Kyessy meant the game interface. None of these people from the other world had had a game interface before the portal opened. Now that was some juicy intel.

“In my world we have games–” he began.

“We have games in my world too.” She’d gotten defensive in an awful hurry.

“We have games, er… like all this. Where you jump into another world and romp around destroying monsters, or killing enemies.”

“Games of pure sorcery,” she breathed, amazed and horrified. Now her face had fallen and a whole universe of misunderstanding went pouring in. She seemed shocked at the idea.

“Uh… sure.”

She turned to Rinna, Drell and Hale, who were done with the loot division and had moved on to building up a fire and telling war stories. Corbin really wanted to be in on that conversation, since he had no clue what a hellmouth was.

“In Corbin’s world you conduct sorcery until you join another world, where you are free to roam around and slaughter anything you see, and this is considered a game.”

“Oh, ah, it’s not exactly like that… the game worlds aren’t real.” This put a damper on things, but she didn’t bother correcting the situation for the others who couldn’t understand. Prissy laughed it off and explained to Rinna, who she was already trying to woo. “Anyway that doesn’t matter. There are thousands of different kinds of games, some violent, others not. Some have windows, prompts and menus like this, others don’t.”

“Yes, but what are all these for?”

He figured she would’ve started with the why, but apparently that wasn’t important.

“Well, there are your attributes, the Strength, Perception, and others. These are all measures of how you stack up against others, and obviously higher is better. For instance my Strength, being a raven, is only five.”

Kyessy stared at him a moment, then fell over laughing. He hadn’t seen a tiefling laugh before (he’d really only seen one kill things, and he was one of the things) and it was a frightening sight. The sound was a honking bray, halfway between a goat and a goose, but it also contorted her features into something terrible.

“This weakling has a Strength score of five.” Cripes, she was crying from laughter.

“I’m sure as a human it would be higher,” he griped.

“Perhaps one day we will find out… if it’s seven!”

The others laughed, and Prissy joined in the fun as well, even though her Strength couldn’t possibly be all that high.

“Do you really want to know things, or are we just going to insult Corbin over and over again? You’re the one who asked me to explain.”

“Yes, the felinian speaks strangely.”

“And you’ll stop with the insults.”

“I make no promises. It is greatly amusing.”

“Skills are attached to the attributes. It appears as though two skills go with each one, but there are a number of Knowhow skills. These, I think, boost your attribute for the purposes of attribute checks. Let’s see… what’s your Luck score?”

All the mirth drained out of the ranger’s face.

“It can’t be that low.”

“Four,” she muttered.

“Lovely. Anyway, if you had either Kismet or Serendipity at one, you’d add one to your Luck whenever Luck is involved.” He was… almost sure this was true.

“And when is Luck involved?”

“Honestly, I don’t know.”

“And when I wish to make Kismet work, how do I do that?”

“I’m not sure of that either.”

She got up and began pacing angrily. “You’re the expert here, bird. You play these magic land games, you know why the whole world is suddenly given these numbers and these nerfed cards–”

“Our world doesn’t normally operate on these game stats, Kyessy. It’s new to me as well, but I grew up playing games like this.” He… thought he’d grown up playing games like this. He was pretty sure. “Now, do you want to listen or not?”

Her face twitched in anger, but she waved her hand at him. She did keep pacing back and forth though.

“Inspect skill, for instance, told me some rumor about you being a mountain runner from north of a place called The Parley.”

She stared at him.

“It was incomplete information. Like I said, a rumor. My Inspect skill is only level 2. But it also told me you’re a Ranger, and you’re level 14.”

“Nearly 15.”

“Excellent. Okay… next. Your hit points are a function of Endurance. I’m not a hundred percent sure on the details, but it seems that when you boost endurance, you get a set amount of hit points. Oh, hit points are your health, how much damage you take before death.”

“We know this much.”

“Mana points fuel your special card powers.”

She nodded again.

“Best guess… wait a moment.” He opened up his menu and plopped a point into Intelligence, and watched as his MP number went from 30 to 35. “Yes, so increasing your Intelligence score boosts up your Mana Points. XP is obviously experience points, and that needs no explanation.”

He also noted that he had an Ability Point for reaching level 5. He could upgrade Mimicry, True Sight, or Unsettling Aura. If he chose the latter, it would change its name to Terrifying Aura, while the other two would just grab some extra bonuses and upped percentages. Unsettling didn’t sound badass enough, so he bumped that one.

However, True Sight was much more than he had earlier suspected. It gave him the ability to see in the dark, detect ultraviolet and infrared, for what that was worth, and immunity to blindness or sight-afflicting debuffs. From there, it gave him the ability to see magically cloaked targets, hidden doors and treasures. Whoa, too bad he’d already upgraded his fear ability.

“Who sets the level and how much xp is needed for the next? The numbers seem absurdly high to reach the next level.”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know a lot. For someone who said he could explain things, you are failing to explain a lot.”

“Imagine it’s a god maybe.”

“Ooohhh,” she said, and turned to the others to translate. Hale gave a frustrated harumph and presented a handful of gold coins to Drell.

“That’s… I’m not sure if that’s exactly right. I could be wrong.”

Drell glared at Corbin after the translation and returned the bet winnings.

“We should discuss the card system. I have the greatest amount of information there.” When she nodded and rolled her hand in that get-on-with-it gesture, he continued. “I used to play a game called Mad Card Again! On the back of every card you see this guy with the crossed swords. He’s a character out of a really old movie. Movies are… imagine… never mind. Not important. Anyway, in Mad Card Again! when you play against another person with the cards, you have up to three Champions, or if you want to play a long game, up to five. These characters get equipped with the special abilities as you draw and play cards out of your deck, until all your opponent’s characters have been defeated.”

“Seems arrogant of you to believe you will always win,” she muttered, then held up her hands defensively when he growled at her in perhaps the strangest sound he’d ever made.

“The ability cards in that game could be auras, enchantments, summons, familiars, spells, manifest magic weapons, you get the idea. Some are just passive abilities that aren’t magical, but useful in some way, and passive cards will always stay on without using Mana. You equip these onto the different characters, which changes the characters into a different class, and different classes have special abilities also. Meaning someone could, for example, go from Adventurer to Fighter to Spellsword. Adventurer being basic and usually the weakest, Fighter having abilities like you’d expect: all weapons, nothing magic, but the Spellsword was the top tier, with lots of card synergy. You have a lot of options with that class… they can equip basically anything, and get the best bonuses.”

She nodded.

“I’d bet that Hale over there went Adventurer, and then Defender, or something similar. He might now be a Righteous Defender or a Paladin or a Shield of the Vanguard or…”

“Shield of the Vanguard,” she agreed, nodding. Now her eyes were alight with respect.

“Meaning his class abilities will be defensive focus, for turning aside damage or soaking it all up, but making him a mediocre damage dealer, compared with Drell. A Skirmisher will be ready to deal out a ton of damage very quickly, but not take the hits as well.

“As for the cards specifically, so far what I’ve seen looks like this: Each card is a special ability. These can be weak or strong, they can be for combat or for out of combat. They come in all different types, like I told you about, but also they can have an Aspect. See the border running around the card? You can have fire cards, water cards, lightning, earth, holy, unholy, wild aspect, order… it’s a long list. These give you bonus damage against a certain type of creature or card wielder… holy is bonus damage against unholy, or undead, for instance.

“Of course, fire or water have other uses outside of monster vulnerabilities. Fire spells create light and heat; useful in a dungeon or setting up a camp. None of this is new or especially difficult to learn. I’m not entirely sure if your class is, for instance, holy, and you try to equip an unholy aspect card. My guess is you wouldn’t be able to even attempt it… though I think in the game you can pretend you’ve changed a card’s aspect. So if you got an aura without an aspect here, you could change it into a fire aspect by equipping it onto a fire class character.”

“I take it back… this all sounds ridiculous and stupid.”

“But it’s the situation we’re living under.”

“What about the rainbow sheen upon your card? Why is this there?”

“Right. So. In the card game, they introduced this holographic effect, and this foil effect, to make cards seem more valuable to collectors. But you were much more likely to get a great card with holo and foil on it, so as soon as we spot another one, it’ll probably be one of the best to lock into your core slots.”

“Alas, I have already locked my core cards,” she said.

“How many slots appear next to your core three?” he asked.

“I am asking the questions. Some cards and abilities are clearly more valuable than others. How do we tell?”

“Based on gaming knowledge, which is apparently the only thing I know well about myself, infuriatingly, I’ll say this with confidence: when a common card levels up, the increase in damage or area of effect or decrease in mana cost is not going to be as good as a rare or mythic. Even if you level up a common ten times, it’s probably still not as good as a mythic leveled up three times. That’s just typically how these things go in video games. Obviously the more you use an ability card the faster it’ll level up, so we may want to go through your inventory of cards, and shuffle them around to give the best ones to the people who will use them most effectively.”

“And give up what I rightfully took after a hard-earned battle?”

He shrugged. “Or, you know, allow your team to help you survive better and longer. Maximize efficiency.”

The word ‘maximize’ struck him: did they have this word where she was from? And that led to another thought: why did he understand their language, or why were they speaking English? They were clearly in another world: off in the distance was a literal floating island.

The obvious answer was magic. Magic had invaded earth and transformed the portion closest to the portal into a fantasy realm. He had been transformed from a person into a scavenging bird. Prissy had gone from abused, miserable kindergarten teacher to abused, miserable cat lady.

A cat lady who was presently, this very moment, putting the moves on Rinna. She was purposefully taking her clothes off and trying on new equipment they’d picked up on their travels, and showing off her ginger stripes. She’d left off with the rogue scarf-over-the-mouth-and-nose deal, and had gotten rid of the cloak. And striking poses, and asking him about the healing light he had going on, and asking him about that six pack not covered by his skimpy armor.

He had had his doubts about handing the card over to Kyessy, but Prissy’s erratic behavior clinched it. She was unreliable and that would become dangerous, disappointing and possibly fatal if he stuck with her. However, he didn’t wish her ill… maybe this thing with Rinna would work out. He hoped it would.