Fortunately, as soon as I stepped out of the high-priced hotel on Molly’s arm, we met Shoshanna and started shopping for the affiliate’s new spacecraft. Shoshanna was a tall blonde woman, with an absurdly long and delicate neck, which she draped with gold and silver chains.

She squealed at the same time Molly did, and I turned down my hearing reflexively. Both women rushed across the baggage unloading area of the hotel’s front entrance and embraced while kissing the air off each other’s cheeks.

“Oh my god, Molly, is it true?!” Shoshanna exclaimed.

“Very true,” the other woman said, smiling slyly.

“Ugh, you slut! I love it, tell me everything!” Shoshanna replied.

“Perhaps not here, though,” I interjected. “I believe we have a ship to go and see?”

Shoshanna smiled, her hair glittering in the late morning sun. “Tyson, so good to finally meet you! Thank you so much for doing our fundraiser, I cannot tell you what a boon your endorsement has been to Save the Cubes. We all aspire to your passion.”

“Especially me,” Molly said, grinning like a Cheshire cat.

“Oh stop that! But tell me everything. We have time on the ride over,” Shoshanna said, grabbing Molly’s hands in her own.

I stretched out my back a bit and sighed heavily. “Ladies, I think I’ll fly, if you don’t mind. Been a while since I’ve seen LA from the sky.”

“Oh he’s shy, don’t mind him,” Molly said, waving a hand dismissively at me.

“Try to come in and land right when we meet the ship-owner!” Shoshanna yelled up at me, as I lifted off.

I nodded and saluted her, then rose rapidly until the women were mere specks on the ground below. Part of my brain kept track of their car, which was a more sensible land-roving sedan. Apparently Shoshanna was more responsible with her money than Molly was.

My head swam with thoughts, as I took in the grimy city from above. It hadn’t changed. From a concrete jungle to a mud and plasti-crete jungle. Homeless encampments sprawled between businesses and residences, with heavy fencing to keep the two separate. A grimy, graffiti filled trolly rolled between the various districts as individual vehicles crammed together in the many roads.

All that I had done to reestablish Los Angeles had led right back to its original form in my own world. But it was full of people. Hobbs, humans, even the occasional orc or Knowle could be seen going about their lives. They filled the streets, factories, black markets, and vendor stalls that filled the city.

Near Long Beach, Shoshanna’s car entered a massive, walled zone that led to the spaceport. Specifically the back end, which sprawled down the coast and featured housing and docking stations for the many spacecraft that called LAS home. Either temporary or permanent, the spaceport housed roughly forty-five thousand ships at any given time.

The craft her car approached, after a hearty drive through the Long Beach ports, towered nearly four stories in the air. It sat in an oversized rectangular docking hangar with the roof extended open to allow it. The ship itself was a large rhomboid block. Its front end housed a major slit that ran from the halfway point down to the underbelly.

I saw a man in a suit step from the docking hangar’s entrance, a canopy-covered area with a single metal bench. Shoshanna and Molly got out of the car after it came to a stop and moved to meet with the man in the suit. Taking my que, I dropped down and caught myself just above the ground. Once my feet were on solid ground, I adjusted my own outfit, a casual day suit.

It was the same suit I’d worn to the fundraiser, just without a vest and tie.

Molly grinned sharkishly and sidled up to me, reaching up to plant a kiss on my stubbled cheek. I smiled down at her and pressed her to my side by her hip. Shoshanna grinned at us, then turned to shake hands with the sales representative. He was gaping at my arrival.

“It really is you,” he breathed, before seeming to snap out of it. “Welcome! I’m so happy your affiliate chose the Pykrete for your needs! I’m Dicky, and it will be my pleasure and honor to facilitate this transaction.”

After he shook hands with Shoshanna, he turned to Molly, and then me. I nodded and smiled at him while I shook his hand, and he just gaped up at me.

“Sorry,” he said, catching himself and clapping his jaw shut. “Let me show you around the ship!”

Molly leaned into Shoshanna as we walked through the hangar’s entrance, which included an empty receptionist’s desk and space for a wall sign to be installed. “Are we sure we’re buying this one?” she asked in a throaty whisper.

“Almost,” Shoshanna said back. “I’ve had my eye on it for a while, the last couple of weeks actually. I dunno, just had a feeling something might happen to boost our chances of renting it. Of course now I want to keep it, given how amazing our fundraiser went.”

She turned, her long straight hair whipping around in a golden cascade that glimmered like Molls’ scales used to. Then she grinned at me, showing perfect white teeth and glittering blue eyes above her sunglasses.

I politely smiled back and squeezed Molly’s hip just a little harder. She squealed and laughed, leaping away from me a step before immediately closing the distance again and leaning into me.

“Yes, right up ahead,” said Dicky, oblivious to our flirting.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

He opened another set of double doors and led us into the open air hangar, where our likely new ship hulked, frost hunkered on thick lines that connected it to the walls. The boxy ship’s mouth was closed, but looking at it from an up close vantage, it was clear that its front half could rise to either side like gull wings.

We approached a small ramp at its base, near a trunk-like landing strut, before walking up past the dealer and his over-wide smile. Shoshanna breathed deeply from the ship’s smell, which was full of metal, old grease, and sweat. She seemed to love it though, twirling around as soon as we reached the craft’s main embarkation area, arms extended as she took it all in.

It was an oversized chamber with space for small loading trucks if needed. The ramp behind us was wide enough to allow them too. On the far side of the area a series of mechanical arms and heavy, cabled netting was crammed together and pressed up against a broad, translucent metallic aluminum bulkhead for us to see.

“Below us on this side,” Dicky began, taking long strides across the embarkation area. “Below us you’ll see the ice grapples, and netting. All in working order, of course. Having been stored for half a year, I recommend a maintenance cycle before use. Oh, and the fuel tanks are empty for both sublight and FTL engines, it will be the renter’s responsibility to refill them, but no fill is necessary upon return.”

Shoshanna shot a quick grin my way and said, “oh we’re not renting anymore, we’d like to purchase the ship, if everything is in order.”

“Oh how delightful!” Dicky stopped and clapped his hands. “Well, allow me to run you through the full tour in that case!”

He showed us the bridge, right above the massive ice grapple equipment bay. It was a broad, L-shaped room full of consoles and computer equipment. All very spare, plenty of cabling merely bolted to the walls and floors. The main viewscreen was installed over another pane of translucent metal. This one was translucent titanium alloy, so it was considerably smaller. Like an armored helmet's vision slit, really.

In the engine bays, Dicky enthusiastically rattled off technical specs for both sublight and FTL drives. Our sublight engines were typical hydrogen rockets, located in a grid at the rear of the craft. In order to slow down upon approaching a destination, the entire ship was required to turn around for rocket-assisted braking. Turning was accomplished by phasing which banks of rockets were fired, and a good portion of the rear area was dedicated to fuel management and storage.

The FTL drive was a space disruptor. It created a warped bubble of space at the fore and aft of the ship, which allowed for dramatically faster than light movement while going in a straight line, but required careful calculation and star-charting before activation. Any kind of hazard encountered would still be able to affect the ship if the shield was not operational.

And the shield was not operational.

Dicky profusely apologized, and quite willingly knocked off a quarter trillion morties from the seller's price.

The shield was in need of some new parts and maintenance, but Dicky assured us the discount would cover it. He expressed remorse for its status and professed a belief in our non-profit’s cause.

When he was finished with his rehearsed speech on the shields system, I leaned in. “How much are you authorized to knock off the sale, in total?” I asked, squinting at him with a sly smile on my lips.

“Well,” Dicky sputtered. “Well I don’t know, I’d have to contact the seller and ask.”

I shook my head and detached from Molly momentarily to stretch. “That’s not how a sale like this works, Dicky. Don’t be insulting now, I thought we were all friends. You’re pre-authorized to make certain decisions and have a hard limit on how much you can alter the price. Otherwise you really wouldn’t be here, we’d be doing it all through BuyMort directly.”

Dicky blinked and looked at me wide-eyed as Molly started to smile.

“Of course, the fact that we’re using a broker at all means the seller is offering at a much higher price than the ship is actually worth. No problem, it’s a sellers’ market right now. But this is for a good cause, as you yourself have said,” I told him, clasping my hands behind my back. “So just between us, how much could you knock off if you had to?”

Dicky opened his mouth a few times, looking up and to the left. “I believe our lowest acceptable offer would be five-hundred and thirty-five trillion.”

“Not five-hundred flat?” I asked, grinning from one side of my mouth, as Molly bit her lip and leaned in to say something to Shoshanna.

Dicky looked quickly between the three of us and started to shake his head. “Well, I could reach out to the seller. It’s not impossible your recent celebrity might sway them in price a bit.”

I clapped him on the shoulder and smiled down at the smaller man. “Thank you Dicky! We’ll wait right here while you do that.”

When I took a few steps back to Molly’s side, Dicky grabbed a phone out of his suit jacket pocket.

Molly gripped my elbow. “I want to go see the cabins,” she whispered.

“Oh, I can smell em from here Molly. I’m not so sure you’d be that happy to see them up close and personal,” I told her. There was a light scent of must and decay wafting from the nearby crew quarters, but Molly insisted. Without enhanced senses, the ship was large enough to mostly contain its smellier areas from one another.

Molly became dramatically less horny when she saw the rooms, as I had predicted. Each was a cramped hexagon, featuring a bunk on one wall, and a toilet behind a shower curtain that cordoned off the back end. Behind it, a showerhead stuck out from the wall, and a simple drain in the floor next to the toilet indicated the area’s primary use.

The rooms were also covered in stains, or glue-spots on the wall where former crew had stuck posters. One of them remained, show-casing a nude Nah’gh woman in a lude pose. Molly giggled at it and took a picture.

We met up with Shoshanna in the captain’s quarters, which were luxurious by comparison. The room was larger, had a higher ceiling, and a Florida king-sized bed tucked up into an oversized view port.

“This could actually be nice,” Shoshanna preened, walking around the room slowly taking it all in. “I’d hang a little chandelier right here, put a nice dining table beneath for hosting company. Of course those linens, if they are linens at all, will have to be changed. Along with a lot of other stuff, but we’ve got funds.”

That confirmed it. The women used their fundraising morties for nonessential purchases. Now I just had to see how far it really went. Upgrading the ship could be easily written off as an affiliate expense, but a full scale luxury upgrade was another thing entirely. I said nothing and smiled as the ladies went about fantasy-renovating.

Molly was showing Shoshanna an ad for a lounge chaise when Dicky entered, phone in hand. He grinned and said, “five-hundred is good with the seller, so long as you cover the dealer fees and publicize the discount in your affiliate’s next online blast.”

Shoshanna squealed, joined hands with Molly, and both women jumped up and down in excitement. “We’re buying a ship!” she exclaimed.

My own feelings stayed steady. Everything was proceeding as I had hoped and planned for, and by the month’s end we’d be in space chasing my old pet and friend Cube. A twinge of guilt surged through me, knowing I was using his rescue to build my own public persona. Knowing I didn’t feel the same set of emotions toward Molly she almost certainly felt toward me.

Infatuation was easy to recognize. Her pupils practically dilated anytime I touched her on the hip, she didn’t make it difficult to ascertain. And while I held a distant interest in her, I certainly was not obsessed with her. With getting to know every detail about her.

I felt like I had her pretty well understood already.