We sat down at a picnic table just outside the house.

  I lowered myself onto the bench and immediately realized my blanket, which was still the only thing I was wearing, had caught awkwardly on the edge. The fabric bunched under one side of my butt while the other cheek was very much bare against the wood. I noticed it and thought about fixing it. Then I decided drawing attention to the situation would somehow make it worse and stayed exactly where I was.

  Ephraim settled onto the bench across from me and the whole table gave a faint protest as his weight came down, not quite tipping but close enough that I tensed out of reflex. He rested his forearms on the tabletop and stared at the grain of the wood like it might give him instructions.

  Mathilde had disappeared into the house without a word, presumably to grab something, which left the two of us sitting there in the open air with nothing but birdsong and the uncomfortable silence between us.

  Ephraim looked at me.

  I looked back at him.

  It was strange seeing him like this. For the short time I had known the man he had carried himself with absolute certainty, whether he was cutting down goblins or choking me unconscious in a barn. Now he seemed oddly unsure, shifting slightly in his seat like a man trying to remember how conversations were supposed to work.

  I was not great at human interaction on my best days, but normally I would have tried to help things along by asking a question or making a comment. That instinct stalled somewhere between general fear and the lingering question of whether “breakfast” had been literal or something else.

  Eventually he sighed and rubbed a hand over his beard.

  “Look,” he said, voice rough and plain. “I ain’t real good at this part, never have been. I figure you’re confused. Got a lot going around in your head. I just don’t rightly know where to start untanglin’ it for you.”

  I kept staring at him, mostly because my brain was still catching up to the idea that he was trying to be kind.

  “So,” he went on, clearing his throat, “let’s start over the best we can. You’re safe now. Nobody here is going to hurt you. You got questions, you ask ’em, and we’ll answer what we can.”

  I continued staring, which apparently was not the response he was hoping for.

  Only then did I realize he was waiting on me, eyes steady but not unkind, giving me space in the awkward way of someone who meant well and had no idea how to show it.

  “…why…” I started, the word dragging out as my brain tried to line up everything I wanted to say and failed halfway through.

  Ephraim lifted one eyebrow slightly at that, not surprised exactly, just bracing himself.

  “…why tie me up, ask me questions, and slap me so much?” I finished, the words tumbling out more bluntly than I had intended.

  He let out a slow breath and leaned back on the bench, eyes drifting off past me toward the fields like he needed somewhere neutral to look while he answered.

  “Because this is not a kind world,” he said at last. “Not most of the time. You landed in a place where plenty of folks survive by taking from others, and in a place like that, someone who shows up being helpful for no clear reason is about the most suspicious thing there is.”

  I watched his face as he spoke, still trying to reconcile the calm explanation with the very recent memory of being choked unconscious.

  “It didn’t help that your timing was perfect,” he continued. “I could’ve dealt with those goblins eventually, but not before they got to Bibi. Then you show up out of nowhere looking like a fresh spawn, and once you start talking, you’re telling us about killing things we would’ve struggled with and meeting gods besides. We couldn’t just take that at face value. Math went to confirm the nymphs were dead and brought the bodies back to be sure.”

  I sat there listening, one bare cheek still pressed against the bench, and had to admit that from their side of things, it made a certain amount of sense. If this was a trap, it was a strange one, and not a very clean one. The tension in my shoulders eased a little as I let myself breathe.

  Still, they had left me naked, tied to a pole overnight. I will ask my questions, but not trust.

  “So,” I said slowly, “what did you mean by the world here?”

  He sighed again, rubbing at his beard.

  “This is the part where most people have a speech ready,” he said. “Big ideas. Fate. Cycles. Patterns. Usually tailored to whatever they’re trying to convince you of. If you ever talk to someone from the Empire or the Necro Kingdom, you’ll see what I mean.”

  “Okay,” I said, because that answer seemed safe.

  He glanced back at me. “You come from somewhere fairly advanced, don’t you? High technology. You tried to downplay it last night, but that train station you mentioned made it hard not to put things together.” A faint, almost amused smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.

  That caught me off guard. “I… guess?”

  “No trouble,” he said, waving it off. “Let me ask you something. You ever hear of parallel worlds?”

  “I think so,” I said. “Yeah.”

  He nodded. “What do you know about them?”

  I told him that as far as I understood it, there were multiple worlds out there where things were mostly the same but diverged in small ways, places where history bent differently and timelines split based on choices and accidents and all the little what-ifs piling up over time.

  “That’s about right,” he said, nodding. “See—”

  “Wait,” I blurted out before I could stop myself. “Are we on a parallel Earth?”

  The moment the words left my mouth I realized I had interrupted him and immediately felt foolish, my shoulders drawing in as I looked at his face to see how badly I had messed up. Instead of irritation, I found him smiling, not a big grin but something warm and approving, like he was glad I was actually engaging instead of just staring at him.

  “Sort of,” he said. “Yes. There are parallel worlds. Trillions of them, far as anyone can tell, all with human history twisted just a little differently each time.”

  He leaned back slightly and rested his hands on the edge of the table. “This one counts, in a way. It’s parallel adjacent, I suppose you could say. Difference is, this world was made. Built. Artificial.”

  “Artificial?” I asked.

  “Yep,” he said. “Made by the gods you happened to run into. They call it Fortune.”

  I stared at him. “Seriously.”

  “Afraid so,” he said, starting to continue when a loud slam echoed from behind him.

  The back door of the house burst open and Mathilde stormed out carrying a tray loaded with cookware and ingredients, her expression set in a way that suggested the world had personally offended her. One of the items was big bowl filled with something, and we both turned to watch as she marched past us toward what I had previously assumed was a decorative slab of metal sitting on short legs.

  She set the tray down beside it, slapped something oily across the surface with her palm, and placed her hand flat on the metal. Almost immediately the slab began to glow red beneath her fingers, heat shimmering in the air.

  After a few seconds she lifted her hand, picked up the bowl, and poured the liquid out in careful circles across the surface. It sizzled loudly. She growled once to herself, set the bowl aside, and stalked back toward the house without a word.

  Even accounting for the magic involved, the most impressive part of the whole thing was that I had just watched someone angrily make pancakes.

  “Anyway,” Ephraim said, picking the thread back up, “I know it all sounds crazy, but you just watched magic happen over there on the grill” he gestured vaguely toward the house and the still glowing metal slab. “I’m fairly sure you didn’t have that going on back at your train station.”

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  “From what folks understand, those gods made this world as a sort of playground. Somewhere to rule. Or torture. Or just entertain themselves. Depends who you ask. There are a lot of answers floating around, and most of them contradict each other, so we’ll leave that mess for later.”

  He paused, then continued more carefully. “What matters is that they put entry points into most of the parallel worlds humans live in. They drop them in random places, inside random things, but always somewhere with a bit of challenge to it. One point in each world. Nobody knows they’ve found one until it happens. Then you’re pulled into a white room and handed a class, completely at random.”

  I swallowed. “Yeah. I hate how much that lines up with what happened to me.”

  He nodded like that reaction was expected. “After that, people get sent to a starting area, pick up a handful of abilities, and they either adapt or they don’t. Survival comes first. Everything else comes later.”

  He hesitated, scratching at his beard. “Funny thing is, when I first got here—”

  The back door slammed open hard enough to rattle the windows.

  Mathilde stomped out, irritation radiating off her in waves. “Ephraim, just shut your trap for a minute,” she snapped as she marched straight to the magically heated griddle.

  She waved her hand over the surface and flames rolled out across the top, licking around the edges of what I now fully accepted were pancakes. With practiced efficiency, she flipped them, grabbed a plate, and stacked several of them up barehanded before striding over and dropping the plate directly in front of me.

  “Ephraim,” she said without looking at him, “you just dumped a mountain of nonsense on the half-wit. Let him chew on that before you pile on more.”

  The plate hit the table with a solid thud.

  I stared down at the food, the smell hitting me all at once, warm and real and grounding in a way the conversation had not been. As I looked at it, everything he had said clicked into place a little too neatly, lining up with my own experience in a way that made it harder to deny.

  I had the sudden, uncomfortable feeling that if this were a movie or a television show, this would be the part where the audience was yelling at the screen for me to catch up and accept what was happening. The part where it was obvious there was something strange stalking the town, and the main character was supposed to stop doubting and start acting.

  The problem was that when you were the one inside that moment, trying to recalibrate your entire understanding of reality, it felt less like a heroic turning point and more like slowly realizing the world you thought you understood had never actually existed in the first place.

  I looked down at the pancakes sitting on the plate in front of me. They were plain, dry, and completely bare of any toppings. No syrup. No butter. Nothing. I picked one up with my hands since I did not have any utensils and took a cautious bite.

  It was dry and dense with little bits in it, something closer to buckwheat than anything fluffy, and under normal circumstances I probably would have called it aggressively mediocre. After days of surviving on minnows and [Magical Berries] that tasted vaguely like someone had described granola to a person who had never eaten it, the pancake was one of the best things I had ever tasted.

  I let out a slow breath and took another bite before looking up.

  Ephraim was already eating across from me, tearing into his stack with practiced efficiency while still keeping one eye on me, like a man who trusted me just enough not to hold a weapon but not enough to stop paying attention.

  “Okay,” I said around a mouthful. “Tell me more.”

  He chewed for a moment, then swallowed and wiped his beard with the back of his hand before speaking.

  “So you’ve seen the system, right?” he asked. “The blue boxes. Killing things makes you stronger.”

  He waited until I nodded before continuing.

  “First thing to understand is that it’s not just a tally. It shows where you stand in this world. How strong you are. What you’re capable of. What kind of magic you’re walking around with. But it’s more than that. The gods made it, and they made it… strange.”

  “Weird?” I asked immediately, my mind jumping straight to white rooms and skill swaps.

  “Not like that,” he said, waving a hand as if he had read my mind and brushing the thought aside. “Not broken, usually. Though stories like yours do pop up now and then. Most of the time when things go wrong, people don’t get special treatment. People just start dying around someone, and nobody can figure out why. And then they get killed”

  “Anyway,” he continued, settling back into his explanation, “the weird part is how much the system likes the number ten. Near as anyone can tell, it’s obsessed with it. Most of what you run into out here ties back to ten in one way or another.”

  He took another bite of his pancake, chewed, then went on. “When you get grabbed and pulled into this place, everyone starts at a baseline of ten. Doesn’t matter what shape you were in before. Fat. Skinny. Strong. Weak. Makes no difference. The system levels the field first.”

  That lined up uncomfortably well with what I remembered, and I felt myself paying closer attention.

  “You remember that white room you woke up in?” he asked. “The one with the spinning thing full of classes?”

  I nodded.

  “You know how many classes are on it?”

  I hesitated, then guessed. “…Ten?”

  He paused, brow furrowing, like he had just realized he had led me slightly astray. “Close. It’s a hundred. That one’s on me. When I say it’s built around ten, I mean it’s usually ten, or ten times something, or ten split up different ways.”

  That was when Mathilde’s voice cut across the yard from behind us.

  “SILAS. FOOD.”

  She came out carrying two plates and dropped one down across from her spot before setting the other on the bench next to me, which I assumed was for the man she had just yelled for. She glanced at me and snorted softly.

  “Don’t let him get you started on the whole ‘ten’ thing,” she said. “He’ll talk your ear off for hours about what it means for survival.”

  There was a scowl on her face, but it lacked any real bite, more irritation than anger.

  “…Okay,” I said.

  “What he forgot to mention,” she continued, “is that the spinning wheel in the white room has unequal slices. Yes, there are a hundred classes, but they don’t all line up the same chance-like.”

  She gestured with her hand toward Ephraim, who was mid chew and froze with his mouth half open. “[Warrior] is the most common. Roughly 30% of the wheel. After that come [Mage], [Priest], and [Raider], each sitting around 10%.”

  She stopped there, stared at me for a beat like she was checking to see if I was keeping up, then went back to eating her pancake as if the conversation was complete.

  Ephraim slowly resumed chewing, pointedly choosing not to comment, and I sat there with a plate of food and the growing realization that the system had never really been fair, only structured enough to pretend that it was.

  Just like home.

  “So that’s 60% of people here,” I said finally, and both of them nodded without hesitation. “What about the other part?”

  Before either of them could answer, Silas appeared beside me so quietly that I nearly jumped. One second the bench had been empty and the next he was sitting there, already reaching for pancakes like this was the most natural thing in the world. Bibi followed a moment later, letting out a low snort before settling a short distance from the table, clearly content to linger nearby without demanding attention.

  Silas did not look at anyone. He simply ate.

  Mathilde picked up where the conversation left off like nothing had interrupted her. “The other half of the part is everything else,” she said. “The remaining of the 100 classes. [Druid]. [Rogue]. [Summoner]. [Warlock]. It goes on and on. There are enough of them that listing them all would take longer than breakfast.”

  She paused long enough to take a bite, then continued. “The important thing is that the class always does what the name says it does. A [Wizard] is not going to be swinging a sword, and a [Sword Dancer] is not going to start throwing fireballs.”

  She glanced at me. “And before you ask, no, nobody is shooting fire from their dick.”

  I blinked, because I had not been thinking that. “Makes sense,” I said, because what else do you say to that.

  Ephraim cleared his throat and leaned forward slightly. “The other thing you need to understand is how abilities work. No matter the class, everyone starts with three abilities at level one. The first is your core class ability. That’s the thing the class is built around, whether it’s magic, strength, speed, or something stranger.”

  He shifted and gestured toward Mathilde. “The second ability is usually a body reinforcement skill. Something to keep you alive while using the first one. Math here, for example, has an ability that reinforces her body so she doesn’t burn herself to ash every time she throws fire.”

  Mathilde stopped chewing and slowly turned her head to look at him, eyes narrowing as she decided how annoyed she wanted to be.

  “The third ability,” Ephraim continued carefully, “is random. Still tied to the class, but not guaranteed to be useful. After that, you get new abilities every ten levels. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. So on.”

  He paused, watching my face. “As for leveling, there are two ways. Killing things. Or raising an ability to level ten. Both give experience. Both push you forward.”

  He tilted his head slightly. “Though judging by how far along you already are, I suspect you knew most of that.”

  I nodded to show that I understood, and Ephraim took that as his cue to continue.

  “So when it comes to killing things,” he began, leaning back slightly as if he was bracing himself for the topic—

  “Tell him about the secrets!” Silas suddenly blurted out, loud and excited, spraying crumbs as he spoke.

  Ephraim sighed heavily and closed his eyes for a brief moment. “Silas, we’ve been over this. Calling them secrets just confuses people.”

  He opened his eyes and turned back to me, catching my raised eyebrows at the word. “What he’s talking about isn’t secrets, exactly. It’s missing information. Gaps. The system tells you enough to function but not enough to be safe.”

  That got my full attention.

  “There are holes in the descriptions,” he continued. “Things you got to figure out the hard way. Magic abilities that quietly require materials the system never mentions. Body skills that work just fine until you overuse them and collapse afterward. It’s not uncommon to spend days trying to make a spell work, only to learn it needs the right kind of lint or dust or focus object that nobody told you about.”

  Mathilde nodded hard once in agreement and chewed her pancake like it had insulted her mother.

  “And then there are the side effects,” Ephraim said. “Stuff it never warns you about. Like using certain weapon skills too often and falling asleep mid-fight, or reinforcing your body until your nerves burn for hours afterward.”

  He paused. “There’s also the things it just does to you without explanation. Like starting everyone off with exactly a thousand experience points. Or pushing a new language straight into your head.”

  “Oh,” I said slowly. “I was wondering about that.”

  “Most people call it Common,” he said, “but that’s just a habit. There’s no official name for it. It’s just… there. Like you’ve spoken it your whole life. Somehow it also becomes your default language, even though you can still think in your original one if you focus hard enough.”

  “That doesn’t sound like—” I started.

  “Tell him about living forever!” Silas interrupted again, practically bouncing in his seat.

  That got my attention in a hurry. “Sorry,” I said, looking back at Ephraim. “Living forever?”

  Ephraim smiled at that, a slow, almost fond expression for Silas, then looked at me with open curiosity. “How old do ya think I am?”

  I studied him for a second. Weathered but strong. Lines from sun and work. Gray just starting to creep into his beard.

  “Maybe…thirty-five?”

  He laughed, deep and genuine. “I’m close to two hundred.”

  My brain stalled.

  “Aging doesn’t really happen here,” he said calmly. “People get older in experience, not in body. You can still die. Plenty of folks do. But time alone won’t take you.”

  He met my eyes and gave a small, almost awkward wink. “So. Congratulations. You’re immortal.”