When Seymour Little finally showed his cards, the other interdimensional travelers seated around the poker table all groaned in miserable unison. A quick laugh slipped out, but at the same time, their sad little alien harmony made him feel oddly nostalgic. Homesick, even. Because it turned out it didn’t really matter which universe you came from—and it didn’t matter if you were just some dude from the Valley or a cthulhu-coded sea monster or maybe even a faceless entity made of pure energy—watching your bankroll evaporate in a smoke-filled barroom was always a kick in the nuts.

  “Like I told you last time, Dathon.” Seymour leaned forward to drag the pot over to his side of the table. “Next time, you better think twice before you call my bluff.”

  “Your duplicitous methods continue to confound detection.” Dathon’s chin-tentacles slithered over one another like angry eels and the nubby little goat-horns protruding from his head were turning bright red, while the rest of his porous, reef-like body remained pale blue.

  Nearly lost in the mound of poker chips Seymour had just won was something called an Essence of Invention. He’d coaxed his squid-bearded roommate into wagering this weird little trinket, but he didn’t actually have a clue what its purpose was. He only knew it looked valuable. And now that the hand had wrapped up, he fished the twinkling, pinky-length vial out from the rest of his spoils and held it up for closer examination.

  “So what exactly is this thing, anyway?"

  “The native population of this world would simply call it a catalyst.”

  “Okay, but what’s it for? Like, what does it catalyze?”

  “It has been described to me as a metaphysical object, one which can be fused with their Virtue Sigils in order to manifest a broad range of magical powers.”

  “Virtue Sigils, yeah, I’ve seen plenty of those.” Seymour nodded. “They’re like hypercolor tattoos or something. Almost all these Heschians have a couple. And I’ve heard some of my coworkers talk a little bit about catalysts, too – just hadn’t actually laid eyes on one before now.”

  “The guild where I have been laboring bestowed it upon me as a bonus, recognizing my excellence in services rendered.” Dathon paused before snidely adding, “reportedly, this particular essence is practically worthless on the open market.”

  “Looks like a tiny little galaxy made of gold is trapped in there.” Seymour squinted at the glittering essence which swirled within the vial. “Weirder than shit, but that’s about par for the course around here, am I right? Anyway, Dathon, my man – you really gotta get those tentacles of yours in check. They’re tipping your hand every time. Worst tell I’ve ever seen.”

  “I have lost nothing of great value.” Dathon huffed while clearly concentrating to settle his squirming chin-tendrils. “Such an item is useless to me. For on my homeworld, magic is our birthright. It is as ordinary and automatic as breathing.”

  “Yeah, well, where I come from, it’s all smoke and mirrors.”

  “Mirror mages.” Rucktizzeran, the pure-energy alien with the multi-colored vortex where his face should be, nodded knowingly. He looked like the utmost peak of a peyote trip personified; a kaleidoscopic, man-shaped aura wearing crimson wizard robes. “Their kind are counted among the most devious beings in many—if not most—inhabited universes.”

  “Not at all what I’m talking about, Tizzer, but I’ll take your word on that.” Seymour slipped the vial into his pocket and went about the task of stacking his newly-won chips.

  “Our name is not Tizzer.”

  “Anyway, you boys up for another hand?”

  “I think not.” Arnok, the new guy, slowly rose from his chair. He claimed to originally hail from a place called the Blood Realm, and he looked like he could be an ordinary human wrapped entirely in a red cloak with only his eyes peering out – but Seymour knew that he was actually just a horde of leeches who could form like Voltron into a facsimile of a normal-looking dude. “I must feed. It must be blood.”

  “Yeah, yeah. We know already.”

  A portly, balding man wearing a cooking apron smudged with grease appeared alongside their table. This was Chester Hedwick, and he ran this squalid tavern along with the attached boardinghouse for folks who had inadvertently ended up in the wrong universe. Hedwick’s Home for Wayward Aliens, he called it, even if the local municipality called it Alien Labor Cabin Number Three.

  If Seymour had been given a million years, he never could have guessed how frequently interdimensional incursions occurred here – so frequently that a number of halfway houses like this had been set up in every major town. The whole ordeal of waking up in the woods outside a legit low-tech medieval settlement would have been way worse if Seymour had been forced to fend for himself over these past few months, so his gratitude for the existence of this fantasy-world social safety-net was very real.

  For a nominal weekly fee, the Ministry of Alien Affairs hooked Seymour up with room and board and found him temporary gigs so that he could acclimate to his new world – while also stashing some savings away for when the day inevitably came that he would be ready to strike out on his own.

  “The butcher has delivered you some buckets out back.” Chester nodded to Arnok the leech-man. Then, he addressed the rest of the table. “And if any of you other fellers want for supper this evening, you’d best place your orders without further delay. The kitchen will close within the half-hour.”

  “Yeah, taking these dudes for all they’re worth has me starving, let’s do three of those b’jooshburgers.” Seymour winked at Dathon and Rucktizzeran. “It’s on me.”

  Early on during his stay at Hedwick’s Home, Seymour had been delighted to find a burger on Chester’s menu, despite having no idea what sort of creature a b’joosh truly was. Whatever the case, burgers made from their flesh turned out to be super juicy and buttery, but had a mouth-feel like salmon. Was it a fish? A mammal? Seymour honestly had no clue – but they sure hit the spot. And it was the only item on the menu that at least felt something like Earth-food; a familiarish port in an otherwise alien shitstorm of weird casseroles and unnervingly floppy kabobs.

  “As you wish, Mr. Little.” Chester angled off to deliver the order to his kitchen and Arnok followed him that way, eager to slurp up the buckets of blood he’d been promised.

  “We appreciate your magnanimity." Rucktizzeran’s aura cycled excitedly through the whole spectrum of colors.

  “You bet. That means generosity or something, right?”

  “Affirmitive.”

  Dathon suddenly gripped Seymour by the forearm. “Aren’t you going to use it right now?”

  “Use what?”

  “The catalyst, obviously.” He rolled his eyes in exasperation and his little goat-horns drained of color until they became entirely translucent. “As a human-type, similar to the majority of native Heschians, do you not perhaps possess a Virtue Sigil or two of your own?”

  “Not exactly.” Seymour held out his hand to reveal the midnight black, tribal-style tattoo that he had found drawn on his palm when he first awakened out in the woods, almost a month back. It looked like a pig-face more than anything. “I have a couple of these, though. Definitely doesn't look very virtuous, but do you think adding a catalyst to it might still work? You think I could actually learn a magic spell or something?”

  “I cannot say with perfect certainty. I remind you that I, too, am not of this world.”

  To hear Dathon tell it, he came from a planet that consisted of one big ocean and no landmasses at all. He’d ended up here, on this world which the locals called the Realm of Heschia, as the result of a portal malfunction. He’d been trying to travel to the next town over and accidentally hopped universes, instead.

  Evidently, magical portals were a real thing and mishaps involving them were how the majority of wayward aliens wound up stuck on Heschia. The exact circumstances surrounding Seymour’s own isekai adventure were actually far more mysterious—and not only because he still had no memory of how he got here—but moreso because Earth, like the rest of its associated universe, wasn’t known as a magically-potentiated locale. Which meant portals of any kind were going to be exceedingly rare there – if they even existed at all.

  Retrieving the Essence of Invention from his pocket, Seymour narrowed his eyes across the table at Dathon. “So even though you can’t say for sure what will happen if I try to somehow combine this thing with one of my funky tattoos, you do think that I should give it a shot, don’t you?”

  “Indeed, I do.” He offered a crisp nod, which sent his chin-tentacles swaying. “If for no other reason than the fact that you have already amassed a fair number of chits through dominating Rucktizzeran and I at these games of chance. Selling a catalyst which you have acquired at no cost—merely for the purpose of adding even more chits to your personal fortune—would seem foolishly redundant when it might instead be used to unlock hidden, magical powers within yourself.”

  “Fair point,” Seymour agreed. “And obviously it would be super cool to learn some magic. But I don’t think I want to do the deed out here in the open. I’ll wait until after we eat and I can slip back to our room.”

  “A most wise course of action,” Rucktizzeran noted. His aura was suddenly gray. “One can never be too careful. Any number of these so-called bar patrons might be mirror mages in disguise.”

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  “You’ve gotta learn to relax, Ruckus. You mind if I call you Ruckus?”

  “But that also is not our name.”

  “I need a drink.” Seymour pushed back his chair and climbed to his feet. “How ‘bout another round of brews to go with our burgs?”

  “A fine proposal,” Dathon agreed.

  “Alright, I’ll go chase down Chester.” He cast a playfully suspicious glare at the two aliens, but cracked a smile as he left them. “Hands off my chips. I know exactly what I’ve got there.”

  Chester Hedwick ran his boarding house on the edge of a town called Ghizo’s Crossing. The roof sagged and not one of the window panes remained intact. If not for the rickety shutters, birds might have flown right in.

  The entire building consisted of only five actual boarding rooms, plus a simple kitchen, Chester’s private suite, the main tavern room where Seymour had been teaching magical aliens to play poker—more like a simple dining room with a wall of booze behind a bar and a number of wooden tables and chairs, all of which came equipped with at least one leg of unequal length—and a community washroom equipped with a community wash basin and a community chamber pot.

  “You’re serious?” Seymour had asked during his initial tour, hoping the innkeeper was only joking. “You’re telling me everyone just goes in the same pot?”

  “But of course,” Chester explained, “this ain’t Emperor Mallex’s palace. And for your further information, each user is obligated to empty it after each use – though truthfully there’s no simple method of strictly enforcing such an obligation.”

  “The honor system, then.”

  Chester cocked an eyebrow. “Lad, if you are able to suss even a single glint of honor in the act of a man grunting and pushing his turds into a shallow, ceramic pot, then I do quite envy your mindset, and I do believe it will serve you very well during your time on Heschia. Now come along and I’ll show you to your room.”

  Doing his business in a ceramic pot probably would have been the single biggest bit of culture shock Seymour had endured in this new world – if not for magic being fairly commonplace. That fact still had him feeling more than a little bit untethered from reality. Over the weeks since Seymour’s arrival, he’d met elves and orcs and even weirder humanoid races during the various daylabor gigs he’d been assigned to, and it also seemed that something like three quarters of the human population had these Virtue Sigil things, which looked like tattoos done in silvery ink that was somehow prismatic, containing a rainbow of colors which shifted depending on the angle from which they were being viewed.

  Supposedly, these tattoos were actually more like birthmarks, and they appeared on their own at certain age intervals. He wasn’t entirely clear on all that, since none of his fellow boarders at Hedwick’s Home possessed any Virtue Sigils to speak of, on account of them all hailing from alternate universes and whatnot, where magic manifested differently.

  When Seymour had awakened to find himself in the cherry blossom forest outside Ghizo’s Crossing, he also discovered that someone had tatted him up on both of his palms, as well as right over his heart. But his weird ink wasn’t silvery and multi-colored – it was all pure black and tribal-looking, real edgy like he was hoping to audition for a nu metal band or something.

  On his right palm, he’d found the pig-faced design he’d shown to Dathon back at the poker table. It was mostly circular, and it wasn’t exactly a face but rather a collection of lines which strongly hinted at one, a kind of optical illusion. When the face became visible, it looked like some kind of pig-man, with a flat snout and a wide, grinning mouth set below two beady eyes. Disturbingly, the mouth was drawn in a midnight black that almost seemed to have depth – like a void in the palm of his hand.

  He found a second weird tattoo on his left palm, done in the same style. It wasn’t an entire face this time but a singular eye, asleep with its lid shut. It sort of reminded Seymour of an Egyptian hieroglyph; the Eye of Horus, maybe? He’d slept through too much of his Intro to Western Civ class to know for sure.

  But that wasn’t all. A third sigil-thing had appeared over his heart, too – the creepiest of them all. This one was in the shape of a pentagram inside a circle, drawn upside-down. Straight up devil shit.

  Early on, the fact that Seymour truly had somehow been warped to a medieval fantasy world was fully hammered home when Chester had shown him the room where he’d be sleeping during his stay. The room held two narrow beds covered in burlap blankets and their mattresses were stuffed with straw. It smelled like a goddamned barn and looked more like a dungeon than a hotel room or anything. A basic nightstand stood beside each bed, and a half-melted candle was plopped on top of each nightstand.

  This was the same room Seymour returned to that night after winning an Essence of Invention off his roommate Dathon, with whom he was quickly becoming friends.

  “Alright, let’s get down to business. How exactly do I use this thing, anyway?”

  “I have witnessed the application of catalysts during my recent labors at the Guild of Artificers.” Dathon held out his open hand, which possessed only three, thick fingers. “Give me the vial and I will assist you.”

  Seymour studied the squid-man’s expression, looking for any signs of deception. But Dathon’s tendrils hung limply, and his nub-horns had shifted back to their typical, pale-blue hue to match the rest of him.

  “Alright.” Seymour dug the vial back out of his pocket and handed it over. “What have I got to lose?”

  “You may wish to be seated.” Dathon gestured toward Seymour’s straw-stuffed bed. “From what I have observed, this will be an intense experience for you.”

  Seymour plopped down on the edge of his mattress. An eerie air of destiny suddenly permeated his thoughts. Was he actually going to learn to use magic? Was he actually about to become some kind of wizard or something?

  A thimble-sized cork topped the vial containing the Essence of Invention. Dathon drew it up out of the vial’s mouth and Seymour was surprised to see that the actual essence was still attached to the cork by a needle-like filament of some sort. He recognized it as a cleverly-designed container, one which allowed a person to remove the essence without needing to physically touch it.

  Dathon strode forward and took Seymour by the wrist. The sea-man’s touch was surprisingly gentle considering the rough, dry-coral texture of his fingers. He deftly turned Seymour’s palm to face upward. The pig-face stared up at the ceiling and Dathon slowly brought the golden, glittering essence closer-and-closer to its gaping pig-mouth.

  “Are you prepared to proceed?”

  “I mean, I guess so. Do I need to do anything special?”

  “From what I’ve seen, we must simply touch the essence to your sigil.” Dathon lowered the essence until it nearly made contact with Seymour’s palm. “While you provide your genuine consent that it may enter you.”

  “Alright then. Let’s do it.”

  Dathon pressed the essence against Seymour’s sigil. At first, nothing happened. The Essence of Invention felt like a warm pebble. But then it suddenly melted into his flesh, and then the sigil itself became animated and was now quite clearly the face of a pig-man, his mouth open in an ecstatic groan that to Seymour’s shock was actually audible.

  But no, wait, that wasn’t his palm groaning – it was Seymour, himself. The sensation that came along with absorbing the essence was better than any drug; a pleasure which he somehow felt through senses that extended beyond the physical dimensions of his body, as if he were surrounded by an aura he’d never known about and now that aura was at a rave.

  “Good, good.” Dathon leaned in for a closer look as the sigil completed its transformation. “Another moment now, and the deed will be done.”

  A golden glow speckled with silver sparks flared around Seymour’s hand, engulfing it entirely. The pig-man drawn on his palm came alive as if it was its own separate entity, opening its void-like mouth wider and wider as if its jaw was unhinging, and then it froze that way. Adding the essence had apparently altered its appearance permanently.

  The whole ordeal had spanned at most ten seconds, but he felt completely spent. His shirt clung to his chest, drenched in cold sweat.

  “Is that it?” he panted. “Did it work?”

  In the next heartbeat, a sort of interface window appeared hovering the air in between him and Dathon, with a black background trimmed in neon green, and filled with letters of the same color:

  “It is done.” Dathon chucked the now empty vial into their wastebasket. “Congratulations, Seymour. You have just acquired your first magical power.”

  “Yeah, I guess so. But what the hell does it actually do? And does that say ‘Sigil of Greed’?” Seymour frowned and studied his pig-faced palm. “Is that what this thing is? Kinda sounds like the opposite of a Virtue Sigil, doesn’t it?”

  Just then, there came a familiar knock at the door and when Seymour flinched, turning his attention that way, the interface window thing dematerialized like smoke on a breeze.

  “Dammit,” he cursed, frustrated that he hadn’t been given more time to study his new spell’s description. “Come on in, Chester, it’s open.”

  “Is this a bad time?” The innkeeper asked, stepping inside. He cocked his head at Seymour, who was still panting and covered in a sheen of sweat, seated on the edge of his bed with Dathon standing over him. “Before you attempt to formulate an explanation, know first that I am in no way judging you, boys – no matter what manner of interspecial lewd act I may have just interrupted. Some randy experimentation is not uncommon.”

  “What? No, it’s nothing like that. Cthulhu boys aren’t really my type. No offense, Dathon.”

  “None has been taken.”

  “So what’s up, Chester?”

  “You’ve received a new assignment.” He handed over a rolled up sheet of parchment. “Starting tomorrow, you’ll be working down at Dragon Dan’s Adventure Depot. The shuttle leaves at just four hours past midnight, so you’d best get some sleep as soon as you are able.”

  The moment Seymour accepted the letter, something bizarre happened. He heard a click inside his own skull and an image flashed through his mind.

  It was geometry, but more dense and way more complicated than anything he’d ever learned in school. It was like a tangle of tesseracts on acid. Really good acid. And while the geometric design captured in his mind’s eye was far, far more ornate than anything he had ever seen before or could truthfully even begin to imagine on his own, it was still somehow totally comprehensible to him in a way he would have struggled to put into words. And then the vision faded, and in its place a sort of label appeared in the corner of his vision, reminiscent of the interface window from a moment earlier:

  “Mr. Little?” Chester sounded like he was miles away. “Is something the matter?”

  “Did you seriously just say ‘Dragon Dan’s Adventure Depot’?” Seymour schooled his expression, putting on his best poker face to keep his weird vision to himself, and unfurled the parchment. It contained directions to the shuttle pickup spot, as well as some basic information about the job. One phrase immediately jumped out: “‘The realm’s preeminent magic emporium’?”

  “Yes, indeed.” Chester nodded. “That it be. And they have requested you by name. This assignment presents a rare opportunity for you, Mr. Little – one which many Heschians would kill for. There is no magic shop more awesome than Dragon Dan’s.”

  In the corner of Seymour’s eye, he caught Dathon’s tentacles quivering with excitement.