“I’m coming, I’m coming!” Hunter shouted out his bedroom door, frantically stuffing the last of his new clothes into his duffel. He hauled it over his shoulder, Trips riding in the satchel already slung across his body, and took one last hurried glance around his room. He was pretty sure he had everything from the first sixteen years of his life that he needed packed up, and it all fit in one bag. “Huh.”

He picked up the best pepper plant he’d grown and transplanted into a pot, cradling that in one arm, and grabbed the channeling rod from where it was leaning next to his door before bounding down the stairs. His parents met him at the front door and guided him out, walking with him toward the center of town. It was early, so early they’d left Jack in bed, because peak time summons into Kansas City were hard to get, and most of the roads in town were fairly empty. They walked past the bakery, though, and since bakers were usually up just as early as farmers, there were already mouthwatering smells wafting out.

“Hey, can we-” Hunter started to say, but stopped when his mom pulled a bundle of wax paper out from her bag and offered it, while his dad took the potted plant from him with a chuckle. He ate the homemade cornbread muffin quickly, finishing it up by the time they made it to the rally point, which was really just an old, twenty-foot radio tower with some Infratech lashed to the top of it. He shifted from foot to foot, suddenly uneasy, glancing nervously at his parents.

“Well, bump, this is it,” his mother broke the silence. “Ernie’s going to take good care of you, or he knows what will happen. Message me every day-”

“Every week,” his dad cut in.

“Fine, message me every week and let me know how things are going. We’re very proud of you, and we’ll just be even more proud with what you make of yourself in the future,” his mom mumbled the end of her sentence into his hair, hugging him tight.

“We love you, Hunter,” his father added, wrapping an arm around the both of them, the other still cradling Hunter’s peppers.

“Hey, umm,” he whispered to his parents, “Is this, umm, is this dumb? Should I not be doing this?”

His mom just laughed, soft and kind, against the top of his head, but before she could say anything, his dad stepped in.

“Hunter,” he said in his best dad voice, steady and strong, “this is absolutely not dumb. For the world that’s out there, son, and what you want to do in it? This is probably the smartest way to go about it. Dumb would be sticking around here until you go stir-crazy and then flinging yourself into situations you aren’t ready for.”

“Yeah, I, I’m sorry about that, still,” he mumbled in reply, just as a message flashed on his Infra.

You have entered the [KC Sorcs Teleport Lobby] messaging group.

[Kenny Westing] is attempting to summon you. Do you accept? Y/N

[Ernie Hallahan]: Hey, kid. This is the guy. It’s legit. First lesson, though, don’t be a cheapskate like me, buy all your ports through approved channels. You won’t always have a stand up guy like your uncle to vouch for these wizard types.

“I gotta go,” Hunter said with a sniffle, making sure to hug both his parents harder than he had in a while. “Just a couple months, that’s all.”

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” his mom said with a soft, playful smile.

“And don’t do a few of the things she would, either,” his dad finished their old joke.

He gathered his things, stepped over closer to the rally point, and waved with his metal staff before thinking yes at the summon request, and then he got kicked. It wasn’t any ordinary kind of kick, though, it seemed to hit him everywhere he felt solid, thighs and upper arms, the middle of his sternum and forehead. And instead of knocking him backwards, or forwards, or to the ground, the kick sent him in a direction he couldn’t comprehend well, the same direction he had to look to use his Infra screen. He coughed, blinked, and then found himself standing somewhere completely new.

“Come in early, do a short range pull to warm up, he says,” Hunter heard someone say while his vision was still coming back into focus. “It’ll be easy, make a few crystals, he says. Except this kid’s carrying a type-b Infratech sentient AI, a hunk of extraplanar alloy, an unsecured hammerspace, and a plant! This is the kind of thing that brings the Pols down on an independent contractor, Ernie.”

“Nothing’s quarantined, man,” he heard his uncle say, still trying to shake the cobwebby feeling out of his head, and wondering if they should have paid extra for one of the fancy combat summons that brought you in fresh and alert. “They’ve had SysPol out in the redoubts for what, ten years now? They know what to look for. Kid just hired on anyway, he hasn’t had time to go digging up contraband.”

“Fine, fine, but get out of here before anything gets flagged.”

Hunter squinted at the figure that approached him, and while everything was still blurry, the nameplate he accidentally activated in his Infra window was clear and crisp.

[Ernie “Spellshot” Hallahan - Level 403]

“Wow,” he mumbled, letting his uncle take his heavy duffel and guide him out onto a for real city street, then down the sidewalk at an easy pace while he recovered. He started feeling better after a block or two, enough to look around gawk at the sights, and at Ernie.

He was looking good, better than the last time Hunter had seen him, when his adventuring group had dragged him to Willard the year before for an enforced break. Back then, he’d been gaunt, worn-out and shaky for the week or so he’d stayed. Now, he looked healthy, his hair and beard were combed out, both a much darker auburn tone than Hunter’s own red hair, he didn’t have any new scars, just the cool one across the bridge of his nose and eyebrow, and he was animated and talkative on the walk as he showed off the city.

“So,” he said as he pointed to the north, “everything on the other side of the river is pretty much shredded. They had some nasty piece of work called a ‘Slide confluence’ up there, about a half dozen of the things spewing out construction mecha, assassin bots, and suicide drones. Most folks avoid going up there any more, there’s just too many traps to try to make a dent in reclaiming anything.”

“That’s what the Siege was, right?” Hunter asked. “Mom says you were up there fighting for a while.”

“Ah, half right there, kid,” Ernie grumbled. “I was up there, but the Siege wasn’t much about fighting. Just as many warm bodies and sharp eyes as possible, trying to keep that mess contained where it was. It could’ve been worse, though.”

They stopped for a moment at a small park on a hill, surrounded by buildings that all looked half abandoned, and his uncle nodded off into the distance. Hunter followed his gaze and blinked, at first confused, then disbelieving, and finally just feeling small. All of those blocks were buildings, bigger than anything he’d ever seen in real life, even from this distance, and there were so many, and all so close together. That was oldtech, lots of hard work and more people than Hunter had ever met doing it together, just to stick a giant building in the ground that went hundreds of feet into the sky.

“Wow,” he breathed, then pointed at something he couldn’t make out, in the middle of the cluster. “What’s that, though?” In between buildings he could see how the bright, clear blue of the midmorning sky was replaced by a deeper, almost purple color that seemed to rock slowly from side to side, but it was too far away to be sure.

“That’s the big one, Hunter. That’s how it could have been worse.”

“Wait, that’s a Slide? It’s like hundreds of feet tall! What’s it doing there?”

“Funny story, kid,” Ernie patted him on the shoulder as they started walking again. “Kind of, at least. In hindsight, maybe. So, K.C. used to be about the biggest place you could find in about four, maybe five hundred miles in any direction. Now, no one’s really sure about the dimensional mechanics, what Slides went where and why, but a pretty good rule was that the bigger the city, the bigger the Slide. And that’s a big one, for sure.

“I guess it vanished a whole city block when it popped up, can’t even imagine the total chaos when a whole chunk of a place just goes missing, and on top of that, it’s spooky. The little Slides, you know, you can’t see much. Maybe the front of someone’s house, maybe the corner of the inside of a building, point is you don’t get much context about what you’re looking at. But that one was wide open and you could see for miles, I mean, you still can.

“Look at it, see that purple? That’s their sky. It’s dark there, all the time, and when you get closer you can see their end of the Slide’s in the middle of a forest. Well, they call it a forest, they call what’s in there trees. Really, they’re these giant growths of black vines, waving about, and every so often one will snap around and point at you, like it can see you from the other side. Course, the first couple of days, you couldn’t see them moving. Probably did look a little like a forest back then.

“So, the army and the national guard,” he paused at Hunter’s quizzical look, “Those are both pretty much what we’d call an Order these days. Anyway, they set up around the downtown area, got all ready to blast whatever tentacle monster came crawling out of that thing, then got ready again when all the electronics went down and Infra came up. So, finally, the Slide opens up and nothing happens, for about an hour. Then the monsters came out.”

“Monsters?” Hunter’s eyes went wide as he peeked over at what he could see of the downtown area again.

“Well, not really. Could’ve gone bad, you know. Things looking like pretty girls, or really pretty boys, on top at least. From a distance. On the bottom, they’re spiders. Don’t know how they avoided getting shot, first thing.”

“Oh!” Things were starting to make more sense now. “I know one of them! Kiki’s super nice, and zhe comes to Willard to buy vegetables and visit. I brought zher a pepper plant.”

“Right, they’re good people. They’re on Infra, too, and they spent that whole week trying to figure out who was going to go through the Slide and get stuck here for who knows how long. First one, I hear, even came out waving a white flag. They got a good sense of humor. Course, on the other side of the river, it was carnage. Everything was really a dice roll, back then, kid.”

“That makes sense. It’s scary, but it’s not like everything could be all awful, all the time,” Hunter murmured. “Right?”

“Right,” Ernie nodded. “Well, here we are. Got an empty room for you upstairs, new sheets, the works. Let’s get you settled.” They’d stopped in front of a long, three-story brick building, with a metal roll-up door on one side and glass windows all along the other. A blinking sign over the glass doors read “Fourex Tech Solutions,” and while his uncle unlocked the entrance, Hunter was busy watching it flicker on and off.

“You’ve got Infratech lights, just for a sign?” Hunter leaned on his staff and chuckled softly. “Gosh, the big city’s weird.”

It turned out, the building was one big floor that housed the workshops and training areas for Ernie’s group, and a second regular sized one on top where they all lived. Hunter got his own room, though, with a window, and brick looked pretty easy to climb up and down, so he figured he was set. His mom always said he should make sure he knew his emergency exits before going in somewhere new, which he always understood to be a tacit approval for climbing in and out of windows.

Trips helped him unpack and make his new bed, easily twice as big as the one at home, and then he headed out to the shared living area, his little helperbot clinging to his shoulder. Hunter glanced dubiously at the weird chair that looked like a cross between a recliner and a torture machine, and had a piece of tape across the back with “massage-o-tron” scribbled on it, instead choosing to settle on the couch and get comfortable. He grinned over at his uncle too wide? feels like a lot of teeth, then cleared his throat.

“So, umm,” he said, brow furrowed. “When do we start?”

“Sorry, what was that?” Ernie looked up from his book, twirling a pen in one hand.

“When are we going to, you know. Train?”

“It’s your first day in the city, and you don’t want to get comfortable first? See the sights, have some lunch, maybe go find your [Arax] friend?”

Hunter shook his head too quick, being weird and bounced a little on the couch, Trips matching his movements with a soft whirr of its pistons. “Not really? I mean, no.”

“Oh, kid,” his uncle sighed, setting his book and pen down. “You are definitely a Hallahan.”

“Yeah, for sure. Half a one, at least. Whatcha mean, though?”

“You’ve got the onnits, that’s all. New hire yesterday, new place today, makes total sense.”

“Wait, the what? Never heard of it.”

“It’s just, ugh,” Ernie shook his head and paused accessing Infra, then said, “It’s something my gramps would say about my granny. Your mother and I, we’d go and visit, and she’d be out in the back tearing up the daisies she’d put in the week before, and he’d say, ‘Don’t worry none about your granny, she’s just got the onnits.’ You know, because she was on one.”

“I have literally never heard of this,” Hunter mumbled, frowning.

“It’s fine, it really is. Your grandmother had the onnits, your mother and I did too for an awful lot of the time growing up, but it gets better. That tai chi stuff your mom’s got you on, meditation, and Infra all really help. The feeling you’ve got right now, when you were back home, did you get it much? And maybe, did you end up doing things you regretted after?”

“Oh,” he thought about it for a while, then said almost under his breath, “Fought things, jumped off the roof, cut my hair, ran away. Did my exercises a lot.”

“Right, that sounds like a Hallahan to me. Eventually, it’ll stop feeling like someone shoving you from behind, kid, I promise. You’ll still get that itch to move, still second guess things every so often, but nowadays that’s almost a good thing. You want to keep on top of things, you’ve got to keep moving, and you want to stay safe, you trust your instincts. How about I make you a deal. The guys aren’t coming back until tomorrow, and it’ll take me a few days to work up a training plan for you anyway, but I’ll take a look at your info sheet and we’ll find a couple things for you to get started on right away.”

Hunter nodded and granted his uncle viewing access, then composed a quick message to his mom.

You are sending a direct message to [Catherine Schmidt], priority RED.

[Hunter Redsmith]: Mom!

[Hunter Redsmith]: apparently i’ve got the onnits? and no one ever told me?

[Hunter Redsmith]: what the flip?!

[Hunter Redsmith]: !?

[Hunter Redsmith]: ugh

“Well,” Ernie said after scribbling a few minutes’ worth of notes into his book. “First of all, congrats. That near unique talent of yours is one of the nastier ones I’ve ever seen. And you’re already building around the ‘no hit, no damage,’ clause, which is smart. I’ve seen a lot of folk with punch up builds, and they almost never think about the consequences. They go in thinking, ‘well I’ll just vorpal that thing and it’ll turn out alright,’ and of course it doesn’t.”

“Thanks,” Hunter said with a little smile. “Hunter ‘Never get hit’ Schmidt. Or Redsmith I guess. Think I can manage it?”

“I don’t really know. I’ll do some research, see what I can dredge up on dodge. Even full-time fighters really don’t bother getting above the fifty-fifty point for whatever they want to fight. But that’s for next week. Right now, if you want to do anything, you’re going to work on your stats.”

“What?” Hunter sat up straighter. “I thought my stats were pretty good.”

“Right. They’re pretty good. They can be better though. See, there’s a trick about stats. Ten’s the highest Infra will assess someone at, but it’s really nowhere near ideal human performance.”

“Really? I mean, I am pretty fast, but I guess that makes sense.”

“So, pretty much anyone can get tens across the board if they work at it, probably not right at integration, but usually not that long after.”

“But, umm,” Hunter bit at his lip. “Why would you bother?”

“Look at it this way, kid. Say you get your first three level ups, and you get a primary body boost for each one. Now you’re at eleven, thirteen, eleven, and you’re locked like that until the next level. Infra won’t let you improve anything on your own when it’s ten or above. You’d always be a little weaker, a little less tough than you conceivably could be, and the difference between life and death out there really comes down to the smallest margins. Get your tens, give yourself the best chance possible.”

“Huh, I didn’t really look at it like that.”

“Most people don’t, kid. And never forget, compared to when I was your age, most people are dead now.” Ernie tore a sheet out of his book and leaned over as he handed to Hunter, patting him on the shoulder.

Hunter scratched idly at the armband Ernie convinced him to wear, some kind of Infratech hack that would keep him from earning raw essence accidentally while he trained, instead converting it to its crystallized form and depositing it straight into his currency account. “His allowance,” he’d called it, which made sense. From what he could understand, if you ever levelled up doing dumb or unimportant stuff, your stat boost could go into areas you didn’t care about, which was just more wasted points. Ideally, you’d only progress while doing the things you were best at, which seemed like an impossible standard to live up to, but Ernie was very against wasted stat points, apparently. Plus, a little spending money couldn’t hurt.

You have discovered [Rally Point Coffee], and received essence for a trivial exploration feat.

WARNING: your raw essence gain has been artificially restricted by [Debt-Bonder X-09], an Infratech device.

You have been credited two (2) small essence crystals into your [currency] account.

He cleared his notifications as he stood out on the sidewalk, alternately peering into the busy shop and reading the notes his uncle had given him. His social scores were the lowest be polite doesn’t work, so he figured they’d be the easiest to raise. The instructions seemed simple, but oh this is gonna be bad they made him anxious.

“Six, find something you believe in, and talk to someone about it,” he whispered to himself, making sure he remembered. “Seven, respond quickly and relevantly to anything said to you. Eight, listen to someone who seems smart but is saying something you disagree with, until they start to sound dumb. Bonus, never say umm, err, or uhh.”

He took a deep breath, then thought better of it and decided to do the slow breathing techniques that went along with his exercises, tucked the note into his pocket, and made his way into the coffee shop. He ordered a tea he’d heard of but never tried big city prices wow, then turned to survey the room, arms folded tightly across his chest.

In one corner, a group of people were quietly arguing about something to do with taxes, something so boring it couldn’t find any purchase in Hunter’s attention span. They were dressed in vaguely matching uniforms Order but not Pols, and he figured that wasn’t exactly the conversation he’d want to dip into. In the middle of the room, there was a young woman sipping at a coffee with her eyes closed, but her face was moving like she was having an interesting conversation, brows raising and lowering, jaw working slightly Infrachat. As he took his drink, however, he saw a kid probably his own age with long, dark hair hanging into his eyes, fiddling with an iridescent globe and a screwdriver.

“Hey,” he said softly as he wandered over, “is that a Kellers?”

“What?” was the reply, followed by, “It’s a semi-autonomous floating affinity focus, actually. What’s a Kellers?”

“The shell, I mean. Kellers makes that kind of plastic. They cook it real hard to get the mother of pearl sheen.”

“Oh. Yeah, it might be. My professor gave it to me for this project,” he told Hunter as he looked up from the focus for the first time. “Why do you ask?”

“Did you drop it maybe, or bang it into something? The outside’s as tough as all get out, but when they cook it like that, the inside loses all sorts of shear strength. Give it a good knock and it’ll be flaking bits into whatever it’s supposed to be protecting.”

The other boy just looked at him flatly, then carefully unscrewed the top half of the sphere from the bottom, popping it open with a faint puff of powdered plastic, then sighed and put his head on the table. Hunter reached over and brushed some of the mess away from his face, then took a sip of his tea oh that’s good.

“How’d you know that?” the teen said, voice muffled with his face still on the table. “You doing one of the tech programs here? Haven’t seen you in any.”

“Nah, I just know a guy back home who’s real into robots. Thing is with Infratech, at least it seems to me, is you can build just about anything to do exactly what you want it to do,” Hunter took another sip and shrugged. “Of course, when you buy something, you never know exactly what whoever made it wanted it to do. That guy I know, he started mixing up his own plastic in his shed. It’s not as pretty as Kellers, or even Braunheim, but it does the job.”

“I don’t think I have time to do that sort of thing. These classes are relentless.”

“I figure, you’re learning what, tech and affinity? That professor’s trying to teach you how to get to the end by starting halfway, it sounds like. Take a weekend or something, work on first principles. You can always do something better if you make it yours, first. That’s what I think. I don’t know, I just moved here from a farm. I’m Hunter, by the way. Nice to meet ya.”

“My name’s Ajit, and thanks.”

Later that night, Hunter sat on an uncomfortable plastic chair in the downstairs reading room of his uncle’s building, two overstuffed notebooks on his lap, reading his instructions again. “Three, read and work through ‘Insane Logic Puzzles for Insane People’ without taking notes. Four, read and memorize ‘Mortal and Ascendant Level Source Locations and Tactics of North America.’ Five, do both of those things with ‘Scab’s Killer Industrial Mix’ playing on the sound system. Fine, ugh. Trips, can you figure out how to work the speakers?”

He read for about thirty seconds before a horrible, awful sound filled the room, a tornado hitting a metal shack full of cats and goats, and he just sighed before soldiering on. He made it about a quarter of the way through the puzzles before he moved on to the Source listings, which turned out to be in no particular order for the sole reason, he suspected, of making them harder to remember. He had switched back between both notebooks for an hour, maybe two time has no meaning, when Ernie came downstairs and shut off the noise.

“That’s enough for tonight, kid. I can hear the factory noises from my room.”

“Hey, umm, Ernie,” Hunter said while his uncle was turning to go back up, “Can I ask a dumb question?”

“Sure, Hunter. I’m not just here to tell you what to do, you know.”

“So, these stat things,” Hunter drummed his fingers on a notebook in a vague, irregular rhythm oh no it’s stuck in your head. “They’re, like, variable right? Not absolute?”

“Hit the nail on the head, there,” Ernie chuckled. “Line up ten folks with ten strength each and have them arm wrestle, and odds are you don’t get any ties. Stats aren’t Infra’s way of judging end performance, they’re more about the work you put in. Infra’s not going to let a kid who doesn’t get out of his chair unless he has to swing around an axe when it’s his life and others’ on the line, same as it won’t let a kid who never cracked a book without pictures delve into the mysteries of the universe. You show it that you’re committed, though, and things just work better. This stuff I’ve got you doing, it’s not necessarily going to make you stronger, or more confident, but it’ll open you up to it. That make sense, kid?”

“Yeah. Yeah, it kinda does. Thanks, Ernie.”

Hunter stayed up for a while longer, reading about the various Sources that had been found, especially those in and around Kansas, before he gave up and went to bed as well. It took him less time than he expected to fall asleep, with the strange bed, new sheets, and unfamiliar noises of the large building, but he’d had a long day. He dreamt about logic puzzles, about sitting next to a man in a blue hat whose name he should know but couldn’t figure out, about cannibals sharing a rowboat with him, about Ernie always lying to answer every question.

He woke, early as usual, the sun barely lighting up the horizon, and went through his usual morning routine before getting dressed in a pair of shorts and a tee shirt emblazoned with the Fourex logo. He slipped out his bedroom window, climbed carefully to the flat roof, and did his exercises during the sunrise, concentrating on his breathing and making each movement so slow as to be imperceptible. After, he let himself relax for just a little while. There wasn’t much of a view, most of the other buildings around were pretty similarly built to Ernie’s, but it was different from Willard, and Hunter appreciated that.

When he felt centered, refreshed, and had dismissed the meditation skill gain messages, he slid down the drainpipe and walked in the front door, toward the training rooms. “One, pick up the weighted training vest and drop it until your arms don’t work anymore. Two, put it on and run in one direction until your legs don’t work anymore. Bonus, repeat.”

Hunter rolled his eyes and sighed, and started the workout. The vest had to weigh about fifty or sixty pounds, which wasn’t so bad for a farm kid, but he was a small farm kid, and after a few dozen repetitions he was shaking. He tried to calm his breathing, to center himself, but the heavy vest landing on the concrete floor seemed louder and more distracting each time it fell. A few dozen more and he collapsed, gasping, and had a sudden, stupid epiphany.

“How am I supposed to put it on if I can’t pick it up again? Ugh.”

Hunter jogged out eastward along the Fourex building’s street, minding his pace with Trips riding on his back and helpfully adjusting the straps of the vest every time it started to jostle. He had originally been very hesitant about the bright yellow sneakers he was supposed to run in, but the odd shape and mesh panels made for a very comfortable stride once he was about a mile in and used to them. As he approached the second set of giant loops of road on his route, his curiosity got the better of him and he ran down one of the ramps to see where they went, only sort of dismayed to see it was just a long, curving highway, a huge version of the ones running through his hometown. It was wide open and relatively flat, and he had nowhere else to go, so he just continued on and checked his messages as he ran, including the flashing ones from his mother he’d been avoiding since the day before.

You are sending a direct message to [Catherine Schmidt].

[Catherine Schmidt]: I’ve already spoken to your uncle about this by the time you read this message, bump. I know how you get when you’re frustrated with this sort of thing, and that’s alright.

[Catherine Schmidt]: There’s nothing wrong with you, and the “onnits” are not a real thing that you have to worry about. If they were, Hunter, you know I’d have already done everything possible to fix it.

[Catherine Schmidt]: Do you remember those block tests Dr. Jensen gave you when you were small? Everything you did came out well within average levels. Your memory was exceptional, your attention span was just fine for your age, and you are such a smart little man.

[Catherine Schmidt]: Ernie and I took similar tests at that age, and we did not do as well at all, but even then it wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened. The worst thing would have been ending up like our mother, with no outlet, with no support, slowly and progressively functioning more poorly every year.

[Catherine Schmidt]: That will not happen to my boy, to either of my boys. I love you, bump. You will do just fine, I promise.

[Hunter Redsmith]: hey, Mom. i’m sry. i was overreacting, and umm. yeah, Ernie had already talked me down pretty good

[Hunter Redsmith]: KC’s pretty cool, btw. but Ernie’s a monster. he’s got me talking to people and reading books

Hunter had taken a wrong turn somewhere, back where the road split into five or six branches, and he found himself heading north toward a barricade before what he assumed was a bridge to the bad side of the river. He stopped a good distance away and slumped against the raised concrete wall on the side of the highway, realizing both that he was about thirty feet off the actual ground, and that he had an amazing view of downtown from another angle.

He stood there while he caught his breath, just staring at the alien view through the Slide that was so much closer than before, chuckling nervously as the hairs at the back of his neck rose involuntarily so weird. He could understand how the Arax called it a forest, if he thought about it, but each glance he gave the undulating tentacles on that dark backdrop just made him more irrationally anxious. Then, he found out if he tried to focus on the stark edge across the sky, the barrier between peaceful blue and somehow ominous purple, all he got for his trouble was a short, sharp headache between his eyes.

It was wrong, it was invasive, and it had been there for longer than he had been alive. It spit aliens onto his planet, and it was only sheer luck that those aliens were kind, playful, people instead of monsters. He felt himself shaking, even if it didn’t make him angry, not this one, but he wondered how he’d feel when he saw a so-called hostile Slide. He just couldn’t figure out how not to be awed and terrified by that other world, how to glimpse at the shifting, slithering vines that dead sky and not worry.

So, he searched for calm in the face of the Slide, a symbol of everything that had gone wrong in his world, years before he was born. He sat on the edge of the barrier, legs dangling high above the ground, Trips clinging to his back as a counter-balance, and meditated. He forced himself to stare into the ominous purple, so visually striking behind and between the huge buildings, at the shifting black shapes that were hard to make out at a distance but still seemed so real grasping reaching. After a while, he realized that it wasn’t making a difference, that it was still scary, and that it would stay that way until something changed, but also that it was alright to feel like that.

You are sending a direct message to [Kinistrata Kit-Tender].

[Hunter Redsmith]: hey, Kiki! it’s Hunter, umm, Schmidt. ignore the name, had a little mixup with the paperwork. get this, i’m looking right at where you came from

[Kinistrata Kit-Tender]: Oh, it’s my little friend, Red? What brings you to our humble Alien Town? How lovely that you’ve made the trip.

[Hunter Redsmith]: ah, i’m not in downtown proper. kinda stuck on the, umm, the 71? great view tho. wait, do people really call it Alien Town?

[Kinistrata Kit-Tender]: Only when we’re being subversive, dear. Or bored. Or if we’ve decided we like how it rolls off the tongues. Now, what do you mean stuck? Do I need to come swooping in to save you? It’s been ever so long since I did any proper swooping.

[Hunter Redsmith]: nah, i know how to get back. staying with my uncle Ernie. but, umm. think i could come visit sometime? i brought a present

[Kinistrata Kit-Tender]: I would absolutely adore that, young Red. I will send you my address, and please, come by whenever you have time for an old friend.

The rest of the week, Hunter subjected himself to more of the same, Ernie’s tasks each day aiming to leave him mentally, physically, and, he supposed, socially exhausted. He ran, he studied, he spent time with Ajit from the coffee shop and a few of his school friends, and when he got a free moment to himself, he explored the big city. He thought, before he came, that it would be packed with people going about their business, and downtown was a bit like that, but for the most part it felt empty, in a good way. The streets were wide, and even though there were buildings everywhere, most the size of Ernie’s, it still felt open free.

Every so often, when he was back in Willard, he’d missed that fleeting feeling of just being out, outside of a building, outside of himself, almost, and he really appreciated being able to get it back. He especially missed it, tucked into a crowded Rally Point, listening to a blandly handsome guy from one of Ajit’s classes talk absolute nonsense about how people should be farming these days.

“We’d do one building downtown at first. Well, none of them are really glass ones. We’d have to build a new one, but that’s easy. Then, some earth mages, some sun priests and you’re set. Vertical, urban farming. Frees the Pols up from guarding every dude with a field out in the country, and it scales. Need more food? Put up another one.”

Hunter took a sip of the sixth new tea he’d tried there’s so many, and listened respectfully, because that’s what you did when you were raised by his mother. Someone raised a good point about maintenance which the authoritative speaker quickly dismissed, and so Hunter decided to take his shot.

“Nah,” he said with a little chuckle. “You’ve got to look at the economics. Forget the earth mages, you just need to rotate your crops, keep the dirt fresh. Sure, nobody likes eating turnips, but they’ll eat ‘em. Sun priests, yeah I get that. How many you need to make up for bad angles and buildings in the way? Unless you want to move your building out a little ways, get it some room to breathe.”

“I see what you’re trying to do,” the guy replied. “Hunter, was it? The point is to bring in as many people as we can into the shelter of large cities. We have the manpower, scattered, all we need is to bring it in, focused.”

“Yeah, but,” Hunter was about to reply when the screen he’d been waiting for flashed in his Infra.

You have raised Drive to ten (10).

Vigor now at 109/110.

“Actually, I’ve got to go. Long story short, monoculture collapse, legionaire’s disease, earthquakes? I think that’s where I was going. It was very nice to meet you, and Ajit, I’ll see you around, still got to show you my helperbot’s speech parsing,” he said quickly, draining his tea and heading out. Trips dropped off the top of the building’s sign and landed on his shoulder with a soft impact, and then they both raced back home.

“I’m done!” he shouted as he burst through the entrance to Fourex Tech Solutions, “And let me tell you, I’ve got a bone to pick, Uncle Ernie!”

He heard laughter long before Ernie made his way downstairs and leaned against the wall in the way Hunter knew he thought made him look like a cool cowboy ok it works. So the teen stalked over and lightly poked him in the chest, scrunching up his face as his uncle laughed at him again, but determined to not let this go easily.

“Now that I’ve done it, and it’s officially not whining, just complaining, what’s the point of all that social stuff? It’s awful. A big building full of plants! For an hour, he talked about it. And there wasn’t even an achievement!”

“Well, kid,” Ernie grinned. “You know how this goes. Short answer, it was only a week out of your life. Level one’s really the only time to get all that done like that, and since you can do it that quickly, there’s no reason not to.”

“Ugh, fine. But why, why bother?”

“Long answer, then? Don’t look at it as social stats. That’s what we called them back when we didn’t know any better, because that’s what they sounded like. But that’s a superficial way of looking at it. Infra calls it presence, spiritual presence I guess. Infra looks at your body, it looks at your brain, and it looks at the impression you make in total on the world. I mean, you know patron skills work mostly off of charisma and wit, right?”

“Right, umm, yeah.”

“But no one thinks that you’re using your charisma to literally convince a giant well of essence to do things for you, right? It’s more like it judges how much of the world you take up, on a level we can’t see all of. All we see is a talkative person that sounds good. That’s why your vigor’s based off of drive. Infra looks at how much of you there is, spiritually, to gauge how long and far you can go.”

“Oh,” Hunter mumbled, working through the implications. “And it’s better to have that presence, because the world’s a lot bigger and weirder than we can see, and who knows what else it, umm, affects.”

“Exactly, kid,” Ernie clapped him on the back.

“So, what’s next, then?”

“Oh, you’re going to like it, I think,” his uncle said with a grin that definitely meant trouble. “I need to take a look at what you’re actually good at, not just what the numbers say. Next, you spar."