Selen didn't remember much of the next few hours. She did remember seeing something nasty outside the city walls. Then having a bucket by her bed the next morning and retching into it, then spending the next morning muttering about being a boneless chicken. The noise of the upstairs office was unbearable and they soon dragged her out of bed and made her sort papers. Meteor showed little sympathy as he made her get up on the tavern roof next door for some flying practice. Sunflare was a fellow student for that but too droopy to say anything useful.

And then two days later Meteor made them do it all again. There were a lot of bars in this city. They were in a Vulin bar, smelling of fox musk, listening to Meteor tell stupid stories while patrons heckled him. They played darts against a Human with a score handicap for his kind's deadly aim.

Then, inexplicably, Selen found herself on a shaking suspension bridge over lava.

She'd slumped over to one side and the boards creaked, startling her awake. She stood in a narrow passage between stone platforms, with something growling in the distance behind her. The light from below jabbed her in the eyes. She staggered forward, clutching the rope handholds.

On a ledge, she caught her breath. "How'd I get here?" The way ahead was a stepping-stone path of pillars, but as she watched, blunt spears jabbed out from the wall. Not wanting to question it right now, she timed her first jump and staggered, catching the pillar's edge. She flailed and jumped again, overshot, and plunged screaming into the lava.

It thudded and shook like a drum. The heat rippled through her feathers and seared her eyes. A damage notice flashed blurrily in her vision. The light came from something fire-red beneath a net she'd landed on. She blinked. Now somebody was shouting -- several people, from a concealed window high along the wall. A hidden door clicked open and a man walked out holding a pole to grab.

Selen hung on and got hoisted up to sprawl on the stone, next to the bridge and the spear traps. A staircase stood exposed where her rescuer had come in. "Didn't think you'd get that far, kid. Stand up."

Selen took his hand and was halfway up the stairs with him before dimly recalling what was going on. "Dungeoneers' Guild?"

"Go home and sleep it off."

They reached a lounge with a bar and a bunch of tables looking down on a "dungeon" of pitfalls and mechanical hazards. Meteor was there, drinking water from one of the narrow-necked glasses meant for Aves. Sunflare was slumped over with something stronger, but Meteor shook him and said, "All right, lad, your turn at glory!"

The red bird got up and headed for the door Selen had used, but Meteor steered him toward some other entrance. Selen leaned against a chair and laughed weakly. From the window overlooking the lava hall she saw swinging blades and a freestanding door chained shut. "An escape room! Used to do those. Did I get over that ramp?"

"You looked like you forgot you can fly," said one of the patrons, a surprisingly burly Elf with hair like gnarled vines.

She spotted Sunflare down there, flapping over a wall but banging into it. She winced.

Meteor tapped her shoulder. "Get the skill yet?"

"The what?"

Meteor nudged her toward a Human who quizzed her: "Recite the spell elements." Meteor himself focused on watching poor Sunflare.

Selen squinted. There was a point to being out here. Drinking so she could get more magic and stuff. "Fire, steel, hydrogen, oxygen --"

"What nonsense is that? Try again."

The skill was to resist alcohol, not collapse from it. Selen thought back to a very different bar, in another world, but shook her head. "Fire, ice, wind, stone, light, dark, sound, lightning." Eight in all. Was that more limiting than ninety-two or so, or less?

[Skill gain: Resist Alcohol (Sanity).]

"Oh good," she said, and remembered nothing more that night.

#

The point of all that, she got reminded too early the next morning, was to get her feathered butt to the temple and meditate. She was in no condition for it but Meteor made her march around for practice, talking loudly about war or something. Selen finally was awake enough to sit down on a cushion and focus.

Her formal profile of powers flashed before her eyes, though it took effort to concentrate on. Her three listed Sanity skills vanished and earned her a note of [Sanity +1!] Her new set of stats read:

[

Physical: None

Mental: Learning 1, Wits 1, Sanity 2

Social: Charm 1

Health: 25/25

Mana: 35/45

Stamina: 35/45

]

On the way out she saw a bedraggled Sunflare being ushered in to do the same thing. "Got it?" he asked her.

She bobbed her head. "So you have to do that even harder to keep raising it?"

"Yeah. Your uncle's scary even when he's partying."

"I'm gonna focus more on other stats next time."

#

She had earned more Mana and Stamina from that convoluted upgrade. The effect was that she could now leap from the fourth-floor balcony of her home tower and, between the point of Flight skill and the extra resources and the Slowfall power, make it safely to the ground. In theory. Any minute now when she was ready.

Meteor had to push her.

On the ground a little later, he listened calmly to her string of squawking curses. "Wow, I never heard some of those before." He spread his wings. "Listen, fledgling, the gods gave you wings and Slowfall. If you know what you're doing and you're sober, you can survive almost any drop. If you're scared, practice more."

Her cheeks burned, but the soldier-bird was right. "Fine." She trudged back upstairs and, eventually, let herself fall. She even relied more on the gliding this time to save Mana.

#

The rest of spring went by quickly. Uncle Meteor came and went, she kept up delivery runs of the city's mail, and she practiced to gain skill points. Learning was going to be her next buy, supposedly making her smarter and better at magic. It was a little scary to think that the System had hooked into her brain somehow and already made her more "sane" and better at things like focusing her attention. Could she become a superhuman genius by maxing the mental stats out? Maybe she'd start dyeing her pale owlish feathers black and calling herself Raven.

Moonlit was her nickname, and it didn't surprise her family that like her original identity, she tended to stay up late. But old-Selen had read maybe six books in total, whatever expensive hand-copied tomes Aunt Tradewind had in stock at various times and was willing to trust her with. And one of those had been a romance novel that Selen now borrowed "again" and found confusing. Her former self had apparently loved it.

She'd been doing math to prove her usefulness to the Knowledge Society, without needing special recognition from the System. She impressed Zahar, the fox Engineer, by using algebra to explain the basic calculations for aiming catapults. That in itself was nothing new to him, but her approach and terminology were unique. So was Descartes' concept of "graphing" equations, something that this culture just hadn't hit on yet. The word she'd introduced for calculus meant something like "stacking pebbles", much like the original term, except that here it was an idiom for "child's play". She was pleased to have added a pun to the language. She was close to the limit of both her knowledge and interest in math, though, and would seem to burn out young like many an Earth mathematician.

But now, she had access to the main library! With Zahar's approval she'd moved up from being a tolerated street urchin, to being trusted to walk into the big collection and not swipe anything. It was a decadent lounge by pre-electric standards. The room smelled of leather. It held the remains of some nobleman's furniture including plush chairs meant for tails, a huge dining table, rugs, a fireplace, and a bust of a stern-looking Vulin man. (Not one of Zahar's family; the Society itself owned the building.) Chandeliers held glowing gems. The book collection itself had disappointed Selen a bit, but it still filled three tall bookcases and had one of those sliding ladders. The full set was worth a fortune.