F-Rank Mimic Chest: My SSS Mimic Skill Lets Me Become Anything

Dane died with the dinner receipt folded in his fist.

Before that, June caught him checking it twice.

She lifted his water glass. The receipt came with it, stuck to the wet bottom.

"You hid it under a clear glass."

"I panicked."

June peeled the paper free and flattened it beside his plate. Blue ink marked the side of her thumb. She had chewed another pen through a meeting and would deny it if he asked.

"How bad?"

The cook slammed the freezer door. Their table jumped, and the soy sauce bottle slid an inch toward the edge. Dane caught it before it fell.

The restaurant had six tables, two cracked red stools at the counter, and a sign taped beside the register in the same handwriting as last month:

CARD MACHINE BROKE.

CASH ONLY.

AGAIN.

June liked the corner because she could see the door. Dane liked that dinner for two cost less than a tank of gas if they skipped the shrimp. Neither choice had required discussion in years.

June took the last dumpling, bit it in half, and put the rest on his plate.

"I’m full," he said.

"You’ve been looking at it since it stopped steaming."

He ate it.

June waited until he swallowed, then tapped the receipt. "The car coughed after you turned it off."

"It was raining."

The freezer motor kicked on. A faint vibration traveled up the table legs while June kept her eyes on him.

"How many Saturdays?"

Dane found a grain of rice stuck to the table and worried it loose with his nail. "Two."

"Which?"

He had rehearsed the explanation: Raymond’s sick kid, Mark’s last-minute coverage, and the belt squealing louder every morning.

"Raymond’s kid is sick, and Mark already covered—"

June set her chopsticks together, parallel on the napkin.

"Which two?"

"The next two."

She folded the receipt lengthwise, opened it, and flattened the crease with her inked thumb.

"The second one is ours."

Dane pressed the rice grain flat. "I know."

June watched his nail grind it into paste.

"You already said yes."

"The belt and labor come to almost six hundred. Two shifts gets most of it."

"Call back about the second one."

The cook dragged a trash bag from behind the counter. Plastic whispered over tile. Rain stippled the front window, and passing headlights smeared white across the glass.

He looked at her. She looked back until the freezer motor cut off.

"If I pull out now, Raymond loses the whole day."

"I know why you did it."

Her phone buzzed beside her bowl. The preview mentioned a missing supply-room key.

"It’s over the cabinet, on the red hook," Dane said.

June’s thumb hovered above the screen, then curled into her palm.

"They can use their eyes tomorrow." She turned the phone facedown.

Dane looked at the phone, then at her.

June pushed it farther away.

The cook called that they were closing in ten.

Someone opened the front door. Wet concrete, fryer oil, and old smoke from the alley rolled through the room. June reached across the table and put her inked thumb against Dane’s knuckle.

"Last Saturday, you fell asleep with one shoe on."

"I was going to finish."

Her hand stayed where it was. No smile.

"You slept through me taking it off."

He remembered the front door, one shoe, then morning.

June’s fingers closed around his. "I had you beside me and missed you anyway."

Dane opened his mouth. June waited. He closed it again.

Dane turned his hand beneath hers and held on. The damp receipt lay between their wrists.

"I should’ve told you," he said.

June looked toward the rain and kept holding his hand.

Dane paid in cash. He slipped two dollars under the soy sauce bottle. June saw.

"He kept the tea hot after he called closing," Dane said.

June looked toward the cook, who was fighting the knot in the trash bag with both hands. She settled the bottle squarely over the money and put on her coat.

Outside, the sidewalk shone black beneath the streetlights. Two blocks away, their car waited in the cheap lot. The closer lot charged twelve dollars after seven; one three-block circuit in sleet had ended June’s attempts to argue about it.

She tucked her hands into her coat pockets. Dane moved to the curb side.

June bumped him toward the storefront with her shoulder.

At the next puddle, he drifted back.

"You do that even when I’m mad at you," she said.

The next two steps passed in silence.

A pack of college students swept past, shouting over the rain without coats. A plastic cup skittered from the crowd. June trapped it with her shoe, scooped it up, and dropped it into the next bin.

Dane clapped once. Before his hands met again, June caught his wrist.

"Don’t."

He lowered his other hand. June kept hold of his wrist until the next curb cut.

The crosswalk signal counted down from fourteen. A delivery van waited at the red light. The driver sat crooked behind the wheel with one hand pressed to his forehead. His mouth hung open. His head sagged toward the wheel, then jerked up without focus.

"Dane."

"I see him. Wait."

The white walking figure lit. Two of the college students moved behind June, and she took the first step with them while still watching the driver.

The van’s brake lights went dark.

"June—back."

She turned toward him.

The van crept forward. A wet tire crossed the painted line.

Then the engine roared.

Dane seized June’s sleeve above the elbow and pulled. The seam tore under his fingers. His shoe slipped off the curb, and his shoulder burned as her weight came toward him. Her fist knotted in his coat while the receipt collapsed inside his other hand.

June’s mouth shaped his name. The van caught Dane below the ribs, throwing his heels off the asphalt as her sleeve tore loose inside his grip and the windshield burst white across his sight.

Awareness returned in the middle of an attempted breath.

The effort shifted a hard weight across something broad, wet, and inside him instead of filling lungs. The wet surface was his tongue. The weight was a scatter of coins.

Their metal stink filled him: old copper, thin silver, and one square-holed piece tied with red string. He knew the dry click coins made in a cashier’s tray. These shifted when he strained for breath, sliding across a tongue wider than his old arm.

The push meant to spit rolled one copper and left the tongue slack.

Dane searched for fingers, shoulders, knees. Wood answered. Grain ran across his sides beneath iron bands pulled cold and tight. A lockplate sat at his front like a hard knot. Above him, a lid sealed against a rim lined with folded teeth.

Revulsion tightened his left hinge. The creak gave his panic a sound, and the sound came from him.

June.

He pushed her name into the dark. Nothing answered.

Sight never arrived. The room pressed into every part of him at once. Dust touched his lid in hundreds of tiny points. Water struck stone somewhere behind his left side and sent a faint shiver through the floor. Small claws worried at rubble beneath a broken shelf. Air seeped around his rim carrying cold rot, old smoke, lamp oil, and the sweet spoil of meat forgotten in a closed cooler.

Scent kept pouring through every seam, with no face to turn away and no breath to hold.

A scrape crossed the stone outside him.

Boot leather. Then metal: a tap, a drag, a tap. Every third step landed light. Whoever had entered was limping and trying not to let the limp make noise.

"Please," a man muttered.

Blood sharpened the room: old in the man’s cloth, fresh underneath. Before Dane understood why it mattered, the tongue thickened beneath the coins and one tooth eased out of its groove. His hinges drew tight. Warm relief ran through the wood, strongest along the rim facing the blood.

Dane flinched in thought. His tongue rose farther.

The man stopped in front of him. Rain had dried in his clothes. Cheap lamp oil clung to him, and the metal tool in his hand rasped once against Dane’s lockplate.

"Be worth it," the man whispered.

Maybe he meant the treasure. Maybe he meant the pain that had brought him here.

Fingers settled on the lock.

The hinges were all he could reach. Dane drove his whole mind into them until the iron hurt.

The lid lifted anyway.

Coins rolled toward the front of his tongue. A second row of teeth rose. Then a third. Slick points unfolded from the dark while Dane forced every thought he had into one useless demand.

Stay still.

A blue panel filled his awareness.

/==[ Brackenvault System: Intake ]==\

| Species: F-Rank Dungeon Mimic Chest

| Control: 0.03%

| Cognition: 4

| Claimed Coins: 0

| SSS Mimic Skill: Sealed

| Lid: Automatic

| Tongue: Automatic

| Thought: Unauthorized / Detected

\==[ Teeth: Folded / Waiting ]==/

The man raised the lid, and Dane tried to scream as his new teeth moved first.