Current Assets: $7
"Wait."
Jude patted down his jacket, working through every pocket twice. Nothing. No wallet. No phone. No keys to an apartment that existed in a reality he'd apparently left behind.
His hand stopped on his front pocket.
The grocery money. The ¥1,100 he'd shoved in his pocket on his way out the door that morning—yesterday—in another life entirely. He could feel the ghost of it, that specific weight of folded bills he'd been saving for rice and fish and whatever looked cheap at the market.
Gone.
He pulled up the system. Seven dollars, current assets. He did the math. ¥1,100 in Japanese yen was, at current exchange rates, almost exactly seven American dollars.
"Oh, you've got to be kidding me." A short, sharp laugh escaped. "I thought this was free startup capital. Should've known. There's no such thing as a free lunch. Just currency conversion."
He stared at the system shop for three seconds. Then he stopped deliberating and started buying. No point in agonizing over it—without English and without documents, he was dead before sunrise regardless of what else he owned.
Purchase: Basic English Proficiency—$1
Purchase: Local Identity Documents—$1
Purchase: Fast Life Recovery—$1
Purchase: Save Point (20 uses)—$1
Current Assets: $3
SYSTEM: Starting from Scratch
SAVE POINT—PURCHASE CONFIRMED
20 reads are available. Can be distributed across up to 5 separate locations, minimum 1 read per save. Auto-triggers on near-death event; you may accept or decline the reload.
IMPORTANT: Future missions will unlock the "Save Point Forward" feature. Don't be stingy.
CURRENT STATUS: Safe Zone Active. You will not encounter danger for the next 30 minutes. Save point creation unavailable during safe periods. Relax! (Sort of.)
Thirty minutes. He had exactly thirty minutes of guaranteed safety in a city that treated safety as a luxury item.
Jude looked up at the sky—clouds low and dense, swallowing whatever light the moon might have offered, rain falling in a thin mist that wasn't quite enough to merit an umbrella but was absolutely enough to make everything miserable. Through a gap between buildings he could make out the top of a clock tower.
9:00 PM.
Too late for any legitimate business. He'd need to wait until morning to find work. Which meant he needed somewhere to be until morning that wasn't a street corner in the most violent city in America.
He took two steps toward the station exit. And the world shifted.
The station noise had been chaos a moment ago. Fragments of sound, voices in a language that his brain had been treating as texture rather than information—a wall of meaningless English syllables he could partially decode the way you'd partially decode a radio signal through static.
Then, between one step and the next: it wasn't.
"— last train to Robinson Park departing platform three —"
"— told you we should've left earlier, but do you listen, no you never —"
"— crazy bastard actually tried to mug me with a spoon, a spoon, I'm telling you —"
Jude stopped walking. The dizziness lasted about two seconds. Then it settled into something that felt entirely natural, like he'd been speaking English his whole life and had only just remembered it. No accent either, or rather: the right accent.
"Huh," he said, in his new native accent. "That's actually pretty good."
He reached into his coat pocket and concentrated on his driver's license. His fingers found plastic. He pulled it out.
Jude Sharp. Age 24. Gotham City address in the Bowery. The holographic seal caught the sodium-yellow light of the platform lamps and scattered it back in little rainbows. It looked real because, as far as any system that checked such things was concerned, it was real.
Gotham opened up around him like something that had given up on pretending to be a city and decided to just be honest about what it was.
The rain came down in a fine mist, slicking the asphalt to a dull mirror. Headlights smeared across the wet road. Somewhere in the distance, factory stacks pushed smoke against the clouds. Closer in, the buildings hunched together like people keeping secrets—art deco towers above, all dark glass and stone carvings, and below them, spreading outward where the money ran out, the slums. Cramped buildings with boards over windows, peeling paint, fire escapes weighted with forgotten things. Almost no lights in those blocks.
From an alley somewhere nearby: shouting, then a crash, then nothing. The nothing was worse than the shouting.
Under the nearest bridge, barrel fires burned. People clustered around the light and heat, huddled into their coats, burning newspapers and broken packing crates to stay warm.
Jude hunched his shoulders and shoved both hands deep into his jacket pockets.
Where, exactly, was he supposed to sleep? Too visible and he'd attract the wrong attention—police, or worse, someone who'd decided a person standing still was an opportunity. Too hidden and he'd just be easier to rob. He ran the options and found none of them satisfying.
He pulled up the system shop and started scrolling through the Full Mall, desperate for something in his price range.
The catalog was comprehensive. He'd give it that. Skills, weapons, equipment, powers, artifacts with descriptions that made his eyes go wide. Things that could make him rich. Things that could make him dangerous. Things that could make him effectively untouchable in any fight Gotham could produce.
Everything started at a hundred dollars.
With his three dollars, he could afford—
He kept scrolling.
Bottled water: $5. A sandwich: $8. A knife: $15. One night at a hostel: $50.
Jude closed the shop menu before his morale dropped below recovery level. Three dollars. He had a bank account, technically, but it was empty. An empty account in a city where you needed money to access anything that might help you get money. No safety net catches you when the net assumes you have something to start with.
He was so absorbed in running through scenarios that he almost missed the moment his pocket felt wrong.
It was barely a sensation—less a feeling than the absence of one. The faint not-quite-rightness of a familiar weight, briefly gone. His hand shot to his jacket pocket on reflex.
The driver's license was gone.
Jude's stomach dropped. He checked his jacket again, both sides. Pants pockets. Shirt pocket. Every pocket twice, in order, while standing still in the rain outside Gotham Central Station at nine in the evening, which was probably not the wisest thing he'd ever done.
His fingers brushed something in his front pants pocket.
Plastic.
He pulled out the driver's license. There it was. Same holographic seal, same face, same Bowery address. Sitting in his front pants pocket, which was not where he'd put it.
Jude stood in the rain and stared at the card in his hand.
Someone had lifted it off him. Somewhere in the last hundred meters between the platform and the street, a pickpocket had reached into his jacket, removed the license, found absolutely nothing else of value, and then apparently moved by some combination of professional contempt and genuine pity, tucked it back into a different pocket.
He hadn't felt a single moment of it. Not the lift, not the return, nothing. The whole transaction had passed through his awareness without leaving a mark.
He should be disturbed. Unnerved. The appropriate emotional response was something in the family of violated and rattled.
Instead, he started laughing.
It built from somewhere low and quiet and came out sounding a little unhinged, which was probably fair. The pickpocket had been operating at a professional level that he couldn't have detected even if he'd been watching for it. And after all that skill, all that risk, the return on investment had been: one driver's license with no cash attached to it. The thief had been so proficient that they'd robbed him clean and so disappointed by the results that they'd given the only item back.
Because what good was a driver's license without a wallet to go with it?
And then the obvious fact landed.
You can't rob a man who has nothing. There's nothing to take. The risk-reward calculation falls apart immediately, why spend professional effort on a mark who turns out empty? A mugger who cornered him would get three dollars, maybe. Not worth the potential witnesses. Not worth the ammunition.
He was broke. Comprehensively, genuinely, by-the-numbers broke. And in Gotham, where every criminal organization in the city ran on calculated self-interest, broke was something close to invisible.
The most dangerous city in the world, and he was standing on its street with three dollars and a functional ID, completely unprofitable to every mugger, pickpocket, and opportunist within a five-block radius.
The laughter faded into something quieter. He turned the driver's license over in his hands and tucked it away.
As long as he had no money, no one could rob him.