“What is this?” Marco asked. “Why is this?”

“It’s a stage. For people to do entertainment on. Surely you’ve seen one,” the woman said.

“I mean, yeah,” Riv said. “But where do you get the actors and musicians and all?”

“Actors have their place. Most people who find themselves out here find themselves out here for a reason. Usually, that means they have combat appropriate variants of their craft. This one was not that exactly. You’ll see.”

The woman walked up the stage to a small wooden door that led into what appeared to be a backstage area and rapped on it. “Hermes. Hermes! Come out. I brought you customers.”

Some time passed before a clomping from behind the barrier sounded through the entire stage. The door burst open as a thin man dressed in colorful clothing staggered up to it, blearly-eyed and clearly hung over. Even in bad shape, he might have been the most handsome person Marco had ever seen, to the point where he wished he could cover Aethe’s eyes.

“Wow,” Elisa said. “That’s a very pretty invalid.”

“Why,” the man said, “have you brought jokers to my door? It’s too early for jokes, Chenchen.”

“Because they have loads of gold and you are going to take most of it.”

“My early morning acting isn’t worth loads of gold. Have them come back for tonight’s show like everyone else.”

“They don’t want acting, fool. This one is a captain.” Chenchen, if that was really her name, waved generally over Marco’s body. “And he needs other things you have. You don’t remember that problem you asked me to help you solve? This one is the solution.”

“Damn. Fine. Sit down. I’ll make tea. We will drink the tea. Then and only then will I consider this.”

The man went back stage and came back soon with some kind of bulky, clearly magical tray. Placing a kettle on it, he set it across an extra chair while everyone else settled in. Not too long later they all had cups of tea. It was an invigorating blend, whatever it was actually made of, and Marco could feel whatever bits and pieces of fatigue he had left in himself evaporate away as he drank it.

“That’s better.” Hermes took a long look at Marco. “Are you sure he wants what I’ve got?”

“Look at his gear. A good look,” Chenchen said.

Hermes took another gander, and his eyes widened in shock as he realized exactly what Marco was wearing and exactly what he was armed with.

“Chenchen,” he said quietly. “Didn’t think you had it in you.”

“Well, folks change. Now go get your damn bag so we can get started.”

Hermes no longer argued. He stood up slowly, gave Chenchen a small bow, and went to his rooms before returning with a leather sack.

“He has the money?” Hermes asked.

Riv threw the backpack to Chenchen, who almost tipped over catching it.

“Yeah. He’s got it.”

+

Charisma Enchantment Token

These tokens add a charisma modification to equipment. Stackable to a point. Use one at a time.

+

“Start feeding them in,” Chenchen said. “To every piece of equipment. Load them to the gills.”

Marco frowned. He liked Charisma well enough, he supposed, but it wasn’t nearly as directly observable an effect as, say, more Dexterity. That made him faster. More Vitality made things hurt less. More Strength made his sword go in farther, and so on. Charisma was always part of his stat allocations, but it had never really made known what it was doing.

“Are we sure this is the right balance?” he asked. “Like really sure?”

“It’s Charisma. It’s right to ask,” Chenchen said. “The first thing you should know is that Charisma doesn’t work like the other stats. I’m guessing your scholar there told you some of this, but it has to do a bit with how your class communicates with the system.”

“Sure.”

“Well, it’s that, but it’s also how well your class communicates with things in general. When you are hitting another person or another person is hitting you, that’s a bolder form of communication. The meaning is hard to miss. On the other hand, Charisma does almost nothing compared to that. But your class doesn’t work that way, entirely. No captain’s does.”

Marco thought back to the times he had felt big upgrades between him and the ship and how that made him feel. He felt like he could feel more of what the ship sensed about itself, that it could hear him more clearly. He started to have an idea where this conversation was going.

“But my commands to the ship are more subtle,” he said.

“Something like that. At the very least, they are flowing in like a dye instead of being bashed in like a nail. And that matters a lot at sea, where slight advantages add up into multiple broadsides the enemy can’t answer. Now, I’m not going to ask a lot of questions about what your class does, but it’s not normal, correct? I saw you take in those clothes so I more or less know this already.”

“It’s interesting, at least.”

“Then there’s a good chance this does even more than I’m saying. That’s nice, but it doesn’t matter to your decision. It will do enough to how you captain to be worth it.”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from NovelBin; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“You are burying the lede,” Hermes said. “Very like you.”

“Oh, shh, you overdramatic man,” Chenchen said. “There’s also the matter your Scholar already probably mentioned. That Charisma makes you more important to the system. Elisa, was it? Forgive me, but the book version of that theory is probably a little wrong.”

“It often is.” Elisa shrugged. “I’m used to it.”

“Very mature of you to know. The reason it’s wrong is that it says it makes a person more interesting to the system, which is only true in the sense that it seems true. Some people pump up their Charisma to absurd levels hoping to be interesting to the system, and it never happens. It never so much as winks at them.”

“She’s being polite, but she means people like me,” Hermes added. “I’m all charisma and just a little dexterity, and I’ve never so much as been on a real adventure. The most Charisma could get me was an interesting stage on some remote island, and believe me it’s not because the number behind that stat is low.”

“You and some others I know. The point is that some people are just more from the beginning. The system is already interested in them from birth, or at least by the time they get their classes. Your friends probably never say it, but I guarantee you that they feel like they are part of your story more than you are part of theirs. That if someone wrote a book about you all, it would really be about you.”

Marco immediately protested. “I can’t imagine that’s true. Elisa’s interesting. Riv is…”

“Oh, quiet,” Riv said. “I was a dockworker before I met you.”

“A calligrapher’s daughter,” Elisa said. “Bound for a life writing things in dim lighting.”

“Part of a communal people who wanted me to be quiet,” Aethe said.

“And you took them all with you somewhere on a ship. Exactly.” Chenchen clapped her hands softly. “The system already is interested in you, Marco, because you have something more. It’s that something more that Charisma increases. It’s like it puts a better handle on your tiller so that the system can turn it quicker.”

“All right. I suppose that makes enough sense,” Marco said. “I’ll get started.”

One by one, he picked small wood tokens out of the leather bag, letting them dissolve into his equipment with little blips of light. Each piece of gear took several of them, glowing bright and brighter until the process was over for that piece and it returned to normal. By the end, even the sword and the gun were loaded up.

“I’ll take back the excess. And my gold.”

Hermes dealt with Elisa and Riv for the latter, settling out for an amount of gold that would have bought miles of shoreline back on Gulf Isle. It was telling that they still had a fair amount of gold left.

“Chenchen,” Marco said. “What was your class again?”

“Think of it as armorer,” she said. “It’s a little more complex than that, but I know quite a bit about what you need that you can’t see. If you trust me, I can help you spend the rest of the gold in that bag for your people in ways you might not understand, but that will help.”

“Sure. But why?”

“Because you wear my husband’s armor and wield his weapons, now.” She softly touched his arm, where a plate of leather would eventually help him resist cuts that would otherwise cripple him. “I have a certain responsibility to make sure things go as well for you as they can.”

Chenchen led them all over the island after that. They stopped at a shop that sold mysterious oils, buying some to rub on Aethe’s bow and Riv’s club, but none for Marco’s gun or Elisa’s hands. They bought a piece of magic flint that Marco’s gun ate immediately, a bag of arrowheads, and some powder for the cannons that Chenchen said would give the cannons a bit more oomph when they really needed it.

And almost always, Chenchen would wheedle a few tokens out of the merchant. They were never obviously for sale, always tucked away in a pocket or a chest until Chenchen mentioned them, and then only reluctantly parted with.

“Look at the boy. Look at his friends. They need them,” she’d say, and the person would crumble. It was always something like that. Never that they had the money, and often the people wouldn’t even charge for them. Just that they needed them more than the people who were holding onto them.

“Chenchen. Why are they never out in the open?” Marco asked. “The tokens.”

“Because… actually, first. You’ve obviously never seen any of those, Correct?”

“Right.”

“You eventually will. They are a rare drop, but only in the sense that you’d never see more than one or two over a long period of time. But over the years, as you got stronger, the equipment you wear begin to get loaded up with them, and they’d start to accumulate.”

“I’d have extras.”

“Yes, but you wouldn’t think of them that way. You would think of them as your future. One day you’d get a new sword, you’d know, and then you’d use them on that. You’d get better armor and be able to make it work better right away.”

“And then they just don’t? All of them are that unlucky?” Marco asked.

“All of them stopped trying. Have you ever heard of an elephant?” Chenchen asked back.

Marco screwed his face up. He thought he had seen something like that in a book somewhere, a long time ago.

“Big things,” he eventually said. “With tronks.”

“Trunks,” Elisa corrected.

“She’s right, and you are right. Nobody ever sees one in the flesh. I’m not sure they even exist. Still, people see the elephant out here all the time.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s a turn of phrase. The ocean is huge, Marco. We each have our time to sail it. We each go as far as we are meant to go unless something stops us. But eventually, at some point, the enormity of it becomes real. People see the elephant. It might be a storm, it might be a particularly dire beast, or it might be an island that can never be fully explored by them. It doesn’t matter. Once the bigness of it all becomes real to them, they all head for the same place. The shore.”

“And they never leave again?” Riv asked. “There are an awful lot of boats on the docks in good repair that say they must.”

“Oh, they leave. But the real adventure, the real risks? Those are over for them. They sail to known places, places they can handle. They do things they know they can do. And they never approach the elephant again.”

“So these tokens…”

“Are still for a future,” Chenchen said. “Just not theirs. Same as your gear, Marco. But it’s not something most people can realize alone.”

The gold ran out in the mid-afternoon. Marco held back a bag of coins for their immediate needs, but besides that, Riv’s backpack was now empty. There were a dozen or more ways they were all slightly stronger now, even besides the tokens, things he couldn’t imagine they would have thought of or bought themselves.

“Chenchen. I forgot to pay you for these clothes,” Marco said. “These weapons. I’m sorry. I’ll get more gold soon, probably, and I’ll be sure…”

“Don’t be stupid,” Chenchen said. “Just live. Sail further than I got.”

Marco hugged her. He couldn’t help it. Nobody on his team seemed to think it was weird, thankfully. When he pulled back, the woman had wet eyes.

“Why, though?”

“You’ll find out soon enough. And if I’m not mistaken, that Charisma stat has already started to set those gears in motion. Good luck, Marco. Look me up when you survive everything.”

Marco felt a buzzing in his system-feelings that turned him around. Coming down the road were the two brothers from before, followed by a man who was nondescript in almost every way besides having huge, sharpened, half-a-foot-long claws where his fingernails should have been. He pointed at Marco, said a few words to the brothers, then turned around and walked away before Marco could otherwise react.

“Marco, right? You spent all your money?” one of the brothers came and asked.

“Close enough,” Marco said. “How can we help you, Bhul?”

“It’s the boss. Mayor Quill. He’d like a word with you, if you are up to it. At his manor.”

Marco looked behind him for Chenchen, but she was already gone. Ahead of him, Quill was still walking away, neither hurrying nor lollygagging. Just moving.

“It is a choice, right?” Marco asked. “We aren’t under arrest?”

“Of course not,” Bhul said. “You’ve just made a stir. He wants to meet you, maybe offer you some work. It’d be a favor to me, honestly. Another task completed without problems.”

Marco looked to the team. They didn’t seem to have any objections, and he thought that it was possible rejecting the offer might come with just as many risks as accepting it. Besides that, he was pretty sure Chenchen would have told him to run if he had needed to. She seemed pretty invested in him living at this point.

“Sure,” Marco said. “Let’s go.”