Izzy stood in a shroud of ethereal mist and cloud, his head pounding slightly and he felt a little off-balance. He looked around in a combination of fear and disbelief.

  “Well, I’m pretty sure that shouldn’t have happened,” he said.

  Izzy had read that when somebody absorbs a core, the magic needs to resonate with the user. This resonance would build until there was a sudden, but usually pretty small, burst of magic determined by the type of core. Some strong affinities would cause more remarkable results; fire cores going off like a large firework, wind cores causing a strong dust devil in the area, things like that. Izzy stood gawking at his surroundings as something changed in his vision.

  Right in front of his face, a pop up window like in a video game obscured his vision.

  “Uh,” Izzy said, rereading the text for the fourth time. There hadn’t been anything like this in the books he’d read. “Forcibly and immediately expunged from your body. As in… I’ll explode?”

  As soon as his thoughts went to this and he asked the question, another pop up layered on top of the first.

  The box closed quickly after Izzy read it, the text and box sputtering out of existence like it was an under-powered highway sign.

  “If I need the power to retrieve the information,” Izzy asked nobody in particular, “then how did I get the information I needed anyway?”

  Another box immediately popped up.

  Izzy’s unease with the situation couldn’t stop him from laughing at the text box.

  It was just so absurd. It seemed like his magic had an attitude or intelligence of its own and it was as snarky as Izzy at his worst. The text box sputtered out of existence like the previous one and Izzy was left staring at the first box once again.

  The more Izzy thought about it, the more it started making sense to accept. Since he got here, he’d been behind the eight ball and trying to put the pieces together. He was infinitely curious about the interaction between nature and magic and was ready to dive in. Even being in this strange place wasn’t as alarming as it would have been a couple days ago; it wasn’t even as bad as when he used the really strong healing spell coin.

  If he was going to do this whole magic thing, he wanted to do more than just survive; he wanted to thrive. No more clutching at straws. It appeared to Izzy that his magic was thinking the same thing.

  He wasn’t going to just get magic powers, he was going to be powerful.

  “All right chums,” Izzy said, smirking at the joke. He took in a deep breath and let it out. “Let’s do this.”

  He instinctively reached out with his mind to the text box, and selected “yes”.

  Ever so briefly, a text box popped up over the one on which he had selected yes before they both flickered out.

  The ethereal mist around Izzy started sparking with intense electrical energy and lightning. It began to swirl around Izzy, growing to a maelstrom of blue-white light mixed with the grey of fog. It gained an amount of substance and Izzy could feel it tugging at his body. Reflexively, he threw his arms up over his head and spread his feet into an athletic position.

  Izzy readied himself for an experience similar to the Grade 4 healing coin; he woefully underestimated.

  In his chest, he could feel his core trying to make sense of the power around him; the resonance began thrumming loudly in his head. As it grew in intensity to match the gale of lightning and magic around him, a single, final pulse erupted from his body creating a sphere of solid blue-white light encapsulating him and a fog of power around him. It then retracted just as fast as it had formed, sucking the entire storm of magic and lightning into his body.

  The magic seemed to have a physical quality and he could feel the power flow into him, filling him up to the brim and making his head and chest fit to burst. As it piled into him, he could feel his body changing. His organs felt liquified, his blood charged like he was hooked to a power line, his vision changing through the spectrum of light.

  He threw his arms out to the side and opened his mouth in a rictus representing all the pent up pain, frustration, and confusion that had been nagging at him since he had come to this world. Blue-white light burst from his eyes and his mouth until the magic finally stopped incorporating itself into him.

  His perspective spun like it was riding an electron around a nucleus, then his view snapped out to the scope of the entire solar system. Izzy gawked as he floated in space, his view unmarred by its vacuum and revelling in its cosmic winds.

  He could pick out the orbits of each of the planets from the vantage point as he could see their reflected light as they spun around the sun at an unbelievable velocity. His view then flickered out and he was back over Xhansarim, falling once again like his grand entrance to this world.

  While all of this happened, a static had started growing in the back of his mind. It was similar to the feeling from the powerful healing coin, with an additional electric buzzing that sent flashing lightning out into his mind and through all of his body.

  At the same time as he was looking at the planetary orbits, he also rode one of the flashes and it pulsed down his nerves through all of his limbs. He was IN all his limbs and appendages all at the same time. As he felt like he was falling to Xhansarim once again, electric fire scoured through his body burning away pounds of material that didn’t belong here, didn’t belong with the magic.

  Didn’t belong with HIS magic.

  The pain surged again and everything faded to black.

  —

  As Izzy popped back into the world, he first heard Yelric take in a gasp of air. The next thing Izzy heard was a wet slap as he landed hard on the floor. Izzy was slick with sweat and a layer of thick oil that he recognized as the residue of core absorption. While the magic core wasn’t strictly a physical thing that was incorporated into a user’s body, he had read that the magic it contained still altered the body and expunged anything that the core didn’t feel was compatible or that it deemed could be a hindrance to its magic.

  Izzy laid in his filth holding his head taking slow, deliberate breaths as the tumultuous power slowly stabilized. His nerves were on fire but he could feel the power of the blue-white light pulsating deep within him. It felt good and natural. Like that core had been made exactly for him.

  He went to open his eyes and they were caked shut with gunk. Making the mistake of wiping his eyes off with equally dirty hands, tears started to pour from his eyes as they stung. Izzy held out his hands helplessly and a soft cloth was pressed into each of them. He used them on his eyes and face, finally seeing the mess of his own making. He slowly made it up to his knees, his hands and feet almost slipping on the slick.

  Yelric was standing there with his mouth open as the Scintillae hustled around where Izzy was kneeling in the middle of the workshop. They were cleaning up some of the further flung goop.

  “Ummm,” Yelric said slowly. “I guess we should have had you take most of your clothes off. This is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. I knew magic absorption caused the purging of impurities, but… Izzy… Where in the world did you go?”

  Izzy looked at the sticky, oily mess and tried not to hurl, recalling everything that happened after he opened the box. From what he’d read, it appeared as though there was much more than usual; it was as if he had gone through multiple grade increases all at once. The only problem; it hadn’t taken him long to ruin his “Prince Eric” clothes.

  “That was, incredible,” Izzy said, looking at his palms. He could feel the magic radiating off of him and watched as little arcs of electricity coursed under his skin beneath the ooze. “It hurt more than anything ever before in my life, but it was amazing! Though, I really need to stop going unconscious, that is NOT good for you. I can feel it though, I have it. I have the power! But wait, I actually went somewhere? I thought it was all in my head?”

  Yelric raised an eyebrow, waiting for more but Izzy just knelt there looking at his body. Yelric pulled out his Magic Affinity Crystal Kaleidoscope, MACK for short. He put the monocle on and held the crystal up. He aligned the Space magic lens and, after a faint chink of broken glass, he winced as a blinding blue-white light seared itself onto his retina.

  His MACK was better than most, but it was still only supposed to take a glimpse at the magic inside a person or object. He looked at the crystal, frowning at the broken spatial shard inside. It was much too soon for the shard to have worn out; Izzy must have overloaded it. He looked up and Izzy, with his head cocked quizzically, was looking Yelric up and down.

  “You look different,” Izzy said breathily. He was visibly shaky even just sitting back on his knees. “All blue and glowy. OOOOO! Like Cherenkov radiation!”

  He looked back at his arm at that realization and continued staring at it.

  “You can see my core?” Yelric said, aghast.

  “Maybe?” Izzy replied, dragging out the word and starting to sound more heady. He looked back at Yelric, “There is a bunch of brown, too. With just a hint of red and silver. It’s really bright and… oh.. Shit.. here we go ag…”

  His eyes crossed a little and he slipped, falling unconscious again and hitting the floor with a squelch.

  Yelric stared at the snoring Izzy, amazed at the revelation. He didn’t know of anybody who could see somebody’s core and shards without a MACK or very powerful Earth magic enhanced with additional Earth or Space shards. He’d also never heard of a space core absorption that caused a teleportation as a result of the resonance. The lightning was a little worrisome, but not completely unheard of.

  He smiled to himself as the Scintillae set about the room and saw to Izzy, cleaning as they went. Yelric was relieved with Izzy coming out the other side of his absorption; he slumped back into his chair satisfied. Plus, this was the most fun Yelric had enjoyed for quite some time. It wasn’t often these days that something could surprise him and Izzy, if nothing else, was an endless source of surprises.

  —

  Izzy was sitting in a backroom of Yelric’s shop, positively vibrating with energy and anticipation. He’d used spell coins a few times, but that was incomparable to the teeming magic coursing through him now.

  This power was his.

  The interface that he thought he’d dreamt up was floating in front of his face and he was reading from it. He’d remembered it and had started thinking about it for only a moment when it populated something for him automatically.

  “So I wasn’t just hallucinating,” Izzy said to himself. “Part of my magic power is to literally explain my magic power to myself.”

  This summary screen was a little more “your mission should you choose to accept it” than the messages he got during core absorption. Reading it over he appreciated the little bit of explanation it gave him. It seemed, if this system could be trusted, that he really was on a completely different world than Earth. The effect of being an Otherworlder, apparently a title he’d earned for just making it here, seemed to explain his strong connection to the core as well as the extra power that he had acquired.

  The next notification put a little more meat on those bones.

  Izzy read it over a few times and was confused. The Researcher, Inventory, and video game effects all felt new and he was interested to test them out, but it was strange that he was only just now getting a notification of his translation power. It was something that had conspicuously been working and he was already subconsciously using it, so why was he only getting notification of it now?

  He was also finding the text the power provided a little funny; the “show me what you got”, “lucky you”, and the thing about looting boots were the little types of jokes he would make himself. Izzy decided this power was going to be a constant source of entertainment, if not just a source of information.

  Pushing the pop up away with his mind, Izzy took in his new world. The interface always had some amount of active information in his eyesight and he was getting used to it. Along the bottom included what were clearly health, magic, and stamina indicators.

  On the bottom-right, there was a humanoid outline filled in mostly with green. The only thing that wasn’t was his head which had a slight tinge of yellow that had been fading over time. It was reminiscent of his experience with the higher level healing spell coin where he had made mental models of the patients.

  He figured that perhaps he already had the potential for the interface power when he had used the coin, but didn’t have enough of his own magic to manifest them properly and the healing coin had made up the difference. He wasn’t certain, but that seemed to be the simplest explanation with the information on hand, and he wasn’t exactly in a position to go back and check.

  In the middle was a thick, horizontal, blue bar that had been filling since he had finished his core absorption; this one gave him some concern because of the slow speed with which it filled. If his magic recovery was this slow, he was going to have to be judicious with its use. This would be easy enough to test, so he would reserve judgement for later.

  The last indicator was a vertical green bar that looked like a stereotypical “sprint meter” from a video game. He was going to have to test that out, too. He was curious to see if it actually had modified his athleticism or if it was just a visual representation of his natural physical ability.

  Looking away from the status bars, he saw a horizontal, bar compass at the top of his view. Turning his head left and right, the compass reacted and reoriented accordingly. Focusing hard on the compass, a larger translucent map popped up in his view. It seemed to work like video game maps where the thoroughly explored parts were filled in with reasonable detail, the places where he’d only gotten a glimpse were less detailed, and the rest were blacked-out, vague outlines of unknown locations.

  Zooming out, he could see that S’or Voril was a large collection of islands, archipelagos, and crescent-shaped continents. As he zoomed into his location, the outline of Xhansarim was better defined with most of the street lines visible but not particularly clear; this detail was probably provided from his short stint of skydiving over the city.

  Once zoomed all the way in, he could see a little icon for himself inside a building labelled “Yelric Mooni’s Emporium of Fine Goods and Enchantments” right next to a building called “Rajir’s Place”. He could also trace the path they had taken to get to the Pathfinder Guild as well as the path from his landing zone to Rajir’s place.

  He put the map away and looked between the two last icons. One was a chest in the upper right hand corner and the other was a small, rolled up scroll in the upper left. He focused on the chest and the short list of the contents of his belt pouch popped up with a currency counter at the top. After playing some with the filters and search feature he closed it and switched to the scroll.

  Focusing on the scroll, it expanded into a list of notifications like an activity feed or email inbox; the unread ones flashing with a deep gold. He saw the “Leeroy Jenkins” one towards the bottom of the list and flashed a grin. He also recognized the “Otherworlder” and “New Ability Acquired: Show Me What You Got”, but saw a few more. He clicked through them.

  Judging by the information on the caster screen versus what showed for any individual power, it appeared as though progress was tracked for his overall core as well as for each power. He’d have to pay attention to how progressing his powers affected the progress of his core.

  Izzy leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes, grinning ear to ear. For the first time since he got to this world, he felt like he had some semblance of control. He had information available to him and he was going to make the most of it. He didn’t stay like that long since he was still extremely wired.

  Izzy leapt off the bench; he had work to do.

  —

  Yelric knew he was going to be a handful, but Izzy had been an absolute menace since he had woken back up. He’d only been unconscious for an hour or so; he’d hastily thanked each of the Scintillae and apologized for the mess, and then had gone to an insulated room Yelric had prepared for Izzy after acquiring some new clothes; his previous set had been irrevocably destroyed even in a world of magic.

  New magic could be volatile and Yelric didn’t want to unleash a freshly empowered Izzy on the local guild, so he set Izzy up in a back room. Yelric was glad for having the foresight. He’d gone to check on Izzy and found him enjoying his new powers to terrifying effect.

  “Unlimited Power!” screamed Izzy, lightning flashing out of his fingers at a wooden target a meter away.

  Yelric had expressed some concern as Izzy had done this a few times now after explaining it was from one of the works of fiction from where he came from. Izzy made a full-throated, disturbingly satisfied sound as he cut off the flow of magic. Also something he had done every time which unnerved Yelric a little bit.

  “Izzy?” Yelric cut in, trying to get the young man to slow down.

  There wasn’t much target left for him to hit, the smell of smoke and lightning strikes strong in the air.

  “Okay… okay…” Izzy said, panting with his hands on his knees. “Enough fucking around. But I mean, come on! How could I not go all Emperor Palpatine? Fuck! I feel great! Never mind the last sentence in that particular power’s description.”

  He giggled a little to himself before a stray strand of electricity arced out of his hand and connected back to Izzy’s body on his thigh. He yelped, surprised.

  “Shit! Oh… phew. That didn’t hurt, just kinda tingled a bit… Aw man… burned a hole in my new pants already. I’m going to have to get some Earth magic! I bet if you took raw plant fibers you could weave it directly into pants! Or a t-shirt? These tunics are breezy but it all feels a little too Fabio-y for me, ya know? I could start a “graphic T” business! What do you think about “I went to Xhansarim and all I got was vast, cosmic powers”? Wait! The real question… do they make lightning resistant underwear?”

  “Izzy…” Yelric said, patiently.

  “So this electricity is obviously the intrinsic manifestation of my spatial magic. I read about that, most cores will give an innate affinity for a certain type of casting after absorption. Not entirely sure how we get from ‘space magic’ to ‘burning hot streams of electrons’ but I’m gonna figure it out, just you wait. I can do this all day, by the way! My magic meter barely ticks down as I do that one. I think I have more magic than I originally thought and it took so long to fill up because I just had that much magic to recover, right?”

  Izzy paused to suck in a ragged breath and continued before Yelric could cut in.

  “I wonder if I can ball it up and huck it like a baseball! Oo… oo… oo… Or wrap myself in electricity and run like The Flash! I have a power that kinda sounds like that might be possible? Though the description is actually about a submarine. Hmm… I think my subconscious would have called it “The Barry Allen” if it was supposed to be more like that?”

  “Izzy…” Yelric said, a little louder, barely getting a word in between the streams of consciousness pouring from Izzy.

  “So if fire works with the potential energy and supplies activation energy to primed chemical reactions, I wonder if spatial magic is tapping into those same potentials but at a much smaller scale! Instead of activation energy, is it the manipulation of some of the four fundamental forces and the interaction of subatomic particles!? Lightning is essentially just a massive amount of electrons expressed very quickly. Could I do that with other subatomic particles?

  “Oh fuck! If you can mess with the space between atoms, that would mean you could literally take that space and make it larger. Apply this to the air inside a bag and to anything that goes into it, all the atoms would be perfectly happy just hanging out next to each other. HA!” he barked a laugh. “Bigger on the inside? More like oppressively claustrophobic.

  “Well, maybe? Did you make the space bigger or did you stick the atoms closer together? Wait!” he suddenly yelled, throwing his hands out to his sides. “But then how do the atoms know to which things they belong? If I put a fist into a spatial bag, how does the magic know to let a fist come back out and not be just a stream of flesh?”

  He held up his belt pouch to his face and glared at it like it had eaten one of his fingers, then started frantically looking around the room, his eyes squinting.

  “Oh God… the amount of spatial magic in this house. How does it know there is a difference between you and me? Between me and that wooden target? Oh my head hurts. That is terrifying!”

  “IZZY!” Yelric exclaimed, exhausted at not understanding what Izzy was talking about. Izzy stopped clutching his head and whipped his gaze toward Yelric. “Slow down. If you don’t understand something, it doesn’t stop it from working. You’re safe, and I’m going to work through this with you. Go take a seat outside the shop and breathe.”

  Yelric ushered the shaking Izzy down the hallway.

  “Why do I feel so raw?” Izzy asked as they passed into the main shopping space. “I feel like I have a car battery attached to my genitals; but not in a bad way. But, not in a not not bad way. Does that make sense?”

  “No,” Yelric replied flatly. “And you feel raw because parts of your body were rewritten to take on your core. In some ways, a significant amount of your body is pure magic now. Calm down and focus. You’ll eventually be able to feel it and control it.”

  They went out the front door and Yelric plopped Izzy onto a bench. Izzy’s eyes flitted between all the people on the road with a slightly manic quality. It was then Yelric remembered that Izzy could see people’s cores and shards.

  Yelric groaned. He then picked Izzy back up and unceremoniously threw the frantic little man over his shoulder.

  Yelric carried Izzy back inside, went to the doorway that led to the hallway. He shut it, moved a little slider at the top, and opened the door which now led to a set of stairs.

  Grumbling to himself, he marched up the stairs.