Allie and I spent a good fifteen minutes tidying up her office. She alternated between grumbling and ughing about forgetting the whirlwind that surrounded people when they chose their csses. Every single time, apparently, she forgot.

  She assured me there were no other things for her to counsel me on; now that I had my css, it would be about getting a look at my skills and then raising them. The only warning she gave was not to go too fast right out of the gate. Go slow and easy.

  “You’re talking to a guy who reached out and touched a god,” I thought and definitely didn’t say.

  I’d find out what she meant soon enough. In the meantime, she also gave me the Pyer’s Handbook to look at.

  It wasn’t long for this world. The illustrations were already being tampered with by the magical resonance suffusing the whole pce. And it appeared that most of Chapter One was already altering itself into nonsense words, and turning the letters into more indecipherable gobbledegook.

  She promised to have some of the cy tablets sent in. These would expin more, and were much more resilient against magical interference than basic paper and ink. Then she sent a runner to grab my gear and escort me to my quarters to deposit all my stuff there, then head to dinner. The runner had a kind of ferret creature, or maybe an otter, made of multi-colored inky stuff. The Nakamamon flowed through and around the runner’s feet, never tripping him up. Sometimes it gnced at me with eyes of solid empty bck that seemed to judge me.

  I was filled with questions, and the runner answered them with great big smiles, while he hopped around from one foot to another. His ink creature kept weaving this way and that in figure eights around his ankles. It turned out he’d only been here a month, and was still pretty new. He’d immediately started turning into a stuffed animal on his first day in, and luckily the pills took care of all that. His clothes were ruined though, haha, and all the electronics he’d brought were toast. Double haha.

  Passing a t-intersection, I locked eyes with Regina, who was grinning at me. I had just enough time to see her clutch her pleated skirt and start to raise it before the runner led me out of sight. When I stopped and leaned back, poking my head back to see down the hall again, she giggled and pulled her skirt all the way up. Once again, she was going commando. The thatch of hair I saw had changed to the same glowing pinkish red as up top.

  Then the runner was calling for me. I gave a lightning fast wave and hurried to catch up, trying to ignore the protesting from my already-aching legs.

  “Holy shift,” I muttered, and grinned at my own unconscious following of her rule.

  Dinner was perhaps the most sumptuous meal I’d ever had in my life. I mean, my family was never very well off, but this was essentially government spending here. Somehow they’d enticed a Michelin chef out into a magic world, and given him an octopus-like Nakamamon with fire on all of its arms. The creature was bigger than I was, flicking woks full of fried rice while stirring several different pasta dishes at the same time. Other cooks and their own companion creatures helped prep, cook, and pte the food.

  And the smells… ugh. I almost wished Regina hadn’t distracted me away from the astonishing world around me, because it smelled like heaven. Sweet, savory, spicy and floral smells all mixed around.

  The dining hall was just a buffet, and since I hadn’t eaten basically all day with Regina, I loaded up my pte with one of everything. I had crab legs and slices of pizza, California rolls and a scoop of cream pasta.

  The runner watched me with bemusement, telling me to slow down a bit. Then, when he asked what css I’d chosen and I told him, he got real sober.

  “Oh. Then I guess you’re not going to be sticking around, are ya?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Well, there aren’t enough Healers. You’re going to be stationed somewhere, probably working under a journeyman Healer. Could be out in the boonies for all I know.”

  “Oh.”

  “You’ll be out among the natives.”

  I didn’t know what that meant, and he didn’t want to expand on it. Instead he waved at friends, and took his inky ferret friend with him before I could even make a proper introduction.

  So I ate, and then I ate more. It could’ve been from all the hiking, but I was pretty sure I had extra helpings because of an afternoon spent having athletic sex. And if they weren’t going to stop me from eating my fill, I wouldn’t stop until I was done.

  The evening found me back in my dorm room, a pce that felt positively enormous compared to my bedroom back home. It was more of an apartment than anything else: two cozy little bedrooms with bunkbeds, even though I was the only newbie, twin dressers and two vanities with rge mirrors. All appeared to be trees grown directly out of the floor, without visible joints, nails or screws to keep them together. The mattress was thick and soft, definitely imported from earth, but the rest had been… I don’t know, commanded to grow like this. Even so, the dresser drawers slid smoothly out and then back in on wooden rails.

  There wasn’t much of a chance I was going to spend more than a few nights here, but I luxuriated in the plush carpet, wine-colored, and the homey candebras that held no candles. Instead, the tapered metal ends just lit up with a yellow white light.

  The bathroom was the only pce where I felt they could’ve done better. It was small and a bit cramped, with those same candebras above the rge mirror, which was too bright. Still, they had hot and cold water that went somewhere after I took a shower, in an anti-gravity portion of a floating castle in a magical world. What was I even doing, critiquing this?

  After a mental forehead sp and a chuckle, I toweled off and explored my living quarters more fully.

  The living area was divided into two sections: one included a wraparound sofa facing two easy chairs, while the other included desks and comfy desk chairs, and straight-backed cushioned chairs that looked like smoking chairs. These had bookstands in front of them. Just as I was getting to the part where I wondered why the bookstand needed to be made of stone, or have a foot thick base beneath, the same runner appeared, with his buddies. They were each holding stacks of heavy cy tablets.

  Which was how I spent the evening reading through an impressive stack of information on this world, all stamped into cy and baked. These had been stamped and looked like old newspapers. Some of them even had hand-carved illustrations, essentially stamps pressed into them. These showed Nakamamon and the different sorts of gods. The guidebook was a very simplistic guide to the world here, and what I could expect to see on any given day.

  The Nakamamon had evolved, or transformed, due to the magic here, and some of those transformations were on account of things humans had brought with them. The creatures could be shaped like anything they’d ever seen. Tweedle Dee was a Vulpetunia, a flower fox essentially. The guidebook expined that these creatures were shown to the world through books, generally, and then the tent magic sort of popped them into existence. So the pteradactyl-looking creature was literally just an artist’s rendering of a dinosaur that had sprung to life after someone brought a dinosaur book in here and started, what, showing the pages to the pnt life of this world?

  I wondered what this pce had looked like initially. A barren ndscape of absolutely nothing? No color anywhere? Had it only started imitating colors once humans came through?

  The answers to those questions weren’t in the guidebook, but I read on regardless, eager to soak up the weird lore of this pce.

  Eventually it came to the pce where css selection happened, and what happened next. I read through the command again, ‘reveal character sheet’, so I said the words aloud. Before, it had been pretty simple, but now…

  Christopher Fletcher

  Healer - Trainee 1

  Attributes:

  Affinity 2 (2/2)

  Durability 3 (3/3)

  Ingenuity 5 (5/5)

  Likability 4 (4/4)

  Physicality 2 (0/2)

  Free Tokens: 6/6

  Unspent attributes points: 1

  Healer Skills:

  Diagnosis (physical, spiritual, magical, mental)

  Treatment (potions, salves, tinctures, elixirs, unguents)

  Develop cure (swarm, small, rge, huge)

  Develop cure (elemental/nature: fire, earth, water, pnt, electric)

  Develop cure (spiritual, beast, insect, fairy, dragon, psychic, unique)

  Administer Cure*

  Unspent skill points: 42

  The tablets expined that each of those skills in the parentheses was a unique skill. So Diagnosis (physical) was different than Diagnosis (spiritual), and both needed points put in them. Meaning I now had around 28 different skills, and not even enough points to give each of them a skill rating of 2.

  Also, I still didn’t have a skill that would allow me to shrug off Bke’s douchey intimidation yell, which I didn’t appreciate, and no skill to defend myself from the guy. I didn’t love that either.

  With luck, this assignment abroad would take me far, far from Bke and any other guardsmen who had battle skills they were forbidden from using. Then again, my luck had a pretty bad track record right this moment. I’d do a lot of finger crossing until I got to where I was supposed to be.

  The cy tablets (and Allie) suggested I should start small. The Develop Cure skills by size indicated the type of gods and Nakamamon I would be healing, so I put 3 ranks in both Swarm and Small. It then indicated I could increase the skill levels of the Develop Cure when I was on assignment, so I should save at least 6 skill points for those. I set those aside, leaving me with 30 points.

  Diagnosis seemed absolutely vital, for me to know what it was I would be doing, so I spent 3 points on all four of those.

  Unlike with the Develop Cure (Swarm) and (small) skills, the moment I sank the twelve points into Diagnosis, I was flooded with a whole host of knowledge on how to check for various madies. I knew how to take a blood pressure reading for the physical ailment, I knew how to apply my Affinity with the Magical skill to discern how magic might be at py. I knew about fonts of magic that bubbled up from beneath the earth, I suddenly knew about ley lines and the shifting tide of magic, in how it circuted throughout the world.

  Honestly, it was headache inducing to have all of that flood my mind all at once. I shook my head and smiled, amazed that I could just put a point onto a screen and instantly flood my brain with understanding.

  With 18 remaining, it was time to take a look at what Administer Cure looked like.

  I now had a whole lot of screens stacked atop one another, and I was enjoying the serene atmosphere of my dorm room, and the game-like challenge of distributing my points in any sort of effective way.

  The screen informed me that Administer Cure would take a different form with each of the affected beings. I might have to dose a creature with a big pill, and get them to swallow it, or inject them in the correct spot, or get them to inhale the cure.

  “Hello with it,” I muttered, and put three points into that. On a whim, I tried to put another point into it, and it allowed me. I pushed it up to rank 6, then even 7 before it stopped me and said 7 was the max for any one skill to begin.

  It seemed obvious that no matter how long it took me to figure out what was wrong, what treatment to use in the meantime, and how to cure the thing, it was all four naught if I couldn’t actually deliver the cure in the end. If I made up a prototype of a huge friggin pill, it would be useless if I dumped it when trying to get the creature to swallow it.

  Plus, the cy tablet newspaper things informed me that Administer Cure was the number one thing you wanted in the end.

  This left me with the 6 I was intending to save for all the different types of creatures, and 11 more besides. I decided to put 2 in each of the different types of treatments. All the balms, elixirs, potions, unguents, and tinctures were getting 2 ranks each.

  More knowledge flooded my brain: tools to use in making them, the correct viscosity of each, the fact that some were solutions and required more of this or that. I knew a whole host of potential ingredients, beginning with oils and moving on through herbs and barks of trees. Some of these I’d never heard of.

  The whole thing was disorienting, and I knew some aspirin would help. Acetylsalicylic acid. Made from willow bark and other natural ingredients.

  “Huh,” I marveled aloud. I knew these things automatically now. Wild.

  I had a single skill point remaining out of the ones I was ready to spend, but pushed it over into the ‘keep for ter’ pile. If the max I could do was rank 7, then I should have at least that many. This made sense in my mind at the time.

  The runner was outside my door. He produced a pair of aspirin when I pced a hand at my head, before I could even speak.

  “Common occurrence?” I asked tiredly.

  He grinned in the affirmative. “Every time. I have to say though, it’s odd having just one newbie at a time.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “The first couple of cohorts around my time were fifteen to twenty strong. My cohort was sixteen. We had a lot of fun those first couple of training days. I got all kinds of id. Practically all the girls we entered with, and one of the runners who helped us out in those training days.”

  I had to wonder how much of this was true, and how much was bullshit. A lot of people liked to puff themselves up to look good for other people, but I’d never had it happen to me.

  He smiled sadly at me. “Pity you don’t have a bunch of fellow trainees to spend the next couple of days getting to know, like Biblically.”

  Was everybody here super horny? It sure seemed like it. Bke wanted Regina, this guy wanted to nail everything that moved. And Regina wanted me, for some unfathomable reason.

  Back in my dorm room, I chanced a look in the enormous mirror behind the sink, and froze.

  My body had been transformed. I’d been a twiggy, pale little guy before, and already my sloped shoulders had a hint of definition. My sunken chest now bulged with far more muscle than ever before, the little belly I had from too many sweets and sodas was conspicuously absent, and I had biceps. Like real honest-to-meadow-goddess arm muscles.

  They weren’t big. They weren’t even remotely what you would call impressive. Nobody would be asking me how often I went to the gym. I definitely wasn’t a match for the towering sb of beef Bke. At the same time I also wasn’t a weakling. I leaned back and watched as a hint of ab muscles appeared.

  “Whoa,” I said. It made me want to spend my free Attribute point on Physicality.

  After a shower, it was time to hit the cy tablets again. According to the guidebook, I had selected my skills pretty well, and the instantaneous knowledge from those skill points meant I could pretty much start doing my job, like, now. It was time to figure out how to get myself an assigned Nakamamon. I needed a cutesy creature in my life, starting yesterday.

  I was interrupted by a scratching at the window. Looking over, I saw two vine-like tendrils curling in through the window, growing with incredible speed and grasping at the stones making up my room. Buds appeared in contrasting colors, then sprang to life on the vines.

  Soon enough, I could hear panting, so I headed over and found Regina climbing up a hastily constructed dder. She waved me away, and then ughing and breathing heavily, she pulled herself up through the window and into my room. She spied that my bed was just beneath the rge window, and rolled down onto it.

  “Uh… thanks Dee!” I called out, as the vines disengaged from their grappling hook configuration. Both vines waved cheerily at me.

  This is Christopher… the sex object?