The interface brightened.
Eenax clasped his hands behind his back and adopted the posture of someone about to deliver a briefing they considered beneath them. Then he glanced at the space left of her face again. As if willing her notifications to be visible to him.
Danica decided not to mention it. It was, genuinely, the nicest thing she could do for him.
"What did you get?" The question came out clipped. Professional. Ruined by the small involuntary flick of his tail.
"I thought you already knew."
"I am a guide," his words were clipped, "not an administrator. Personal notifications are private." A beat. "Obviously."
"Obviously," she agreed, keeping her face neutral. "Fifty thousand Galactic Credits. Ten stat points. One Identify skill. And…" she watched him carefully, "unlimited lifetime access to a system guide."
The silence that followed had weight.
His image flickered and when it reformed he had the look of a man who had read his own contract and found a clause he deeply regretted.
"Unlimited," he repeated.
"Unlimited. Is that a big deal?"
"A big deal?" He let out a sharp laugh, one that verged on unhinged. "Most people are granted written system guides at best, and only in liminal spaces such as this." He gestured dramatically to the void surrounding them. "Live guidance might be given, but anything beyond ten minutes costs one Galactic Credit per minute. Unlimited access? That is akin to being handed the keys to a vast and ancient library, butler included."
"Oh," she said, trying to sound nonchalant. "I can see how that would be... good."
"Good?!" His wings flared as he mimicked her voice with exaggerated incredulity. "'Millennia of knowledge at her disposal, and she says good.'" He shook his head in theatrical disappointment before muttering, "Utterly hopeless."
Danica laughed. "Fine. It's very good. Happy now?"
He waved her off with an idle flick of his claws. "Back to business. Might I assume you are finally ready to hear why the base classes are, in fact, the practical choices?"
"Does this mean you're going to tell me how to unlock the fun ones instead?"
Eenax sighed, wings drooping as though she had sentenced him to an afternoon of excruciating paperwork. "The base classes exist for a reason. Stable stat bonuses, reliable skill trees, and most crucially, a low probability of transforming oneself into a cursed amphibian."
"I'm sure they're great," Danica said. "But shouldn't I know all my options before I commit to something?"
Eenax fixed her with a look that said he'd heard this before. "Advanced classes have prerequisites. Unless you are willing to sacrifice your race-specific skill selection, those four are your only available options at this stage." He paused. "Once you reach Soul Level 10, additional classes unlock based on what you've demonstrated."
"So, there are cooler ones. I just can't have them yet."
"You could have them now," he said, with the careful tone of someone explaining why you shouldn't touch the large red button. "If you waive your race skill selection and allow the System to scan your memories instead. It translates accumulated knowledge directly into skills — considerably faster than earning them through experience." His wings settled. "I do not recommend it for most initiates."
"Why not?"
"Because the majority of initiates from technology-dependent worlds have no useful memories to scan." He said it without cruelty, simply the flat weight of statistical fact. "And the distinction matters. Skills earned through point selection are granted whole: knowledge, instinct, muscle memory, all of it. Skills the System pulls from your memories are recognized, not installed. It finds competency you already possess and codifies it. What it cannot find, it cannot give you." His gaze sharpened. "Survival skills — hunting, navigation, shelter, clean water — these are not optional in an untamed environment. They are the difference between reaching your first level and becoming a cautionary footnote." A beat. "You would be astonished how many people die because they drank from the wrong stream. "Danica was quiet for a moment.
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He wasn't wrong. The average person couldn't start a fire even with instructions on their phone. Couldn't navigate without GPS. Couldn't identify a plant as edible or poisonous if their life depended on it.
Which, apparently, it now did.
But her parents were not most people. And neither, she was starting to realize, was she.
"What happens," she said slowly, "if the scan finds something worth keeping?"
Eenax tilted his head, not quite looking at empty air again. As if checking something or pretending to. "Then your class options expand considerably. The System rewards demonstrated competency. If your memories contain genuine survival skills, combat training, technical expertise — it will recognize all of it." He paused. "The question is whether you trust what you know."
She almost laughed at that.
A memory hit her before she could.
She was ten years old, and her brother was wrong about the rabbit.
Danica crouched behind a tangle of brush, breath slow and measured, fingers pressing into damp earth. The forest canopy filtered morning light into thin gold strips across the undergrowth. Thirty feet away, her snare sat exactly where she'd set it the night before, trigger balanced, loop open, positioned along the run she'd tracked at dusk.
Zelimir was somewhere to her right. She could tell because she couldn't hear him, which meant he was trying. When he stopped trying he sounded like a man walking through a kitchen at two in the morning.
"Your breathing is too loud." His whisper came from directly behind her left shoulder.
She didn't startle. She'd learned not to. "You've been standing there for four minutes."
"Three and a half."
"You tripped on something getting here."
A pause. "Root."
"Rock."
The rustling stopped them both. A small nose appeared between the ferns. Twitching, testing the air. Danica went still. Her father's voice in her head, the same way it always arrived in moments like this. The animal isn't deciding whether to come closer. It's deciding whether you're already there.
The rabbit moved forward. One step. Two.
She didn't touch the snare. Didn't need to. Just waited.
Snap.
The loop took it clean. The rabbit thrashed twice and then stilled as Danica moved in, quick and certain, hands already knowing what to do before her brain finished the instruction.
"That," Zelimir said, appearing at her shoulder with his arms crossed, "is not fair."
"You've had the same training I have."
"You're better at the waiting part."
She glanced up at him. He wasn't wrong, and they both knew it. Zelimir was sharper in almost every way that mattered. Faster on tactics, better at reading people, the one their parents sent first into anything that required charm or authority. But stillness had always been hers. The ability to be present in a moment without needing it to move.
He produced his own rabbit from behind his back with the energy of someone presenting evidence. It was smaller. Not by much, but enough.
"Yours might be marginally larger," he said.
"Victory is mine."
"For this exact moment, in this specific category." He fell into step beside her as they turned back toward the tree line. "Which I'm noting for the record."
She laughed, and he laughed, and the morning felt like a memory worth keeping.
She came back to the white void slowly, as if surfacing from a dream that hadn't finished with her yet.
Eenax was watching her with the particular patience of someone who had learned not to interrupt whatever initiates did when they went quiet like that.
She'd been ten. Her brother had been fourteen and already insufferable about everything he was better at, which was most things. But he'd never made her feel ridiculous for the things she knew. Never rolled his eyes when their father handed her a field manual or their mother made them both identify plants from memory before breakfast. He'd shown up, the way he always did: a little too close, pretending not to care how she did.
She had no idea where he was right now.
The thought arrived without drama and sat in her chest like a stone settling to the bottom of still water. Zelimir would be fine. That was simply true the way physics was true, not because she'd reasoned it out but because the alternative didn't have anywhere to stand. He was the most competent person she'd ever met and he'd been prepared by their parents for something like this since before either of them understood it wasn’t normal.
Her parents too, in their own way. They'd built the bunker, collected the manuals, and spent years drilling skills she'd half resented and apparently needed.
She looked at Eenax.
"The scan," she said. "If the System finds real skills in someone's memories, not only knowledge but actual demonstrated competency. It converts all of it?"
"Everything it can verify, yes."
She thought about the rabbit. The snare she'd set at dusk from memory. Her hands had known what to do before she'd consciously decided to move. Fifteen years of her parents' paranoia, encoded in muscle and instinct.
"Then I'll take the evaluation."