I pushed the door to the first floor open, and was treated to an image of total devastation. Swaths of desks were reduced to ash, and many nearby were burning merrily. As soon as I crossed the threshold into the office floor, my nose was assaulted with ash and char, with a faint undertone of roast chicken. Joe had a campfire set up at the far side of the floor, near the closed door to the executive suite. The sprinklers were active, but their coverage was so poor, and the water flow so meager, that they were making no difference. Joe waved at us from across the large room, and we started picking our way across the desolation.

“How’d you do that mental attack, anyway? Some item from that final office?” I asked as we made our way over. “No one went past us while we were chatting in the stairwell, so that guy is probably still up there in the crystal vestibule.”

She froze momentarily, glancing behind us. The door we had come in from had already shut, and there was nothing to see.

“We spoke for several minutes, and Adrian did not follow me. There is no other way down, save for leaping from the edge, and we would not be so lucky that he would choose that,” she said, pulling out a small plastic rectangle from her waistband and holding it out toward me. I noticed that she had a gold band on her middle finger on the same hand. She continued, “I found only this ring, and an old style credit card. Nothing obviously magical, like your folder. I have nothing to explain this, unless either of the two is hiding its function from us.”

“In that case… I think it’s a facet of your power,” I summoned and brandished the folder as I spoke, “I just read the part here about powers, and it said that our type of power can be broadened in scope through introspection.”

I banished the folder and turned to continue moving toward Joe’s camp, weaving around the area covered by the sprinklers and speaking as we walked. I used my power to store whatever looked even vaguely useful and was within my arm’s reach. Ink pots, pens, notebooks, even a stubby looking silver knife (which, upon closer inspection inside my inventory, turned out to not actually be all that sharp). I hadn’t run into anything even vaguely resembling a capacity limit, just a transfer size limit, and even that had expanded greatly as I used my power. Why waste this opportunity to improve?

“I think our type of power is more loosely defined and conceptual,” I speculated, “I think maybe you severed my train of thought.”

“Interesting,” she said, “but you seemed to recover very quickly. Was it just because I was not… ‘aiming’ at you?” she asked.

“No, using my power seemed to end the effect. It seems like we’ve got a lot more work to do than people who picked the other power types. Or possibly we just have extra options.”

Lindsey frowned at that, “Yes. I wished to pick the easy option so I would not need to think about this game so much. So much for that plan.”

“That’s how it goes sometimes,” I said. I could feel the heat from Joe’s bonfire on my skin as we walked up to where he stood. As we got closer, the scent of cooked bird overwhelmed the smell of ash.

“Joe,” I called out, “this is Lindsey, the person I agreed to help out. Lindsey, this is Joe, my coworker, and also recently a dinosaur.”

He stood and turned towards us as I made introductions, offering a clawed hand to Lindsey.

“Good to meet you,” he said, shaking her entire hand with two of his clawed digits, “Will said you picked a power like he did, so having you assist us will be really helpful. So far we haven’t seen anyone but the two of you running around as humans, so we suspect that everyone else picked the first two power options. Not that your people or the Chinese have been lining up for us to count...”

“It could be that, when presented with a choice of any power one wishes, it is difficult to relinquish that decision. Unless one simply doesn’t know what they want,” she said.

Joe turned to me, extracting his clawed hand. He pointed at Lindsey and said, “I like her, she sounds all wise and dignified.” He turned back to her and asked, “You at least got something good, right?”

Suddenly a sliver of the claw he was pointing with was no longer attached to the rest, separated by a perfectly flat plane.

“Yep, that is definitely a good one,” Joe said, examining his claw.

The severed fragment bounced soundlessly on the brown carpet, and I reached down to scoop it up. There were obvious growth layers where the claw fragment had been cut. I furrowed my brow and showed the flat side to Joe.

“Look at this. This looks indistinguishable from something natural. They have biochemistry or some emulation of it working - I was embarrassed earlier and could feel my face heat up. The wood from the broken desks, things seem to break in a natural way. The fire even looks and feels right, and look at this!”

I moved up next to Joe’s fire, and pointed at the various charred birds arranged nearby.

“Those you obviously killed with your powers, but those...”

I indicated the ones with their feathers removed, suspended over the fire on long pieces of wood that Joe had obviously shaped for the purpose.

“You are literally cooking. You are doing it manually, assuming you haven’t picked up a cooking skill while I wasn’t looking,” Joe shook his head, “and I don’t see any cut corners anywhere. None anywhere! This pretty much confirms it.” I was becoming more and more agitated with what I was seeing, and what it seemed to point to.

“Confirms what?” asked Lindsey, lacking the context to follow along.

“The physics simulation here is too good. Any shortcuts they are using are either below the level of human perception, or hidden cleverly enough that none of us have spotted anything yet, and Joe and I are trained to spot that sort of thing. The only candidate for a cut corner I have seen yet is the blurred text, which doesn’t seem like it actually saves any computation. Even the bodies despawning seems to happen as the game sees fit, instead of being a technique to save processor time. Joe ran into the same birds we fought yesterday, and the blood and some previous bodies were still around. Until we can get our hands on a microscope, or a magical equivalent, we won’t be finding anything useful by looking into the mundane substance of this world.” I explained.

“A magical microscope...” Joe said. He seemed to be thinking something over. After a moment he continued, “or someone with microscope powers.”

“Maybe,” I said, “but the skills they get might not do what we need. We’d need someone who can pick the third option and end up with microscope or other perception-type powers, if we really wanted to dig down. Not something we just ask management for when the next wave of keys comes out, and even if we could guarantee the right power would come out, I doubt they would agree. They are clearly going hard on combat power for farming keys, once we find where they drop, so would they really sacrifice some portion of that just to potentially find physics glitches that might not even lead to any actionable exploits?”

“Yeah, you’re right.” Joe seemed to deflate. It had been a good idea, just not quite practical. Also not our area of focus. I loved a good physics exploit as much as the next guy, surfing on stop signs straight into the sky because of bad collision code, or running above the tops of trees when leaf hitboxes ended up way too big by mistake, but Dreamshards seemed too well made for any of that.

Joe bent down to retrieve a skewer. The bird appeared to be a little burnt on the side where it had been nearer to the fire, but the other side looked cooked to perfection, like the rotisserie chickens I had recently seen in the commissary on my floor of the arcology. He held it out to Lindsey, who took it with a nod. She shaved a slice off with her power, and popped it into her mouth.

“Ah, it’s hot! Good though.”

Joe just looked at the fire where he had just pulled it from and chuckled.

“Where’d you learn how to do all this, Joe?” I asked.

“My folks had a farm, back in the old days. Raised pheasants.” He said.

“Wait, had a farm?” I asked, shocked. Then, realizing my mistake, said, “I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking.”

“You are sorry? Why?” asked Lindsey.

“It’s no problem Will, the past is the past,” he said to me. He turned to Lindsey, “where we’re from, it isn’t polite to talk about the days before the arcologies were raised, especially where families from outside the metro core are concerned. Will must have forgotten my, ahem, advanced age. Probably because of my handsome new body.”

She sat there for a moment before she responded, “I think I am learning more about the Americas than our new neighbors. I always imagined that you lived much the same as we did, but with more land between cities.”

Joe and I looked at eachother, not entirely sure how to respond to that.

“We should get moving,” I said. Cultural exchange was definitely not what I was here for.

“Hold on,” Joe said, “I want the experience from these ones where I disturbed the bodies, I am close to level three. It should only be a minute.”

I looked at him, confused. I was about to question him when he spoke again.

“Ah, there it goes,” he said.

I looked around and noticed that the charred corpses had started to disintegrate into glowing fragments. Unlike the last time I saw them, they weren’t drifting about freely. They were instead being drawn to Joe as if he were a magnet. I held my hand up to intercept one, the shard passed cleanly through. No resistance and only the faintest tingle.

“This is how you get experience? Always after the bodies despawn?” I asked, pointing at a shard as it was drawn to Joe.

“Yeah,” he said, “Works from reasonably far, but no reason to take chances. Can you see the experience?”

I nodded, and looked at Lindsey, who nodded too.

“Damn, you guys don’t get a lot of the game mechanics, but you can see the stuff behind them. How does that make any sense?”

I shrugged and said, “maybe we just need to learn to do everything manually.”

I reached out to a passing piece of experience, and tried to pull it into my inventory. It felt wrong, in some vague and intangible way, but it seemed to work. The glowing shard disappeared, and appeared in the void inside me. Nothing more seemed to happen. It just floated around listlessly. I looked up to see Lindsey eyeing the stream of glowing fragments as well. I thought I could feel her invisibly reach out with her power, but it was a subtle feeling and I couldn’t be certain if I was imagining it or not. In any case, she didn’t seem to be having any effect at all on the ethereal objects. I grabbed a small handful of the glowy bits, adding them to my inventory, and stepped back to watch.

We waited a minute or so for Joe to absorb his bounty. Having to wait for experience seemed like a really dumb mechanic. What purpose could it possibly serve? As the stream of experience was turning into a trickle, I saw a burst of golden light from Joe. There was definitely a clear shape within. I could see things shifting around, the shape changing somehow, but the glow faded before I got a good look.

“Level three?” I asked.

“Level three,” Joe confirmed. His reptilian eyes grew unfocused, probably looking at his game interface. After about a minute, he spoke again, “No more upgrades for Incinerate for now. There is an interesting upgrade for Flashfire, my area attack, that makes it skip allies as well as grant them fire resistance. I will probably need to take that sooner or later, especially once we find a way to meet up with people in the other towers. That said, I think I see a combination that I can’t resist… here, watch.”

[Stoke Flames] he intoned. Here, inside the game, I could hear the power in his words. They resonated in a way that wasn’t captured at all in the footage he had shown me in the office.

The campfire nearby surged into a roaring inferno, rapidly burning through the pile of desk debris that fueled it. Joe turned towards it and stepped forwards, disappearing entirely. I looked around and spotted him standing near another fire, a dozen or so feet away.

“Some kind of elemental teleportation?” I asked.

He grinned his terrifying crocodile grin and nodded, “every bit as great as I suspected.”

“Good,” I said, “we can throw that at the barrier on the tenth floor. Probably won’t work, since the game gave it to you relatively early, but worth a try.”

I turned to start back to the stairwell when I felt a tug. I felt like I was forgetting something. I turned back, looking at the one remaining closed door.

“Actually, let’s take out the boss, and pick up any loot from the other offices. We need as much gear as we can get. Backpacks or something at least, unless you guys want me to carry anything interesting we find. Lindsey, come with me. You need to exercise your power, since that is how we can grow. Joe, want to go ransack the other offices?”

“Sure,” he said, moving towards the nearest open office, “but I don’t know if you’ll find another boss. It hadn’t respawned yet when I checked yesterday. Your power might have done something weird when you stole the entire boss.”

I shrugged. I moved up to the door, Lindsey following closely. I turned to her and stepped aside.

“Right,” I said, “Lesson learned from yesterday. This time you are going to open the door, and tear the thing up with your power when it charges you. I’ll stand by in case you need help.”

She nodded and got into position in front of the door. I stood ready, just to the side, a summoned golf club now rested in my hands. She opened the door, and it was just like the first time.

[NICOBAR PIGEON EXECUTIVE]

The bird sitting on the desk looked functionally identical to the one I had seen the night before. Something inside me recoiled in disgust at the hideous and imperfect usurper in the office, but before I could dissect that thought the bird was already in motion. Lindsey wasted no time in extending her power forward, and cuts began to rapidly appear across its body. The first few cuts barely shaved off feathers, but by the time it had crossed the distance its head had been roughly removed from its body. The entire neck and upper torso were bloody ruins, my companion’s precision likely reduced greatly by the lack of time to focus. The result was pretty horrifying, but I was having trouble looking away. I was caught between a strange sort of sympathy and an alien smugness.

“I think having the boss pigeon in my inventory is affecting my mind,” I said.

I had been about to suggest that I could bring it out for her to kill as well, when I was met with a burst of fear followed by indignation.

[NEW OFFICE GROWTH POTENTIAL] it sent.

It was true, I had offered it an office in my inventory. I acted out of desperation at the time, but I didn’t want to immediately resort to betrayal and risk my powers somehow developing in that direction. There was still too much I didn’t know about how conceptual powers develop and I wasn’t entirely certain what my theme even was yet. That said, I really didn’t like the idea of things influencing my thoughts.

As soon as I had that thought, I felt the pigeon’s mind recede and cease to overlap mine, leaving behind a tinge of uncertainty and a lingering desire for the furniture in the executive office I was standing at the entrance to. Now that I had noticed it, I found that I could inspect the pigeon’s mind in its entirety while it was in my inventory, no different than how I could inspect the physical aspects of stored objects. Its mind was mostly composed of the three axioms it had thrown at me when I first tried to store it, with scattered bits and pieces of personality and a few other things that I struggled to understand. I didn’t see anything that was obviously objectionable after a few minutes of sifting, just a desire to survive and to have a nice office. Maybe a few minion pigeons to lord over. I also now knew how to isolate its influence, so I didn’t see the harm in leaving it be for the moment. Maybe this was an avenue for expanding what my power could do?

I pulled my focus back out of my inventory, and found things to be just how I left them. Apparently, time in my inventory happened at a much faster rate than in the outside world.

“What?” Lindsey asked. It took me a moment to remember what I had said.

“Nevermind,” I said, “it’s probably fine.”