Acid turned my whole world bright green.

  My health bar didn’t care.

  For as long as the Vescent pool was flowing over me, I was immortal. It hadn’t healed me, but I didn’t need it to. I didn’t even need to see. Anything I could do with a gesture, I could also do manually in my HUD screen.

  So I opened my equipment menu, switched into a new pair of gloves, and then did something far more dangerous: I swapped my NerveGear out for the Helm of Expedient Beheading.

  Suddenly, there was nothing between my face and the ooze. It drained over me, vivid green, but thick enough to hide my face from the viewers. The helm felt heavy on my head, so it probably had horns or something. I turned around to face the golem.

  A spell populated along the bottom of my screen: Whittler. The helm gave it to me as long as I wore it. I wiped my eyes, and my vision cleared just enough for me to see the golem’s outline in front of me.

  Dave sent me a frantic Whisper:

  Fuck You Dave: Don’t show them your eyes!

  If I did, it would give the game away. Remnant’s eyes weren’t normal no matter what he shape-shifted into, and mine were.

  Good thing I didn’t need much time.

  I manually tapped the spell on my screen, since I had no idea how to cast Vescent magic with gestures yet. I’d never tried a character with this Aspect.

  The spell bloomed in my hands, and I extended them out in front of me. The golem raised both arms to pound the ground around me. If that blow landed, I might fall out of the immortalizing water. I hoped I could get this done fast.

  The green glow of the Whittler spell built and built—apparently, it had a long-ass casting time—until finally, it coalesced into a beam and struck the golem in its chest, right where the acid had splattered out of it.

  Instantly, the golem turned into wood. The acid was growing thinner on my face, so I raced to swap back into my NerveGear.

  As soon as I stepped up to the golem, the acid still on me started to do damage. I ignored it and laid a hand on the golem’s leg.

  Then I put my other hand down… and I pried its leg apart.

  The gesture for Dismantle was to pull something apart with two fingers of each hand. That’s all it took. The golem—temporarily made of inanimate wood—broke apart like the object it was. My Apprentice Breaker’s Gloves made it easy, with their +10 bonus to Dismantle.

  My experience bar jumped, and the golem collapsed into a loot pile. I didn’t have time to look at it.

  I turned to face Bridget.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  She was twenty feet away now, but she’d come to a stop. Her eyes were huge, clinging to either side of her feathered head, ringed in gold, and glued to me.

  I lifted my hands.

  Bridget fled.

  I smiled. She had no idea that the Whittler spell was gone. I could only use it while wearing the helm. Hell, she probably had no clue what I’d just done to the golem. She only knew she didn’t want to be on the receiving end of it.

  My health bar was blaring at me again, thanks to the acid, so I pulled out one of my three health regeneration potions to offset the HP loss. Then, when Bridget jumped down from the Luminous path to the next one, I looted the golem. It came with another Golem Clay, four more Acid Conversion Orbs, and a surprise item: a Heartburner Grimoire. I could learn that acid spell now, if I wanted.

  Only I couldn’t. I’d chosen Vescent, and the associated elements for that were Psychic, Stone, and Void. Acid typically came from the Water element, and when I double-checked, I found that Heartburner was a Water spell.

  Wittler had been a Nature spell, but since it came with equipment, it bypassed my normal rules. Armor and weapons that came with spells were very expensive for exactly this reason. They kept players from being limited to three elements.

  “What… what did you just do?” Dave asked, slapping his wings up over the edge of the Luminous pool.

  “I got creative,” I said.

  “But—how did you dismantle a creature?”

  “I had to turn him to wood first,” I said, but I explained it a bit more over Whisper:

  Remnant: Wood counts as an object in Seven Keys. You can dismantle trees, so long as they are in your inventory. So the system temporarily read the guy as an object, not a mob. Lore showed me the trick once.

  Dave stared at me. Then he said, “I stand corrected. You’re not as crazy as a two-penny fish-pumper. You’re as crazy as two-buck Chuck.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Isn’t that just cheap beer?”

  Dave tried and failed to flop himself out of the pool. “Chuck would be very offended if he heard you say that. He may be poor and he may be crazy, but he’s not a drunk.”

  I sighed and picked Dave up by one wing. He protested, but I only shook him lightly, sending green droplets flying.

  I remembered his racist comment. “Is being green really such a big deal?” I asked.

  He fell still and hit me with a glare that could have bored a hole in me, if he’d had laser eyes and been more than ten inches tall.

  I deposited him on my shoulder. “Sorry, sorry. I’ll stop mentioning it.”

  “Yeah, you’d better. I don’t roll with bigots.”

  Remnant: Remnant wasn’t a bigot?

  Dave sniffed.

  Fuck You Dave: Sure he was. But I had no choice with him. I’ve got a choice with you, now, haven’t I?

  That he did. If I died, he’d be able to go on living his merry life, thanks to the Developers’ deal. That is, if Bridget didn’t murder him first. She seemed very keen on trying.

  “So,” Dave said. “What magic did you pick? You really shouldn’t have done that without consulting me, you know. I could have told you how wrong you were.”

  I stuck my gloved hands in the pockets of my dirt-smeared black suit. The material really had to be Kevlar or something, because the pants, the coat, and the shirt were all intact. Dirty as the hells, but intact.

  They were also the same clothing I started with. They were exactly what they looked like: a coat, shirt, and pants. The rest of my equipment was something else entirely.

  So was the gargoyle. The water tower. The golem. This whole world.

  If what FATE had discovered was true, then everything around me was just a shell laid over something else. And if I had the power to control my environment, maybe I could find a way to see under that shell.

  Maybe I could use what I found underneath.

  “I’m a Vescent mage now,” I said.

  “What the fuck is that?”

  “I can manipulate the environment. The ground, man-made stuff, pretty much anything not alive. Provided I have the right spell.”

  “Well, you’ve got next to nothing, spell-wise, and only one slot you can use. As the sheep would say after the divorce: we are fucked.”

  I started to walk on down the road. “You always say that.”

  “No I don’t. I reserve sheep-fucking jokes for special occasions.”

  I opened my inventory. “Just keep an eye out for your ex-girlfriend,” I told him. “I’m going to pick out our first spell.”