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, a wobbly table, a window over the street, and a tall mirror leaning against the wall. He locked the door and stood there a second, not from nerves, just sorting through what had happened and where to put it.
His body felt off. In a good way.
No dizziness or pain. Just different. His spine held straight without him thinking about it. His lungs filled all the way—no trace of that tightness he'd always had. No ache behind the eyes. No dull spot in his lower back. He lifted a hand and looked at it. Clean joints. The proportions right. No dry skin, no faint scar from that dumb kitchen accident at sixteen. This was the body of someone who'd never been ordinary.
He lowered the hand.
He'd spent his whole life in a body that collected little damages the way old streets collect cracks. Now the cracks were gone. The absence of them was louder than the damage ever was.
He let the thought sit, then pushed it aside.
"Arthur."
The name didn't fit here. Not an accent thing—it just didn't belong anymore.
Arthur had no roots in this place. No real history. He'd never shown his face on camera, just a silhouette, background noise for the character people actually watched. No family who'd look for him longer than a few days. No friendships that survived the distance he kept. Nothing that would hurt much if it got cut.
He was honest with himself about it. Always had been.
Arthur was just the container. Functional. Private. The face behind the other face. Gepetto had been the real one—the one who moved without hesitating, who made other people trip over their own plans, who took up space like he was owed it. The chat spamming top 4 is top 4 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.
No complicated feelings. No mourning. Arthur had been an okay name for an okay life. It did its job. When something does its job, it ends. The stream would stop. People would wonder for a while. The algorithms would eat his audience in a few weeks.
That was all he'd leave behind.
Not bitter. Just how it was.
He needed a last name. Something that worked in this world without sounding fake.
"Viremont."
Solid. A little aristocratic, but not showy. Old enough to pass.
Gepetto Viremont.
He tried it in his head. It held.
Arthur was gone.
He reached for the interface with intent instead of words—he'd already figured out you didn't need to talk to it. The panel came up smooth.
---
Name: Gepetto
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 resources, then closed it with a flick of focus. He already knew what the numbers meant on paper. What he didn't know was how they felt now that they were actually his.
That gap was what he planned to close.
He stretched out his hand.
The Arcane Threads came to life. Translucent, almost invisible, linked to his will the way fingers hook into a hand—extensions, not tools.
The feeling was deeply strange.
Three years running Gepetto through a screen, through muscle memory and hotkeys, and he had never once thought about what it would actually be like to be the source. Now the threads came out of him, and it wasn't pain or effort. It was the raw wrongness of something physical existing where his nervous system had no map for it. New limbs. A reach that went past the edges of his body into space it didn't belong in.
He looped one thread around the chair and pulled.
The chair slid across the floor in perfect silence. He knew right away he'd only used a fraction of what was there. A lot more was coiled underneath, waiting.
He pushed harder. The thread thickened. Then he eased it back until it was almost invisible.
He tested range, speed, how many he could handle at once. At four threads the coordination slipped—not badly, but the chair skidded a couple extra inches.
He stopped.
Looked at the chair, then at his hand.
He'd written guides about this. Analyzed every interaction in high-end content. But knowing the blueprint and living inside it were two completely different things. He flicked one sharp motion through the air. A single thread cut across the room with a crisp whish, and 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 he'd expected. Not from the outside in, but from the middle outward. First came a kind of 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. Where Gepetto expected a heavy presence, it just took up as much space as it needed. Average height. Unremarkable build. Clothes that hinted at a few social classes without picking one. Its features stayed sharp but somehow slippery—every time he glanced away and back, they seemed slightly different.
It stood there. Waiting.
Not for words. For connection.
He felt the threads link. Less like taking control, more 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, but its shadow didn't match the gas lamp's angle. 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, what had passed through it. 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.
He gave a clear order: still. Neutral. No changes.
The shadow fixed itself. The mirror showed both figures. The Illusionist stood by the wall exactly as it looked.
He let out a slow breath through his nose.
He kept the puppet out a few more minutes, running simple sequences. Not testing limits—just getting a feel for 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 that left him wondering for a second if some piece of it was still hanging near the wall.
He checked. Nothing.
The room was normal again. Bed. Table. Mirror. But he was now aware 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 yet.
The threads. Their real range. How much they could carry at full stretch. Whether he could run them while controlling puppets without losing precision.
Four puppets left to touch.
The thought stirred something close to excitement. He noticed it, acknowledged it for what it was. Excitement was just data. It told him where his focus really was: on the problem in front of him. 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 real cover, and no idea how dangerous the streets outside actually were.
He held the threshold steady.
Then, slowly, methodically, he started to push it a little further.