In true honesty, the Sense aspect made things much easier. I had a much better sense of my body and all the things going on. I could even feel the other pools in my body. The green one that rested at the top of my vision, I was calling stamina, lived in my blood and muscles. I could feel it there like a saturation, a sponge that could drain and refill. The blue mana, to the right, also had a watery feel, but more ephemeral and more widespread. I couldn’t use it yet, but I could feel it. That left the left lying Vitality. The black bar felt more solid. It was the very meat of me, muscle and bone. I had this feeling that I could take a pretty solid hit and keep on going. And keep going, I needed to do. I had no real goal but to get strong enough and sidle up to Vex, and that was, by Mord’s account, a long-term one. I needed short-term goals. I guess I had the ‘reach the next tier and get a visit’ goal, but I was willing to bet that the next tier was a goal for everyone who was awakened.

  I took a few moments to cycle through my Interface and Menu to see if anything else had changed. After convincing myself that it was all the same, I wanted to focus back on the task at hand. I was just starting to reach for the next Loci and the hot tub or potential when I realized I was skipping over a step. My interface was a ‘racial’ power, and I used it often; vitality was always at the edge of my vision, though that could be the interface’s fault. These were the only ones I had used. I suppose I might have used my direction-finding skills to avoid getting lost in the simple rooms, which usually have only two doors, or at least only doors on opposing walls. My loot power would have to wait, obviously. But what about my storage power? I kinda forgot about it, but it could have prevented the whole pantsing debacle if I had just tossed the bag in storage. Hell, if my shorts had kept falling, I could have tossed them in there too. I would still have shorts. I was still somewhat angry about that. I wonder if Mord absorbed them or if they were constructs that dissipated if they were too far away. I would ask him the next time I got him out of robot mode.

  I walked back to where my coin bag was on the ground and began my pondering. I really hadn’t figured out how to activate any of my powers. I could use the aura sense because it was passive. I did use it to look in the bag of coins in an active sense, but I had no idea how I did that. Even so, I was already looking at the bag with my aura when I looked harder. It was time to experiment. My reasoning was if looking at the bag harder made my sense of object tick off, maybe holding something harder would make the storage power activate.

  I squeezed one of the gold coins as hard as I could, setting up a dynamic struggle between the structural integrity of the coin and that of my hand. The hope was that the storage power would come in like a tag team partner off the top rope. It did not happen. My hand lost.

  My blood smelled different. Maybe it's because I could smell it for the first time, but it was just a little off. It wasn't a cheap smell covering a bad one, like an air freshener in a bathroom. It was a mix of the normal metallic smell with that of the deep forest, a place you shouldn’t be. The smell only lasted a few seconds as the magic of the room healed it up. I made a note to myself, if I was stuck here long enough, I would uncover the secrets of this room. Healing and sustaining would be a cool trick. Back to the matter of my hand, and lacking any cleanup materials, I did what most rough-and-tumbles would do in this situation: I licked it. It tasted like blood: blood and foreboding. I would have to use that in the future.

  That was the future though and not the matter of having a huge personal storage but no fucking clue how to get stuff in. I’d figure out the out after the in. I was still somewhat miffed that the coin had cut my hand, so I tossed it back into the bag. It was in the transition from holding to tossing that I noticed something. I felt the coin more as it started to leave my hand than when it was in it. It was when I had not quite let go but let go enough for my aura to pick it up that I was suddenly super aware of the coin. In that moment, I felt as if an option came up. It didn’t explicitly pop into my vision, but it was there in my mind. Instead of pulling on the coin, I used something to push on it. I felt that semifluid feeling of what I was calling mana reach out, and a thin little tendril touched the coin. The coin hovered in the air for just a split second before it was drawn back and not just into my hand but through it. I noticed my blue haze flicker just a little before returning to full. It had to have taken mana to activate the skill. I felt it then. I was fully aware of the coin. It was in a previously empty space in my awareness. So empty that I just skipped over it without thinking, chocking it up to a quirk of all the changes. The coin felt so tiny in the vastness of that space, yet I could see all the details at will as if I held it up to my eye.

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  In an effort to further the experiment, I focused on grabbing the coin and dragging it out of the space. It took some effort to actually grab it, but I eventually got it. After grabbing it, it was just a matter of willing it into a space. The space being my palm. After two or three tries, I got it to work. I spent the next hour acting like an amateur magician with his first trick, making the coin appear and disappear at will. Yes, even behind my ear and the ear of an imaginary Vex.

  It was as I was getting incautious as I got comfortable with the ability that I, of course, dropped the coin. I was trying to do a fancy fake toss and catch when I tossed the coin a split second early, and I wasn’t touching it when I went to put it in storage. It still worked.

  I further experimented by trying to grab a coin out of the bag at the edge of my aura awareness. After all that practice, it was easy. Still a struggle mind you but far less than the initial lets fuck up my hand event. It was in grabbing the coin successfully from the bag that I noticed that it was a significantly larger draw on my mana pool to grab at a distance.

  I took a step back from the bag and allowed it to slip out of my extra awareness. I could still see it clearly, and I could even focus on a single coin, like a hawk, but I couldn't make them budge. It was as I suspected, my Tangible Aura ability allowed me to grab things into storage that were in my aura’s range at increased mana cost. This immediately gave me an idea. An Idea I wouldn’t be able to test for some while but some real street rat shit.

  After another hour of practice, I could even get objects to appear out of storage at a distance, but this had even higher cost scaling. Where my five-foot working area was not enough for me to notice a difference in picking up, it was enough to notice the cost difference of putting it down. It was a significant factor. That or I had a shit mana pool. Probably both. I’d need to work in that.

  It had been probably five or six hours at this point, and I could feel my joy wavering, so I pulled all my items, including the blades, into my storage. Well, almost all. When I went to pull the amulet that Vex gave me, it wouldn’t budge. It was at this point that I realized I couldn’t even take the thing off. And thinking back, I didn’t really remember her giving it to me. I assumed it was her because it was the first thing I got in this world, and it didn’t come from Mord. I did manage to get it off of my neck, and it just stuck to my hand. I shook it a few times, and the necklace portion animated itself and wrapped around my wrist. Very tightly. I got the hint. Don’t take off the goddess’ pretty necklace that she gave you as a gift. I pressed the center disk to my chest, and the chain wrapped itself around my neck like a gentle hug. It felt just like her.