Darkness sticks to a city.

  It wants to spread, to encompass, like an obscuring mist, a comforting blanket. But it can’t. A city is too tight, cramped, all buildings and crowds and angles and sharpness. It forces the darkness into hiding, into alleys and corners, behind dumpsters and in broken or abandoned places.

  And it sticks there.

  Like an old wound. Easily overlooked. Forgotten. But always there. Always in need of the attention it abhors, because otherwise…

  Otherwise it festers.

  Jojo looks out through the glass doors of her office building and sees darkness. Dark streets, punctured here and there by flickering streetlights, the same streets that greet her every day after she finishes work. The wind outside whines as it scrapes against the buildings. The darkness remains unmoved.

  “Looks like rain,” comes a voice from behind her. She recognizes it vaguely, but has forgotten the name and face it belongs to. “Need a ride?”

  Jojo squeezes the umbrella in her hand. “I’ll be fine.” Her leg throbs.

  “Suit yourself.” The voice leaves.

  Jojo pushes the door open and walks into the darkness.

  The wind pushes her along as she begins her walk. She does her best to ignore how it chills her to the bone, how it makes her aging joints creak. Her leg won’t be ignored. She tries anyway.

  Left at an intersection.

  The streets are mostly empty at this hour. Sometimes headlights blind her as they speed past. That’s fine. She knows where she’s going. Some days, there are ones that don’t blind her. Their lights are low, or off, and they drive slow. Quiet. None of those tonight, though. It’s a good night.

  Left again.

  Her apartment building is in sight now. As always, her eyes drift to an alley she passes. It’s all darkness, shadows that seem to morph and roil if you’re not looking at them head-on. At the far end of the alley, she can just make out her office. She doesn’t see anything in the alley. She never does. Only the sticking darkness.

  Jojo has never been afraid of the dark.

  She walks on.

  She knows better than to take the alley.

  Jojo wakes up from the nightmare in a cold sweat. She sits up, panting, and rubs at a phantom pain in her leg. Soon the pain leaves, and the dream with it, and she pushes herself up and out of the rickety cot that has served as her place of rest.

  It’s been a few days since her visit to Gouge’s shop, and she’s settled into something of a rhythm. She wakes up early in the guild’s lodgings, heads into the guild proper, says hi to Frankie, and finds herself a simple job. Something like picking herbs or cleaning litter, just enough to pay for the bed and cheap food for the day. She gets the job done, and then she trains.

  Unfortunately, that training has yet to pay off. She spends every day’s MP on life magic, which has gotten her up to level 8 for that skill, and then she meditates.

  Or at least, she tries to meditate. She’s no stranger to the idea, it’s something she would do now and then in her previous life, so it wasn’t exactly hard to finish out her days in meditation. The problem is that those hours of effort don’t seem to have accomplished anything. She never unlocked the Meditation skill, and it never restored a single point of MP.

  She tried asking Frankie for her thoughts, but she drew a blank. Because nobody ever actually takes the Jack of All Trades Job, nobody knows how the Job is supposed to gain ‘any skill’ as it advertised. Jojo was hopeful that it would just be a few hours of work with her boosted experience gain, but if it is just a matter of effort, it’s clearly more effort than she expected.

  Not that Jojo minds putting in effort necessarily, but she’s on a deadline. The week nears its end, and it’s clear that at the rate she’s going, she’s not going to evolve her life magic skill before the poison leaves her system.

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  So, unfortunately, Jojo once again finds herself deep in the back alleys of Petal Run, at a dingy shack up again the town’s wall.

  “So, what do you want me to do about it?” Gouge asks after hearing out Jojo’s predicament. “I can’t teach you to Meditate.”

  “Well, I thought, maybe, since you’re interested in seeing how this turns out, you could maybe… Give me some poisons?” Jojo asks. “I mean, if there even are poisons that would make somebody lose MP. I can’t imagine they would be that useful for the kinds of people who actually use poisons, but I thought maybe that’d mean they’d be cheap and easy to make, so—”

  Gouge puts a hand up to tell Jojo to stop talking. “I have some, yes, but I don’t give them to you for free. Can you pay?”

  Jojo frowns. “Um… I don’t have the money right now, no…”

  Gouge thinks for a moment. “Well, we are on a time limit. You can simply be indebted to me.” She gets up from her bed and wanders over to a shelf. She starts grabbing random potions, mixing some together haphazardly, as Jojo watches. “Go ahead and find somewhere to sit and work,” Gouge tells her after a second.

  Jojo glances around. She assumes ‘find somewhere’ means the bed isn’t an option, so instead she finds a mostly-clear spot on the floor and just kind of pushes the junk around until there’s a spot big enough for her to sit down.

  As she waits, Jojo pulls the little potted plant she’s been using to practice out of her storage. It’s little more than a wilted stem with a couple of drooping leaves, but it perks up noticeably whenever she pours her magic into it.

  “Here.” Gouge sets an array of bottles down in front of Jojo. Inside them are liquids of various hues and shades, some bubbling, some swirling, but no two seemingly alike. “These all drain MP in one way or another. Use what you need, and I’ll figure out what you owe me later.”

  Jojo sighs and picks up a poison at random. “It’ll be worth the price,” she mumbles to herself. Then she drinks it as quickly as she can.

  Gouge doesn’t bother watching her, instead heading over to her own workstation and noisily getting to work making potions and poisons. Jojo follows her lead and starts pouring her fresh MP into the plant, watching as the leaves twitch and tremble under the deluge of life.

  She settles into the work easily. The world around her almost vanishes as she focuses on what’s right before her, and she settles into a simple cycle. Magic, potion, repeat.

  Over and over.

  Hours pass like minutes, until finally:

  Jojo, entranced in her workings, doesn’t notice the notification at first. She feels a slight hitch in her magic output, but chalks it up to still learning the ins and outs of using magic. Rather than worry about it, she just refocuses herself and resumes her magic.

  Suddenly, the plant explodes into life. It quadruples in size in a second, growing massive leaves and wicked thorns all over the stem, and at its tip a huge flower blooms. The vibrant blue petals seem to glow with livelihood, almost dancing with magical life.

  “Woah!” Jojo gasps and reels back from the plant. She checks her notifications and lets out a cheer. “Woo! I did it!”

  Gouge is looming above her immediately, peering down like she’d been watching the whole time. “So it would seem. What skill did you receive? This output seems above what would be expected from level one life magic.”

  “The skill is called, uhh, Essenceweaver,” Jojo says. “Sounds cool.”

  “Hmm. I haven’t heard of it.” Gouge leans down and examines the now-lively plant. “This is quite impressive, though. If this is just at level one… I may have a way for you to pay off your debt earlier than anticipated. How would you feel—”

  Suddenly, there’s a knock at the door. Gouge doesn’t react, but Jojo jumps and quickly stores the plant in her storage.

  “Door’s open,” Gouge calls out.

  The door swings open, and on the other side is… Somebody tall. That’s all Jojo can really tell. Whoever it is, they’re wearing a clean, crisp suit, and they’re tall enough that their head and shoulders are out of view above the roof of the little shack. It doesn’t help that they’re standing ramrod straight, their arms folded neatly behind their back. They give the impression of a statue placed in front of the door as a prank.

  “Quentin,” Gouge says, apparently recognizing the person. “I don’t believe I have anything for you to deliver today. Did you need something?”

  In slow, stiff movements, the person slides one arm out from behind their back and holds out a slip of paper in a gloved hand. Gouge goes and takes it, looks it over, and says “Huh.” She turns to Jojo and hands the paper out towards her. “Looks like you’ve been invited to meet the Shadow.”

  Jojo frowns. She walks over and takes the paper. All that’s on it is her name in big, blocky letters, above a symbol of a star casting a long shadow.

  Jojo looks at Gouge suspiciously. “Did you tell somebody about me?”

  Gouge shakes her head. “If he knows about you, it’s your own fault. Nothing to do with me.”

  Jojo looks between the tall statue of a person and Gouge, weighing her options, and then sighs. “This… Isn’t the kind of invitation I can say no to, is it?”

  “It is not,” Gouge says her.

  “Great.”