Z3ke (Original Poster)

  Everyone brace yourselves because I’m about to go off on a bit of a tangent here. I know Crush is gonna be pissed because this has nothing to do with combat, but bear with me for a minute.

  Ever since I got dropped into this world, whenever I try and talk to someone about magic it always goes one of two ways. Either I get incomprehensible nonsense like that one guy who taught Intro to Arcana at the MIZ, where the guy somehow managed to talk about magic for hours without explaining anything. Or the conversation inevitably drifts to the “vibes” that surround magic.

  Cole couldn’t explain how he turned slips of paper into traps that could shred echoes with razor-thin mana threads without detouring into stories about his academy days. Maribel, the healer from the caravan, wouldn’t shut up about “feeling the injuries that linger in the body, even after the healing’s done.” Even that one weather guy who was working with the caravan, keeping an eye on storms, kept going on about “feeling” the air currents and the pressure changes and whatever else. To me, it all sounded like mystical-hand waving.

  I’ve actually got some practice tuning all that stuff out. I dated this chick once who was really into all that astrology and tarot cards and cosmic alignment stuff. I mean…she was really into it. So I learned how to nod and smile and make all the right noises when people started talking about mystical shit. But it was never really my thing. The alignment of the planets never told me who I am, what I want, or how my day is going to go.

  Yet lately, I think I’m finally starting to understand what people mean when they talk about vibes. At least when it comes to magic. The funny thing is, it still doesn’t really apply to me.

  I don’t chuck fireballs or shoot lightning or throw heals at people. The only magic that I’ve got is a preternatural understanding of how to play the guitar. That’s it. It’s like a whole bunch of talent was dumped straight into my body.

  It works. It’s “useful” in the fact that I can now strum some chords of my favorite songs. But it feels weirdly mechanical, like I was just handed a bunch of talent and told congrats, you can busk for money now.

  But watching Jared navigate us through the city? That’s magic. He’ll crouch beside a building and place a hand flat against the stone and just…do magic. It’s like he’s listening to something that’s muted and just out of reach. He gets a sense for a place. He knows when a path is going to dead-end, when a bridge is about to collapse, or when there’s danger sitting quietly inside a building that we’re about to pass.

  He tried explaining it to me once. He talked about pressure and flow and how the city has its own rhythm and its own emotional geography. But like with most every other magical explanation that I’ve gotten in this world, it all went over my head. I smiled and nodded and then made a mental note to ask you all what the hell he was talking about.

  Then I remembered this one night of bartending. It was the only time I ever truly lost my shit on a customer. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve been pissed before and I’ve yelled at people. Anyone who’s ever worked behind a bar has customers that they absolutely fucking despise. For me, it’s the finger-snappers; the assholes who snap their fingers like I’m their servant and they’re trying to get my attention. I fucking hate them with the passion of a thousand suns.

  Normally, there’s subtle ways to punish a customer like that. You give them slower service or you take care of everyone around them without paying attention to them. You give them shallower pours or take a touch longer making their drink. And somehow, they always know you’re fucking with them, even when they can’t prove it.

  But this one night was a little different. El Pedro’s is a neighborhood dive bar, which means we’ve got a certain clientele. All bars cater to a specific group, and for us it was the locals and the regulars and the familiar faces. We weren’t the kind of bar where big groups came in to start their night.

  I remember this large group walk in one day, and I was getting some weird ass vibes from them. There were too many of them and they had too much energy and the edges about them were too sharp. I knew something bad was going to happen with them. It wasn’t due to any logic or reason or anything they said. It was just…in the air.

  The other bartenders felt it too. You could see it in the looks we all exchanged. Keep an eye on them. No one had to say it out loud.

  I immediately went into damage control. I gave them fast service and shot them some friendly smiles and got their drinks quickly to keep them happy and just hoped to move them along before the whole night went to shit. For a while, it worked. One by one, the group filtered out and went about their night. But there was one lady left.

  She was an absolute nightmare of a person. She was a human papercut, just endlessly fucking annoying. Before I was able to get her out of the bar she started screaming at one of our regulars and threatening to call the cops on some of the locals who hadn’t done a damn thing. She was looking for a fight and was determined to be a shithead. Eventually I had to take her drink away, point her to the door, and let the bouncers handle the rest.

  The whole night had played out exactly the way that initial feeling had warned me it would. At the time, I chalked it up to experience. Years behind a bar teaches you how to read people. You get a subconscious understanding of their posture and their tone and the way that emotions can ripple through a room. You learn to sense when shits about to go sideways.

  Watching Jared read the city, I finally get it. That’s what the vibes are. It’s not some mysticism or cosmic nonsense. It’s just…awareness. It’s a feeling. It’s a quiet sense that tells you this is bad, or you’re safe here. Where I felt the tension in a crowd of drinkers, Jared feels it in the stone and buildings and streets. Where I sensed trouble brewing among a group of drunks, he senses it lurking down back alleyways and behind closed doors.

  I don’t know if any of this makes sense, and I’m sure some of you are gonna complain and say that I turned into Cole and went off on a weird tangent here. But I wanted to give you a glimpse into how Jared navigates through the city…at least how it looks from my end.

  After we emerged from the Halcyon Records Annex, Jared guided us through the rest of the Crushed Skirt. I told him that we needed to head to the Anchor Guild, and he nodded once and then led the way.

  He stayed a few steps ahead of us and would occasionally tilt his head to listen to the city, or he’d press a hand against a stone wall as we passed. Every now and then he’d point out something without breaking stride. They were these small anchor symbols painted on the sides of buildings with red paint. They were stenciled sometimes and sketched other times.

  I wondered what they were until Milicent volunteered the answer.

  “Safe approaches,” she said. “The Anchor Guild uses them to mark stable ground and structures that aren’t in any danger of failing. They’ve got members who scour the city and refresh the markings every now and then.”

  Once I knew what to look for, I started seeing them everywhere. The deeper we went into the city, past crumbling buildings and streets that dipped and twisted where the ground had ruptured, the more anchors appeared. They were slathered on walls and chunks of exposed bedrocks and even on half-rusted traffic signs.

  To reach the Anchor Guild, we were forced to climb through the husk of an old, half-collapsed building. I didn’t really love that part. The floors were springy, which was an incredibly uncomfortable situation when you know you’re walking over solid rock and it’s not supposed to have that kind of give.

  Wind whipped through the broken walls and empty windows, making the whole building groan and sway. If I hadn’t already started to trust Jared’s delving instincts, I would have noped out of there in a heartbeat. It was his instincts and the thick steel cables that were attached to various support beams in the building. They crisscrossed at odd angles and kept the entire structure from tipping over and crushing everything in sight.

  We climbed a few narrow staircases and then finally came to a long rope bridge that was stretched out over a massive drop. The bridge was made of thick ropes and reinforced planks and the whole thing swayed to the point that I wanted to just give up on the whole expedition and head back to The MIZ. I crossed it carefully, my eyes locked on Jared’s back as he led the way.

  On the other side of the rope bridge was the Anchor Guild. The moment I saw I had another of those rare realizations that this world, despite everything in it trying to kill me, still had some moments of beauty to it.

  The Anchor Guild had taken over an old office building and reinforced the hell out of it. Thick cables vanished into the bedrock, holding the structure in a permanent and careful embrace. There were porches and railings and staggered landings all around the exterior, and every single one of them was filled with scavenger teams. I saw people leaning against the railings or seated in loose circles as they ate meals and talked and relaxed.

  Lanterns were everywhere, casting a soft, warm glow over the place. It was all…so calm and completely out of character from the post-apocalyptic nightmare that we’d just walked through. For a second it felt like we’d stumbled into some pocket of reality that had missed the memo about the end of the world.

  Inside the guild there was an old wooden desk smack dab in the center of what had once been a wide, open office floor. Everything else radiated out from it - lanterns that hung from the wall and a small bar that was set off to one side. There were a few tables scattered around the place with candles set in the middle of them. The desk itself was scarred and gouged and pitted so badly that I couldn’t imagine anyone being able to write anything on it without punching holes clear through the paper.

  A man was seated behind the desk and he looked up as we approached. He was middle-aged, with his hair pulled back in a tight knot and sleeves rolled up to show forearms that were ridiculously muscular and covered in old ink.

  “Welcome to the Anchor Guild,” he greeted. “You’re new, so I’ll-”

  His eyes slid past me and landed on Jared who’d fallen into step just behind me.

  “Well I’ll be damned,” the man said as he broke into a grin and stood up from behind the desk. “If it isn’t Jarebear.”

  “Nope,” said Jared immediately, giving the man a crooked smile. “Not my name.”

  “Oh come on,” the man laughed, stepping out from behind the desk and clapping Jared on the shoulder. “The boss gave you that name herself. You know she only nicknames the people she likes.”

  Jared actually harumphed at that which…what the hell? That’s actually a thing? The man glanced at me while still talking with Jared.

  “Friend of yours?”

  Jared nodded. “He’s got business.”

  “That so?” The man stepped back behind the desk and flashed me a grin. “You’ll have to excuse me. I haven’t seen Jarebear in months. He always heads out into the dark and comes back with enough loot to enjoy himself up in The MIZ for a while. Let me start over.

  He reached out and offered me a hand. “Name’s Rowan. Current floor manager for the Anchor Guild. I handle trade intake, map access, and dispute resolution for when people forget their manners. Just so we’re clear up front, the Anchor Guild acts as a neutral broker around these parts. We don’t take sides, we don’t care about grudges, and we never, ever lie about our maps.”

  “Zeke,” I said, reaching out and shaking his hand. “I’ve got some trade goods, and I’m looking for a map that’ll let us reach deeper into the Under-MIZ. Specifically, I need something that shows us the way to the Holdfast.”

  Rowan didn’t react right away. He simply leaned back and studied my face before flicking a glance towards Jared who didn’t say anything. He just gave the smallest possible nod.

  “Okay,” said Rowan slowly. “That’s not normal information we just hand out to people. You’d better have a lot to trade.”

  “Uh, I think I do,” I said and reached into my dimensional storage space.

  At first, I was worried that we wouldn’t have enough to get the full map. Mushroom and 7 had warned me that I’d probably need to buy the average Crushed Skirt map first and then use it to locate more caches that the forum knew about. But as I started pulling items out of my dimensional storage space and laying them out on the desk, Rowan’s eyes got wider and wider.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  There were old-world cases filled with tech, some tablets that were stamped with the Halcyon Records logo, and some vacuum-sealed boxes that Jared had assured me worth serious credits. Joining all that on the desk was a slim black box that hummed faintly and that I thought was some kind of power charger.

  Everything that I laid out didn’t really feel like too much. I’d had to hold back Jared and Daryl’s cut of the loot as payment for the expedition. The deal that we’d made was that they’d get first salvage claims on the loot in the Crushed Skirt. I still had their stuff stored away. Looking down at the pile, I decided to add two more items. The first was a laminated access pass for the Halcyon building. It was probably completely useless. The second was a palm-sized recorder with a cracked screen. I set them both down next to the rest and just waited for Rowan to start assessing them.

  “Holy shit,” he muttered, letting out a low whistle. “You realize that most crews come in here with some shit metal and maybe, if they’re lucky, a few pieces of pre-Fracture scrap.”

  That’s when I realized I probably fucked up. I glanced around and noticed the other scavenger crews in the room watching us. There were a handful of sidelong glances that I didn’t exactly like the looks of.

  Jared might’ve been a known quantity at the Anchor Guild, but I sure as hell wasn’t. And from the outside, it probably looked like some new guy had walked in and casually dumped a fortune out onto the desk. People obviously had to be wondering who the hell I was and how I managed to pull so much loot out of my ass on my first delve into the Under-MIZ.

  Negotiations for all our loot took a while. Rowan eventually waved us off to the side, away from the main desk, and he called in some more Anchor Guild members. They all started scanning the loot and checking it with any information in the Anchor Guild records to try and get a baseline price for it all.

  Jared stayed quiet through the whole thing, his arms folded and his face saying that he’d done all this hundreds of times before. Daryl kept an eye on the surrounding scavenger crews, casually watching them and making note of the few that seemed a little too eager to see what we were selling. Milicent, meanwhile, kept shooting me glances, like she was trying to figure out who the hell I was.

  Eventually, Rowan turned away from the pile of loot and motioned for one of the Anchor Guild members to come over. The man stepped up, carrying a small black booklet in his hands. Rowan grabbed it and set it down on the desk between us.

  “For all this,” he said, motioning to the loot pile, “you get everything we’ve got on the Under-MIZ.”

  I frowned at that, realizing for the first time how much loot my team was able to scavenge up. “Everything?”

  “Every verified route. Every collapsed structure. Every safe descent we’ve managed to chart,” he said. He opened the book and started flipping through the pages, showing the highly detailed maps filled with symbols and warnings and small writings on the margins.

  “We’ve only fully charted the Crushed Skirt and part of the Flooded Neighborhoods. But,” he flipped a page and pointed to a few spots on the map there. “These access points will take you into the Flooded Neighborhoods. And here is a clean route straight to the Holdfast.”

  I stared at the booklet and the maps that had just landed into my lap. “That’s…more than I expected.”

  Rowan smiled at that. “So was your pile.”

  The map wasn’t the only thing he handed over. He added a small chunk of credits to the deal as well. It was enough that I felt like I could go back to The MIZ and live comfortably for a month or two.

  With everything settled, I gathered everyone up and moved us to a side table out of the way. It was small and bolted into the floor and surrounded by mismatched chairs that had obviously been scavenged from at least three different buildings. The table was off to the side and gave us some breathing room and, more importantly, a bit of distance from the curious glances that were still drifting our way.

  When we sat down, I reached into my storage space and handed Jared and Daryl their shares of the loot we’d pulled from the Annex. They each only took a few choice bits before asking me to store the rest, and then they headed back to Rowan and the Anchor Guild clerks to run their own negotiations.

  I also learned something from them. It turns out that the Anchor Guild generally doesn’t hand out a lot of physical credits. They maintained accounts with about half a dozen banks up in The MIZ. Whatever Jared and Daryl had earned from their loot would be written down and a line of credit would be opened up with those banks. That meant that neither of them had to walk around the Under-MIZ carrying a fortune and hope to not get knifed by the surrounding scavenger crews.

  While Jared and Daryl were off getting paid, Milicent kept me company at the table. I pulled out my Tech Slate and set the small booklet of maps next to it. Then I opened the forum and started writing down some of the information from the booklet and posting it.

  There were tons of routes and warnings and notes written down by the Anchor Guild, and I posted it all in the forum. Then I sent a quick message to 7Spirals and Mushroom, letting them know that I got the map but that I’d probably need a few more trade goods before hitting the Holdfast. I was tapped out, and if they expected me to trade for a new map in the Holdfast, I’d need something to give them.

  When I was finished I looked up and noticed Milicent leaning over me, looking at my Tech Slate.

  “Huh. Writing notes for a book or something?” she asked, sounding a little too casual.

  I paused. “Uh…what?”

  She nodded towards my Tech slate. “I’ve seen historians do that. They record notes and observations about their expeditions. The serious ones usually stick to pen and paper, though. No risk of losing everything if the Slate breaks down.”

  That set off some alarm bells in my head. Her question seemed harmless, but I could feel her probing. She was probably trying to figure out whether my Tech Slate held the glyph book that I’d bribed her with.

  I leaned back slightly in my chair and, without even really meaning to, my Persona skill slid into place over me. It was an odd feeling. It was kinda like being drunk. It gave me all the unearned confidence but without all the nausea and dizziness.

  “And what makes you think I’m a historian?” I asked lightly.

  She smiled. “Because I checked.”

  Even my Persona skill wasn’t enough to stop my eyebrows from raising at that.

  “I had my family look into you,” she continued, unfazed. “Turns out I wasn’t the only one curious. A man shows up in town with no class, then suddenly he’s out on an expedition with a junior researcher interested in pre-Fracture magitech. He comes back from that expedition changed and with a class. Then he disappears into the Library and somehow earns a History skill with no trouble at all. Most people never bother with that skill.

  Before I could respond, a waiter stopped by and set down two glasses of alcohol in front of us.

  “Compliments of the Anchor Guild,” she said with a smile before moving on.

  Milicent and I thanked her and sipped at our drinks. Whiskey. All the while, my mind was racing, trying to figure out how much I should tell this woman and how much I should lie about.

  Before I could say anything, Milicent continued with her earlier train of thought. “You know, when we first met I had you pegged as a novice adventurer. I could have sworn that this was the first expedition that you ran all on your lonesome…and that you were in a little over your head.”

  “That’s a fair assessment.” She glanced at me over the rim of her glass. “But wrong,” I added.

  I tried to keep my face neutral and not give anything away. A notification popped up in the corner of my vision but I ignored it.

  “I have recently picked up the History skill. You’re not wrong about me trying to become an amateur historian.”

  Milicent tilted her head slightly, listening and wondering how truthful I was about to be.

  “Cole carried this battered old notebook on the expedition. I remember him stopping in the middle of our march and scribbling notes and observations. I picked up the habit from him and just…modernized it a bit.” I gave a small shrug. “The Slate’s faster to type with and easier to organize. And if it breaks, I'm not losing anything important. Anything worth keeping gets backed up somewhere safe and then deleted off the Tech Slate to make room for other things.”

  I hoped that would be enough to steer her thoughts away from the book on glyphs and keep the idea that I was carrying it on my Tech Slate out of her mind. Stupidly, I was carrying the glyph book on my Tech Slate.

  “But as for being a novice adventurer, that’s where you’re wrong.”

  Her eyebrows rose and she leaned forward a bit. “Oh?”

  All sorts of lies started running through my head. I didn’t want to brag about the House of Seasons and I didn’t want to mention the Glens at all. The fact that she’d had her family digging into my past had me choosing every word carefully. I couldn’t tell what she already knew and what she didn’t.

  My mind scrambled for something believable, and for some reason it landed on a bunch of old movies. I couldn’t exactly tell her that I’d stolen the Declaration of Independence and that there’d been a treasure map on the back of it that led me to a Templar treasure horde. I knew if I tried to tell her that, her first question would be what the fuck is the Declaration of Independence?

  So I did the next best thing.

  “My first delve…yea, that was memorable.”

  She smiled faintly, clearly ready to humor me as she didn’t believe I had any experience whatsoever. “Memorable?”

  “Unforgettable. Picture it: an ancient ruin that was buried deep in the jungle. Just getting there was hell. We had to carve our way through thick vines that were everywhere. They snagged at our clothes and our packs and tried to trip us with every step we took. It felt almost like the jungle itself was trying to grab us and turn us around.”

  “There aren’t many jungles in the Deadlands,” she said flatly.

  Thankfully, Persona kicked in and I just smiled. “Oh, I never said this was in the Deadlands.”

  She huffed but waved for me to continue.

  “There were four of us. I hired two porters who knew the terrain and could carry the gear. But the second we got close to the temple and I turned my back? They bolted. Poof. Just ran and vanished into the trees.”

  I leaned forward, starting to warm to the story while trying not to think of Weird Al Yankovic for some reason.

  “The guide I’d hired…what was his name?” I actually wasn’t acting now. I was completely blanking on it. He played Doc Ock in the Spider-man movies. I snapped my fingers. “Oh. Alfred. Alfred Molina. He was nervous as hell as we approached the temple…and for good reason. You could practically smell the traps inside that place. Even the locals avoided it.”

  Her eyes sharpened. “Traps?”

  “Oh yea. The first trap was absolutely ingenious. If you touched the light creeping in from a gap in the walls, it would trigger a spear trap. I honestly have no clue how it worked, but it was terrifying. Then, after that was a pit trap. There was this massive gap in the floor with a bunch of sharpened stakes buried into the ground. Thankfully, I had a whip with me and I snagged it on a tree branch and used the whip to swing to safety.”

  She blinked at that. “You had a whip?”

  “Always be prepared,” I said solemnly, holding up three fingers. “After that was this room with pressure plates. If you stepped on the wrong spot, these poisoned darts came flying out of the wall. But once you bypassed all those traps and reached the center of the temple, what do you think we found?”

  She leaned in despite herself, obviously sucked into the story as created by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.

  “A golden monkey idol with a big smile carved into its face. It was exactly what I’d been searching for, and it was just sitting there right out in the open on a stone pedestal, like it wanted to be stolen.”

  She scoffed. “That was definitely a trap.”

  “Oh, without a question,” I agreed. “But it was a classic trap. The pedestal had this pressure plate built into it and hooked up to a counterweight system. As long as the idol stayed put, everything was fine. So, how do you think I managed to grab the idol?”

  She shrugged and I smiled and picked up my glass and drained it in one go just to milk the moment.

  “I had a bag of sand. I spent a good moment eyeballing the idol, then the bag, then the idol again. The bag was too heavy, I thought to myself. So I took a handful of sand out and tossed it aside. I still wasn’t sure, but at some point you’ve got to commit, right?”

  I mimed the motion with my hands. “Bag in one hand and the idol on the pedestal. And then I swapped them.”

  She held her breath.

  “It worked. The counterweight held. I smiled and turned around, feeling pretty proud of myself. Alfred was there, kneeling on the ground with this grin on his face, eager to share in the spoils of the expedition.”

  I paused.

  “Then everything started to go wrong. I heard it first, this faint grinding sound. I looked back at the pedestal and then down at the idol in my hands. The idol was much lighter than I expected. Way lighter. I’d misjudged the weight. I hadn’t taken out enough sand.”

  I had her now. I’d given way too many descriptions in the story for it all to have been fake. I mean, how could I accurately describe all the traps, or the golden idol, or come up with a random name like Alfred Molina. And I came up with that story so effortlessly. I didn’t stumble over anything. So it had to be true, right?

  “The temple started crumbling apart all around me. The ceiling cracked and stones started falling, threatening to crush me to death. I was forced to race back through the trap room with darts firing out from the wall, but I was thankfully able to race ahead of them. I managed to get out of the trap room, but then I reached the massive gap in the floor leading back to the entrance of the temple.

  “Alfred had already swung himself over the gap with the whip, but the branch snapped the second he landed. I skidded to a stop just in time to see him staring down at the whip in his hand.

  “‘Throw me the whip,’ I yelled at him. He looked from the whip up to me before saying ‘Toss me the idol.’”

  She winced, understanding what was about to happen. I just gave her a rueful smile and nodded.

  “In my defense, I was young and inexperienced. So, yea, I tossed him the idol.”

  "And he ran,” she said flatly.

  “Obviously. With the idol in his hands he gave me a wry smile and dropped the whip. ‘Adios, Zeke.’”

  I almost stumbled on the last word, close to saying Doctor Jones which would have forced me to come up with an entirely new lie on the spot.

  “By that point, the temple was crumbling down around me and the door leading to the front was closing. It was this massive slab of stone and it was inching shut. I knew that if I didn’t move now, that was it. I would have been sealed in that temple and stuck to rot there as a skeleton for the rest of my days.

  “I leapt for the gap and caught a tangle of thick vines growing out of the rock face, and managed to haul myself up just as the door slammed shut behind me.”

  “Did you manage to catch up with him?” she asked and I just smiled, happy that she was so sucked into the story that she’d stopped trying to question it.

  “Yea, but I didn’t really need to go far. Alfred forgot all about the spear trap near the entrance and stepped right into the light.” I mimed spears puncturing my throat and head. “I picked up the idol from where he dropped it and started making my way back to the entrance. But that’s when the final trap kicked in.

  “It was a boulder. It was massive…had to be at least fifteen feet tall, easily. It came rolling down this tunnel from up above me, threatening to crush me. I sprinted as fast as I could, knowing that this thing weighed hundreds of tons and could flatten me like a pancake if I wasn’t careful. So I just ran and didn’t look back. And I managed to burst out of the temple just in time. The doors slammed shut and stopped the boulder cold.”

  Milicent stared at me for a long moment, her drink forgotten in her hands as she tried searching my face to decide if I was telling the truth or if everything was pure bullshit. Finally, she shook her head.

  “That sounds almost too ridiculous to be true.”

  “All the best stories sound almost too ridiculous to be true,” I said easily. “But here’s the thing. The story is true, and the idol wasn’t the most valuable thing I walked away with that day.”

  “Experience,” she said, rolling her eyes as she got where I was headed to.

  “Yep. The porters ran the moment things got too dangerous. The guide I hired tried to stab me in the back for loot. So, yea, I earned the experience of all that. That’s why I’m always cautious about hiring people for my expeditions now. I always assume that someone’s going to panic, betray me, or disappear the second things go sideways.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Daryl and Jared start making their way over to our table, carrying their own complimentary drinks from the Anchor Guild.

  “And that’s why,” I explained as Daryl and Jared joined us, “I have contingency plans in place before every expedition. The way I see it, it’s a carrot and a stick situation. Carrot, everyone gets incredibly wealthy as long as I make it to where I’m trying to go. The stick comes out when I go missing. That’s when the contingencies pop up.”

  She studied me for a beat before nodding. “Patch. You’re talking about Patch.”

  I simply shrugged and then went back to sipping at my drink and she sighed. “You know what…I don’t care if that story was real or not.”

  “That’s good,” I said as I pulled my Tech Slate out of my dimensional storage space. “Because it really doesn’t matter. What matters is what comes next, and how we can earn even more money on our descent down into the Flooded Neighborhoods.”

  That perked up both Daryl and Jared and they smiled as they downed their drink. I opened up the forum and checked what 7Spirals and Mushroom had to say, and then started asking Jared about specific stops that we could make on our way through the city.

  While he spoke, I checked the two notifications that I’d earned while talking with Milicent.

  Persona - Rank 3

  You have learned to suppress visible signs of fear, pain, or hesitation. Your posture, expression, and body language present as controlled and intentional.

  Performance - Rank 1

  You have learned how to weave music, speech, and spectacle into a force that works for you.