Capitalistic worlds, when you have the resources, are simpler in some ways than others.
Anyone who ever said “money doesn’t buy happiness” has never solved a fuckton of problems very quickly with a fuckton of cash. It really makes life easier. And to some, ease equates pretty evenly to happiness.
Say, for instance, you found yourself stranded in the middle of nowhere, you didn’t know anyone, and had no identification, but you did have a fuckton of cash.
Easy peasy, you hire a lawyer. The bigger retainer you throw down, the better.
All worlds that are spun around by money have lawyers. Economic systems that encourage people to be motivated by currency also encourage people's need to argue how thick the lines in the sand concerning morality really are.
Hiring a lawyer might not be your first thought, but really— if you have to hide a really big thing, like, say… you appeared out of thin air and are stranded at the ass end of nowhere, and you have a whole lot of money that you can’t provide 100% legitimate receipts for, then you hire someone who obviously already has dubious morals —they’re lawyers, for all the gods' sakes— and they have spelled out price points, usually by the hour, and they legally can’t run their fucking mouths if you contract them right. It helps if you heavily hint you might be a fleeing noble from a far-off land that has different customs and require secrecy for safety’s sake.
Everyone loves that story. The fewer details you provide, the more they get filled in by the other person's imagination--- it becomes a titillating drama. Even if the details are all wrong, if you're convincing enough, people always fall for that one.
You can get the lawyer to subcontract a driver, who can come to the ass end of nowhere and render aid, and — if also done correctly—the lawyer can expedite your “lost” identification since you very obviously have a long record of existing. A very true and correct and not made up on the fly by a metal spider and an alien, legitimate paper trail.
”Of course I’m a real person,” you say. “It’s all there on ‘net. Look me up. Of course, I belong on this planet.”
-Rule 3, Footnote in A Guide to Isekai, Authored by Traveler 2
“Drop me here on the curb, if you can?” Max said to her driver while looking out of the rear passenger window. “Much appreciated, Steve. Thank you for the ride and for bringing me a phone. I’ll keep your number and call when I need you again.” Miles, still pretending to be a necklace, tapped the back of her neck. She awkwardly added, as if reading from a screen, “You provided a professional and smooth ride. You are attractive for your species and will... I'm not saying that." She grimaced. Her eyes did not focus on Steve again. "Anyways, thanks.”
She hastily got out and laid eyes on the first city on this planet she had seen. She wasn’t awed. Miles was. His legs flexed and relaxed with the rate of an erratic heartbeat.
It was an average post-industrial, pre-space-colonial-age city. People walked to work, or home, or to mass transport while talking on flip phones. Sweet. She always liked flip phones. Smartphones were nice for convenience, but flip phones were the last generation of devices that you could angrily hang up if the conversation called for it. They also had the early internet on them at a prohibitive cost, but Max and Miles had that covered.
Max wanted a face-to-face with the lawyer to hammer out their business relationship. She needed what could be considered, "a face." Someone who knew how things worked and could navigate her through the first steps while minimizing her need to do a lot of stuff in person. She wanted to spell out exactly what kind of shop she wanted to them, and for them to tell her where to go next to make her dream come true.
It was what she fixated on to avoid very real worries, so it had to happen.
For her dream shop, she needed a lot of space. A lot, a lot. She wanted to grow her own products, so she needed space to do it. Some of the plants she wanted grew big.
Attached to that, she wanted what you could call a “quaint” storefront.
An attached living space, big enough for a few people more than just her. She wasn't ready now to open up her life to others, not other than Miles, but she would. She had enough self-awareness to know that.
An industrial kitchen to brew her potions.
Maybe a forge.
She needed a place that was highly customizable, and she wasn’t afraid to pay a premium for it. She also wanted it in an area that wasn’t too fancy and wasn’t too run down. She wanted it as average as a customized potion shop and greenhouse that was run by an otherworldly goddess and war golem could get.
Small dreams.
Miles just wanted it wired with the internet. That was his only concern. She couldn’t argue, it was a good stipulation.
Ding! You’ve reached level 8. All stats distrib….
The fuck? I haven’t done anything, though? She dismissed the notification.
Apparently, this world’s people didn’t have a system HUD. Made sense since their system was dead. They didn’t claw their way through XP, didn’t have levels, and didn’t unlock spells through classes. If they wanted a class, they either inherited it or studied for it. If they wanted a spell, they found a book and researched it. If they wanted an ability, they practiced for it.
That’s probably how the world got to this quiet, quaint sense of peacefulness instead of the usual warmongering non-novelty. No one was declaring war because a king and his army needed levels. No one was summoning dubiously-controlled monsters to kill for levels. Back alley rogues weren't randomly killing passers-by for levels. No adventuring parties.
People instead, just had jobs? Lived their lives?
Fuckin’ wild, man.
And so, in the spirit of doing as the natives do, Max didn’t give an iota of a fuck about her levels, either. That, and she was spooked half to suicide with the whole “goddess” bullshit. So, she was going to be as unremarkable as she could and be a non-leveling little druid potion-maker, and hope for the godsdamned best. Her base stats already made it so she could rip into a bank vault with her bare hands, so she didn’t need to do anything else. Her free healing spell could probably heal her through a direct bomb blast.
She only wanted the druid thing so she could eventually have wings again.
All the flags so far had been either ignored or avoided. Denied. She was well on her way to un-remarkability. Or at least as close as she could possibly get.
At her lawyer’s office, she was let into an upscale corner office in short order, after giving her totally real name at the front desk.
“Thank you for meet… oh. You are of the shining blood. Why didn’t you say so?” He trailed off, but they maintained eye contact, and they searched each other’s expressions.
Her lawyer, Mr. Green, struck her as immediately as kith and kin. A familiar feeling. Like a member of her clan. One of mine, her mind said. Like a favorite jacket. Safety. A fleece blanket. Warmth coziness.
His face was thin. It was pointy. His arms and legs were gangly, almost more of an arachnid than Miles. His coloring was garish but wonderful. Like a carnival. His red eyebrows were long and curved at the ends and drifted up like a silk moth's antennae. But his expression was that of a child who had seen his favorite, beloved aunt. He seemed as if he should be evil, but the feelings she got were of kindred spirits and wild growth, of curling up in a fur-lined pile with all your brothers and sisters. Of flying a thermal with your flock. Of pride-mates with full bellies after a successful hunt.
He grabbed both of her hands and held them. As if speaking in a dream, the words oozed up through her throat, across her teeth, and out of her mouth, ”I’m new here. And I’m not versed in the protocol. I don’t... I don’t know what I’m doing. I just know what I want.” Something in the back of her mind slammed out of her mouth, “I’ve earned my place here.”
He didn't cast anything. It wasn’t a spell. There weren't honesty wards, she checked. There were no active effects. She considered her situation.
Fucking flags, man. She thought she knew what was happening, and it fucking pissed her off. It has to be the godsdamned classes. Hinky fucking bullshit. Shoulda read the fine print. Maybe read the books? Shoulda read the books. At least the one, Blending In. Bet that shit has answers. Fucking "Fae Touched."
Mr. Green’s gaze drifted to Miles, in his necklace form, and his eyes got pensive and considering.
"You are very new, aren't you? Hmm. Let me think for a moment. Have a seat." He pointed over his shoulder. "Don't eat the pastries or drink the tea. Those were for an entirely different situation. I wasn't expecting you to be... of us." He walked her over to two chairs, each facing the other, with a tea set and some colorful cakes on a plate prominently displayed on the table between.
"First things first: I will not do you nor yours harm. I am governed by the rules of the blood. Be at peace, cousin."
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
That did fuck all to relax Max. Miles was quivering against her throat and neural-chatting questions and threats and options for retreat.
Mr. Green considered her for a moment and raised an overly expressive eyebrow. “Let me make some guesses, and let’s see how close to your truth I can get. Will you permit me? I am bound by our contract, so anything discussed is confidential. No blood nor death will make me speak of it. There was a geas in the fine print to protect me, but it cuts both ways.”
She hissed the word, “Okay.”
”You are a long way from home.” He said this with threateningly pointed eye contact.
A nod of her head. "We've established that, yes."
”You want to hide here in the city, and you don’t want any trouble.”
Another nod. "Also established that as well."
”You are… you are used to things being a certain way, and you want them to not be that way while you’re here.”
A freezing pause. A fervent nod. Multiple nods. Continuous nodding. She didn’t stop nodding until he began speaking again.
”Okay, Ms. Traveler, I can arrange that. Do I need to hire security for you?”
Weird question, but okay. Realization dawned, it relaxed her completely. The clueless, sheltered runaway noble act is a go. I can work with this. ”That's not necessary. Just Steve. The driver. And get me some ident cards, if you could.” She reached for the tea, thought better of it, and folded her hands back in her lap. In for a penny, she continued: “I wanted to tell you about the store I wanted. I negotiated for it in the contract? It needs to be particular. I have the money to pay quite a lot. Can we work on that now?”
”Of course, your… I mean, of course. Tell me exactly what you want, and I’ll find it for you.”
After she laid out exactly what she was looking for, and the paralegal came in with her cards, she got up to leave. She had started shaken, but ultimately ended up feeling good about what she and he had talked about. What all had they talked about? Anyway, she felt good about it.
”It has been my honor in assisting you. If you need anything, anything at all, please let me know. My card has my personal number on it. I will call your assistant,” his eyes drifted to her necklace, “when I find what you want. Be careful out there." He snorted and got an amused look on his pointy, pointy face. "Don’t steal too many children, but if you do and get caught, call me for legal representation, haha.”
What the fuck does that mean?
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Three weeks later, after spending a bunch of money -- and having several not-spelled-tea meetings with her tentative friend and definite kin Mr. Green (she read the book, and yeah, they were distant kin) -- Max sat on the bench in a public park across the street from her almost completed warehouse-cum-greenhouse/storefront. She was feeding the park’s ducks the bread from her uneaten lunch and pondering her current dilemma.
Green had pretty much gone down the list and played a wish-fulfillment granter (do not call him a fairy godmother, apparently that is in very, very poor taste and will get you the stink eye). Her dream started as a ramshackle warehouse in an area that was on the brink of undergoing gentrification. The construction company Green hired tore down the walls, tore up the concrete flooring, and replaced them with a state-of-the-art glass greenhouse setup. The beams were metal and the glass was custom. The floor was a mixture of freshly poured, textured, non-slip concrete, and a section of raised beds.
It was huge, absolutely perfect, and hers. She almost immediately began growing and brewing and concocting and creating. It felt good to do it for reasons that had nothing to do with anyone's plots or plans. It was for funsies.
The back corner was walled in and had a lab for brewing, and a forge so she could putter around with. She always had a fondness for blacksmithing and metal crafting, so she'd try it again with a hand unaided by the system. Like a regular person.
The front had a shop complete with display cases and a register. It was cozy, in a commercial way. She loaded it for bear with wards. Well, not bear-- monsters, but yeah. The shadows inside were weird, but they felt perfect. Above that, she had a three-bedroom apartment, also warded to the high hells. In the basement, she had an emergency bunker (also warded) behind a heavy steel door (warded) that comfortably slept a dozen, and it would be her main residence. It also had escape points (yep, warded) that lead to a drainage tunnel that led out of the city (not yet warded, but on the to-do list).
She knew she had paranoia issues, but Green was understanding. Like he suspected her past was almost as bad as it really was. She didn't offer details and he didn't ask.
Green made sure that the invoices got paid, was the go-between for her and the construction company and a few vendors, and when the time came, he posted an ad for a shop helper. Max was iffy about that, but both Green and Miles, in separate conversations, had assured her she'd need it.
Turns out, Max was skittish around people. All people, apparently.
She wanted and thirsted and wished and yearned for a real life, a normal life, the life of a random jagoff, but she was crushed by a whole heaping serving of anxiety. Miles assured her that normal jagoffs also had anxiety all the time, and it didn't have to make her not normal.
He said it was a trauma response. He said her constant bitching about flags was also a trauma response.
The logic system is dead, the flags you're seeing are just life. Any time something happens, it isn't a "flag" -- it is just something happening. No one or thing is out to get you. He said that right to my face. Er, interface. He doesn't know shit.
Miles told her she could heal and it wouldn't be a big deal afterward. He said she could learn to manage her reactions and have an unremarkable life. Apparently, people do it in droves. Until that happened, if she wanted a people-facing business, she needed a people-facer. She could always just be the supplier and not have to worry about the shop part at all, but she had a dream and wanted what she wanted.
The main problem was, Max assumed that this was just a temporary reprieve. A breather and the cycle would all begin again. She's seen cities like this before. She's seen these cities fall when the hero and villain fight. When your neighbors start getting message prompts and level-ups, the killing begins. Heroes and villains spend blood in bulk when the cycle starts. She should know. She's been both.
This place, the planet, the city, although almost unbelievably peaceful, wasn't special. It would always have a place in her heart, as it and Miles made her break her promise to never "Maybe this time..." herself again. She was all-in at this point, her hopes are way up there, but she didn't really believe it could be different. Not really.
After an hour of spiraling down the drain with her circling, self-pitying thoughts, the visions of doom and the end of the world a bloody dance in her brain, she noticed a group of youths walking down the sidewalk across the street from the park stop and look in the windows of her storefront.
"Is this the place?" A young pre-teen boy asked a young, pre-teen girl.
"Yes, this is it. Merri, go inside and apply. Me and Thom will hang out here." The girl pointed to the bench. Max's bench. The bench her ass was sitting on.
The fuck? Rude.
A grunt from the older boy. Maybe man? Max didn't know.
Max continued to feed the quacking, demanding birds. She was interested in the group, but not too interested. The older one would go inside to see no one there, he'd come back out, and the three would fuck right off into the sunset and Max could continue to think about how she was doomed and keep feeding these ducks until they stopped eating or the world ended.
"Hey, lady! Can I help feed the ducks? I like birds!" The delicate-looking boy child yelled across the street. The older boy rolled his eyes and went into the store. The younger boy and the girl looked both ways and crossed the street.
Max ignored them. She did not wake up this morning and sign on for children.
”Thom, Thom, Thom,” the girl whispered and tugged his sleeve, “that’s her.”
Thom, the boy, looked Max up and down. “Oh? Oh.”
Both of the children stared at her.
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Merrick was in hell.
Okay, maybe that was hyperbole, but this shit really sucked.
His money did not go far in the city. A couple of hundred credits coulda paid for two months in the trailer. They'd been here for a week and it was already gone. Pissed away after two nights in a shitty hotel with wet carpets and crunchy sheets, and three days of shitty, expired vending machine meals.
He was caught in a stupid, shitty loop. He couldn't put the kids in a school without a permanent address, so they were always with him. He couldn't get a job because he always had the kids. The kids couldn't get a permanent address because he couldn't get a job.
This whole city was fucking bullshit.
He was tired and scared. He was really close to signing on with one of the packs in the city. They ran like a gang and paid like shit, but shit was more than he was earning now. The problem with that? Packs always took whole families, and if they found out how special Em and Thom were, the kids would end up back on the bargaining table. Merrick didn't lose his pack, his parents, his girlfriend, his home, and his whole life, just for the kids to end up in the same fucked up situation they were back home.
He walked up to what looked like a new building. It was a potion shop, according to the sign, and had HELP WANTED written in fancy calligraphy in the window. He'd seen the ad and almost didn't even bother coming. Places like this -- in a swanky part of town, with trees covering sidewalks so the heat didn't boil you alive, with grocery stores instead of convenience stores, with off-the-street parking, actual parking spaces, and not just dirt lots that people used to park their cars on-- these places didn't usually take people like him. They usually closed their fancy fucking doors in his face or asked him to move along, or followed him around to make sure his trashy hands didn't nick their fuckin' merchandise.
He didn't have anything better to do, and he couldn't act like he was as emotionally beat to shit as he was in front of the kids.
They were already treating him with kid gloves because they thought they were the reason that all this happened, and they fucking apologized for it. Like they had any say in what had happened to them.
Like it was their fault.
It wasn't. They weren't the reason, at all.
Shitty fucking pack alphas were the reason. Shitty fucking towns. Kiddie fuckers. Exploiters. Everyone but them was to blame. This whole world was a flaming pile of fuckin' garbage.
The shop door opened with a light push - jingle jingle - and he walked in. It was nice and cool with a silent air conditioner. The floors were shiny and clean.
It would be a great place to work, but.
Holy fuck, this place had so much goddamned magic that if he were in fur, it'd all be standing straight up. It was overpowering and suffocating. It crawled on his skin. It moved over his face. It poured itself into his eyes and pulled his hair to slant his head back, his throat open. The shadows -- the fucking SHADOWS-- moved toward him like he was an intruder. The walls buzzed and the floor buzzed and the windows buzzed and he needed to get out get out get out get out GET OUT GET OUT.
He stumbled out of the shop. The door closed behind him.
He knelt on the ground.
Fucking breathe, man.
He breathed.
"...and then they killed my ma and pa and the beta wanted to fuck me, even though I'm only thirteen, and they wanted to collar Thom and make his animal a slave because it's a raven and it's supposed to be special, and they wanted to kill Merri because his beast is big, and we just wanna be safe, but no one will help us, and I..." Emma was fucking telling this random lady sitting on a park bench fucking everything. Thom was just standing there, lookin' at her like she might have an answer. The fuck.
"The fuck, Emmafly. Don't bother the lady." He needed to make a hasty retreat before this lady called the cops. The cops would one hundred percent take the kids. "No one was in the store. Let's just go."
"But Merri..." Emma started to explain why she was fucking telling this lady all their fucking problems. Like this skinny fucking bitch had any answers. Probably would call one of her fuckin' pimps to come and pimp out the kids right after they left. Probably texting him right now. Fuck!
"Let's just go," he interrupted. "We can maybe find someplace good to sleep tonight. Let's go. Ain't safe here." He started walking away, and after only a few steps, they both started following him. Em's shoulders were low, and Thom had his fists clenched, but they both followed anyway. Just like the good little puppies home always wanted to make them into.
Fuck, they're breaking. Fuck.
The lady made a noise like she was choking. He looked back at her. She looked like her expensive gold necklace was tightening, tightening, tightening around her neck.
Fuckin' freak show.
"Alright alright alright, Miles," she gasped. "Give it a rest, I get it. Let's talk about what a godsdamned flag is again later, though, because apparently I haven't told you enough, or you're bad at listening. Shit. Fine, fucking fine. It's fine."
He kept walking until he turned those words over in his head. Em and Thom stopped walking the second the lady said her second "alright."
He turned back to her. He held his breath and asked the question.
"What'd you say about a flag, lady?"