Yoshi woke up in a room he didn't recognize, in a body that felt, immediately and unmistakably, wrong.
Not wrong in the way a bad dream is wrong. Wrong in specific, physical ways that his mind kept cataloguing even as the rest of him tried to process the larger impossibility of simply being awake at all. His hands were smaller. His shoulders sat differently. The ceiling above him was timber, not the water-stained drop tiles of his apartment, and the air smelled of tallow smoke and old stone instead of instant coffee and recycled HVAC.
He sat up too fast, felt his head spin, and steadied himself against a bedpost until the room stopped tilting.
There was a mirror bolted to the wall near the door, cracked along one corner, the silvering gone soft and cloudy with age. He crossed to it on legs that didn't quite feel like his own and stared at the face looking back.
It wasn't his face.
The boy in the mirror was younger than Yoshi had been, maybe seventeen, with a narrow jaw and dark hair that needed cutting and eyes that widened in exactly the shocked, disbelieving way Yoshi's own eyes were widening right now, on the inside, where nobody else could see it.
"Where am I?" he said out loud, and the voice that came out was a stranger's voice too, a boy's voice, cracking slightly on the last word.
A pale rectangle of light unfolded itself in the air an arm's length to his right, hovering there with the patient, unhurried menace of something that had all the time in the world to wait for him to notice it. He noticed it. He couldn't have done anything else.
User Information
Name: Remus
Age: 17 1/2
House Affiliation: Draymoor
Region: Southlands
Class: Artificer
Skills: Identify; Search; Craft; Modify; Store
He read it twice. Then a third time, because the first two readings hadn't made it any less absurd.
"This is weird," he muttered, and some small, exhausted, engineer's part of him noted the absurdity of standing in a strange body in a strange room calmly narrating his own reaction out loud, and kept doing it anyway, because narrating things out loud was how he'd always thought. "It's like a game interface. What do these even do?"
He reached out and touched the word Identify the way you'd touch an icon on a screen. Nothing happened. The panel just hung there, serene, unbothered by his poking at it.
"Maybe I have to tell it what to identify."
He looked around the room for something, anything, to test it on, and his eyes landed on the bed he'd just climbed out of, an old four-poster with a frame gone dark and glossy with generations of hand oil. He put his left palm flat against the wood and, feeling faintly ridiculous, said the word out loud.
"Identify."
Another window bloomed into being above the first, and this time it worked.
Item: Bed Frame
Material: 2 x Wood and 1/4 x Iron
Size: 6 Units x 4 Units
Beneath it, smaller, almost an afterthought:
Save Design y/n?
Remus stared at the prompt for a long moment before something clicked, the same click he used to feel back in Yoshi's life, hunched over a drafting table at two in the morning, when a stubborn assembly finally resolved itself into a shape that made sense.
"This means I can copy it. Reproduce it. That's a save file for the object itself."
He pressed the invisible surface where the word y hung in the air, and the whole prompt vanished in a soundless little collapse.
Design Saved: Bed Frame!
"Alright," he said, and felt a small, giddy thrill move through him, the first genuinely good feeling he'd had since waking up dead and then waking up again. "What if I stored it? If this is a game, there should be an inventory somewhere."
"Store," he said.
The bed frame under him vanished. Not folded away, not shrunk down, simply gone, wood grain and iron fittings and all, and the mattress it had been holding up dropped the six inches it had lost with a dull, echoing thud that made him wince and glance at the door.
2 x Wood and 1/4 x Iron saved in inventory!
He blinked at the little confirmation window a beat longer than he needed to, because underneath it, so faint he almost missed it, a second line of text had appeared and then faded, the kind of tooltip a game gives you exactly once before assuming you understood it the first time.
Store, Mode: Reclaim (default): breaks a simple or unfinished item down into its raw components for storage. A second mode, Preserve, keeps a complete, designated construct intact and retrievable by name. Preserve must be chosen deliberately at the moment of storing.
He read it twice, filed it away the way he'd have filed away a spec sheet, and thought, with the particular satisfaction of a man who liked systems that made internal sense: good. Consistent rule. I'll remember that. He had no idea, yet, what kind of finished thing would ever be worth keeping whole instead of breaking down for parts. He assumed, for now, that a bed frame wasn't it, and moved on before the household woke up to find their spare bed missing.
"I'd better put it back before someone sees."
He said "Create," mostly on instinct, the way you'd hit a menu key out of muscle memory.
Items Menu
1. Bed Frame
2.
He selected the bed frame, and a second panel replaced the first.
Craft
Item: Bed Frame
Adjust Size: <> 6 Units by <> 4 Units
"So I can resize it." He tried typing in a larger figure, curious, the engineer in him wanting immediately to find the edges of the system rather than just its center. "Let's try bigger."
Craft: Bed Frame
Size: <> 8 Units x <> 6 Units
Error: Not enough material
"Right. Limited by what's in the inventory. Makes sense." He felt almost reassured by that, oddly. A system with real constraints was a system he could learn to work with. He'd spent his whole professional life inside constraints like that. "What about smaller, then?"
Craft: Bed Frame
Size: <> 4 Units x <> 2 Units
Enter y/n?
"Craft."
Item Created: Bed Frame!
A smaller frame shimmered into existence where the old one had stood, undersized and slightly absurd looking under a mattress built for something twice its width.
Three knocks landed on the door at exactly that moment, and Remus, still half a stranger to his own reflexes, nearly jumped out of his borrowed skin.
"Uh-oh." He looked between the too-small bed and the door. "I need to fix this. Now."
"Modify," he said, and a familiar-shaped menu unfolded.
Modify: Bed Frame
Size: <> 6 Units x <> 4 Units
Enter y/n?
"Yes."
The bed swelled back to its proper proportions with a faint groan of settling wood, mattress dropping neatly back into place a half-second before Remus crossed the room and opened the door.
A young woman with red hair pulled back into a tight, practical braid stood on the other side, waiting with the kind of patience that had clearly been drilled into her rather than chosen. She dipped a small, correct bow.
"Master Remus, your father requests your presence in the family room."
Remus followed her out into a hallway lined with pale rectangles on the wallpaper where paintings had once hung and now didn't, gaps in the plaster where hooks had been pried loose. He wondered, walking past them, what had happened to the art, and to whoever had needed the coin badly enough to sell it, and felt the first cold, practical stirring of a thought that would occupy a great deal of his new life: this house is poorer than it looks like it wants to be.
The stairwell was old, dark wood, worn pale in a track down the center of each step from decades of feet. It opened into a spacious room built around a soot-blackened hearth, where a well-dressed man and woman sat in wooden chairs whose red cushions had gone thin and faded at the exact points where a body would rest against them. A bespectacled man stood beside them, smelling faintly of drink despite the early hour, a heavy leather satchel slung over one shoulder, tapping his foot with the particular impatience of a man who has somewhere better to be. Two other teenagers rounded out the room, a boy who looked perhaps twenty-three and a girl a few years younger, maybe nineteen.
"Children, this is Lorekeeper Leo," the seated man said. "He's come all the way from the Archive at my request, to help us learn your classes and set your paths in life."
"Me first," the older boy said, stepping forward before anyone could object.
"Very well, Master Gregory," the Lorekeeper said, straightening slightly, as if the act of practicing his trade sobered him a little. "Check Class."
A window opened in front of Gregory, invisible from where Remus stood, blank as far as he could tell, though he supposed that meant nothing.
Maybe I can only see the windows I make myself, Remus thought, filing that observation away too.
"Ah," Leo said, brightening. "It seems your class is Ranger, the same as your father, Duke Ferron. Uncommon enough. Most who draw this class end up legendary Adventurers."
"As my firstborn son and heir, he'll use it to succeed me as Duke of the Southlands," the seated man, Duke Ferron, said, with a broad, hopeful smile that made him look, for a second, ten years younger.
"I'm sorry to disappoint you, Father," Gregory said, and something in his shoulders squared up as he said it, bracing for the blow he clearly expected to land. "But I don't intend to spend the rest of my life here. I want to become an adventurer. I want to see the world."
The Duke's face fell, quick and total, the hope draining out of it in a single visible collapse.
"This is very disappointing," he said, after a long pause, in the voice of a man choosing the mildest words available to him.
"Mistress Annabelle," Leo said, moving on with the brisk professionalism of someone who did not want to linger in the wreckage of that particular exchange. "Step forward, if you would."
The younger girl stepped up. Leo repeated his line, and Remus, watching, still couldn't make out any window at all in the air in front of her.
"Ah, your class is Cleric, like your mother, Duchess Aminala," Leo announced. "You'd make a fine lawyer, or an accountant, if you were of a mind to."
"She'll help set our finances right and turn our fortunes around," Duke Ferron said, and Remus could hear, underneath the pride, the actual desperation of a man who badly needed that to be true.
"I'm sorry too, Father," Annabelle said, quieter than her brother, but no less certain. "I've fallen in love with a man from the Merchant's Guild. I mean to build a life with him, away from the Southlands."
"That is disappointing," Ferron said again, though this time some of the sting had already worn off him, blunted by repetition. "But I understand it. Your mother came all the way from the far Northlands to marry me. I know what it is to leave everything behind for someone you love."
"The children share their parents' classes," Leo observed, half to himself, flipping open a small leather notebook and jotting something down, "yet each intends a different path than the one their class suggests. Curious. Very curious indeed."
"You're next, Master Remus," Leo said, and Remus, still working out that the strange new name belonged to him now, didn't respond, lost somewhere in his own head, running the same loop he'd been running since he woke up: what happened. What actually happened.
"Remus," his father said, sharper, rapping his knuckles once against the arm of his chair. "He's talking to you. Why is the boy always so absent-minded?"
"Don't speak of your own son that way," the Duchess said, gentle but firm, laying a hand briefly on her husband's forearm. "Perhaps his mind simply wandered a moment."
"He ought to pay closer attention to what's in front of him," Ferron said, not unkindly, more tired than cruel. "He's been like this since he was small."
"Master Remus. Step forward, please, I don't have all day," Leo said, a little more impatiently this time.
Remus came forward, and this time when Leo said the words, he understood them for what they were, an old, worn spell rather than a question.
"Check class."
A window opened in front of him, visible this time because it was his own, and he read it in the half-second before Leo did.
"Oh, dear," Leo said, blinking at it.
"What is it, Lorekeeper?" the Duchess asked, leaning forward.
"His class is... Artificer," Leo said, and there was something almost reverent in the pause before he said it, the tone of a man handling something he didn't fully understand and knew he ought to be careful with.
"What in the name of the Drowned Faith is an Artificer?" the Duke asked, and the Duchess, out of old habit, reached up and touched a small pendant at her throat, a tiny lantern shape worked in dark tin, the same gesture Remus had already noticed her make twice since walking into the room.
Leo set down the satchel he'd been carrying, pulled a thick leather-bound book from it, and began flipping through the pages with an urgency that suggested he already suspected he wasn't going to find much.
After a long, uncomfortable silence, he said, "Artificers are recorded as the second rarest class known to the Archive."
"They're said to have the ability to craft extraordinary things," he continued, still scanning the page, "though I'm afraid I can't tell you much more without returning to the Archive itself to research it properly. I've never met an Artificer in my life. I didn't know the class truly existed outside old records."
"Perhaps Remus could succeed you as Lord of the Southlands," the Duchess said gently, "since none of his siblings want the responsibility."
"He's no fighter, to lead our men," Ferron said, and Remus felt each item land like a small, precise blow, not cruel exactly, just honest in the flat, exhausted way honesty sometimes gets when a man has run out of better options. "No druid, to bring life back to our farms. Not even a bard, who might talk our enemies into a treaty. I fear the future of the Southlands looks grim."
"It's fine by me," Remus said, and meant it more than he expected to. "My plan was always to go wherever I could learn the most anyway."
"All the knowledge in the world is shelved at the Archive," Leo said, brightening at the opening. "I've other business first, but I'll be departing the Southlands in sixteen days. With your father's blessing, you're welcome to come along and study your ability there properly. I imagine the High Lorekeeper would be very curious to see what a rare class like yours can actually do."
"That suits me fine," Ferron said, waving a hand, already moving on in his mind to the next problem in a long list of problems.
Sixteen days, Remus thought, turning the number over. Sixteen days to learn something real about what he'd apparently become before he stood in front of scholars who'd never had reason to fear anything he might build. Standing there in a hall full of people already moving on to their next problem, he had no way of knowing yet how much would change about him, and about all of them, before those sixteen days were through, or how many of the faces in that room would still be waiting for him when he came back.
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