Jumble wipes her eyes and motions for me to help her stand up. I push myself to my feet with a grunt, grab her hand, and pull her right up with me. She lets out a cute little eep and almost totters over but catches herself at the last moment, sending a look at Euro before she decides if she wants to keep talking or not.

  “Euro can hear this now. As long as you don’t bring up… you know.” Jumble motions at herself. “Everything I just told you. But I promise–and I really mean it–that I’ll tell you everything I physically can when we’re closer to getting out of here. It might be really important by then.”

  I offer her a smile and a nod. “I’ll hold you to that.”

  She nods seriously. “Please do. Just a warning; I’ll probably try to worm my way out of it because I get really nervous, but don’t let me. Just… um… hold my hand and don’t let me run away. That’ll definitely do it.”

  “Sure, yeah. Got it. Now.” My eyes dart to Euro. “What’s with the staticy earmuffs?”

  “Those? Pshaw.” Jumble steps over to Euro, still wiping her tears with the back of her hand, and hovers the other over the back of Euro’s head. “They’re masses of magic that kind of put blinders on you. Like… you get stuck in your thoughts, but you can focus unbelievably well while they’re on. I use them myself when I really want to get sucked into a book.”

  She turns back to me and her eyes go wide. “I, um–I… they’re also super conspicuous. They don’t work like psychic skills or spells at all; I promise.”

  I tilt my head to the side. “All that was showing on my face, huh?”

  Jumble nods sheepishly. “Yeah, it was. I’ve had some bad run-ins with psychics, too, so I get it. But hey, the only way I can put these on someone is if I touch them or they can actually hear me talk. Eventually I might be able to do it through writing, but not yet. W–where was I again? Did I get sidetracked?”

  “Sort of. Euro’s earmuffs?”

  “Oh! Right!” Jumble giggles and snaps her fingers. Euro’s earmuffs disappear, but they don’t even seem to notice. “Like I said, they just help you focus really hard. Now that they can hear us, they’ll–”

  Euro startles, whirls around, and stares wide-eyed at Jumble. Then at me. Then back at Jumble, to me again, and back to Jumble while the gears in their head clunk together in an attempt to turn.

  “Did you two… make up?” They ask, heavy with worry. “For a minute there, it looked like you were about to break into a fistfight. Or… worse.”

  They shudder as Jumble smiles and shakes her head. She reaches out and pats Euro’s shoulder, which somehow calms the rogue down instantly.

  “We talked, and we came to an understanding.” She smiles shyly back at me. “Hopefully one that lasts for a long time.”

  “An… understanding? About what?” Euro asks. “Did I miss something important? Why’d that book freak you out so much?”

  “That’s what we came to an understanding about. Turns out Shelby’s a lot more understanding than I thought she was, and she… understood about my Class.” Jumble mimes putting earphones over her head. “She knows I’m a storyteller, and she completely believes me.”

  Euro’s eyes light up like fireworks. “Really? That’s great!”

  Jumble sighs happily in agreement. “It really, really is. I’m just about to explain how ‘stories yet to be told’ works, and figured you’d at least want to know I’m telling her before I do. So you aren’t super confused when Shelby starts mentioning it.”

  “Perfect; good to know. I’ll keep searching here if you two want to go back to the main room.” Euro grabs Jumble by the shoulders, spins her around, and urges her towards the door. “Give me another set of focus-muffs and I’ll stay out of your hair.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to–” Jumble starts, but Euro cuts her off with a shake of their head.

  “I am more than happy to keep looking. I mean, I already know everything about you–what’s one demonstration going to do for me? Shatter my entire existence?” They chuckle to themselves while Jumble winces. Luckily, they don’t notice. “Solve this quest, you two, so we can be back to the towers for some RnR in a few hours. I don’t know about either of you, but I’ll definitely need a nap.”

  Jumble considers Euro’s words for a good few seconds before stepping away from her friend’s hands. She quietly whispers to herself, staticky magic building up in her throat like a shout waiting to be let free, and gently places her palms on Euro’s ears–one on each. The magic pours out of her throat and snakes up her arm in thin rivers that knit together at her hands to coalesce into the earmuffs from before. Euro grins and gives Jumble a thumbs-up of confidence, then turns and goes right back to searching the room–except this time, they don’t only focus on the bed.

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  After waiting a few seconds, Jumble turns to me and motions for us to get moving. “So, um, I have two skills that don’t cost Worth to use; stories, which can’t really generate Worth, and another called ‘Living Lore’ that lets me… well… it’s really complicated, and I can’t do it while we’re on a quest. It kind of lets me re-do quests I’ve already done and get the rewards the system gives out again.”

  “Hm, sounds… hrm.” I furrow my brow as her words actually sink in. “That sounds insanely broken. Way better than my Worth generating skill, that’s for sure.”

  “Not a surprise at all; I bet the system powered down every Class once it… um…” Jumble glances at Pearl’s shell. “I don’t know if I can say what happened.”

  “It powered down all the Classes after it defeated the shellraisers.” I finish for her. “Damn, why didn’t I ever think of that? Is that what a Class perfection coin does? Bring a Class up to how powerful it was when the system was fighting the shellraisers?”

  Jumble stares at me with wide eyes. “How do you know that? Not the perfection coin thing–I’ve never heard of that–but the shellraiser thing! Didn’t the system really try to suppress that knowledge?”

  I raise an eyebrow and lean a little closer to her. “You’re talking like someone who knows way more than you should, too.”

  “U-um… I-I…” Jumble turns away, flustered. “I won’t say anything more about it, and I won’t ask how you know, as long as you don’t ask anything else about what I’m saying way too much of completely by accident.”

  A few theories knock around my head like loose bouncy balls, but if I don’t want to explain who Pearl is just yet, this is the best out I’m going to get. Besides, she’s definitely going to slip up eventually–or just tell me everything near the end of the quest anyway. I can wait a little bit.

  “Deal. Now let’s actually use that not-a-prophecy skill of yours, yeah?”

  Jumble sighs in relief, then nods. “Sounds super good to me. So, for my skill to work, I have to write out something I want it to do–and I have to be really general about it, or else it just won’t work. It has to have a lot of leeway to run with. Here, it’ll be easier to just show you what I used to find the trigger that started this subquest.”

  She pulls out her Class Card as she walks, then sits down on the backless couch. I take a seat next to her and lean in to watch her tap through her Class Card, which has… so many inventory spaces. Before I can say anything she brings up her skill, which in turn brings up a holographic screen that looks like an old, yellowed scroll. Jumble reaches out and grabs the scroll, and with a simple tug, pulls a hologram into reality. She hums to herself as she spreads it out on her legs, and with another few motions, she pulls an inkwell and a fountain-tipped pen from the same skill.

  “Convenient.” I say.

  Jumble giggles. “Nope, not convenient at all. It’d be way easier to type out what I want to, but the stupid skill only accepts commands this way. If it didn’t provide the tools, it’d have to be a lot easier to work with. Give me a second… here!”

  She wipes her forearm over the paper and ink smears over it like a reverse erasing of a whiteboard. I lean in closer to read the words, but obviously they’re in paindne script. The handwriting is absolutely gorgeous, though.

  “You’ll have to read it to me. Can’t do it on my own.”

  “Right! Sorry.” Jumble clears her throat and straightens the scroll. “The first part–which I wrote–says; ‘inside of this room where a quest lies dormant, the… um… uh…”

  She blushes furiously and looks away. “The extraordinarily beautiful paindne and her… companions… set out to find that which is hidden.”

  I can’t help but grin as Jumble squirms. “Extraordinarily beautiful, huh?”

  “I, um, never expected to read this to anyone.” She squeaks. “S-so, then, that was general enough for the skill to work. If I tried to be any more specific, it would just give me some flowery answer about how I couldn’t find what I was looking for–unless I was exactly right, in which case I wouldn’t even need to use the skill in the first place.”

  Hm. Almost sounds like the opposite of my skill. “Interesting. How’d it respond?”

  “Like this.” Jumble clears her throat again, but this time, she scans the rest of the scroll before she starts reading. “Okay, here it is; ‘our hero and her companion search high and low for the trigger, yet by looking too closely, they will fail. Rather, once she takes a step back and simply looks at the larger picture, the answer shall become abundantly clear.”

  She stops reading and looks at me expectantly. I furrow my brow, wracking my brain for how that one little paragraph somehow led her to the exact spot at the wall she needed.

  I shake my head with a sigh. “Alright, you got me. How is that supposed to help you?”

  Jumble smiles coyly and points at the words. “It tells me that I don’t need to look too closely; just scanning things from a distance is good enough. Because of that, it’ll be something that isn’t too hidden, and something that I can actually see from a ways away. Also, it used the words ‘larger picture’, which means the thing I’m looking for is connected to something else. So when I started looking, I just stood in the doorway and looked around until something caught my eye.”

  “Hm. And that was…?”

  “A very slight discoloration on one of the walls–almost like someone had hung a huge picture there a long, long time ago.” Jumble explains. “Something that I would’ve only noticed if I wasn’t in the room with my nose to the walls. Then I focused on that area and found out that it was made of a bunch of super tiny hexagons. After that, it was just a matter of time until I found the one that was missing a line–well, two, actually–and when I pressed on it the quest started.”

  That sounds… complicated. And like it took a lot of trial and error to find out what the skill’s specific wording means for every single word. I scan the scroll one last time in an attempt to make anything of it, but it’s no use. Hopefully Pearl would’ve said something if Jumble was lying to me, so… I guess I just have to take her explanation at face value.

  “Complicated, but hey, it looks like you’ve got it down. Let’s put it to use solving this thing.”

  “O-oh. I… um…” Jumble wipes her arm down the scroll, and more words appear. “I kind of already did.”