Daniel managed to turn his head, the hammock swaying slightly under him. Around him. A spike of dizziness was his reward, the world tilting and smearing as his body felt like it was simultaneously setting itself on fire and freezing solid.

  Mari reached out and set her hand on his shoulder. "Easy. Just breathe, Master Aren. Breathe in slowly. Hold it. Let it out nice and slow. It is going to be alright." Is it? Is it really? At that precise moment, Daniel was not so sure of that. The doubt of that twisted his already pale, sweaty features.

  "You aren't dead. That is progress," she continued, her voice little more than a whisper, before letting out a small burst of laughter. Stress laughter, not true mirth.

  Mari reached out and brushed the hair from Daniel's face. Absentmindedly, clearly a long-held habit of hers. Her hair was, once again, pulled back into a no-nonsense ponytail. A determined look in her eyes that was unmistakable, even in the bare hint of sullen light from the small fireplace.

  "Where... where's Callen?" Daniel asked, his voice breaking on a name that ought to be familiar enough. But in that moment, it sounded woefully foreign to Mari's ears. The System corrected the phrase enough, but as a true native speaker, she could tell that Daniel's... not.

  "Gone". Mari's single word was sharp and clipped.

  Daniel looked at her blankly for a long moment. "Is he coming back?"

  "No". A moment to let that sink in before she explained, "He believes your condition to be death, and his only remedy is to speed that death along. Mana Sickness, without a Dantian to slowly remedy it, is not curable. And as you are, Ascension would be too much of a strain. Your Eidolon would collapse and you would die shortly thereafter."

  Daniel blinked at that. Yes, the System translated all of that for him, but it did not give him context. Mana Sickness? Dantian? Ascension? Eidolon? A chill surged up his spine, making him gasp. After the sensation faded, he asked softly, "Believes?"

  Mari nodded. "Yes. But he cannot know for certain. He may be a Physic, but Physics do not know everything. Cannot explain away everything. Truth is not always apparent, and it doesn't always fit into nice, neat models. It is... messy."

  Mari caressed his face again, her fingertips lightly brushing through his hair. Daniel could see and feel how those fingertips trembled ever so softly. "So... what happens now?" he asked. For a moment, he blanked on her name. After all, he only heard it once and he had always been terrible with names. Marie? Mary? Mari. Her name was Mari. "What do we do, Mari?"

  The moment hung there, in the dimly lit room. It would be oddly intimate if the situation was different. Instead, it was simply the result of Mari remembering that Daniel said it was too loud and bright.

  "We need to know more, Master Aren. I need your full Status."

  Daniel blinked at that. Again, a complete lack of context. His brow furrowed. "Uhh... well, I have never felt this bad in my life," he replied, obviously clueless.

  Mari froze in mid-caress, her eyes narrowed. Her voice climbed somewhat, taking on a waspish edge. "Your Status," she repeated, slowly, as if speaking to an exceptionally slow child. Perhaps not far from the truth, there. After all, everyone knew what Status was, what it did. About how a copy of it can be taken with certain magical items, producing a written transcript of it. But Daniel? He was ignorant.

  "Invoke the ability, you know how. Only you can see it. Read it. Tell me." Mari said.

  Daniel opened his mouth, closed it. Status? He closed his eyes and focused on that word. Hard. But nothing seemed to happen. There was no sensation, no sense of anything happening.

  "I... I don't know how. How do you..." Daniel started to say when Mari recoiled suddenly, as if Daniel was a red hot piece of metal and she had just burned herself. Not in fear, but in sheer disbelief. Moments later, she leaned in again.

  "How could you not know? It is the first Ability anyone ever learns. Some seem to be born able to perform it. I know you can do it, Master Aren. It is how you were able to prove you were the Baron's bastard. Now, come on, close your eyes. That helps sometimes. Think of the flow of energy within yourself, feel the creases within your Eidolon. The pattern will be there, burned into you from prior use." Her tone shifted towards that of a teacher. Daniel was reminded of kindergarten, and smiled ever so slightly.

  She stopped for a moment there, and thought. Would the pattern be there, in Daniel's current state? Or would the Mana Sickness ravaging him have erased it, making it more difficult?

  "Start here," Mari instructed, placing a fingertip on Daniel's sternum. Then, she traced a spiral that folded out from that point. The caress tickled, making Daniel laugh... and then groan with what that laugh took out of him. "Focus. Take a deep breath, try again. Slowly build the spiral outwards, let it find its way, oscillating back and forth through your Eidolon. Then when you reach your skin, invert it sharply, trace it back the way you came, through the holes in the pattern."

  Daniel struggled with the concept, envisioning exercises like this had never been his strong suit. But, as he focused, he slowly managed to approximate what Mari was describing. As he did so, he mumbled under his breath. It didn't translate into Darshevi, the System let it simply be. Mari looked puzzled by the foreign sounding syllables.

  [Status]

  A jolt surged through Daniel, and he let out a short but ardent scream. It was like being electrocuted, but it was not electricity. Not fire or frost, either.

  The world dimmed for a moment, the call for the Status Screen echoing strangely. Then, a window manifested, rotating to face Daniel's eyes. Unseen by any but himself. At first, it was those same runic symbols he saw in Callen's monocle. The same as he saw in that Quest announcement. But, after a moment, like in the past, it slowly morphed and became not only readable, but exquisitely so.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  When Daniel managed to bring his scream to an end, and he managed to catch his breath, Mari asked, "Are you alright?"

  Daniel shook his head wearily, but flashed Mari with the barest hint of a grin. "No. That hurt. It still hurts, but... it worked. And I can handle a little pain." Then, he started to read, giving voice to what he saw. All the way up to the line noting his Titles.

  The first was expected, Mari nodded along. Perhaps a bit impatiently. She'd heard this before. But then Daniel added, "There is a second title, but it looks strange..."

  Mari blinked and gave Daniel a long look. "What do you see?"

  "Three question marks. And they are, I don't know. Glitching? Disappearing and then coming back a moment later, slightly to one side. Broken, then normal again. Over and over again." Frankly, it looked like a subtly broken UI to Daniel's eyes. An ancient legacy system with so much technical debt that it ought to collapse.

  Or maybe something trying to refresh, but not able to render anything useful. A warning, or perhaps an error of some sort that is not being handled by a sane error handler. For a moment, Daniel saw it try to express in another manner. A quick flash of something that looked corrupted before it reverted back to three question marks again.

  Mari didn't respond, but she looked confused by what Daniel had described. A confusion that only deepened at the mention of a temporary quest stabilization. She opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again, then finally waved Daniel on.

  The Mana Sickness was something she expected, but apparently the values Daniel was giving before the sharp contraction to the bare minimum 1 were shocking. Her jaw clenched at that 21, betraying that surprise, and the 11 elicited a hitch in her breathing. Like she got punched in the gut. After a moment or two, she murmured something under her breath that Daniel didn't catch, and when Daniel didn't continue, she encouraged him on, using both hands. How much worse could it get?

  Critical. Exhaustion. And the odd reference to a Metaeffect. Daniel paused there, clearly puzzled. What the fuck was a Metaeffect?

  But Mari didn't seem to give it any mind. After all, everything else had left her positively blown away. An unknown, unreadable, and glitchy second title that was patently not there the last time Aren shared his Status with her? A Quest Stabilized condition? A Tier-Breaker level of Control and Resistance? It had her breathing almost as raggedly as Daniel was, but for very different reasons.

  She looked at Daniel for a long, inscrutable moment, before she decided to address the one thing she could. "Quest... Master Aren, did you accept a Quest? You aren't even Tier 1, and the System issued you a Quest?"

  Daniel blinked and nodded, "Yeah, I won't say it gave me a choice. It kind of just landed in my lap." Mari blinked at that, shaking her head. "Quests do not work like that! You always can choose to accept or refuse them. What... what does this one want you to do?"

  "Survive. For a day. If there was any way to refuse that, I don't think it would be smart to do so."

  Obviously.

  A yawn interrupted the silence that followed, and Daniel murmured sleepily, "What was that last bit? Metaeffects? Authority?"

  Before Mari could snap out of it and try to explain, the window in front of Daniel did something new. It suddenly spun clockwise ninety degrees as its interior swirled and collapsed into static. After a confused moment, the static condensed into that strange runic script once again. Was this the native language of this... what, this System? The runes translated themselves again, achieving a sharp focus, assuming the earlier, distinctly easy to read form.

  Wait, what? Daniel's eyes blinked heavily, and he let out a shaky groan. "It... it changed? It isn't showing any of that now. But explaining what Authority is." Whatever this was, it was responsive. Horrifyingly responsive. A cognitively-resonant user interface? Companies back home would cheerfully commit genocide for something like this. This would be worth trillions. More, it would change the world, a paradigm shift that would make the invention of electricity look like a minor footnote.