Vresh had given him an ultimatum to meet him at a neutral location alone, where she would brief him on ‘the mission’, by tomorrow noon, or else she would... I dunno, she was vague about the ‘or else’ part.

“You watched her saw a man’s head off,” Smartass pointed out, as if reading his mind.

“That is true,” Jeb said, taking a deep breath and blowing through the Appraiser, filling the center of his room with a roiling grey cloud laced with bright red thunderbolts.

Let’s see what I’m at.

Jeb stepped into the cloud and let the red lightning course through his body, lighting it from inside for a moment before it withdrew.

Mystic Trapsmith, Level 39

Accolades: Krusker’s Brawn, Siren’s Cunning, R-R-RubU’s Mysteries, Gresh’s Subtlety, Innovator, Lagross’s Power

Body 21 (17+3)

Myst 71 (45)

Nerve 26 (22)

Abilities: >>FATAL EXCEPTION. Ability missing or corrupted. Awaiting resolution by Administrator.<<<

Accolade Pending: Lagross’s Power suspended due to multiple instances. Awaiting resolution.

Jeb reviewed his status critically. He had about as much Body as a mid-low tier fighter. All but the stupidest combatants understood the need to toss at least a few token points into Nerve for reaction time, coordination, planning, and strategy, so a level twenty usually had about twenty Body. Jeb should be able to wrestle a level twenty fighter to a standstill.

College football level, but way better than being outmatched by busboys.

Jeb’s Myst was over halfway back to where it had been before, and at this level he could lift roughly a ton before whatever he was trying to lift simply refused to budge.

Good enough for a handful of people, most horses, but not enough for buildings, or even cars, sadly. Still, it was easily enough telekinetic force for him to fly, which opened up a whole new ballgame.

He put the ring back over his finger and began patting down his left hand with it. By some divine magic, the ring served as an itty-bitty backdoor into the fifth dimension, allowing anything sticking through it to interact. Jeb was fairly sure that wasn’t standard on Appraisers, and it was that way because someone took a shine to him.

Jeb was at the age where he would happily take the free power-up from cronyism.

There. Jeb’s finger found a hard lump in his left hand. A lump in the fifth dimension, the Fate dimension...where the System resided.

Jeb had one night before he was probably going to be carried off into some ill-conceived suicide mission, so he’d like to take care of some of his backlog before he left.

Item #1 on his backlog: getting the System implants out of him. They creeped Jeb out.

He prodded around the lump, getting a feel for the protrusion. Instead of a wiggling snakelike…thing, it felt more like someone had driven a nail through the meat right next to his wrist, right into the thumb.

Somebody magically enhanced my thumb?

He glanced up at the list of Accolades, but he had no idea which one it could be.

Well, no time like the present. Jeb grabbed a pair of long nose pliers with loops at the tip, made specifically for getting whatever the hell was inside him out.

Because the 5th dimensional nail going through his hand was smaller than the brain worm that had granted him his Class Ability, he could easily fit the ring over the head. Jeb took a little extra time to duct tape the ring in place exactly above the offending object and set his left hand in a vice before reaching in with the pliers.

He fumbled around for just a moment before he grabbed the nail with the pliers and started pulling.

Having taken a lesson from the last time, Jeb went all in on the magic from the very beginning, weaving a thick thread of Myst through the ring and into whatever was in his hand before yanking, hard.

There was a bright flash of light and a strange pressure on his viced hand. It suddenly occurred to him that that extra stability came at the cost of not being able to fling off whatever eldritch abomination he pulled from the ether.

Jeb blinked the black spot out of his eyes and saw…something on his hand.

“Damn, you’re ugly,” Jeb muttered.

The ungodly wall-eyed offspring of a catfish and a squirrel blinked at him, stroking its whiskers with its unnervingly humanoid fingers.

“It’s kind of a cute-ugly, don’t’cha think?” Smartass asked, settling on Jeb’s shoulder to get a better look at the strange creature.

Like the teacup chihuahuas that are so inbred they can’t stop shivering? Pass.

Jeb slowly reached up and loosened the vice on his hand. So far the creature seemed calm, and Jeb wanted to keep it that way until he could get him into the terrarium he’d set aside for just this occasion.

Inch by incredibly slow inch, Jeb lifted his hand out of the vice, the creature placidly sitting on his arm, its eyelids slowly blinking, alternating between right glassy orb and left glassy orb.

“Okay…” Jeb said softly. “We’re just going to take you over to the terrarium and set you down until we can figure out what you are, okay?”

The creature blinked. Right, then left.

Jeb slowly took a step to the left, then another one, aiming for the terrarium.

Click. The door opened without warning, and Mr. Everett, the former teacher/former slave peeked his head through. “Hey Jeb, I wanted to ask how the field trip we—”

“Close the door!”

“EEE!” At Jeb’s sudden outburst, the creature let out a shriek and leapt off his hand, proceeding to race three circuits around the room.

“Gah!” Mr. Everett slammed the door shut, but it didn’t do much. Jeb watched in fascination as the creature’s ribs collapsed like a rat’s, allowing it to squeeze under the doorframe, much to Mr. Everett’s shock.

A fraction of a second later, Jeb heard the old man outside the door cursing and the skittering of tiny claws against wood.

“That could’ve gone better,” Jeb muttered.

“You probably shouldn’t have yelled,” Smartass said, nodding sagely.

“Thank you for stating the obvious.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Let’s see what we’re dealing with.” Jeb took off the ring again and used the Appraiser on himself. In a moment, the status window floated in front of him a second time.

“Hmm…Innovator is missing,” Jeb said, scanning the list a couple times to be sure. “So…some kind of tech gremlin, maybe?”

“If it’s implanted as an Accolade, the gremlin has to be a good thing, right?” Smartass asked with a shrug.

“Venom can be diluted into medicine,” Jeb said, scowling. “There’s a possibility this thing is absolutely destructive when unchecked.”

There was only one place a tech gremlin would go, so Jeb hustled down to the basement.

In the dark tomb underneath the orphanage, Ron and Eddie were having their zombies vs. robots conversation for the umpteenth time.

“I’m just saying, if the choice is cheap labor, you can’t beat a zombie,” Ron said. The ginger necromancer was leaning up against the table as he spoke. “They cost literally nothing to make and maintain, they actually perform better once you weather them a little bit. Robots are degrading from the moment they are made, and as soon as one part breaks, poof, it’s over.”

“Oh sure, but can a zombie stamp out a perfect engraving five times a second? I don’t need cheap labor, I need precision. Not to mention the amount of damage rotting flesh does to materials in terms of corrosion—”

“Hey guys,” Jeb said upon trotting into the dark basement.

The two eggheads looked up from the zombie cyborg on the table in front of them. Jeb briefly wondered where they got the dead body before shaking the thought off and refocusing.

“Eh?” Eddie grunted. The white-haired roboticist held a suspicious canister with heavy duty gloves, currently in the process of screwing it into the borg’s empty chest cavity.

“Either of you see a skinny bottom-feeding-looking gremlin come in here?” Jeb asked, “Face like a catfish, about her size?” Jeb snatched up Smartass and held her out for them to get a size comparison.

“Hey!” Smartass bit his finger, but it felt more like a gentle pinch.

Ron frowned and shook his head. “Naw, we ain’t seen any—”

“EEE!”

“Oh gawd!” Ron jumped away from the table.

Something under the table where they were engineering the end of the human race began skittering across the stone floor, shoving tiny bits of scrap and metal dust into its maw as it escaped toward a dark corner of the room.

“The hell was that?” Eddie asked, frowning.

“Just one of my Accolades got loose,” Jeb said, peering under the desk. He couldn’t see where the thing had gotten off to, and he didn’t think it would be safe to move around Eddie’s equipment. Some of the stuff the old man had in storage now was incredibly dangerous.

Purified-bottled-Myst dangerous.

“I’ve got just the thing,” Eddie said, glancing over to the side of the room. Several RC car-sized robots whined to life and began herding the creature under the drawers, causing a ton of rattling and screeching as they pushed the gremlin toward the harsh light of the garage lamps above them.

Deciding to make a break for it, the creature shot out from under the tool cabinet and darted for the stairs.

Jeb lunged into the creature’s path and reached for it with telekinesis. The nimble creature swerved toward Eddie’s desk, and the robot arm on the desk reached down like a snake and plucked the creature off the ground, holding its captive firm.

“Eee?” The tiny creature gave a squeak as the robot hand clamped down on it, far too hard to struggle. It looked like it was having trouble breathing.

“Now, don’t kill it, it might—”

Clink!

Something shiny came out of the creature’s back end and dropped onto the stone floor with a metallic ring, followed by a little narrow red tube that landed silently.

“Did that thing just take a dump?” Ron asked.

Eddie leaned over and plucked the two objects off the ground, inspecting them. “A heat-shrink tube and a six millimeter aluminum T-nut. I’ve been looking for one of these.”

“Yeah, but did it just take a dump?” Ron asked.

Eddie leaned down and picked up a piece of scrap aluminum and held it to the creature’s face. It sniffed it for a moment, then opened its mouth and engulfed the bit of metal, watching them cautiously as it ate, gluttonous even while being held captive by a robot arm.

A moment later, another shiny T-nut dropped out of the creature’s ass, followed by a 10k ohm resistor.

Eddie’s expression was that of a man who’d discovered his soulmate. His eyes were dilated until Jeb couldn’t see the color anymore, slightly watery, with a dopey smile on his face.

Ron looked slightly nauseous.

“Don’t be afraid, little guy,” Eddie said, the robot hand dropping the creature into his palm “I’m not gonna hurt you.” He offered the creature another piece of shaved aluminum, which it greedily devoured.

“Your name will be Scrappy, and I will teach you to poop in a bowl.”

“You can’t seriously be considering adopting a monster that literally shits odd and ends?” Ron asked.

“Don’t listen to these naysayers, Scrappy. They don’t understand us.” Eddie cradled the ugly-as-sin trans-dimensional creature close to his chest while feeding it plastic and bits of copper wire.

“I’m fine with it,” Jeb said, backing towards the stairs and washing his hands of the situation entirely. “Just make sure it isn’t dangerous.”

Jeb backed out of the basement and headed back up to his room, keeping his ears perked for any sound of trouble, the smell of smoke or brimstone, anything that might indicate arson or a robot uprising.

So far, so good. Jeb hadn’t mentioned it out loud, but Eddie’s ability to mentally interface with robot programming combined with his outlandish Nerve had made his robots eerily smart.

Bringing it up would make the robots think about their own behavior and place in the universe, and the last thing Jeb wanted was introspective death machines under his orphanage full of superpowered children.

I’m living on top of the world’s biggest powder keg, Jeb thought, shaking his head as he sat on the bed, patting his body with his finger, searching for more Accolades.

The first one hadn’t caused any problems, and he still had plenty of time left in the night. Might as well go for two or three.

“Try behind your ears!” Smartass suggested, eager for more chaos.

Jeb shrugged and probed behind his ears and around the base of his skull, making damn sure he didn’t have any more things sticking out of his skull. R-R-RubU’s Mysteries seemed like something that might be skull-adjacent.

Thankfully, Jeb didn’t find anything more embedded in his skull.

“Now your teeth!”

Jeb raised a brow.

“You gotta be sure, don’t you?”

Jeb really didn’t want to discover something squirming around in his mouth in the fifth dimension. The thought alone sent prickles up his spine as every hair stood on end.

He took a deep breath and put his finger in his mouth, starting at the right-hand molars and tracing them around until—

Ow!

Jeb reflexively jerked his finger out of his mouth.

There was a straight red line on his finger, gushing blood like he’d just sliced it open on a razor.

“Fuck!” Jeb shouted, scrambling for the nearby desk and wrapping a clean shirt around the wound.

“Wow, I think you nicked a vein!” Smartass said, flitting up close. “Can I see?”

“Get lost!” Jeb shot back, hissing as the sharp pain settled into an agonizing throb in his finger.

Jeb lumbered to his feet, keeping pressure on the wound as he headed for the door of his room.

“I’m probably gonna have to get stit—”

BOOM!

Something popped at least a dozen of Jeb’s FMO (Fast Moving Object) shields, along with his eardrums, and a bunch of the surrounding room.

Jeb staggered backwards, falling on his ass and staring up at the hole in his ceiling while debris rained down on him.

What the hell? A tiny black dot in the sky sailed away from him at maybe a hundred meters per second, disappearing as it arced downward. Jeb could actually see the sky through the hole in the ceiling.

I knew the ceiling was out to get me! Jeb thought as he crawled to his feet, still clenching a fist around his bleeding finger as he stumbled for the door.

“What the hell just happened?” Jeb demanded at the top of his lungs as he threw the door open before returning his hand to his wound. He couldn’t hear a word of it. Outside his room, the orphanage was in disarray.

Bookshelves had been knocked over, toys were scattered everywhere, and there was a bit of wood shrapnel here and there stuck into the wall.

Mrs. Lang, always on the ball, was motioning for the children to evacuate, probably screaming, but Jeb’s ears were ringing too hard.

Evacuation sounded like a good idea to Jeb, though.

He had joined the procession down the stairs to the main lobby, when one of the stairs buckled under Jeb’s weight, sending him toppling to the side.

Still clenching his bleeding finger, Jeb toppled over the railing. He saw a guillotine-shaped piece of a broken standing mirror beneath him. Jeb was too dumbstruck to react as the makeshift blade went right for his neck.

The moment it broke the surface of his skin, the foreign object was caught by one of Jeb’s armor traps and shoved into the floor, shattering the delicate glass into a less dangerous pile.

“Gah!” Jeb hit the ground in the lobby, then picked himself up with telekinesis, not wanting to risk scrambling across broken glass.

Are we under attack or something? Jeb thought as he flew out the door above the stream of children, scanning them to see if anyone was wounded.

Once he was sure nobody was injured, he scanned the surroundings. There was no indication that they were under attack. There were no sword-wielding shitheads or magic users with glowing power around their hands…none of that fantasy bullshit. Just a bunch of wood shrapnel, evacuating children and yellowish smoke from the basement…

Jeb’s eyes widened as the double doors to the storm cellar burst open and he spotted Ron and Eddie being dragged by Buddy the bomb-defusing robot and the mecha-zombie. The two were coughing and shivering like they’d been exposed to some kind of nerve gas.

The fifth-dimensional gremlin in Eddie’s death grip didn’t seem to mind the smoke, and the robots were…robots.

Jeb was going to go see if the two were all right when their brand-new mecha-zombie turned its gaze on Jeb, a single red LED blinking on in its eye, a rule-of-cool decision by Ron.

It saved Jeb’s life.

Jeb held up his palm, fingers splayed wide.

A shield of telekinetic force appeared between him and the borg moments before the zombie robot snapped up an arm with a stripped down P90 submachine gun embedded in it.

Bullets rained against the shield like hail, but Jeb had a hard time hearing them because of his busted eardrums. He could feel ‘em, though.

Buddy’s camera looked between Jeb and the borg before grabbing the creature’s arm and yanking it down, creating a plume of dust in front of the creature and buying Jeb some time to think.

The borg looked down at the bomb-defusing robot and tried to smash it with its other hand, but the robot’s armor was too thick, shrugging off the powerful blows.

Ron can fix it later. It must’ve gone berserk because its master was threatened.

Jeb dropped himself to the ground and reached out with two separate threads of telekinetic Myst, forming them into blades and whipping them through the creature, slicing off the submachine gun hand and the torso, effectively making it a non-threat.

The borg toppled to the ground and seemed confused for a moment by its own lack of legs. Then it tilted its torso toward Jeb, using its remaining arm to carefully…aim its chest cavity at him?

Jeb’s eyes widened as a feeling of impending doom closed in around him, prickling his Myst senses. Dodge!

He threw himself to the ground and rolled an instant before a beam of raw Myst consumed his shield and carried on into the hedge between the orphanage and their neighbor, turning it into a pile of charcoal before Buddy yanked the beam up, possibly saving lives.

Jeb reached into the zombie’s ribcage and ripped out the creature's inner workings, leaving it wiggling angrily, but otherwise harmless.

Why the hell is everything coming after me? Jeb thought, frowning.

A weight he’d grown accustomed to was lifted as Smartass fell off her usual perch on his shoulder, plopping onto the ground in a little plume of dust, demanding his attention.

“I don’t feel so good, Jeb,” she muttered.

Did she breathe in some of that smoke? She’s not shot…. Jeb thought, glancing over at the yellowish smoke billowing from the garage. Smaller creatures feel poison first. It was why they used canaries in mineshafts, after all, but the garage was simply too far away to have poisoned her already.

“Your Impact feels bad,” she said, visibly shrinking just the tiniest bit.

Wait, she IS a canary in a mineshaft, and this IS poison, just not that kind of poison.

Jeb ripped the rag off his finger and spotted a tracework of necrotic black veins crawling around the oozing wound.

My Impact is literally poisoned! Jeb thought, his heart pounding. It stood to reason, if there were ways to add Impact, there were ways to take it away. There was an entire ecosystem on the other side that he couldn’t perceive.

Jeb noticed the unhealthy black veins on his finger stopped right at the ring that served as a tiny gateway between this dimension and the Fate dimension.

Maybe if I take it off, it’ll take the poison out with it. Jeb had to really try hard and inject Myst in order to make something cross over, so maybe he could use it like a filter and physically drag the fifth-dimensional poison out of his finger.

Jeb got his fingers around the blood-slick ring and slid it off over the gash in his finger, hissing as it dragged itself across the wound.

“God…damnit!” Jeb cussed as the thick ring finally came free, scraping the wound as it slid across his finger. He heaved a sigh of relief as he inspected the wound. It no longer sported the disturbing black veins.

“Is that better?” Jeb asked.

Smartass flopped over and tossed her cookies, shrinking a little more.

“Hey bird-lover! Fuck you!” A nearby SUV screeched by, plowing through the front courtyard. The sound of an AR-15 was immediately followed by pained cursing as Jeb’s FMO shield returned the lead projectiles back to sender.

“We know where you live now!” the driver screamed out the window as they plowed through his fence and back out onto the street. “WE KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE!”

That’s not good.

“Mrs. Lang, could you fetch me a pair of pliers? Quick as you can?” Jeb asked, glancing over at the older teacher.

The woman was clutching a bullet wound in her outer thigh.

I guess not.

Pretty sure I’m still Fate-poisoned. I refuse to call it bad luck.

Jeb felt a bump on his side and glanced over, half-expecting giant wasps or eldritch horrors.

Buddy the bomb-defusing robot held out a pair of needle-nose pliers, just small enough to fit through the Appraiser. The robot wiggled them up and down as soon as he saw he had Jeb’s attention.

“Thank you, Buddy, you’re a credit to your species,” Jeb said, slipping the ring over the pliers and opening his mouth.

This is gonna suck.

***Vresh Tekalis***

Vresh tucked her bib in as she waited for Jeb to arrive at her favorite restaurant in Solmnath. Golden light cascaded down from the chandelier above onto the pristine white surface of her table…and beautiful music from live musicians swelled in the background, allowing her to relax into her personal chair.

All that was nice, but it wasn’t why she liked the place so much.

The owner strived to be on the cutting edge of culinary advancement, offering dishes you couldn’t find anywhere else, and adapting new discoveries at a moment’s notice. The first time she’d eaten an Oiled Eel Cake, she’d actually laughed.

“The V.I.P. menu, Ms. Tekalis,” the maître d’ said, bowing as he handed her the list.

“Ooh, gasoline. Sounds exotic. What is it?” Vresh asked, brows rising.

“It’s refined oil humans use to power machines. We’ve found that melas find it tasty, albeit a bit one-note. Its refinement strips most organic flavors from it. We could serve it to you plain as a flaming shot or mix up a cocktail if you wish?”

“I always like to try a shot before a cocktail. I like to know what the underlying flavor is.”

“Of course,” the man said, nodding.

“And to eat?”

“I think something light. A fruit bowl and some sauteed peruha.” The sea monster’s flesh had a nice snap to it.

“And will your companion be joining us soon?” the maître d’ asked, glancing at the empty seat in front of her.

“He better be,” Vresh said, handing the menu back. If Jeb didn’t show up, it would force Vresh to think of a creative prod to force the human to act, which was time and energy she would rather not spend.

“Would you like to order for your guest before he arrives so the food comes out at the same time?”

“What do humans eat?” Vresh asked, frowning. She didn’t actually know what the cold, brown little people ate on a regular basis.

“We’ve developed a menu for humans since the Stitching. It seems that in this part of the continent the standard human fare was pizza, cheeseburgers, burritos and french fries.”

“Fix up one of everything,” Vresh said.

“As you wish, Ms. Tekalis,” the maître d’ said, backing away until he was out of sight.

It wasn’t until shortly after the order had been brought out to their table, and Vresh was starting to feel stood-up that Jebediah Trapper showed up, looking paler than the day before. The man’s clothes were covered in scuffs and tears, along with a few burns and bullet holes. His hand was wrapped in bandages and he sported dark circles under his eyes.

Around his neck, the disheveled human was wearing a leather thong bearing a single porous-looking canine tooth the length of her palm.

The human collapsed into his chair and grabbed the plate of delicately arranged french fries and began eating them with his hands, resting the plate on his chest like a savage.

“You look terrible,” Vresh blurted, taken aback by her deputy’s appearance. They had a dress code. Unfortunately, since he was with a Tekalis, nobody bothered to inform the human.

“I had an interesting night,” Jebediah said between handfuls of salted fried potatoes.

“Your next shot of flaming gasoline, my lady,” the maître d’ said, bringing a ceramic cup of vigorously burning liquid to the table. Jebediah tracked the fire across the room like it was a live serpent, still stuffing his face.

The human’s eyes widened when Vresh threw her head back and downed the burning beverage in a single gulp, exhaling a satisfied plume of fire. She felt a little bit of undeserved satisfaction, impressing the human with such a simple feat.

The human sniffed the air.

“Smells more like diesel. Gasoline vapors are too explosive to serve in a restaurant,” Jebediah said before turning to the maître d’. “These are good. Do you have any ketchup?”