I wait impatiently for Fleur’s salt-wrapped ‘present’ to fully reveal itself. The safe’s about what I expected; as tall as me, wide as half my wingspan, and with a cartoonishly huge spinning wheel plastered on it. There’s no obvious place to input a code, or turn a key, or… use the things we found underneath the symbols our client left us.

“How are we supposed to open this?” I mutter as I walk around the safe. “Actually, how’s anyone supposed to open this?”

Pearl’s awareness creeps into my own. I feel it poking and prodding at the safe, like a thousand hands carefully pressing against every surface of the metal, but I don’t feel anything like success.

“Wow. This is really weird.” Pearl huffs adorably. “It’s not that there isn’t a… dial, or something, but there’s literally no openings at all. No hinges, no welds, not even a microscopic little crack where even air can’t get through.”

“The entire thing’s one solid piece of metal?”

She nods.

That’s… not what I was expecting. I quickly take out all the things we gathered from behind the symbols, and stare at what really looks like a strange writing set in my hands. If there was a scanner or something, I could use these to make a… special ticket to unlock the safe. Or… uh…

Honestly, that’s about the only thing I can come up with. I’ve got a stylus, a ticket, some ink, and a stone. As long as I actually have to use all four of them for the same purpose, then I’m pretty damn sure my imagination’s already done all the work there is.

“Maybe I can just… ignore all this?” I place a hand on the safe and try to connect a relocation coin to it. A blaring warning telling me that I don’t own the thing kills that hope. “Damn system and its restrictions. Pearl, you got any ideas?”

“Um… maybe try touching all the things to the safe? Just in case they do something weird. It, um, couldn’t hurt, right?”

“Probably not, yeah.”

I take the ticket between two fingers and press it to the safe. There’s absolutely no reaction. Then I go to the stylus, followed by the ink. Neither the bottle or the stylus do anything, so I open the ink and carefully dip the tip of the stylus into it. It hisses, like a hot pot under cold water, and thin fumes waft up from the glass. I lean back just in case and press the ink-coated stylus to the metal.

Nothing.

Which leaves nothing but the stone. I close the bottle and flick the stylus off to the right to clean it, then push the stone against the safe. Before I can get close enough to touch it, the stone rips clean out of my fingers and thunks against the metal. Like a magnet. Except… I’m pretty damn sure it touched metal before.

“Pearl… is this metal weird?” I ask slowly.

“I think it is.” She confirms just as slowly. “Because that stone isn’t magnetic at all. There was a really tiny flash of magic when it happened, but even I barely saw it. No way you did. …Um, I didn’t mean it to sound like that.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Even if I was hurt by her choice of words, I’m way too focused on the safe to bother caring. The stone snaps to the metal. Which leaves me with ink, a stylus, and a ticket. Like the safe is screaming at me to write the right thing and press it against the stone. But… what the hell am I supposed to write?

“Five, two, three, six, four, eight.”

I frown at Pearl’s random listing of numbers. They seem… really familiar, for some reason. “Excuse me?”

“Five, two, three, six, four, eight. Maybe not in that order, but… yeah.” She gestures at the things in my hands. “Those are all the weird numbers that were in the symbols.”

I blink in surprise. It takes a second for me to wrack my brain to get at those memories, but yeah–there they are, plain as day. A five legged snake with two tongues, a goat with three wings and six eyes, a cross made out of four old-timey keys, and a skull with an eight sided angular pattern on its forehead. 5,2,3,6,4,8. Now that sounds like a code to me.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

“Good call, Pearl.” I grin and dip the stylus in the ink. “Let’s hope it works.”

After quickly scribbling the numbers onto the ticket, I press it against the stone stuck against the safe. The ink crackles and fizzes when sandwiched between the frozen ticket and the stone, loud enough that I almost flinch away in surprise. Then the safe clicked. Loudly. Once, twice, three more times in quick succession, and then one final time.

The ticket in my hand crumbles to dust. Half of the ink evaporates, and the stylus splinters into a thousand pieces. As the stone on the metal, too, starts to crack and fall away, I watch as something underneath it is revealed. A very small hole–just big enough for a Class Card to fit into.

I stare at it for a few seconds. No way in hell am I risking my Class Card to something this shady. But now that there’s a little opening, Pearl should be able to see inside.

“Pearl.”

She nods and leans forward. “On it. There’s a complex scanner in here, probably for Class Cards, and it’s connected to a motherboard inside the metal. If you can get a coin in there just right, and destroy the entire system, you should be able to force it to open.”

“What if it just destroys everything, and now we’ve got no idea how to get in there?”

“Then I can squeeze in, grab a bunch of Class Coins, and you can relocate me back out.”

I raise an eyebrow as Pearl sighs.

“Or I can just do that right now and not risk anything. You don’t have to say it.”

She squeezes out of her shell for the first time in what feels like forever, smiles warmly at me, and hops down my arm. When she reaches the safe she doesn’t bother stopping, and simply squishes into the slot in a way only a slime-like creature can. Quiet little grunts of effort grow distant as she works her way in, and then they pause.

“Gambler, you–”

I press a relocation coin to the slot. “I know I forgot.”

She giggles, and I feel the coin connect to her. Then she goes right back to crawling through the safe, her awareness leading her towards our treasure trove of insanely valuable goodies. The client only wants two, but hey… this place is going to hell in a few hours anyway, so the rest of them would just be lost.

I’ll find way better uses for them.

“Okay, I found them!” Pearl’s voice echoes from inside the safe. “But it’s… weird in here. There’s only five coins, and the rest of the stuff is just gemstones and paperwork. Do you want that, too?”

“Clean it out.”

“Okay! I’m ready!”

I take a half step back, press my arms together to make a bed, and let the relocation coin roll down between them. When it reaches the middle of my forearms I activate the spell. It hurts like hell. After a moment, Pearl appears in my arms with five Class Coins floating in her body.

And nothing else.

“Oh, right, the restrictions.” She laughs awkwardly and shifts her body, stacking the coins and placing them in my left hand. “Good thing I copied all the documents in there. Too bad about the gemstones, though.”

“How’d you…”

Pearl pats her stomach proudly. “I can read with all my body, not just my eyes. That’s why we put almost everything on glass–easier to feel the tiny scratches in it than ink. But I’m really good at reading. Want to hear what everything said?”

I quietly stare at the Class Coins during all of Pearl’s explanation. The defender coin is instantly familiar, and one has a wide-open eye that’s probably the psychic. But I can’t make heads or tails of the other three. Something’s… wrong with them. One of them has a hole in the middle, another looks like someone snipped a chunk off it with garden shears, and the third is bend in half at a ninety degree angle.

And none of them have etchings on either side. They’re completely and utterly blank.

Class Coin: —.

Primary Stats: —.

Ownership Status: —.

This Class Coin has been tampered with.

All abilities removed.

“You can tamper with Class Coins?”

Pearl nudges me with a tiny hand. “You already did that.”

“Well… yeah… but I did it with a skill. This looks like someone destroyed these with brute force. Is that possible?”

“Nope.”

…Then how the hell did it happen? I stuff the rest of the supplies and the Class Coins into my pack, then look out over the flow of salt and grease. There isn’t really a huge difference between destroying a Class Coin and squirreling it away, so there’s no way that was the purpose of whoever did this. It’s gotta be something else.

The thought of altering a coin to be a different class briefly crosses my mind. This could be research on that. Definitely. And with the documents Pearl has in her mind, hopefully we’ll shed some light on the purpose of the destroyed coins.

But that can wait two hours. The krarig can’t.