He paid for three days up front and didn't talk much. The kind of transaction innkeepers forgot by morning.
The room was small. Bed, wobbly table, window over the street, a tall mirror leaning against one wall. He locked the door and stood there a moment. Not from nerves.
His body felt off. Good way.
No dizziness. No pain. Something different — the way a building is different when you're inside it instead of looking from distance. His spine held straight without thinking. His lungs filled all the way. The tightness he'd had for years was gone, but he could still remember the shape of it, which was wrong — you don't remember pain locations, you just forget them.
No ache behind the eyes. The dull spot in his lower back that had been there since twenty.
Just gone.
But he could feel where they'd been.
He lifted a hand and looked at it. Clean joints. Proportions right. No faint scar from the kitchen accident at sixteen.
This was the body of someone who'd never been ordinary.
He lowered the hand.
The absence of all those small things was different from the damage. More noticeable. He registered that, pushed it aside.
"Arthur."
The name didn't belong here. Not an accent thing. It simply didn't fit.
Arthur had no roots in this place. No real history. Just a silhouette on stream, background noise for the character people actually watched while someone else did the actual work. No family who'd look for him longer than a few days — he'd made sure of that. Friendships didn't survive distance; he'd watched them not survive. And there was something almost clean about that, about having nothing to leave behind that would hurt when it disappeared.
He'd always been honest about that.
Arthur was the container. The face behind the other face. Gepetto had been the one who moved without hesitation, who made other people trip over their own plans. The stream viewers — top 4 is top 4 spammed in chat — hadn't been watching Arthur. They'd been watching this.
He turned to the mirror.
Gepetto's face looked back. Calm. Steady. Already filling the room more than made sense for a single body.
No mourning. Arthur had been an okay name for an okay life. When something does its job, it ends. The stream would stop. People would wonder for a while. The algorithms would consume his audience in a few weeks.
It wasn't bitter. That was the strange part — it didn't feel like anything yet, which meant either he was lying to himself or he'd spent so long not caring that the muscle had atrophied entirely.
He needed a last name. Something that worked here without sounding constructed.
"Moreau." He tried it. The name sat wrong in the room, too heavy, too French. He tried it twice more like that might change it. Didn't.
"Viremont."
He tried it against the weight of the room. It held.
Arthur was gone.
He reached for the interface. Not with words — with intent. The panel came.
---
Name: Arthur
Level: 100
Strength: 60 / Agility: 100 / Speed: 85 / Arcane: 100 / Mind: 100 / Faith: 100 / Physical Resistance: 60 / Arcane Resistance: 80 / Stamina: 80
---
Level 100. The cap. He scanned the abilities and closed the panel. He already knew what those numbers meant on paper.
The gap was between that and what they felt like now.
He stretched out his hand.
The Arcane Threads came to life. Translucent, almost invisible, linked to his will. Not tools. Extensions. Parts of him that shouldn't exist.
The sensation was deeply strange. Three years running Gepetto through a screen and he'd never once thought about what it would be like to be the source. Now the threads came out of him — not pain or effort. The raw wrongness of something physical existing where his nervous system had no map for it. New limbs. Reach that went past the edges of his body into space it didn't belong in, and he could feel every inch of it, which was impossible because nerves didn't go there.
He looped one thread around the chair and pulled.
The chair slid across the floor in perfect silence. A fraction of what was available. A lot more was coiled underneath, waiting.
He pushed harder. The thread thickened. Then eased it back until nearly invisible.
He tested range. Speed. At four threads the coordination slipped — not badly, but the chair skidded extra inches.
He stopped.
He'd written guides about this. Analyzed every high-end interaction. Knowing the blueprint and living inside it were different things.
He flicked one sharp motion through the air. A single thread cut across the room with a crisp sound. The curtain on the far side swayed from the displaced air.
He hadn't been aiming at the curtain.
He pulled the threads back carefully — the way you touch a hot stove after you've already burned yourself — and moved on.
The Illusionist formed differently than expected. Not from the outside in. From the middle outward. First came a dense pressure in the air, then shape bleeding into it. Edges soft at first. Solidity arrived uneven — torso before hands, hands before face. The face came last and looked the least finished.
Under two seconds.
The puppet didn't dominate the room. It took up exactly as much space as it needed. Average height. The clothes — he couldn't quite place them. Hinted at something. Social class, maybe, except they didn't quite settle on any class, and the more he looked the more he wasn't sure what color they were. Unremarkable build, except the way it stood wasn't unremarkable. Its features stayed sharp but somehow slippery — glance away and back, they seemed slightly different, or maybe he was forgetting what they'd looked like the moment before.
It stood there. Waiting.
Not for words. For connection.
He felt the threads link. Less like taking control. Like touching something that was already facing him, already patient.
He moved two fingers.
The Illusionist turned its head. Smooth. Natural. No mechanical jerk.
He tilted his wrist. The puppet took three steps toward the wall and stopped.
He hadn't told it to stop.
In those three steps, it had done something to the light. Nothing obvious. Its shadow didn't match the gas lamp's angle anymore. And the mirror — which should have shown both of them — only reflected Gepetto.
Not gone. Misdirected.
He didn't move for a moment.
That hadn't been a command. He traced the thread back, checking the flow. The puppet hadn't acted on its own. But its idle state wasn't neutral. It kept adjusting how it was perceived, the way water runs downhill without thinking about it.
He gave a clear order: still. Neutral. No changes.
The shadow fixed itself. The mirror showed both figures. The Illusionist stood exactly as it looked.
He let out a slow breath.
He kept the puppet out a few more minutes. Running simple sequences. Not testing limits — getting the baseline. The difference between what it did when ordered and what it did when left alone wasn't small. It was the most important thing about it.
He filed that away and dismissed the puppet.
The Illusionist faded in an uncertain way. He wondered for a second if some piece of it was still near the wall.
He checked. Nothing.
The room was normal again. Bed. Table. Mirror. But he was aware now that what the mirror showed wasn't necessarily the whole truth of the room.
He pulled the chair over and sat.
Three days paid. Five puppets registered. A body he still barely understood. A world he knew the surface of but hadn't felt the weight of.
The threads. Their range. How much they could carry at full stretch. Whether he could run them while controlling puppets without losing precision. Four puppets left.
The thought stirred something. He noticed it, acknowledged it for what it was. Excitement was data. It told him where his focus actually was — on the problem. How its parts moved. What happened when he pressed here. What it was hiding.
He reached toward the spot where the Illusionist had stood.
Not to bring it back. Just to hold the thread right at the edge of becoming real. That thin line between possible and actual. Feeling where the sensation changed.
A small thing. The kind of thing a sensible person wouldn't waste time on on their first day in an unknown world with no allies, no cover, no idea how dangerous the streets actually were.
He held the threshold steady.
Then, slowly, methodically, he started to push it a little further.