I recovered my broken phone from the ground and held it up. The screen was cracked as well as any number of tiny parts inside. I had no clue how to fix it, but still didn’t want to leave it. “Not even close,” I said, “we make stuff like this. We call this technology. I guess you could say it’s our magic.”

Ferrith nodded appreciably. “Is that your Skill then? To make this ‘technology’? What other kinds of things can you make? No offense intended, but a shiny rectangle that breaks if something steps on it doesn’t seem very impressive.”

I put my broken phone in my pocket. “No, I can’t make technology. It’s really complicated. I just use it. You still never told me what a Skill is or how it’s different from a Brand, but if it’s a type of magic, I promise I don’t have one.”

Ferrith waved me off towards the next harpy corpse while we talked. I noticed he’d taken the role of merely inspecting feathers while I fetched them, which was fine as long as he kept answering my questions while he did it. “Of course you have a Skill,” he said casually. “Everyone does. It’s just… the thing you can do. Like how I summon ogres. That Fireball Brand you saw me use? That was somebody’s Skill once too. That’s all a Brand is, a copy of someone else’s Skill. You can buy them from a Broker; they’re useful, but not unique like my ogre summoning Skill. Everyone has a Skill. I’ve even summoned ogres before that had their own Skills. It’s kind of annoying when I do, though, since they usually end up running off once they realize I can’t take them home.”

“So they do ask to go home sometimes!”

“Well sure,” Ferr admitted, “the ones with Skills do anyway. You only get a Skill if you’re smart enough. That’s how I know you have one. The intelligence needed to communicate with language is basically a guarantee that you’ll have a Skill.”

I handed Ferr the next bundle of harpy feathers. “Well we don’t get those on Earth,” I said. “So I don’t have one.”

Ferrith glanced up from his feather inspection. “You’re not getting this. You do have a Skill. I guarantee it. You’re in Earris now. Everyone in Earris has a Skill. If you didn’t have one before, you do now. That’s how I know. That exact thing has happened to… I don’t know, ten? Yeah, I think you’re the eleventh ogre I’ve summoned that can talk. It doesn’t happen very often, but there’d have to be something severely wrong with you if you didn’t have one.”

“Can you maybe stop referring to me as an ogre?” I asked. “I’m a human. A human from Earth. We actually have stories of ogres where I’m from and believe it or not most of them aren’t that far off these ones,” I said, waving my hands towards the two ogres still standing. It looked like one of them was trying to eat the fallen tree. I had no idea if that was normal behavior for an ogre. Ferrith didn’t seem to care though, and considering he was the expert I decided not to point it out.

Ferrith pointed to the next harpy, which was firmly held in the cold dead hands of one of his ogres. I approached it and got to plucking, making sure to focus on the feathers and not the dead creature they were attached to. I’d carved turkey carcasses before, so I just tried to think of it like that. “Sure, I’ll call you a human… if I remember,” Ferrith promised pretty noncommittally. “I had an ogre one time that insisted I call him an orgkin. Funny guy. He was smaller, like you, but you’re definitely the smallest yet.”

“How lucky,” I remarked in dry sarcasm I’m sure went over Ferrith’s head. “So how do I find out what Skill I have, if I do in fact have one?”

Ferrith grunted as I handed him off a few more feathers. “I dunno. You should just have a sort of instinct about how to activate it. That’s how it usually works.”

I paused. “Really? That’s it? I should just have an instinct? You don’t have any other tips than that?”

“Skills can be really different depending on how they work. You can’t expect someone else to know how your Skill works. If you have a passive Skill, trying to activate it won’t do anything.”

“Passive?” I asked. “Wouldn’t that mean it’s already active? How would I not notice that?”

Ferrith looked at me more closely. “Well you do look kind of sickly. Maybe that’s your Skill.”

“You’re kidding! You mean I could come to another world full of magic and gain a new magical power that just… gives me cancer? I had that before I got here!”

“Look, I’m just an adventurer. I don’t have all the answers. Either you have a Skill you can activate or you don’t. If you can’t figure out what it is I can take you to see the local Power Broker when we get to Haemir. They have Brands that can identify your Skill.”

“Whoa there, hold on,” I said. “That was too many words I don’t understand. You lost me there. Is Haemir where we’re going?”

“It’s the largest city for 27.32 miles,” Ferrith said. “That’s where I got the contract to take out this harpy nest.”

I was sort of impressed with how precisely Ferrith was apparently familiar with the local geography, but decided to not comment on it in case that just revealed my own ignorance. I didn’t need to give the guy more reasons to draw comparisons between myself and the mentally deficient ogres. “Okay,” I said, “and before that you called yourself an adventurer… is that like your job?”

“Oh, right,” Ferrith said. He reached into the neck of his shirt, under his ocean-blue scale armor, and pulled out a large metal medallion. He held it up for me to see. It was a sort of burnished gold color and had an upward-facing sword embossed on it, with wings spreading out where the cross guards ought to be. “I’m a professional adventurer. Bronze rank, registered with the guild and everything. They give me dangerous contracts that would kill most people and I get paid to complete them.” His rank impressed me only when I considered that in this world a mere bronze adventurer had a small army of ogres at his beck and call; I could only imagine what a gold tier might be able to do.

“You mean you get paid to order your ogres to complete them?” I corrected him with a cynical emphasis I immediately regretted.

Thankfully, Ferrith just laughed it off. “You’re sounding a bit concerned with ogre exploitation for someone that claims not to be one. But really… me? My ogres? It doesn’t matter, as long as the job gets done. My ogres would just sit around picking their buttholes if I didn’t tell them what to do.” He jerked a thumb to the side. “Case in point.” The ogre that had been eating a tree a few minutes ago was now in the process of puking half-chewed wood and mud on the ground. “Stop eating!” Ferrith told it. I could tell it heard his command only because it stopped trying to shove more food in its mouth even as it continued to gag. That had been the other injured ogre that was still on its feet, the red-skinned one seemed to have a bit of a better head on its shoulders—which it demonstrated by choosing not to eat trees and mud until it was literally puking. The bar for ogre behavior, it seemed, was quite low.

“Yeah, I get it,” I said as I squished through the mud to the next harpy corpse. I was really going to have to do something about shoes pretty soon. The soft mud was fine for now, but I didn’t have calluses. If I tried to walk through a grassy field for a few hours my feet would become a bloody, blistery mess. “So can you explain more about Brands now?” I asked. “Where I come from that means a mark you burn into your skin.”

“That’s right,” Ferr said. “That’s kind of what they are.” I looked back at him. He started to undo one of the clasps holding the armor on his arm in place. “Give me a second and I’ll show you a few of mine.”