Rhett’s dried-up marker scribbled on the wall, where he had gnawed a flatter surface to think on.

  The wall in question contained a variety of useful notes, such as “Elfs = Really good sandwiches?”, and “Rats = probably worshipped here? (Spirit Animal)?”

  “Okay, so, according to one little girl, everyone in town knows who I am,” he begun. “And I haven’t seen a single mousetrap laid outside of my den, so at worst, I’m in a ceasefire with the natives.”

  He took a deep breath. “Which is good, considering their most powerful ability is BEING REALLY GOSSIPPY!” his voice rose into a yell aimed out of his hole, just in case anyone had breached the Rhett-Sunnymeat exclusion zone.

  There was also the possibility that the little elf was exaggerating, and it didn’t take the better part of two days for an entire hive-village to learn about one random-ass rat stowing away in a hole.

  “Hmm. Children speak only in lies, but delivery drivers are honorbound to only speak the truth, as part of their blood pact,” he muttered to himself.

  “But then again, she’s too young to drive, so…” he hummed, the nonsense spewing from his lips helping to calm him down a bit.

  Finally, he made a decision that had nothing to do with the bullshit he was spouting. “Oh, but kids in this world might be able to drive as pre-teens, so it’s fine,” he nodded.

  With that, Rhett concluded that it was probably fine for him to stop acting like a gutter goblin and start acting like a person, despite the latter being far less fun.

  He could practically hear his towel whimpering at the vibe that had emerged.

  “Don’t worry baby, daddy will never leave you,” he promised the inanimate object, patting the towel with the wet drip of a lie slipping down his cheeks.

  With a sigh, his shoulders slumped, and he looked at the half-sandwich and sawbread stuffed away.

  “This… probably isn’t a lifetime supply of food,” he grimaced. Unlike his life back on earth, here, he didn’t have a huge inheritance from several economic bubbles popping and him being one of the few people who didn’t get arrested in the process of utilizing them.

  Mostly because he inherited the winnings from the stock-lottery from his grandparents, but still. He took the W.

  Here though…

  “...Shit, I’m probably going to have to work for a living, aren’t I?” his traitorous lips uttered.

  His fur bristled, and he could practically hear the anguished howls of his bed-nest.

  –

  Rhett passed by the Adventurer’s Guild, a faint buzz like the desperate screaming of frustrated gods prompting him to dig in his ear with a pinkie.

  Flicking away the consequences of that, he spotted the perfect place to start.

  Waddling up to the copper-lined door, Rhett pushed it open, the little bell on the door dinging to announce him like a king of old.

  “Hello? Yoohoo?” he asked, looking around Cop’s Copper Cleaners.

  The room was bedazzled in dazzling color, something that surprised Rhett more than a little.

  Doorknobs, chains, jewelry, trinkets and more, all in shades of copper he didn’t know existed. Crimson red, vibrant oranges, shades of brown so bright they looked almost gold.

  In the corner of the room, a full suit of copper armor sat, not in the cheap sense, either, it looked less like a piece of level-one gear, and more like something a prince would wear into battle, covered in illuminated engravings and made to fully cover the body in the metal.

  Was it even as soft as copper was supposed to be? Somehow, he doubted it. The armor did not look ornamental, as thick as it was.

  “Hey there darlin’, what can I get for ya’,” a lithe woman remarked, coming out of a backroom, wiping down a plate. Curiously, despite being made of copper like everything else, the top of it was a pure ivory white. A coating?

  The woman herself was the color of stripped bark, pale green and freckled with dots of avocado on her cheeks.

  Her mouth was overfilled, teeth poking free, and from face to body, she was a bit chubbier than he would have expected, clad in a loose dusty apron and thick canvas overalls in shades of tan and black.

  “Oh, a-awesome!” he exclaimed, his suspicions confirmed. “Yeah, I found out you people weren’t out to get me, so I’m looking for a… Job… Thingie?” he said awkwardly.

  He had never been to an interview, and even if he had, this place didn’t seem like the type who would give him forms to fill out with his diploma and references.

  She waited for him to continue, and he shuffled awkwardly.

  “Well, what can ya do?” she finally asked, raising both eyebrows.

  “O-oh, uh,” he startled, getting himself under control. “I can totally use a feather duster, or whatever? Rags?” he offered.

  She blinked, and her lips twisted a bit. “You know any Channeling? Conduits? Any Psychic Powers? Can you do this?” she raised a finger and started wiggling it, until a green something started wobbling free from her fingertip, a glowing, hazy mist.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  He didn’t think he could, but the idea was tantalizing enough for him to ape the Orcess.

  Sadly, wiggling his own finger didn’t do anything interesting. She seemed a bit saddened at this.

  The door dinged, and she glanced up as Rhett darted to the side to avoid getting trampled by the newcomer.

  “Hey Joe, hollon’ kid, I’ll be back with you in a sec,” she promised, rummaging around in the shelves behind her at the elderly Orc’s approach.

  Rhett, meanwhile, glared at his finger. She made it look easy, and she made it sound easy, and she seemed to think it was perfectly normal to be able to do it, just from what she had said and shown…

  Yanking up his lens-mask, he glared at the finger in plain daylight.

  “Mnph, come on…” he grumbled.

  Jokingly, he muttered “Alright planet, give me that stupid energy.”

  The harder he squinted, the more he seemed to see the little rainbow sparkles that danced in a person’s eyes in broad daylight, the wiggling tadpoles encroaching in on his vision as he stared.

  He stared so hard at his wiggling finger, his vision wobbled like a heat haze.

  “Hey hon, I’m back,” Cop said, handing over a little copper tipped baton to Joe, who nodded to Rhett once before leaving.

  Rhett blinked, and lost his train of thought. “Oh yeah, uh, I don’t know how to do whatever that was you were doing.”

  She laughed. “Don’t worry kid, it’s a willpower thing. If you’re really willing to work, I’m sure I can scrounge up something for you to do. Hop up, I get the feeling you don’t know what my shop does,” she smirked, waving him on.

  Climbing onto the counter, he squinted at the sunlight beaming down from the nearby window, offended at the rays invasion.

  Before he could pull his glass mask down, however, Cop thumped a heavy plate on the table, the square hunk of copper thudding as it landed.

  “Copper is local, abundant, a Precious Metal, and easy to work with,” she started. “But it’s not perfect. See that?” she pointed to the dust covering it.

  “Yeah?” he answered, curious where she was going with this.

  With her sleeve, the orc brushed off the dust, and gestured. “Look now.”

  Slowly, he noticed the oddity. Wherever the sunlight touched it seemed to get dustier than the rest. She let him stare for a minute, as the noonday sunbeam was slowly filled with the haze of powder, dancing in the still dry air.

  “Copper is ‘Time’, but on its own, it’s neither forward nor back. So it’s just ‘Time’ in the vaguest sense when it’s copper alone, and Time is dusty,” she explained.

  Her hand glowed green, and she gently ran it over the metal, faint pops and sparks of light erupting as the dust seemingly ceased to exist.

  “Cleaning it is pretty simple, though. You mix magic and powder, and the world gets… Confused,” she explained.

  “Mana is too complicated, and there’s too many bits of dust. Water is one thing. A brick is one thing. Even gasses take the form of a singular mass, generally speaking, but powder It’s a bit different…” she attempted.

  “You ever heard of the paradox, where they ask how many grains of sand makes up a pile?” the plump woman asked rhetorically, leaning back on her counter with a whump of thrown dust.

  Rhett nodded. He was vaguely familiar with it.

  “Turns out, physics doesn’t have an answer to that either. Dust isn’t ever considered one thing, for most purposes. It’s never one pile. As far as magic’s concerned, it’s a million little tiny rocks.”

  The swirling, crackling, popping energy continued, and as her hand moved, shining pure copper remained in its wake.

  “The magic reacts with every bit of the dust, and then every other bit, attuning, changing, mixing… Until finally, the world loses track of what’s what. Mana changes its properties as it attunes to Matter, and the more attunements it undergoes, the more obscure, and complex the effects become…”

  “But throw mana at a pile of dust, at a million little rocks… It’s an exponential explosion of complexity. The world can’t cope with it, and so…”

  The dust is gone, and her hand’s green glow is mingled with a grey, static-speckled orange.

  “The dust gets mistaken for its own mana, and that’s that,” Cop finished, flicking her wrist and sending the Mana careening into the wall, where it scatters and disperses.

  Rhett stared, he stared until the last little dot of glowing magic was impossible to see.

  “Hell yeah, maid magic. Maidgic,” he said, getting flicked in the head by the annoyed shopkeep.

  “Ya know they run engines on this stuff in fancier places, right? It’s a little more important than ‘Maidgic’. Candles that make soot for rituals, runic arrays made in dust- Chalk, for gods’ sakes.” she growled lightly.

  With a huff, she continued as Rhett rubbed his aching head. “Show up tomorrow, and I’ll see if I can’t find something for you to do, alright?” she offered.

  After a moment’s thought however, she visibly appraised Rhett, letting out a small approving noise.

  “...Or if you like, I can grab you today and shake ya till’ you toughen up and figure something out. Swing you by the tail for a few minutes, really centrifuge the Chi right out of your core,” she smirked, making the Ratboy back away with raised hands.

  “What? It works. You gotta get stubborn, unless you want to waste time learning things the “Formal” way,” she said, a bit of mockery in the word vanishing as she had a thoughtful expression moments later.

  “No thank you mo- ma’am”

  She lets out a huff, still amused by the rodent’s antics. “Just show up for work tomorrow. I’ll poke around for something, don’t you worry. I’ve got an idea that might be more your speed…”

  With those ominous words, Cop waved Rhett off, the rat-person scampering out the door as he came in.

  “Kid doesn’t know a damn thing,” the orc remarked sadly, earpoints furrowing like her brow as her jaw clenched hard enough to pull on them.

  “I mean, most people don’t know anything but their own little tricks, but he didn’t know a damn thing,” she shook her head. “No songs, no Katas, no Phonemes or Psychic Powers… He couldn’t even Channel,” she muttered to herself.

  Sunnymeat was supposed to be a nice place, Mayor Dry made sure of that.

  There wasn’t meant to be any sad little uneducated orphan rats scurrying around in the buff, oohing and ahhing with dawning revelation at the most basic kindergarten Thaumology.

  She strode over to her sister’s wire, the platinum ring on her finger barely out of contact with the copper thread poking out of the wall.

  “Sis, come over here,” she said, little sparks of electricity jumping between the ring and the wire as her voice breached the hair-thin gap.

  The magic in her breath flickered as it touched the ring, and from there, it was only a tiny gap between the synthesized lightning and the wire trailing from her house to her sister’s.

  “Need some sewing done.”