After a nice night of worrying my ass off about the quest, the sun rises on a new day filled with more worrying. I wake up before anyone else, quietly creep out of my glass room, and find my way to the kitchen for something warm to drink. Miss S appears moments before I get a mug off the shelf, clicks her tongue at me, and gently shoos me away from the kitchen.

  “Let me, sugar.” She says with a smile. “You just focus on doing what you need to do.”

  I smile right back, but inside, I’m twitching and muttering at all the worries I’ve got bottled up. Taking a seat at a table to wait only makes it a little worse; the thumping of my leg against the ground vibrating the entire chair and table around me. Illumisia huffs and brushes up against my leg as she appears out of nowhere, then settles in on my right side so I can reach down and scratch her head.

  “Morning.” Pearl yawns into my mind. “Today’s the big day. Are you worried?”

  A sarcastic smile pulls at the corner of my mouth. Pearl pauses, rubs the sleep from her eyes, and looks down at her feet. When she sees how much I’m fidgeting, she giggles to herself.

  “Nevermind, I can see the answer already.”

  I’d be worried if she couldn’t. Before I can make any other silent faces at Pearl, a mug of steaming hot purple-ish liquid clinks against the table and brushes my knuckles. Miss S pats a reassuring hand on my shoulder and offers me a comforting smile, then leans against the counter with a mug of the same stuff cradled in her hands.

  “Now you probably don’t want to hear it from me, sugar, but you’re going to be fine even if you don't find the quest.” She pauses to blow on her drink, then takes a sip without breaking eye contact. “It’s only Worth and some rewards; your life doesn’t depend on it. No matter how it feels like it might.”

  I raise the mug to my lips without cooling it down and take a long drink. The boiling hot liquid drains down my throat like molten lead, burning and scraping in equal measures, but my body stops it from causing any real harm. Nothing like the healing backlash I had to endure in the middle of the night from that potion I drank in the graveyard.

  “Hoo, that burns.” I cough, steam rising from my throat with every exhale. “Just because I know you’re right, doesn’t mean I don’t have my own reasons for being worried. Most of them boil down to the fact that I have no idea what’s going to happen whether I get the quest or not.”

  Miss S nods sagely. “So it’s a worry of possibilities, not because you’re scared for your life.”

  I snort and shake my head. “I’ve been in way worse positions than this. Hell, I might be in more danger if I don’t get the quest than if I do thanks to those masked assholes I told you about last night.”

  “Mm, yes, them. An unpleasant little gathering of people with just slightly too much power in their hands. Very similar to your Preservation trying to take over Palastia.” She sighs and shakes her head. “Like all idiots, they’ll keep biting until something bigger bites back. I just have to hope that they don’t hurt too many people before they get their comeuppances.”

  “The masked assholes or the Preservation.”

  “Both, sugar.”

  “Fair.”

  I take a much smaller sip of my drink as the sounds of someone else waking up fills the room. Shandi stumbles in clutching her head from all the drinks she had last night, and less than a minute later, Clutter joins the rest of us as peppy and bright as ever. He takes one look at Shandi, wrinkles his nose, then motions for me to get a move on.

  “Gimme two minutes.” I say and raise my mug for emphasis. “We’ve got enough time for me to shake off the grogginess.”

  Shandi knocks her knuckles on the table, then signs at me.

  “She wants to know why you're not hung over like she is.” Miss S translates. “Curiously she isn’t asking me the same thing, considering I drank the two of you under the table last night.”

  I shrug. “Biology, I guess. Remind me why you’re still here?”

  “I can do that, sugar.” Miss S cuts in before Shandi can start signing. “She’s our prisoner, and even if she’s not worth much as a hostage, I’ll find a good use for her. Something that’ll help you just as much as me.”

  Whatever. As long as she isn’t roaming the streets to try again, I don’t give a shit. There’s going to be far worse people after my head come sundown, anyway. I down the rest of my drink, say a quick thanks to Miss S for her continued hospitality, and follow Clutter out into the courtyard. He’s already tingling with magic to make a starway, but before I take his hand, I pull out my Class Card and double-check the map.

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  “So tell me again where we’re going to appear.” I pivot on my heel so both Clutter and I can see the map.

  He reaches around my shoulder and taps a spot about a fingertip’s length from the end of the word. “My closest exit is right here. It should still be a pretty long walk to Denmary Well, so I want to get moving as quickly as possible.”

  Illumisia yawns and nudges my leg. “I will carry a coin ahead at speeds that will not draw unnecessary attention. As such, the walk is of no concern to us.”

  Clutter blinks, as if remembering that Illumisia exists and that I have teleportation coins at the same time. “That makes it a lot easier. Actually, it makes it so you don’t even have to come for the first leg of the trip; so you can go get the thing from Clamber instead! That works out great!”

  “Sure does.” I agree as I hand Illumisia a relocation coin, then toss an empty one to Clutter. “You two head on through the starway and shoot me a message when you’re all ready. How long od you think it’s going to take?”

  “Um… close to thirty minutes for the walk, then however long it’ll take Illumisia to get there.” Clutter turns to her and tilts his head to the side. “What’s the fastest you can run?”

  “I am going to assume you meant to say ‘run without alerting anyone.” Illumisia says sarcastically. “Three hundred miles per hour should not set off any warning bells if anyone observes or senses me. If I push it, it will be closer to four hundred.”

  Clutter nods. “Then it’ll be around an hour from when we leave. Is that enough time for you?”

  “All I’m doing is picking up a delivery. Don’t worry about me.”

  “Okay; we won’t.” Clutter grins and extends a hand for Illumisa. “See you in an hour!”

  “Yes, see you then.” Illumisia echoes as she gently bites down on Clutter’s hand. Magic swirls around the pair as they dissolve into mist that sparkles with powder blue and stars of brilliant white. I watch it swirl for all of ten seconds before I make my way to the exit and walk without hesitation into the mists connecting us to the ground.

  An hour later, a message from Clutter flashes onto my Class Card. I glance down at the new metal band wrapped around my forearm, made of thin bluish-grey material inlaid with a bunch of plastic ‘gemstones’. Remembering the mixture of hope and sadness on Clamber’s face as she handed it to me sends a pang of guilt into my stomach, and the silence that followed as Scooch comforted her hurt a little more. But hey, now I have two plastic markers on my map designating my location, so… yay.

  I set my jaw and look up at the sky as I focus on the coin Illumisia has. Depending on how this goes, there’s a chance this is the last I’m going to see of Palastia for a while. The quest’s still a complete mystery. It could send me to another underground labyrinth of tunnels, or it could just send me back to Palastia with a set of cryptic objectives. Well, I guess I’ll never know until I’m staring at the system prompt.

  Relocation flares. Illumisia grunts as I appear on her back, then shakes me off before she can even take a breath. “Oop, sorry. Clutter–”

  “I am aware of how long I have been running for.” She says. “If I am correct, our destination is three miles away. Clutter would only slow us down for now–send him a message telling him to wait a handful of minutes.”

  “Alright.” I summon my Class Card and type out a quick message. “So, what’s the real reason you haven’t gotten there yet?”

  Illumisa cocks an eyebrow. “What makes you think I was not simply en-route to our destination when you appeared?”

  “I don’t know; maybe the fact that you were standing still when I appeared.” I shrug with a smile and start slowly walking into what looks like a simple village–wooden houses, stone roads, and blatantly abandoned. “What’s on your mind?”

  She laughs dryly. “Many, many things; though the vast majority have no bearing on our current situation. I have been here for close to ten minutes already, and a preliminary scan of the area showed no lifesigns in the slightest. Yet that is not the strangest part; there is an oddity to this place that I want your input on before I make a rash assumption.”

  “You want my opinion?” I raise an eyebrow in surprise. “What the hell could make you want that?”

  “Do not flatter yourself–I wish to hear both your and Pearlescence’s takes.” Illumisia clarifies dryly. “I have not lived in anything like this for a very, very long time–yet even I can tell that something is very, very wrong. Turn left here.”

  Illumisia turns as she speaks, herding me towards a house that looks no different from any of the others. I reach for the doorknob as I get close enough to the door, but pause when I actually take it in. The door is just… a slab of wood. Which is technically what a door is, I know, but this goes way beyond that.

  There’s no carvings, no handle, no window, no paint, and it isn’t fitted into a frame. The logs used to make the house just stop, then there’s a slab of wood, and then the logs start again. I frown and press my hand to the door, fully expecting it to either fall inward or be completely boarded up, but… it swings open. Without any hinges to swing on.

  “I think I’m starting to see what you mean.” I note as I walk into the… perfectly lit house. There’s not a single shadow to be seen, and no light sources either. “Okay, this is just eerie. What happened to this place?”

  “That is what I am wondering.” Illumisia says as she flows past me into the house. “The oddities continue to pile up the more you observe this house. Windows exist without frames, stairs are simple chunks of wood, and if you look at the grain in the wood, you will see that it appears to follow no logical pattern–if there is even a pattern at all.”

  I blink in surprise and turn back to the door. Sure enough, the ‘grain’ on the wood is more like random lines on a beach–and it just disappears randomly only to appear again later. I take in the rest of the entrance with a frown, noting dozens of strange inconsistencies that just make the place feel… wrong. Almost like someone who only ever heard what a house was threw one together at the last minute.

  Pearl grits her teeth and balls her tiny little fists. “The system made this.”