Kafrim was dead. He was sure of it. Everything was dark, and cold, and quiet. And, he was being pushed hard by something, against something hard.

Typical, he thought. All these afterlives they talk about, and his turned out to be caught between a rock and a hard place, forever.

He shuddered at the thought. That sounded too boring, and too stupid. And - hey, he’d shuddered. So he still had his body.

He tried to sit up. It didn’t work at all, first - he couldn’t move. So he pushed hard, with all his might, and suddenly found himself launched into the air and turning over backwards, until he slammed back into the ground. This time on his back.

It was an improvement, he decided, as he stared up at the yellow sky. Not being dead, and being able to see. Well. He tried to sit up again, but his body felt heavy and leaden and he couldn’t move.

This wasn’t the normal post-shift lethargy. He didn’t feel like he’d been hit by a truck - he felt like he’d been hit by a caravan of steamrollers, one after another, before they all turned back to run him over again. He felt heavy and beaten, and... sticky.

This was stupid, he thought. With a huge effort, he managed to push himself to a sitting position, without launching himself in the air. He looked down at his body. It looked okay. It just felt very, very heavy.

He looked around, but he didn’t see the cloak. His heart sank, but he refused to listen to it. He must have gotten it. He had shifted at exactly the right moment, he was sure of it. So where was it? It should be hanging off his shoulders like it had on the Hollow God, billowing out with its glittering star-scape...

Kafrim started, or tried to, when the cloak suddenly did just that. It appeared from nowhere - one second there was nothing, the next it hung from his shoulders, rippling around him as he moved. It looked just like it should.

He began to laugh, quietly at first and then more and more raucously, as he realized he’d done it. He’d stolen the cloak from the Hollow God, and it was working exactly as the Professor had guessed. It wasn’t the Professor’s fault that Kafrim hadn’t thought it all through.

He stretched out his arms and imagined himself wrapped in dancing flames, and laughed as the cloak morphed, instantly. Too bad nobody could see him, this had to look spectacular. They would see him soon, though.

He itched to shift somewhere else and do something, to try it out, but even he realized he probably needed to test it out a bit first. The Professor had said a lot about the cloak and about what Kafrim could expect, but most of that could wait. There were only three really important things. Kafrim looked around to find a large rock or something else that he couldn’t see around, so he could try the cloak properly.

There wasn’t anything, of course - he’d chosen his retreat world with care, so there would be no risk of crashing into anything. No matter, he shrugged, he’d just have to go somewhere else.

If, that was, he could manage simply to stand up. The thing was heavy.

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An hour later, he was getting the hang of it. He was in something called the badlands of Dakota, in a cartoon world. He didn’t really like cartoon worlds, since they made him look stupid and they were usually even sillier than books or games. It had been the first thing to come to mind when he tried to think of a good labyrinthine place, and so here he was.

The cloak was ridiculously easy to use, for something so powerful. All he really had to do was imagine what he wanted to, in something like the same way he did his shift-out twist. Except the cloak twisted space-time directly.

The first thing he’d figured out was how to reduce the crushing weight of the thing. That was just another space-time twist, of course, and after a couple of tries, which sent him a couple of meters into the air, he had a good sense of how it worked. He made a mental note of that – did that mean he could fly now? That could come in handy too at some point.

He’d found a quiet place out of the way of the main action, just at the edge of the cartoonist’s imagination. The place was in two levels, with big mushroom-like rocks with flat tops rising out of a flat, sandy landscape. All he needed was the rocks, and they’d done their job.

It was good he’d practiced, he thought, since the first time he tried to step through a portal he nearly sliced his head off. It was easy enough to bend space and make an opening to look through, and he thought he’d figured out how to make it one-way.

That was hard to tell without someone else to verify it, but he’d made a space-time window looking at a rock to his right, and thrown pebbles until one of them bounced on the rock, and then bounced on the window.

If he made it slightly different, the pebble went straight through. That was the second thing he wanted, and he quickly figured out how to make it small or large as needed. It didn’t even take much effort. It did take some effort to keep it from wobbling at the edges, and that was where he nearly killed himself.

He’d made a portal to step around to the other side of the rock, and just as he took the step, the whole thing wobbled badly and shrunk at the top. He ducked, but felt it graze his head. He pulled his hand up in automatic instinct, and then stared at his glove. The top of the fingers of the glove had been sliced clean off.

Some more experimentation established that the edges of the portal were razor-sharp, or worse - they cut a pebble in two without even slowing it down. The Professor hadn’t mentioned that... but Kafrim decided not to hold it against him. That’s what tests were for - and that was also why tests were better done live and in game worlds, where you could respawn if you managed to get yourself killed.

It wouldn’t do to pull off a stunt like this and then get yourself permanently killed in a forgotten corner of a forgotten world five minutes later. No, if Kafrim were to get himself killed it would be in a more spectacular fashion, and while doing something interesting.

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

He looked around and decided he’d spent enough time here. Time to try it out for real. He smiled as he closed his eyes and shifted out.

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He opened his eyes right where he’d planned, in one corner of a square. This was Terenze, a vaguely twentieth-century Italian-ish city in an assassin-themed game. He’d played the game through - it was fun and pretty challenging. It even had an impossible task, which wasn’t that common in games. At least, he thought it was impossible. He’d never succeeded, even after he’d started building his time skills. But now, he had the Hollow God’s cloak.

Kafrim shifted up and began jogging along the southern boulevard, towards baron Mancini’s villa. It didn’t take him long, even lightly shifted. The game was more focused on game play than realism, so the distances weren’t too great. Soon enough, he stood inside a large shrub just outside the fence.

This was the obvious hideout, but he’d never been discovered here. He would just have to hope no actual player showed up.

Right. He’d been inside the villa twice, and managed to search most of the first floor and basement before getting caught. There had been no sign of the necklace, and so it had to be on the second floor. Unless it was hidden in the walls or something. That wouldn’t help the baron this time.

Kafrim whistled to himself as he reached out and opened a window into the second floor of the villa. As he’d found in the cartoon badlands, it was trivial to open, but not trivial to make sense of the weird slithering feeling as he searched for where to open it.

He would have to talk to the Professor about that, and about the icky sticky feeling all over his body. It was probably normal. Probably. The Professor had warned him that the cloak would probably feel like a second skin. Maybe this was what his own skin felt like on the inside too, except he was used to it and didn’t feel the wet stickiness.

Anyway. Back to work. He opened a small window, and chortled as he looked straight into the main hallway down the middle of the villa. Somebody turned a corner at the far end and disappeared from view. Good, good. All clear. He opened a portal rather than a window, and stepped into the hallway.

How convenient, he thought, as he moved down the hallway and opened windows into the different rooms. This would make his life ever so much easier. He moved through the rooms at leisure, but found nothing interesting except for a maid dusting paintings in one room and another maid collecting lingerie from the floor in what looked like a large bedroom.

He shook his head at that, and realized he might very well happen to look into somebody’s secret meeting with their lover, if he did this at the wrong time. Then he laughed, as he realized he could probably charge quite a lot of money for that. Good to know, if the thievery stopped paying.

But no necklace. He’d expected that. The baron wouldn’t keep it right out in the open, but he wouldn’t keep it hidden in some completely inaccessible location. In fact, he would probably keep it somewhere very easily accessible... such as near where he took his lovers and mistresses.

Kafrim checked back in the bedroom. The maid was still there, and he grunted in annoyance. And then laughed, again, as he remembered he wasn’t there and didn’t have to stay hidden from her.

He scanned around the room, and saw the huge painting hanging on the wall opposite the bed. Aha, he thought. That’s where he keeps it. He moved his window closer, and saw the carefully hidden hinges on one end of the painting.

Careful now, he thought - the windows were portals too, and he didn’t want to slice a big hole in the painting. He could sense it easily enough, with the slither-sense, and could sense the empty space behind it. And then - yes. He opened a window, and another, and saw the jewelry holders mounted on the wall inside the hidden space. And there it was. The diamond necklace.

Kafrim had seen it in the game, of course, when the baroness rode past him right in the beginning of the game, wearing it. It was a twirling gold chain with a very large, very shiny diamond on it.

It would be worth a fortune, in this and other worlds, but he had another use in mind for it.

The maid was still busy, but he thought he could do it without alerting her. It should be possible to open just a small portal, right behind the painting...

The space was small, with just a few centimeters between the painting and the necklace, but he took it slowly and practiced in front of the armband mounted next to the necklace. Then he opened the real portal... and reached in and simply lifted the necklace from its holder.

He laughed out loud as he pulled it through the portal and closed it. So easy! So very easy! Almost too easy, for a competent master-thief as him. Still, he wouldn’t complain. He grinned from ear to ear as he put the necklace in a pocket, opened a portal, and stepped out of the villa, into the street next to the shrubbery.

He jumped backwards, instantly, as a huge horse-drawn carriage thundered past, exactly in front of him. It had very nearly run him over, and the horses’ hooves would have trampled him to death. His luck with vehicles had saved him again, and he laughed to himself as he closed his eyes and shifted out from right inside the shrubbery.

He opened his eyes again on the square in the faux-medieval town. It was dusk, again. One of the peculiarities of his shifting ability: he couldn’t really control it in either time or space, and usually ended up where and when the world wanted him to appear. Most often that was at the start of the game or book.

No matter. He was where he wanted to be, and began walking purposefully across the square, towards the Daft Craftsman.

As he’d hoped, Hannah was there, behind the bar.

“Kaf!” she shouted as she saw him. “Come here!” She was filling beer mugs, as usual, but she waved frantically.

He grinned at her as he sauntered over to the bar.

“Kaf,” she said, and gave him a worried smile. “Are you okay? Are you... you?”

“Yep,” he said. “I’m me, and I am officially the greatest thief in all the worlds.”

She squinted at him. “So - you did it?”

“Of course I did,” he said. “I said I would. Have I ever broken my word?”

She shook her head and murmured something inaudible. “The Hollow God was here,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. “Except he looked like you. I thought he was you,” she said, her face reddening slightly.

He frowned at her. “He was here? When?”

“A few hours ago. He came in looking like you and talking to people, and then all of a sudden he was - himself. Right in here. And really, really angry. He demanded to know where you were, and threatened to consume this whole world it we didn’t help him find you.”

“Okay,” Kafrim said slowly. That didn’t sound good. Although he’d sort of expected the Hollow God would be angry. If he survived - the Professor had said there was a real chance he wouldn’t. Kafrim hadn’t believed that. He’d thought the guy would respawn, but hopefully without his cloak. No such luck, apparently.

“Okay,” he said, more brightly. “I’ll deal with him later. Right now, I want to deal with you.”

“You want a beer?” she said. “That’s six shilling, mister.”

“Nope. I want to take you out for dinner,” he said, and grinned as she gave him an exasperated look.

“I’m working, Kaf.”

“Yeah yeah, but Belonde can do that, can’t she? It doesn’t look too busy anyway.” He looked around the pub, which was really rather quiet. “I know this place at the top of a skyscraper in Hamerza, where they have good seafood and where the owner owes me a favor.”

A big one, since he’d have been shipped away to a labor camp for dealings with the mafia if Kafrim hadn’t saved him. He had repaid some of it, but Kafrim reckoned one or two more six-course dinners could be wrought out of him.

“Belonde’s left. She took off with that guy she met. Said she wanted adventure.” Hannah kept one eye on the mugs, but glanced at him.

He shrugged. “I hear some girls are like that.”

She snorted. “And some boys. But…” She trailed off, watching the slowly filling mugs.

“Cath is over there, and Mari is in the back and will start working soon. They can run the place without me. If you really did it and aren’t just bragging again...” She finished pouring the mugs and looked at him, challenging him.

“I did,” he confirmed. “And I will prove it to you. If you will come with me.”

She looked at him for a long time, but when a slow smile spread across her face, he knew she was coming.