I received, and this is rich, a new Achievement.

  Achievement: first sexual experience

  Someone got lucky, didn’t he? Well congratutions on your first. May it be the first of many.

  Reward: +1 Free Attribute rank and associated Token.

  Rather than spend that, I just grinned at it like a fool. It seemed like I would need a job before I knew what sort of attributes I should be specializing in… though it seemed like I’d already blown that load.

  The next few hours included mostly Regina telling me about her time here. It was difficult to map out this world, because things were constantly springing into being and shifting around. Luckily her Ranger skills and special abilities gave her an innate sense of direction, and an ability to survive out in the wilderness. She had only been an ‘employee’ of the company that also now employed me for a few months, and after her first month in the academy, she’d gotten her job, her skillset, and actual paid assignments: to ferry folks to and from the portal. She didn’t know why the portal didn’t open directly on the castle, but told me that the distance between portal and the stronghold had been growing. She shrugged as if it was normal for towns to just slide around the map.

  I had a lot to learn about this world, and although I really liked being around Regina, she wasn’t the person to teach me. She kept getting tangential, going off into the weeds about this or that Nakamamon she discovered out ranging during her academy times. A squid like creature that had the same kind of camoufge as cuttlefish and octopus but spread confusion instead of ink when it was threatened. A humanoid chain of water droplets and bubbles roaming the countryside, some ten or twelve feet tall.

  And the gods… she described a swarm of tiny lights, a thing like a mouse but with gaxies instead of eyes, and then a bnket that covered a good third of the sky some nights around twilight.

  “Speaking of which…” She grabbed onto my hand and massaged it a little, then squinted at it. “I thought there might be… yes, look.”

  I looked at where she was pointing, and saw something. A faint shape in the middle of my palm. The spiral petal shape of a rose. It wasn’t a tattoo, but rather a darkened series of lines beneath my skin.

  Concentrating on it brought the blue window back up.

  [Goddess of the Meadow] has judged you worthy, and bestowed the gift of [floral knowledge] onto you. [Goddess of the Meadow] felt your compassion and willingness to help, though you knew not the way. [Goddess of the Meadow] has bestowed upon you +1 Likability. You gain 1 Likability token.

  [Floral Knowledge]: You are a living encyclopedia for all flowers and the pnts they are attached to. You are able to identify them by sight, smell, touch, or taste. This knowledge includes poisons, medicines or herbs you might encounter.

  I blinked the message away, amazed. The Goddess of the Meadow just… gave me all this knowledge. I knew false goat’s beard. Poinsettia. Lic. It was like everything Sarah had been excited about when I was a kid all came flooding back to me, but way more. I could tell that types of sage and how differently they tasted. Plus, I knew… other flowers. Windwhispers and true grellets, and common numphties.

  It was so strange. Also, the word numphty sounded stupid and silly.

  From what I gathered, there were basically four types of jobs I might take up: ranging and guiding, like Regina, researching the Nakamamon and the gods and the magic and such, guarding and combat, or the job Mustache Face had: healing. There were probably more boring jobs out there, like bureaucracy and logistics, and I guess being a desk jockey would’ve been safe, but this pce… who would want to be stuck behind a desk when you could go out and watch mountains float away?

  “What are you going to do when you go back on R&R?” she asked.

  “Huh?”

  “You’re going to have three months’ worth of wages waiting for you… it’s way more money than I could’ve ever hoped for. I mean it’s not this pce, but we can basically do whatever we want.”

  I gave her a considering ‘hmm.’ I hadn’t thought about it at all, honestly. It was my first day here. And now I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to tell her about my family situation. My mom’s cancer, my sister’s impulsive behavior or her terrible taste in men would only prompt pity. I didn’t want that.

  Instead I let silence do its work. She was going back to earth soon, and she was geeked to get in some travel experience.

  “I’m going to see the water like they show you in the movies. Like the Seychelles or Fiji. I’m going to get my SCUBA certification and take underwater photos and basically forget that people exist. No internet, no social media, nothing at all except maybe a couple gsses of wine watching the sunset on the water.”

  I nodded. “That sounds lovely.”

  “I think this pce might break me on earth, though.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve seen a centipede flower nearly kill a guy, and I have a fox with flowers in its ears and tails. I don’t think anything on earth can compare to this.”

  “Yeah.”

  She snorted and looked off at the mushrooms big enough to be apartment buildings, and the mountains beyond. She had more in mind but didn’t want to share it with me. She’d already given me far more than I could reasonably expect. Practically the only thing she hadn’t given me was anal, and I wasn’t about to go asking after that, not when I’d just arrived here, just met her, just nearly died, and just lost my virginity.

  “I guess we’d better get back on track,” she said. “Time to start earning what they’re going to be paying you.”

  Oh! I smacked myself upside the head. I’d just been having sex and zy snuggle conversations while on the clock. Whoops.

  She tossed her bra and shirt out into the open air, and scrambled to make her way down the rge branches in the nude. I watched her go before following after. Getting down, although terrifying, wasn’t as hard as going up the tree. The window told me it was Easy Difficulty, and I could spend 1 Physicality Token for an automatic success, but I chanced doing the check without the requisite skill. It then told me I had scored a success, but barely. My legs still compined, but I was amazed to find they weren’t as bad as I remembered from on earth.

  I peered down at them; they didn’t appear to be any different. The surgery scars were still there, along with the pces where the bones had poked through. No gigantic swelling of muscle. Stick-thin legs, underdeveloped calf muscles, all the same.

  “Oh well,” I told them. “Maybe one day.”

  I paused to watch Regina slide the skirt up her legs and zip it up, then repce her bra and button her blouse back up. For some reason, it struck me as just as sexy as her being naked, possibly even more so. She noticed me watching and winked.

  “You’re just standing there in the buff, my guy,” she said, grinning. “I don’t think my poor puss can handle another round. I’m going to need some ice.”

  I quickly got into my boxers, then pulled on the rest of my clothes. By the time I was done, she had her stockings back on and adjusted. Tweedle Dee was also nuzzling her shoulder, and got some chin scritches just because. After all, he was a treat.

  “You’re a good boy, aren’t you Dee?”

  He yipped in response.

  “You love the Dee,” I told her, and she gave me a wicked grin.

  “I have another one I’m rather fond of,” she told me, and I chuckled.

  ~2~

  The castle grew a lot rger as we approached. It didn’t seem to make sense, being like a reflection in a pond. The bottom half was a perfect reflection of the top half, just upside down. It was the same way for the guard towers. Somehow it functioned, though it didn’t really go into my brain how it should. I kept expecting some of them to fall out onto the grass below.

  Eventually the castle approached, and I saw a smattering of smaller houses and buildings also floating, and also mirror upside down versions of themselves. Now it became clear that the castle was held down by a series of chains. The smaller buildings also. Some were mud and timber, others were stone, and still more were made of red and orange brick. The upside down parts and the chains were both difficult to handle.

  “How do people get inside?” I asked.

  “You’ll see,” she said, grinning. “Let the magic happen. Surprises aren’t all bad.”

  I found at least one answer before we got there: a magic carpet lifted off the ground with people on it, too far away to see clearly. It approached the upside down part of the castle, where a balcony would allow access to one of the very highest towers on the castle—in this case closest to the ground—and in an instant the rug flipped upside down. It nded, and the folks sitting on it, now upside down to me, stood and headed inside the castle.

  Another one involved a flying manta ray descending out of the sky. It swooped down in a rge arc that suddenly took them into the opposite gravitational pull once they reached a certain point. It was carrying some eight people, all seated comfortably, and there was room for more.

  There were others: another cloud bearing a person, a tiny tornado, and several more flying Nakamamon.

  “Holy heckabaloo,” he muttered.

  ~3~

  The guards from the nearest tower called down, and leapt down to meet them. Christopher thought they were going to nd on a cool giant dragonfly or something, but instead he just nded in a perfect superhero crouch. Two more guards nded at his sides a moment ter.

  These three were huge, built like trucks, and it took me longer than I cared to admit to realize that one of them was a woman. They wore spartan style helmets and carried spears, round metal shields, and had short swords at their backs.

  “Guns?” I asked.

  “They don’t work here,” she said, and didn’t eborate.

  To be fair, the spear was rife with magic, having a spark that ran down from the tip through a vein of what looked like marbling, to the base of where it was connected to the haft. The shield, too, was embedded with gems that seemed to sparkle in a variety of colors. These were red, purple and several shades of pink in between.

  “Let’s have your name and ID,” the guard said.

  “Ranger Regina Hampstead, sir,” she said, and handed him a packet of papers sealed with wax. “I’m here on a guide and escort mission.”

  The guard looked up at me. “I s’pose you don’t have any of the requisite paperwork.”

  I shrugged. “Just arrived a few hours ago, uh… what should I call you? Sir?” I wasn’t military. I hoped not to be, also.

  The guy raked my figure up and down, pausing at my legs. “Sure, kid. Sir is fine.”

  He won zero points with me. The good news is that I’d had tons of experience with these kinds of people ever since my legs got broken and I got out of the hospital. I shrugged it off, reserving the right to dislike Bke, and holding out judgement on the rest of the guards here.

  Regina saw this, and her face twisted with anger. “Excuse you?”

  The guard looked up from her papers, then back down at them.

  “Do I go take this up with command then?” she asked.

  He snorted. “Why would you do that?”

  “Christopher here is twenty years old. He’s not a kid, and we don’t do disrespect around here. How old are you again, Bke?”

  Bke’s demeanor grew instantly dark. “Look, Hampstead, you do the ranging, I do the guarding. Get off my back.” He swelled to even bigger than his already enormous form. This isn’t like a guy puffing out his chest, either. His guard uniform tightened onto his obscenely bulging body. He literally got muscles that didn’t formerly exist, his neck disappeared, and it was a good thing he was wearing an armored skirt, because he would’ve shredded through any pants he’d been wearing. The leather groaned as he grew. The hulking routine took time, long enough for me to realize Regina had no visible reaction to him doing… whatever he was doing.

  “This ain’t earth, Bke,” she said. “You don’t pull that shizz here. And the super muscle routine doesn’t work on me. I’m not intimidated. Now, you going to apologize to our newbie here, or do I go talk to your boss?”

  Bke bared his teeth at her but said nothing. One of the other guards put a hand on his shoulder, and that seemed to do it. He defted a bit, and gnced over at me.

  “Sorry Christopher.”

  “What—” I started, but didn’t get that far.

  Regina stepped forward and stared intently up at his eight foot, double wide frame. “Not good enough.”

  This time, Bke went super saiyan. Yellowish energy literally burst out around his feet and surrounded him in an aura. He was breathing heavily, teeth clenched, hands balling into fists and falling limp again and again. He looked like he needed a truck to bench press, stat.

  “Last chance, Bke, apologize to the man.”

  Bke turned and literally screamed in my face. He got down, opened a jaw that he nearly had to unhinge, and spittle flew out with a mighty roar.

  Unknown check: You have been targeted by a special ability! You do not have the associated skill for this check. This check is very high difficulty. Would you like to spend 8 Tokens to automatically succeed this check?

  The urge to mentally click yes was almost overwhelming, but some tiny part of me decided against it. That would be all my Free Tokens and whatever other Tokens that were left from my attributes. I knew I would need them. That meant choosing failure.

  Morale check: You have failed this check. Do you wish to spend 1 Token to try again? If you fail again, the Token will be lost.

  “No,” I growled.

  Instantly, paralyzing fear swept over me. My knees buckled and I fell to my ass, scrambling backwards, into… another one of the guards. I looked up and into the face of a weary female guard.

  “We’re sorry about this, newbie,” she said, and picked me up as though I was just a bag of groceries that needed putting away. “Bke’s got a bit of a temper.” When I peered back at the source of my terror, Bke was gone. I saw a tiny speck of a person wreathed in a yellow fming aura flying through the air.

  “He’s also got the skills to be a serious danger,” Regina said, “in a pce like this. He is precisely the wrong sort of person to be working in a job like this.”

  The dy guard grimaced. “Go ahead and report him.”

  “You could go ahead and report him,” the other male guard said, “or you could chalk his behavior up to extenuating circumstances, and trust that he’s a good guy otherwise.” He removed his helmet and shook out a head of curly brown hair, then stared at her with icy blue eyes that glowed with magic.

  Regina stared at the other guard for some time, then snorted in derision. “Come on, Chris, let’s get out of here before this whole pce goes up in hypocritical fmes.” She stalked off.

  “Oh, I thought it was Christopher!” the other male guard yelled. “You giving him pet names on his first day in the Shire, huh?”

  I didn’t know what was happening. I had to push myself pretty hard to keep up with her, which set my legs to aching something fierce.

  When she finally realized she had outpaced me, she stopped and tapped her foot, eye twitching. Tweedle Dee seemed to grasp her agitation and rubbed up against her leg. By the time I got there, she’d knelt down and had her hands buried in his fur.

  “What… was that… about?” I asked, out of breath.

  Regina sighed heavily, and kept her eyes downcast. “I’m sorry about that. I wish one of the other guards had been on rotation, but you had to meet Bke.”

  “And Bke is…”

  “He was, kind of, not really, my boyfriend for a hot second.”

  This is Christopher rethinking his choices.