’t have a mind of their own, but someone could have ordered it to do this. That person could’ve turned me into a quest item, but… I don’t know. That seems like the kind of thing you’d have to be super powerful to do.”

“Agreed. Even if I barely know anything about the system, I know it’s barely giving me anything to work with.” I sigh as I pull up another batch of ruined lumber. Nothing of note under this pile, either. “Say I needed to get information on the machine, but I can’t get it from you. And there wasn’t another tunnel to go down other than this one. You have any idea where I should go from here?”

Pearl shifts herself a little as a shimmering black stain leaks onto the world around me. It trails along the ground towards a cluster of rubble, then disappears in a flash.

“Oh, I guess I can’t do that anymore. Did you see the path?”

I nod slowly. “I did. How did you do that?”

“You probably don’t want to know.” She giggles. “That’s about all I can do with it right now, though. I used to be able to make them super long–and long lasting, too. But that’s sealed away with everything else.”

“If you say so.” I say as I start to follow the path. Even if I’d only seen it for a second, it was seared into my mind like a less painful brand–warm and itchy and permanently there. It leads me to the largest pile of rubble, with planks that actually look like they’re in good shape, and far more miscellaneous things than the others.

I sift through the rubble, initially throwing all the wood aside. After five minutes of same-old same-old, flashes of yellow-orange catch my eye through the rubble. I instantly shift my priorities to whatever my Fate stat’s trying to highlight, moving even faster as I work through the ruins.

A massive chunk of wood that looked like it hadn’t been turned into planks at all falls to the side, revealing below it a row of… twigs? They look just like driftwood, too, but now that the yellow-orange fades away I can see a slight sky blue shimmer around them. Almost like a tiny forcefield. It emanates from the pots they’re planted in, which look like they’re made of the same material as Pearl’s shell.

“Wow! I can’t believe any saplings survived!” Pearl says as I pick one of them up. “You should take them with you. Everdriftwood is great for making… well, almost anything!”

Everdriftwood, huh? Sounds magical. Which probably also means valuable.

“Sounds good to me. I’ve got some free inventory space thanks to how expensive you were.”

No notifications or quests pop up when I send the first sapling into an open inventory space. Both the pot and the tiny tree go into the same slot, which is a relief, but that relief is short-lived. Each of them takes up a slot on its own, and there’s a total of eight of them that aren’t destroyed or overtaken by dried black tar leaking from one shell or another.

“...Crap.” I mutter, slightly censoring myself for Pearl’s sake. “I’ve got one space reserved for you, one for the shark-dog, and two for the leftover ghost quarters. And I don’t feel like leaving six of these things behind.”

Pearl tilts her head to the side. “You’ve got your backpack. Just put them in there.”

“Yes. And if we run into that machine again, I’ll accidentally destroy all eight of them trying to keep myself alive.”

“No, you won’t.” Pearl confidently assures me, but seems to see my hesitance “If you’re that worried about it, throw away the shark-dog and some ghost quarters. Or… buy another inventory space. You can do that with your Class Card, right?”

“Not with sixteen Worth, I can’t.” I sigh as I swing my backpack around and start filling it with saplings. At least they’re only the size of my fists put together, or else I wouldn’t have room.

I heave it over my shoulders once again, it’s new weight throwing me off ever so slightly. I adjust it a dozen times in a few seconds, then give up with a sigh of resignation to carrying my newfound burden. A quick look around confirms no more obvious Fate outlines, and I return to my initial path.

It leads me a few more feet into the rubble, then stops. A massive pile of wood, seemingly glued together with black tar, blocks me from going any further. I reach down and try to pry a splintered board free from the mass, but a gasp from Pearl stops me dead in my tracks. And a massive shudder from the pile sets me furiously backpedaling.

“Pearl?! What’s happening?!”

“Um, a monster? I think?” She squeaks apologetically. “I guess all the dead people sort of… um… fused into a mass of hatred?”

The wood shudders and creaks as it rises around a mass of black tar-like sludge. Chunks of shell cling to the mass like shards of glass stuck in a used mattress, slurping in and out as the thing rises to its full height. It takes most of the rubble with it, cleaning a section of the ground so thoroughly that it’s almost impressive.

Except for, you know, the fact that it’s a monster made of dead shellraisers. I snap over to one of the busted shells I’d seen a second ago, half expecting it to have risen along with the main thing. Trembling black residue breathes along with the main mass, but for now, it doesn’t look like it's going to stand up and join the fight. None of the others do, either, but that can change at a moment’s notice.

Wood swirls through the thing like flotsam in a whirlpool. It bobs in and out of the tar, surfacing every now and again coated in a thin sheen of magic, then begins to knit together. Slowly but surely, the thing builds itself armor made of broken driftwood.

“How do I fight this thing, Pearl?”

“Me? What are you asking me for?!”

“It’s made up of your dead people, not mine!”

“Well, I’m sorry, but this isn’t an everyday occurrence for me! Maybe you can dodge it to get to the tunnel I was trying to lead you towards!”

Tunnel? I narrow my eyes and look past the monster, and wouldn’t you know it, there’s a three foot wide opening right behind the thing. A gurgle from the wood-clad thing reminds me that I’m on a timer here, and that my window to make a decision’s horrifically short.

I grit my teeth and summon a quartet of empowered ghost quarters. “I’m not fast enough. And I’m not risking my life until I know if that thing’s powering up or if it’s waiting for me to make a move.”

Pearl huffs and crosses her arms. “Don’t blame me if you lose your opportunity to run.”

“Wouldn’t even think of it, my strange little friend.”

Projectile and Shield each flow into two coins. Projectile moves just as easily as before, but something about shield catches on the edge of my understanding and pulls like a hangnail. What I’d easily done many times before was now like pulling teeth.

The monster’s wooden armor clicks together, fully coating it in a glistening driftwood shell. It’s taken on a vaguely humanoid shape, with an oval torso that’s wider at the top than the bottom, and two long legs that narrow to points no wider than a quarter at the bottom. Both of its arms are thick flails, with three ‘fingers’ on each positioned like triangular clamps. And instead of a head, all of the shell pieces come together to create a moving ‘eye’ on its chest.

An eye that locks onto me with absolutely no intelligence behind it.

Only cold, unselective hatred.