Seymour dreamed of blood.

  Drowning in an entire ocean of hot, sticky blood. Desperately bobbing, he fought and failed to keep his head above the surface. His clothes quickly became saturated to the point of bogging him down. The blood plastered his hair to his head like a helmet made of wet, flayed skin. It seeped wet and thick and hot into his ears and nostrils. It caked his eyes shut and he swallowed panicked mouthfuls deep down into his lungs. Soon, he could no longer distinguish between the blood within him and the blood without.

  And it was straight up glorious; close as he’d ever come to a religious experience.

  He awoke in the middle of a coughing fit, lying face-down on his cot. The room was still lit by the flickering touch-candle he’d failed to turn off before passing out for the night. And Jerome the cactus was still over there across the room, too, sitting on the workbench, right where he’d cracked his way out of the Blank Slate Tea Service like a baby chick who had doubled in size after its first full meal. In a disorienting way, it took Seymour by surprise to see that the cactus was still there. The entire night before now felt more than a little bit like a dream.

  “No,” he whispered. “Normal people might dream of finding a sapient cactus in a teacup, but not you. You dreamed of drowning in a goddamned ocean of goddamned blood. And you liked it. Sicko.”

  He had collapsed into bed still wearing his work clothes from the day before. Spots of blood speckled the cuffs of his shirt, and the entire outfit was creased and crumpled all over from having been slept in.

  The dream continued to haunt his thoughts as he finally peeled himself off his cot. It wasn’t so much the blood and the drowning, but moreso the way he now felt certain that he’d been enjoying it. That was the most troubling part. He’d felt an almost sexual gratification while the blood enveloped his whole body, and the state of his anatomy upon awakening seemed to confirm as much.

  It seemed obvious to Seymour that the cactus was the cause of his wet nightmare, and yet he felt nothing but warmth and positivity when he reminded himself of the fact that he now shared a blood pact with the spiny little succulent.

  He crossed the room to his workbench and leaned in and studied Jerome more closely. Did he hear a tiny snoring sound, almost like a fly buzzing in regular intervals? Stupidly cute. He chuckled softly, touching his candle twice to turn it off before quietly exiting his chambers, like a father sneaking away after putting his infant child to bed. Like a proud cactus daddy.

  Seymour shook his head and laughed. “Dude. You have got to get a grip.”

  It was time to go to work.

  Over the following week, Seymour began to settle into a comfortable—and consistently busy—work routine. To start his days he stuck strictly to the showroom, helping stem the early, opening rush that always turned the place into a retail magic madhouse.

  For the most part he simply helped check customers out at the counters and familiarized himself with the sales floor. Whenever anyone approached him asking for help to locate a specific item or section, Seymour led them there personally, even if he himself had to first ask one of his coworkers for directions. In this way, he began to better learn the lay of the land and how to navigate the thousands of items displayed in the showroom. He began to achieve a level of comfort and familiarity in the loud, busy space, which in turn fostered a sense of normalcy.

  But the other major task he kept finding himself assigned to was helping un-classed customers apply catalyst to their sigils – and that never felt normal. Because every single time Seymour touched a catalyst to the sigil of someone who had yet to evolve any sort of class, his Nepotism class trait would activate, awarding the customer with a unique hero class like Thornton Gring’s Apocalyptic Gardener and his own Invisible Hand of the Market.

  So far his favorites he’d helped evolve included a Nocturnal Emitter—a wizard-type whose evocations became much more powerful at night—and a Metalhead which was basically a bard whose songs sheathed he and his teammates’s bodies within bright silver form-fitting metal skin like Colossus from the X-Men, in addition to whatever other effects they’d normally convey.

  Word had quickly spread, and with every passing day an increasing number of customers came to the shop solely to request that he be the one to perform their catalyst applications:

  “Not that they’ve been asking for you by name, mind you.” Eusebio explained, “but rather, they say things like, ‘I hear you have a weird Riftborn doling out weird classes’.”

  Even as his special touch with catalysts continued to increase his workload day-by-day, come mid-morning he could usually find some time to sneak upstairs to snag a takeaway brunch from Gordon’s cafe. No matter what he tried, every dish that came out of that kitchen stimulated his tastebuds in surprising ways, almost as if he’d been eating all wrong his entire life. Finding a favorite had so far proven impossible.

  Opting away from the cafe’s patio, he instead took his meals back downstairs to enjoy in the relative peace and quiet of his semi-private quarters, where without fail he’d find Penny Amberwine laboring away at her repairs. He quickly made it a practice to bring an extra plate of food down for her, too, and suspected that if he hadn’t then she wouldn’t eat at all during her shifts. The girl’s focus on her work bordered on full-blown obsession, though she would at least take short breaks with Seymour to scarf down the morsels he offered.

  He couldn't deny that he felt some attraction toward her. Her skin and eyes, those freckles, the bright red hair and its twisty-little curls – she looked like a princess from a cartoon. But more than the physical attraction, which he could at least begin to dismiss as the result of having been celibate since arriving on Heschia, he found her expertise as an artificer and the fact that she seemed completely disinterested in him damned near irresistible.

  But his attempts to flirt with the work-obsessed girl had so far been met with nothing more than polite smiles on her part. Most of the time she seemed completely oblivious to the fact he was showing that kind of interest in her, though she did at least seem genuinely grateful to have food delivered to her in the workshop so that she could stay on task.

  “Thank you.” Penny took her plate over to her workbench, barely pausing her repair project long enough to have a nibble here and there.

  Seymour plopped onto his cot with his plate in his lap. “So, this is where the magic happens.”

  “Quite the contrary,” she answered, typically oblivious. “The entire shop has been equipped with adaptive runes which negate most magical effects. I can only assume that during the construction of this place Dan ordered the runes be etched upon the very blocks from which it is built, likely on the surfaces which are inaccessible. Meaning that nullifying their protections is impossible so long as the walls remain standing. I further assume this has been done in order to dissuade would-be robbers and thieves. As far as I have been able to discern, no offensive magics nor effects can be activated within the depot, nor teleportation nor personal storage powers. I find it all quite fascinating, how selectively the protections function in practice. And there seem to be other categories of magic which are entirely blocked, as well, such as mind-control effects, reality-altering powers….”

  “I was actually just making a joke,” Seymour muttered under his breath as she droned on.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  “Pardon?”

  “Nothing. I, uh, better get back to work.”

  Sometimes, when the showroom hit what passed for a lull, he’d spend an hour or two up on the third floor, continuing the inventory he’d originally been brought on to complete. At any other job he’d ever held he would have taken advantage of those lulls to partake in some good old fashioned slacking – but he felt oddly motivated to go above and beyond, now that he found himself employed in a legit magic shop. The neverending inventory of the uppermost floor felt like as good a way as any to prove his willingness to bust his ass.

  And yet, for the most part Penny had this task covered, too. She blitzed through the repair portion of her work with such speed and efficiency that Seymour often caught glimpses of her heading upstairs with his old basket or coming back down to her workshop with it filled full of stuff. Once or twice, she tracked him down during one of his inventory jaunts to take over, sending him back down to the showroom.

  Then, every day in the late afternoon, there always came a second, lesser rush right near closing, as crawlers raced in from the local dungeon in hopes of catching the store still open. They came to offload their treasures and gold coinage in exchange for stacks of paper chits, which spent better in the taverns and pleasure houses of Ghizo’s Crossing. Seymour was expected to man the showroom to help clear out these last stragglers.

  The depot officially closed at sunset, and the shuttle to Ghizo’s Crossing always arrived within the last hour of daylight, driven by Ermin Troudt, with whom Seymour always enjoyed chatting. Ermin owned the shuttle independently, and bringing the workers to Dragon Dan’s Adventure Depot wasn’t his only gig. In between the morning and evening commutes, he transported cargo and any passenger who’d pay a fare, piloting his shuttle between Ghizo’s Crossing and other stops along the Emperor’s Highway. Interacting each day with such a wide variety of Heschians who each had their own reasons for avoiding less discreet means of transport meant that he always had a story to tell – and Seymour always had an ear with which to listen.

  “I appreciate our easy rapport, Mr. Little, and I’ve been meaning to ask you some questions about this dungeon of yours,” Ermin said to Seymour, leaning against the side of his transport vessel. The sun was nearing the rim of the caldera, and the shop would soon accept its last customers of the day. “Some evenings, as I wait for the shop’s business to conclude, I count the adventurers as they depart from yonder dungeon, and the number of simultaneous parties astounds me. It seems that dozens—perhaps hundreds—of these monster-slaying treasure-hunters might be occupying the same dungeon at the same time, and it makes me wonder, Seymour: how can this possibly be? Is the dungeon within this old volcano truly as enormous as I imagine?”

  “Yeah, I haven’t personally set foot inside it myself, but from what I’ve heard, you’re right. The dungeon is pretty much an endless tangle of tunnels and torture chambers,” Seymour confirmed, “but that’s only one of the reasons such a large number of crawlers can stay busy inside at the same time. There’s also the sorting steps – have you ever heard of those?”

  “Sorting steps? Can’t say as I have.”

  Seymour gestured over toward the nearby dungeon entrance: a small, shrine-like structure constructed from a single mass of shiny obsidian. Only a single room stood above ground level, and it contained nothing but a staircase, also made from—and delving into a pitch-black tunnel of—the same ominous, black, volcanic glass.

  “Apparently the magic happens as the crawlers begin down the stairs,” Seymour explained. “It kinda messed me up to learn that the dungeon itself is actually like…. intelligent. While the adventurers are heading down the steps, it looks at the team and decides which wing will provide the most appropriate challenge. Straight up analyzes their strengths and weaknesses and whatnot. Then everyone is assigned their quests and the dungeon seamlessly teleports the entire party to the starting location. It all goes down so seamlessly that the crawlers don’t even realize it when it happens. To them, they’re just walking down the staircase and then when it ends they find themselves inside a room with a single door. And then, just like that, they step out that door and the crawl is on.”

  “‘Quests’, you say? Fascinating.” Ermin stroked his bushy mustache and pondered. “I’ve heard Emperor Mallex possesses a training hall within the imperial palace which assigns quests. I must say: I find this whole concept extremely stimulating, Seymour. Why would it do that? Why would a dungeon encourage its invaders to collect eight ears from its children? Why would it ask an adventurer to gather a dozen candles? What does it stand to gain from such a transaction?” He made a fist and shook it in the air as he asked these questions. Seymour, having no proper answer, only shrugged and smiled, tickled by Ermin’s enthusiasm. Here was this great, big, formidable man – but the topic of the dungeon had turned him into a big kid. “Of course you can’t give me an answer, how could you possibly know what motivates Vol’kara? How could I? How indeed could any of us? We are men, not sapient volcanoes.”

  “Preach it.” One of Gordon’s kitchen workers had come out of the shop just in time to hear the end of Ermin’s mini-rant.

  “Shut up. Get in the goddamned transport.”

  Seymour laughed, as did the kitchen worker, who climbed aboard the shuttle.

  “So,” Ermin turned back to Seymour, still maintaining his intensely curious tone, “the dungeon teleports them to a second location, but how do they get back out? You said they find themselves in a room with naught but a single door, yes?”

  “Right, so that’s the safe room,” Seymur explained. “They can return to it as much as they need to for rest or divvying up loot or whatever – and no monsters can enter. And as for exiting the dungeon, they have three options. First, anyone with powerful enough teleportation powers can zap their team out. The dungeon doesn’t block portals or anything like that. But if they don’t have a teammate with that kind of magic, they can always just wait for the staircase to open back up. It locks them in for a while but lets them out eventually. And finally, we always encourage adventurers to buy a temporary Sigil of Return from us. They just slap them on, and then when they’re ready to head back out, the crawlers simply peel off the temporary sigil, and after a ten minute cooldown the dungeon returns them to the obsidian shrine over there.”

  “What’s the cooldown for?”

  “In case they change their minds, or on the off-chance the sigil is removed accidentally. Like, say they’ve applied the sigil to their right arm, but then the entire limb gets torn off by a hungry basilisk or whatever,” Seymour recounted the example Eusebio had given him during his training. “This could in theory activate the return teleport, right? And shit man, maybe they’d want it to. Maybe if you lose an arm or a leg you’d just call it a day. But the ten minute delay gives them time to peel the temporary sigil off their amputated limb and slap it on someplace else. You know, in case they want to continue the crawl one-handed and whatnot. I’m telling you, man, some of these adventurers are real hardasses.”

  “I, uh.” Ermin blinked. He did it several times, like he was waking up from being hypnotized. “Why, that’s unimaginably awful. And dedicated.”

  “That’s the life of an adventurer!” Seymour clapped him on the shoulder and laughed. “Or at least that’s what Eusebio has me tell them when I’m explaining all this to a newbie.”

  “Do reckon it is the life. I’ll confess, in my youth I dreamed of becoming an adventurer someday, myself. I even went so far as to save for a Page of the Whip to use on my Diligence sigil.”

  “The whip? Really?”

  “Don’t look at me like that. My uncle was a terror with the whip and knife, and I hoped to honor and learn from him.”

  “So what happened?” Seymour wondered. “Dungeoneering turn out to be just a touch too claustrophobic for a road warrior like Ermin Troudt?”

  “Who knows?” The big man sighed. “Never did find out if it was for me. The Page of the Whip didn’t manifest a combat power like I’d hoped. Instead, it gave me a spell which enhanced the physical attributes of any animal I groomed. It wasn’t the sort of sigil power I’d been after, to put it mildly – but it was a useful one, nonetheless. I caught on first at the livery, making tips, and soon I was hired to buff whole herds of livestock for a baron who fancied himself a rancher, shortening the time it took to move them from place-to-place by a considerable margin, since they not only moved more quickly but also required almost no rest at all. And that is how I eventually got introduced to the transport business.”

  “But you don’t use animals to pull the shuttle, right? You have your golems.”

  “No,” Ermin explained, “I overwrote that first spell many years ago, when I built my original transport. Now my power set is mostly tuned for that purpose – constructing mana-driven conveyances and golems to pull them. And then expertly piloting them, of course. I’ve come to believe that if you don’t need to exploit a flesh-and-blood animal for a task, then ye better ought not to.”

  “An interesting perspective. Admirable, really.”

  Suddenly the sky, which had turned purple as the sun slowly set behind the caldera, filled with fire. Dragon Dan blew a roaring orange flame impossibly high into the twilight air, signaling that the last customers who would be permitted to enter the shop that day had already done so. When their business concluded, the shop would officially close. Seymour and Ermin shared a smile and a nod, each acknowledging that their chat was coming to an end.

  “I almost forgot, I have a surprise for you,” Ermin began, “or a delivery, as it were.”

  “Oh? From who?”

  “Come on out,” Ermin called over his shoulder.

  And at his command, Dathon stepped off the shuttle. His chin-tentacles swayed, mirroring the friendly wave he sent Seymour’s way. Rucktizzeran followed, exuding a kaleidoscopic aura.