Behind Seymour and the showroom’s main sales counter, four ordinary-looking doors stood side-by-side. The second-from-the-right opened into what had become his own living quarters—Ridley’s former workshop, where he had yet to actually sleep—and where at the moment Penny Amberwine was spending the dayshift doing her whole artificery thing. Beside it, the rightmost door supposedly led to a staircase which descended to the mysterious Ressurectory. He hadn’t been down there at all yet. However, neither of these doors were destinations on he and Thornton’s current itinerary.

  And then there were the pair on the left, which led to the testing chambers and the vault, respectively. They’d visit the testing chambers soon, but prior to that Seymour guided Thornton around the counter and together they stepped inside the door marked ‘VAULT’.

  Customers were permitted to enter if accompanied by staff, because it wasn’t like the vault held mounds of treasure laying around waiting to be stolen or anything. In fact, this was little more than a windowless, stone-walled chamber. And a small one at that, like some kind of jail cell, without any furnishings at all aside from a plain wooden table pressed against the far wall.

  A black, velvety bag sat alone on the tabletop. Not a small bag by any means, closer in size to an oversized purse than a sandwich baggie, with an opening Seymour could have crawled inside like a sleeping bag. The way the black bag was all puddled upon itself on top of the table, it looked completely empty. But Seymour knew that nothing could be further from the truth.

  “Okay, now this is the freaky part.”

  Seymour approached the black bag. Thornton hung back, anxiously crumpling his hat in both hands. The turkey feather was long gone. The mood had suddenly become tense as Seymour sidled up to the table like he was trying to sneak up on a rattlesnake rather than performing a simple task he’d likely be repeating multiple times a day now that he’d been promoted to Sales Dude.

  Eusebio had given Seymour only the briefest introduction to this thing. He was simply supposed to concentrate on the item he wished to retrieve – in this case an Essence of Sprouting. Still wearing his goggles, which were becoming too intoxicating to ever take off, he quickly examined the bag’s details:

  Summoning his courage, Seymour parted the sack’s opening and slipped his hand inside. Immediately, his flesh stung from the biting cold and his entire arm began to tingle up to the elbow. He instinctively realized the bag was attempting to eat him; attempting to pull him in like he was nothing more than another item for sale – but only because that was its nature.

  It’s not evil or anything. There’s nothing malicious in the way it's trying to eat me up. It just is what it is.

  Somehow, that thought settled his nerves as he concentrated on the essence he’d come here to retrieve. In the moment that followed he felt a vial in his hand and quickly withdrew it from the bag.

  “There we are,” he said, holding it up for Thornton to have a look. The Essence of Sprouting sat trapped inside a small vial; a tumbling, pale-green spark like a tiny starburst caught under glass. “And as you can see, my hand is still totally attached to the rest of my body. This couldn’t have gone better – you ready to hit the testing chambers?”

  At that moment, the nervousness fled from Thornton Gring. Suddenly the essence had him completely enraptured, and he stared at it without so much as blinking. He couldn’t form intelligible words so he simply nodded to confirm that he was ready to get on with it. Seymour led him back out of the vault and through the door to its left, which opened into a short, wide hallway.

  Pairs of doors had been set into each side of the corridor, and at the far end stood a small booth, manned by a caramel-skinned man with a shiny bald head. This was the testing chamber attendant who Seymour had yet to meet, though he’d seen him chatting with Eusebio from time to time out on the sales floor.

  He smiled in greeting as Seymour and Thornton entered, revealing rows of teeth so white they were hard to look at. He sat behind a counter, and racks of random merchandise loomed behind him; gear which had been tried on and tested out but which the customers had ultimately decided against purchasing. The salespeople, Seymour among them, were tasked with reshelving all that stuff in their downtime.

  “Good day, gentlemen,” the man said as he rose, revealing his impressive height and a bodybuilder’s physique dressed in a neatly-tailored suit. “How can Leon be of service?”

  “Well, Leon,” Seymour said as he approached, “we need a testing chamber. Mr. Gring here is about to gain his first sigil power. I’m Seymour, by the way, the new shop artificer and sales-dude. I’m from another universe. We haven’t met.”

  Leon smiled. “Very clever, Seymour – that line about being from another universe. How’s that working for you?”

  Seymour blinked. Eusebio had once asked him the same question. “Uh, not bad, actually.”

  Leon gave Seymour a nod like he understood exactly what he meant. Then he retrieved a keystone from behind his counter and held it out for Seymour to take.

  “You’ve done this before, right?” His eyebrow crept up into an arch. “You know what you’re doing.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Seymour lied, reaching to accept the keystone. Leon didn’t release it to him right away, holding it firm with what seemed like no effort at all.

  For a moment he remained frozen like that, demanding Seymour’s eye-contact. Then he eased back with a laugh and let go of the keystone.

  “Chamber One is available.” He waved toward a door marked ONE. “You boys have fun.”

  Seymour led the way and used the keystone to open the door to their designated testing chamber, pausing before entering to hold it open for Thornton.

  “After you.”

  Inside, the walls were entirely coated in more of the liquified crystal that was quickly becoming a familiar sight. It appeared to be the same material used to craft the GLCDs scattered across the showroom—and which Seymour suspected was also present in the lenses of his goggles—but here in the testing chambers it had been put to use on a much larger scale.

  As he and Thornton first entered, they experienced a sort of funhouse effect warping their faces in the wall-to-wall mirror, but after occupying the chamber for only a moment they saw the crystal surfaces ripple like water and then smooth themselves out so that they cast perfect reflections.

  A knee-high, circular platform sat in the center of the room, like a little stage. Thornton stepped up onto it and waited. He looked like a sorta dorky action figure on display in the window of a toy store.

  “So,” he said, “what now?”

  Seymour chuckled. “Just jumped right up there, didn’t you?”

  “Oh, yeah. I guess I got a little carried away. Am I not supposed to be up here?”

  “I honestly don’t know.” He glanced around the chamber for any special instructions, but there were none, only the wall-to-wall, smooth, glass-like crystal. “But it’s obviously the most awesome spot in this room for you to become a druid, so I’m gonna say we roll with it.”

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  Thornton smiled and nodded.

  “I think all that’s left to do then is for you to uncover your purity sigil and for me to just slap this baby on there.” Seymour held the twinkling Essence of Sprouting up between his thumb and forefinger. “And then we’ll see what you get.”

  “Here goes nothing.”

  Thornton pulled his tunic up and off to reveal his Virtue Sigils, all three of which had manifested on his torso. He daintily handed the garment off to Seymour, who simply dropped it on the floor. Thornton’s sigils looked like shimmering tattoos, drawn with white lines so bright that they appeared damn-near luminescent, much more pleasant to look at than any of Seymour’s own, less-than-virtuous sigils.

  Thornton’s Patience depicted a waterfall, carving through boulders over the course of eons. His Diligence was a hand holding a spade, presumably in the act of digging up worms or just about to be. And the Sigil of Purity to which they’d be adding the Essence of Sprouting had manifested in the form of a stylized white dove, drawn on Thornton’s chest, just above his heart. Thornton stood with his arms crossed, looking uncomfortably exposed.

  “Are you ready?” Seymour asked. He offered the vial with the essence inside.

  “Yes,” Thornton replied. “I think I’m ready – but will it hurt?

  “Naw, man – the opposite.” Seymour recalled his own experience receiving an essence and realized he might need to catch Thornton if he struggled to remain upright on the platform. “It’s going to feel good. Really, really, good.”

  “Okay.” Thornton uncrossed his arms so his Purity sigil could be accessed. “But can you do it for me? I’m afraid I’ll do it wrong; drop the essence or something.”

  Seymour shrugged. “Sure, Thor. No problem, but can you like, kneel down for a second or something. I can’t reach all the way up there.”

  Thornton sank to his knees. He squinted at Seymour and turned his head away like it was painful just to look, despite the fact he’d been assured this would be a pleasant ordeal. Seymour could only shake his head.

  The vial had the exact same construction as the one Seymour’s Essence of Invention had been kept in. He drew the cork out and the essence followed, attached to the topper by a thin, sharp, crystalline filament.

  Slipping the now-empty vial into his pocket, Seymour then moved closer to Thornton with the sparkling essence held out. After that, applying the catalyst required only that he make contact between the essence and the sigil, and the moment he did so the dove depicted on Thornton’s flesh came to life.

  First, it turned its beak up to look at Thornton’s face. And then, it turned to look at Seymour. He gasped, and the Sigil of Greed on his palm suddenly tingled unexpectedly. A voice rasped in his mind, whispering over-and-over: choke-choke-choke.

  Does this happen to everyone who helps evolve sigil powers? He wondered. Is it always like this?

  Did Dathon feel something like this when he used the Essence of Invention on Seymour? Had he also heard voices?

  The dove on Thornton’s chest blinked and instantly changed its coloration. Previously brilliant white, its outline had now become swirled with deep, forest green. In the next moment, the dove became inanimate again, but dark green vines crept up to form a border around it.

  “Green has to be a good sign,” Seymour said hopefully. “Right?”

  The vines growing up around Thornton’s sigil became more and more dense, encircling the dove in a vortex of green. Finally, the image ceased its movement. What remained was a dove which was now contained within a cage of green, thorny vines. The distress on its little face was clear; it did not like being caged.

  Well it definitely worked, but it’s creepy as hell, isn’t it?

  He tried to get a sense of how Thornton felt about the changes affecting his sigil, but suddenly his customer’s eyes shone with a green light of their own, as well.

  And then vines began to appear from nothing, sprouting from the stone floor to snake up the crystalline walls. The sheer mass of the vines startled Seymour. The room quickly filled with ropy green vines as thick as his wrist. It was quickly becoming a jungle in here. Seymour obviously couldn’t be sure, but his gut told him that the effect seemed very powerful for a brand new, neophyte-ranked sigil ability. In the next moment, his catalogoggles registered the spell:

  It definitely seemed like an impressive spell to Seymour, and judging by the last line of text his goggles had spit out it was an entirely new and unique power, as well.

  “Thor! Damn, bud, that’s a strong power.” He stooped to retrieve Thornton’s tunic. “And my goggles here say you’re the first to ever unlock it. Pretty cool, right?”

  Thornton didn’t reply right away. His face was bunched up, and he was frowning. Then his eyes began to radiate an even deeper green glow, nearly black. A moment later, the same eerie light began to seep up smoke-like from all three of his sigils. Seymour felt a little scared but put on a brave face and smiled at his customer, nonetheless.

  And then a tooltip appeared in the corner of his vision, written not on the goggles but this time in his mind’s eye:

  Seymour didn’t let on that anything was amiss, but he knew what those four little words meant: Thornton had evolved a class. And owing to Seymour’s influence it would be a Hero Class—whatever that really meant–and in the future when his sigil powers ranked up Seymour would somehow receive a sum of gold coins.

  “Alright, man! We did it! That’s a class evolution if I’ve ever seen one.” He paused, still covering his eyes. “And I guess it's actually only the second I’ve ever seen, too, after my own. But still, the point stands.”

  Thornton began to spasm and twitch and he slumped right off the platform. Seymour couldn’t see well enough to catch him on account of the green and black smokescreen leaking out from his sigils, so it was a stroke of luck that the entire floor was still covered in a carpet of lush, leafy vines to break his fall. By the time Seymour could reach Thornton and help to right him, the green smoke had mostly dissipated.

  Thornton sat with his back against the raised platform, face slick with sweat. Seymour knelt beside him, a steadying hand on his shoulder. He felt for this kid – it had been an emotional morning by any world’s standards.

  “You okay?” he finally asked when Thornton’s breathing had slowed back to normal and the vines swarming the chamber had finally begun to wither and recede.

  Thornton looked at him and Seymour shrank back. The kid had tears in his eyes.

  He climbed to his feet, still bare-chested, and projected his status panel:

  Could that be a brand new class, too? Seymour wondered. Shit, it has to be right? ‘Apocalyptic Gardener’?

  “What do you think?” Thornton wondered. He wrung his hands and Seymour passed him his tunic. “Have you ever seen anything like an Apocalyptic Gardener before?”

  “Can’t say I have. But what do you think? That’s what’s really important.”

  “It’s not what I expected. I guess I’m not sure what I expected.”

  “Well you wanted something to control your enemies, and this Aggressive Reforestation power sure fits the bill. And it’s actually really strong, too – plus versatile.” Seymour paused. He didn’t get the sense he was doing much to soothe Thornton’s concern. “I think it’s probably super uncommon for a Purity sigil to spit out powers with multiple uses like this, you know? Both offensive and defensive. I was under the impression actually that Purity was all about doing one thing and doing it well.”

  “Something about all of this doesn’t seem entirely druid-like, though, does it?” Thornton stood studying his own status panel, which remained hanging in the air. “For instance, what’s the deal with the boost in effectiveness in urban areas? Shouldn’t a druid—a Hero Class druid, whatever that means—be more attuned to nature?”

  “Yeah, that’s some weird shit, for sure. But hear me out: I actually think it might wind up being a good thing if you want to be a treasure hunter.” Seymour explained, “Like, wouldn’t it make sense if the dungeon instances under Vol’kara are designated as urban zones? Seems to me that pretty much any place that occupies a large enough area and was built intentionally should activate your boost; dungeons, castles, haunted crypts and whatnot. Sure, every now and then you’ll probably find a cult hiding out in a natural cave system or the tunnels left in the wake of an enormous worm or something, but mostly the work of an adventurer gets done inside dungeons, right? And what’s more urban than a freaking dungeon?”

  “I’m sorry,” Thornton squawked, suddenly pekid. His family business had come hurtling to the forefront of his mind. “Did you say something about an ‘enormous worm’?”