Sculla was big, surly ogre with a single horn protruding from her forehead and shoulders that were every bit as wide as Alforde’s. Her hair was gray and she wore it so long that it almost looked like she was wearing a cape. Her bottom fangs were yellow and one was jagged, as if it had long since been broken.

She sniffed once as Vee and Alforde approached, and then took a great drag from her pipe. “You two aren’t from around here, are you?”

Vee shook his head. “We just arrived today, but two boys named Nen and Cris told us that we could stay here for a reasonable rate.”

The ogre raised her eyebrow. “Nen and Cris Hallstrum?”

“The very same. We met them on the road during our trip here.”

This got a mighty laugh from the ogre, and her hefty shoulders rocked up and down with each hah and heh. “Well, in that case, I’m half surprised that you’re here then. Old Bert Hallstrum isn’t known as a paragon of mercy, and I reckon his boys aren’t much different. But if they told you to come here then you must be decent folk. Rate’s pretty simple. It’ll be a fleur a night for you, boyo, and another half fleur for your golem.”

“I am not a golem,” Alforde hissed. “I am an armorsoul!”

Sculla took another drag from her pipe and let the smoke trickle out into the twilight sky. “Golem, armorsoul, what’s the difference? You all look alike so far as my eyes can tell. Doesn’t matter anyway. Price is the same either way.”

Vee took out the money that Nen had given him and handed it over. The silver coins looked no bigger than pebbles in the ogre’s meaty hand, and she grunted as she threw them both up into the air and swallowed them.

“Storing the money this way makes it easier to make sure no one nicks my coins when I’m not looking,” she said by way of explanation when she noticed Vee’s horrified expression.

“Room 570 is yours. It’s up a few flights of stairs and then it’ll be on your right.”

[You have unlocked the Horrified Boarding House Guest class, would you like to take it?]

Vee found the class so fitting to his sentiment just then that he momentarily considered taking it. Originally, he’d planned to ask for change, but that was definitely off the table now. As always, he dismissed the notification, but for the first time in a long time, he almost regretted it.

Sculla reached into her shirt pocket and drew out a small key attached to a dented brass charm. She lobbed it to Vee, who fumbled it instead of catching it and had to bend down to pick it up.

“Huh. Before you two go up to your room and get settled for the night, there’s something I need brought over from across the street there,” the ogre said. She pointed at a pair of boxes that were haphazardly stacked on the other side of the road. “Stupid delivery carriage always drops their boxes on the wrong side. Those are filled with the groceries for tomorrow. Would you two go and grab them for me? I’m afraid that my knee is acting up today.”

Vee was a little irritated by the request. He was tempted to refuse, to ask her why they should be the ones to go and bring the boxes in when she looked plenty able to go and do it herself, but Alforde shook his head and stopped him from doing so. That was when Vee remembered what Nen and Cris had told him about Sculla liking boarders who helped out. He wasn’t totally sold on the idea that “pulling one’s weight” meant “carrying out menial tasks for the landlord without compensation”, but this was their only place to stay for the moment, and it wouldn’t do to get off on the wrong foot. Thanks to Sculla’s…unique…method for keeping the coins, they technically had a credit for another night’s stay, and Vee wasn’t keen on throwing that money away.

He followed Alforde across the street and got to moving the boxes.

Well, got to trying to move the boxes. See, there was a small problem. Alforde hefted one box up off the ground as if it was a pillow filled with feathers, but no matter how he strained and pulled Vee couldn’t even get his own off the ground. Even getting it to slide more than an inch or two was close to impossible. After the third or fourth fruitless shove session, Vee stood up and shook his head in defeat. Curse his bookish nature and lack of might!

Thankfully, Alforde was a good sport and was more than used to having to pick up the slack when it came to completing physical work with Vee around. After taking his box across the street, he returned without a word of complaint and picked up the second one. Eager to look like he was helping, Vee made a great show of holding onto the bottom of the box and pulling up on it as hard as he could.

When they put it down in front of Sculla, Vee flexed his arms and grinned at his friend.

“Whew, that was a tough one, wasn’t it pal?”

“Not really. The second box was much lighter than the first,” said Alforde. Vee let his head sag forward and resolved to have a chat with the armorsoul about the importance of strategic lying some time soon.

Sculla laughed and knocked on the ground with her free hand.

“You’re more brains than brawn, huh?”

It was a harmless barb in the grand scheme of things, but Vee was embarrassed and frustrated and so this time, his temper got the better of him. He angrily gestured at his skinny frame and then made a wide, frustrated gesture. “What incredible powers of observation you possess! What gave me away, huh? Don’t I look every part the raging [Berserker] or [Heavyweight Brawler]?”

He cut himself off as his rational mind fought back his emotional one, but far from offending the ogre Sculla seemed happier than ever. “Well, don’t worry, boyo. You’ll have plenty of opportunity to improve that physique of yours if you stay here. There’s always manual labor that needs to be done.”

She scooped up both boxes as if they weighed nothing and slowly rose to her feet. Just standing, she looked healthy as could be, but when she started walking it was clear that one of her legs was acting up. She limped a few steps and then looked over her shoulder. “Good to meet you two. Breakfast will be served from six to eight tomorrow morning, and you’re welcome to come and have some if you like.”

When the ogre was gone, Vee and Alforde traipsed up the narrow staircases until they got to their floor. Each staircase had around twenty steps or so, and though five flights really isn’t that many, Vee was pretty out of breath at the top.

The room itself was nice and big, which was a surprise. It was sparsely decorated, with a large bed in the center, a small square table beside it, and a small window that looked out towards the mountains. The air smelled – and tasted – like cleaning supplies, but that was better than rotting garbage. Alforde opened the window and a healthy breeze cleared the air pretty quick.

As he settled himself in the corner where he’d sleep standing up, Alforde opened the door on his chest and got to work removing all of their stuff, detaching both of his arms from his shoulders and sending them in one at a time to grab the various bags and loose ends that Vee had insisted on bringing along.

“I’m going to go ahead and go to sleep,” he said after piling everything up. Then he stood at attention with his hands tucked tightly to his sides and his eyes disappeared into the empty darkness of his helmet almost instantly.

Vee sighed. Not for the first time, he wished that he had his friend’s ability to fall asleep anywhere without any issues. Alforde never struggled with a mind that kept racing for hours after it was time to sleep, the way that he did.

He was tired, but knew that if he laid down now and tried to sleep no good would come of it, so he picked up the nasty top hat that Reginald wanted to possess, took it to the sink, and got to trying to wash it. To say that it was an unpleasant experience was an understatement. Most of the gunk from the dumpster was caked on, and things that had probably once been gooey had hardened so much that they might as well have been stone. Vee soaked the hat and scrubbed it as best he could, but after a lifetime of having servants handle all of his laundry, he was woefully inept. When he finally gave up almost twenty minutes later, the hat looked more or less the same as it had before, but it was now wet.

Vee drew Reginald’s core out of his pocket and set it on the table. The spirit’s form clambered out of the stone’s side and sat down atop it.

“Hat doesn’t look much better,” Reginald said. “I thought you were going to make it nice? This looks like you yanked it from a dog’s mouth.”

“I know. Be patient. I’ll make it look great, but you’ll probably have to wait until tomorrow. I’m pretty tired.”

“That’s fine,” Reginald said with a tiny shrug. “I’ve been in this core for as long as I can remember, another few hours won’t hurt. Look at that view!”

He pointed out the window and Vee looked to see a few handfuls of lights dotting the horizon. They were like balls of fireflies here and there, tiny orange and yellow globes against the inky darkness of the night sky.

“It’s beautiful,” Vee said. He’d never seen such a big city. His own hometown, Bardis, was considered a pretty large city, and it would have filled less than half of the sprawl he saw before him. “I didn’t realize it was such a big place. No one ever talks about it much.”

“That’s because this city has died and been forgotten. Time was, when I was young, that the whole skyline would have been full of lights, and we would have heard music all night long.”

Looking out at the decrepit buildings, Vee had a hard time believing that. “What happened here?”

“Why don’t you look for yourself? Really look, that is, not just stare at it.”

Vee walked to the window and leaned outside. He closed his eyes and activated his [Second Sight] ability once more. When he reopened them, he flinched back from all the vibrant colors of ghosts that hovered over the city. The city’s neat grids and impeccably laid out streets turned into a patchwork quilt of lost loves, hopes for new beginnings, and desires to leave something behind for those who came after. It was melancholy and hurt Vee to look at, but there was also something exciting about it.

“See all that ectoplasm, young [Ghost Maestro]? I bet you could really make something special with that.”

Vee thought the same. In all honesty, he was surprised that the city wasn’t crawling with his peers already. Naturally occurring ectoplasm was like gold for [Ghost Maestros]. Normally you had to make it with [Convert to Ectoplasm], which was time consuming and more than a little dangerous.

He wouldn’t have to do that here, but that still begged the question: what could he do with it here? His talents were in taking ectoplasm and forming small minions with it, which he could then direct to handle small tasks. Bringing in mail and groceries, opening doors on command, that sort of thing. That might be somewhat useful, given the state of decay in the city, but from his efforts back home, such work wasn’t particularly lucrative.

And lucrative was what mattered, ultimately. After all, he’d been kicked out with the expectation that he’d make something of himself, and somehow, commanding a tiny army of trash collectors didn’t seem like what his parents had in mind. He ran through his options. He hadn’t earned his [Ghost Artificer] class, which would have let him turn the goo into useful machines, nor had he earned the [Ghost Smith] class, which would have given him the skills to forge ectoplasm into weapons and armor that were as powerful as they were physics-defying.

But even if he could do either of those things, they wouldn’t be useful either. There was no market for weapons here, unless the fiends were worse than they seemed to be, and machines that could –

[You have unlocked the Overthinker class, would you like to take it?]

Vee smiled, and dismissed the offer, but it reminded him of something that his father had once told him. A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. There’s nothing wrong with thinking in moderation, but at some point, son, you need to stop thinking and start doing. Otherwise, you’ll live in a world of illusions instead of reality.

It had bothered him at the time, but it made more sense now. Without meaning to, he’d fallen into the same trap he’d fallen into dozens of times. He was doing the same thing he always did, thinking about why he couldn’t do something instead of why he could.

That was going to change. “New city, new me.”

“That’s the spirit, lad.”

He looked over at the [Core Sprit], and wondered once again what the spirit saw that he didn’t. He was too tired to figure it out, and so he crossed the room to the bed, flopped down, and closed his eyes.

Tomorrow, he resolved, he would stop thinking and would start doing.

Right after he visited a [Tailor] or a [Laundress], if any could be found, to get the hat clean. THEN he would start doing.

A strange twinge filled his chest.

[Congratulations! Your desire to better yourself has given you the ability to earn points in Ambition! Ambition +3]

Stat Sheets:

Vee Vails:

Primary Class: Ghost Maestro (Locksmagister University), Level 13

Secondary Class: None

Might: 6

Wit: 18

Faith: 11

Adventurousness: 4

Ambition: 3 (+3)

Alforde Armorsoul:

Primary Class: Clunker (Vee Vails), Level 9

Secondary Class: Right-hand man (Vee Vails), level 7

Might: 13 (+1)

Wit: 10

Faith: 20

Adventurousness (Bound – Vee Vails): 3

Reginald:

Primary Class: Core Spirit (Unknown), Level ???

Secondary Class: Loudmouth (Self), Level 26

Might: 1

Wit: 24

Faith: 2

Ambition: 18 (+1)

Greed: 15

[OTHER STATS BLOCKED AND HIDDEN BY ORDER OF JACQUES MALUW VII]