I left the inn barefoot in yesterday's stolen linen trousers, which were doing their level best and failing. My first order of business was shoes. Not because I had any particur attachment to footwear as a concept but because this city, charming as it was in a medieval fantasy sort of way, had horses. Lots of horses. And horses, as anyone who grew up on a farm in Ohio until age twelve can tell you, are essentially manure factories that also happen to be useful for transportation. The streets were full of evidence of this fact and I had been navigating around it on bare feet for the st three minutes with the focused attention of a man crossing a minefield.

  The cobbler was two streets over and had a pair of pin leather shoes for one silver, which I paid without haggling because I didn't know what anything was worth. Also because the alternative was continuing to treat every step as a life or death decision. One silver. Gone. Just like that. I now had four silver and some copper to my name, twenty five percent of my total fortune was currently on my feet, which felt like either a reasonable investment or a sign that I was going to be broke again by Thursday.

  I didn't know what day it was. I wasn't sure this city had a Thursday.

  I wandered after that, just letting the city do its morning thing around me while I tried to think. Market stalls were opening up, the kind with canvas awnings and vendors who looked like they'd been there since before dawn and resented everyone who hadn't. Carts ground over cobblestones with that specific sound that said these streets had not been designed with comfort in mind. Something was frying somewhere nearby. I could smell it, something savory and fatty and extremely persuasive. My stomach made its position on the matter very clear.

  The city had the bones of every fantasy RPG I'd ever pyed. Guards in practical armor doing slow patrol routes. Merchants arguing with each other across narrow streets. Someone selling something from a basket and announcing it loudly to no one in particur. It was all extremely familiar in the way that a pce can be familiar when you've spent several hundred hours in games that were clearly built from the same tempte. Except those games didn't smell like this. And the cobblestones had genuine grime worked into them that no art department would have bothered with. And nobody here was going to respawn if something went wrong.

  I had a css, a stat screen, skills, and levels. The system had looked at my situation and assigned me a framework that made complete sense in video game terms and absolutely no sense in any other terms. I was a Vitalist. Which sounded dignified, mysterious and like something a schor might study at a university.

  It meant in practice that I produced magical healing fluid from my cock in continuous generous quantity and had figured out how to weaponize the rest of it. I was level five. I had defeated a goblin in hand to hand combat using my own erection and one shot a wolf the size of a dining table with a concentrated bst of cum so hard it cracked ribs.

  I was nineteen years old and I was from Ohio and nothing in my life had prepared me for any of this in any way.

  I found a breakfast spot that had the right combination of cheap looking and not immediately threatening. I sat down and pointed at the cheapest thing on the board. Sausages and oatmeal. The server brought it without ceremony and I ate with the focused gratitude of someone who had been subsisting primarily on their own biological output for three days. I was extremely ready for something that came from outside my own body.

  The oatmeal was genuinely good. I spent a moment being surprised by this and then decided to just accept it.

  While I ate I tried to work out the economics of the situation. Ten copper for breakfast. One silver for the shoes. The inn had been one silver for the night. So one silver was roughly the cost of one night's lodging or one pair of basic shoes or ten breakfasts. Back home a decent hotel night ran about a hundred dolrs, which made a silver roughly a hundred dolrs, which made a copper roughly a dolr, which made my ten copper breakfast a ten dolr breakfast which honestly wasn't bad for sausages and oatmeal with table service.

  I sat with this comparison for a while feeling pleased with myself for working it out.

  Then I thought about it a little more and realized it wasn't actually useful. Prices here weren't pegged to Ohio economics. Things that were cheap there might be expensive here and vice versa. The comparison only worked if the underlying cost structures were simir and I had absolutely no basis for assuming that. I had derived exactly one piece of actionable information from the entire exercise, which was that I was poor, and I had already known that before I started doing the math.

  I ate the rest of my sausages and let the comparison go.

  The pn was simple enough in outline. Morning Dew was a healing substance. I knew this empirically. I'd watched cuts close on my own body, I'd eaten it and felt restored in ways that went beyond normal nutrition. The woman st night had walked out of that room with zero soreness after an experience that by all rights should have left her unable to sit comfortably for a week. She'd mentioned it with genuine surprise. No soreness at all. The Morning Dew had been running freely down my shaft the entire time, healing her in real time through contact and she'd had no idea it was happening.

  So the substance worked. It worked well. Better than well, it worked consistently and thoroughly and apparently without any side effects beyond the obvious question of origin, that I was choosing not to examine too closely from an ethical standpoint right now.

  The question was collection and containment. I produced Morning Dew constantly at any meaningful charge level, which given the ring's general philosophy about maintaining charge meant basically always. The ring absorbed everything by default but I'd gotten good at the override — I could direct it to let things through rather than storing them, a focused intention that the ring accepted with what I could only describe as reluctant compliance. In theory I could produce into a container and fill it in a single session.

  What I needed was the container. Vials, small enough to sell as individual doses. A bowl wide enough to collect into without making an even bigger mess than I was already making on a regur basis. A funnel. Corks. The kind of equipment an alchemist would stock.

  I left copper on the table and went to find one.

  A guard pointed me left without breaking stride when I asked, the particur energy of someone whose job involved answering the same six questions from strangers all day and had achieved a kind of zen about it. The alchemist's sign had a little carved potion bottle on it with some herbs, which was reassuringly on-brand. I was beginning to feel like this world had been built from a tempte I recognized, which was either comforting or unsettling depending on how much I thought about what that implied about my situation.

  I sneezed the moment I walked through the door. Sulfur hit me immediately and comprehensively, the thick mineral smell of it filling my sinuses, with something floral underneath that was clearly putting in a lot of effort and making no real progress. The shop was orderly in the specific way of someone who knew where everything was and had ideas about where everything should be. Shelves of jars and bottles arranged with the precise logic of a person who did not want to be asked where things were. Labels I couldn't read. Colors I didn't have names for. Something in a tall gss container near the back that was moving slightly in a way I decided not to investigate.

  The shopkeeper looked up from whatever he was measuring with the expression of a man who had been interrupted and was deciding if it was worth it. He was older, somewhere between fifty and ancient, with the specific permanent squint of someone who spent most of their day reading small bels in inconsistent lighting.

  He said nothing.

  "Good morning," I said, which felt like the right opening even if it wasn't being reciprocated. "I need some vials, a collection bowl, a funnel, and corks. I've got three silver to spend. What can you do for me?"

  He looked me over. This had become a thing, I was realizing — people in this city looked at me and then their eyes went somewhere specific and stayed there for a moment before coming back up. I was nineteen and narrow through the hips, the ring meant I was never entirely soft and linen trousers were not engineered for discretion. On someone with more mass to distribute across it probably wasn't noticeable. On me it was just. Present. Sitting there in my pants being a whole situation that I couldn't do anything about and had mostly made my peace with except for moments like this one where a stranger was visibly doing inventory.

  I turned slightly and examined a jar of something purple on the nearest shelf with the focused attention of a person who was extremely interested in whatever was in this jar. The jar contained what appeared to be dried beetles. I looked at the dried beetles and waited.

  The shopkeeper cleared his throat. Turned. Began pulling things from shelves with the unhurried efficiency of someone who had decided on a price and was assembling the order before announcing it. Seven vials, slender and stoppered with small gss caps that would need repcing with the corks. A bowl, clear gss, maybe four inches across and four deep — wider than I'd expected and therefore more useful. A small funnel that fit the mouth of the vials precisely. A handful of corks pulled from a drawer.

  He set it all on the counter and named a price. Two silver eighty.

  I paid and tucked everything carefully into my arms — the bowl nested against my chest, the vials wrapped in the cloth he provided without being asked, the funnel and corks in my pocket.

  "Thank you," I said.

  He had already gone back to whatever he was measuring.

  I walked back to the inn with my purchases and tried to think of a dignified way to describe what I was about to do to myself.

  I came up empty on that front. Production, I decided. Clinical, efficient, implied a certain professional distance from the specifics. I was going into production.

  The ring pulsed warmly at my base as I climbed the stairs, which was its way of indicating it had strong feelings about the upcoming session and no patience for euphemism.

  "I know," I said quietly, to my own crotch, in a hallway, in a fantasy city.

  Level five Sex Mage. Vitalist. From Ohio. What a world.