Moss

Moss recovers. That is the whole of it, stated plainly, because the plain statement is more alarming than any elaboration. Where other people reach a point of genuine physical or psychological depletion and stop, Moss reaches that same point and then continues. He has been rendered unconscious by slavers with enough times that the count stopped being notable and started being a pattern, and the pattern was that he always woke up and immediately resumed the exact behavior that got him knocked out. At F-grade this is pure instinct rather than conscious fortitude: his body simply does not accept the signals that typically tell a person to stop. Wounds close faster than they should for someone of his age and station. Exhaustion that would flatten someone twice his size passes through him in hours. He does not experience this as strength or power. He experiences it, when he thinks about it at all, as things being roughly normal. He has no reference point for what it feels like to stay down. He has only ever gotten back up.

Moss is a lean, sun-browned boy with an explosion of dark chestnut hair that sits on his head in a state of determined disorder, long enough to brush his jaw and perpetually salt-stiffened from time near the coast. His face is open and quick, freckled across the nose, with brown eyes that take in a room at speed and settle on the exits before they settle on anything else: a habit six years of street life burned into his reflexes and two years of captivity burned deeper. He is small for his age in the way that children who have missed too many meals tend to be, but his arms and shoulders carry a wiry, practical muscle built not in training but in actual use. Since his adoption into Karthos's household he has been outfitted in Vaitafe-style clothing: a patterned wrap-tunic in deep earths and burnt reds, a sash belt at the waist, loose printed trousers, and braided leather cuffs at both wrists. A necklace of carved animal teeth sits at his throat, a gift from Karthos that he accepted without ceremony and has not removed since. A curved claw or fang hangs from his belt cord, his first claimed trophy, the origin of which he describes with different levels of plausibility depending on who is asking.

Moss moves like he is always in the middle of deciding whether to run or fight, which is because he usually is. His default resting posture has his weight slightly forward, hands loose at his sides, feet placed wider than is strictly necessary: the unconscious stance of someone who has spent years needing to react quickly to things. He has a collection of small scars on his knuckles, shins, and one notable one above his left eyebrow that he cannot fully account for because he was unconscious when he got it. He makes sustained eye contact that some people find confident and others find unsettling, depending largely on what they were planning to do next. He swears with the fluency of someone for whom profanity is simply the native register of speech, which is exactly what it is: six years without parents to correct him produced a vocabulary that Karthos is gently attempting to redirect and Moss is politely ignoring.

Moss grew up in Brackenwall, a working port city with more edges than comforts and more people looking after themselves than looking after each other. He does not speak much about his parents, partly because the memories are old and partly because street children develop an economy around not appearing vulnerable, and explaining that you lost your parents at four years old is the sort of information that gets used against you. What he has acknowledged, in the fragmentary and offhand way he acknowledges things that matter, is that there was a mother and then there wasn't, and after that there was the city, and the city was what it was. He learned it well. By the time he was six he knew which market stalls left unsaleable fruit at the back, which dockhands could be charmed into tossing down scraps, which alleys flooded in the rainy season, and which ones didn't. He made no plans beyond the next day. Days were enough.

He was eight years old and hunting frogs in the reeds at the edge of a canal outside Brackenwall when the slavers found him. This is the detail he returns to most reliably when he talks about it, the frogs, with a specific quality of bafflement that six years of life on the streets had developed in him a thorough and practical survival instinct, and then one afternoon he was simply somewhere he shouldn't have been because there were frogs there, and that was that. He fought immediately. He fought hard enough that it took three of them. He woke up in a cage with his hands bound and the canal already well behind him, and he spent the next several minutes conducting a very thorough assessment of his situation in language that would later become characteristic. Then he started looking for weaknesses in the cage.

The slavers quickly determined that Moss was a problem and never meaningfully updated this assessment. He fought when they moved him. He fought when they tried to put him to work. He fought when they attempted to display him for potential buyers, which complicated the sales process significantly. He was knocked unconscious with regularity and woke up each time with the methodical patience of someone taking inventory: where am I, what has changed, where are the weaknesses, what is the next attempt. He was not heroic about it. He was not even particularly strategic about it. He simply could not make himself stop. The slavers cycled through increasingly frustrated approaches, and Moss cycled through the same determined refusal to accept the situation as permanent, and neither side made much progress. He was never sold. He was, in the end, never broken. He was just there, being an ongoing problem, until one day a small orange catfolk walked into the market with a gold bar and bought thirty-two people without haggling.

Moss's first coherent impression of Tingle Geodegazer was that he was approximately the same age and size as Moss himself, and was somehow purchasing an ogre. Moss watched this happen. He watched Tingle count out thirty-two people with the focused precision of someone running a grocery list and the complete absence of any apparent awareness that this was remarkable. He watched him get arrested for it afterward and go to jail without complaint. Moss has not said directly that this was the most impressive thing he had ever seen a person do. He has, however, mentioned the gold bar incident approximately seven times in various conversations since, always in the context of making a point about what is actually possible when you simply decide to do something.

Karrthosin Raukura Taringa adopted Moss recently and in Moss's estimation without making nearly enough of a production of it, which is to say Karthos simply treated it as the obvious next step rather than a significant decision, which Moss found disorienting and then quietly correct. Karthos did not require Moss to be grateful or reformed or presentable. He did require him to be present, to eat, and to make a reasonable attempt at moderating his vocabulary at mealtimes, which Moss considers a fair exchange for the first actual bed he has slept in for six years. He is navigating the experience of having a parent again with the same approach he applies to most things: observing what is expected, deciding whether it is reasonable, and either complying or making his objections heard with considerable directness. So far most of it has been reasonable. He has not said this. Karthos probably knows anyway.

The pocket dungeon operates in altered time: one hour outside its walls equals one full day within. Tingle Geodegazer, who is Goodberry's reigning junior record-holder for almost everything, had held the dungeon endurance record at nine hours outside, which translated to nine days of solo survival inside. This was considered extraordinary. The general consensus was that it would stand for some time. Moss went in without announcing his intention and came out eleven hours later having spent the equivalent of eleven days inside alone, without resupply or backup, and emerged nearly dead and entirely satisfied with himself. He immediately wanted to know Tingle's exact time so he could be specific about the margin. Tingle is currently preparing a twelve-hour attempt. Moss is watching this development with the composed interest of someone who has already begun calculating thirteen.

Moss does not have a specific vision for his future, which is unsurprising for a child who spent six years not planning past the next day. What he has is an instinct that has been with him since Brackenwall and has only sharpened since: the conviction that being better at things is the only reliable currency, that skill and toughness and adaptability are the only possessions that cannot be taken away. The pocket dungeon record is part of this. Whatever comes next will be part of it too. He is not ambitious in the way that people with futures in mind are ambitious. He is relentless in the way that people who have survived entirely on relentlessness are relentless. The direction will sort itself out. He will be ready for it.

Moss has not used the word family out loud in reference to Karthos or Goodberry or the people around him. He uses other constructions. He refers to Tingle as "the orange kid" and to Karthos as "Karthos" and to the household as "here." But he keeps showing up. He keeps coming back to the dinner table, keeps participating in whatever is happening, keeps inserting himself into the life of this place in the specific way that someone does when they have decided it is worth inserting themselves into. Six years on the streets taught him to identify places worth staying. He is staying. He does not require anyone to make a ceremony of it. He just needs it to continue.

Tingle is going for twelve hours. Moss respects this. He is also already thinking about thirteen. This is not spite or rivalry in any negative sense; it is the cleanest and most honest motivation Moss has encountered since arriving in Goodberry: a goal with a clear number attached to it, a competitor who is genuinely trying and genuinely capable, and a metric that does not require anyone to explain its value. Eleven days alone in an altered-time dungeon as a ten-year-old with no formal training and two years of captivity behind him. Twelve is achievable. Thirteen is achievable. He is aware that at some point the number will stop being the point and something larger will have taken its place. He is not there yet. Right now there is twelve, and then thirteen, and that is enough.