"I saw you," Zoe said. "Laying on the floor. Annoyed, frustrated, maybe? In there." She pointed towards the throne room Jeff had carved out. "Jeff was there, he asked you what you thought. Thought it would be funny. And then I was back, here. Gasping for breath."

  Tom nodded, his eyebrows furrowing in thought. "I remember that. It was just after Jeff finished making the throne. He was so proud of himself, thinking you'd wake up and see him sitting on a throne and have a bit of a laugh about it. I thought it was stupid and would rather he spent his time practicing more useful applications of his skills."

  "Hmm," Zoe pondered. "I used my skill on the throne, I think. So I guess it lets me see memories from something that I've seen? It's going to require a lot of testing though and I don't know if it will help us much here anyway, so I can leave that for another time."

  "Well, it might help us. Do you think you could figure it out tonight?" Tom asked. "If you can look at the memories of something you might be able to see how that larger guard fights, or if other people have been here before even."

  Zoe stood up, rubbing the dirt off of her clothes. Cleaning skills were useful, but after so many years with them it sometimes felt nice to just feel the dirt against her hands. The small pebbles that clung to the waves of fabric. To see the streaks of brown and red as the somewhat damp dirt smudged against her white, puffy shirt.

  They were signs of wear, signs of being human instead of some perfect creation. Once she started smelling a little off, a pulse of blue light would always wash out, ripping away the bacteria and grime that was letting off the slight odour. But before then? Zoe was out on an adventure, and adventures were supposed to be a little bit dirty sometimes.

  "I can try, I guess. I'm not sure I'll get used to it tonight. It's very jarring." Zoe shrugged. "But we've got nothing else to do tonight anyway so may as well. First I want to try this one out as an enchantment though." Zoe summoned a small wooden dowel, and filled it with her mana.

  She prepared an enchantment of her new Beheld skill and pushed it into the dowel, like a mould pressing into raw clay. The internal structure bent and twisted into the form of her skill, with a massive gap that her attention was drawn towards. A pull, a request. Begging for something more from her.

  Zoe squinted at the dowel, running her mana sight around it and through it. The enchantment didn't do anything, besides create a stable hole that begged to be filled. She tossed the dowel at Tom.

  "Got any idea what this could do? It's got a hole in the enchantment but it's not telling me what it wants, just that it wants something. I'm betting it wants a memory, given how the skill itself works but I'm hesitant to give it one." Zoe explained.

  "Worried it will take the whole memory from you?" Tom fiddled with the dowel, rotating it between his fingers with pursed lips as his eyes turned towards Zoe.

  Zoe nodded. "Kind of, yeah. It was a very jarring experience to use."

  Tom tossed the dowel back to Zoe. "Give it to Jeff. He's got some memories he wouldn't mind losing."

  Zoe caught the dowel and teleported down to Jeff. He was in the process of refining the throne, adding more details to the armrests and the back. Spikes of earth with twirls of spiky rocks around them at the top corners. A weaving web of raised dirt and sunken holes covering the sides in patterns that made frankly little sense to Zoe.

  More than anything, she thought it looked quite ugly.

  "Ah!" Jeff jumped back at Zoe's sudden appearance. "You're done already?"

  "Kind of," Zoe tossed the wooden dowel to Jeff. He fumbled with it, the dowel bouncing back and forth between his hands a few times before he caught it firmly in his right.

  "What's this? Feels weird. You sure you did it right?" Jeff looked at Zoe with a quizzical expression.

  "Pretty sure yup. I think it wants a memory but I'm worried it'll just take the memory entirely from me. Tom says you have some you wouldn't mind losing." Zoe explained.

  "Sure do." Jeff said, a hint of pain wafting from his form as mana surged within him and filled the gaping void in the dowel. "Still got it. That's too bad." Another surge of mana flooded from him, ripping the enchantment apart. The dowel broke apart, crumbling to the earthen floor in chunks of sundered wood.

  "So you kept your memory then? What'd the enchantment do with it?" Zoe asked.

  "I did, and no idea." He tapped on his head. "Again, not a memory I'd like to keep."

  "Right," Zoe said. "Sorry."

  She summoned another wooden dowl, and enchanted it with the same skill. This time though, she pushed through a memory of her own into the enchantment. Something as mundane and unimportant as she could think. The feeling of dirt rubbing between her fingers as she brushed it off her dress a few minutes earlier.

  Mana rushed through her body, through her mind and head before it flooded out of her fingers into the dowel and filled in the gaping void within it. She thought back to when she stood up with Tom earlier and remembered the dirt, the streaks of colour against her dress. The tiny, cold pebbles that clung to her dress. The memory was untouched.

  Zoe focused on the dowel in her hand, then flashed some mana through it. In an instant, her mind was flooded with a similar memory. The coarse dirt, the tiny cold pebbles. But even things she wouldn't have thought of normally.

  She felt her dress clinging to her shoulders, the weight shifting across her back as she moved her arms. The slight tug as her dress lifted off the ground and tried to stick to the cold dirt it had been pressed into. She felt the faint breeze that ran across her hair, and the tight feeling that normally faded into the background not long after she tied it up as prominent as if she'd only just done so.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Every little detail of what that moment felt like smashed through her mind in an instant. She couldn't hear anything, there was no visual stimulation. But it truly embodied exactly what she'd wanted, even better than she could have imagined.

  It was the purest, most refined version of what rubbing that dirt between her fingers felt like, without any of the other distracting senses.

  Zoe tossed the dowel to Jeff. "Here, try using this."

  Jeff caught the dowel — with much less effort this time, and pulsed mana through it. His emotions shifted several times in an instant. Anxiety, fear, confusion, excitement, anxiety, joy, anxiety.

  "Woah. That's. Huh. Hmm." Jeff pursed his lips. "That's weird. Oh. Uh, not you. The enchantment. The experience."

  "Right? I can think of so many ways this could be useful. I think with some practice it might be possible to refine the memory. Make it more concise, cut out all of the extra nonsense it has. I could leave markers at dungeons, memories of fighting the enemies within. The brochures we give out in Foizo could have each page enchanted with a memory of the creatures they're describing, a memory of the halls and paths and forests they're trying to showcase." Zoe rambled on, ideas raging through her head at all the ways the enchantment could be used.

  "Stop, stop stop." Tom waved his hands. At some point, he'd come down the rather poor looking steps into Jeff's throne room. "I can't have two people getting distracted with stuff. Give it here." Tom gestured to Jeff, who tossed him the dowel.

  Tom's emotions raced through much the same as Jeff's. Anxiety and confusion followed by mixtures of joy and excitement, with twinges of anxiety lurking below.

  "I see. This could be very useful, but we have a dungeon to fight tomorrow. This won't help with that but the skill itself might so either get to practicing its use so we can find out if this dungeon's even worth trying to conquer. If somebody else has been here, we may as well just leave after we get you an enchanting class. It's too high level to be worth spending this much time here if we're not going to be getting our feats from it." Tom explained.

  "Right," Zoe nodded. He made a good point. Zoe would have all the time in the world to play with this particular skill later. Right now, there were more pressing matters to contend with.

  A wooden chair formed under Zoe as she sat down, the arms coming up to wrap around her and hold her in place with some relative degree of comfort. She took a breath and readied herself, then focussed on her dress and pushed mana into her Beheld skill.

  "La ha ha fee doo da day, a dress for you and a dress for... Ah what rhymes with day?" A man asked, looking to the woman sat next to him. They were in a rather quaint room, shelves lining the walls with various sewing notions piled up on them. Needles pricked into colourful fabric balls, dozens of small metal thimbles scattered about on them. Buttons and ribbons draped from the shelves, often reaching down to the colourful fabrics that hung from loops below the shelves.

  The man looked down at Zoe with an incredible passion, scissors held in one hand and a firm grip grasping at something out of sight. His broad, shoulders were bare but for a small adornment of cloth that seemed sewn into his flesh, a poofy frill of red and pink fabric.

  "Say?" The woman suggested, contrary to the man's almost entire lack of clothes the woman had almost no skin visible, at least from about the chest up that Zoe was able to see. She wore a well fitted brown shirt that stretched up her neck, wrapping around the back of her head.

  "No no no. That doesn't work." The man waved the scissors around. "It needs to be something like they? No they doesn't work. A dress for you and a dress for hay?" He leaned back, revealing more of his bare, hairy chest to Zoe's perspective.

  "Fae?" The woman suggested.

  "Yes!" The man shot forward with excitement. "That works wonderfully. La ha ha fee doo da day, a dress for you and a dress for fae! Frills and pomp for you to play, a dress for me and a dress for..." The man droned off.

  "Who's this for anyway?" The woman asked.

  "Who's the what for?" The man asked.

  "The dress." She pointed at Zoe. "Who's it for?"

  "Oh I don't know, I never know, you know. I just make them. Better off not knowing, really." The man laughed. "What if it's for a queen? Oh I could never make something for a queen, my hands would shake more than your mother when you told her we were getting married."

  "I told you she wouldn't like it." The woman said.

  "Oh of course, of course darling. But we must've told her! It wouldn't be right otherwise." The man laughed. "Ah! Swamp!"

  "Swamp?" The woman asked.

  "A dress for you and a dress for the swamp!" He exclaimed.

  "Ah," The woman blinked. "Do you think that'll work?"

  "Bah," The man waved his scissors dangerously again. "All I'm told is that somebody wants something bright and cheerful with undertones of danger. What better than the fae and the swamp?"

  The woman shrugged.

  "La ha ha fee doo da day, a dress for you and a dress for fae. Frills and pomp for you to play, a dress for me and a dress for the swamp." The man said.

  Zoe's perspective twisted, the colourful fabrics that filled the room twisting in her vision, blending back in with the dark room that Zoe's true body was in, sitting on her wooden chair. Tom and Jeff were standing next to her in the dark room, the holes in the ceiling filled in at some point while she was using her skill.

  "How long was I gone?" Zoe asked.

  "Couple minutes?" Jeff said. "Did you see anything good?"

  "I think I saw when my dress was made. Felt intimate. I'm not sure how good I feel about using this skill, to be honest. Feels like I saw something I shouldn't have." Zoe grimaced. "Definitely something I shouldn't have."

  "Was it bad?" Tom asked.

  "No, no it was friendly. There were two people, partners. One of them was working on my dress, the other was I guess there to see how he worked? Or as a visit, maybe? They seemed familiar, and I think they were married. Or going to get married, but they also didn't know each other as well as I'd expect two people to know at that point. I don't think I'm supposed to have seen that moment." Zoe said.

  "Hmm. That's concerning." Tom said.

  "It is." Zoe agreed. "I've made many things, and I've talked about things while I did it that I would rather people not see. The class is somewhat difficult to get, but hardly impossible. And I don't think it would be the only class that would have something similar either."

  "No, it wouldn't be." Tom agreed.

  "Can it be used to see things other than the creation of something?" Jeff asked. "If you tried to use it on your dress but for yesterday, would it show you yesterday or still show you when it was created?"

  Zoe focussed on her skill again, pushing it to show her memories of her dress from the previous day. Which should be while she was knocked out after taking her new class.

  "La ha ha dee foo wa way, a gown for you and a gown for... Hmm. What rhymes with way?" A woman asked, looking to the man next to her. They were in a rather bright, stimulating room. Colourful walls with dozens of different shelves full of different fabrics. Sewing notions filled little jars that sat atop tiny wooden tables below them.

  The rest of the memory continued the same way. Similar, but different. This time the woman was bare, with the man in a frilly jacket. They weren't married, but friends — and neither of their parents were even mentioned.

  Zoe's vision shifted at the end when the poem was eventually finished, shunting her back out into the dark room with Tom and Jeff again.

  "Okay, it showed the creation again but this time it was different." Zoe said, explaining all the tiny differences between the two memories.

  "But when you focussed on the throne, it showed you exactly how I remember it. Why's the dress different?" Tom asked.

  "I'm not sure. But at any rate, I don't think it's going to help with finding out if this dungeon's been cleared or not. One way or the other, we're going to have to clear it ourselves and find out." Zoe grinned. "That sounds more fun anyway."

  Links:

  Amazon Series:

  Ko-Fi:

  Patreon: